My Goblin System : Levelling up with my SSS Class Devouring skill Chapter 281

Satou stood from the bed slowly, the weight of TheReaper’s warning still settling over him like a heavy cloak. The spell’s information had been comprehensive—troop numbers, hero abilities, tactical suggestions—but it was the underlying ssage that stuck with him most.

Don’t die before we can fight properly.

Even a legendary hero who’d killed twelve demon lords thought he was worth preserving as a future opponent. The thought would have been flattering if it wasn’t so terrifying.

Jessica sat up beside him, her hair tousled from their intimate reunion, eyes watching him with concern. "Satou? What’s wrong? That ssage—it was from TheeReaper, wasn’t it? The legendary hero?"

"Yes," Satou confird, reaching for his shirt. His mind was already racing through tactical implications, defensive preparations, resource allocation. One month. Maybe less. "The humans are coming. thousand troops, four summoned heroes, siege weapons, everything."

Before Jessica could respond, Satou’s vision suddenly blurred.

A spike of pain lanced through his skull—sharp, sudden, and absolutely overwhelming. It felt like soone had driven a red-hot spike directly into his brain, twisting and burning and pulling at sothing fundantal in his mind.

"Ahh!" Satou gasped, one hand flying to his temple as his knees buckled.

"Satou!" Jessica cried out, lunging forward to catch him before he could fall.

Lyra, who’d been dozing contentedly on the other side of the bed, jerked awake instantly. Her dark eyes widened in alarm as she saw Satou doubled over in pain. "What’s happening?! Satou!"

But Satou couldn’t answer. Couldn’t even hear them properly over the roaring in his ears. Because the world was changing around him, reality twisting and reforming into sothing else.

Not his room. Not his settlent. Sowhere else entirely.

Satou found himself looking through soone else’s eyes again—rc Assault’s eyes. The perspective was jarring, disorienting, made worse by the emotions flooding through the mory. Not the cold confidence he’d felt in the first mory, but sothing else entirely.

Fear.

Pure, primal, bone-deep terror that made rc Assault’s hands shake and his heart pound hard enough to hurt.

The legendary assassin was standing in a lavish chamber that definitely wasn’t his own. Satou recognized the aesthetic imdiately—temporal motifs everywhere. Hourglasses of various sizes lined the walls, sand flowing in impossible directions. So poured upward, defying gravity. Others had sand that moved sideways, or spiraled in patterns that hurt to watch. A few contained sands that glowed with inner light, each grain seeming to contain entire monts of frozen ti.

Clocks covered every surface, their hands moving at different speeds or sotis backward. A massive grandfather clock in the corner had twelve faces, each one showing a different ti—or perhaps different tilines entirely. Smaller tipieces were scattered across desks and shelves, so ticking in perfect synchronization while others moved to their own chaotic rhythms.

The floor was polished obsidian that reflected not the present, but glimpses of possible futures and forgotten pasts. Looking down at it made rc Assault dizzy as he saw himself standing in the room, then dead in the room, then never having entered at all, then—

He forced his eyes away from the floor. That way lay madness.

Chronus’s private chambers.

rc Assault shouldn’t be here. Absolutely shouldn’t be here. This was the most secure location in one of the most powerful demon lords’ territories, protected by layers of temporal magic and spatial wards that would kill most intruders instantly. Ti itself was weaponized in this space—intruders would find themselves aged to dust in seconds, or regressed into non-existence, or trapped in temporal loops until their minds broke.

But the assassin was a legend for a reason. His nightmare powers let him slip between perception and reality, moving through spaces that shouldn’t exist, bypassing defenses that assud intruders had to exist in normal ti and space. He could walk through dreams and manifest in shadows, existing in the cracks between monts where even temporal magic struggled to find purchase.

Still, his hands trembled as he approached a particular desk—massive thing made from wood harvested from trees that existed in multiple ti periods simultaneously. The grain shifted as he watched, showing rings that represented centuries in one mont and re days in the next. On it lay dozens of scrolls, docunts, artifacts that Chronus had been studying.

This was the third ti rc Assault had infiltrated these chambers. The first ti had been re reconnaissance—mapping defenses, learning patterns, establishing that such infiltration was even possible. The second ti had been more daring—actually examining docunts, though only briefly and without touching anything that might be trapped.

And tonight was the third visit. The one where he’d finally take the risk that had been building since that second infiltration, when he’d noticed one particular scroll sealed with temporal magic so powerful it practically scread "dangerous secret."

The scroll was sealed with temporal magic, locked with enchantnts that would normally take decades to crack. Chronus had woven protective spells around it that existed across multiple tifras—try to open it in the present, and it would trigger alarms in the past that would alert Chronus before the attempt even happened. Try to dispel it with brute force, and the temporal backlash would age the would-be thief into dust.

But rc Assault had been patient. Three visits over the course of six months, carefully studying the patterns, learning the rhythm of Chronus’s power. He’d discovered that the Ti Lord’s protective spells weren’t perfect—they had to allow Chronus himself to access the scroll, which ant there were brief windows of vulnerability when the temporal lord adjusted his own defenses.

Tonight, finally, the seal had weakened just enough. A gap in the tiline barely five seconds long, a mont when the protections thought Chronus himself was accessing the scroll and temporarily lowered their guard.

rc Assault’s nightmare-coated fingers touched the scroll, his power wrapping around it in layers of unreality that convinced the defensive enchantnts they were being touched by their own master. The seal dissolved like smoke exposed to sunlight, temporal energy dispersing harmlessly.

The parchnt unrolled slowly, as if reluctant to reveal its contents even now. The text was written in an ancient script that predated most modern languages—sothing from the Age of Gods, before the current demon lords rose to power. Characters that seed to shift and change as he read them, each word carrying weight that made his eyes water.