Chapter 67: 3 Minutes

—Rizevim Livan Lucifer—

He had expected Sirzechs to try and unseal his True Form, and he had remained confident, assured that no one would be a threat to him to allow the Crimson Satan to succeed. What he hadn't accounted for was the extent of Asura's power.

It should have been a warning the moment he broke into his True Form purely by brute force, forcibly unleashing the power of Asura's piece.

Now, with Faiser burning with Demonic Power, his skin literally glistening as his Satan-Class aura sent tremors rippling through the battlefield, Rizevim finally understood something.

He had been underestimating the boy for far too long.

"Still too weak!"

He gathered demonic power around his palm, condensing it, shaping it, and merging it with his trait until it became an energy meant to cancel out anything it struck. A pure nullification attack.

Whatever Faiser threw at him, he was ready.

"Dragon scales?" Tannin muttered, awestruck as he barely managed to remain standing, on the verge of fainting yet unable to look away.

The devil lord's entire body was covered in dragon scales.

That alone made no sense. A pure-blood devil shouldn't be capable of such a thing.

"Your tricks make no difference!"

Rizevim didn't waste time. The energy in his palm twisted into the shape of an arrow and shot straight toward Faiser.

The attack was guaranteed to hit. Any demonic power used to block it would simply be erased by the nullification trait, ensuring a direct strike.

And that was the strange part.

Despite having already seen this ability when Rizevim fought Sirzechs, Faiser still charged forward headfirst.

The bracelet he had been using, something Rizevim had already taken note of, shifted and morphed into an axe.

The boy wasn't playing at long range anymore. He was closing in with a melee weapon.

True Satan-Class demonic power surged outward, his red scales gleaming as Faiser leapt forward.

He gripped the axe with both hands.

Rizevim was almost amused.

"Idiot."

The devil scoffed, certain that the arrow attack would pierce straight through Faiser.

But certainty stopped meaning much when Asura was involved.

And it showed.

"RIZEVIM!"

Faiser's roar tore through the air as his axe cleaved the arrow cleanly in half. The energy didn't disperse entirely, however, and the split arrow struck him in two places—his neck and his shoulder.

Rizevim grinned.

For just a moment.

"Huh?"

The attack that should have incapacitated him did nothing.

Not a single wound was left behind.

"Im—"

Before the word could even leave his mouth, the axe swept through his neck, ripping it off clean.

"That… Faiser?" Tannin gasped, still shielding Vali's unconscious body.

The dragon couldn't believe what he was seeing.

The boy had just sliced through and killed a True Devil.

And that was the problem.

Faiser hadn't killed Rizevim.

And he knew it.

The young devil didn't celebrate, didn't hesitate, and didn't waste even a fraction of a second before activating his other abilities.

<Bind>

Valefar chains erupted from the ground, shooting upward and shackling the headless body made of pure demonic power.

<Sever>

Amplifying the ability a hundredfold, Faiser diced Rizevim's body into hundreds of pieces.

No devil could survive this. Decapitation followed by complete dismemberment.

Except there was no flesh.

No blood.

Only energy.

And energy couldn't be destroyed or erased. It could only be transformed.

That was exactly what happened.

The scattered pieces reshaped themselves into hundreds of arrows, firing toward Faiser like an artillery barrage.

Faiser didn't even try to dodge.

He let them hit him.

The spectators didn't understand his confidence, but when the attacks struck and still failed to draw even a single drop of blood, Tannin finally realized something.

Whatever Faiser had used moments ago—it wasn't a normal ability.

"YoU CuRsEd BoY!"

Rizevim's projected voice boomed across the battlefield as the scattered energies began to reform the devil. Every single movement, every shred of energy caused the space to tremble. Each attack it launched, every blow Faiser tanked, even its mere existence was tearing at the environment around them.

Faiser couldn't let that continue. He couldn't allow something this dangerous to fully regroup.

<Wield (Space): Void>

Rizevim didn't understand it at first, but instinct screamed at him as the space around his fragmented form began to twist against his will. The very fabric of reality contorted around each floating piece of energy.

<Wield (Time): Deceleration>

His body slowed.

The energies failed to converge at their intended pace, moving as though trapped at a fraction of their original speed.

"T-THesE AcCuRsEd PiLlArS!"

Rizevim roared in fury as realization struck. He knew those powers. He had seen them before.

From Faiser's grandparents.

The memory tasted bitter.

'It makes no sense!'

And it didn't.

Slowing his body was one thing, that was still within reason. But how was a Satan-Class devil surviving the attacks of a Super-Class being? One fighting in his True Form, no less?

'Is that the Asura piece again?'

Frustration gnawed at him. That tiny fragment had been enough to awaken his True Form, and he was guarding it with his very existence. A significant portion of his energy fragments had been assigned solely to protect it, to keep it away from Faiser at all costs.

Yet slowly, unwillingly, he was beginning to realize something.

Faiser carrying the Asura Heart piece might take priority over him.

And that thought unsettled him deeply.

As those doubts swirled through his consciousness, he noticed Faiser doing something utterly absurd.

'That shouldn't even be possible with his exhausted body!'

What he saw made his core tremble.

The boy was grabbing hold of time and space itself with his bare hands.

Pulling on the fabric of reality.

Threatening to tear it apart.

* * *

My mind was fading. It was dangerous.

[System cannot help you against self-induced mania.]

Didn't need the reminder. I already knew.

