Ian had never been the type to shortchange himself, so he was already thinking about how he'd make it up to himself once he got back.
Maybe this was what a truly invincible heart looked like. No matter what kind of situation he faced, he never believed he would fall.
He always believed he'd eventually find a way to overcome every obstacle and return to his own time. That was what real confidence meant: believing that, in the end, you'd always be the one left standing.
Ian had that kind of confidence. Even so, dealing with this immortal, ever-evolving twisted monster was still a massive headache.
"Let's keep trying."
Ian knew conventional methods wouldn't work anymore. He had no choice but to pull out more of his secret techniques and unconventional ideas, searching for any weakness he could exploit. At the same time, this was also the perfect chance to test the theory he'd been forming.
"Time Lock!"
His wand traced intricate silver runes, attempting to slow the flow of time around the monster to an absolute crawl, perhaps even bring it to a complete stop. But the moment the runes activated, the dark violet glow filling the area erupted violently.
It was as though an even higher law governing space and time forcibly intervened and suppressed Ian's magic.
The silver runes melted away like snow under a blazing sun, and his Time Domain shattered before it could even fully unfold.
"ROOOAR! Join us! Join us! Join eternity!"
Taking advantage of the disruption, one of the monster's tentacles pierced through the still-unstable ripples in space-time. It almost struck Ian.
Almost.
Ian remained perfectly calm. He always left himself plenty of room for error. Anyone who knew his fighting style understood that, more than anything else, Ian prioritized avoiding damage.
"Mirror Legion!"
His figure flickered, instantly splitting into dozens of mirror clones whose magical signatures and mana fluctuations were completely identical to the original. They launched feints from every direction.
He wanted to see whether this approach could bypass the power the monster was borrowing.
With so many targets before it, the monster's countless maddened eyes seemed confused for a brief instant.
Then, it emitted a high-frequency vibration. An invisible wave swept across the battlefield, and the magical clones burst like soap bubbles, vanishing one after another. They couldn't fool the monster's corruption-based senses at all.
"Life Form Distortion!"
Ian took the risk of casting a high-level Transfiguration spell that directly targeted the essence of life itself, aiming straight at the monster's core life code.
The beam of magic struck true. The mountain of flesh swelled and contracted violently, its body becoming so unstable that it looked ready to split apart or transform into something else. Even a Pureblood Dragon couldn't resist magic at Ian's current level.
The monster couldn't either, at first.
But barely two seconds later, an even greater, filthy power surged from the entire space, forcibly suppressing the distortion. Not only did the monster return to normal, but its body also evolved a slick, oily-looking layer of hardened flesh with an extremely high resistance to Transfiguration magic.
"Commandment: Regeneration is Forbidden Here!"
Ian attempted to imitate the authority of natural laws with his own magic, issuing a Commandment infused with overwhelming will. The light of the spoken law enveloped the monster, and its regeneration visibly slowed, for a single moment.
Then, the twisted patterns covering the walls of the Chaos Space seemed to come alive, and their dark violet glow intensified.
A brutal law filled with the concepts of "proliferation" and "mutation" crashed directly into Ian's temporary Commandment, shattering it instantly. The monster's regeneration didn't just recover, it rebounded, becoming even faster than before.
Ian didn't care. It was exactly what he'd expected.
"Then let's try Soul Echo Pierce."
Gathering his mental power, Ian condensed it into an invisible spike designed specifically to attack soul connection points. His goal was to locate and sever the mental link between the monster and this space.
The spike successfully pierced the monster's chaotic Sea of Consciousness, but what flashed back was a torrent of billions of screaming soul fragments. The backlash nearly shattered Ian's own mind. Letting out a muffled groan, his face turned pale as he immediately cut the connection.
"Damn it! Anything that attacks this thing on the soul level gets reflected back with disgustingly vicious force."
His injuries completely healed in an instant. After all the battles he'd fought today, Ian felt like he'd practically maxed out every healing spell in his arsenal just to make up for the weaknesses in his magic. He'd put a lot of new ideas into practice through sheer necessity.
"No more mental attacks. At this rate, they'll turn into attacks against me instead. So..."
"Element Collapse Sequence!"
