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“Exactly 99,999 seconds,” I declared. “You held on longer than I thought.”
Less than a second had passed in the real world, but here inside the UR Time Prison, we had spent roughly twenty-seven hours battling Doc.
“Y-You’ve broken the ties that bind humanity...” Doc lamented. “You ghouls!”
We hadn’t allowed Doc any time to rest, eat, or drink while we peeled away the corpses that made up his Created Golem until he didn’t have enough bodies to keep his repulsive weapon running. At present, Doc was sitting atop a small, collapsed heap of cadavers, and as he looked up at us, I could see he was shaking with fright.
As for myself and my lieutenants, we were all still perfectly fine, and with plenty of energy to spare. The reason for this was not only were we all Level 9999 warriors, but we had activated gacha cards beforehand that allowed us to operate continuously without sleep, rest, food, or water, and without feeling any fatigue. In other words, my Unlimited Gacha had Doc’s “bonds of humanity” beat any day of the week. Of course, if we hadn’t cared about the fallout, we could have destroyed the golem in a matter of minutes. I could have just unsealed my Gungnir and tossed it into the middle of that monstrosity, for example. But my brother was somewhere within that mass of corpses, as was Doc, and needless to say, I needed the pair of them alive. So my options were limited to this twenty-seven-hour battle.
We began striding over to Doc to restrain him when we suddenly heard a roar.
“Brother!” I cried out, turning toward Els. He was still being burned by the Hellfire along with the piles of corpses that were littered about. I mentally extinguished the flames and took out a new card.
“SSR Overheal—release!” I yelled. The card healed up all the burns on Els’s body until it looked like it had never come to harm in the first place. My brother moaned softly and turned to me.
“L...” he said in a halting, otherworldly voice. “Light...”
“Els? Big brother?!” I called out to him. “Are you really back to your old self now?!”
I completely forgot that we were supposed to be in the middle of battle, and so did Mei and Aoyuki. All three of us turned away from Doc and focused our full attention on my brother. Els held his hands to his head and staggered toward us, though despite his unsteadiness, there was a determined look in his eye.
We might be able to bring him back to his old self! I told myself inwardly, a flicker of hope igniting as I ran toward my brother with tears in my eyes.