The return was a violation. It wasn't a gentle fade-in or a startled awakening. It was a slam, a brutal reattachment of his consciousness to a body that should not exist. One moment, he was a bleeding, broken thing in the mud, his mind screaming into a void of agony and half-sight. The next, he was whole. The cold iron manacle was a familiar, hateful weight on his right ankle. The rough hide of the slave tunic scraped against unblemished skin. He flexed the fingers of his left hand—all five of them—and a soundless scream built in his chest.
He was back. Again.
The horror was no longer a sharp, stabbing fear. It was a deep, settling frost, a permafrost of the soul. He stood rigid in the line, his eyes, both of them, fixed on the scarred topography of Kael's back. The memory of the night-walker's scythe taking his left eye was a phantom pain, a ghost limb of sensation that made his vision swim. He could still feel the wet, sucking mud, the shocking lightness of a severed foot, the final, puncturing darkness as his eye was extinguished.
He had run. He had convinced them to flee the known terror for the unknown. And the unknown had been… creative. The Cursed Terror had been a force of brutal, overwhelming power. The night-walkers had been artists of disassembly. Both had ended with him as the last one alive, a mutilated plaything for the nightmare's amusement, before being reset like a broken chrono.
This was not a trial. A trial implied a chance of success. This was a meat grinder. A personal, exquisite hell designed to break him down to his constituent parts, over and over. The policeman's words about the Spell tailoring the experience felt like a sick joke. What part of him was a Cursed Terror? What part was a silent, clicking butcher from the deep dark?
What is causing this?
The question from his previous death was the only thing that kept the frost in his veins from solidifying into absolute, catatonic despair. He had to find the flaw. The crack. The mechanism of this endless, agonizing loop. He wouldn't spend this cycle panicking or fighting. He would observe. He would dissect the nightmare itself.
The line trudged forward. The script was etched into his soul. The grumble of Kael, the whispered prayers of Elric, the swagger of the guards. He moved through it like an automaton, his mind a detached, cold engine of analysis.
At the narrow pass, he initiated the rebellion with a chilling efficiency. His whisper to Kael was devoid of passion, a simple statement of fact. "The Nest is death. The Spinners pierce and drain. I have seen it. There is a path away from here. We must take it, together." He used the same words, the same inflections that had worked before. He was a craftsman assembling a known device.
The rebellion unfolded with the same chaotic energy. Kael roared. The chain strained and broke. Adam retrieved the keys, freed himself, and then freed others, his movements precise and economical. He pointed into the thick, menacing jungle. "That way. Run and do not stop."
They ran. The same desperate, gasping flight through thorns and mud. The same eerie, glowing fungi. The same gradual dimming of the light. They found the same pathetic rock overhang by the stagnant pond. The same hopeless search for shelter. The same chilling, melodic clicking that began as the last of the purple light died.
This time, when the group huddled in terror, Adam did not just listen. He studied.
"The light is fading," he said, his voice flat, cutting through the whimpers. "The fungi are our only light source. Their glow is changing. Dimming. It's a signal. It tells them when to hunt."
Kael, clutching his club, grunted. "What are you talking about, boy?"
"The creatures that come," Adam said, his one good eye—no, both his eyes, he had to remember that—scanning the pulsating mushrooms. "They are tied to the dark. To this specific kind of dark. They use the fungi. They see by its light. Or it masks their approach."
Elric, the wiry man, stared at him. "How… how can you know that?"
Adam didn't answer. He was remembering the last cycle. The way the fungi had brightened just before the night-walkers appeared. As if on cue, the fungal glow around their makeshift camp intensified, casting long, dancing shadows.
"They're here," Adam said, his voice still devoid of emotion, though his heart was beginning to hammer a frantic rhythm against his ribs. The fear was there, a wild animal trapped in the cage of his analytical mind. "They use the increased light to see us, to disorient us. Form the circle. Back to the rock. Now."