Ian raised both hands, guiding the four fundamental elements, earth, water, fire, and wind, into reverse-flowing vortices inside the monster's body, attempting to tear it apart at the most basic level of matter.
Dull explosions echoed from deep within the monster's enormous body. In several areas, the elements descended into complete chaos, even annihilating one another.
Yet the destroyed portions were immediately filled by an even more primitive dark substance that wasn't made of elemental matter at all. It was as if the monster had already transcended the very concept of ordinary matter.
"Fate Thread Stripping!"
Ian invoked a sliver of an extremely dangerous forbidden spell involving causality and fate, trying to locate and sever the Thread of Fate that sustained the monster's existence. In his perception, countless tangled crimson threads appeared before him, each radiating an ominous aura.
This was the power that governed the fate of all living beings; not even gods were exempt from it.
But the moment he tried to touch them, he discovered the threads were woven together with the fate of the entire space itself. They were unbelievably sturdy, and the slightest attempt to cut them only provoked rejection and backlash from the laws governing this dimension.
Not wanting to cause another disaster, Ian reluctantly stopped.
"So the mysterious existence connected to this thing carries enough weight in fate that even I can't shake it..."
Still, the attempt had given him another valuable piece of information. He fell into thought, though his attacks never stopped.
"Summon: Ancient Heroic Spirit!"
Ian chanted an ancient contract, attempting to summon heroic spirits from antiquity whose holy power naturally opposed evil.
The space rippled. Several indistinct figures bathed in sacred light began to emerge, but before they could fully materialize, the corruption filling the Chaos Space surged toward them like sharks smelling blood, consuming them without mercy.
Their radiance dimmed almost instantly. The Heroic Spirits let out silent cries of anguish before being forced back into nothingness.
This was a spell Ian had developed after visiting the River Styx and meeting Anubis. Its foundation borrowed part of the Guardian God Spell, so in theory, it should have been the perfect bane of all evil.
'Who would've thought it'd die before it even had the chance to shine? The very first time this spell appeared in the mortal world, it didn't even manage to finish casting.'
'Well... it wasn't that Ian was weak. His opponent was simply far too unnatural.'
"Dream Cage!"
This spell was meant to determine whether the monster still possessed a mind, whether it could even be considered a living creature in the conventional sense. After all, every living being should have dreams.
Ian wove his immense mental power into an illusory dream world, attempting to drag the monster's consciousness inside and imprison it. The monster actually froze for an instant, and a trace of confusion flashed through its crimson eyes.
But in the very next second, its consciousness, made entirely of pure madness, brutally tore the Dream Cage apart. Worse, through the mental connection, it hurled an even more chaotic, nauseating flood of nightmare fragments back at Ian.
"That's disgusting."
Again and again, Ian changed tactics. From orthodox white magic to the most bizarre black witchcraft... From elemental magic to space-time magic... From soul magic to fate magic... From summoning to illusions... He practically searched through the entirety of his vast magical knowledge.
Every attempt displayed astonishing magical ingenuity and creativity. Anywhere else, any one of these spells could have become a textbook example worthy of study. Yet within this bizarre Chaos Space, against a monster that existed on the level of Rules themselves, every effort proved futile.
The creature was like a magical testing device that evolved endlessly. No matter what kind of attack it suffered, it responded by becoming even more twisted, developing stronger resistance and regenerating even faster.
It had become the living embodiment of this space's laws: Chaos, Proliferation, and Immortality.
"This damn thing is basically immune to all magic now."
The constant, high-intensity spellcasting and mental struggle rapidly drained Ian's magical reserves. Even his formidable mental strength was beginning to reach its limits. The whispers of Join us clung to him like a curse.
Though his willpower kept them from invading his mind, the relentless assault left him increasingly distracted.
Just when it seemed he'd reached the end of his rope, his magic nearly exhausted and his mind on the verge of collapse, Ian narrowly dodged another spray of the monster's corrosive acid, which was powerful enough to eat away at space itself.
As he moved, his weary gaze accidentally swept across the pitch-black region behind the monster, a place that had remained untouched throughout the battle. During that brief lull in the fighting, Ian finally noticed a detail he'd overlooked in the heat of combat.
Something about the monster was off.
"I see!"
His eyes suddenly lit up. The vague suspicion he'd had about the monster's range of movement became crystal clear, like a bolt of lightning cutting through the darkness.
