Lina was mumbling in her sleep, but her words were too vague to make any sense of. This strange phenomenon only added another layer of mystery to everything happening around them.
Kag irritably scratched his head, staring back toward the city. The raging green light was gradually dying down, though terrifying waves of magical power still lingered in the air.
"If it's not this and it's not that, then where the hell did this monster come from? Don't tell me he just popped out of a rock!"
The instant Kag finished venting, something flashed through Saruman's mind like a bolt of lightning. He suddenly straightened, his silver eyes shining brighter than ever.
All the confusion and contradictions that had plagued him until now suddenly seemed to point toward a single answer. It was an utterly unbelievable explanation, but it was possible!
Saruman slowly turned toward Kag, then looked around at this dead world that completely defied common sense. Finally, his gaze settled on the stone tablet bearing the words "Domain Beyond Time."
When he spoke, his voice trembled with excitement, though beneath it lay the creeping horror of realizing he might be approaching the truth.
"Kag... do you remember what was written on the stone tablet? 'Domain Beyond Time.' What if... what if this place really can disrupt time and distort the continuity of space-time?"
He took a deep breath before voicing, word by word, a theory that shocked even himself.
"Then perhaps... we and that Legendary inside the city aren't actually from the same time and space!"
Saruman truly deserved his reputation as a brilliant young wizard who had touched the threshold of the Legendary realm. After eliminating every conventional possibility, he had turned his attention toward the deepest, most inaccessible domain of all: time.
Through exceptional intellect, sharp intuition, and the cryptic clues on the stone tablet, he had managed to brush against the edge of the truth.
He was only half right, however.
The Forbidden Land of R'lyeh was indeed distorted by forces beyond the normal laws of space and time. Temporal turbulence and folded spacetimes truly existed here. But Ian, currently inside the city, hadn't come from some ancient past as Saruman suspected.
He had come from a point after their era, from a future that had yet to happen.
"Huh? That's actually possible?"
Saruman's theory of "Spacetime Displacement" struck Kag like a lightning bolt in pitch-black night. For a moment, it illuminated the confusion filling his thoughts, but it also brought a deeper chill, the horror of having his understanding of reality shaken to its core.
"N-Not from the same time and space?"
Kag's mouth fell open wide enough to swallow a dragon egg. He looked around at the desolate world where even time seemed to have died, then toward R'lyeh City standing silently beneath the murky yellow sky, radiating an ancient aura of madness. An indescribable sense of absurdity and insignificance seized him.
Time? Space-time? To a warrior, concepts like those were far too abstract, and far too terrifying.
"You mean... that guy in the city might have come from... the past? Or... the future?" Kag tried his best to follow Saruman's reasoning.
"It can only be the past!" Saruman rejected the possibility of the future almost instinctively.
In his mind, time was a river that flowed in only one direction. The past was fixed and could be explored; the future was an uncertain fog of infinite possibilities. How could a concrete person travel backward from a future that hadn't even been determined yet?
"He can only have come from some ancient era we know nothing about, one buried in a gap in recorded history! An ancient being who reached the Legendary realm before known history began, who then either became trapped here or entered willingly!"
Saruman spoke with complete certainty. Nor was it merely wishful thinking: by ordinary logic, the present era was incapable of producing new Legendary Wizards. How could the future possibly produce one?
Therefore, this Legendary could only have come from the past. Perhaps that even explained why so many Legendaries throughout history had vanished without a trace.
The more Saruman spoke, the more reasonable his theory seemed. All the contradictions that had bothered him suddenly found a place to fit.
"Yes. Only this explains why he's so powerful, yet there's no trace of him anywhere in recorded history! It would also explain why his voice sounds so young. Perhaps in his era, some kind of magic, or even a racial trait, naturally made people sound like that! Or perhaps he really did reach the Legendary realm at an exceptionally young age, and his era was simply buried by time!"
Saruman could accept the idea of an ancient prodigy reaching Legendary before him. After all, Saruman hadn't been born in an age overflowing with magical resources. He believed his talent was second to none, but he could admit that in a resource-rich ancient era, a true prodigy might have achieved Legendary status at a remarkably young age.
"Uh..." Kag listened to Saruman's analysis and felt as though a Troll had mashed his brain into pulp. He struggled to follow. "A Legendary... from ancient times? Is that really possible?"
When he looked back toward R'lyeh City, his earlier awe was now mixed with a strange sense of distance and uncertainty, as if he were staring at an ancient relic brought back to life. The thought of sharing space with someone from a completely different era was deeply unsettling.
"It's very possible!" Saruman nodded firmly, pacing quickly around the stone tablet. His silver eyes shone with a mix of excitement and gravity. "This 'R'lyeh'... The tablet mentions 'eternal slumber' and a 'Great Old One.' This place may be an ancient ruin that has existed across unimaginable spans of time. It might even be a space-time node... or a graveyard of time itself! When we passed through that stone door, we didn't just cross through space. We entered a region where time flows differently, where the laws of time are in complete chaos!"
Saruman stopped, once again sensing the lingering traces of Legendary-level death magic in the air, trying to draw out more clues.
"If that's true, our plan needs to change completely. A Legendary from an unknown ancient era... His mindset, his goals, his attitude toward us, everything is an unknown. Approaching him recklessly could be far more dangerous than we imagined."
Kag realized the gravity of the problem. If the person was from their own era, no matter how evil, they would at least share a basic understanding of the world and have some foundation for communication. But an ancient Legendary whose entire way of thinking might be alien? Who knew how he would view two uninvited guests? Would he crush them like insects, or use them as experimental subjects?
