Die. Respawn. Repeat.

Chapter 234: Book 4: Party Wipe

Adeya had no idea what had happened.

By the time she was conscious again, there was a lot of noise and arguing. The good news was that there weren't any giant beetles still trying to kill them, so she assumed they'd survived somehow. How they'd managed to survive she had no idea: the number of Root Acolytes and Seedlings swarming them even without the Seedcracker had, in her estimation, made that battle an unwinnable one.

The fact that she'd also survived elevated her estimation of events from "unlikely" to "miraculous." The last thing she remembered was falling into what looked like a disturbingly colorful blender. She shuddered at the memory, curling up into herself slightly.

She just needed a moment to process. No one around her seemed to have figured out she was awake just yet, at least.

"You need to watch where you're going!" That voice was... Dhruv's? "If you didn't get in the way of the evacuation maybe he'd still be alive!"

Adeya's heart ran cold. Had someone died? Was it Taylor?

To her relief, Taylor responded. Apparently, he was the one Dhruv was arguing with. "I tried!" he said. He sounded frustrated, upset, and maybe on the verge of tears. "I tripped! It was an accident!"

"It's life or death! You can't just say you tripped and expect things to be okay!" Dhruv snapped.

"It's not like I was trying to trip!" Taylor said, sounding even more upset. "I'm sorry, okay? What more do you want from me?"

"I said I'd try," Taylor muttered. "That's not enough?"

"Absolutely not," Dhruv said. "This isn't a video game. We don't get to try again. You fuck up and someone dies—"

"It wasn't just me—"

"I really need the two of you to shut up," Adeya said. "You're making my headache worse."

There was a long silence. Then both Taylor and Dhruv rushed to her side, talking over one another and trying to get her to listen; she raised a hand with irritation and almost triggered a skill, but stopped herself just in time. Instead, she slapped her hands over Taylor's and Dhruv's mouths.

They stopped, thankfully.

"I apologize," Novi's voice filtered in from farther away, and Adeya looked up to find the scirix Seer walking toward her from the far side of the tunnel they were resting in. "I tried to get them to stop earlier, but they would not listen."

"No, they wouldn't," Adeya said dryly. "They're best friends, but they argue a lot. It's how they get their feelings out."

Dhruv made a noise of protest. Adeya was pretty sure Taylor just made a whimpering noise.

"Mistakes happen in battle," Adeya said. Dhruv began to speak up again, but she just pressed her hand more firmly over his mouth. "No warrior is perfect. But you need to learn from your mistakes, which means you need to talk about what happened. Figure out where it went wrong. Taylor, you don't get to just say you'll try. Dhruv, you can't just beat him over the head and expect him to figure it out."

She drew her hands away slowly. Mercifully, both Dhruv and Taylor remained silent.

"Now," she said. "Someone please tell me what happened."

It took several long minutes, mostly because Taylor and Dhruv kept talking over one another; eventually, Novi interrupted and took over, explaining things much more concisely. About halfway through that explanation, Yarun showed up to check on her injuries, muttering to himself as he set about replacing bandages and rubbing fresh ointment into her wounds.

She winced, but it really did help. She'd been worried about it at first, unsure if scirix medicine was compatible with human physiology, but the ointment had worked fine in previous tests. Something about the Firmament in it.

Firmament was a uniting factor for many things, it seemed.

"So let me get this straight," Adeya said. "Ethan showed up and saved us all, but he died in the process?"

"Well," Taylor began hesitantly. "We don't know if it's him."

"Novi said it was him," Dhruv snapped irritably. "You don't believe her?"

"He looked like a monster," Taylor protested. Adeya sighed. Clearly, it was going to take some time for the two of them to get through this. She flicked open her Interface, glancing through the screens.

"He's still alive," she said. Both Taylor and Dhruv looked at her, then groaned in realization. "Did you dig through the tunnels to find him?"

"We don't have any equipment that can make it through the brick," Novi said quietly. "I do not believe he could have survived, but... Protectors do not work the same way as we scirix. Perhaps he could return."

