Chapter 44: What’s Left When All Hope Is Gone?
"So, do you have any ideas for what we could do by combining our three elements?"
The three of us had drawn off to the side, into an alley where the city’s uproar reached us muffled. This time, we wouldn’t go see Isaiah — we knew how it ended, and the north would hold long enough without us for what we had to do. The point of this loop wasn’t to win, but to find something that could kill the giant, and to work it out while a failure cost nothing.
"We could do it like usual," Alice offered. "Water and lightning, plain and simple."
She said it in a slightly detached tone, as if the idea of adding Seorin to our duo only half appealed to her. But I knew it wouldn’t be enough.
"No, it won’t be enough." I shook my head. "What we do as a pair is fine for rabble. Here, we need something bigger to take down the giant."
Seorin thought for a moment, then looked up.
"What if we made a storm?" She looked at each of us in turn. "On paper, with our three elements, it’s possible. My wind to carry it, your water to feed it, Alice’s lightning inside it."
"It’s true that should work," Alice admitted, grudgingly.
It held together. The more I turned the idea over, the more it took shape.
"Then that’s what we’ll do. We build a real storm, and we see what it’s worth."
We spent the next few hours working out the details, deciding who set off what and in what order, until we had something clear enough to be worth trying.
Six hours later, the wave was crashing against the ramparts again, and we’d taken position on a deserted stretch of wall overlooking the plain.
"You two ready for the first test?" I asked, my eye on the black tide rising. "We do it as agreed, all right?"
The girls nodded.
I let the wave draw closer, pack together, until it covered the whole plain. Then I raised my hand.
"Infinite Arsenal."
The sky filled with some thirty giant weapons, but I didn’t send them down onto the wave. I made them rise straight above it, suspended, and I pushed my mana inside them — Worldflow’s pressure packed to the extreme in each one, compressing the water to its limit. Then I released all control over them at once.
The water poured out in a single mass, a thick, heavy mist that fell back over the whole plain.
Then Seorin went to work.
The wind rose from her two katanas and seized the water mid-fall. Rather than let it drop, it set it spinning on itself, faster and faster, drawing it into a spiral that swelled before our eyes — and the mist became a column, and the column became a storm. A cyclone of water reared up over the plain, sucking the wave into its base, howling so loud we heard it over everything else.
Then Alice charged it.
She raised both hands, her red eyes lit up, and lightning burst in the heart of the storm. Not one bolt, a dozen, sparked all at once through the whirling water — and the cyclone ignited from within. The light ran through the spirals, white and stark, every droplet becoming a point of discharge, until the whole column turned into a pillar of lightning drilling up toward the red sky.
Below, the wave melted away. The demons caught in the cyclone’s base were torn apart, struck down, ripped from the ground by the hundreds, swallowed into the turmoil and spat back out as ash. Where the storm passed, nothing remained but a blackened, smoking plain.
It lasted two or three minutes. Then the storm weakened, came apart all at once, and fell back as a dirty rain over the ravaged field.
Seorin dropped to her knees, out of breath.
Holding something like that had to have drained all her mana. I stepped over and set a hand on her shoulder.
"That was magnificent, Seorin. Well done. Rest before the giant shows up, we’ll handle the rest."
At my back, I felt Alice’s stare, that stare that plainly said and me? what about me?
"You were magnificent too," I added without turning around.
We held the position a while, cutting into the wave as it climbed back up, without overdoing it — just enough not to draw Lazaüs’s attention before it was time.
Then the giant arrived.
We did it again, all of it concentrated on him this time.
The Arsenal burst into mist around the colossus, Seorin closed her storm over it, Alice discharged — and the hurricane of lightning swallowed him whole, striking him from every side at once. The giant roared, his skin blackening under the discharge, his flesh splitting, charring. We were hitting him with enough to level a whole district. Nothing could survive inside that.
I believed it, for the space of an instant.
Then I saw the wounds close.
Before my eyes, the burned flesh filled back in, the blackened skin grew back, the gashes stitched themselves shut — and in a few seconds, he set off again as if we’d never touched him.
I stayed frozen a second too long.
Regeneration.
He could take all of that, and remake himself right away. All that power, the storm we’d spent hours building, and he erased it from his body in the space of a breath.
He didn’t slow. His foot was already rising over the rampart.
"Hold on, Seorin!"
She was still holding the storm around the colossus, but I could feel her fading beneath me, her mana already eaten into by the first test, each second costing her more than the last. I raised my hands and loosed the Arsenal again and again, drowning the giant under waves of water-weapons, while Alice chained bolt after bolt without pause, everything we had, everything we could give.
