Getting a Technology System in Modern Day-Chapter 1043: Winner & Nightmare

[Winner: Emperor Aron Michael]

Those words appeared in the vision of everyone watching the match, followed by large-scale fireworks filling every viewer’s entire vision due to their scale alone.

However, despite that, no one moved at all, as they were still having difficulty digesting what they had just heard and seen.

The emperor had just stopped, no, slowed time in a portion of space to the point that a spatial fracture that usually happened at the speed of light looked like it was moving in slow motion.

It was the first time they had seen such an ability in action outside of fiction or imagination. Even the Trinarians, who were closest when it came to space affinity, hadn’t been able to conquer the domain of time, as it was something they saw as an unreachable and unachievable domain. It would give anyone on it unfathomable power, but in front of their eyes, they had seen it being put into action.

Even the Xor’Vak, who had just had their leader killed in front of their eyes in a combination of an explosion of unimaginable scale and the remnants of his own attack, couldn’t react to that, as they were fully focused on the temporal part of the fight, as if everyone was hypnotized by it.

They had also even missed the action of the emperor using teleportation on himself in order to leave the location moments before the entire area was covered in light.

..........................

However, while they were still focused on that matter, Aron was focused on something completely different.

[All conditions for the system’s consciousness awakening have been met]

That line appeared in front of the system screen, written in gold colors, as if the system was celebrating the completion that it had been awaiting for decades.

But that celebratory atmosphere didn’t last, as a pitch-black screen soon appeared, replacing the golden one.

[The universe doesn’t allow such powers to an unworthy individual. Survive to show you’re worthy.]

Before he could take the time to digest what he saw, two massive hands made of black smoke materialized from both sides out of nowhere, trying to catch him.

It didn’t take a warning from the system for Aron to know that they didn’t mean good news. The moment they appeared, he felt his soul shudder from fear as he experienced an existential dread from just their appearance.

{Run,} the system voice that he had last heard when he accidentally awoke it, way before the right time and conditions were met, shouted at him, carrying the still-distorted sound with urgency filled inside it. Although he didn’t need to hear it to know he needed to run, he immediately activated the teleportation rune, appearing on the opposite side of the designated fighting location as a wormhole opened thanks to Nova acting fast.

He immediately jumped through before it was collapsed, breaking all wormhole-closing safety measures, as that would mean it was going to take a fraction longer to close—something she knew Aron, who had just received a system warning, didn’t have.

He had been sent to a randomly chosen location to escape those hands, trillions of kilometers away from the final battle location. Still, not even five seconds since his arrival, those hands once again appeared out of nowhere. This time, there were not two but four. They had doubled and were once again trying to catch him as he once again teleported millions of kilometers away, arriving with a wormhole already waiting for him as he disappeared into it.

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“This is going to wear me down,” Aron said when he realized that no matter where he went and how far he ran, he was going to be followed a few seconds later, with the number of hands doubling each time. He was now running away from 2,048 hands.

Already realizing that the more he used the wormhole to escape to a long distance, the more the hands were going to increase, he was now teleporting within the same area while receiving aid from Nova, who was using mana reactors back on Earth to aid him in having the required amount to activate spatial displacement or teleportation at will. If he wanted to do it with his own mana, it would take him a few seconds to accumulate the required amount.

As he teleported from one place to another in an empty space somewhere within the galaxy, he used that time to think about possible solutions. He wasn’t being frugal or wanting to save all his earned SP, because he knew if he was dead, they would be as useless as water to a person drowning. To find a solution, he had opened the system interface, trying to look for it. On his third teleportation, he realized that he couldn’t escape them, and they were doubling after each round, but the system didn’t even respond to his calling to it.

His interpretation was that it had deemed he already had a possible solution on hand, and all he needed to do was find it and deal with the current situation. If he failed to find it and died, the system could just go and find someone else and repeat the same process again and again until one finally succeeded. There wasn’t really an indication that the system was only given to one individual at a time, as it could also be done by giving it to many people simultaneously and rewarding the one who survived at the end.

The moment he reached that conclusion, he immediately started looking for a possible solution. Since he wasn’t alone, by extension, Nova was also doing the same. She used her authority to commandeer all of the available computing power in the empire to come up with possible solutions and handed them to Aron by order of priority for him to test.

SLASH! Though no sound of a cut was heard in space, his cleanly cut hand was left behind as he teleported from his current location just as the hands arrived where he had been. Finally, it seemed like he had found a possible solution. The hand that he had left had delayed the hands for more than five seconds as they devoured it. That wasn’t the end of it, as their number halved to 1,024, and the darkness surrounding them decreased, though not by much, in a noticeable amount.

Although it looked like good news, it didn’t seem like that at all. Although they had halved and their dark color had lightened, albeit slightly, the dread and fear they induced had doubled instead of decreasing.

“FUCK!”