Die. Respawn. Repeat.
Chapter 267: Book 4: Trialblazers, (1)

To say the sight before us is awe-inspiring would be to do it an injustice. Hestia's Heart is a massive crystalline growth that would easily dwarf one of Isthanok's cathedrals. Oddly enough, it takes the form of spheres budding off one another, almost like a series of glowing bubbles that are frozen in time. There's something poetic about that, I suppose.

The ground beneath us takes the form of that same crystal, though small enough that it feels almost like walking on gravel. It's a little slippery, since everything is spherical—Guard in particular has some trouble steadying himself on the ground, and eventually settles for activating his thrusters and hovering above it instead—but it gives the place an atmosphere that feels almost sacred.

It helps, of course, that everything around us is drenched in an ocean of power so thick it would be suffocating if it weren't for the way it parts so carefully around us.

That power, I think, is the only thing preventing the Heart from being completely taken by the infestation that lingers here. Kauku's tendrils worm their way all throughout the ground and wrap around the Heart, pulsing and constricting in time with the glow of its crystal; they're a sickly yellow-green, and the color infects and discolors the Heart wherever it makes contact.

I wince at the sight. It looks... unpleasant, to say the least. Ahkelios, on the other hand, looks outraged.

"We should tear those things off!" he declares.

"That," a voice says, "would be a bad idea."

A figure appears in front of us between one moment and the next, almost like she moved within her own version of Eternal Moment. Somehow, I know who she is, even without her introducing herself—there's a distinct familiarity to her presence. It's the first time I've actually seen her, though.

The Heart's manifestation is more of a distortion in space than an actual, physical form. I can tell where she stands only because it's out of sync with everything else. The glow of the crystalline Heart, the pulse of Kauku's tendrils—they're all delayed by half a second in a window of time that takes the shape of a woman.

"Kauku is in the process of completing Integration," she explains, her voice oddly serene despite the situation. "If you were to interrupt it, it would destroy me, and the planet along with me. I gather that outcome is one you wish to avoid."

"Oh." Ahkelios frowns. "Um. Yeah, that would be bad."

The Heart smiles at me. "You figured it out," she whispers. "I hoped you would. It was quite a gamble you took."

"I cut it a little close," I mutter. "And I'm afraid I don't remember making that gamble."

Hestia chuckles. "You would not," she agrees. "But it is a gamble you took, nevertheless. Humanity is such an interesting species. I do not know if it is a quality you alone hold, or if it is a trait of your kind, but you have such a strong tendency to hope... and it seems you inspire that hope in others, as well."

"So I'm right," I say. "I did this once before?"

"307A," Hestia agrees. "A dead timeline. A version of events in which you defeated Kauku, but at great cost."

"I created a paradox."

"One that echoed into every Trial ever hosted on my surface," Hestia agrees. "I hold no resentment for the choice, mind you. Kauku had to be stopped. And yet... you carried so much regret. I decided to ask, in my final moments, if there was any single thing you would change."

"What did I choose?" I ask.

"You chose to help a certain mantid friend of yours," Hestia says with a smile. "Every other change emerged from that choice. When you last stood before me, you were alone, and now..."

I glance at the others. Ahkelios looks teary-eyed at this revelation, which almost makes me laugh, despite the severity of the moment. Gheraa and Guard both seem a little awestruck.

"You know what you must do next," Hestia says.

I hesitate, then nod. "Will it hurt you?"

She chuckles. "I am not a god. I do not know. But I am ready for what may come."

I clench my fist. "Let's do this, then," I whisper.

Shatter Time.

I strike the center of the Heart. The crystal resounds like a gong, reverberating out into the world; cracks splinter out into reality, following the exact series of lines I've already seen mapped out into the sky.

The world warps. Something breaks. I rip a hole through time itself into 306 different Trials, using the relic and the cracks as a map to guide me to the exact moments I need to break into.

I can't do this alone, of course. All these Trials are too many for me to rewrite by myself, even if some of them have already been resolved.

But I have allies. I don't have to do this alone.

Adeya's response is waiting for me in the Interface. I read it, then smile and turn to Gheraa. "Think you can do this?"

