Chương 206: Unicorn Overlord (12)

The world was engulfed in purple, and time came to a stop. The wind ceased to blow. The ground no longer shook. The movement of the stars in the sky halted, and so did the clamor of battle. The elves, Alphonse, Shura, even the jaws of his infernal demiplane reaching out for the manatree's roots had ceased to move, frozen in purple. The Oracle and Overlord alone remained full of color in a universe of silence. Simon remained speechless in the light of this towering display of sorcery.

This wasn't Stasis, since Simon was immune to such things, nor a mere ailment or status effect. The Oracle had truly halted the march of time itself, except for her and him; and even then he wondered if he was only immune to it because he was the Overlord, or simply because she chose to spare him. This… this had to be a Tier X Chronomancy spell. The apex of the magical world.

"Stop this sorcery," the Oracle ordered him.

"Only if you release me and my allies, then let us teleport away," Simon replied as he burned away the vines holding him with Hellfire. His magic still worked, and he could sense his connection to his minions remained active.

"Or else all these deaths—and the horrors that will come after—shall be on your head." He attempted to teleport away once more, but the Oracle's Telecatcher summoned him to her side again. She attempted to slam him into the ground when he appeared, but he had expected that and immediately activated Darkbound on arrival. His body surged to immense size, and he landed on her like a rolling hill. His fist struck only empty air and frozen water however, for the Oracle had dodged his blow.

She joined her hands into a cup, gathered mana inside, and then fired a beam of sunlight straight into Simon's chest. System notifications weren't frozen in the slightest. Supereffective damage! He collapsed onto his back and into the lake, the water propelled in the air freezing in suspended time without ever reaching the earth. The Oracle leaped onto his chest and slammed into him with her foot, the weight of her slim frame greater than a mountain.

"You would risk casting an entire region into the Abyss, and still claim the moral high ground?" The Oracle glared at him in disgust and began to make hand gestures; she was likely casting some sort of counterspell.

"You are as vile as your ancestors."

"I came here to talk, and you forced me into this!"

"You will not be forced to do anything anymore. Sleep tight." The Oracle gathered her breath and intoned a spell which Simon immediately recognized as the very same ritual the elven mages used to petrify him in Valne so many reigns ago. Already he sensed stone materializing out of nowhere to engulf him into a prison he would not escape until Abraxas shone bright in the sky. Except now he would be caught in Lorean territory, with the Oracle taking a personal interest in containing him. No. No, no, no!

Simon furiously tried to figure out a way out of this situation. With no way to overcome the Oracle, he attempted to switch strategies and targeted the time-frozen Shura. Even if he knew he couldn't win a duel with the creature, he still tried to force one out of desperation. I challenge you to an Ordeal! His mental order went unanswered. The forced Ordeal likely required the targeted eidolon to be capable of at least being notified of the challenge, and he was currently indisposed.

The Oracle's sealing spell would likely be completed before her Clockstop expired. He was trapped, and the stone had already engulfed his limbs and reached his chest. He could only move his head, and he would soon lose that freedom as well. Wait! A mad idea crossed Simon's mind; one that would be extremely risky, but still better than being left at the Oracle's mercy. She might disturb the reigns anyway with her 'other options,' so what do I have to lose?!

"When the curtain of darkness falls on a world devoid of light," Simon chanted,"the black mirror shall show your true se—" The Oracle swept his entire lower jaw with a swift kick. The pain was atrocious, but the fountain of acidic blood erupting from his giant-sized maw took her briefly by surprise and forced her to step back. He drained his ghost-goats of their energies—promising to honor their martyrdom in the next reign—and then completed his incantation.

"Reveal thyself, Carbuncle the Devil-Mirror!" The frozen world trembled as the Abyss intruded upon it, the shadow of a floating mirror materializing above Simon. Its surface cast a partly shrouded reflection of the Oracle, showing Simon a glimpse of her holding a green-haired shadow in a tight embrace. Auspice: Twisted Reflection: Constant Mirror status applied to the summoner. His intuition proved right when the stone ceased to crawl up his body, and instead began to appear on the Oracle's ankles.

Simon's heartbeat quickened in his chest with glee. His plan was simple: since the sealing ritual appeared to be a continuous effect, he had hoped Carbuncle's constant Mirror effect would throw it back at the Oracle. It had been a long shot, but the best he could come up with in this delicate situation. The Oracle nearly stumbled in surprise and Simon exploited her brief surprise to blast her with Hellfire Gaze for good measure.

A magical barrier immediately appeared to shield her, but the ritual's interruption made the stone holding him fragile enough that he could begin to free his arms. But then all of his plans shattered with a cracking noise. There was no other way to describe it. He heard a terrible droning noise, akin to a thousand glass windows exploding all at once. A vibration spread through the land and earth, nay, through the very fabric of reality itself.

