Palzol was angry. First, he had to see a reminder of Maldol's excessive cruelty in Padina, then he learned that they were to continue unnecessary cruelty to try to create another tortured soul. While cruelty with the slaves was sometimes required to get them to work properly without a strict set of instructions, it was entirely unnecessary to create another detector like Padina. She had never lied about the Skill's feedback and was capable of surviving its heart attack-inducing levels of fear.

Which were all too unnecessarily cruel. Maldol could have just displayed the information as numbers, like the SKill uses internally, but he decided on cruelty, as always.

And now he was out here in the middle of nowhere, fighting some endless hoard of odd humanoid creatures, instead of advocating against continued unnecessary cruelty. They had managed to keep him from the Dungeon for almost a full two hours, but no longer. Once their numbers had lowered enough that whatever anti-knockback Skill they had couldn't be stacked together to stop his advance, he'd bolted for the Dungeon.

Making his way over to what was probably the boss, he said, "If you come quietly, I promise you a painless execution after interrogation."

----------------------------------------

Degritone stood and saw the figure's mouth moving. As Degritone got close enough to the man that his Aura of the Lolicon affected them, almost 40 feet, they fell to their knees clutching their head with their mouth open in what was probably a scream of pain Degritone couldn't hear. So not someone I need to negotiate with. Do still need to make sure they don't have any lolis that care about them, though, he thought.

Degritone used his Aura Control to create a small bubble around the man as he got within his sword's reach. Creating a window to "speak" with the man, he said, "Given your reaction to my aura, you are someone I'm going to kill, maybe imprison. Give me one reason I shouldn't do so right now?"

They started speaking and Degritone sent another window. "I am deaf. Respond using one of these windows. Just create a new window with the 100% customizable HUD and project it at me like you would when sending someone a Skill description."

"I am Palzol, the 8th High Noble. If you value your life, you will let me live. Killing me would result in you getting hunted down by the king and the 11 other High Nobles. I was sent here to retrieve our commandeered Dungeon, or properly assess the threat of those who took it over if I was unable. Your little army out there seemed to be of no real threat, but whatever that aura was alone would cause all but the king to be unable to fight back.

"If you kill me, they are to assume maximum threat and send everyone. If you let me return, I can return and save my peers, only requiring the king to come slay you, from what I've seen so far, though you have given me very little data to work with. If you could flail around as we fight outside your aura for a while, it would be highly appreciated."

Degritone began to silently laugh. He accelerated his time to the maximum so he could get over it much more quickly before going back to normal time and saying, "Oh, good. You being a High Noble simplifies things. Does your king have a tier 2 or 3 image? Has his image's Skill Set been upgraded more than twice? Can he survive an attack that does over a billion damage?

"Can he ignore a few hundred million flat DR and well over 99.99% percentage DR? Can he deal with someone who can heal for over 4 million per second without Skills? Can he deal with someone who can predict his movements a full three seconds in advance? Can he survive taking over 10% of his maximum health per second for the rest of time? I am specced out specifically to fight people like you and your king.

"You lose stats when fighting me, you are inflicted System-ignoring pain when near me, you take increased damage from me, I ignore all your DR, deal millions more damage on each attack to you, and have increased DR against you. I just spent what amounted to over a year in my soul and I am uncertain if I'll be able to stop myself from torturing each and every one of you 'nobles' for your crimes against lolis for the rest of eternity.

"Do you really think that your king scares me? I was almost prepared to take him on at level 47! Now that I'm level 88, do you really, truly, believe he won't pay for his crimes?" Degitone waited until Palzol's eyes were halfway down his message before closing the bubble created by Aura Control and channeling all his rage into a single image.

Until Degritone was done with them, this man would forever feel the pain of every single pain receptor fired to the maximum possible, feeling as if his bones were all shattering and being used to fuel an ever increasing deluge of blades used to cut and dismember him for the rest of his life while every imaginable, painful torture was inflicted upon him, kept conscious by his image to create the worst experience possible.

