Chapter 51: The First Doubt
Once the three of us had gathered our wits, after the fever that had taken hold of us, I started getting dressed again.
I pulled my clothes back on, searching for the words to tell Seorin that these things happened, that we should move past it, something along those lines.
That was when time stopped, and ran backward.
I found myself dressed once more, my body perfectly restored, without a trace of the exhaustion from what had just happened, standing among the other heroes on the square. And in my field of view, the window was floating.
[ Mission: Rewrite the tragic history of the fall of Akhartenzia, and the death of one of the great heroes. ]
[ Loop completed: 10 ]
Damn it. We just wasted a whole loop because we gave in to our little pleasures.
Gabriel was the first to speak.
"Are you close?"
This time it was Alice who answered, a note of mischief in her voice.
"We managed to create the matter. The problem is the size — the lance is going to be reeeeally big, and one that size is hard to handle~" She smiled at me as she said it.
Wait. Did she just make a crack about my dick?
I cleared my throat to push the thought out of my head.
"Anyway, we’re doing our best, don’t worry. We’re on the right track!" I said, more clumsily than I’d meant to.
The others noticed nothing, though. They didn’t imagine even a tenth of what might have gone on in that warehouse.
We told them about our progress, about how we were going at it, about everything else — except the ending, obviously — and it was on that note that we parted, each heading back to their front.
We went, of course, to wake Adam, in case this was the right loop. This time, he came to convinced he was a demonic spy planted among the heroes, and begged us to expose him before he betrayed everyone. It took a while to persuade him that a demonic spy probably wouldn’t turn himself in of his own accord, in tears, which he conceded with a very solemn nod before heading off with his cheerful stride toward the north.
Then we were back in the warehouse.
And the boredom fell on me at once.
Always the same thing. Raise my hand, make the water appear, watch it burst while the girls trained. Seorin, this time, didn’t say a word — she just nodded at the advice, carefully avoiding my gaze, her ears still a little pink. Alice laughed about it under her breath, but stayed serious all the same, correcting her shell, adjusting, explaining.
Me, I had nothing. Not even anything to occupy my mind.
I could have trained on my own, worked out, pushed a skill, anything. Except we’d probably rewind all of it in a few hours, and everything I gained would be wiped along with the rest. Training here was training into the void.
Aaaah... so boring...
So my mind started to wander, for lack of anything better.
I caught myself thinking back over these last few days, over everything that had piled up since we’d entered this tower. And the more I thought about it, the more an odd impression came back to me, without my quite being able to put my finger on it.
Since we’d crossed the threshold of this trial, something was off. Not outside, not in the fights themselves — in us. We were all in the extreme. In our reactions, in our answers, in our blows.
I thought back to the very start, when Alice had told me I’d changed. At the time, it had pleased me. Now, I wasn’t so sure what she’d meant by it.
Lazaüs, for instance. My rage against him was understandable — he’d killed Isaiah, he was crushing us loop after loop, there was reason enough. But hadn’t I precisely learned, recently, to keep it in check, that anger? So why did it still boil over like that, at the slightest opening?
And when I’d snapped, when I’d decapitated Gabriel several times over... Sure, the loop erased everything, there’d been no consequence. But was that really me? Would the Kuro from before this world have killed a man several times over to blow off steam, even without consequence?
And all the little things of the same sort.
Alice, above all. That she’d mark her territory against Seorin, whom I’d grown close to, was understandable — she was like that, I knew it. But like that? There, just now, in that warehouse, a few meters from someone else? Wasn’t there something strange about it?
And Seorin herself, for that matter. This calm, composed woman, all restraint, who hadn’t said a word out of place since we’d known her — but who’d offered to hold Lazaüs off alone, without flinching, as if the cost didn’t matter. Was that courage, or did that too fall a little outside the frame?
Weren’t we all doing things in the extreme, without even realizing it? And me — would I have gone along with something like that, in front of Seorin, under normal circumstances?
All right. That one, I’ll admit, potentially yes.
But all the rest stayed strange. That way we all had of pushing everything to its breaking point, as if it had become normal.
And then there was something else, a less comfortable thought I didn’t feel like digging into but that surfaced anyway.
If something were pushing me to the extreme, would I even know? I had Apotheosis. That skill kept me standing when I should have collapsed, kept me from feeling the exhaustion, the panic, everything that would have warned anyone else that their mind was going. It was a blessing in a fight. But if one day I started to slip for real, to lose my grip without even an inner alarm to warn me... would I notice, or would I go calmly on, convinced I was fine?
That idea left a bad taste. I ended up setting it aside with the rest, for lack of seeing any clearer.
"Failed again," Seorin let out, a little way off, pulling my attention back to the present.
The barrel of plasma they’d just built up had gone out in a gust, leaving a sizzling puddle on the floor.
"You let the front face slacken," Alice said, leaning toward her. "When I discharge from the back, you shift all your wind behind, and the front gives."
"I can’t hold all of it at once."
"No one can. That’s why you have to feel where it’s going to push before it pushes, and already be there."
Seorin sat for a moment on an overturned crate, short of breath, a hand on her knees. I made a little water appear, clean this time, and held it out for them to drink. Outside, the din of the battle took over for a second in the silence — a dull rumble, shouts — before we forgot it again.
Then we started up, and added a difficulty.
Until then, the mass of water stayed still while they worked on it. But the giant moved — we’d have to aim at a moving target, and so launch the plasma, not hold it in place. So I added movement to the exercise. I’d slide the sphere of water from one point of the warehouse to another, slowly at first, and Seorin’s wind had to follow the displacement, to mold itself to a mass in motion rather than a fixed one.
The first attempts were a disaster. The moment the water moved, the shell lagged, slipped by a fraction, and Alice’s whole charge shot out through the gap. Once, the plasma went clean off to the side and melted a whole section of the warehouse wall before dispersing.
"I’m going to have to move the water for you," I finally understood. "Not too fast, not too slow. At a pace you can follow, so we advance together."
"That would be simpler, yes." Seorin nodded. "Give me the tempo, and I’ll hold on."
So I started moving the water at a steady, predictable cadence, and Seorin’s wind learned little by little to follow it, the shell gliding with the mass instead of chasing it. Alice, for her part, timed her discharges to the movement, striking only when the confinement held.
We spent hours at it. The sphere grew as we mastered it, from a barrel to a cart, from a cart to something I could no longer have named, and at each step everything had to be recalibrated — my tempo, her wind, her discharges. But it was coming. Slowly, laboriously, but it was coming. All three of us could feel we were closing in on something, that this lance we’d never once launched for real would end up existing.
All that was left was to hope it would be equal to the giant. And, beyond that, to whatever awaited us next.