"Might be something about his Trial," Adeya muttered, mostly to herself. "If he's still alive, then he'll be back. In the meantime, we need to take stock of what's going on. You said he had friends with him?"

"They all disappeared when he died," Taylor said, wrinkling his nose. "It was really weird. And kind of gross, honestly. Felt like space just... folded itself around them."

Adeya frowned. "Did they say anything before he died?" she asked. "Any hints about the dungeon or whether they'll be back?"

Taylor and Dhruv both shook their heads. "We weren't close enough to talk to them," Taylor said. "I think one of them was looking after you, though. A scirix? I didn't recognize him."

One of them had been looking after her? It might be a little too convenient for him to have left her a note, but Adeya shifted in the makeshift bedroll she was lying on and felt about in her pockets, just in case.

To her surprise, her fingers closed around what felt like a folded piece of paper.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

She pulled it out, brows furrowing at it. The first thing she noticed was that despite the texture, the note wasn't made of paper—in fact, she was pretty sure the thing was made of pure Firmament. Bizarre.

The front of that note read "Open In Case of Death" in beautifully cursive, golden writing. She snorted, then opened it.

Hello. I am leaving you with a quick overview, in case the worst happens. It's unlikely, but dungeons can be tricky, and it's probably best we get information to one another sooner rather than later. So, in order of importance:

First, do not fail any of the prerequisites. The Integrators do not want Trialgoers completing dungeons. Ritual prerequisites are a trap designed by them. If the main objective of a Ritual stage is met without all prerequisites also being met, it will trigger a process known as Ritual blowback, which is essentially a cross-Trial explosion. It tends to kill a large percentage of Trialgoers in otherwise unrelated Trials.

Second, we are likely not actually dead. Ethan's Trial allows him to return if he dies, so if you hang tight, we'll be back. We have a way to navigate the Sewers, so focus on keeping yourselves safe. We'll figure out how to complete the stage when we meet up. It won't take us long.

Third, if you find any monster that the Interface marks as Corrupted, run. Do not try to engage. Seal it off if you can, but if you can't, run. Stay as far as you can until we manage to find you.

Good luck. Hopefully, this note won't be necessary.

For what it's worth, I'm sorry.

Adeya said nothing for a long moment as she read over the note. Then she folded it with a sigh.

"Well?" Dhruv asked. Adeya tapped her fingers on her knee, trying to figure out how much she could tell them. Part of her wondered if she was just jumping to conclusions, but the wording in that note...

"It was a set of warnings. Nothing we didn't suspect already," she said. "Nice to have confirmation, though. Basically, if we fail any prerequisite, a bunch of Trials are going to explode. So let's not fail any of them. Everyone on the expedition team is alive, right?"

Her Interface said as much, but there was always the chance someone was in the process of dying. Thankfully, Novi nodded at her. Adeya sighed with relief, then glanced over the Interface to look at the rest of its numbers.

Current Firmament saturation: 91%

"Looks like the saturation went down slightly, so we'll be able to use a few skills, but we need to be even more careful with them now that we know what's going to happen," she said, her brow furrowing. "I say we stick with evasion until Ethan and his team catch up to us again. The note said it wouldn't take them long."

"Did the note say anything else?" Taylor asked. "Because you look like something about it is still bothering you."

Adeya sighed. No hiding it, then.

"I think Ethan might be working together with an Integrator," she said. Unless Ethan had managed to dig deeper into Integrator records than even their best information-gathering Trialgoers, only an Integrator would know about the fatality rate of Ritual blowbacks.

Then there was the fact that the entire note was a persistent Firmament construct. As far as she knew, only Integrators could create persistent Firmament constructs on the fly like that. Firmament solidification was a skill she'd only seen demonstrated from her assigned Integrator when she was claiming an Inspiration.

Dhruv's expression darkened. "Are we going to have to fight him?" he asked, clenching his fists.

Adeya eyed him for a moment. "You really think we stand a chance here, of all places?"

"Why would he work for one of them?" he demanded. "Look at what the Integrators have done! Look at what they're doing!"

Adeya shook her head. "I wouldn't be so sure he's working for one of them," she said. "Let me handle it. I'll deal with it when they get here."

