The chamber broke into motion.
Captain Edrin did not shout. He did not hesitate. The instant Astrae moved, he moved too, shield snapping up, sword drawing a clean arc through the air.
It was meaningless.
She crossed the space without effort, her body blurring not from speed, but from authority. The world around her simply agreed she was already there.
Her strike landed.
Edrin's shield screamed as metal folded inward. The impact hurled him across the chamber, his body smashing into stone hard enough to form spiderweb cracks through the wall. He hit the ground and slid, blood streaking behind him.
Lyra fired.
Her arrows flew true, precise and lethal. They shattered before reaching Astrae, splintering into dust as if reality itself rejected them.
Tomas slammed his palms into the floor, his support field flaring as he forced stability into the collapsing space. The pressure eased for a fraction of a second.
The entity looked at him.
She stepped forward and brought her foot down.
The stone ruptured. The shockwave tore through the chamber, flinging Tomas aside like a discarded tool. He hit the ground and did not rise, blood pooling beneath him as his field collapsed.
I felt it then.
The sheer wrongness of her.
Not strength. Not magic.
War.
She turned toward me.
Her gaze pinned me in place. Not because I could not move, but because some part of my body understood what facing her meant.
She crossed the distance in a single step.
Pain exploded.
The world cut out.
I was on the ground.
Cold stone pressed into my cheek. My ears rang. My vision swam.
I tasted blood.
Someone shouted my name.
I tried to push myself up and failed. My body refused to respond.
She moved again.
Every time she struck, it felt like the chamber itself flinched. Walls cracked. Symbols flickered. The seal groaned under the abuse.
From the outside, it looked like I was being battered, thrown aside, barely conscious.
In truth, I was dying.
Again.
And again.
Each time, I returned to a moment where I was still alive, still broken, still within reach of her next blow.
She slammed me into the floor.
Darkness swallowed me.
Then I was back, coughing, lungs burning, bones screaming.
She crushed my ribs.
The world went black.
I came back gasping, already collapsing.
She tore through me with casual brutality, not even looking down half the time. To her, I was no more important than debris.
To the others, it looked like I was being struck once, twice, then lying still.
To me, it was a loop of agony.
I lost count quickly.
My mind struggled to hold onto anything that wasn't pain or impact. Each return left me slower, foggier, my thoughts lagging behind her movements.
She was not even fighting seriously.
She was venting.
Captain Edrin staggered back into the fray, blood running down his arm, sword raised again despite the way his shoulder sagged.
"Stay away from him!" he roared.
The entity glanced at him, annoyance flickering across her face.
She backhanded him.
Edrin hit the ground and didn't move.
Lyra screamed.
She scrambled forward, dragging me by the arm, trying to pull me away. Her hands shook. Tears streaked down her face.
"Don't die," she whispered. "Please don't die."
I wanted to tell her I already had. More times than she could imagine.
She stepped closer. Her presence crushed the air. Breathing felt like pulling water into my lungs.
She stared down at me.
Her eyes narrowed slightly.
"You're still alive," she said.
Not suspicion. Irritation.
I tried to speak.
Blood filled my mouth.
She lifted her hand.
The pressure spiked. Everything inside me shattered.
The strike came down.
From the outside, it looked like my body went limp.
From the inside, the world was destroyed again.
When I came back, my vision was swimming so badly I thought I had gone blind.
My limbs barely responded. My thoughts were scattered, fragments of strategy and memory slipping through my fingers.
The chamber was ruined now. Cracks split the floor. The symbols flickered erratically, struggling to hold form.
The female entity stood at the center, aura flaring violently.
"This is tiring," she said. She raised her hand.
This time, power gathered visibly. Heavy. Dense. Enough to erase what little remained of us.
I knew this one would end me completely.
Not permanently.
But decisively.
I looked up at her, my vision tunneling, and the words slipped out without thought.
"You said you wouldn't be sealed again."
Her hand paused.
Just slightly.
Her eyes sharpened.
For the first time since the fight began, her full attention focused on me.
