CHAPTER 188: SURVIVED AGAINST HEAVENS

Even the System’s gone... I’m standing here with nothing... Is this the end...

I’ve fought through everything life threw at me... only to end here, powerless.

And to Leon’s hopelessness, in the next moment, the golden giant finally moved. It couldn’t even be said it moved — to him, it just appeared in front of him in the next instant, towering over him like looming death.

This isn’t a battle. It’s a sentence being carried out.

Despite seeing no way to overcome this challenge right now, he was still not going to stand there and be slaughtered. He tried to escape by running away, but once again the strange sound assaulted his brain. BZZZZZZT!

The pain means nothing — it’s the knowing I can’t win this battle even in my mind.

His mind shook, and he tasted a metallic tang in his mouth from his own blood. He didn’t understand, but to his horror, he was frozen in his spot, unable to move. He couldn’t even speak.

"Urrrrggghhhh!!! Why is this happening!" Only this thought remained.

He tried everything, but he couldn’t move even an inch. His eyes were locked onto the legs of the golden-armored giant.

In the next instant, he saw the giant sword hanging at its waist move. SHHHK!

"Nooooo!!!"

Then he heard something—an emotionless voice filled with disgust—which he understood this time.

"Sinner... begone."

The sword in the giant’s hands, which hovered over Leon, moved. Not just moved — it sliced too fast to be called movement, not just once but thousands of times. WHOOSH! WHOOSH! WHOOSH! The sword, more than half the size of the twelve-foot giant, still moved lightning fast.

I don’t even have the strength to pray.

Slicing Leon into small pieces of his previous self, he didn’t even have the chance to think. Now he was gone.

What was left of him was the golden heart, which floated above the ground, but it vanished completely somewhere with the wave of the giant’s hand.

Then there was one more thing — his mana core, a ball of ever-shifting color — but the giant could not ignore it.

A red, mesmerizing feather with fiery cold energy floated above Leon’s bloody remains. It was about to unleash phoenix fire, making Leon be born from the ashes once again.

However, before it could do anything, the golden-armored giant sliced his sword through the air between Leon’s remains and the feather. SWOOSH! In the next moment, the feather lost all its brilliance and will to rebirth Leon, and it just dropped down on the ground like a normal feather drifting slowly in the air.

Leon was dead.

The giant should have gone by now, but it didn’t vanish. It just stared at the ever-shifting ball of mana — the all-elemental core of Leon.

The golden giant had done his task, killed the sinner who was trying to break the law of the heavens, but when he looked at the mana core of the mortal he had just killed, he felt uneasy for some reason — a feeling he didn’t like even a bit.

"#$#@@#!!@" Once again, the strange sound came from him. VRRRMMM...

The eyes behind the golden helmet shrank. The strange mana core of the mortal was still there. It should have been destroyed.

Now his suspicions were certain. The mortal might not have actually died. To truly make the sinner disappear, he had to make this mana core disappear along with him.

The giant’s sword came crashing down on the mana core. BOOM! Yet the moment it reached only inches away from it, his strong arm wouldn’t even budge. After a few seconds of struggle, the giant stopped.

The ever-shifting core still floated leisurely.

The air around the giant turned heavy, and a pressure descended on the whole dimensional realm. THUD! It wasn’t a pressure that could be emanated from a mortal.

The people thousands of kilometers away in the dimensional realm slammed hard to their knees without choice. The air felt heavy for them to breathe.

A white-haired beauty, trapped somewhere inside the dimensional realm, had closed the screen from which she was witnessing her future master.

They couldn’t even let him stand before striking him down.

She had turned it off when she saw a talent like him die just like that, killed by some unknown being that even she couldn’t identify.

She was sitting in her throne with a hollow look on her face, as this loss was too much for her to bear.

Just then, she detected the pressure in that dimensional realm.

A divinity...

She hadn’t realized it before, but now she knew the golden-armored giant was a divinity.

Even she felt absolutely disgusted at whoever sent a divinity to kill an apprentice-rank human like her master. He never even had the chance to retaliate.

