SSS-Grade Acceleration Talent made me Fastest Lord of Apocalypse
Chapter 99 - 600 times

Chapter 99: 600 times

[Acceleration Level 2 Activated]

[The limit raised—now you can Accelerate everything 600 times]

A blood-streaked smile tugged at Damien’s lips, even as muscle and sinew continued weaving themselves back together. His skin was still torn in places, his face half-reconstructed, but there was no mistaking--

He was grinning.

And that grin...

That grin wasn’t human.

It was the kind of smile a demon might wear as it crawled back from the pits of hell.

John, still breathing heavily, caught sight of that expression—and something inside him snapped.

"You bastard... what are you smiling for?!"

With madness burning in his eyes, John lunged forward like a hurricane in human skin, rage twisting his once-calm demeanor into that of a beast.

Boom!

The sky growled in fury. A thick column of lightning fell from above, slamming into John’s body like divine judgment. For a moment, he looked like a thunder god descending—hair whipping through the wind like furious serpents, eyes glowing with wrath.

He raised his arm, lightning dancing between his fingertips.

"Let me see how you’ll survive this—"

But before he could finish—

A voice cut through the storm. Calm. Cold. Unhurried.

"Say less."

John blinked. His thoughts froze. His tongue felt numb.

And in that single moment, the world changed.

Under the effect of six hundred times acceleration, Damien’s body surged with energy. Torn flesh reknit. Ruptured veins pulsed anew. Every bone fused back into place in a flash.

He was whole again.

But more than that—he was faster than ever before.

To Damien, the world was no longer moving. It was frozen.

Raindrops hung in the air like suspended glass beads. John’s hair floated mid-snarl. Even the lightning above appeared trapped in time, fractured into glowing shards that hadn’t yet touched the ground.

His mind processed everything—every twitch, every ripple in the air, every shift in John’s mana signature.

And then something new happened.

His vision trembled—then fractured.

Three Johns appeared before him, ghost-like silhouettes made of light particles. They hovered, translucent and ephemeral, yet each one vibrated with terrifying possibility.

These weren’t illusions. These were predictions.

Possible futures. Multiple realities branching from John’s next move.

Each particle-John represented a future step, a killing blow, a defensive maneuver.

Damien’s brows furrowed. His heart thundered like a war drum—but his face remained perfectly still.

"So this... is Level 2 Acceleration," he murmured.

With a quiet inhale, he dismissed all thoughts.

There was no need to calculate. No need to analyze.

Just trust the instinct honed in battle.

Move.

In the next instant, Damien vanished from where he stood.

The air exploded.

Wind howled as space itself seemed to rip, and the place where Damien had stood moments ago was reduced to dust.

And John... never saw it coming.

BOOOOOOM!

A thunderous roar ripped through the heavens.

In a single step, Damien unleashed a shockwave so cataclysmic it tore through reality itself. The air cracked. The earth howled. A tempest of destruction surged outward from his footfall.

Every single glass object in the entire Dreamy Sky City—chalices, vases, windows, ornaments—shattered at once, their fragments raining like silver dust upon stone streets. Carriages toppled. Birds screamed into the skies. The mountains echoed the sound like a drum of war.

And yet, that wasn’t the end.

The shockwave—wild, uncontrollable, divine—leveled the entire Dreamy Sky family estate.

Ancient walls, fortified for centuries... reduced to ash.

Pagodas and towers, crafted with gold and cold-iron... flattened like paper before a storm.

In the center of it all, where Damien had once stood, now remained a colossal crater—scorched and still smoking, as if the heavens had hurled down lightning in divine fury.

This...

This was the aftermath of one step.

And the target—John—had never even seen it coming.

A Channel Forging Realm expert... a man who could bend the laws of reality with his domain... had been utterly outpaced. Not by technique. Not by martial mastery.

But by sheer speed.

He only registered the attack after Damien’s fist had buried itself into his chest.

BOOM!

A new explosion rang out—this time the force of the punch itself.

The world behind John... ceased to exist.

A corridor hundreds of meters long disintegrated. Stone walls vaporized. Tiles split and soared into the air like paper. Concrete was swept away as though caught in a hurricane. The wooden beams, the steel supports—all of it was pulverized and carried by the invisible tide of that impact.

John could barely gasp, his body arched backward unnaturally, blood spraying from his mouth like a crimson fountain.

"Argh! My chest!" he groaned through clenched teeth, his trembling hand reaching toward the mangled wreck of his torso.

Everything below his sternum was gone.

Not broken. Not bruised.

Gone.

Vaporized.

A gaping void remained, scorched at the edges, his insides charred and burnt by the frictionless force of Damien’s accelerated punch.

But Damien... Damien wasn’t unscathed.

His right arm—just moments ago perfectly healed by his Level 2 Acceleration—was now completely gone.

Flesh, bone, muscle—all obliterated in the moment of contact.

The backlash of his own speed had caught up to him. His shoulder was a mangled stump, smoking with steam and raw power.

Yet...

His eyes remained clear. His breathing, steady.

And then—

Time began to move normally again.

