"We... we won...?"
Rowan sat down in disbelief as he read the system notification.
After five years of suffering, they finally won!
While he was still in shock, Orelia rushed in and jumped into his arms, her face beaming with tears and a smile as she yelled, "We WON! We finally won!!"
Her cry of joy pulled him back.
And then he started laughing, the disbelief finally giving way to something that felt like relief.
"We actually won!! We won, Orelia! Everyone!"
"Everyone...? Anyone?!"
He stood up and looked behind him. Only the scarred battlefield answered back, silent.
"No one made it, Rowan. I checked..." Orelia confirmed it.
With the core in her chest she was linked to the planet itself, every life on it flowing through her like breath. And there was none left to feel.
Just the two of them. The last two survivors of the entire world.
[Congratulations for fending off an invader!]
[Due to special integration, you will receive extra rewards]
[You have gained an extra tier up, you are now Tier 2]
[Level cap unlocked to 150]
[You have leveled up to level 122!]
[You have gained 1x [World Fragment (SSS)]: Can be used to upgrade any skill to the next tier while retaining its current rank]
While Rowan was busy sorting through the bombardment of system notifications, from the skills he could stole from the Demon King to the loot drops, Orelia, upon seeing him alive, was overcome with such relief and joy that she burst into tears and pulled him into a tight embrace.
Rowan understood her suffering, gently patted her head.
She had been the number one hunter in the world after it all came crashing down.
For a long stretch of time, before he had grown strong enough to stand alongside her, she had stood alone against the entire demon army, just to buy the world a little more time.
No one in the world had worked and suffered as hard as she had.
She deserved to let it all out.
Sadly, with all the souls gone and everyone dead, there was no one left to sing her praise.
That duty fell to him.
"Thank you for everything."
He gently caressed her hair as she sobbed in his arms.
The strongest human turned to a girl who cried and cried until her eyes turned red.
"You don't understand…" But she seemed far from satisfied with simple praise.
"We finally won! US!!" She looked up at him, a wide smile stretching across her face.
"What do you mean?" Rowan was confused.
They won, yes, but why did his praise still not seem to satisfy her?
"It's us, Rowan. You and me. WE finally won."
"You might not know it, but I tried SO hard!!"
Orelia took a deep breath and stepped back, clearing her throat to collect herself.
"Before we continue, I don't want to hide anything from you anymore, so...."
"So...?" Rowan had no idea where she was going with this.
'Was this a love confession??' His heart danced in his chest, tightening with every beat.
"This is my 1,571st time," Orelia said.
"What?" Rowan was stunned.
"This is my 1,571st time. Among them, I killed the Demon King 210 times. And from all of them, you never made it."
Her face wore a sadness deeper than anything he had seen, it was etched into her eyes, that brief glimpse of emptiness within those deep blue depths.
"Phew! I finally got it off my chest, been holding that one for SO long! Hehe~!" Orelia laughed, visibly lighter, the biggest weight she had ever carried finally lifted.
"What did you do?" Rowan's face turned pale.
He walked up to her and grabbed her shoulders, and when he looked into her eyes, he finally saw it.
Insanity settled all the way to the core.
Now that the job was done, the girl who had spent ten thousand years chasing one man finally revealed her true self.
A madness he had never once caught in all the years they had spent together.
"You know my class, don't you? Time Lord. I can manipulate and control time to a certain degree." Orelia cupped his face in her hands, her smile warm, sweet as honey dissolving on the tongue.
"And with the power of the [World Core], I upgraded my [Rewind] to [Reset], turning back time all the way to when I first awakened."
While Rowan only received a [World Fragment] from the Demon King, she had obtained the perfect version of it.
"But that's like... 7 years ago?" She is 25 now, the apocalypse happened around 5 years ago, meaning she had two years to herself, give or take.
"You remember~! I'm so happy!" Orelia hugged him tightly, possessively.
"Then why didn't you warn the others? There was no preparation!" Rowan was shocked.
