Unholy Player

The gray cloud drifted through the silent void for a moment, wavering as if feeling the rips in space, then thinned, broke apart, and faded to nothing. Sszhar narrowed its eyes at the vanishing mist and let a low hiss roll through the pocket dimension.

Everything in front of it suggested a simple outcome: the strange man had finally died, leaving not even a scrap behind. Yet Sszhar was a wild Spark; it did not follow logic. It listened to the pull of its instincts, to the tiny alarms that pricked along its scales.

A ripple split the pocket realm like a hairline crack sliding across glass. Sszhar triggered Riftwalk and slipped through the fold, returning to the Legacy Domain, where everything still crumbled in slow plates and curls.

Just as it had suspected, Adyr was there with his wings spread, the feathers tilted to catch the stuttering air. A small, needling smile sat on his face.

"Hey, what took you so long?"

Adyr looked genuinely amused at the Rank 4 Spark's confusion, imagining its stare saying, "Fuck you," if it had a tongue for human speech.

He could not blame it, actually, as he had been just as surprised when he uncovered his new innate ability.

After he consumed the Synergy Crystal, the Dawn Raven's flesh-eating heal, the Mindrake's rapid regeneration, and the White Shroud's cloud traits merged and reinforced one another until they produced a new innate ability.

Then, on top of it, his bloodline talent, Gaze, seeped into that new structure and refined it, upgrading the result into something far stronger than the sum of its parts.

I will call it Time Devour, he thought, weighing the name and finding it clean and good.

Time Devour had a single function. It rewound time for his body by 3 seconds.

That was how he escaped the pocket dimension previously.

The instant the dimension pulled him in, he ate the time that had passed for his body and reappeared exactly where he had been 3 seconds earlier.

The same principle explained the gray-cloud trick during his strikes. Each time he met Sszhar head-on, the impact was too strong; the Rank 4 Spark's raw force tore through him and would have left damage. So he devoured the last 3 seconds and reset his body to its peak, returning whole as if the blow had never landed.

There was a limitation, though: the ability worked only on his body. The world did not rewind. No debris slid back, no cracks sealed. Even so, as a pure survival and tempo tool, it was already god-tier.

There was also the cost of flesh. As an innate ability, it required no energy, unlike his Spark Skills, but each use still taxed him. His breath shortened; muscles twitched and seized.

He accepted the price and set the limit. For now, 3 seconds was the ceiling. Push beyond that, and he would risk exhausting his stamina and even losing consciousness.

Fortunately, even those side effects had a solution. After his body changed, his Grace bloodline talent took up residence in his right white wing, threading through the feathers like a resident healer, mending body and mind without extra focus and trimming the weakness to a minimum.

And for Malice, now residing in his left black wing? Now it was time for it to reveal itself and prove useful.

A black substance, thick as smoke, began to pour from his left wing and spread over him from head to toe. It crawled across skin and cloth in a slow, certain tide.

Then it started to materialize and harden.

It formed first around his head, shaping into a T-shaped helmet as black as the void. The surface looked like matte steel, dense and unyielding, leaving only his crimson eyes showing through the narrow slit.

The armor flowed across his bare upper body, coating his ash-gray skin in the same matte black. It mapped every muscle, settling into tight, clean lines until it looked as though it had been forged in place.

It reached his hands and solidified. The black metal thickened over each finger and narrowed to hooked points, turning his hands into claws that seemed capable of tearing at the void itself.

It ran down his legs next, sealing over the shredded remains of his tactical pants like a nanotech suit. The plating continued to his feet, where it reshaped toes and arch until his steps ended in eerie and powerful dragon-like talons.

Now, with black armor sheathing him from head to toe and his crimson eyes burning beneath the helmet like a nightmare, he looked like a legion of the dead sent into the mortal world to fight for the divine.

If not for his left white wing still being there, one would have thought he was the manifestation of evil; even with it, he still looked like that anyway.

Looking at Adyr now, with his new armor, Sszhar seemed slightly taken aback, as if even the sight of him made it uneasy, as if an ancient fear were etched into that black shell and his lone black wing.

"Don't even think about running." Adyr's voice came from behind the helmet, his crimson eyes taking on a harder light as he raised his staff into an attacking stance.

He was at his peak, using everything he had, and he wanted to see the outcome. For that, he needed Sszhar to strike back.

Without wasting another moment, Adyr began to use his Spark skills, flooding his arm muscles with Burst Hop's kinetic energy. His biceps swelled beneath the black armor, one more notch thicker, heavier, and primed.

With size manipulation active, the Tower of Worth began to grow, larger and larger. Black smoke bled from his armor and wrapped around the staff's stone shaft, sheathing it until it looked like a massive block of ancient black stone.

Lastly, he triggered the earthquake skill, charging the tower—now towering over 20 meters—for the strike.

Sszhar felt the pressure building and froze for a heartbeat, confused. Then its eyes hardened. A proud hiss cut the void as the serpent slid forward across nothing and hurled itself at the oncoming strike.

RUMBLE!

The serpent's massive head met the towering block of blackened stone. The impact detonated through the void. Thin cracks whipped outward from the collision and raced away like lightning across glass.

The hard black scales on Sszhar's skull shuddered. Under the pulse of the earthquake charge, hairline lines appeared and multiplied, and blood burst between them in red fans.

This time, it took real damage, the kind that forced it to recoil and seek space to recover.

The recoil slammed through Adyr as well. His dark armor creaked in a dozen places, vents of smoke leaking from every seam as if the shell itself had been overrun by the force.

Blood spurted beneath the helmet, bright against the matte black, a clear sign that his organs had taken the shock. Every opening on his body bled, and for a breath, he looked one step from collapse.

His right white wing pulsed of its own accord with Grace's healing light, keeping him alive and binding his body together like a loyal friend that refused to let him break.