The suspended rain resumed its fall. Smoke curled through the cracks. Debris crashed back to the ground. Screams echoed faintly from the outer districts of the city.

And in the heart of the chaos stood Damien—bloody, broken, and half-burned.

But alive.

A force of nature wearing a human form.

Thud.

John collapsed like a ragged puppet with its strings cut—what remained of his once-proud frame crumpling to the ground.

His eyes... still wide open.

Still burning with fury.

There was no peace in that gaze—only confusion, disbelief, and rage. As if, even in death, his soul refused to accept the truth.

A Channel Forging Realm expert—felled by an iron rank.

---

"Huff... Huff..."

Damien stood, barely, each breath sounding like a dying engine. His chest rose and fell violently, lungs screaming for air as if they had been set ablaze.

Sweat poured down his forehead and pooled at his feet. His arms hung limp. His clothes, or what remained of them, fluttered in the hot, swirling wind that still lingered from the battle.

"Damn, I feel so hungry..."

He muttered it like a joke, but the hunger gnawed at him—fierce, primal. His stomach growled like a beast unsatisfied by blood.

Most of his body had reconstructed thanks to mana—healing tissues, regrowing nerves, fusing bones like clockwork.

But...

That process came with a price.

And the price was vitality.

His internal systems, accelerated a hundredfold, had devoured every shred of stored energy. It wasn’t just healing. His metabolism, cell division, energy reserves—everything had been forcibly sped up to match his powers.

It felt like he hadn’t eaten in weeks.

He was running on fumes.

And yet... he lived.

---

Damien finally straightened himself, half-dragging his foot through the cracked and scorched ground. His half-burned right side ached with every step, but it was nothing compared to what he’d just endured.

Then he looked around...

And his expression twisted with awe and fatigue.

The Dreamy Sky Castle was gone.

What had once been an opulent estate—ornate stone courtyards, celestial pagodas, enchanted gardens—

—now looked like a celestial impact zone.

Craters large enough to bury wagons marred the landscape in every direction. Pillars lay snapped in half like twigs. Entire wings of the castle had been vaporized—turned to molten slag or reduced to nothing but ash and broken dreams.

Smoke coiled up into the blood-red sky.

The scent of mana, charred flesh, and scorched soil lingered thick in the air.

"This place..." Damien whispered, voice low and dry, "looks like it got hit by a damn asteroid."

He could hardly believe it.

He had turned the stronghold of a thousand-year-old noble family... into ruins.

And now, surrounded by devastation and death, barely able to stand, Damien did the only thing he could:

He smiled.

Not out of pride.

But out of survival.

Slowly... but steadily... Damien began to walk.

At first, his steps were shaky—his bare feet dragging against the broken stone and scorched soil. Every muscle in his body trembled, not from fear, but from sheer exhaustion.

But then, step by step, his footing became firmer.

More certain.

More resolute.

To the outside observer, it might have looked like walking.

But in truth—it was something else entirely.

Teleportation.

His body, still partially wrapped in the lingering threads of his accelerated state, moved with strange, unnatural grace. He would vanish for a heartbeat and reappear several meters ahead, like a flickering illusion refusing to stay still.

Then—he stopped.

Mid-step, mid-breath, his head snapped toward the horizon.

His pupils sharpened like daggers, locking onto something far away.

Two silhouettes.

Running.

No—charging.

Through the dust-filled battlefield and ruined streets of Dreamy Sky City, two figures pushed forward with everything they had—faces pale, but eyes sharp.

Anek and the Iron Dungeon Stronghold Leader.

Their boots crunched over debris and bloodied stone as they sprinted toward the source of the explosion, toward the crater that now marked the grave of a Channel Forging Realm expert.

Toward Damien.

---

Anek’s face was stiff, horror still clinging to his expression.

He had seen the blinding light tear through the clouds. Had heard the otherworldly boom that shattered every window in the city. He had watched, helpless, as the sky seemed to crack open.

And now, as he neared the epicenter, his breath hitched in his throat.

"He’s still standing...?"

How?

How was Damien even alive after facing such a monster?

Anek didn’t know. He only knew one thing for certain: if Damien had lost, none of them would have survived.

---

By contrast, the Iron Dungeon stronghold leader was practically glowing with exhilaration.

Even as smoke curled up from his burnt armor and ash stuck to his sweaty face, his eyes were bright with something that Anek couldn’t understand.

Hope.

He had expected it.

Somehow, he had expected Damien to survive.

To win.

He didn’t know how or why—but deep down, he had known that the young man who crawled back from the jaws of death again and again wasn’t going to fall now.

So, unlike Anek, he didn’t hesitate.

Didn’t flinch.

He sprinted toward the crater—toward Damien—with a fire in his heart and a grin tugging at his lips.

---

Damien stood still as a statue, bloodstained and tattered, watching their approach with narrowed eyes.

The wind howled behind him, carrying smoke and thunder through the ruins.

And yet, in that moment, the battlefield was silent.

Only the quiet crunch of boots against rubble marked their meeting.

And Damien waited, eyes sharp, stance unshaken—like a lone wolf staring down the dawn.