He then kicked the screaming man over and began punching him, reigning in his Strength so as not to actually kill them. The first strike removed the entirety of his Health, and the next ones caused blood to spurt out of his no longer System-protected body. Blow upon blow rained on the man, slowly making the bloody pulp under him less and less recognizable as human, until Degritone's vision was blocked by some familiar Stavch flows. He looked up to see another version of himself.

"I know we're kinda unstable from the years of isolation, but it shouldn't be this bad. How long were you in here for?" They sent.

"Over a year," the one sitting in the pool of blood responded. "One whole year with almost nothing but finally killing these nobles on my mind."

"Gosh dang, dude, you need Melena. Judging by the results here, though, you got some good Skills out of it."

"Yeah, to both points," he sent back before sending over his new Skills.

"Holy cow, LRR and AotL are crazy. Blessing, too. Yeah, I don't know if it'll be enough to take on So'Ejan, since he'd, presumably, not be super affected by LRR, but holy cow, you're going to like 2-shot the king. What's your regen now?"

"Higher than before the System update. 86 mil at around 20 seconds per regen cycle."

"Holy. Can you even keep up with your maximum speed, though? Surely it's increased by a lot, especially with AfO and Potent Vitality."

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"And Potent Vitality got upgraded. No, I can't keep up with my maximum speed. Time compression skills are nowhere near good enough as they are. Movements at maximum speed are effectively instant, again."

"Have you tried upgrading the skill?"

"No. I thought I'd have way less time than I did, I only evolved the Immortal Troll. I should have gotten Flash again, and maybe worked on making a compatible second time compression skill. Soul exploration is OP as balls for image stuff. Heck, hold on, I may be able to figure out a way to make- well, no, it's actually limited to 1k time compression and doesn't actually compress time separately from skills.

"Anyway, I need to go kill the king and other nobles."

"You sure that's a good idea with you being unable to actually see attacks coming?"

"No, but I do have swordsman's territory."

"Yeah, and look at all the good it did against the guard that killed us. We have to assume the king, at the very least, is capable of taking you on, even with all the absurdity in your kit in the match up, simply because he will probably actually be able to keep up with his speed."

"Didn't Melena say out skill's better than others?"

"Yes, but she said it's better than the standard one, I'm almost certain. She said nothing about the peak ones. We have to assume they can reach 10k+ compression. We need another, what, 1k compression skill to match that, since that would take us to 10k?"

"I would say that I'll work on it, but holy cow I don't want to ever use soul exploration again. Next time I work on skills, I want Melena or some other loli nearby to cuddle with every few hours. Heck, even just another one of us to spar with occasionally would work, but definitely get way too old after like a month."

"We could have a few Degritones come over here, get to level 80 for soul exploration in just a few minutes real time, and work on getting a good skill, then explaining how it works to you."

"I could also just use our newfound timeline hopping capabilities to teleport into wherever the king happened to be at the time and instantly use Omen of Famine to kill him. LRR says 'attacks,' not 'melee attacks,' so it works with the Omens. I was planning on keeping them alive to torture for a bit, but just quick murdering them like that makes most sense to me."

"Actually, that might work, yeah. Though, make sure to go for the king last. Don't want to go into that fight first if he somehow doesn't instantly die to what will probably be billions of damage. You have 86 mil regen, he's probably hurt millions of lolis in his years. 8% of your regen per loli hurt is a ton of damage. I don't think even we'd survive. Actually, if he survives, just immediately go home. We'll need a plan to deal with him if our stupid amount of damage in this situation doesn't work."

"I was thinking my level 90 skill would be a mark that's applied and stores how many lolis you've hurt until then so we don't have to execute everyone who hurts a loli immediately. If they hurt a loli after the mark is applied, they take huge damage that ignores and bypasses DR. Even if the system nerfs it to a small amount of damage, I can just include the words, 'this counts as an attack' in the text and it'll apply LRR."

"That actually sounds like a great idea. Both as a way to get around not having better punishments than death and to kill the king. How much longer would it take to reach level 90?"

