AUTHOR'S REINCARNATION IN A FANTASY SETTING

"Anyway," she said, looking back at the Zero of the present. "Apart from getting closed into the body of a female, I got powers that surpassed all common sense."

"What do you mean by that?" Zero asked since her wording seemed weird to him.

"You can't understand because you are still not on that level. And as weird as it sounds to say this to my past self, I'd say that you are weak. Right now you are still on the level of humans— of physical entities.

"However I was forced to discard that physical body and with that went all my limits too. I took upon a spiritual body and rose to new heights. After connecting with the Requiem sword I was able to harness its full potential. There was so much power that I hadn't even thought existed.

"To put it in simpler terms; I'd grown from a man to a god," she said. But while saying this there was no ounce of happiness or thrill in her eyes. Her voice was also dry as if she were telling a story she didn't really like.

Zero might have liked to pass this off as a joke or question his sanity but in only a few moments he had witnessed what she —or rather he himself— was capable of doing. That's why he stayed quiet.

"But that much power was still not enough. I wanted some more; as there were still some demons who were capable of standing on equal grounds with me even after my power-up. In fact, one of them had given me a good beating and destroyed a few cities in our fight. That's when I decided to go a step further.

"I had a plan in mind, and with a little help from Req, I was able to make it possible. I went back to the human realm and spent a good number of years trying to find the magic items that the five kings—who stood against Req in the past—had left behind. Each of those items contained tremendous levels of power, and I ended up finding all of them."

There was a pause because she noticed a slight spark of curiosity in Zero's eyes. No one else would have noticed it, of course, she did because both of them were the same. Zero also caught up on this.

"Do you still have those?" he asked.

She passed him a slight smile, that was clearly a forced and tired one. Then raising up her right hand she stretched it out a little toward Zero.

The black shadows covering her hands moved back, revealing her palm and some of her fingers. And there in each of her fingers was a ring—a total of five of them.

All of them were gold colored with a matt finish, but each of them had a different pattern engraved on them.

"So they really do exist!" Zero said, looking at the rings. free𝓌𝗲𝒃𝓃𝒐𝐯𝒆𝙡. 𝑐𝗼ｍ

"Oh yeah, I used to doubt the existence of these when I first heard about them from Req. I'd forgotten that" she mumbled to herself, and then pulled her hand back.

The shadows covered her hand again and the rings were lost in darkness again.

"Anyway, after collecting these rings I was almost ready to get on with my plan. I'd trusted the information Req had given me, of course, but as it was my nature I had also confirmed its existence beforehand through various ways.

"Thus I now had both the rings and the Requiem sword, so I used their powers together and tore a gap in the fabric of space. And from there I entered into the Nihility."

"Wait for a moment there, what's that you are talking about?" Zero questioned.

"Exactly what it means. Nihility is a dimension of absolute nothingness. However, that is quite contradictory. Since there exists something, and that is energy; in its purest form.

"When I entered the Nihility that energy started getting absorbed into my body. And for that very reason, I had to return within a few seconds or my body would have exploded. However, even that much was enough.

"The energy that I had absorbed had connected me with Nihility, and when I opened my status window there I saw a new skill: Absolute Null. It wasn't what I wanted to get, but far greater than that.

"It was a defensive skill, and the world's strongest one; I can say this confidently. Because upon activation it transferred any attacks that had been cast on me into Nihility and there they all lost their power and got nullified. Its only drawback was that despite being a skill it used too much mana, but it was acceptable.

"Now I had all the power I needed, thus I began my massacre of the demon race. Within a few days, I wiped them out completely. I was much like a villain to them; after all, I killed without caring if it was a man a woman, a child, or an infant.

"No one stood a chance in front of me, there was not a single demon general, not a single warlord, that could face me. In fact, I was just a few steps away from killing the demon lord and wiping out their race.

"There was no one to stop me; I was finally going to get my revenge. I had the perfect defense, no one could attack me or defeat me. I truly had become a god. Right? …Wrong," she said, in a rather heavy tone.

"I had underestimated the demons. A few of them had escaped and were researching in secret just to create a demon to fight me, and I'd to say they did succeed in that. With the body of the demon lord, a new monster was created, one that was powerful enough to rival me. And the worst part, while researching upon me the demons too had discovered the Nihility. Of course, they didn't have the power needed to open a hole in the fabric of space. So they copied its concept.

"They gave the monster the ability to absorb its opponent's power, compress it, and store it in its core; it had six cores, by the way. The end result was successful. Its power was somewhat similar to Absolute Null, and for the first time in a while, I had trouble in a fight.

"I defeated him of course, in the end. I was powerful. Too powerful. Way too powerful than that was necessary," she said, staring down at the ground.

"...What happened?" Zero finally spoke after a pause. She looked up at him with the same forced smile.

"Why do you think I came back to the past?"

"Because you wanted to change the future for a better one?"

"You are right but wrong. I wanted to change the future, but not to a better one. I just want the future to be something other than what it is right now."

"...And why is that?" Zero was serious by this point, he could sense the heaviness in her voice.

"I mean," she said. "There's nothing left in the future; no one left. They died, all of them. All the people from the demon and human realms. And…I was the one who killed them."