Ainen opened his Equalizer Zone and trapped everyone inside.

"Your fate is sealed," Ainen said, his voice utterly cold.

"Indeed." Zurdon nodded.

"What the fuck is this?"

"What kind of domain is this?! I can't use any of my skills!"

"All the phenomenon we cause with Mana is instantly devoured by this field."

Two of them tried to escape, but to no avail.

"It's no use." Ainen's voice rang from all directions.

In a moment, ten Ainens appeared, surrounding the group of Cradle.

'Bastard, what the fuck is this?!'

'Did you know he was this strong?!'

'What kind of skill is he using?! I can't determine its attributes!'

'Fuck! We are dead if he wishes so!'

Everyone was enraged and also fearful.

They were certainly not expecting to meet their death in this mission.

"I am greatly holding myself back from just erasing you all." Ainen composed himself, his voice still icy. "Because I want to make sure you all suffer a lot before dying."

"So let's start, shall we?"

The Equalizer Zone hummed like a wound. Air inside the ring turned wrong — thick as oil, cold as the grave, and all the usual rules of magic blinked out at its edge. Spells died a breath after being born. Barriers folded into themselves. Resistance meant nothing here. Ainen stood calm in the center, hands empty, eyes empty, and the seven Cradle operatives clustered like rats at the rim.

He started slow.

Ainen's palm flicked; wind wrapped into impossibly thin knives and painted the space between him and the nearest operative. The knives didn't cut flesh so much as cut continuity — a person's reflection, then a thought, then the creak of a tendon — until the target staggered like a puppet with severed strings. The knives withdrew, and the man dropped, gasping, but Ainen didn't let them die. Not yet.

He layered elements with the surgeon's patience. Earth rose in a lattice of glassy basalt, a cage that refracted their shouted spells into themselves. Fire joined as a slow, tasting thing — Palatebloom Flame — that licked not at skin but at perception, burning the memory of warmth until victims could not tell if they were cold or burning. Water braided through as pressure, squeezing lungs, making speech stutter to a bubbling whisper. Lightning danced across the glass like a conductor, making the trapped magic in their veins flare and recede.

For one, Ainen composed sand into a thousand throat-seeds. Each seed slid under the skin as if it were dust and lodged along nerves. The seed did not explode outward; it amplified sensation inward. Pain expanded, precise and geometric, a chorus of pinpricks that multiplied into a roar. When the man tried to call his name, the sound split into frequencies his brain refused to accept. He clawed at his throat and then collapsed, eyes wide, jaw locked.

Ainen knelt, touching the man's forehead. The sand vanished like a lie. He straightened, and the man came up shivering, whole — until the next sequence began.

He alternated undoing and remaking with a slow, clinical rhythm. Break, heal; break, heal. Each cycle tightened the noose of fear and exhaustion in a way no single deadly strike could. Ainen's methods were invented for cruelty: not killing outright, but engineering body and mind until the mechanics failed.

For another, he drew wind into a spiral and spun the man's bones into latticework glass. Not blood, not organs — the structure of the body itself became translucent, soundless.

The man watched his hands as if they belonged to someone else and tried to run. Ainen's palm clapped, and the glass shattered into precise dust that blew through the man's chest. He buckled, lungs collapsing under the sudden loss of form.

Ainen breathed, and the dust threaded back, rebuilding ribs and sternum from absence. The man vomited from the reconstruction, eyes drowning in panic. Ainen let him stand for a single minute to taste being unmade, then broke him again — this time turning marrow to storm-lava within the bones, heat that never burned skin but screamed inside like a smith forging a soul.

He used sound as a weapon next. Ainen grabbed the audible spectrum, pulled it thin, and drove tone into their inner ears. The tone did not hurt by volume but by memory: a single pitch tuned to each operative's worst regret. For one, it was the cry of a child; for another, a broken promise.

The pitch forced the memory forward until the brain could not separate now from then. They staggered, shouting fragments of their past crimes. He let the tone swell until his eyes rolled, and then snapped it; the silence afterward was a surgical void. He fixed them with threads of water to keep heartbeats steady, then resumed.

When one operative — a woman who had smirked at captivity — tried to rise and curse him, Ainen made a gesture and the ground gave way into a shallow domain of cold. Tiny ice-daggers crept through the soles of her boots, ran along veins like winter fingers, then widened into an oceanic pressure that folded the chest inward.

She could not breathe without feeling the ocean's mass pressing down. He let her hunger for air for seven long breaths, then gave it back. When she gasped, he let her weep tears of the ocean he'd given her; salt for salt. She would come to hate water after that, and she would despise her own lungs.

This was not quick. It was technical persistence. Ainen was deliberate in the order of loss and restoration. He drained their mana to nothing — turning their outer wards into brittle paper — and then fed them a measured pulse so they would continue to function. They learned that life could be a ledger of hurt and reprieve, and the reprieve taught them to expect the next ledger entry.

