“Killed itself,” Ben repeated, pinching his brow. “Myriad, how far out from it are we?”

That was the main issue. Even though his goal of reading its memories had been lost they weren’t actually out of options but assuming they had no reason to speed up, that meant whatever was pulling the strings could potentially see up to six minutes in the future. That was an outrageous amount when gauging something as specific as how a group might attack it, far above his worst estimates.

If they were dealing with an awakened time magic user then he was assuming they were dealing with something that had an advanced variant of the magic instead of just the standard high version but even then he’d been prepared for at worst, three minutes of precognition. Six was an eternity that pointed to a far more worrying sign. Unless it had a combination of time skills helping it and an awakened time magic variant as out of the norm for that affinity as his unnatural mind was when compared against other mind skills, that meant the thing they were facing hadn’t just awakened their time magic, it had leveled it.

But that’s impossible. I know I can’t exactly be one to judge but I have the benefit of a pile of jobs and blessings to go with any natural talent I might have for my skills, the only benefit this thing would have is the structure given by the job system. There’s no way it managed to awaken its magic and then also level it a few times in the two months it could have been here.

Hell, that’s two months if it got through on the first day, this has to be something else. Did the one able to control others snag one of this world’s awakened time mages then? God, if they’re this good at it then I’d be expecting someone on the level of a contender but I feel like I would have heard about someone like that going missing so what is it? I guess it’s possible they got someone with an already high awakened variant and then they got a level after they were taken over, but… No, there’s too much I don’t know, let’s hurry up and get answers.

“Pick up the pace, we’re moving,” Ben told his group as he activated his shoes to propel him forward with each step he took, feeling them throw him through the air and giving him a burst of speed beyond what he’d ever normally manage as the other three did their best to keep up.

By all accounts, he could at least say that no matter how far into the future their enemies could see, they’d made a mistake in how they’d done things. They’d made a choice by having that demon kill itself that in turn selected the future Ben would choose to follow, creating results beyond whatever it could predict, even if it created a new danger for them as well.

He had no doubt that they’d been found, with more things coming their way, the fact they hadn’t seen fit to use Pato to help the creature escape was their blessing and one he was going to take advantage of for all it was worth by the time they reached the corpse, nodding to Azeezol as they did.

“You’re up. Push your skill to the limit ‘cause I don’t know if we’re going to get another shot at this.”

She knelt down by it without a word with the order given and began using her magic while Ben connected to her, seeing in her mind as it activated to reveal the life of the demon, with an unexpected mana requirement behind it.

Corpse song was a magic that let the user see a body’s history, with a higher mana cost the farther one wanted to look back that would only be increased with the age of the body it was acting on but the price was already well beyond what anyone had expected as her mana drained due to the intense weight of experience.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

She wasn’t just seeing the past as she used it, through the power that had been at play the entire time, she was also forced to feed her mana to see all of the potential futures it had looked through in its last hours, creating so much more for her to process and try to work through because of it.

But mana wasn’t a problem when Ben had thousands. When he felt her start to struggle he began feeding her his own to keep her spell running, watching everything as it passed through her mind and interpreting it the best he could while pressing her to keep looking back farther in the past, looking for one key thing and eventually getting it as they were lead to that demonic groups layer.

With more answers too, all of them giving him a headache as he was forced to toss aside so many of his theories in the face of what he was experiencing.

The demon in control, for it was by all appearances only one, seemed to have mastered both soul and time magic to an extent that it was responsible for both effects he’d seen in his companions and the swarms that roamed the forest with everything that implied ringing clear as well.

It held two awakened skills and by all accounts at high levels. Something no demon that had just come to the world should have had but he didn’t know what that meant. Was it some genius that was flying through its levels after making its way to the world? It was possible it had somehow gotten its hands on a job crystal and had found some way to cheat the system the same way he had to speed through it; that could have potentially helped it gain whatever growth it had.

Or maybe it had been another observer who had gotten itself stranded when the first wave ended early. The gods had told him it was only the one before but it wasn’t like they were never wrong, who was to say one more hadn’t managed to slip through?

Both would be bad but neither was what he considered the worst option, even if he tried not to focus on something else. It didn’t matter when it had gotten them, the monster had high-leveled awakened skills. What did matter was how it was using them.

He was now convinced that the way the demon was controlling so many others wasn’t through some collection of skills but instead managed by a high-level soul spell but it was one unlike anything the world had created before and in essence, replicated more than a few of his own abilities.

It dominated others like hive mind, it linked it to others like bind and connect but the worst part was that all of that was to serve the greater purpose of trying to expand its own mind as far as it could.

Seeing the future was difficult, seeing it efficiently was more so but it had created what Ben couldn’t deny felt like a brilliant workaround to enhance its own abilities. By expanding its mental power with each new target it took in it was able to use their brains to look at more futures, expanding its own abilities far beyond what he would have considered the limits of the magic to turn prophesy into something so much more viable than it had ever been used before and in a way that couldn’t help leave him as jealous as he was impressed.

This demon was in essence using others to replicate the earliest levels of unnatural mind but its natural affinities let it do things that Ben would never be able to, if it wasn’t a monster he had to kill then he would have wanted to spend hours picking its brain for all it was worth to see what other ideas existed within it.

Eye on the prize, Ben. This thing needs to die and sooner rather than later too so I’ve gotta figure out how to make that happen.

From what he’d seen, he could tell that the limits of its precognition were seeing up to five minutes in the future, that meant he needed to find a way to kill it where by the time it realized what was happening it would be too late to escape.

It had Fone with his awakened lightning and mace skills, Pato with his awakened space and death magics, and Thera who was an endless fountain of power for the magics she held, all to defend itself. He didn’t know where to begin but he knew the longer he waited the worse his odds would get.

The demon that had them hadn’t seemed immediately comfortable using their skills but that would change before long as it got practice with managing their power and by then it would be too late to do anything. He was already on a time limit, he just needed to make the most of it.