As her words fell, space at the arena's center began to warp and fold in an extremely unstable manner.
The surrounding scenery shifted rapidly—now a primordial jungle from the age of dinosaurs, now a futuristic cityscape filled with spacecraft, now the KOF '94 tournament venue...
Finally, all scenes froze into a pure white void.
A man emerged slowly from the nothingness, bare-chested, his body covered in black flame-like patterns.
He didn't even have a physical form—his entire being seemed like a "recording" forcibly extracted from the river of time, emanating ancient chaos and an absolute arrogance that viewed all things as dust.
He was the god of "Those From the Past"—Saiki!
"Vermin..."
Saiki opened his eyes. Those golden pupils were filled with the fury and contempt of one whose slumber had been disturbed.
"Who... dares awaken me from eternal stillness?"
He clearly hadn't grasped the situation yet, hadn't even noticed Otoma=Raga on the throne. He merely regarded the Earth Alliance before him as ants who had disturbed his eternal dream.
Unlike the previously resurrected bosses, what Otoma=Raga had granted him wasn't greater power but more "stable" time manipulation abilities.
She had repaired Saiki's body, which had collapsed from forcibly stopping time, allowing him to more freely wield his inconceivable temporal powers under the special rules of the "Feast Throne."
"Saiki..."
From the crowd, a woman in elegant noble attire with short silver hair slowly stepped forward.
Her face bore incredibly complex emotions—hatred, sorrow, and resolve.
She was the descendant of "Those From the Past"—Elisabeth Blanctorche.
"Ancestor... you already failed. Why do you persist in this delusion?" Elisabeth's voice trembled slightly.
"Oh? So it's my descendant." Saiki glanced at her, a cruel sneer curling his lips. "Failed? No... I merely pressed the pause button. Now the game continues. And all of you shall become the first frozen statues in my eternal kingdom!"
With that, he simply raised his hand and snapped his fingers.
"Time, be still!"
An irresistible force of law spread instantaneously!
Everyone present, except for a few powerhouses with extremely high resistance to space-time laws, felt their thoughts and bodies being poured into cement, growing sluggish and slow.
Kyo's flames froze in his hand. Iori's claws stopped mid-air. Terry didn't even have time to tip his cap down...
Yet three people remained completely unaffected.
One was Elisabeth—a peculiar light power emanated from her body, neutralizing Saiki's time stop.
Another was naturally Cloud, who even had the leisure to pull a bag of sunflower seeds from his fourth-dimensional pocket, ready to watch the show.
And the third...
A green, mischievous flame figure suddenly appeared before Elisabeth, making a face at Saiki.
"Nyeh nyeh nyeh~ Old fossil, your tricks are outdated!"
This figure was none other than the "troublemaker" who had chosen self-sacrifice to stop Saiki and ultimately vanished in a temporal paradox—Ash Crimson!
"Ash?!" Elisabeth's eyes instantly filled with tears and disbelief.
"Ancestor?!" Even Saiki's face showed shock for the first time. "Weren't you... erased from the timeline?!"
"Yeah," Ash scratched his head with an innocent look. "But it seems some kind-hearted director thought my screen time was too short and forcibly recovered part of my script from the recycle bin."
He turned to wink at Cloud.
Indeed, before the battle began, Cloud had expended a portion of his Essence of Time and Dimensional Power to forcibly interfere with causality, "salvaging" Ash's "traces of existence" that were about to be completely washed away by the river of time, temporarily condensing them into a spirit form with partial consciousness and power.
In Cloud's words: "Fighting a time assassin without bringing your own top-tier assassin? That's just unprofessional."
"A mere remnant dares act arrogant before me!" Saiki's fury was fully ignited. He abandoned his suppression of everyone else, concentrating all his temporal power on the three before him!
"Let me show you what true time really is!"
Saiki roared, and the pure white space instantly split into black and white!
"Divine Domain—Prison of Time!"
Within this domain, Saiki was the one and only god!
With a thought, Ash's shadow from one second ago appeared beneath his feet and launched a "Thermidor" at Ash's current self!
"Past-me attacking present-me?" Ash yelped, nimbly dodging. "Hey hey hey, you can't play like that—that's a paradox!"
With another thought, a future phantom of Elisabeth from two seconds later appeared above her head, preemptively firing "Noble Light" to cut off her escape routes!
"Future-shadow sealing present-path?" Elisabeth frowned, forced to use her light whip to shatter her own future phantom.
This was Saiki's enhanced ability—within the "Prison of Time," he could freely intercept, summon, and command a target's "selves" from different points in time to attack!
This was a nearly unsolvable assault from the temporal dimension itself!
For a moment, the arena presented a supremely bizarre scene.
Countless Ashes and Elisabeths from different time points were besieging their "present" selves.
Yesterday's Ash was fighting the-day-before-yesterday's Ash.
Tomorrow's Elisabeth was setting traps for today's Elisabeth.
The entire battlefield had become a temporal porridge.
"Hahahaha! Feel it? In this eternal prison, your greatest enemy is yourselves!" Saiki floated in mid-air, arms spread wide, savoring the pleasure of controlling everything.
Only Cloud stood in place from start to finish, cracking sunflower seeds, watching with great interest.
All of Saiki's temporal attacks automatically slid away when approaching within three meters of him, as if an "absolute domain" independent of all timelines existed there.
...
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