Not because she knew what I was.
Because she sensed something wrong.
Something that refused to behave like it should.
The hesitation cost me my life anyway.
The blast hit.
From the outside, my body convulsed and fell still.
Inside, the darkness took me again.
When I returned, my chest heaved violently, my body trembling as if it might fall apart without her touching me.
My vision burned.
The number burned brighter.
Astrae stood tall now, rage coiling tighter around her, wings of pressure flaring unseen.
She lifted her chin and spoke, her voice carrying through the chamber like a declaration written into the world itself.
"I am Astrae Valyrix, a tiered goddess of war."
The name struck the seal.
Symbols flared. Stone groaned. The structure shuddered under the weight of a god reclaiming herself.
She did not look at me when she said it.
She looked beyond us.
Toward something older.
Something unfinished.
And I knew, with a clarity that terrified me more than her strength, that she was done holding back.
My deaths had taught her nothing.
But her rage had taught me one thing.
If this continued, I would not outlast her.
I would simply run out of time.
~~~
The moment Astrae spoke her name, the chamber stopped pretending it was stone.
It became a battlefield shaped by her will.
The air thickened until every breath felt earned. Light bent around her body, not warping so much as stepping aside. The symbols carved into the walls flared, then dulled, as if they were ashamed to still exist in her presence.
She moved.
Not fast. Not slow.
I realized, with a sick clarity, that speed was irrelevant to her. Distance meant nothing. Direction meant nothing. She acted, and the world corrected itself to match.
Captain Edrin rose again, dragging himself upright through sheer refusal. Blood soaked his sleeve, his stance imperfect but steady. He charged.
Astrae did not look at him.
She lifted her hand and closed her fingers.
The pressure crushed inward. Edrin's armor folded. His sword snapped at the hilt. He was hurled backward and embedded into the far wall, stone cracking around his body like a coffin being sealed.
Lyra tried to reach him.
The goddess stepped once.
The ground ruptured between them, a jagged scar opening that forced Lyra back. She fell hard, rolling, barely managing to avoid being crushed by falling debris.
Tomas tried to raise a support field.
It failed before it could form.
Not broken. Refused.
Astrae finally turned her gaze toward us. Toward me.
"This is not war," she said flatly. "This is delay."
She came for me again.
I triggered Failure Converter the instant I felt the pattern collapse. The skill flared, dragging fragments of prior deaths into focus. Trajectories. Timing. Pressure shifts. I moved before she struck.
I still died.
Her attack did not miss. It adjusted.
Darkness.
Return.
I tried again. I altered my angle. I waited longer. I moved earlier.
Death.
Again.
Again.
And again…
My body was breaking faster than it could recover. Even with resets, the shock lingered. My mind started lagging behind my senses. I would realize I had been hit only after the pain arrived.
Death count climbed.
One by one.
I tried Death-Linked Burst.
Once per life, everything I had learned poured into a single moment. Perfect prediction. Perfect timing. Perfect execution.
The vision unfolded clearly.
There was no opening.
Not a hidden gap. Not a delayed strike. Not even a flaw that could be forced.
Astrae had no weak point.
The Burst fired anyway.
I moved with absolute certainty, striking where she would be a heartbeat later.
My attack passed through empty air.
She had not dodged.
She had simply never been there in the first place.
The backlash tore through me. Bones shattered. Organs ruptured.
Death.
Again.
I came back shaking.
Again, I tried to force Error Exploitation. I pushed instability into the environment, collapsing weakened supports, turning fractured symbols into cascading failures.
The dungeon screamed.
Astrae stood untouched at its center.
She did not even brace.
The chaos bent around her and dispersed.
"Stop," she said, irritation creeping into her voice. "You are noise."
She killed me without looking.
Again.
And again.
Time stopped behaving.
I could no longer tell how long I had been fighting. The moments between deaths shrank until they overlapped. Pain stacked on pain without space to fade. My thoughts fragmented. Strategies slipped away the instant I formed them.
Death followed death followed death.
I stopped remembering how many times I had returned.
