Chapter 512: Karsas's Ascension

Ambrose looked out over the now-empty arena. "Have you lost your mind? Scattering all these legends across different points in time—do you have any idea what the fallout of that kind of chaos will be? Can you actually survive the consequences?"

On his own single trip back through time, Ambrose himself had run into bizarre trial after trial, forced to become entangled in major historical events he'd never intended to participate in.

Atros had just scattered an entire group of legends across countless different timelines all at once. Even if time itself possessed some capacity for self-repair, the damage from something on this scale was bound to be severe.

Ever since leaving Alkhemia, Ambrose had often felt a sense of wrongness. Plenty of memories tied to specific points in time simply didn't line up the way they should have. At the time, he'd assumed it was nothing more than his own age catching up with him, muddling his memories.

Looking back now, it seemed far more likely that all of it must have been the distortion caused by this dragon's reckless meddling.

Atros, though, couldn't have cared less about any of that. The moment Arthur Lyon appeared, he launched into a frenzied assault against him.

Despite already having been reborn once, the Dragon Tyrant had inherited every ounce of his original hatred. The sight of Arthur Lyon was enough to send him spiraling entirely out of control.

Arthur Lyon's mech form stood a full ten meters tall.

But compared to a dragon nearly a hundred meters long, even that felt utterly diminutive. A single strike from the dragon's tail sent him flying, scattering debris in every direction.

There was simply no way to win this fight through force.

The only reason Arthur Lyon had managed a sneak attack at all was the hourglass artifact housed within his own body, an item that itself carried a fragment of the Dragon Tyrant's own power over time. Arthur Lyon had spent seventeen centuries serving as its bound spirit, and had barely managed to draw on a fraction of that power for himself.

But the moment the dragon turned the full weight of his attention onto him, that same hourglass inside his body became a liability instead.

Arthur Lyon's body locked up entirely, leaving him utterly unable to move, forced to endure blow after blow. He tried, at last, to fight back—but before he could even raise his sword, the dragon had already torn one of his legs off.

The dragon wasn't fighting to kill. He was simply venting, pure and unrestrained.

Over and over, he pounded Arthur Lyon's body into ruin, then healed it again and again, as though determined to make him suffer without end.

Ambrose, meanwhile, made no attempt to flee while the dragon was distracted. Instead, he pulled out a strange device and studied its readout intently.

By the time Arthur Lyon had been shattered apart for the fifth time, Ambrose finally saw the readout on the device cross some critical threshold.

An instant later, there came a sharp crack. A furious, towering figure abruptly materialized on the arena floor.

The orc king, Roga, wielding his twin axes, had suddenly reappeared in the arena.

Roga seemed not to have fully caught his bearings yet, but the moment he spotted the massive dragon looming overhead, he let out a roar and hurled one of his axes straight at it.

The axe spun through the air at tremendous speed, startling even the dragon for a brief instant.

He'd sent this orc king off into a completely different point in time. How had he suddenly reappeared here?

The dragon understood what had happened in an instant. He'd been drawing on far too much of his own power. Using his temporal energy to simultaneously banish an entire crowd of legends elsewhere had inflicted severe damage across countless points in the timeline all at once.

This was a continuous drain, because the restoration of the timeline was drawing energy directly from the dragon himself.

Though he was now stronger than the original Dragon Tyrant had ever been, he'd still underestimated just how much damage this many legends scattered across time could inflict.

The orc king's sudden return was only the beginning. If this continued, the other legends would inevitably start returning one by one as well.

Faced with the incoming axe, Atros could not afford to vent his fury any further. He beat his wings instead, unleashing a gust of temporal wind that slowed the axe's speed down to a snail's crawl.

Then, with a flick of his tail, the dragon sent the war axe hurtling back the way it came—at ten times its original speed.

The orc king's eyes went wide. He tried to catch the axe as it returned, but his own movements had likewise been slowed down to a crawl.

The spinning axe blade sliced straight into his chest, cleaving the orc king's body diagonally in two.

An artifact sharp enough to cut through any armor had, in the end, turned against its own wielder.

The orc king never imagined that he would be defeated this easily. He couldn't even begin to understand where exactly he'd gone wrong.

Ambrose, meanwhile, let out an involuntary sigh.

This was exactly the kind of failure they'd tested for repeatedly in the linked dreamscape simulations. Power over time was fundamentally unreasonable, and there was no way to guard against it with any kind of magic resistance at all. It simply slowed you down, warping the flow of time around you so subtly that you couldn't even perceive your own sluggishness. You would only perceive the lethal attack as being impossibly fast.

Only a dense, overwhelming barrage of attacks all at once could force the dragon to burn through his reserves fast enough to prevent him from finely controlling his time power.

For the orc king to fight alone was tantamount to suicide.

The dragon didn't even spare the corpse a second glance, turning his attention back to Arthur Lyon's battered mech instead. He was already scheming how best to continue tormenting him.

Watching the orc king's horrible death, Arthur Lyon, barely clinging to consciousness himself, finally couldn't hold back any longer. He shouted, "How much longer?!"

The dragon blinked, startled, and finally turned to look at Ambrose, who'd been quietly hanging back this entire time. Caught up entirely in tormenting Arthur Lyon, Atros had genuinely forgotten the lich was even still there.

How much longer? Did that mean this lich still had some card up his sleeve he hadn't played yet?

Ambrose crushed the device in his hand and said, "The timing's just right."

The frozen flow of time began to shift once more. The temporal barrier the dragon had laid taut across the arena was now being shaken by a force of truly staggering magnitude.

