Chapter 4642: The Armageddon of Time

The expression that Gigabrain Rui had made when he saw his daughter stand before him was exactly the kind of expression that Rui imagined himself making.

It was an expression of a profoundly deep self-loathing. If he had gone berzerk such that his own daughter needed to throw herself at him in order to stop him, then he had failed as a father. In her memories, a week had passed since Rui had begun his rampage. Shortly after destroying Gaia, he teleported to the Web of War, destroying it in one fell swoop.

Divine Mother —o-o—o herself came to fight him off, but he crushed her effortlessly. After destroying the Web of War, however, he had turned around to attack the human forces, fighting many of the strongest pathwalkers of human civilization.

It wasn’t that he actively destroyed infrastructure and planets, but just chasing about the strongest identified pathwalkers to adaptively evolve to led him to many different star systems, where he inadvertently had wiped out every single human being in them. In just the week that Amare had needed to bring Ria in front of him, he had destroyed all of human civilization, leaving a very minute surviving population.

And it was only at the end of his rampage that he came face to face with his own daughter.

What he saw on her face shattered his heart.

He saw grief, sorrow, and rage.

And it was only then that the otherwise unfazed expression that his Gigabrain self wore broke into one of reckoning.

Reckoning with everything that had happened.

Everything that he had done.

Ria attacked him.

She had grown so strong.

Yet, her power was infinitesimal before his own. The trance of adaptive evolution compelled him to wipe her out, just as it had countless times over the span of several days.

This time, however, his body didn’t move.

It was his heart that had resisted.

Through sheer willpower and through the limitless depths of his love for his own daughter, he managed to resist the shackles of the trance.

Just enough to stop himself from retaliation.

SPLAT

Her attack had impaled his heart, much to her own shock. Yet, an expression of sorrowful affection had emerged on his face through the blinding brightness of the two red suns in his eyes. Her attack had dug deeper into his body as he pulled her into an embrace, hugging her tightly.

"I?????????????????????? ???????? l?????????????????o???????????v?????????????????e????????????????? ????? y???o????????u???????????."

His voice had reverberated through past, present, and future. His mind tried to heal the wound and kill the impediment that was hugging him. Yet, his heart resisted that directive, causing his body to draw closer to death. All of the countless healing, endurance, and recuperative measures he had that made him extremely immortal froze as his heart resisted their execution.

He began to die like any ordinary man would, unable to bear the tears of grief and sorrow his own daughter shed at having to kill her own father.

"This story... this future..."

The blood-red suns in his eyes blazed with blinding brightness.

"...should not exist."

With his dying breath, he acted one final time. With the power of Gigabrain and the Forge of Creation, he had created a new technique.

"Armageddon of Time."

RUMBLE!!!!!

It was a more complex technique than anything Rui had ever created in his entire life. Even his famed Resurrection technique was naught but a child’s toy in front of the universe-defying technique that he had created.

The current Rui gasped as he barely managed to recognize one of the countless traits of the technique he saw in Amare’s memories. "Verse amplification!"

But not just any kind of Verse amplification.

Gigabrain Rui had managed to adaptively evolve the amplification such that all of the amplification was focused on only one aspect of her dual Martialverses.

Her ability to travel back in time.

That was what Rui had amplified by orders of magnitude.

Amare had been shocked by what he was doing. She felt an erupting surge of euphoria as a nigh-omnipotent power filled her consciousness and her very being. The barriers of time were not easy to cross, not even with two Martialverses resonating with each other. With her own power, she could only time-travel a portion of her body; her attacks, not her entire being. And that too, she could only send them back in time a nanosecond or two.

But with the power of Gigabrain, future Rui had temporarily given her the power of a God, allowing her to traverse the river of time and rewrite the future itself.

"Go." He had whispered to Amare. "Go to the past. Change the future."

The blood-red suns within the depths of his eyes shone with blinding brightness and... a flicker of hope.

"Ensure that this light never illuminates my eyes ever again."

Amare directed one last deep gaze at him, wiping her tears, before nodding.

A smile of deep sorrow emerged on his face as she heard his final words.

"I’m sorry."

WHOOSH

She traveled towards the solar system at superluminal speeds, but while traveling through space, she also traveled through time. Each step she took towards her destination that was light-years away, she traveled a moment back in time.

Step after step.

Moment after moment.

She watched time itself rewind as the future unraveled.

With each step, she saw the destruction that Rui had inflicted turn back. With each step, lives were restored. Planets reconstructed themselves. And stars rekindled their snuffed flames.

Yet, she didn’t stop.

She didn’t stop until she reached her destination.

Until she reached the solar system.

Until she reached the battle between the protectors of Gaia and the Divine Mothers.

Until she reached the exact moment Rui was about to activate Gigabrain.

"That won’t be necessary."

She stopped him just in time. The light that was about to consume him halted as his ethereal eyes widened with shock.

"...Amare."

She had succeeded.

She had changed the past.

She had rewritten the future.

The nigh-omnipotent power she had for negative periods of time had been fully consumed, though Gigabrain Rui had also fully restored her phenomenological stamina, so she could go all out on the battlefield with the primary objective of ensuring that Rui didn’t activate Gigabrain.

And she had succeeded there as well.

That was where her retelling and her memories ended.