The number burned anyway.
It felt meaningless now.
I was being killed faster than my mind could recover. Each return dumped me back into a body already mid-collapse. There was no clean reset. No breath. No pause.
My consciousness started to smear.
I died standing.
I died falling.
I died reaching for nothing.
At some point, I stopped reacting.
My body moved on instinct alone, but my thoughts lagged behind by several deaths. I would feel pain before I understood what caused it. I would hear sound after the darkness had already taken me.
Astrae was everywhere.
Her strikes did not feel like attacks anymore. They felt like corrections. As if my continued existence was an error she was smoothing out.
Something in me cracked.
Not physically.
Mentally.
I started to lose the edges of myself. Memories overlapped. Faces blurred. The sound of my own breathing felt unfamiliar. I could no longer remember what it was like to not be in pain.
Negative infinite luck did not just bring failure.
It chained me to it.
I understood then that this was hell.
Not because it would never end.
But because it could.
If this continued long enough, something inside me would give way permanently. Not my body. Not even my mind.
Something deeper.
The part that knew I was still me.
I felt myself slipping.
Astrae loomed over me once more, her silhouette sharp against the collapsing light.
She frowned.
Not in confusion.
In annoyance.
"You persist," she said. "Why?"
I tried to answer.
I could not remember the words.
My vision tunneled. My thoughts unraveled. The world narrowed to the space between deaths, shrinking until there was barely room for awareness.
If this continued, I would not escape.
I would dissolve.
Death would no longer be a reset.
It would be an erasure.
And for the first time since my deaths began, I was afraid that my unlimited rebirth was actually a curse. Same evil twin of my negative luck.
~~~
Before my two-hundredth death, I was aware of exactly three things.
The first was the taste of blood.
It filled my mouth, metallic and thick, seeping down my throat no matter how shallow my breaths became. My chest barely moved anymore. Each attempt to inhale felt like dragging air through broken glass.
The second was pain.
Not sharp anymore. Not clean. It had dulled into something vast and suffocating, like being submerged beneath a weight that pressed from every direction at once. My limbs no longer answered me. I couldn't tell where my body ended and the stone floor began.
And the third was my arm.
My left arm lay twisted in front of me, fingers half-curled, palm slick with blood. Wrapped around it, faint but unmistakable, was the thin black line that had replaced the strand of hair Madison had tied around my wrist.
It looked almost like a vein.
It pulsed once.
I stared at it without really understanding why it mattered. My vision blurred. The world wavered. Astrae's presence crushed everything else into irrelevance, yet my mind no longer focused on her.
Instead, a face surfaced.
Madison Ultima.
Not in motion. Not speaking. Just standing there the way she always did, soft expression untouched by chaos, amethyst eyes calm and distant, as if the world's end was something she could afford to observe rather than fear.
I didn't know her well. I knew that.
We weren't close. We hadn't shared long conversations or confessions. She had helped me, yes, but never explained why. Never lingered.
And yet, as my consciousness slipped, she was the one my thoughts reached for.
Not my parents.
Not the team.
Her.
It felt strange. Almost wrong. But at the same time, it seems natural. As though it was given.
But the feeling underneath was clear.
Madison wouldn't give up here.
The thought wasn't logical. It didn't come with reasons or arguments. It simply existed, firm and unyielding, like a rule my heart had accepted long before my mind caught up.
I exhaled weakly.
Then the world froze.
Not slowed.
Stopped.
The blood no longer flowed. The pain no longer advanced. Astrae's form, mid-motion, locked in place like a painting abandoned by time.
And something vast turned its attention toward me.
Death arrived without ceremony.
The pressure changed first. The air lost weight. Sound vanished. The unbearable tension that had crushed my mind loosened, as if someone had unknotted a cord around my thoughts.
A presence loomed over me.
It stooped.
Death.
It looked around slowly, gaze drifting over the frozen battlefield. It paused briefly when it noticed Astrae.
No reaction.
No fear.
No anger.
Just acknowledgment.
Then it looked back down at me.
