Betty ran and ran, her body slowly melting into pure light. Looking back, Death was still breathing down her neck. The whole world just passed by, hundreds and thousands of times, as she ran circles around it. Soon, the mortal world had a halo of pure white light crowning it.

Many underestimated the speed of light, but now, Betty was stressing it to the limits. At such speed, her next step was always where her sight ended, and running a circle around the world to dodge an attack seemed easier than taking a step to the side.

It was a beautiful scene, but the people of the mortal world weren’t amused at all. Last time something of this scale happened, the entire world almost exploded as a goddess called Sol ascended and became their second sun.

If they only knew there was no divine magic involved, just one halfling, a bad joke, and Death chasing her. But not all common people were ignorant, especially the students of the magic university. They have managed to notice their chairman’s magic, and most of them got a headache just thinking about her.

When the important people saw the halo, though, chaos exploded everywhere as everyone with a shred of power rushed toward where Nyar was fighting Luminous and Linda, and of course, that included almost all of Arad’s wives, the dragons and their queens, and even the divine gods walking the mortal world.

"You can’t run from your death, give up." Death called, and Betty ignored her, pouring all of her mental capacity into one thing. She had to analyze the eldritch magic Nyar stabbed her with, reverse engineer it, then remove it from her body before she exhausts herself and slows down.

"Nice outfit there, Death. But I’m clearly able to run away from you. So, you aren’t always right." Betty looked back at her with a grin. "Care to tell me why a maid, though? Some kind of fetish?"

"My true form is both scary and disgusting, so the maid form is more inviting. Besides, I could only copy the Mother of All Life, and she loves being a maid." Death actually replied. Betty was dying anyway, so since they could speak, she didn’t mind talking.

As long as Betty ran at the speed of light, time stopped for her, and her death, which was a second in her future, could never arrive. Death couldn’t reach her before her time, so Betty was going to take full advantage of that.

"How much longer can you endure the pain? Do you think your mortal body can hold up for long?" Death’s hand was right beside Betty’s neck, the cold chills brushed against her hair, but the little halfling just smiled.

Pain? If it is pain alone, then she’ll never stop running. In the past, she had burned herself whole thousands of times when trying to accelerate to the speed of light. She couldn’t count on a hundred hands how many times her whole skin got torn and burned to ash.

The millions of crashes she had suffered were even more harrowing. Running at such high speeds had caused her to almost die many times, breaking all of her bones more than a hundred times each. But at all of those times, her grandma was there to heal her, so Death never showed in front of her.

If they were talking of everyone she knew in her life, then no one had felt as much pain as her, and no one had ever seen anything close to the extent of injuries she endured trying to master her speed.

But Death’s words were never wrong, and Betty indeed couldn’t run forever. Her body was already showing signs of falling apart, and keeping this speed for such a long time was already far past her best record.

She had to slow down, but if she did that, Death would catch up.

"Say, Death. Why can’t you just will me to the grave? I’m sure you can just do that, right?" Betty asked, buying herself a moment to think.

"Stop, and I’ll tell you." Death wasn’t slowing down, nor was she willing to answer. No halfling would fall for that.

"Tell me, how many people fell to that?" Betty stared back at her, and Death smiled. "You would be surprised. Especially the elves. Seven out of ten elves who tried to escape from me stopped when I told them they could suck my toes. For halflings, not a single one ran from me."

Betty wasn’t any halfling; she was a genius, an archmage, and the chairman of a whole university that teaches magic. She had the students who looked up to her, including her husband, and she wasn’t going to let them down.

If she is forced to slow down, then she would just use time magic, the spell [Time Slow], to compensate for her loss of speed. Because in the end, her goal wasn’t running at the speed of light, but keeping her time frozen no matter what.

Won’t that have worked from the start? Couldn’t she just freeze her time and wait for someone to heal her? Sadly, no. Since Death arrived, she would’ve cut her anyway. Betty didn’t just need to keep her time stopped, but she also needed to make sure Death never caught up to her.

So, wouldn’t slowing down allow Death to catch her? Betty had hoped that slowing time would also slow Death, but it wasn’t effective, and Death almost cleaved her head off, or ripped her soul. Betty didn’t know what would happen when Death’s scythe hit her.

Most likely, it’ll sever the link between her soul and body, allowing Death to snatch her soul and throw it into whatever afterlife she has prepared.

So, while dying, running as fast as she could, she now had to play tag with Death, dodging her scythe and trying to stay as far away from the inevitable as possible. Wasn’t this some kind of ironic joke? Death is trying to catch her? No one should be able to escape Death, so why could she still run away? Honestly, Betty expected Death to catch her no matter how fast she ran.

She was a wizard, and now had to know and understand why she was still alive. How could she cleanse Nyar’s eldritch magic and heal herself? And how she would make sure Death won’t just take her soul after all of this is done.

As she tried to answer those questions, she finally noticed something. Her body wasn’t clean either. There was her radiant light, the form she usually took when running at the speed of light, then there was Nyar’s eldritch magic seeping out of her open heart.

But, something else, something even darker and scarier was burning below her chest, right on her womb, a darkness of a being far beyond comprehension. That was probably the reason Death couldn’t just will her out of life, and it was also the same reason Nyar’s eldritch magic couldn’t instantly poison her entire existence.

The halo of light around the mortal world flashed and twisted, contorting around the globe like a snake as Betty ran away from Death everywhere, and so the battle against Nyar below became even more violent.