My Goblin System : Levelling up with my SSS Class Devouring skill

Chapter 535: Chapter 535

Eighty thousand people.

Gone.

Cassius walked faster, his composure intact but his mind running calculations at full speed. He checked streets, checked buildings, checked alleys, checked every space his senses could reach.

No bodies. No blood. No signs of violence. No evidence of disease or plague.

No footprints leading out of the city. No cart tracks suggesting mass evacuation. No discarded belongings along the roads. Nothing that said people left here.

Just absence. Clean, total, impossible absence.

He’d been inside the city for twenty minutes when one of Loki’s fighters — a young demon named Reth who handled scouts’ assessments — found him near the central plaza.

"Commander Cassius." Reth’s voice was carefully controlled, but underneath it was something that wasn’t quite fear but was occupying adjacent territory. "We’ve checked the northern and eastern sectors. No one. The barracks are empty — beds made, equipment racked, duty rosters still posted on the walls. Kitchen fires cold. Food stores intact." He paused. "The food stores are full. Nobody took supplies before leaving."

"People evacuating take food," Cassius said.

"Yes," Reth said.

"People fleeing take whatever they can carry," Cassius said.

"Yes," Reth said again.

"Which means this wasn’t an evacuation."

Another fighter appeared from a side street — Mira, the group’s mage, who handled magical assessment.

"I’ve been reading the residual magical signatures," she said. Her voice was flat with the controlled professional tone of someone who had found something alarming and was choosing precise language carefully. "There’s temporal magic throughout the city. Old signatures — weeks old, matching the timeline. Whatever happened here happened approximately three weeks ago." She paused. "The signatures are—" She stopped.

"Say it," Cassius said.

"They’re not teleportation signatures," Mira said. "Evacuation portals leave traces of movement — direction, destination residue, the characteristic pull-and-push of mass displacement. These signatures are different." She met Cassius’s eyes. "These look like absorption."

The word landed in the plaza like a stone.

Cassius held it for a moment, turning it over.

Absorption.

Chronus’s temporal abilities at their apex included the theoretical capacity to manipulate people through time itself — not just speed them up or slow them down, not just age them, but fundamentally remove them from one temporal position and place them in another. Or extract them entirely from the present moment, holding them in a kind of temporal suspension.

An army of eighty thousand, frozen in time. Or dispersed. Or held in some temporal state that explained the lack of bodies, the lack of evacuation signs, the mid-task abandonment of everything.

Chronus hadn’t evacuated his people.

He’d done something else with them entirely.

And the question — the question that settled in Cassius’s chest like cold water — was why.

Why would a demon lord remove his entire population from his own capital city?

The only answer Cassius could construct was the one that made him want to leave immediately.

Because Chronus was about to do something to this territory that he didn’t want his own people caught in.

Or because he needed his people elsewhere.

Both interpretations were catastrophic.

—-----

He spent another twenty minutes conducting the most thorough sweep his skills allowed, documenting everything with the systematic attention that had made him Loki’s most reliable intelligence operative.

The temporal clocks still ticking. The food stores full. The duty rosters on the barracks walls. The child’s toy in the farming settlement mud. The proving dough gone hard in the bakery bowls. The cold cup on the gatehouse window ledge.

Three weeks. Eighty thousand people. No trace of where they’d gone.

He gathered the group in the central plaza.

Eight fighters looking at him with the careful attention of people who had understood something was wrong since the first empty gatehouse and were now standing inside the confirmation of it.

"Document everything you’ve seen," he said. "Every detail. We leave nothing to memory — I want written accounts from each of you before we reach Lord Loki."

"What did this?" Reth asked.

Cassius looked at the temporal clock built into the plaza’s central column — still ticking, still measuring, utterly indifferent to the absence of every living thing around it.

"Chronus," he said.

"Where are the people?"

"I don’t know." He held Reth’s eyes. "And that is the part that concerns me most."

He turned toward the gate.

"We run," he said simply.

—------

They ran.

Not the tactical movement of a reconnaissance team withdrawing carefully — running. Cassius set the pace and the pace was fast, burning through the miles between Tempra and the border forest with the focused urgency of someone who had decided that the only appropriate response to what they’d just seen was immediate distance and immediate reporting.

He thought as he ran.

Chronus had lost Richard Clay three months ago. Half his soul. Half his power. An injury that should have crippled him — that every intelligence assessment suggested had crippled him — sent him into seclusion while he recovered.

Three weeks ago, his border patrols had stopped.

Three weeks ago, eighty thousand people had disappeared from his capital city.

And the residual signatures were temporal absorption — not evacuation, not portal exodus, but absorption. Chronus actively doing something with his own population.

Cassius had spent years in intelligence work. He had developed the ability to sit with incomplete information and resist the urge to fill gaps with comfortable assumptions. He didn’t know what Chronus had done with those people. Didn’t know where they were or what state they were in.

What he knew was geometry.

Chronus was the Second Seat. Half-powered, yes. Grieving, yes. Furious, yes.

But the Second Seat half-powered was still something that had destroyed an entire human city in sixty seconds. That had existed for millennia. That had built an empire of temporal control through means most demon lords couldn’t comprehend.

And something half-powered had just done something with eighty thousand people that left no trace.

That wasn’t weakness.

That was preparation, he is planning something that will make him far stronger than everyone , that would explain the missing people.

He ran harder, because the more time he wastes , the stronger he felt Chronos will become.