[Mission... Failed!]

The glowing red words seared into Logan’s mind like a brand.

He had tried everything.

He had used his knowledge of the novel he had written and rushed here, desperate to offer Evelyn the cure. He had reassured her countless times. He had been so certain.

"FUCKKKKKKKKKK!!!"

The roar tore through his throat as the realisation crashed down. He had crafted this world himself. He was supposed to be in control. All he had needed was to retrieve the cheats, and life had flowed smoothly enough that he had never imagined losing anything.

But now...

*The only woman I love...* Logan barely managed to whisper, trying to grasp the shattered fragments as they slipped away.

His eyes were hollow, lifeless, as though the will behind them had simply gone out.

Astra remained silent, absorbing every shade of her master’s grief.

The silence stretched, save for Logan’s choked sobs and the soft tears tracking down his face.

He was broken. He truly was.

Memories of Evelyn surfaced unbidden.

The realisation that he would never see her again ripped open something deep in his chest.

He remembered their training sessions — how he had once brushed his fingers against hers, and she had instinctively pulled back, her face coloring faintly with crimson. How meticulous she had been in teaching him, ensuring he would master every technique.

He was supposed to represent her at the academy.

They were supposed to—

"Oh ho... what do we have here?"

A slender figure descended silently from the sky, hands clasped behind his back. He carried the unhurried ease of someone who had never been rushed by anything.

Light purple hair fell in neat waves around his face; a purple-black robe draped from his shoulders with quiet elegance. Beneath his feet, the shadows twisted unnaturally, bleeding a deep violet as they writhed against the drifting snow.

Logan raised his head.

The origin king. Standing over him like something that had already decided the outcome.

He had killed the woman Logan loved.

Logan’s grip tightened on the SSS-rank sword, fury threading through every vein.

"You fucking bastard."

"Hehehe..." A low, unsettling laugh. The man’s gaze dragged downward with idle curiosity, the way a predator examines something that hasn’t realised it’s already caught.

"You want to kill me?"

His eyes dropped to Evelyn’s still form.

"Because of her?"

Logan said nothing. He kept his gaze fixed on the origin king and held still.

"You need manners." The man raised a slender finger.

The shadows erupted. They bled against the snow, impossibly dark, almost purple, and latched onto Logan’s arms and legs, wrenching them apart and suspending him midair with nothing beneath him.

Logan strained against their grip, staring up with undisguised hatred. He was at the origin initiate realm. Against an origin king, the gulf between them was vast enough to swallow him whole.

"I know you hate me." The origin king drifted closer with an unhurried ease. "I love it when people hate me."

Shink!

A shadow drove itself into Logan’s side.

Bang!

Logan spat blood. The colour drained from his face.

"That expression." The man tilted his head. "I love to see the despair in people’s eyes when they hate me so deeply, only to realise it doesn’t matter. That they will die in my hands regardless."

He extended another finger.

Bang!

A shadow pierced Logan from behind. He tried to scream, but the tendril coiled around his throat had already crushed the sound, squeezing the air from his lungs one thin measure at a time.

His vision blurred. Pain pressed in from every direction. Only stubbornness, raw and unreasoning, kept him from slipping under.

"How dull." A lazy sigh. The origin king raised one finger toward Logan’s head. "I thought this would be more entertaining."

Logan looked up at him through blood-streaked eyes. Hatred still burned there, steady as a coal.

He could not let it end like this.

He had to take revenge for the woman he loved. He refused to let them both die at the hands of the same person.

He had to—

His thoughts unravelled. Darkness pressed in.

And then, in the deep of it, a chime cut through.

[Ding! Detected that the master is in critical danger. Life devouring mode activated. Burn your life energy to increase your strength for a period of 1 minute...]

He barely heard Astra’s voice, but he recognised a lifeline when he felt one.

*Burn everything. Burn all of it. I need to kill this bastard.*

[Initiating unholy ranked origin technique: Lifespan devouring mode.]

The origin king raised his finger to end it.

Then the shockwave hit him.

It wasn’t an attack he had braced for. It was a force that simply materialised and flung him. He wasn’t harmed, but the sheer unexpectedness of it sent him skidding backwards through the air several kilometres before he caught himself.

He turned, frowning.

And stilled.

Logan was hovering.

His figure floated gently in the air, the space around him distorting, faint shimmers warping the falling snow before it could reach him.

"You should have killed me when you had the chance."

The words left him quietly.

Then the space shattered.

With more than a hundredfold increase to his strength, Logan had long surpassed the origin king rank in an instant. His mastery of the space affinity had reached something unprecedented, something that should not have existed at his age, in this body, under these circumstances.

The origin king stared.

One moment, the boy was three metres away. The next, he was already there, already past the distance, and the origin king felt a sharp, clean pain in his right arm.

He looked down.

His arm was gone.

Before the horror of it could settle, the void fractured again. Logan reappeared directly in front of him and brought the blade down in a single, unhurried arc.

The SSS-rank sword, fully unleashed, parted everything it touched.

The origin king had moved the instant Logan vanished.

His other arm fell.

The languid composure he had carried through the entire encounter, the boredom of an expert entertaining himself, finally cracked. True terror crossed his face.

[15 seconds remaining.]

Logan read the words without expression.

The origin king abandoned dignity entirely and fled, spatial technique activating the moment he moved.

He stopped.

The space around him had frozen. He could feel it, a stillness that wasn’t natural, a grip on the air itself.

He turned.

Logan was already behind him.

Boom!

Logan’s hand drove into his chest and came out the other side. The origin king’s heart rested in his palm, still beating.

His eyes went wide.

"You—"

"Spatial distortion."

The space around the origin king warped, fractured, and collapsed inward like a painting dissolving into black. He was gone before he could finish a word.

Under a minute. The most powerful man Logan had faced in this world, gone in under a minute.

Logan looked down at his clenched fist.

Bang!

The heart burst. Blood spread across the white ground.

He stood motionless for a moment.

[Your lifespan has been exhausted. Life devouring technique forcefully deactivated.]

Then his legs gave out, and he sank to the snow.

"E—Evelyn..."

In the growing dark, at the very edge of consciousness, Logan thought he saw a familiar figure.

She was standing just ahead of him, watching him with a quiet, gentle expression, the one she reserved for moments when she thought he wasn’t looking.

He smiled.

He had found her.

The warmth of it settled over him as she extended her hand, and the darkness felt less like an ending than like a door finally swung open.

At least here, wherever this was, no one would ever take her from him again.