I felt its annoyance before it spoke.
A long, tired sigh escaped it.
It waited.
I realized, dimly, that it was waiting for me to finish dying.
The moment my consciousness slipped completely, darkness folded inward like a closing curtain.
Something hooked into me.
Not painfully. Not gently.
Decisively.
My awareness was pulled free, yanked away from the battlefield, from my broken body, from the stone and blood and rage.
When sensation returned, I expected pain.
Instead, there was silence.
Complete, profound silence.
I floated.
There was no ground beneath me, no sky above. Only an endless darkness that didn't feel hostile. It felt… still.
Almost peaceful.
For a terrifying second, I wondered if this was what being dead was actually like.
Then a voice echoed through the void.
"You again!"
I tried to speak.
Nothing happened.
No sound. No breath. No body.
A shape emerged from the darkness.
Small.
Very small.
A small figure stepped into my vision, cloaked in an oversized black robe that dragged slightly along the ground. A bone-white mask covered its face, smooth and simple, eye sockets dark and unreadable. A scythe far too large for its body rested against one thin shoulder, its blade dull and ancient.
I had the strange feeling I had seen this figure before.
Not clearly. Not recently.
Just… somewhere.
The little reaper tilted its masked head.
"Oh. Right," it muttered to itself. "You can't talk."
It flicked a bony finger.
Something loosened inside me.
I gasped.
"What do you mean… again?" I croaked.
The reaper stared at me.
Just stared. The silence stretched.
Then its shoulders slumped.
"Oh," it said, tone shifting into something between annoyance and reluctant understanding. "Yeah. That tracks. You wouldn't remember."
It tapped the side of its mask with the handle of the scythe.
"Makes sense. Annoying sense."
I tried to ask what it meant.
Death growled softly.
"Quiet," it snapped. "This time, you stay dead."
The words should have terrified me.
Instead, relief flooded through me so fast it almost hurt.
Good.
If I went back there, I wasn't sure my mind would survive it. The deaths had come too quickly. Too relentlessly. I hadn't even had time to process one before the next tore through me.
Staying dead sounded merciful.
Before I could respond, I felt something tighten around me.
A pull.
I realized, distantly, that I had no body.
I looked down.
Where my form should have been, there was only a drifting wisp. A small, rounded core of faint light with a trailing tail of smoke that curled and faded into nothing.
A soul.
Mine.
The reaper hooked the scythe through the misty core with surprising gentleness.
"Ugh," it muttered. "Extra work."
Then it dragged me along.
The darkness split.
Light spilled through, soft and gray, revealing a space that defied definition. It looked like a castle, but not really. Walls rose endlessly without texture. Pillars stretched upward until they vanished. The ceiling, if it existed, was too far away to see.
It was enormous. And filled with movement.
Hundreds.
No, thousands.
Tiny figures fluttered through the air. Others bouncing.
They were shaped like droplets of water given form, bodies semi-transparent and softly glowing. Small batlike wings flapped behind them, carrying them in uneven, playful arcs. Each held a tiny scythe no bigger than a needle.
They noticed us.
Instantly.
"Master!"
"Master, master!"
"Where did you go?"
"You should let us handle it!"
Voices overlapped, high-pitched and breathless, circling the Death in excited swarms.
One of them spotted me.
"It's him!"
"The weird one!"
"The bad soul!"
They crowded closer, poking at my wisp-body with their tiny scythes.
"You make master work more!"
"No redemption!"
"Throw him in the fire!"
I drifted helplessly, unsure whether to laugh or panic.
Then the reaper slammed the butt of its scythe against the unseen floor.
"Enough."
The sound boomed.
The tiny deathlings froze midair, then scattered with disgruntled chirps, vanishing in soft puffs of gray light.
Death turned back to me, mask tilted in a glare I could somehow feel.
"I'll make sure," it said slowly, "that you don't give me extra work."
Then it tugged the scythe again and dragged me deeper into the vast, unknowable space beyond.
And for the first time since my deaths began, I had no idea where I was being taken.