The heat radiating from the Dragon Lord Grym was immense, yet the transformed young boy, who was already walking a path of instant decay, felt colder, infused with the chilling power of the dead. Grym stared at the human who dared to challenge him, an ancient terror coiling in his gut.
"Who is that human?" Grym's voice was a strained whisper of disbelief. "I can feel the power coming from him. What is that light around him?" The boy was no longer merely glowing; he was surrounded by a vibrating shroud of pure, focused energy the essence of two decades of accumulated death and refinement.
The boy vanished.
One moment, he was standing thirty yards away amidst the dust; the next, he was directly in front of Grym, the tip of his finger less than an inch from the Kaiju Lord's colossal, obsidian chest plate. The air between them shimmered, thick with lethal intent.
"What? When did he come this close to me?" Grym's mind raced, unable to process the impossible speed, the utter obliteration of spatial laws.
"Kneel," the young boy commanded, his voice a low, terrifying vibration that echoed through Grym's very bones.
The Dragon Lord, one of the supreme commanders of the Kaiju forces, felt an involuntary shiver of submission cascade through his body. "I know this sensation," Grym admitted, sweat a thick, black, oily substance dripping from his face and sizzling on the hot ground. "It is the same sensation I feel when I am in the presence of the Kaiju Lords... those chosen by the Kaiju God to be our rulers on this planet."
He understood the feeling immediately: "It is the feeling of awe felt towards those with ultimate power, those on top of the food chain."
Grym's serpentine eyes dilated in genuine horror. "Impossible! This cannot be! Me, Grym, a Kaiju, can't be intimidated by a mere human!"
His pride, centuries old and thicker than his hide, rebelled against the instinct. With a guttural roar, Grym rejected the fear and transformed. "Behold, human, my strongest form!"
He swelled further, his body ripping the air as it grew, shedding the last vestiges of his humanoid shape to become a colossal, bipedal dragon of midnight scales and jagged spikes. His roar shook the tectonic plates. "Feel my might! Feel my magic energy! In this form, I can rival a Kaiju Lord!" Grym declared with an angry, defiant tone, ready to unleash the stored energy of a thousand storms.
The young boy merely stood there, the terrifying stillness of a perfected weapon. He didn't raise a fist or draw a weapon. He simply focused the power that had cost twenty-two lives to attain.
"Aura Slaying Art."
He spoke one word, a quiet whisper that somehow drowned out Grym's roar.
"Shatter."
A pulse of energy, invisible and absolute, emanated from the boy's fingertip and touched the Dragon Lord's chest. There was no explosion of flame, no tearing of flesh. The terrifying, massive body of Grym, which had just been bellowing its challenge, suddenly went rigid. The obsidian scales developed crystalline fault lines, the solidified energy within him instantly rendered inert and brittle.
Grym, one of the Seat of the Black Blood Kaiju, turned into shattered ice a million pieces of black crystal that instantly dusted the ground. The force of the technique shook the area like an earthquake, and the sheer residual power caused every remaining lesser Kaiju in a mile radius to instantly turn to dust, their weak life forces unable to withstand the wave of perfected death.
The battle was over. The annihilation was total.
The boy, who had been an unstoppable grim reaper a moment prior, gasped for breath. The blinding aura surrounding him dispersed, leaving him looking exhausted, human, and vulnerable. The cumulative toll of channeling the fused power had hit him.
"Ryder!" a clear, familiar voice called out from behind him.
The young girl, who had watched the confrontation from a safe distance, unscathed and untouched by the chaotic energy, ran towards him.
Ryder. That was his name, the name he had almost forgotten through the cycles of his temporal crusade.
"Yo, Si!" Ryder said, a genuine, tired smile finally breaking through the grim set of his features. He walked up to her and hugged her, leaning into her small frame for support. The sheer relief of success, of finally surviving the twenty-third run, made his knees tremble.
"You did well," Sitri said, patting Ryder's head with maternal affection.
The Architects of Time
In a dimensional realm far removed from the Earth, where time was stopped and reality was a canvas of eternal twilight, a woman spoke to a glowing, fading silhouette of a man a spectral figure who wore the heavy cloak of a seasoned warrior.
"I warned you, right?" the woman said, her voice echoing with eons of knowledge and sorrow. "I told you, going back won't help you. Your past self won't be able to do anything, just like you. You won't be able to go back anymore." She watched the man's silhouette with an unreadable expression.
"Despite that," she continued, her voice softening, "you are still smiling, even in death. You did not bow down before me."
The woman smiled, a faint, melancholic gesture. "We have been here for a long time, and this is the first time you have put up a smile on that face, Ryder."
The spectral figure the future self of the young boy nodded slowly. "Well, there is nothing I can do now. Everything now rests on your past self to accomplish our goal. Our goal of accomplishing a Kaiju-free world will now rest on the shoulders of our past self for the 23rd time."
He was a ghost now, his purpose fulfilled, his power transferred. He was the sacrifice that ensured the final, successful timeline.
On that very day, where the Kaiju first woke up and cities were destroyed, people were slaughtered, on that day the hope of humanity had returned. The Grim Reaper of Kaiju had arrived.