With my body coated in Bova's borrowed dragon scales, fused with an invincible frame and overflowing Demonic Power, my brain was running far past its limits.

<Wield (Space): Firmament>

The wield ability wasn't fixed. It wasn't rigid.

It was insane.

<Wield (Time): Entropy Gradient>

This wasn't just power. It was permission. Permission to toy with physics, to defy logic, to do things no sane being would ever attempt.

It hadn't appeared out of nowhere.

I was finally beginning to understand what my grandfather and mother meant in their diaries.

The ability worked when I needed it to. When I forced it to be real at any cost. When failure simply wasn't an option.

That was the true strength of devils.

Magic born from imagination.

And this was it.

With barely a minute left before my energy ran dry and I likely lost consciousness, all of space and time belonged to me.

"FUCK!"

My throat nearly tore itself apart as I screamed, my fingers digging into reality and dragging both time and space along with it.

Space in my left hand. Time in my right.

I pulled on them like cloth.

As Rizevim finally began to regain his humanoid form, I forced the two together.

<Wield (Space-Time): Chaos Loop>

Even the system panicked.

[Warning! Ability far surpasses your current limits! Attempting usage without Asura's Wrath will result in immediate death!]

Didn't matter!

Even with this invincible body, it felt like I was dying. Like I was being burned alive, nailed down, flayed apart as time and space fused together.

[Satan-Class limits Chaos Loop to a maximum duration of 60 seconds.]

Didn't matter!

Just work!

And it did.

"Y-You—"

The pain was unbearable, invincibility or not. There were consequences.

"Y-You—"

The skill was functioning perfectly.

And it gave me a moment.

A moment to think ahead.

"Y-You—"

[Chaos Loop: Traps the targeted being or object within a perpetual sequence of time, sustained only by the limits of your available power. The higher your power and class, the longer the loop and the longer the sequence.]

With me leveraging Asura's Wrath, the ability barely lasted a minute. And instead of forming a complete sequence of actions, I was only able to loop a single second.

That meant that instead of replaying an entire scene like hitting rewind and play, I could only trap one second in repetition. In this case, that second was Rizevim's energies reshaping into a humanoid form, only to be torn back into individual strands of power.

I was literally watching the devil form and unravel, again and again and again.

"Y-You—"

"Y-You—"

"Y-You—"

Stuck in a perpetual loop, while my eyes searched desperately for one specific thing.

[Quest: Asura's Retrieval!

Objective: Retrieve the piece of Asura's flesh from Rizevim Livan Lucifer.]

The quest was still active. That alone told me everything I needed to know about where to look among his scattered energies.

Tannin stared on, wide-eyed and speechless, and honestly, I couldn't blame him.

If you'd told me just minutes ago that a Satan-Class could fight a Super-Class almost evenly, I would've laughed.

Yet here I was, keeping a being capable of erasing the world locked inside a loop.

Only for a few more seconds.

Which also happened to be exactly how much time I had left.

I'm practically dead if Sirzechs doesn't wake up soon.

[Asura's Wrath Duration Left: 20 Seconds]

I was fucked.

But I didn't stop.

I searched and searched through the fragments.

Ten seconds bled away before realization finally hit.

There!

A massive chunk of energy was gathered in a single spot. Every other fragment had been shaped into weapons, arrows meant to tear me apart. But this cluster existed for one purpose.

To hide something.

To protect something.

My wings flared with Demonic Power as I hurled my body forward like a stone launched from a catapult.

<Wield (Space): Void>

Void swallowed the space ahead of me, granting me absolute control within its boundaries.

<Wield (Time): Decelerate>

Decelerate worked in tandem with Void, slowing anything trapped inside it to a crawl.

Using Void to envelop the energy cluster and Decelerate to stop it from being dragged back into the perpetual loop, I activated Bind—

And then froze.

I didn't need it.

Void already gave me full authority over the space. Binding it was redundant. Cursing myself for wasting even a fraction of a second, I immediately switched abilities.

<Sever>

The cluster shattered, its energy dispersing and revealing what it had been hiding.

The Asura Piece.

As it began to fall, I pushed my body beyond its limits.

[Asura's Wrath Duration Left: 3 Seconds]

Just in time, I grabbed the piece—and felt everything inside me start to give way.

[Asura's Wrath Duration Left: 2 Seconds]

My body felt hollow. My heart stuttered, as if it might stop altogether.

[Asura's Wrath Duration Left: 1 Second]

My eyelids grew unbearably heavy.

Rizevim was freed from the loop, and as I plummeted with the Asura Piece clenched in my grasp, the system's voice echoed one last time.

[Quest Complete!]

The world went dark before I could hear the reward.

But I heard something else.

Not the system.

A voice.

"Faiser!"

Familiar. Feminine.

And then I felt it.

Something cold. Something warm. Something metallic. The scent of blood, the ocean, and the Arctic all at once.

Something fluid wrapped around me as consciousness slipped away, and something else emerged—something freezing.

Water.

Blood.

Ice.

And the final words I heard made my lips curl upward as darkness claimed me.

"Power of Destruction: Absolute Erasure."

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{A/N: Got a pat reon named RedLamp01 with 30+ chapters + Other Stories.

Sorry about the delay. I will make up for it tomorrow by posting 2 chapters (best case scenario).

Anyhow, I had to be with my friend. Man got cheated on by the girl he was with for 3 years. 😭 The girl went to Wales, and within 10 days, cheated on him. At this point, I don't even know if true love actually exists. It's both tragic and scary out there.}