At the very center of the arena, a rainbow-hued blaze of light burst up through the ground, surging straight toward the sky.

The dragon, the lich, and the mech—all three were squarely within the blast radius of that radiant light.

Atros had no idea what this was, but given that he was by far the largest target present, he stood the highest chance of being struck. He had no room left to spare on dealing with Ambrose or Arthur Lyon. He threw every ounce of his power over time into trying to pin that rainbow-colored light in place.

The rainbow-colored energy visibly slowed, but it did not stop entirely. The power of time, normally something entirely beyond perception, took form in that instant: countless hourglasses materialized in the air, coiling around the massive light like chains, straining to hold it down.

Ambrose watched this earth-shaking display of power and remarked, almost admiringly, "A time dragon really is a born legend, after all. You can still hold it back? This power was gathered from the faith of tens of millions of people. Even a god would have trouble withstanding it."

"You damned lich! What exactly have you done?!"

Atros gritted his teeth and held on, every part of his body now frozen in place except for his jaw.

Ambrose let out a light chuckle and explained, "Nothing much, really. I just spent my entire life's savings building an enormous magic circle, using tens of millions of underground undead and kouto as a battery of faith, and cast a long-lost, forbidden spell: Karsas's Ascension."

"Karsas's Ascension?! Impossible. That's absolutely impossible!"

Of course Atros had heard of Karsas's Ascension, that infamous spell that had once killed the first Goddess of Magic. But the spell had been sealed away ever since, and no one alive should have been capable of casting it.

"Ordinarily, you'd be right. The Goddess of Magic would never allow a mere mortal to commit that kind of blasphemy again. I owe my thanks to the Dark Goddess Shara and the Prince of Lies, Cymric, who made a few modifications to the spell along the way. This version of Karsas's Ascension is no longer bound solely to targeting the Goddess of Magic. It can now be aimed at any divine pantheon at all. So long as the gods themselves consent, this rainbow-colored light can elevate any mortal into godhood. And don't worry. It's completely nontoxic, with zero side effects, guaranteed."

Ambrose wasn't lying this time. He had genuinely secured the gods' approval. Those lingering shadows still hovering in the sky above were the gods themselves, watching—and it was only with their tacit consent that today's outcome had ever become possible in the first place.

Ambrose had cashed in the favor he'd earned by helping kidnap the kouto goddess, borrowed some goodwill from Thanos in the process, and secured approval from every god present today for this particular ascension.

As for the "Let the World Forget Me" scroll, Ambrose hadn't used it on Karsas's Ascension at all. Instead, he'd used it to make the entire world forget the linked dreamscape ever existed.

It was the single most convincing, most undetectable illusion magic in existence.

Ambrose had built a magic circle on Coin Island modeled after the Dreamveil Barrier used in the Emerald Dreamwood. From the very moment the Lyon delegation had first checked in, they'd been trapped inside a dream. And it hadn't been just the Lyon delegation, either. Every single guest from every kingdom in attendance had been caught in it as well.

The entire reason he'd had the elves handle hospitality in the first place was that elves were immune to dream-based effects, which meant they could carry out the rest of the plan freely once everyone else had fallen asleep.

Ambrose had woken each guest individually, walked them through the plan one by one, confirmed they understood how the lie-detecting rings worked, and asked each of them to play their assigned role in the performance.

Even so, Lyon's people had proven stubborn to the last. Of the entire delegation, only William Garrison and Allen had actually been willing to cooperate within the dream.

Everyone else in the scene had been left to the dream's own improvised fiction, which was why they'd come across as almost comically inept in combat, never once displaying anything close to their true legendary strength. Fortunately, the dragon never noticed anything amiss. He eventually exposed himself within the dream, giving away his true identity at long last.

By that point, everyone present had already been quietly transported to an entirely different location, Thanos's own Arena of Storms. Ambrose had spent an equally enormous sum building a massive magic circle there as well.

It featured the modified Karsas's Ascension.

An ordinary person couldn't have made use of this spell even if they somehow got their hands on it, since a working of this scale required not just enormous manpower and resources, but the express approval of the gods themselves.

What pantheon, exactly, would someone who forcibly seized godhood join?

Wasn't he worried about Aion striking him down on the spot? Wasn't he afraid of getting devoured by some dark god?

And of all places, he'd chosen to do it on Thanos's own turf. If Thanos hadn't consented, that would have been outright suicide!

Fortunately, Ambrose's network of connections ran far deeper than any ordinary mortal's. No one else would have been able to come up with such a grand spectacle.

"What exactly are you trying to do?! Karsas's Ascension? What scheme could you possibly be running after going to all this trouble?!"

Atros still hadn't figured it out. He couldn't shake the feeling Ambrose was deceiving him somehow. The pressure from that rainbow light bearing down on him was immense, leaving him no room to relax even for an instant. All he could do was grit his teeth and hold out against the onslaught.

"No scheme at all, Your Majesty. I'm simply sending you home, back into the embrace of the dragon gods. The moment you stop resisting, you'll ascend to godhood, and everything in the mortal realm will cease to have anything to do with you ever again."

Just as Ambrose had said, only three people stood within the arena.

Whichever one of them the rainbow light ultimately settled on would be the one elevated to godhood—a minor, weak divinity, certainly, but more than enough to lift them entirely out of the mortal world and remove them from it forever. And since the dragon was by far the largest target present, he was guaranteed to be the very first one the magic circle locked onto.

Once he ascended into a divine realm, he wouldn't be able to meddle in mortal affairs again.

And, of course, if he couldn't survive the process and simply got blown apart instead, that would be even better.

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