Infinite Paths: The Raging Phoenix-Chapter 1544: Breaking free

As he checked the unfolding chaos before him, Lonos felt the weight of frustration settling upon his shoulders like a heavy shroud. Every twist and turn of the battle seemed to defy his expectations, throwing his meticulously laid plans into disarray with infuriating consistency. And now, as if to add insult to injury, new complications arose, further complicating an already precarious situation.

With a barely concealed scowl, Lonos steeled himself for the battle ahead, knowing that he would need to summon every ounce of his considerable power to overcome his adversary’s seemingly indomitable spirit. For the first time in his existence, he found himself truly tested, and the realization only served to deepen his growing sense of irritation.

The temporal Path was updated.

Lvl 55: Time Compression - Condenses temporal events into compressed temporal loops, enabling the rapid acquisition of knowledge or skills. Higher levels increase the speed of absorption,

The temporal Path was updated.

Lvl 60: Temporal Erasure - Erases events or individuals from the timeline, altering history and reshaping the course of destiny. It decreases the effects of time magic by one thousand points per level.

"This guy is so annoying..."

Lonos could tell that his nature was only making things get more complicated. He couldn’t see the future anymore, and the fact that he had to deal with the dragon god and the overseer eventually only made his caution more obvious. freeweɓnøvel.com

"It couldn’t be that I can’t see the future anymore because all of the possible futures lead to my end... is it?"

While he considered that, Lonos gave Rain enough chance to recover. At that point, he was starting to understand the feelings of the enemy. If he were to face an opponent like himself, he probably would lose hair during the battle out of sheer annoyance.

In any case, it seemed that the machine god finally reached a breaking point... after failing to kill Rain time and time again, it was about damn time for that to happen.

"Even if I have to waste some time, I can always retreat to a time where they won’t be a threat to me... staying there for long isn’t possible, but at least I will buy enough time to absorb the experience of this battle and improve my chances against them."

Lonos snapped his fingers, and time stopped in the area once again. If it were before the battle, Lonos would have thought that killing Rain now would be easy, but that wasn’t the case. While time had stopped, he created a transparent portal on the side that looked like a water mirror reflecting everything that was in front of it, but before long, the images on the water mirror began to change, and then they began to show the previous images of the battle.

The changes started slowly, but eventually, they began to gain speed and showed images of Rain’s life even before their current battle. When Arel showed up a few moments before her death, Lonos pulled her out from the mirror, and then she appeared in the area. Arel looked around in total shock and confusion, but then she saw Rain and Lonos.

"Lonos... to think that you can even do this and you were forced to do this much? What are you planning?"

"I suppose you all deserve an explanation about this. This technique I call: Time Paradox."

A time paradox is also known as a temporal paradox or causality loop, and it is a situation in which the sequence of events or cause-and-effect relationships in time travel stories or hypothetical scenarios contradict the standard laws of causality. It’s a scenario where an action produces results that, in turn, make the original action impossible or contradictory.

One famous example is the grandfather paradox: if you were to travel back in time and kill your own grandfather before your parent was conceived, thereby preventing your own existence, it creates a paradox. If you were never born, how could you have traveled back in time to kill your grandfather in the first place?

"... You want to bring us back here before the time of your death... all in order to weaken him since he wouldn’t have the power and knowledge he obtained from us? Why don’t you just kill him there?"

"I can’t risk showing him anything else... his learning capacity is too dangerous. Besides, in the smallest chance, he can enter in contact with another version of one of us or himself from another time location, even I can’t tell what will happen. His death here won’t happen with your direct help, but to change this present, we will help each other and erase his existence completely. That will also make the other enemies lose all of their knowledge about us. At least to some extent."

That was very convenient for Arel... she had a second chance now that she knew about a future where she died, but she also felt conflicted about that. Even though they worked together for so long, Lonos never helped anyone without gaining anything in exchange. She only had free reins to do as she pleased because she guaranteed him a lot of energy for his experiments.

While Lonos was going back in time while watching Rain’s story in order to look for the next machine god to rescue, Arel looked at Rain, who had been completely immobilized. She found it hard to believe that a mere human managed to defeat her, but since that human also managed to corner Lonos that much, perhaps her defeat was unavoidable.

While looking at Rain, Arel couldn’t help but feel many things like annoyance and danger... much to her surprise, the feeling of danger was stronger, much stronger and it was increasing with every passing moment.

"... It almost feels like he is about to break free at any time."

When Arel said that, she had the feeling that Rain had moved just a bit, but that couldn’t be true... she denied that for a while, but eventually, Rain’s body began to tremble very clearly.