Both Simon and the Oracle looked at the source, their enmity briefly forgotten by shared terror. Carbuncle's mirror imploded above him. The dark eidolon collapsed in on himself into a hole of miasma dug into the heart of space itself, cracks spreading through the very air from it. The howl of the Abyss echoed from its darkened depths, the blackness so thick it could swallow even the stars.

"What have you done?" The Oracle muttered to herself, her three eyes wide with fear and horror.

"I… I don't know!" Simon replied earnestly. The dark rift had begun to widen and suck in everything close to it. The frozen air, the floating water and stones propelled upwards by the impact of their various strikes… it consumed all within its grasp.

"This…" Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. And then it hit Simon. Each time he had summoned a dark eidolon so far, it had caused a small error in causality; and here he had summoned Carbuncle in a realm of frozen time between two ticks of the clock. This had magnified the effect and created a dreadful paradox. By the Light… I think I may have broken time.

"This… my vision…" The Oracle glared down at Simon, her fury a terror to behold.

"You knew this would happen."

"I did not!" Simon snapped back.

"You forced me into desperate measures!"

"But you still took the risk! You would rather endanger the entire world rather than admit defeat!" The Oracle coated her fingers in holy energy.

"You selfish, deluded madman!"

"Wait, we can stop this together—" The Oracle tore out his heart with a holy punch. Her fist struck through his chest and pulverized everything in its way. His giant-sized armor, his bridge-sized ribs… none could survive her light. It incinerated its way through Simon's organs, but left enough of his lungs for him to scream with.

"I am stopping this," the Oracle said while Simon howled in pain.

"Right now!" The elven fool… No doubt she hoped that killing Simon would stop the reaction in some way, even if it would mean shouldering the Overlord Class' burden. It was a desperate plan from someone trying to save the world from the prophesied end, the last gamble of a seer whose foresight only promised annihilation should she do nothing. And it failed. The blow should have killed Simon, but it didn't… maybe.

His body shrank back to its original size in a hole of swirling time-frozen water pulled upwards by an all-devouring spatial anomaly. He bounced onto the earth with a gaping hole in his chest oozing acidic blood, yet he would not die, nor could he move. He felt cold and unable to move a muscle, but his consciousness wouldn't fade away into death's quiet mercy. Like all of time, he was trapped between two transitory states of existence.

His body was shrouded in shadows, scales and demonic claws overlapping with his own fading human limbs. Whatever the Oracle saw in him frightened and disgusted her.

"They… they are all in there," the Oracle said in shock, the poisonous blood on her fist dripping off an invisible barrier shielding her skin from harm.

"What is… that thing in the depths of your soul, glaring back at me …

"She joined her hands and prepared another spell." Sever –" Death cut in with malice, " Chaos Prism." The Oracle's head suddenly snapped to the side just as she seemed to sense something at the edge of her senses. Multicolored walls surrounded the Oracle from all sides, imprisoning her in a prism of solid light. A familiar presence made itself known, as oppressive as the shadow of death. A cowled figure soundlessly appeared at the edge of Simon's gaze, two vile eyes and a Crestone shining beneath his hood.

Neither the frozen time nor spatial collapse could delay his malice. Instadeath negated by Unyielding Essence. The Librarian had come to chronicle the end of the world. The Oracle's three eyes glared at the newcomer." Elios."

"It was unwise to leave your island, Lysandra." If words could kill, then the way Elios Magnos uttered that name would have brought the world to an end. There was so much hatred between these two, so much animosity, that it dwarfed even the rift in its fathomless depth.

"I have waited a long time for this, my old friend." Elios ignored his dying descendant and waved his hand at the Oracle." Implosion." The prism prison shrunk in on itself and tried to crush the Oracle. However, she swiftly unleashed a pulse of light that shattered her prison and then swiftly activated a Contingency spell to renew her buffs.

"This is not the time, traitor!" the Oracle shouted back at the lich with pure animosity written all over her face. Neither of them paid much attention to Simon, so absorbed were they in their hatred and rivalry.

"Look up! The world is collapsing! We must stop this reaction before it's too late!" Elios Magnos did follow her advice and gazed up at the rift, which had now spread across the entire purple sky. The Librarian gazed into the very end of the world staring back at him with gaping hunger. And then he summarily dismissed it.

"It doesn't matter," Elios Magnos replied coldly, miasma coursing in his hands." Grand Delta." He cast a great triangle of converted mana at the Oracle, who countered by summoning a miniature sun in the palm of her hand. The two projectiles crashed together in a violent explosion that ruptured the cracks further open, allowing baleful eyes to glare through them with otherworldly hunger.

