Reincarnated Hero System

Beatrix tried to rewind it, but her time power was rebuffed by the stronger darkness law energy. To make matters worse, she sensed the unmistakable presence of Time power woven into the dark tendrils!

In stark contrast, Evan fared much better. Due to Adaptive Evolution, he already had strong resistance to darkness and curses, leaving him a little bit less affected than Beatrix.

Mesarthim’s Yellow flames of purification were constantly working, so there was hope that he could eventually cleanse the damage inflicted upon him.

***KABOOOMM!!!!

Suddenly, another deafening explosion erupted in the centre of the city, pulling their attention towards it.

There, they beheld Arthur, floating in mid-air, Lostvayne drawn and crackling with tendrils of silver light.

The boy’s heterochromatic eyes glowed as he faced an aged man wielding a staff—the one who had attacked Evan and Beatrix.

“Πως;! Πώς έχεις τη δύναμη του θεού μας;!”

“Γιατί το ‘ΕΣΥ’ έχεις τα πυρά των Ολυμπιονικών;!”

The two spoke in Olympian as they fought, leaving the contents of their conversation a mystery to the others.

While Arthur couldn’t care less about the havoc their fight was wreaking around them, the old man wasn’t as unbothered as he was.

This man—dressed in ornate priestly robes adorned with intricate silver markings—was the ‘Chief Priest’ Idrilla had mentioned.

His long, white hair marked him as a figure of considerable age and he wielded a long staff of gold that shimmered with an otherworldly glow.

Reflected in his eyes was a deep concern for the chaos enveloping Iklaque and the lives lost due to Arthur’s disregard for collateral damage.

He cursed as he fired beams of Death energy towards Arthur, but the Progenitor dodged them with ease and closed in on the man, releasing a slash with his sword.

Evan could barely see the thin silver line that escaped Arthur’s sword, but his instincts warned him that the power of whatever law Arthur had just used wasn’t any weaker than that of the law of Destruction!

The Chief Priest narrowly dodged, swinging his staff to counter, but to his surprise, Arthur blocked the strike with Lostvayne, the sword itself taken aback by the staff’s ability to withstand its power, especially when Arthur was using his Null power!

[What is that thing made of?!]

Arthur’s second Ego Weapon, ‘Celestia’, exclaimed in his mind, but he dismissed her concern, focusing entirely on the battle.

He swung Lostvayne repeatedly, each strike imbued with a slash of destructive energy that the Chief Priest parried with skill.

If the Staff was indeed what Arthur suspected, it explained why Lostvayne couldn’t cut through it effortlessly. The clash of sword and staff resonated through the air, shockwaves rattling the very foundations of Iklaque as they fought amidst the chaos of evacuating citizens.

In the sky, they exchanged blows, each landing hits on the other. While Arthur’s wounds healed almost instantly thanks to his time rewind, the Chief Priest grappled with the erasing power of Arthur’s Null, unable to reverse the damage it inflicted.

‘The fact that he’s able to ‘rewind’ in the first place is the issue…’

Arthur thought, channelling Anti-Divinity around Lostvayne, its silver glow intensifying.

The Chief Priest, drawing on the same divinity source as Idrilla and the Holy Knights, infused his staff with even more power. A moment of silence hung in the air before Arthur lunged forward, swinging his blade in a wide arc.

The Chief Priest met his blow with the staff and the two forces collided with an explosive energy, ripples coursing through the air and shaking the ground. Arthur pressed the attack, his movements a blur as he broke through the Chief Priest’s divinity defences.

Arthur feinted to the left, then spun right and struck down with Lostvayne, forcing the Chief Priest to parry. The impact sent him reeling, but Arthur quickly followed up with a barrage of Anti-Divinity-infused strikes, overwhelming the old man’s defences.

Each blow chipped away at the Chief Priest’s very existence, prompting a desperate line of thought.

‘I have no choice! I’ll rewind the entire city later. But I have to kill this outsider first!’

Ignoring the nagging doubt about whether Arthur was truly an outsider, he infused even more divinity into his staff.

“Θεϊκός Θησαυρός: Απελευθέρωση!” (Divine Treasure: Release!)

At the top of the Chief Priest’s staff, power bulged and accumulated until it blossomed open like a rose.

From within emerged three serpents, each clutching a jewel of a different colour: Sky Blue, Sea Green, and Obsidian Black.

The divinity emanating from these crystals made Arthur’s expression turn strange.

Artemisia and Beatrix, both children of deities, felt a familiar power radiating from the jewels, and their expressions darkened in realization.

‘That’s the power of their ‘god’? This has become troublesome! Arthur can’t fight that!’

In that tense moment, the Chief Priest shouted with righteous fury.

“DIE, foreigner who intrudes on our god’s land!”

He channelled divinity into his staff, unleashing an absurdly powerful beam from the black jewel. The beam shattered Arthur’s time-stop and gravity barriers with ease, forcing him to dodge frantically.

As the Chief Priest rotated his hand, the beam chased Arthur, obliterating city walls and carving deep scars into the ground. The destructive force destabilized space itself, making teleportation impossible for Arthur and leaving a path of devastation in its wake.

Arthur unfurled his black wings and soared into the sky just as the Chief Priest aimed.

|¬THREE OF YOU! GET OUT OF HERE!!!¬|

His faux true voice echoed throughout the city, reaching the ears of the three teenagers. Though they worried for him, they knew they were powerless in this fight and quickly fled to avoid becoming liabilities.

Arthur caught sight of Artemisia carrying Beatrix and though wondering why Beatrix couldn’t walk, he pushed the thought aside to focus on the beam of energy closing in on him.

|¬ENOUGH!!!!!¬|

His voice resonated once more, now laced with anger as he unleashed a sphere of cosmic destruction energy.

