87: Chapter 87 Infinite Time Loop? Stop it!

As long as he exerted force with his fingertips, this ancient artifact, along with the Time Stone inside, would be easily pried out.

But just a thousandth of a second before Lynn closed his five fingers.

In Strange's bloodshot eyes, a determination akin to a death squad suddenly erupted.

"Lynn! You forced me to do this!"

He didn't even try to protect the pendant on his chest; instead, he exhausted the last shred of his magic, forming an extremely complex, ancient seal with his hands in front of his chest.

"Hum—!!!"

Following Strange's movement, the metal casing of the eye of agamotto snapped open. The green Time Stone embedded in the very center erupted with an unprecedented, blinding green light!

The green radiance, like tangible ripples of Water, instantly swept past Strange, swept past Lynn, swept across the entire New York Sanctum, and expanded wildly at the speed of light until it enveloped the entire Earth!

The Law of Time, fully activated!

Lynn only felt as if the scene before his eyes was a videotape that someone had pressed the rewind button on.

The shattered floor rapidly restored itself, and the mages who had collapsed, coughing up blood, flew back to their original positions.

Even Lynn himself felt the surrounding scene change abruptly.

"Bang." The scene froze.

Lynn discovered that he had returned to thirty seconds ago.

He had just shattered the Shield of the Vishanti with a single step and descended from the broken dome into the center of the hall.

And directly in front of him, Strange wiped the blood from the corner of his mouth, his hands behind his back, looking at Lynn with a calm, death-defying gaze.

"Lynn." Strange took a deep breath and spoke the incantation that had saved Earth in thousands of futures. "I've come to bargain."

Facing this familiar opening line, Lynn did not speak; his expression didn't even flicker. He simply raised his right hand.

"Shhh!" A streak of dark red reality law shot out like a sharp blade, instantly piercing through Strange's skull!

No defense, no resistance. The Sorcerer Supreme's body collapsed heavily into a pool of blood, dying on the spot.

But just a second later, "Hum!" The blinding green light flashed once again. Everything in the hall was abruptly reset.

The corpse on the ground vanished, and the blood flowed backward. Lynn was back at the exact moment he had just landed.

Strange stood in place, completely unharmed, looking at Lynn with a tone as flat as a machine: "Lynn, I've come to bargain."

"Bang!" Lynn delivered a kick in mid-air, the terrifying physical kinetic energy instantly crushing Strange, along with the load-bearing wall behind him, into bloody chunks of flesh.

But the next second, the green light flashed, and everything reset.

"Lynn, I've come to bargain."

...

Slaughter, reset.

Slaughter, reset.

In just a few minutes, using the most purely physical means, Lynn had snapped Strange's neck, cut him in half at the waist, burned him to ash, crushed him into pulp... he had killed him exactly fifty times.

But with every death, accompanied by the flash of green light, Strange would revive, completely unharmed, thirty seconds earlier, and then repeat that despair-inducing line.

The fifty-first reset.

Strange stood in place, his eyes revealing a morbid persistence and cruel gratification.

"It's useless, Lynn." Strange looked at the expressionless young man in black and sneered: "This is a forbidden time loop of Kamar-Taj. As long as I don't dispel the magic, we will be trapped in this one minute forever."

"You can kill me a thousand times, ten thousand times. But I have endless time to spend with you. Until your mind completely collapses, until you kneel down, compromise with me, and swear to leave Earth forever!"

This was Strange's trump card.

He had once used this move to force back Dormammu, the ruler of the Dark Dimension.

He believed that no matter how powerful Lynn's physical body was, in this endless cycle of repeated slaughter and imprisonment, his will would sooner or later be worn away.

However, contrary to Strange's expectations, facing his declaration, Lynn, in the fifty-first reset, did not rush to kill him again.

Lynn stood in the center of the hall, his hands in the pockets of his black trench coat. In those deep black pupils, there was none of the mania, anger, or even a shred of the despair that Strange had anticipated.

Instead, there was only an extreme sense of mockery and ridicule, as if looking at a circus monkey.

"Pfft." Lynn suddenly laughed. The laughter sounded particularly jarring in the silent Sanctum hall.

"Compromise? Collapse?" Lynn shook his head, looking at Strange as if he were looking at an idiot.

"Stephen Strange. Do you think that because you set up a dead loop with a stone, you've become a god who controls time?"

Strange's brow furrowed sharply. For some reason, looking into Lynn's ripple-free eyes, a feeling of extreme unease suddenly welled up from the bottom of his heart.

Lynn slowly walked forward, his leather boots making crisp sounds as they stepped on the wooden floor.

"You used this move to deal with Dormammu because Dormammu is a creature of the Dark Dimension; he doesn't understand the laws of time, and he would feel fear when trapped in the illusion of time passing."

Lynn raised his left hand. On the back of his hand, the lights of five Infinity Stones—Space (Blue), Mind (Yellow), Reality (Red), Power (Purple), and Soul (Orange)—lit up simultaneously.

The pressure woven from the five fundamental laws of the Universe made Strange's breathing stop instantly.

"But I am not Dormammu." Lynn's voice was cold, revealing an unbridled arrogance.

"My physical body has merged with the essence of five Infinity Stones. My will has long since transcended a single time dimension."

"Your time loop, to me, is like a shoddy single-player game save point. You can only reset the surrounding matter, but you cannot reset my spirit, nor can you trap me."

Lynn walked up to Strange and looked down at him condescendingly.

"Furthermore, you have made an extremely foolish mistake."

"You keep claiming that you are trapping me with time." Lynn suddenly reached out his right hand and grabbed the eye of agamotto on Strange's chest.

"But in my eyes, you are just a low-level administrator who doesn't even know the password and only knows how to borrow backend programs."

"And you, you actually dared to try to use my things to deal with me?"

Hearing this, Strange felt as if he had fallen into an ice cellar. He frantically urged his magic, attempting to trigger the time reset once again.

"Hum!" The green light erupted again!

But the moment the green light lit up, the crimson blood watch on Lynn's left wrist erupted with an extremely blinding red light!

Game over.

"Now, I'll let you see what true violence of controlling time is!"

"Hum—!!!" The eye of agamotto erupted with an unprecedented, blinding green light.

The fifty-second time reset, activated!

Strange's hands were forming seals frantically; he wanted to lock him forever in this mind-breaking infinite loop!

However, just a thousandth of a second before that green light, capable of twisting the entire Universe's timeline, was about to touch Lynn's body.

Lynn raised his right hand extremely calmly and gave a light tap on the crimson blood watch on his left wrist.

"Click." An extremely faint mechanical crisp sound.

Immediately after, a blinding dark red light instantly engulfed Lynn's human shell. His flesh faded away, transforming into a half-mechanical creature covered in black and White streamlined armor, its entire body radiating high-dimensional space-time energy!

[Tenth Form: Time Phantom]!