"This shall not be my death… but yours is long overdue, Lysandra," Elios Magnos declared, snapping his fingers and opening more rifts in the fabric of reality." Meteor!"

"You insane madman!" The Oracle snarled back as she shattered enormous flaming boulders with her bare fists. Simon watched her smash the rocks to pieces as the rift's hunger and pull grew strong enough to lift up his corpse. He floated into the air alongside so many. Alphonse, Satine, the elves who had followed their fool of a leader to their demise… all of them were sucked into a darkness that devoured even time.

The last thing Simon saw before the shadows consumed everything was the sight of Elios Magnos and the Oracle dueling on the ground amidst the collapsing ruins of a dying world. Those two kept flinging high-level spells at each other even while reality collapsed around them. They settled their grudge as the universe unraveled into primordial darkness. He was himself, and not himself. Simon could tell something was wrong the moment he faded back to awakening.

He felt as sick as he did after he had completed the Dark Visionary ritual, with his eyelids being heavier than stones. Light fell upon his face rather than faint starlight, and most importantly, something warm pressed against his chest. Something warm, and which snored lightly. He was sharing his bed with a stranger. What… What's going on? Simon's eyes opened on his own, moved by an otherworldly force. My body… it's moving on its own.

A flash overtook his vision, and when it faded away, he found himself in a room he didn't recognize. It was big, white, and well-lit, with a huge wardrobe, a large mirror, and other amenities a bastard of his rank had always been denied. It was a princely room, and one he did not recognize in the slightest.

"Mornin', Simon," a familiar voice said gently.

"Did you sleep well?" Simon's head turned on its own, and he found himself staring at Satine Renais. She was on him, as naked as he was, and holding him in an unchaste embrace with a mere sheet shielding them from the cold. She smiled at him in the way she never had, her expression full of warmth. Satine? he wanted to ask in disbelief, but instead his lips shifted to say, "I did, dear." He kissed her languorously without wishing to, and she returned the gesture before snuggling against him.

"Can we stay a little longer?"

"I wish," the force possessing Simon replied with his voice, "but your uncle will call for us soon."

"He can wait…" A knock echoed on the door, and the princess grunted in annoyance.

"Yes?"

"It's me!" Alphonse's voice answered through the door.

"Mel and I are getting down to meet the Warrior and the Adventurer! Will you come with us?!"

"Sure thing, brother!"

'Simon' replied while stroking Satine's hair.

"Give us half an hour, give or take." It was Mel's voice that answered through the door, "Are you going to fool around or somethin'?"

"Yes! And so should you!" Simon answered without wishing it to. He heard laughter echo from outside, and though Satine rolled her eyes, a smile was etched on her lips.

"I should have cut out that tongue of yours long ago," Satine said as she sat up on the bed and began to adjust her hair into a bun.

"You are too insolent by half."

"And you love me for it, princess," Simon answered as he left the bed, his limbs moving on their own. His legs moved towards the mirror, where his eyes spotted a sword leaning on its frame. Is this… a memory? Simon wondered, a prisoner in his own body, a spectator forced to witness a life he never had. A puppet show, or an illusion? But then the other Simon looked into the mirror, and he understood.

The reflection outwardly resembled him, in that he had the same hair, same face, same eyes, and yet so many small details were wrong. He was a tiny bit younger and more muscled, with a deep scar on his right cheek. Quite the uncanny feeling, to become a stranger to yourself. Moreover, the sword sitting next to the mirror caught Simon's attention. It was an exact copy of the blade Alphonse recovered from Marraco's stomach, except its pommel was encrusted with the Paladin Noble Crestone.

It glowed as his hand reached out for it and unsheathed it with casual ease. Gleaming white armor covered him head to toe without burning his skin. No. This wasn't a memory, nor an illusion. It was a Remembrance.

"It looks good on you," Satine said at his side, and she was right. It fit him so well.

"It truly is the day, then?"

"Yes," Simon said, the words coming out on their own, his eyes looking down on his sword and the past he never had.

"We will finally take the fight to the empire. All together."

"Yes," Satine answered softly, her arms holding his own.

"And we will win." Simon nodded gravely with resolve alien to his own, and then stared back at the mirror. Except… there was no noble knight staring back at him, nor a room in the background. A darkness intruded upon the memory and twisted the mirror, until Simon found himself facing a ghost sitting on his Crimson Throne.

"Yes, my wayward son. In the end, you did win. This time." Balzam Magnos leaned forward to better look into his successor's eyes, his smirk widening with glee at robbing his own child of a happy ending.

"But this …" Black armor covered him, leaving only blazing eyes burning with infernal flames exposed." This is all there is now." The Overlord's hand reached out of the mirror, and murdered his past.