His cold command, born of absolute certainty, spurred them into action. They scrambled into a tight defensive ring, just as the night-walkers emerged from the trees and the black water. Tall, slender, insectoid, with their glowing head-slits and scythe-like arms. A dozen of them. The same horrifying chorus of clicks filled the air.
Kael, as before, broke first. With a roar, he charged. Adam didn't try to stop him. He was a data point. The creature flowed around the club strike, its scythe-arm flicking out. Thwack. Kael's head tumbled. The body crumpled. Data confirmed.
Pandemonium erupted. But this time, it was slightly different. The slaves, primed by Adam's strange calm, didn't just scatter blindly. They fought, a desperate, clumping mass of humanity against impossible predators. A man with a sharpened stone actually managed to deflect a scythe-blow, the impact sending sparks flying before he was gutted from the side. A woman screamed and threw herself at a creature, her teeth sinking into its chitinous leg before she was decapitated.
It was still a slaughter. But it was a noisier, more protracted one. Adam stood his ground in the circle, his empty hands clenched. He watched the patterns. The night-walkers moved in pairs, their attacks coordinated. They favored disabling blows first—limbs, eyes—as if to prolong the hunt. They were toying with them.
One turned its glowing slit towards him. It took a step. Adam didn't wait for it to lunge. He dropped into a crouch, mimicking the motion he'd used before, but this time, he scooped a handful of the black, stinking mud from the pond's edge. As the creature's scythe-arm whistled over his head, he sprang up and hurled the mud directly into its glowing face-slit.
The effect was immediate and dramatic. The creature shrieked, a sound like grinding glass. It staggered back, its clicking becoming a frantic, discordant rattle. It clawed at its face, the mud smearing the source of its perception. It was blind.
For a moment, just a moment, the other night-walkers paused, their rhythmic clicking faltering. Their prey had fought back in a way they didn't understand.
That moment was all the remaining slaves needed. A surge of desperate hope fueled them. They swarmed the blinded creature, beating it with rocks, tearing at its legs with their bare hands. It went down under the weight of their terror and rage, its chitin cracking, its limbs snapping.
The victory was short-lived. The other night-walkers recovered from their surprise, their clicks turning furious, vengeful. The slaughter resumed with renewed ferocity. Scythes rose and fell. Elric died, his prayer cut short. Another man fell, then another.
But they had killed one. They had broken the perfect, elegant hunt.
Adam found himself backed against the rock, facing two of the creatures. He had no weapon. No plan. Only the cold, hard knowledge of what was to come. He saw the scythe sweep towards his legs. He tried to jump, but he was too slow, his body malnourished and weak. There was that same, sickening impact, that same shocking lightness. He looked down. His left foot was gone, a fountain of blood arcing from the stump. He collapsed.
The pain was a white-hot brand. He gritted his teeth, forcing his mind to stay clear, to watch. The second creature advanced, its blade aimed at his outstretched left hand. He tried to pull it back, but the movement was too slow, too clumsy. The scythe descended. Chop. His hand vanished from his wrist. He stared at the twin stumps, his body going into shock, the world beginning to tunnel.
The first creature, the one that had taken his foot, loomed over him. Its glowing slit regarded him with what he could only interpret as a cold, alien curiosity. The scythe-tip darted forward, too fast to follow. A puncture, a burst of impossible pressure, then a sudden, permanent darkness on his left side. His eye.
He lay in the mud, a ruined thing. The remaining night-walkers finished off the last of the other slaves. Then, as before, they began dragging the corpses away. They left him there. The interesting one. The one who had blinded their kin. The one who had to die slowly.
He bled out in the cold, clicking dark looking at the somber sky, his mind a whirlwind of fragmented observations. Mud disrupts their perception. They can be surprised. They prioritize the group, leave the isolated for last. The regression trigger is not immediate death… it's…
Blackness.
The return was a hammer blow to a psyche already fractured. Whole. Always whole. The manacle, the tunic, the mud. Kael's back. Elric's prayers.