"Now that I'm alive again?" Gheraa flexes his fingers and cracks his neck. "I'm still a sixth-layer practitioner, Ethan."

"Prove it," I say, a note of challenge in my voice. He grins right back at me, then reaches out toward my core—I can feel him flexing his will onto the Intermediary inside, reconfiguring and rebuilding it. The scirix within cry out in surprise, and I reach in to assure them and explain what's happening.

It takes only a moment, relatively speaking. And once everything is ready—

Soul Realm.

Scirix and humans alike flood out and into the holes in time I've left wide open. Teams of them break their way into different Trials, different times, different pockets of reality. Ahkelios, Gheraa, Guard and I all look at each other.

Then we follow suit.

Above us, Kauku roars again, his anger building as he realizes that something's wrong. He tries to push down with his power, to tear through the ocean of Temporal Firmament in his way.

But he's slow. He doesn't have control over that type of Firmament. It isn't Integrated, and so it isn't a part of him—or a part of his "greater self," as he might call it.

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And far beneath him, out of his reach, we begin to rewrite time.

General Caico was many things.

She was a conqueror of nations, for one. Her armies had brought low all the enemies of her kingdom, and she had won many an accolade in the process. She was well-respected by her people—celebrated, even—as much as she was feared by her enemies. When she had first been brought into the Trials, she had assumed it was enemy action, and that she would defeat it soon enough.

That illusion had only lasted through her first three hundred deaths.

The next three hundred were not so kind.

Not that she had given up, of course. Dogged persistence had gotten her through many things that strategy and strength alone could not; she was loathe to give up now, when she was finally gaining an edge over her opponents and learning more about the Integrators that had put her here to begin with.

Still, Caico was running up against a wall. What could she do against the end of the world, when not even any of Hestia's own Trialgoers could defend against it? Caico scowled in thought, her gaze flicking back to the Interface and the increasingly-tempting option to simply give up.

From what she'd been told during her last meeting with her Integrator "sponsor", her planet was long since erased. She couldn't tell if it was a lie, but the Integrator had known some of her kingdom's deepest secrets. Countermeasures only meant to be employed if their world was in dire straits.

Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to just—

—a flash of light interrupted her thoughts. Caico blinked once, staring at the crack in the sky that had opened up in front of her. A dark-skinned biped stepped through, bearing enormous, crystalline wings.

For a long moment, they stared at one another. Like many of the people of Hestia, the biped was much larger than she was. She also carried a regal sort of bearing. Royalty, perhaps?

She spoke first. "...Are you a cat?"

Caico sniffed. "I do not know what that is, but you may refer to me as General Caico. I have conquered fourteen nations in the name of the Nine. Who are you to appear before me?"

"My name is Adeya." The woman made a strange sort of expression that Caico couldn't quite interpret, then knelt in front of her.

No one she'd met so far had shown her such respect. She felt an immediate kinship for this woman.

"Well met," Caico said. "From where do you hail?"

"That's a long story," Adeya said. She glanced back at the crack she emerged from, then made a strange noise. "But I suppose I have nothing but time. I'm here with answers. And, eventually, a way out. We'll have to work together for a while."

The crack was closing, but Adeya didn't seem all that worried about it. Caico eyed her suspiciously. "First things first," she said. "I would like to establish trust."

"And how shall we do that?"

Caico extended a paw toward the wings on Adeya's back. "You will take me on a flight," she announced. "And then I will hear your story."

Adeya stared at her for a moment, then grinned. "Deal."

"I thought you said you knew what you were doing!" Javin yelled as he ran as fast as he could, nearly tripping and falling as he did; before he could collapse, the biped that called himself a "human" by the name of "Taylor" grabbed him by the arm and hauled him along.

"I do know what I'm doing!" Taylor yelled back, dodging to the right a split second before they were nearly crushed by a fist the size of a boulder. "I didn't think your monster was going to be immune to skills!"

"Why do you think I was having so much trouble?!" Javin demanded, finally managing to get his own feet beneath him. It was his turn this time to haul Taylor out of the way before the human could get stabbed with a dozen spikes for the second time. "Did you think I was just bad at this?!"

