Chapter 4664: Now

Even as Amare pushed forward with an overwhelming onslaught of trans-temporal attacks, time slowed down in Rui’s eyes as the euphoria of the epiphany consumed him.

Rui rarely named a technique before completing it, but on this particular occasion, he felt a surge of serendipity. The Echoes of Divine Revelation as a name was as ostentatious as the technique itself was, reflecting the weight of his ambition. It was not a technique he would have ever conceived of in the past, but Amare had opened his mind up to the possibilities of time travel.

He would be lying if he said he wasn’t jealous of her.

Time was the highest principle there was. Not even space, quantum mechanics, or even higher dimensions were as high a principle as time was. And just by tapping into it in the least, Amare had gained a power so immense that it exceeded the ability of his existing solutions to cope with. Not even his predictive power could allow him to take on time-traveling Martial Art.

In order to take on time travel, he would need the power of time travel. However, he knew he couldn’t replicate the methods that Amare used. Not only did her time travel rely on her absurd relativistic efficiency, which had become its own force after she became a Corporeal, but it also relied on the power of two Martialverses with the same phenomenological uniformity. For now, he couldn’t replicate that.

That was why he shifted his attention to the ethereal overlapping voice that Transcendents naturally possessed, the voice that traveled in all directions in time. It was a novel curiosity, one that he had never scrutinized. Strangely enough, he had never thought to weaponize this either.

He suspected this phenomenon was likely a product of the interaction between one’s voice and the information dimension. Somehow, through mechanisms he didn’t entirely understand, it violated causality and the laws of time, and traveled back in time. The most notable thing, however, was that it wasn’t a product of active Administration, but rather a natural phenomenon with the laws of information as they existed. After all, he didn’t disappear as a result of the ethereal Transcendent voice, which meant that it didn’t violate the law of conservation of causality for some reason.

’Most likely because of the fact that the voice is an illusion of information.’

The ’voice’ that traveled to the past was not made up of sound waves, but rather information. That was why Transcendents could transmit their voice to the past without disappearing.

It was a rare hack, and one that he hadn’t used properly.

"That will change now."

RUMBLE

The world around them shook even as Amare ravaged him with an onslaught of impossible trans-temporal attacks, each more powerful than the next. The smile on her face spoke to her ecstasy at dominating a battle against Rui despite all the power and progress he had made. They had once been nigh equals, but Rui had since opened a gap and had completely left her behind once he broke through to the Transcendent Realm.

And now, after all that time, she had finally caught up. The confidence in her amber eyes spoke to her certainty of victory. It appeared that, after all this time, she had finally found a power that even Rui couldn’t adaptively evolve to.

Or so she thought.

Suddenly, she heard a voice.

It was Rui’s voice.

It spoke a single word.

"Now."

The moment Rui heard that word, his Autocorpus shot into action, shifting his body out of the way with hyperdimensional motion almost instantaneously.

WHOOSH

It was a success.

Amare’s eyes widened as Rui barely managed to evade a point-blank trans-temporal attack. For the first time in the fight, he had managed to dodge an attack from the future. Both of them understood the sheer significance of what he had achieved.

A wild grin emerged on his face.

It had worked.

He couldn’t transmit complex instructions or data packages to the past. There wasn’t enough time for that, nor was there a need for that either.

All he needed was timing.

All he needed was a single signal.

If he could just figure out exactly when the attacks were coming, then he would be able to handle them.

And that was exactly what the Echoes of Divine Revelation provided him with.

"Now," his future self whispered to his current self. Rui’s Autocorpus immediately leaped into action, completely displacing his body from where it was, successfully evading the attack one more time.

Amare understood what he had done, her expression growing more serious. She hadn’t expected that he would find a counter to her technique this quickly, but she had no intention of giving up.

"Even if you can evade the future, you still have to deal with the present."

She rushed forth, her palms devastatingly battering him with great power as she pushed both Martialverses to the limit, enhancing the force she could inflict to the very limit. With two Martialverses empowering her offensive power, Rui couldn’t afford to get hit too many times; he was forced to evade both present and future as he felt like he was being ganged up on by two Amares at the same time, each of whom had two Martialverses.

It was like fighting four Transcendents at once.

It took him every ounce of all of his Realms of power just to neutralize all the incoming threats, leaving him on the defensive. Amare, on the other hand, converged on him like a predator, her amber eyes blazing with determination. She sensed that this was the first battle where she would be able to extract a victory against him. She didn’t intend to let that opportunity go. The Esil part of her was most adamant about extracting a victory against him.

The battle grew more intense as Rui remained on the defense while Amare remained in pursuit of victory as an increasingly taut stalemate began to manifest, all while Ria stared at her parents with wide-open jaws and eyes.