The timeline of the world's end was still clear in his mind. One year before the apocalypse, the number of gates had tripled, and one year after that, all gates broke at once, releasing a gigantic wave of monsters ranging from S rank to E rank that flooded the entire world.
"Well, at that time you hadn't even become a hunter yet, so I just solo leveled myself, hehe~ I may had forgot but aren't I strong?" She buried herself in him and relaxed like never before.
"7 years times 1,571... That would be almost 11,000 years..." Rowan's heart dropped.
He looked at Orelia, so cheerful in his arms, and felt the full weight of what she had actually done.
Not five years of suffering he had been through.
But 11,000 years of resets, lived through one loop at a time.
"No? Yes? I don't know, I just counted the times, not the years. Sometimes I just reset immediately after getting the [World Core], but if it was only either when you died or some piece died, it was very annoying to keep things the same when you deal with a timeloop."
She explained so casually, like it were just a game.
"Then, can you still go back?" Rowan grabbed her shoulders and pushed her back, making Orelia's face flush red.
"W-Well, yeah, I still got the [World Core]." Orelia's words stumbled just from being pressed back by him.
"Then let us start over, then we can save everyone!" Rowan's voice filled with hope.
Even if it sounded selfish to ask her to suffer through it again, if they succeeded the next time, the outcome would be better.
The ending would be better.
The good ending, where everyone made it out alive.
But somehow his suggestion made Orelia's expression sour, a pout pulling at her face like he had said something deeply irritating.
"You never changed, Rowan..." Instead of answering, she just let out a sigh and a smile. This wasn't the first time he had begged her for a reset.
Because that is who he is, a man who is willing to save everyone before his own life.
Including her own, but that was a long time ago.
"Please, Orelia, just one more time. I'll help!" Rowan offered, meaning every word.
"You know where I work right? Ohio first Hunter Asscocitation, Floor 7 just come to me."
Rowan knew he would be useless at that point, but if there was anything he could help with, he would do so.
And he believed that his past self would have done the same.
Believe in you, who believes in yourself.
Those are the words he lived by.
But to her, those words felt like an insult to everything she had already given.
"NO!!" She shoved him back.
"We tried that before. It didn't work. No more tries! Let's move on to the next stage."
"Come on, if we just..."
"I tried that, okay! You didn't make it!!"
Orelia cut him short.
"No matter what route I chose, even when I found you earliest or when I soloed everything myself, you never made it no matter how hard I tried!"
She had killed the Demon King many, many times, exploiting every loophole across hundreds of loops before finally learning how to guarantee a win.
But her win wasn't saving the world; everyone could burn in hell for all she cared for.
Just HIM being alive was the win she had wished for.
"Like this time, do you know how many times you died in this exact same scenario? 68! Before I finally figured out to wait for everyone else to die so you would have enough SP to both survive the boss and one shot it."
Orelia tried to explain. If the boss didn't die in a single attack it would counter and kill a SP-drained Rowan instantly.
She had no choice if she wanted to keep him alive.
In this loop she had shared her power with him, leaving herself without enough to kill the Demon King alone. But if she hadn't, he would have died midway through.
"You WHAT?!!" The blood rushed to Rowan's face. "You purposely let everyone DIE?!!"
"To save you, to save us! Why are you angry at me? We finally reached the ending together!"
Orelia was genuinely confused. She had expected him to be a little upset, but not like this.
She had done everything to help him.
"Was there really no other way? What about the other 210 times you won?!"
Rowan didn't want to believe it.
She was the person he had looked up to from the very beginning, the one he had pushed himself to his limits just to catch up to, to lighten her burden as humanity's last line of defense.
To find out she was the one who had condemned everyone to death just so he alone could survive.
His life was not worth a billion innocent people!
"It was either you die or everyone else. Don't you understand?"
"Why does it have to be me?! Why can't everyone just make it?" Rowan couldn't accept it.
If she had tried that many times, there had to be a point where humanity fought back on its own.
He wasn't even second in the hunter rankings.
There were people far stronger than him before all of this started.
"Because of your class, Rowan. Only you can buy enough time for people to start winning, but the result is always you dying. No matter how many times I tried, you never made it."