No matter how talented he might be, such a big gap could never be overcome.

Remember this moment in your heart!

Even if it felt hopeless now, she promised herself one thing:

If I am ever able to get out of this place... I will take revenge on whoever did this to my master.

But then a thought appeared in her mind, which made her open up the blue screen again.

Why is the strange golden tin showing its pressure now? Master is dead... Does it want to kill the rest of the humans inside?

She couldn’t care less if the rest of the humans were dead, but it still felt strange to use such pressure on humans thousands of times weaker than her master.

Something is off...

She gazed at the golden tin, adorned with a sword that radiated a dangerous, holy aura — not merely a simple aura, but a full embodiment — and the surrounding golden cathedral, which appeared to be its Domain.

She knew that monster was going all out, but for what?

In front of him floated the mana core left by her master, which she had seen previously. It looked unique, but to go as far as to destroy even his mana core, someone had to have another level of hate.

Her master’s mana core was more like a treasure than a thing to be destroyed. Normal people’s mana cores were also valuable, but the mana core of someone with so many rank 7 affinities — even prime divinities would go after it after the person died.

Her hatred increased even more now.

You’ve made yourself my eternal enemy.

She was going to be as cruel as possible if she ever came across this golden tin in the future. To go as far as destroying his mana core was despicable in her eyes — more so than stealing it.

Just when the terrifying sword was about to erase the existence of her master’s mana core, which seemed inevitable, she closed her eyes for a few seconds so she wouldn’t see the last bit of her master disappear with her own eyes.

Then she opened her eyes — and they bulged out of their sockets — as everything had stopped still. Not just stopped, it was frozen.

She realized what that was at first glance.

Time had been frozen? But how?

A Domain, even at only level one of holy energy, could only be countered with another Domain. To achieve this effect, the Domain must be at least one level higher or superior.

The time element is equally strong as the holy element... but how could it dominate it completely? There’s only one conclusion: A Domain higher than level one of the time element... even I can’t do that!

But what freaked her out even more was the fact that she couldn’t see any physical manifestation of the Domain.

What is happening? Who is the cause of this? Is this really a Domain?

What was happening right now on the screen in front of her was far beyond her comprehension. From the strand of lethal holy energy to the golden giant, everything was frozen.

What... w-what!!

Suddenly, she felt her time mana draining at a breakneck pace. WHOOOM! She tried to stop it, but her own element wouldn’t listen to her command.

She didn’t understand what was happening or who was draining the mana from her without her control. This just felt too unreal.

She felt lucky that it didn’t require mana for her to create the blue screen due to her connection to the realm.

She watched intently at the screen without caring about her reserves running dry, as she couldn’t resist whichever force was responsible. She felt she would find out soon, as the one who froze the Domain was likely the same being.

A power far greater than a Domain.

Then, around her master’s mana core — a sphere of ever-shifting colors — a figure materialized. It was silhouetted in the same color as the orb, formed of mysterious energy she couldn’t comprehend.

The silhouette glanced at the puddle of blood on the ground for a second and then slowly walked up to the golden-armored giant who was frozen in time. Its fiery eyes of energy just looked at it.

She could feel it looked as if it was looking at a bug. In the next second, the golden-armored giant crumbled into dust. CRRSHHH! Everything in its existence vanished completely.

She was shaking — she didn’t even understand how it happened — but one thing she was sure of was that this had been done using the time element.

Next, when it arrived back at Leon’s remains along with the golden heart floating beside him, time started to turn back only around him. It stopped at the moment when the Phoenix feather was releasing its fiery hot energy. FWOOOSH!

The silhouette looked up at the sky for a moment. Then it vanished completely, leaving only the mana core remaining in its previous position.

She, who had witnessed everything, suddenly felt that her time mana reserve, which had been drained out of her control, stopped.

A message rang in her mind, an ethereal voice.

Good job, little one.

Xyvarithiel felt happy after so long. She was somehow able to help save him through the mysterious entity that used her mana.

She felt proud of herself and smiled gleefully. Her happiness increased even more when she saw her master’s body being reborn.