Within his Energy Field detection range, even the biological matter blasted away by his punch returned to the body. The scattered dirt and rocks also moved as if rewinding at a microscopic level. "Time reversal? Or reading a save file? It does not matter."
"I will just beat you until you stay dead. It has been a long time since I found a punching bag that can take hits." If it was only fast healing, then this was all the enemy had.
A save scumming monster that keeps reloading, right? Today I will turn you into a dead file.
Based on the legends of the Dragonkin known to Sylvia, the first dragon, Bahamut, created the Dragonkin race and then created four high ranked dragon lineages apart from the five colors. Each of them carried an important duty and was granted a different Authority by the Dragon God, though most dragons never understood what those duties truly meant, while Sylvia knew a little. Her own Authority allowed her to sense other Dragon Soul and form a mental connection with them, and it could even do more, though in practice she mostly used it to keep order over a large group of Teddy Bear inside Dragon Valley.
But the Bronze Dragon was different. "Time-Inscribed Dragon, the Bronze Dragon is the historian of dragons. Its duty is to record the past, and those inherited records are the foundation of the Dragon Soul Legacy System," she said. "That Authority can observe past time and replay history. In that case, doesn't it mean that Edward can observe and replay a version of himself before being injured, achieving endless recovery?"
After realizing this, Sylvia felt her eyes go dull with shock. The consequences were not just the collapse of the Dragonkin inheritance system, but also the question of how anyone could kill or stop such a monster. She did not doubt that the Black Dragon had the strength to defeat Edward, but if the enemy could reload endlessly, how was that even a fight?
Yet when she finally reached the battlefield, the anxiety she had felt vanished almost at once. The scene was oddly familiar, very much like when she usually beat up Ham. The ground shook as a massive black Great Dragon pinned down another Great Dragon that kept repairing itself, only to be smashed back into a ruined shape again and again, with no room to fight back at all.
"Try this one too. Magnetic Field Rotation, God's Hand!" With precise control, gravity was driven into Edward's body and tore him apart from the inside out with Rend, flipping flesh and exposing bone until even Belial felt sick looking at it. A single Fusion Reaction Beam followed, wiping out the mangled thing in front of him.
But the pile of blackened charcoal on the ground rewound itself, growing bones and muscles until it fully recovered. About fifteen minutes had passed, and this was already the third reload for Edward, each one proving that his body had suffered damage that should have been fatal. It meant that his usual passive regeneration could no longer keep up with Belial's output.
Edward could hardly believe it. He had known he could not win, but nearly dying three times in fifteen minutes was beyond reason. He had thought his growth would at least let him trade a few blows, yet now he was being crushed one sidedly, his attacks barely doing anything at all.
"Damn it, what kind of monster are you? How did you become this strong in such a short time?" Edward roared as light capable of twisting space burst from his body, mixed with dense lightning and all kinds of Draconic Magic strikes. On top of that came time based effects from his Authority such as freezing the present, reversing time gaps, rewinding history, and cutting off past segments, all slamming into Belial without leaving so much as a mark.
He never expected these methods to defeat the enemy, but at least there should have been some reaction. He tried again and again to target the past, yet he could not find any trace of this dragon, even when tracing the surrounding time back thousands, nearly tens of thousands of years. It was as if the dragon existed outside the timeline itself, which made no sense if it had not become a god.
Being killed in different ways like this was only tolerable because he needed to gather information, otherwise he would have ended himself already. Every punch felt like it hammered directly at his Shard soul, far beyond anything pain nerves could explain. "Enough of your whining. Die already, you mutt. Take this, Rapid Bullet Fist!"
Heavy, inertia free punches carrying twisted gravity came down in a flurry, smashing Edward into a pile of pulp once again. Seeing him revive over and over did not surprise Belial at all, and he was even pleased. A punching bag this durable was rare for him at his current level.
He had stored up plenty of spells and ideas, and now that he had a target worthy of testing, there was no reason to hold back. "Then eat this one. Wind, Fire, Thunder, Snow!" With a thunderous blast, raging winds surged from earth to sky, and a white flood of elements erased Edward's body once more, even lifting a few strands of hair by Sylvia's temple.
She watched in silence, finding that she felt no tension at all. The nightmare of the past and the great monster that once swallowed half of Dragon Valley was being crushed with ease, and she moved a little farther away. This time, Edward had been kneaded by Gravity Manipulation into an Elves ball and sent on his way.
As Belial grew more excited, his techniques became smoother and more complete, and Edward's death rate climbed straight up. Slashing, smashing, burning, freezing, and even stranger deaths were all tested. Reloading again and again left Edward numb, and he started to feel glad he had decided to give up everything and sign that brutal contract, since it truly saved his life.
Even with endless retries, he would otherwise have been beaten until he gave up completely. Before finishing his probing of the opponent's abilities, he had no choice but to grit his teeth and endure. Belial continued to toy with him, thinking about what new move to use next, while giving him a playful look.
"You are not planning to just keep reloading to annoy me, are you? Sorry, but the Laws of victory has already been decided." Edward kept reloading to observe Belial's methods, while also carefully watching how his own body rewound time and reassembled itself. He was not stupid enough to treat those time related effects that did nothing to him before as mere fireworks.
Being able to control time to some extent but only using it to repeat yourself was a waste, yet the two of them were stuck like this. Either Edward gave up reloading, or Belial got bored, and the latter was not about to accept a fight he could not finish. "Time is not some solid thing. It is just a definition for the state of matter in motion."
"In the real universe, reversing time might just mean restoring particles to a previous state. When you think of it that way, it does not sound so amazing." This time, Edward was pinned to the ground as Belial raised his fist high. High output Gravity Manipulation twisted the light around them into darkness, and space rippled like a simulated gravity black hole once calculated by Bella.
The punch fell, and under immense gravity and tens of millions of tons of force, Edward's head was blown apart. When he tried to repair it, he froze. "My head only recovered halfway. It did not fully restore."
Before he could react, another heavy punch came down, and this time he found that his entire head could no longer be repaired at all. No matter how he reloaded or replayed the past, history could not fix it, while reality could still regenerate the body, which filled him with deeper fear. "This should not be happening. I obtained the complete Bronze Dragon Authority. Did something go wrong?"
He forced an eye to grow and looked at Belial's fist, recognizing what the twisted gravity had touched. It was a corner of time itself, distorted under massive gravity. "Time? Impossible. You should not..."
"It works then. I told you it was not that mysterious." Edward's upper body was completely crushed into Shard dust.
Using light and darkness, Belial could also observe an individual's time. Killing him again and again was not just for fun, but also to observe the exact "archive" Edward chose when rewinding time. "I am not fully used to this new trick yet, but it is more than enough to kill you."
"If you keep reading the past to endure my attacks, then I will flip it around and hit the past directly. I will blow up your archive." By carefully recording the original state of matter with light and dark and then arranging it back along the same path, he realized this counted as a form of time rewind.