"Then... what do we do? Do we still follow him?" Kag hesitated.
Saruman fell silent, looking at the unconscious Lina. The scales covering her face glistened with an oily sheen under the murky yellow sky, her breathing so faint it seemed ready to stop at any moment. Then he looked at the black markings on Kag's arms and neck, slowly writhing like living parasites.
They were running out of time. Staying here meant waiting to die. Entering the city and facing an unknown ancient Legendary was a massive risk, but it offered their only chance at survival.
"We need more information," Saruman said, his voice regaining its usual calm decisiveness. "We can't rush into the city, but we can't stop observing either. We need to know what he's fighting, what condition he's in, and... whether he has any way of leaving this place."
He turned back to the stone tablet. "This tablet is the key. Since it records 'R'lyeh' and those warnings, there may be more information about the temporal properties here. There might even be clues about that ancient Legendary."
He resolved to decipher the more complex and dangerous sections of the tablet, regardless of the cost. Kag nodded, tightening his grip on his greatsword. Whether the enemy was a monster, a Dark wizard, or an ancient Legendary, his duty remained unchanged: protect Saruman and Lina, and find a way out.
Just as Saruman was about to immerse himself in deciphering the tablet again, that youthful voice echoed from R'lyeh City once more.
This time, however, it wasn't casting a spell. Carried clearly through the strange distortion of space and time was an unmistakable human emotion, impatience.
"This is... never-ending."
The voice remained cold, but that tiny trace of raw human irritation, the annoyance of someone dealing with a relentless hassle, shattered the image Saruman had built of an incomprehensible ancient being.
Saruman froze.
That tone... That distinctly boyish irritation at dealing with repetitive trouble... Was that really how an ancient Legendary with an alien mindset would sound?
An even more absurd thought crept into Saruman's mind like a poisonous vine in the dark, strangely matching an unexplainable instinct he had tried to suppress.
What if the youthfulness in that voice wasn't a trait of some ancient race? What if... he really was that young?
The possibility was so irrational that Saruman instinctively pushed it away, refusing to examine it too closely. But the seed of doubt was planted. The fog surrounding space and time was apparently even thicker and stranger than they had imagined, and the truth remained hidden beyond R'lyeh's twisted architecture and churning tides of green magic, waiting to be uncovered.
Over the next stretch of time, Saruman's theory of Spacetime Displacement weighed heavily on both of them. Before they could process it, renewed activity inside R'lyeh City locked their attention firmly back on the twisted, bizarre structures.
After that irritated "This is... never-ending," the battle inside didn't just continue, it exploded with terrifying violence. It was no longer just individual casts of "Avada Kedavra" or the sweeping "Avada Plague."
"He's being swarmed!"
This time, they sensed a far more chaotic, unpredictable, and dangerous rhythm of battle.
Dense volleys of green "Avada Kedavra" bolts poured out from city corners like a storm of lethal arrows. Every beam was precise and deadly, as though dozens of Grim Reapers were swinging their scythes at once. The casting speed completely defied Saruman's understanding of rapid casting, this was no longer technique, but pure instinct or the direct wielding of fundamental law.
At times, the horrifying "Avada Plague" erupted again. The green cloud of death moved like a living tide, contracting into a dense torrent that ripped through obstacles before surging outward to engulf vast swathes of the city. Its power bore the unmistakable mark of absolute extinction.
"Terrifying... So this is the power of a Legendary!"
Even at a distance, Saruman and Kag felt their skin sting and their souls ache. But what chilled them further was the collateral damage.
They watched as twisted towers, built from massive blocks of green stone that defied physics, were struck by invisible forces and collapsed like toy blocks kicked over by a child. Stone fragments flew everywhere, kicking up huge clouds of dark green dust.
What echoed across the wasteland wasn't just the sound of exploding spells, but something deeper and far more terrifying.
At times, it sounded like mountains groaning or the earth tearing open. At others, an ear-splitting shriek pierced the air, a sound belonging to no creature either of them knew. Then came a low, resonant hum, barely audible yet powerful enough to vibrate their internal organs, rising from deep within the earth's crust, or from some indescribable dimension beyond it.
The magical turbulence grew violent and chaotic. Alongside the cold aura of death magic were other energies neither could identify: some bore the wet, oppressive chill of the deep ocean, others felt like the void of dying stars, and some were steeped in pure, unadulterated madness, an insane will that profaned reason itself.
These conflicting energies collided, corroded, and annihilated one another. The shockwaves swept across the wasteland like invisible gales, whipping Saruman's silver robes and Kag's hair, carrying a chill that cut straight to the bone.
"Damn it... what the hell is he fighting in there?" Kag cursed under his breath, instinctively shifting the unconscious Lina behind him, as if his body could shield her from the unseen horror. His knuckles turned white against the hilt of his greatsword.
As a veteran of countless battles, Kag could usually gauge a fight's scale simply from sound and movement, but what he was witnessing defied experience. This wasn't a battle between armies; it was a catastrophic clash between terrifying entities, each capable of tearing apart the world.
Saruman's expression turned grave. Abandoning his work on the tablet, he focused entirely on sensing the energy fluctuations within the city.
"I can't even fathom it..." his voice was dry. "That Legendary... he's fighting more than one enemy. And every single one of them is monstrously powerful!"
It was impossible to imagine what kind of horrors could force a Legendary to fight this hard. After all, even the weakest true Legendary could slaughter someone like Saruman as easily as stepping on an ant.
The thought chilled Saruman to the bone. He was immensely relieved they hadn't rushed into the city earlier, otherwise, not even their ashes would remain.
(End Of This Chapter)
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