A scream, raw and silent, built in Adam's throat. He choked it down. The frost in his soul was now mixed with something else: a desperate, grinding determination. He had data. He had a hypothesis. The regression was not a punishment for failure. It was a reset upon the completion of a specific, horrific script. He had to change the script enough to survive, but not so much that he triggered a new, equally terminal ending.
This time, when the rebellion began, he was more forceful. "Listen to me!" he hissed as he freed the slaves. "The creatures of the night are blind! They see by the light of the fungi! We can use that! We stick together! We find a defensible position with no glowing mushrooms! We use mud, dirt, anything to blind them!"
His eyes, wild with the memory of his own mutilation, carried a conviction that was contagious. They ran, but this time, Adam led them on a different route, away from the stagnant pond and its glowing guardians. He found a small, dry crevice in a rocky outcrop, a tight, cramped space with a narrow entrance and, crucially, no bioluminescent fungi nearby.
As night fell, the clicking began. But it was distant, confused. The hunters had lost the scent. For hours, they huddled in the absolute blackness, listening to the melodic, searching clicks move around them, never quite finding their hiding place.
Dawn came, a faint, grey light filtering through the oppressive canopy. They had survived the night.
A fragile, disbelieving hope bloomed in the group. There were eight of them left. They looked at Adam with a new kind of awe. The crazy, whispering boy had saved them.
The next five days were a brutal tutorial in survival, orchestrated by a prophet of his own repeated doom. Adam became their reluctant leader. He knew where to find grubs that were (probably) not poisonous. He knew which streams to avoid. He remembered the locations of predator lairs from his previous, doomed scouting attempts.
And he began to train.
He took the obsidian-tipped spear from the guard he'd helped kill. It was a crude thing, little more than a sharp rock lashed to a pole, but it was a weapon. He knew he was no warrior. His body was still that of a starved slum rat. But he had time, and a terrifyingly sharp memory for violence.
He remembered the way the night-walkers moved. Their fluid grace, the economy of their killing strikes. He couldn't replicate that, but he could anticipate it. He spent hours each day, when they were safe, practicing thrusts and parries against a makeshift dummy of vines and wood. His muscles screamed in protest, his hands bled, but he drove himself with a manic intensity. Every ache was a reminder of a far greater pain. Every blister was preferable to the clean slice of a chitinous blade.
"Your form is terrible," one of the other slaves, a grizzled man named Rorke who had once been a city watchman before being captured, commented on the third day. "You hold it like you're afraid it will bite you."
"Teach me," Adam said, his voice flat.
And Rorke did. He showed him how to plant his feet, how to put his body weight behind a thrust, how to use the spear's length to keep an enemy at bay. It was basic, crude instruction, but to Adam, it was a revelation. It was structure. A system to combat the chaos. He absorbed it like parched earth absorbs water.
At night, they took shifts on watch. Adam barely slept. He sat in the dark, his spear across his knees, listening. He was waiting for the other shoe to drop. He knew this respite was temporary. The nightmare would not let him go so easily. He was an anomaly in its system, and systems always seek to correct anomalies.
On the fifth night, it found them.
They had moved to a new campsite, another rocky cleft Adam had scouted during a previous regression. But this time, the hunters were more determined. The clicking started earlier, and it was closer. More of them.
"They're here," Adam said, his voice low. "Remember. They use the fungi. We stay in the dark. If you have to fight, go for the glow. Put it out."
The night-walkers emerged from the tree line, not a dozen, but nearly twenty. Their coordinated clicking was a wall of sound, a psychic pressure that made the slaves whimper. They surrounded the rocky cleft, their slender forms silhouetted against the distant, pulsating glow of the forest.
"They won't come into the narrow space," Rorke said, hefting a sharpened stake. "We can hold them here."
But the night-walkers didn't charge. They began to tear at the edges of the rock face with their bladed arms, their incredible strength chipping away at the stone, widening the entrance.
"We can't let them!" Adam yelled. "We have to push them back!"
