Riches and Bitches: I have a gate to an isekai and leveling-up system!

Loraz's fist physically surged forth. The aura around it swelled and bloated, all the way to the point where a shadow of a massive, clawed hand seemed to be layered on top of Loraz's real hand.

And with those aura-made claws of his, this damned bastard actually dared to direct an attack at Fay!

Loraz's daughter didn't seem to mind their blood relation at all, though, not allowing it to put any limit to her power. Instead, not moving an inch from the spot just ahead of me, Fay simply waved her hand, scattering a huge number of sparkling stars of her aura in the air before her.

And then, with a gentle tap…

The snapping stars of Fay's divine aura surged forth, forcing Loraz to change the route of his fist, raising it up to block the retaliatory attack as opposed to using it to reach for Fay's precious yet extremely delicate flesh.

The bright sparks of Fay's aura collided with the illusion of a massive dragon arm that layered over Loraz's hand…

But no explosion ensued.

Rather than invoking the one thing that people of my world found to be so much in love with, the clash of aura brought forth no flames or shockwaves. Instead, as Fay's aura dissolved into more natural thickness, it also increased in volume by quite a lot, revealing just how thick it was before.

And when flooded with a huge amount of foreign aura he couldn't control, Loraz suddenly found himself struggling to maintain whatever spell allowed him to turn just his arm into the form of the spiritual beast that laid at the very foundation of his soul.

In the end, the clash turned out to be extremely anticlimactic. For a few moments, the two of them simply stood in front of the other, their faces as tense as they could get, both trying their damnest to prove it would be their aura that held out, dispersing the other.

But with how much time Fay bought me, what kind of a man would I be if I gave a single fuck about battle courtesy and continued to just stand around doing nothing while my girl was trying her best?

I took a deep breath and brought my eyes up to the slowly brightening sky… only to close them as I exhaled. And as I allowed my entire system to get retranslated through the new height of my darkness attribute…

Everything suddenly started to make sense.

The aura swirling around Loraz's fists and forming into the image of a dragon's arm, the seemingly chaotic movements of the sparks of Fay's divine aura…

For a moment, even all the endlessly complicated pathways my aura had to take to invoke a skill suddenly grew… obvious?

It was a feeling that any man would struggle to describe, as it went beyond what a human was designed to experience.

The overwhelming sense of familiarity allowed me to understand my skills properly for the first time. The effect of my affinity for darkness was also reflected in my Eye of Time skill.

And its current state was likely the reason why everything suddenly became so simple.

[Skill: Eye of time

- Darkness Affinity Skill

- Temporarily raises intelligence by 3(+4)

- Cooldown: 6h]

After maxing out my natural intelligence, using this now improved skill… Brought me all the way to what I believed to be the halfway mark of the limits of the rank I would achieve after my next rebirth. For with the twenty points in intelligence, I already had, the bonus seven from the skill…

The change didn't even amount to half of my current attribute's value. But the worth of attributes grew exponentially rather than linearly. And because of this, the endlessly complicated and chaotic tapestry of all sorts of auras permeating the air… Suddenly turned into a complex, but straightforward picture.

The endless flow of myriad directions, the scattering of the world's aura that led to its general level across the world staying the same… It turned from a chaotic, unpredictable movement, to a set of simple patterns that I could vector and calculate.

In a sense, the world around me felt as if it lost an entire layer of complexity. If the world before my skill improving was akin to a pendulum made out of two smaller ones. Its movements were chaotic, and erratic, holding a distant sense of logic and reason but one that the human brain was too limited to grasp.

On the other hand, now that my intelligence nearly reached thirty points… the entire world could be summed up as a straightforward, simple pendulum. One that would move in an extremely simple and repetitive pattern, as opposed to the chaotic movements of its more complex version.

And in terms of what it meant for me in the moment…

Loraz's fist twitched.

In the extremely tense fight between his aura and one of his daughters, the divine leader finally leveraged his experience and finer control over the echo of his soul, slowly starting to push Fay's sparks aside and press ahead.

Once the process started, once Loraz's fist started to gain ground, things only accelerated. His hand, under lesser and lesser resistance, moved faster and faster, scattering the weakening power of my woman with rapidly increasing ease.

Through my bond, I could tell Fay refused to surrender… and even went as far as to bite down on her sweet lips in frustration when she started to sense what I could see right before my eyes by now.

Loraz's fists started to move again. And with it, the illusory claws of its projected dragon's hand.

But all of it… all of it was pretty much for nothing.

'Elemental aura tribute,' I thought, only for the familiar sense of the time freezing to nearly instantly envelop the whole world. And for the first time since I first used the original time-stopping skill… I hardly felt any burden of doing so.

No fresh wounds opened up on my body, no blood squeezed out of those wounds to offer itself on the altar of my skill. And while I could feel an increasing tug on my aura, slowly but surely sapping my reserves dry…

Now I had more than just enough room to affect the outcome of this fight!