My Dragon King System-Chapter 296: Checkpoint

Aiden’s consciousness split from his body just as he died.

For a brief moment, everything went dark. Then light flooded back in, but it was fragmented and distorted.

Scenes played backward before his eyes. He watched himself fall from the sky in reverse. He saw Samael pull the Longinus out of his chest, then stab it back in. The spear withdrew completely, and Aiden’s body flew upward, healing as it went.

The battle continued in reverse. Attacks unmade themselves. Dragons flew backward through the air. Samael’s transformation reversed, his single black wing splitting back into six.

Faster and faster the scenes rewound, blurring together until they became incomprehensible flashes of color and motion.

Then suddenly, everything stopped.

Aiden’s consciousness landed back into his body.

He gasped as awareness flooded back into him. His red eyes opened up, and he found himself standing in Rhyos’s temple once more.

The dragons stood beside him. The gods were still gathered nearby, looking toward the exit.

They had just arrived in Eden.

This was the exact point where he had first cast the fail-safe spell moments ago.

Syqora, who had been standing beside him, turned his head and looked at Aiden with a puzzled expression.

"What was that?" Syqora asked.

The scene repeated itself. The same question. The same moment.

Aiden took a breath before replying.

"We will lose that battle."

The extra measure Aiden had cast earlier, he called Checkpoint.

He had used his Time Authority as The Eternal Arbitrator to create a temporal anchor, a marked point in time that his consciousness was bound to.

This anchor acted as a fail-safe. The moment he died, his consciousness was automatically extracted from that point and pulled backward through time to the checkpoint moment, overwriting his past self’s memories with everything he experienced up to his death.

Now only Aiden retained his memories of dying because his consciousness had been protected during the transfer.

From his perspective, it was as if he had "woken up" in the past with full knowledge of the future, while everyone else had no idea anything had happened.

Syqora and the others looked at him strangely. Syqora specifically had an expression that looked disappointed.

"This is not the confidence you expressed earlier," He said.

Aiden sighed and spoke firmly.

"If we proceed with this, every other thing goes as planned except one thing: defeating Samael."

Syqora frowned at that statement.

"You speak as though you’ve seen a future even I can’t see," he replied.

Aiden met his gaze directly. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝚠𝚎𝚋𝗻𝗼𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝚘𝐦

"I didn’t just see it," He said. "I experienced it. In fact, of the four of us, I died first."

He paused, then continued urgently.

"There’s so much I have to tell you, all of you, but we don’t have time, Syqora. They already know we’re here. We have to leave now."

The moment Syqora heard Aiden say he had died in this future he saw, a thought to truly reconsider began forming in his head.

Orlien, who stood nearby, could sense Aiden’s emotions and with that, could tell how serious he was.

"I say we listen to him, Syqora," Orlien said. "There’s something he knows that we don’t."

Syqora nodded slowly in agreement.

Adam, who had been listening with visible worry on his face, spoke up then.

"Are we really going to let them continue as is?" he asked. "The more time the fallen angel is given, the closer the gods come to extinction."

Aiden turned toward him and replied,

"I know that, which is why I will be forcing your kind out of this place. But first..."

He stretched his hand to the side and opened another portal with a thought. The blue gateway opened up before them.

"You all leave," Aiden said.

The dragons moved first, stepping through the portal one by one. Adam followed, then Thera, Orion, Umgadi, and Gaia.

Within moments, they were all gone, and now it was just Aiden standing alone in Rhyos’s temple.

He could sense Samael and Lilith drawing closer. He also could feel other gods moving toward this location as well, drawn by the presence of intruders in their city.

And with his Dragon Sight active, he could see every god and what positions they were in within Eden.

Then he stretched his hand forward and whispered one word.

"Banishment."

In that moment, every god within his field of view was automatically teleported away.

All of the gods who had been proceeding with Samael vanished from his sides in an instant.

Even Lilith disappeared mid-flight.

The ones who were still in other parts of Eden, those who hadn’t proceeded to the wedding venue yet, also vanished without warning.

Every single one of them disappeared from sight.

Samael stopped in his tracks mid-flight, and his eyes widened slightly as he glanced around himself in surprise, trying to understand what had just happened.

Everyone had vanished. Only he and his demon lords remained floating in the air.

Even Asahel had disappeared alongside Lilith.

"What just happened?" Samael muttered to himself.

And as soon as Aiden completed the Banishment spell, a smile appeared on his face.

Then he disappeared as well.

His reappearance point was right inside his Pocket Domain, which was also where he had forcibly brought almost everyone in Eden to.

The gods materialized all at once within the endless expanse of floating platforms and void. What followed up was the confusion erupted immediately as they looked around at their unfamiliar surroundings.

"What just happened?" one god asked.

"What is this place?" another demanded.

Voices overlapped as panic and confusion spread through the gathered gods.

And in that moment, while they were all still disoriented by how they had suddenly gotten here, Aiden spoke one word.

"Stop."

Time froze for everyone within his domain.

Every god went still instantly. Even the Archons and Adam who had returned through the portal were caught in the time stop.

The time stop, however, did nothing to stop the other dragons. They moved freely through the frozen moment.

Thyron, Orlien, and Syqora approached Aiden immediately, with expressions filled with astonishment at what he had just pulled off.

The first thing Aiden said to them was.

"I broke a rule."​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​