My Goblin System : Levelling up with my SSS Class Devouring skill-Chapter 281

Satou stood from the bed slowly, the weight of TheReaper’s warning still settling over him like a heavy cloak. The spell’s information had been comprehensive—troop numbers, hero abilities, tactical suggestions—but it was the underlying message that stuck with him most.

Don’t die before we can fight properly.

Even a legendary hero who’d killed twelve demon lords thought he was worth preserving as a future opponent. The thought would have been flattering if it wasn’t so terrifying.

Jessica sat up beside him, her hair tousled from their intimate reunion, eyes watching him with concern. "Satou? What’s wrong? That message—it was from TheeReaper, wasn’t it? The legendary hero?"

"Yes," Satou confirmed, reaching for his shirt. His mind was already racing through tactical implications, defensive preparations, resource allocation. One month. Maybe less. "The humans are coming. thousand troops, four summoned heroes, siege weapons, everything."

Before Jessica could respond, Satou’s vision suddenly blurred.

A spike of pain lanced through his skull—sharp, sudden, and absolutely overwhelming. It felt like someone had driven a red-hot spike directly into his brain, twisting and burning and pulling at something fundamental in his mind.

"Ahh!" Satou gasped, one hand flying to his temple as his knees buckled.

"Satou!" Jessica cried out, lunging forward to catch him before he could fall.

Lyra, who’d been dozing contentedly on the other side of the bed, jerked awake instantly. Her dark eyes widened in alarm as she saw Satou doubled over in pain. "What’s happening?! Satou!"

But Satou couldn’t answer. Couldn’t even hear them properly over the roaring in his ears. Because the world was changing around him, reality twisting and reforming into something else.

Not his room. Not his settlement. Somewhere else entirely.

Satou found himself looking through someone else’s eyes again—Merc Assault’s eyes. The perspective was jarring, disorienting, made worse by the emotions flooding through the memory. Not the cold confidence he’d felt in the first memory, but something else entirely.

Fear.

Pure, primal, bone-deep terror that made Merc Assault’s hands shake and his heart pound hard enough to hurt.

The legendary assassin was standing in a lavish chamber that definitely wasn’t his own. Satou recognized the aesthetic immediately—temporal motifs everywhere. Hourglasses of various sizes lined the walls, sand flowing in impossible directions. Some poured upward, defying gravity. Others had sand that moved sideways, or spiraled in patterns that hurt to watch. A few contained sands that glowed with inner light, each grain seeming to contain entire moments of frozen time.

Clocks covered every surface, their hands moving at different speeds or sometimes backward. A massive grandfather clock in the corner had twelve faces, each one showing a different time—or perhaps different timelines entirely. Smaller timepieces were scattered across desks and shelves, some ticking in perfect synchronization while others moved to their own chaotic rhythms.

The floor was polished obsidian that reflected not the present, but glimpses of possible futures and forgotten pasts. Looking down at it made Merc Assault dizzy as he saw himself standing in the room, then dead in the room, then never having entered at all, then—

He forced his eyes away from the floor. That way lay madness.

Chronus’s private chambers.

Merc Assault shouldn’t be here. Absolutely shouldn’t be here. This was the most secure location in one of the most powerful demon lords’ territories, protected by layers of temporal magic and spatial wards that would kill most intruders instantly. Time itself was weaponized in this space—intruders would find themselves aged to dust in seconds, or regressed into non-existence, or trapped in temporal loops until their minds broke.

But the assassin was a legend for a reason. His nightmare powers let him slip between perception and reality, moving through spaces that shouldn’t exist, bypassing defenses that assumed intruders had to exist in normal time and space. He could walk through dreams and manifest in shadows, existing in the cracks between moments where even temporal magic struggled to find purchase.

Still, his hands trembled as he approached a particular desk—massive thing made from wood harvested from trees that existed in multiple time periods simultaneously. The grain shifted as he watched, showing rings that represented centuries in one moment and mere days in the next. On it lay dozens of scrolls, documents, artifacts that Chronus had been studying.

This was the third time Merc Assault had infiltrated these chambers. The first time had been mere reconnaissance—mapping defenses, learning patterns, establishing that such infiltration was even possible. The second time had been more daring—actually examining documents, though only briefly and without touching anything that might be trapped.

And tonight was the third visit. The one where he’d finally take the risk that had been building since that second infiltration, when he’d noticed one particular scroll sealed with temporal magic so powerful it practically screamed "dangerous secret."

The scroll was sealed with temporal magic, locked with enchantments that would normally take decades to crack. Chronus had woven protective spells around it that existed across multiple timeframes—try to open it in the present, and it would trigger alarms in the past that would alert Chronus before the attempt even happened. Try to dispel it with brute force, and the temporal backlash would age the would-be thief into dust.

But Merc Assault had been patient. Three visits over the course of six months, carefully studying the patterns, learning the rhythm of Chronus’s power. He’d discovered that the Time Lord’s protective spells weren’t perfect—they had to allow Chronus himself to access the scroll, which meant there were brief windows of vulnerability when the temporal lord adjusted his own defenses.

Tonight, finally, the seal had weakened just enough. A gap in the timeline barely five seconds long, a moment when the protections thought Chronus himself was accessing the scroll and temporarily lowered their guard.

Merc Assault’s nightmare-coated fingers touched the scroll, his power wrapping around it in layers of unreality that convinced the defensive enchantments they were being touched by their own master. The seal dissolved like smoke exposed to sunlight, temporal energy dispersing harmlessly.

The parchment unrolled slowly, as if reluctant to reveal its contents even now. The text was written in an ancient script that predated most modern languages—something from the Age of Gods, before the current demon lords rose to power. Characters that seemed to shift and change as he read them, each word carrying weight that made his eyes water.