The storm held. The lightning struck. The giant smoked, convulsed.
And he rebuilt himself faster than we could tear him down.
I saw it, and there was nothing I could do about it. Every wound we opened closed before we could open the next. We were striking a wall that grew back as fast as we hollowed it out, and for the first time since we’d started training in this loop, a cold thought crossed me: what if we can’t do it? All that power brought together, and it wasn’t enough. It wasn’t even close.
The giant’s foot came down on the wall and broke through it.
Through the breach, the tide poured into the city. High above, Lazaüs rose into the sky, a single finger raised, and the dome of black mana closed over the city, exactly as it had the times before. As if nothing we’d done had carried the slightest weight.
Then the world flowed backward.
[ Mission: Rewrite the tragic history of the fall of Akhartenzia, and the death of one of the great heroes. ]
[ Loop completed: 8 ]
Back on the square, surrounded by the six other heroes, I hadn’t even gathered my wits before Evelyn was already speaking. From her sector, she must have seen our storm rise over the north — hard to miss a pillar of lightning like that, even from the far end of the city.
"So even that huge storm and all those spells, it’s still not enough."
"It’s insane," Leon let out. "Even something like that, and it’s not enough."
"The problem is he’s got a regeneration ability." I shook my head. "Our spell may have been powerful, but it wasn’t strong enough all at once. We need a destructive attack, one that brings everything down in a single blow — not something that wears him down over time, like the storm."
"That makes sense," Gabriel said.
He was calm, composed, his gaze a little evasive, unable to hold mine for more than a second. We were a long way from the colossus who’d laughed in my face at the first loop, the one who refused to be told anything. Since then, he no longer argued with a thing. He waited to be told.
"Anyway, we’ll find something over the next few loops." I turned to the others. "And on your side? Did you find the hero who was missing?"
"Yes, we found him," said Gu Yanshu. "The problem is his state. He looks terrified, like he doesn’t see us but is staring at something in front of him. He’s in no condition to be of use."
I started turning over what could be causing it, and the more I thought about it, the less clearly I saw.
Why was nothing working? We’d built a spell that could level a district, and the giant had erased it from his body in a breath. We fell loop after loop without even coming close to the end, while the ancients had gotten through it with a single death. How? What had they understood that still escaped us?
And why did it have to be that with every step forward, every time we thought we had something, a higher wall rose right behind the last? We found a way to hold the wave, and the giant regenerated. We found the fourth hero, and he was broken. With every step forward, two more problems.
I thought back to Lazaüs. To the way he’d killed Isaiah, a monster of power, with a single gesture, without even slowing. To what Elsa had told me about the castle, where it had taken an entire army and still nearly hadn’t been enough. And he was only one high demon among others — above them were the Seven Calamities, and above those, the Demon King. Thousands of demons, powers like his in droves, and us, unable even to save a single city from a single one of their spells.
I felt something give in me, slowly. That hope I’d brought back from the north, that sense that we’d get there in the end, was crumbling as the walls closed in from every side. Maybe we weren’t up to it. Maybe we never would be.
Then a hand settled on my cheek.
Alice. I hadn’t noticed her come closer. She was smiling at me, that smile, the one she only ever showed me, and without her saying a word, the weight crushing my chest eased by a notch. It was always like that with her. When everything closed in, when I sank without even realizing it, she was there, exactly at the right moment, as if she felt the night falling in me before I saw it myself. She didn’t pull me out of the dark with grand speeches. She just laid down a hand, a smile, and it was enough to remind me I wasn’t alone in it.
She turned toward the group, and I understood she was going to speak for me — because she’d sensed I needed it, and she did it without any of this truly interesting her, only because it was me.
"Maybe the hero is under a mental spell?"
"Aaah!" Evelyn nearly smacked her own forehead. "Why didn’t I think of that? It makes sense! But the trouble is finding out for sure, and helping him — there’s a step to it."
"I have a spell for that," Alice said, simply. "Take us to him, and we’ll check if it really is tied to mind magic."
And so the seven of us set off toward the fourth hero.
I looked at Alice, clinging to my arm, smiling as if nothing were the matter.
No matter the despair. No matter what waited for me up there, in this tower, or after. I had her with me. Her, who every time I sank was there at the right moment, without my even having to ask. As long as she stayed at my side, I could take the walls that rose, the loops that started over, whatever this world threw in my face. And I had to — not just for me, but for the two of us. So I’d move forward. Whatever it cost.
And I turned my eyes to the distance, more resolved than I’d been in a long time.