With my mind made up, I pulled out an Unlimited Gacha card, although Doc just laughed at me. “Whatever it is you intend to do, it will not work against me, my boy!” he bragged. “You and your ilk cannot possibly dream of challenging the limitless possibilities of the human race! No matter how high your power levels are, they remain powerless against the bonds that unite all humans!”
“You haven’t got the right to say anything about ‘human bonds,’ you worm!” I shouted back at him. “You stain the very meaning of those words. And don’t you dare try to measure the power of the Unlimited Gacha!”
I thrust the card out in front of me. “UR Time Prison—release!” The card immediately turned our surroundings black, from the sky to the plains, and even blacking out the light from the sun. These walls of darkness formed an enclosure stretching five kilometers in all directions, and inside it, not a single blade of grass shook, nor could the sound of the tiniest pebble moving be heard. No sunlight or even starlight managed to penetrate this space, but even without an obvious source of light, everyone was able to see each other just fine, almost like we weren’t in the dark at all. The ground had transformed from a grassy plain to a blackened floor, yet it was neither hard nor soft, and if I’d had a mind to punch it with the entirety of my Level 9999 powers, it would most likely have simply absorbed the full force of the impact, rather than breaking apart. It probably wouldn’t even crack.
“Where are we?” Doc inquired. “What have you done to us?”
“I’ve created a sealed enclosure to make sure you can’t get away,” I explained. “The only way out of here is by defeating me. So, to start us off: UR Card Holder—release!”
I activated my Card Holder and unleashed all of the purification cards contained inside. Unfortunately, because I’d used up all of those types of cards in my battle against the Soul Dragon, and not a lot of time had passed since then to allow my stock of them to replenish, only a handful of cards floated around the corpse golem. Just as I’d suspected, the cards I did have managed to purify some of the bodies and release their souls, but over ten thousand corpses remained unpurified.
“Is that all you are capable of?” Doc taunted. “If you have indeed run out of options, then I shall cut you people down where you stand and take my leave from this place! Then afterward, I will return to my lab to continue my research into realizing a new future for humanity!”
Doc moved the golem toward us, continuously slammed its fists into the ground as it went, but we easily dodged its punches and made sure to keep our distance from it so the necro energy wouldn’t touch us.
Believing his victory to be assured, Doc started laughing. “Trapping me in this space in the first place was a mistake on your part,” he scoffed. “Thanks to that wrong move, all you have succeeded in doing is leaving yourself with no means of escape, ensuring your eventual demise! You cannot evade my attacks forever!”
“Wrong move?” I queried, repeating Doc’s words as I nimbly evaded his golem’s punches. “No, you’ve got it all wrong. This was the best move I could’ve made.” I took out another card. “UR Hellfire—release! Go burn in hell, Doc!”
The Hellfire card sparked a high-intensity blaze that covered a wide area and lasted for a set amount of time, with no amount of water or magic able to put it out before then. The only way the fire would die down was if the time limit had already passed, or if the user of the card thought the flames away. The dark blaze swallowed the corpse golem and burned away layers of dead bodies. I felt sorry for the victims, of course, but after running out of purification cards, setting the monstrosity alight was the only way I could counter it. Unfortunately, Doc felt none of the pain from the fire, since he was at the center of thousands of corpses, which stopped it getting to him.
“You think this will burn us? Think again!” Doc crowed. “I have already boosted these bonds of humanity, so what you are doing right now is akin to tossing a cup of water over a bonfire! You three are powerless against the human ties that bind! Debuff! Debuff! Debuff! Multilayer Debuff!”
Doc’s debuff managed to weaken the Hellfire so that the flames would cease way before the time limit in order to stop them from completely burning up the corpse golem.
“UR Hellfire—release!” I yelled, activating the same card again and enveloping Doc’s golem in flames once more.
“There is no point in attempting that again!” Doc called out to me before proceeding to debuff the fire a second time.
“You have left yourself wide open!” Mei declared.
“Mrrow!” Aoyuki agreed.
Mei infused her Magistrings with excess mana so they wouldn’t be corrupted by the necro energy this time, while Aoyuki did the same with her Beast Chain, then both of my SUR warriors used their weapons to peel away some of the dead bodies from the golem. By this point, Doc had finally figured out what my plan was from my present tactics. If he carried on debuffing the Hellfire—and as a side effect, the golem’s necro energy—he would leave himself open and vulnerable to Mei’s and Aoyuki’s attacks. But if he left the Hellfire to its own devices, it would allow the golem to burn down.
“A-Are you mad?!” Doc wailed. “Do you really intend to remove all of the bodies from these bonds? I must remind you that over ten thousand people sacrificed themselves to make this creation! You would have to be insane to go to all that trouble!”
“Oh, don’t worry. We’re sane all right,” I replied. “We could easily destroy your golem with brute strength alone, but we don’t want to accidentally hurt my brother, nor you, for that matter. We’re going to take our time peeling away the bodies one by one until we get to the two of you, which was why I used the UR Time Prison card in the first place.”
I let Doc ponder what I meant by this for a moment before making the big reveal. “That card doesn’t just trap you on a totally separate plane of existence. No, no. This whole space will remain like this for a full year—yes, I do mean 365 days—unless I, as the user, decide to cancel and collapse it. However, for all the time we’re in here, only a single second will pass in the outside world. That means we can take all the time in the world to battle each other, and you won’t get a chance to sleep or even take a break. Now, let’s continue our fight until one of us lies battered and bruised on the ground!”
Doc recoiled in dismay, but I certainly wasn’t bluffing. The UR Time Prison created a dimensional plane five kilometers in radius where one real-world second was equivalent to 365 days. The only way Doc could escape was to spend an entire year in this bleak space, or if I let him out, for some reason. I had no idea what kind of expression Doc was pulling on receiving this news due to the fact that he was out of sight inside the corpse golem, but the sound of his voice betrayed his desperation.
“Th-That’s not sane at all!” Doc stammered. “Are you sure you’re not mad? Are all of you mad?”
“Wow, that really hurts,” I said mockingly. “That’s the last thing I want to hear from the likes of you.”
“I feel the same,” Mei agreed.
“Nrrow! Nrrow!” Aoyuki hissed. Once we’d all aired our thoughts about the mad scientist’s assessment of the situation, we once again assumed fighting stances.
“Here we come again,” I warned. “Let’s see if your ‘bonds of humanity’ really can beat our unlimited powers.”
“I-I will prevail!” Doc yelled anxiously. “I must prevail! For the sake of the future of the human race!”
The golem raised its fists once more, and because the last flames had already burned themselves out, I released another Hellfire card to allow Mei and Aoyuki to peel a few more bodies away with their weapons. We would subsequently repeat this process over and over and over again.