"Maybe another two real time hours. The puddle on the ground said that they're going to hunt me down once word of his death reaches the nobles and king, though."

"Dang. I highly doubt we'd be able to survive that. So, yeah, go ahead and go kill the nobles and stuff, we'll work on taking over the rest of the world and clearing the noble houses of lolis and stuff."

"Wait, can we even use Stavch stuff without incurring an order reaction?"

"Yes. It seems that Stavch corruption is dungeon sickness, or I guess the other way around, and it can slowly go away on its own. We already had stupid high resistance to it, as seen by us being in a dungeon for literally months on initial System integration, but blah. Our bodies are also more resistant to it now that we're pure Stavch. We aren't sure if we're immune yet, testing is ongoing, but we are very much safe to be hopping timelines and stuff."

"Cool. See you at Melena's in a bit?"

"No, a bunch of us have changed our minds and are going to help you in your endeavors on the main timeline. Leave the grunt work like cleaning up the rest of the world to us, we'll leave the big stuff like So'Ejan and the king to you. After you deal with them, go to Melena. She's missed you."

"I will. Man, this power is arguably better than being an actual timeline hopper. I can actually have copies of me to interact with. It's magical."

"Ye"

And so, Degritone began looking through timelines to find one where he'd already been ganked by the nobles and followed adjacent timelines that were slightly behind to find their origin point, a meeting room in a castle that shouldn't be possible without the System.

He first tried his strategy on a timeline closely adjacent to his to see if it would work with only minimal repercussions, preferably none. Surprisingly to Degritone, it did. I guess things just go right, sometimes, he thought before teleporting into the meeting room behind the majority of the nobles and king. If two of them were very carefully looking for him, they may have seen him.

They didn't. Omen of Famine was cast on the closest noble first, then the second, and third, and so on. The king started to turn unlike in the test timeline, but with Omen of Famine and Lolicon's Righteous Retribution taking all his Health, the force from the turn turned his body into paste on the spot. He then went and decapitated the nobles. As he was searching for Melena's world on his timeline, he saw some strange Stavch flows appear in the middle of the room, over the king's "body."

He didn't know what they were, but they lead out from the castle. He wanted to make sure it wasn't a revival Skill or mechanism of some sort, so he followed it with the screen provided by the coordinate-less teleportation construct. It lead to a loli, sitting on her bed, in the middle of a room with a wall missing. She seemed to be crying, so Degritone teleported over.

She got startled and probably began screaming, based on her wide open mouth and scared expression. Degritone immediately sat down, took off his armor, and raised his hands. While he was still crafting what he'd say, she calmed down and started trying to talk to him as someone else entered the room.

He sent, "I am sorry I startled you. It seemed like you were sad. You were crying, at the very least, and I wanted to come comfort you. I have an aura that calms lolis. I can leave if you want. I cannot hear you speak because I just recently came back from the dead and have not spent time figuring out how to hear. I'm mute for the same reason, but for speaking. You can respond to me by creating a window with your 100% customizable HUD and sending it to me like you would a skill description."

"What? You came back from the dead?"

"Yeah. Some guard killed me like a month ago or so and I had to craft a new body to escape the System's version of an afterlife, if you can even call it that. I haven't paused in my mission to save this world since I've come back."

"You're my savior! I wondered why my actions lead to your death, but apparently this was it. I probably won't live much longer, I used my Skills to spend too much of my lifespan to guarantee you'd succeed."

"What? Whatever, we need to get you some Endurance, then. Can't have a loli dying on my watch. But first, I'll go talk to the other versions of me. You'll see more of me in just a few seconds," he sent before teleporting to Melena's world.

A large group of Degritones nodded at him before disappearing and Melena ran over and hugged him, sending, "I shouldn't have sent you on that mission. I heavily under calculated how angry you'd be, and how much it would affect your rationale."

Degritone hugged her back and said, "I'm alive, though. I'm alive and I could really use a cuddle."