It was a brutal, close-quarters melee in near-total darkness. The only light came from the hunters themselves, their glowing head-slits casting just enough illumination to see the flash of a blade. Adam fought with a desperate, trained ferocity that was entirely new to him. He used Rorke's lessons, keeping his spear extended, thrusting at the glowing slits. He felt the tip connect once, and a creature shrieked and fell back, its light extinguished.
But there were too many. One by one, the other slaves fell. Rorke died with a stake through a creature's neck, just before two scythes took him in the chest. The group was whittled down, until only Adam and two others remained, backed into the deepest part of the crevice.
It was then that Adam saw it. A larger night-walker, its chitin adorned with strange, phosphorescent patterns, stood at the entrance, directing the others. A commander. A node.
The Cursed Terror was the mind for the spiders, he thought, his mind racing, clinging to analysis even as death closed in. This is the mind for the night-walkers. Kill the mind, break the will.
"The one with the patterns!" he screamed over the din of clattering chitin and dying men. "We have to kill that one!"
It was a futile hope. The two remaining slaves charged forward and were cut down in seconds. Adam was alone again. But he was armed. He was trained. And he had survived for five days.
The patterned night-walker clicked, a complex, commanding series of notes. The other creatures held back. It wanted him for itself.
It flowed into the crevice, its movements a terrifying ballet of death. Adam set his feet, just as Rorke had taught him. He thrust the spear. The creature deflected it with a casual flick of its wrist, the force nearly wrenching the weapon from his hands. It lunged. Adam dodged, the scythe-arm gouging a chunk of rock from the wall behind him.
He was faster this time. Stronger. He understood distance and timing. He managed a glancing blow against its leg, the obsidian tip scoring a deep groove in the chitin. The creature hissed, its clicks turning angry.
They circled each other in the cramped space. Adam was panting, his arms trembling with fatigue. The creature was toying with him, learning his patterns. It knew he was different.
It feinted high, then swept low. Adam saw it coming, a memory of a similar move from a previous death flashing in his mind. He jumped, but not high enough. The scythe caught his left foot, shearing through the flesh and bone. He fell with a cry, the spear clattering from his grasp.
He looked up, expecting the final blow. But the creature paused. Its glowing slit regarded his bleeding stump. Then, with deliberate, cruel precision, it brought its other scythe-arm down on his outstretched left hand. Chop. The pain was immense, a fire that consumed his entire being.
He lay there, gasping, his lifeblood pooling around him. The patterned night-walker leaned in close, its featureless face filling his vision. He could smell the ozone and cold chitin. It was studying him. Understanding its interesting prey.
Then, with the same surgical accuracy he remembered, the scythe-tip darted forward. A burst of pressure, then darkness. His left eye was gone.
The creature straightened up, gave a final, dismissive click, and turned away. It left him there in the dark, just as the others had. A broken, one-footed, one-handed, one-eyed wreck. But he had lasted five days. He had learned to fight. He had killed one of them.
He felt the blood loss pulling him down into the final, cold embrace. The frost in his soul was now absolute. There was no fear left. No despair. Only a cold, hard nugget of resolve.
He had data. He had a new variable. A commander. A pattern. The regression was coming. He could feel it, the edges of the world beginning to fray.
As the blackness swarmed his vision, his last thought was not a prayer or a curse. It was a plan.
Next time. Next time, he would find that patterned one. And he would kill it first.
The world dissolved into nothing.
The return. The manacle. The mud. The chain.
Adam stood in the line, his body whole, his mind a scarred and bloody map of repeated failure and fleeting, costly victory. He took a deep, shuddering breath of the humid, rotting air.
He was back.
But he was different. The slum rat was gone, whittled away by a thousand deaths. In his place stood something harder, sharper, and infinitely more dangerous. A student of agony. A cartographer of his own personal hell.
He looked at the path ahead, at the narrow pass, at the oblivious back of Kael.
"Thank you," he whispered, the old habit now a vow of vengeance against the nightmare itself.
He began to walk. He had a plan