Not every method was subtle. He used glass and gravity together to unmake a man's arms: bones softened to mercury, fingers spilling into polished drainways, then spun into a ring of knives that hovered and hummed. The man screamed as his hands became a threat to his own chest; Ainen plucked the knives back and reformed fingers that trembled.

He turned nerve into music for one, crafting a melody that threaded through the spine and played on every ache he'd caused that day. The tune left with the man, but the memory of music became a new phantom pain he could not scrub away.

They screamed. They begged. They tried spells and found the Equalizer Zone devoured them; they clawed at their own skin and found it refashioned as smooth basalt; they attempted to kill each other and discovered their limbs refused to aim true. Zurdon never broke. He laughed through tears and spat curses at Ainen, soaking the hurt like an exchange.

"Do it," Zurdon said once, voice steady in the current of pain. "Break me. Kill me. You cannot be satisfied with mere terror."

Ainen watched him like someone reading an open wound. He obliged, but different rules applied to Zurdon. Where others were dismantled and reconstructed until their bodies failed, Zurdon became a testing ground for extremes.

Ainen summoned a rain of glass-needles to pin Zurdon like a butterfly. The needles did not pierce so much as map — each one writing patterns across muscle, tallying, drawing the sound of iron into his bones.

Zurdon laughed, a raw, hoarse sound. Ainen brought heat and let the needles liquefy within Zurdon, melting patterns into him so his skin bore liquid script.

He dissolved stalwart defenses with currents of void-breath that unraveled spells at their root.

Zurdon shrieked and grinned at once, as if he tasted something feral at the edge of annihilation.

When Ainen shoved a spear of condensed storm through him, Zurdon's chest convulsed, but he did not die. His throat opened in a soundless howl, and anger sharpened like a blade.

Six of them could not endure the loop. Body after body failed. Bone collapsed into dust that did not return. Nerves burned to nothing and refused the reweaving. Each time Ainen finished a cycle, he waited exactly long enough for the subject to have a sliver of hope, then took more. Once the repair could not fill the absence — once cortex and marrow would not knit back — Ainen stopped. He allowed final stillness, then used his fire like an eraser and consumed the husk until no trace remained. He did not leave wreckage; he left a silence that made the air taste different, as if the world had taken a breath and noticed something missing.

When the sixth fell, the Equalizer Zone felt colder still. The survivors' faces were scalpel-edged with realization. It was a methodical purging.

Only Zurdon remained.

He lay on the ground, bloodless, eyes open and furious. He had been unmade, remade, torn, and soothed, but his soul — whatever stubborn core he had hardened—would not break. He coughed, spat a dark sliver of something, and laughed.

"You did well," he rasped. "Very well. Thank you for killing all of them."

Ainen knelt, not to the man but to the moment, and pointed at Zurdon's chest.

Where Ainen's finger passed, the wound sealed, and the bones beneath hummed into order. He did not heal fully; he left Zurdon raw as a wire, conscious of every splinter and every memory. Then he wrapped the survivor in two simple bindings: one of stone, one of contract, both precise, both absolute.

Zurdon felt unimaginable pain coursing through his mind as Ainen kept his nerves active and healed while breaking him constantly.

As he screamed, Zurdon was also laughing. "YOU WILL LOSE THE MOST PRECIOUS THINGS TO YOU VERY SOON!"

"I BEG YOU, JUST KEEP ME ALIVE TO SEE YOUR FACE AT THAT TIME!"

"Hahahahaha!"

Ainen frowned.

"What are you talking about?"

[ System Warning! System Warning! ]

[ A higher power is trying to invade and kill Ron and Syl inside the Star Gazing Restaurant. ]

"What?!" Ainen's eyes widened. "What the fuck do you mean by that?! BLOCK IT!"

He himself started to feel a power that was suppressing his very soul, trying to reach into his Star Gazing Restaurant that was inside his Inventory, which was a mini dimension anchored to the system.

"Oh, is it starting?!" Zurdon crackled maniacally.

"What did you do?!" Ainen roared at Zurdon.

'System, you can stop this, right?!' Ainen shouted mentally at the system's sentience.

[ I am trying Master, but the system is not upgraded enough. If the higher being exerts more power, it will be bad. ]

'What?! Then upgrade the system! I already have enough Cook Points!'

[ I have already done it. And also used all Cook Points to bolster the resistance to keep Ron and Syl safe. But if the other party exerts more power…]

Ainen looked at Zurdon with his furious eyes.

He healed Zurdon completely and made him float in front of him.

"STOP THIS RIGHT NOW!"

Zurdon grinned. "You are all-powerful here, Ainen. Amazing, truly. But don't think for one moment that I am afraid of you."

"I am not afraid of death, so who are you?"

Ainen very much wanted to prove him wrong, but this situation was unexpected.

'Just what the hell did he do?! System, can you tell me what is going on?!'

"Tell me what you did," Ainen asked Zurdon outside. His expression was flat.

"I did life to you." Zurdon grinned. "All lives are unfortunately not equal, but I paid enough lives to get the lives of those you hold dear."

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