Whenever the monster chased or attacked, its massive body and countless thrashing tentacles seemed to be confined by an invisible boundary.
It was mad, and it was violent, but every one of its attacks instinctively avoided the deepest part of the Chaos Space, that region of absolute darkness, so dense that not even the eerie violet light could penetrate it.
Ian remembered what had happened when he'd first entered this place. The monster had lunged out from that region of absolute darkness. Yet throughout the battle that followed, no matter how frenzied its attacks became, its main body never retreated into that darkness again.
Even when some of Ian's area-of-effect spells reached the edge of it, the monster instinctively reacted with a strange mix of fear and rage. It deliberately avoided that area, choosing to tank Ian's attacks rather than let its tentacles or dripping slime touch the edge of the darkness.
That wasn't normal.
"It doesn't dare go near it?"
The thought flashed through Ian's mind. To test his theory, he began deliberately steering the battle toward that pitch-black region, intentionally exposing a few openings while gradually retreating.
Sure enough, once he was less than fifty meters from the darkness, the monster's attacks remained just as fierce, but it had clearly become agitated. Its tentacles no longer swept across the battlefield without restraint.
Instead, they focused almost entirely on Ian himself, as though desperately trying to stop him from retreating any farther.
Then Ian unleashed a wide-range Dimensional Cut, forcing the monster toward the dark region. The creature let out a shrill scream unlike any of its previous roars of pain. It sounded like a warning, and its enormous body even recoiled. It would rather endure Ian's attack than squeeze itself into the darkness.
At that moment, Ian was certain. That patch of absolute darkness was a forbidden place for the immortal monster. It either dared not or could not enter it.
"Is its creator hiding in there... so it doesn't dare offend them?"
Countless possibilities flashed through Ian's mind, and his heart began pounding. For the first time since entering this desperate situation, he'd found a variable.
Whether that darkness concealed an even greater danger or some flaw in the rules governing this bizarre space, it was still better than staying here forever, fighting an endlessly resurrecting monster.
"Maybe that mysterious existence is actually extremely weak right now. Otherwise, why send this monster to assimilate me? If it could act freely, it would've killed me itself. There'd be no need to rely on a servant to fight.
And judging by how desperately it wants this monster to assimilate me... maybe absorbing high-quality human life is necessary for its recovery, or to heal its injuries."
With that realization, what was there left to hesitate over? Ian had never been someone who wavered. He made his decision instantly.
After blocking a combined strike from several tentacles, he used the impact to propel himself backward. At the same time, he abruptly changed direction and poured nearly all of his remaining magic into the flying cloak on his back.
Whoosh…!
The Starlight Cloak erupted with a brilliance unlike ever before. Carrying Ian, it transformed him into a shooting star. Ignoring the monster's frantic roars and the ever-denser wall of intercepting tentacles behind him, he charged without a moment's hesitation toward the absolute darkness that swallowed all light.
"ROOOOAR…! NO!! COME BACK!! JOIN US!!!"
The monster's roar reached its peak, filled with indescribable panic and fury. It even shouted words it had never spoken before. That alone was surprising. Maybe it proved that any living creature, when pushed into a corner, could unleash hidden potential.
"Come back!"
The monster threw everything it had into stopping Ian. Countless tentacles shot forward in a frenzy, trying to seize him. It even crashed headlong into several delayed-action magical traps Ian had hastily set, blasting chunks of flesh in every direction.
Its regeneration was astonishing, but it wasn't faster than Ian's desperate charge. Just as the foremost slimy tentacle was about to wrap around his ankle, Ian disappeared completely into the region where even the light from a wand's Lumos spell was instantly devoured.
Into absolute, silent darkness.
No matter how desperately the monster's tentacles reached after him, they did not dare enter. The monster roared, but there was nothing it could do. Ian had escaped.
It felt as though he'd passed through a sheet of icy water... or leaped into a void. The monster's deafening roars behind him, the sound of whipping tentacles tearing through the air, even the endless whispers of Join us... in that instant, they all vanished.
Not because they had grown quieter, but because absolute silence had swallowed them whole. It was as though this place didn't merely reject light.
It rejected everything.
(End of Chapter)
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