"Are you sure?" Taylor asked.

"I am," Adeya said. "You two should focus on reviewing what happened during the fight. You know the drill. After-action review."

She would've participated herself, but she'd been out of the majority of the fight, and there wasn't much she could have changed on her part. Adeya listened to Taylor slowly, haltingly going over the fight and what had caused him to trip, but for the most part, her thoughts were distracted.

The contents of the note ran through her mind again and again. That last line in particular, written with hesitation and uncertainty, from someone who was supposedly one of the scirix.

Adeya knew what it looked like when the Interface translated a language. Most of the note was translated, but that last line lacked the feeling of the Interface's Firmament.

It was written in plain English.

For what it's worth, I'm sorry.

Even before I open my eyes, I can tell that something is different.

The air doesn't feel like air. I can't feel the ground beneath me. There's no sound of birds, insects, or the rustling of leaves. I normally wake to the heat of the sun and the smell of damp earth, but even those things are absent.

Instead, around me is an all-consuming pressure that flows... past me, rather than pressing down on me. Good thing, too. If it pressed down on me, I think I'd be entirely dead.

When I do finally open my eyes, there's a distinct stream of green-purple surrounding me and rushing past me. It takes me another moment to figure out what it is and what I'm sensing.

This is Hestia's temporal barrier, and for the first time, I find that I'm awake as time rewinds around me.

My body stitches itself back together from the mangled mess left behind in the tunnels of the Sewers. I feel myself moving backward through the Sewers, through the city of First Sky, and then eventually back into Hestia and the ground above Inveria.

Instead of going back down into Inveria, though, my perspective shifts. I find myself floating higher and higher, above the planet, watching as time pulls itself backward.

A few things stand out to me.

The first is Gheraa and Ahkelios. They're both being held in a bubble of solidified time, a mass of mutated Firmament that holds them in place as we're pulled back through the timestream. That's a relief—it means Gheraa was right. They're being brought back right alongside me. Granted, they'll be in some sort of Tear I need to get them out of, but that shouldn't be a problem.

The second is my core. Fyran mentioned that this was a part of the core deepening process, but from the sounds of things, he hadn't experienced anything like this. I can actually feel my core beginning to grow larger in this space between spaces. The Web of Threads pulls at its edges, and it grows to compensate.

The density of my Firmament decreases slightly in the process, but it begins spinning even faster, and it takes only a small mental nudge to help the process along. Firmament Control allows me to pull small threads of power from the timestream and feed it into my expanding core, making it grow a little more, spin a little faster.

It's going to be a while before I hit my limit like this, I can tell. Even with me manually pushing the process along, there's a long way to go. Every so often, I pause to push my core's density instead of its size, trying to keep the two mostly aligned—I don't want my skills to suddenly be weaker if I can help it.

I do this for what feels like a long, long time, though I have no idea how much time actually passes. Subjectively, it feels like hours. Objectively? Beyond Hestia's temporal barrier, the universe just seems... frozen.

I pay it no mind and focus on my core.

Two more abnormalities show up before the loop finishes its reset. I notice them as tiny specks in the distance.

The first one feels like Guard. He's too far away for me to see, but I can sense his presence through the bond we share. There's another figure next to him, extending its hand casually, and around it the timestream just... splits apart. Like it's somehow defending itself and Guard against the reset.

And it's not the only one. Somewhere farther away, in another Great City, I notice another similar abnormality—a second figure doing the exact same thing, creating a bubble of safety within Hestia's loop.

I frown. That seems like a problem.

Before I can do anything about it, though, the bubble pops—

—and I find myself lying on the forest ground, staring at Hestia's morning sky.

This time, there's a pulsing mass of Firmament flesh near me that I can identify as the Tear containing Ahkelios and Gheraa. I grimace a bit as I rip it open, pulling them both free; Ahkelios coughs as he stumbles out, glaring at the temporal wound like it personally offended him. It probably did, considering he's covered in what I can only assume is some kind of time goop. Gheraa just pretends to dust off his coat.

"We need to get back in the Empty City," I say before either of them can say anything. "But something's going on with Guard. I'm going to check on him before we go."