My Goblin System : Levelling up with my SSS Class Devouring skill

Chapter 548: Chapter 548 (Bonus Chapters)

The high orc — battered, bleeding, one arm held wrong — looked at the tiny green-haired elf who had just made a demon lord stumble, and made a decision.

”Yes,” he said.

”Then keep moving,” Freda said. ”Circle. Keep his attention split. Don’t stop moving.”

She hit Chronus again — four elements this time, a different combination, targeting the specific points where his temporal field was thinnest after the first strike.

He walked toward her.

The walk was deliberate. Unhurried. The walk of someone who was choosing to engage rather than needing to engage.

”You’re one of Morgana’s,” Chronus said, studying her as he came. ”I can feel her teaching in your magic structure. Very elegant. Very thorough.” He tilted his head slightly. ”She trained you to fight. Not just to cast.”

”Stop talking,” Freda said, and hit him with earth and darkness in combination — a technique that used gravitational weight to force temporal field compression, which darkness then exploited by attacking the compressed zones.

Chronus raised his hand and pushed the earth component back.

But the darkness slipped through.

He felt it. His expression changed — not pain, but acknowledgment that something had landed.

”Interesting,” he said.

============

The fight that followed was the best twenty minutes of Freda’s life and the worst twenty minutes of Freda’s life simultaneously.

She had no illusions about the outcome. A seventy-year-old elf, however exceptional, however thoroughly trained by the most skilled mage in Loki’s territory, was not going to defeat the Tenth Seat demon lord at half power. That wasn’t an option on the table. It had never been an option on the table.

What was on the table was time.

She bought it with everything she had.

Every time Chronus moved toward her, she moved — not away, but perpendicular, forcing him to reacquire, keeping herself out of direct contact range because direct contact was where his temporal aging ability had its clearest application and she had no counter for that specifically.

The three elite fighters worked with her — they understood the pattern faster than she’d expected, adapting to her movement as a coordination point, using her elemental strikes as distraction cover to apply their own attacks at the moments her strikes had his attention.

The three other mages threw up barrier after barrier across building fronts, herding civilians out of collapse zones, buying the people of Vael’kira what time they could.

Chronus killed one of the elite fighters — the high orc, who came half a second too close after a light-element strike and paid for it. He fell with the specific dignity of someone who had done what they came to do and understood that it was finished.

Freda hit Chronus with fire immediately after. A statement, not a strategy. A response.

He looked at her with something in his expression that might, in a different context, have been respect.

”You’re not going to win this,” he said.

”I know,” Freda said, and kept fighting.

She was at sixty percent mana. Fifty. Forty. She had been precise — no wasted casting, no emotion-driven expenditure, everything calculated. But seventy years of reserves were still seventy years, and the demand of maintaining six-element combat was significant.

Thirty percent.

The two remaining elite fighters went down — not dead, but down, temporal aging applied with what she registered as deliberate restraint. Chronus had options. He was making choices about what he applied.

She filed that. It meant something. She wasn’t sure what yet.

Twenty percent.

She was alone in the plaza with Chronus.

He stopped walking toward her.

”You’re out of allies,” he said. ”You’re running low on mana. You’re significantly outmatched.” He looked at her with genuine curiosity. ”Why are you still fighting?”

”I will protect everyone in this city ” Freda said.

Chronus was quiet for a moment.

”You will die” Said Chronus

”I won’t make it easy for you.”

A pause.

Then Chronus smiled — a real one, which was somehow more unsettling than the pleasant performance smile he’d been wearing.

”No,” he said. ”I don’t think you will.”

He raised his hand.

And then Cassius arrived.

—-----

He came over the plaza’s eastern wall at full vampire speed — silent, low, the rapier already in his hand, blood-magic awareness fully extended and reading the situation in real time.

One demon lord. One small elf holding her ground with what his assessment told him was close to empty reserves. Two figures down but alive. The city burning in the background.

He landed between Freda and Chronus.

”I don’t recommend this,” Freda said immediately.

”I know,” Cassius said.

”He’s at half power and he’s still—”

”I know,” Cassius said again.

He looked at Chronus.

The Tenth Seat looked back at the vampire with mild interest. ”Loki’s intelligence operative. Cassius.” He inclined his head slightly, the way one might acknowledge a professional one had heard of. ”Your reputation is significant.”

”Yours too,” Cassius said.

He attacked.

What followed was not a fight in any equal sense. Cassius knew that going in. He attacked with the understanding that his goal was not to win — his goal was to give Freda the seconds she needed, to keep Chronus’s attention split and his hands occupied, to use two centuries of combat experience to be the most inconvenient possible obstacle between the Tenth Seat and the woman behind him.

He was very, very good at inconvenient.

Vampire speed gave him genuine evasive capability against the temporal aging — he could move fast enough that physical contact became difficult to land cleanly, and he exploited every fraction of a second that Chronus’s attention was on him rather than on Freda.

His rapier skidded off a temporal field three times. Once it found purchase — a narrow window between field rotations where the blade connected and Chronus actually stepped back.

Cassius pressed the gap immediately, blood-magic activated, pushing pain tolerance to limits that would have incapacitated a human, moving through the edges of a temporal distortion that aged his coat to rags and his skin to tightness at the extremities.

He lasted four minutes.