Everything within a kilometre of Arthur turned to dust as he drew upon the little comprehension of darkness laws he possessed, swirling the power around his blade as he began to chant.

|¬Know the mercy of the King of the Underworld. ¬|

Celestia reacted with shock, recognizing the chant and knowing that the ability it was tied to did not belong to Arthur.

|¬With this single strike, I shall send you to the deepest reaches of Tartarus. ¬|

[Master?! What are you doing?!]

Ignoring her, Arthur charged toward the Chief Priest, who gathered divinity and unleashed another beam of powerful darkness. Arthur borrowed power from a crystal in his subspace, mixing it into the swirling energy around his blade.

|¬Be cursed by the Styx!: Avyssaléos Exorismós!¬|

With a powerful swing, Arthur executed the technique his father had taught him, his blade coated in dark silver energy. The slash cleaved through the Chief Priest’s beam, continuing its relentless advance. The Chief Priest raised his staff in a desperate attempt to block.

**BOOOOOOOM!!!

The explosion was cataclysmic, splitting Iklaque in two and reducing the city to ruins with no survivors.

Arthur’s slash didn’t stop there; it shattered the distant hill and blasted the temple atop it to pieces, leaving a giant fissure kilometres-deep in its wake.

Dropping to the ground, Arthur surveyed the devastation.

He saw Artemisia standing strong, a spherical shield around her and the others—likely powered by an artifact from her father—blocking the residual energy from his strike.

His concern quickly shifted to Beatrix, whose presence felt alarmingly weak. Even Evan’s aura seemed diminished, but more pressing was the Chief Priest, who, against all odds, remained alive.

Arthur approached the battered man, noting his left hand that had been erased from existence, while his right gripped his golden staff tightly.

The black jewel on the staff was dimmer than usual, but the other two jewels still brimmed with power.

“…h-how… h-how d-do you… h-have our god’s p-power?”

“I should ask you that. How do you have My father’s power?”

Arthur’s words finally clarified the strange expression he had worn since encountering the old man.

The Authority emanating from the obsidian black jewel on the staff was unmistakably the same Authority possessed by Arthur’s father, the Olympian god of Darkness, Hades.

The technique he had just used—Avyssaléos Exorismós—was also a technique of his father’s and he’d used it to gauge the Chief Priest’s reaction, which came as expected.

“Father?! Imp-guh! Impossible!”

The Chief Priest was incredulous. How could Arthur be the son of their god? As far as he knew, their god had no children.

“Where did you get this staff?”

Arthur stepped closer, but the glowing silver light of his sword caused the Chief Priest to panic. He recalled the sensation of a piece of his soul vanishing when Arthur’s blade had touched him.

Raising his right hand, he pointed the staff at Arthur and shouted.

“D-don’t come close-rr!!”

“…”

Arthur ignored the warning and calmly approached until the Chief Priest said something that made him halt.

“I-if you… k-kill me… your f-friends… w-would die!”

“…what?”

Though Arthur instinctively wanted to dismiss the claim, he remembered Beatrix’s weak presence and Evan’s unusual condition.

|¬Artemisia! Bring Evan and Beatrix here!¬|

Arthur kept his gaze fixed on the Chief Priest, only turning away when Artemisia drew near. Evan was in relatively good shape and could walk, but Beatrix was barely conscious, being carried by Artemisia.

Her breathing was laboured, sweat drenching her, and her legs had turned black.

‘This… Darkness Corruption? No… it’s familiar…’

Arthur struggled to recall where he had seen this condition before, and then it clicked: Celestia’s voice echoed in his mind.

[It’s what your father used!]

‘Dad…?! The Curse of the Styx!’

One of the Six Rivers of the Underworld in Olympian Mythos. The river responsible for granting the famed Achilles his invulnerable body.

Not only did this man possess his father’s power, but he could also somehow curse someone with the Olympian Underworld’s power.

Realizing the truth, he turned back to the Chief Priest, only to see the man unexpectedly fire a beam of darkness at him.

His instinct was to freeze it in time, but the ‘Authority’ within that beam overpowered Arthur’s Pseudo-Authority of Time, leaving him unable to halt it. Just as he prepared to slash the beam with his sword, something unexpected happened.

A sudden pang of pain struck his chest as a dark divinity crystal burst from his subspace, flying into the beam’s path.

This empty crystal had once contained his father’s power and though exhausted, Arthur had kept the empty crystal. Now, it absorbed the energy from the Chief Priest’s beam of darkness.

Shockwaves erupted, pushing Artemisia and Evan away, yet Arthur remained unaffected. The crystal not only absorbed the beam’s power but began drawing energy from the Obsidian Jewel it came from.

Initially, the darkness from the Staff’s jewel tried to lash out at Arthur, but then it turned docile, swirling around him like a pet seeking affection.

Eventually, the crystal reached its limit and stopped absorbing power, leaving only a small amount within the Obsidian Jewel as it fell harmlessly into Arthur’s open palm.

“…w-wa-what?”

The Chief Priest was utterly dumbfounded, unable to comprehend how Arthur had survived a point-blank hit.

“…what just happened?”

Evan, equally confused, watched as Arthur clenched the dark divinity crystal in his hands.

“My Dad’s power helped me, that’s what.”

Arthur responded before dashing towards the stunned Chief Priest, swiftly stabbing his hand with Lostvayne, and pinning it to the ground. He stomped on the priest’s face to stifle any screams of pain before wrenching the staff from his grasp.

As soon as he touched it, the three jewels flared brightly, unleashing their powerful Authority.

From the Sky-Blue jewel, a torrent of lightning surged forth, incinerating the flesh on Arthur’s arm and leaving only charred bones.