Taylor said nothing, and Javin glared. "You did!" he accused. They leapt over a wall, then crashed down into the ground together, even as the chimera-thing behind them let out an angry roar.

"In my defense, I found you stuck upside-down in a puddle," Taylor panted.

"I told you, Naru put me there!"

"The puddle wasn't deep enough for anyone to put you in there!"

"It was cold! Nirleans shrink in the cold!" Javin yelped as a new spike appeared between his legs. Taylor yanked him out of the way before the second one could impale him through the throat. The human shouted something strange, and a massive burst of light erupted from his hands, blinding the monster behind them. Then he snapped his fingers, making the ground beneath it dissolve into starlight.

Skill negation or not, it couldn't avoid gravity. Javin followed up with a Landscape Echo, drawing on a phantom of a boulder that had once stood there in the past, and sent it falling down the makeshift pit trap after the monster.

A second later, they both got a notification, and breathed a sigh of relief.

As much as he was complaining, Javin was glad that Taylor was here. He hadn't said anything about it yet, but the human had saved his life. And the more time he spent with him, the more Taylor told him about the world that awaited him—

Well... the whole thing with Kauku and the Sunken King seemed scary. Earth didn't, though. Earth seemed fascinating. Especially everything Taylor told him about its food! Earth had so many foods.

It was a future. It was possibility. Javin had given up hope on that a long time ago, but now that he had someone fighting through this with him, it felt like things might not be as lost as he thought.

He'd been stuck at the first phase shift long before he met Taylor. Now he'd broken through the second, and it felt... Well, it was starting to feel like he was beginning to grasp his Truth.

"We're gonna make it next loop," Javin announced. Taylor glanced at him, surprised, then smirked.

"Or the loop after that," he agreed, holding out a fist. "But we're definitely gonna make it."

"I'm going to phase shift before you." Javin bumped his fist against Taylor's. He liked these fist bumps.

"Pfft, you wish." Taylor laughed. Then his eyes unfocused slightly, the way it always did when he looked at his Interface. "Come on, we gotta get going. I don't want Dhruv to beat me out of this thing."

"And Adeya?" Javin teased. Taylor turned red.

"Shut up," he muttered. "Let's go, you little rat."

Before Garran had been forced into the loops, he'd been a musician. He'd tried to keep that part of him alive, in the early loops, but somewhere along the way, he'd forgotten what that was like. There were too many life-or-death battles, too many monsters, too many Trialgoers he needed to run from. There was never time to settle down and listen.

Which was why he didn't quite understand how he'd ended up here, in the back of the largest concert hall in the Great City of Glitter and Light. The whole place was a giant, sparkling tower that shone in the middle of a desert, and something about it was even more ostentatious than Isthanok. And Isthanok was nearly entirely made of crystal!

The concert hall was, in fact, made of the same crystals that could be found in Isthanok. Some sort of import from the other Great City, maybe? It was certainly excellent at conducting sound.

"You're thinking too hard," Dhruv said, glancing at him.

Garran scowled. He didn't even know how this human had convinced him to come here. There were more important things to worry about! His planet was in danger, and what was he supposed to do, trust the words of some primate that had just... appeared in the sky?

But then this was the only other creature he'd met that could remember the loops. The only person that he could, however tentatively, call a friend.

And even more stunning was the fact that Dhruv fought with music.

Or sound, technically. He used raw blasts of sound to destabilize and destroy. But every time he did, Garran thought he could hear something just on the edge of it—something that was begging to be turned into something more. Like there was a song hidden within the cacophony of noise.

Before he knew it, he'd allowed Dhruv to lead him here, and the rest... Well, he was still waiting for the rest.

"This is a waste of time," Garran grumbled. Druv shook his head and gestured to the stage.

"It's starting," he said. "Just listen."

The first of a few haunting notes began to emerge into the hall, and Garran stilled. He wasn't aware of it, but he leaned forward in his seat, his eyes suddenly fixed on the figure in the distance, his ears straining for every note.

And his core—long since frozen by his inability to find his Truth—slowly began to move again.

Beside him, Dhruv smiled.