小嫂子的味道

"What? You killed all of them? You mean, each and every person?" Zero exclaimed.

"Yeah… I did. In my fight with the modified monster created by the demons, I broke through both of the realms. Both of us were insanely powerful and fought without any limiters," she said, staring down.

"First it was the demon realm that was destroyed, then at one moment our attacks clashed and tore through space again. Of course, it wasn't enough to lead us to Nihility, but it opened a portal between the demon and the human realm. It opened for just a matter of seconds, but in that time we got inside it in the midst of our fight.

"And there we fought more. Cities were destroyed with punches and humans fell like flies. I remember Leon, Ellyn, and the others came to stop me— of course, they didn't know it was me since my appearance had changed— but they were being a nuisance, so I killed them off too.

"Our fight continued for a good while, when it ended and I was finally free after killing the modified demon I came to know that in the process I'd ended the whole world…

"Not a single soul was left, not even corpses… All of it was gone, down to ashes. The face of the Earth looked like a barren planet. And I was the one responsible for it… responsible for it all…

"And as I sat there in the barren lands with the ashes of people rubbing against my face, I realized something. My revenge was complete, true; I had wiped out the entire demon race. But in the process of coming here, in the process of getting all this power, I lost everything. Everything I could have cared for in the future, the people who would have cared for me. I killed them with my own hands.

"And now that my revenge was complete, I was left with nothing to live for, no one to live with, no one to protect, no one to avenge, nowhere to go, nowhere to return to, nowhere to stay, and nowhere to die.

"There was nothing left… absolute nothing," as she spoke, she looked up at the sky. "The sky there was covered by black clouds and mist that was hurled up in the air during our fight.

Her head tilted back down, and the darkness in her eyes rose. "I tried to kill myself," she said. "But it was of no use. I was just too powerful to be killed; death was something that was not allowed for me to have. Everybody was gone and now I was left alone in the world with no means of escape.

"I spent many miserable and lonely years in that state until an idea finally occurred to me. It was born from the regret I was feeling without any pause from the time I ended the world. The heaviness in my chest made me realize that there was still something I could do, and it was to avoid this future from ever coming true by changing the past.

"And when I actually thought about it, I came to find that this was something I always wanted to do; from the time I had turned into a spiritual body. Because even I was urging for revenge at that point somewhere deep inside I wanted to change things. After all, revenge was not what I wanted to do when I came into this world.

"What I wanted was to slowly stray away from my sadistic side and start seeing people like people while quietly living a peaceful life. Even though the latter might've not been possible even if I changed the entire timeline, I still could stop myself from coming at this stage. I was more of a monster than a human."

As she spoke, there was a sense of regret in her voice. That's when she took a pause and stared into nothingness for a while before lifting her head back up and deciding to continue.

"Thus it was decided what I wanted to do. I will travel back in time and change the turning point of my life; which was the death of my parents. I spent a few months trying to figure out how I will do that— like what changes I will need to do, how will I do them, and how can I perform all this without creating a paradox. But above all, I needed to find a way to actually do time travel.

"Doing that was possible since I'd confirmed it from Req and had myself found some evidence of its existence— when you reach a certain power level you get to know things you weren't even aware of before. Thus in the span of five months I finally figured it all out," she said, looking into Zero's eyes.

"The answer to time travel existed in Nihility, a place where vast amounts of energy existed in its purest form. Therefore I used the power of the five rings and the Requiem sword to open up a hole in the fabric of space yet again.

"As I entered the Nihility I experienced another burst of power all around my body. However, as much pain it was this time I planned on staying for a bit longer than before; and I had something I needed to do. When I was completely inside the Nihility I used my skill of [Foresight]— which at that time was around level 5.

"And just as I activated it an insane amount of energy was absorbed into my body. It was too much, and I felt like I was really going to explode this time. So I escaped back into the human realm. However, upon coming back when I looked at my status screen, or my skill, to be precise. I saw that it had changed.

"Instead of Foresight it was now called [Time surge], and its description was something like this: With this skill, the user can travel through time or make someone else travel within it."

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