Her answer stopped him cold.
His class. Soul Reaper. The only class that could convert death into quality rather than quantity.
Every other dark magic user, every necromancer, could only trade corpses for numbers.
But numbers meant nothing to the Demon King. He had just lived through proof of that.
"And because I love YOU!" Her confession carried complete sincerity.
"I don't care about them! I only ever wanted you!"
Her voice and expression were void of empathy. Only obsession and love filled her heart.
She truly did not care about human life in the slightest. The only thing she cared about was him.
Maybe she had cared about them once, but being alone for ten thousand years, she had forgotten it all and only he remained.
But as much as he felt the weight of that, he couldn't let it end like this.
"I'm sorry, Orelia."
[You have used [World Fragment (SSS)]]
[Skill selected: Soul Eater (SSS): Directly attacks the target's soul, damage dealt to the body is proportional to skill rank]
[Soul Devourer (Tier 2, SSS): Makes your next attack target the soul; damage dealt to the body is proportional to the strength of the target's soul. On hit, temporary steals the target's stats proportional to damage dealt. Can be cast at range.]
[You have gained skill: World Ender (Tier 2, SSS): Tears open a concentrated void, then violently collapses and releases it in a directed blast.]
"If you won't do it, then I'll do it for you."
[World Ender] + [Soul Devourer]
A giant scythe appeared from above, not expanding from him but descending like a hanging guillotine swung down from the heavens. It dragged Orelia's soul out of her body like a hook pulling meat, then devoured it clean.
Her body never had a chance to react.
She had no answer for combination of skills she had never once seen used in 1,571 loops.
And worst of all, after falling in love with him across a thousand lifetimes, it had never once occurred to her that he would be the one to kill her.
"I'm not going to let the world die just because you wanted it to!"
Even though he was angry about her methods, her sacrifice was real.
"I'm going to save it and save you."
Rowan was crying too, for the woman he loved.
The list of skills he could steal from her made him shiver.
She really was the most powerful person who had ever lived.
[Time Alter (SSS): Diverts yourself into x number of copies, after 20 seconds you must choose one as your primary timeline.]
[Time Dilation (SSS): Diverges the flow of time around yourself or a target.]
[Time Stop (SSS): Anchors a target in frozen time.]
And so many more, each one more OP than the last.
But after going through all of them, he finally found the one he was looking for.
[You have gained skill: Reset (Tier 2, EX): Turns back time to an anchored point. (Anchor point found: 21/4/2027)]
Rowan gained the skill from killing her, but instead of panic or despair, her soul laughed and smiled.
"Ah, this is so like you~!" Her voice carried no anger or remorse.
Only love and warmth.
[Higher level entity detected: Skill effect reduced]
"This is why I love you so much, Rowan~ You always care so much, too much for your own good. You always push for the right thing, no matter what."
While he only got a fragment, she got a core.
[Debuff effectiveness reduced]
Orelia's soul slowly pushed itself free from the scythe's edge, drifting toward him.
"Guess that's something that needs to change."
Her mortal body had perished, but the soul of a regressor who had ruled the world hundreds of times over was not so easily contained.
"I know all your weaknesses, Rowan. So, I'm going to fix them."
[Reset]
Before he could react, Orelia activated her skill first.
A clock drifted out of her [World Core] and began turning backward. He felt the pull immediately, his actions reversing, dragging him back second by second, then minute by minute.
"No!" Rowan fought against the current of time but couldn't.
Orelia moved freely through it, drifting up to him, and pressed a gentle kiss to his lips.
When he looked into her eyes, there was nothing there but madness.
"I'm going to change you. You're going to be perfect, and we will finally get to move on. Together~"
Her body slowly dissolved into a sea of time as the battlefield around them wound itself back toward its ending.
[Reset]
[Error: Only one timeline can exist. Skill failed.]
Rowan tried to use the stolen skill, but it didn't take.
"No, NO!!!"
He fought to stop her, but she only smiled back and raised her hand in a small, gentle wave.
"See you soon, my dear husband~"
And the world restarted.