Chapter 19: Regret
Armored Dragon Calendar Year 417 – Claude, Age 12 – The Night Before
[Claude POV]
That night, the nightmares came for me.
I had been expecting them. The presence that carried hundreds of deaths had been stirring for days.
Pressing against the boundaries of my consciousness with increasing urgency.
Each night brought more fragments, more echoes of pain that didn't belong to me.
The pressure had been building like a storm, and now, in the darkness of my small room, it finally broke through.
I died in the first dream.
Vorpal Rabbits swarmed me in a dungeon corridor, their crimson eyes gleaming with mindless hunger.
The creatures were small, deceptively cute, but their teeth could shear through armor and their speed made them nearly impossible to track. In the dim light of the dungeon, they looked almost like pets, until they moved.
Skitter.
I fought them off one by one, my sword moving with desperate precision. The combat presence guided my strikes, finding the weak points in their skulls, the angles that would end them quickly.
But there were too many. Always too many.
The first bite took my arm.
Crunch. Pain exploded through my nervous system, raw and overwhelming.
I felt teeth pierce skin and muscle, felt them scrape against bone, felt the hot rush of blood that followed. The second opened my stomach.
I felt my intestines spill out, felt the hot blood soaking my clothes, felt the terrible wrongness of a body that was no longer whole.
The third and fourth and fifth came so fast I couldn't distinguish between them.
I screamed as they consumed me, feeling every tooth and claw, tasting my own blood on a tongue that wasn't mine. The agony stretched on for what felt like hours.
An eternity of being eaten alive by creatures that showed no mercy. I felt myself fading, consciousness dissolving into pain, and then,
Then I was somewhere else.
An Ancient Troll's massive fist descended, crushing the breath from my lungs. The creature stood fifteen feet tall, its regenerating flesh making it nearly impossible to kill through conventional means.
Its skin was like weathered stone, and its eyes held the patient intelligence of something that had outlived civilizations.
I had tried to fight it with fire magic, feeding the creature's strength instead of weakening it. Fire didn't harm Trolls. It healed them, accelerating their regeneration to supernatural levels.
A mistake.
The kind of mistake you only make once.
Except I had made it again and again and again.
The troll roared in triumph as my ribs shattered.
Crack. I felt the bones splinter inward, puncturing organs that had never been meant to be pierced.
I felt my lungs fill with blood, felt my heart struggle to beat against the pressure. I watched darkness consume my vision, felt my heart stutter and stop.
Another death.
Another failure.
I woke gasping, tangled in sweat-soaked sheets, the echoes of agony still reverberating through my body.
My hands were shaking. My heart pounded against my chest like a caged animal.
For a moment, I wasn't sure if the pain was real or remembered. The sensations were so vivid, so immediate, that it took several seconds to convince myself I was still whole.
Then the nightmares continued.
They came in waves, each one dragging me back into unconsciousness before I could fully recover from the last. Death after death, an endless parade of endings that belonged to someone else but felt increasingly like my own.
Each death was different. Each failure unique.
Some stretched on for hours, forcing me to experience every moment of prolonged suffering. Others ended in seconds, sudden and brutal and merciless.
A blade through the chest.
Shnk. The cold steel sliding between ribs, finding the heart with surgical precision.
The gasp of surprise, the cough of blood, the slow fade into nothing. I felt the blade enter, felt it twist, felt my life drain away around the wound.
A fall from impossible heights. Wind rushing past, the ground approaching at terrifying speed, the brief moment of impact before consciousness ended.
The fall seemed to last forever, each second stretched into eternity, the ground growing larger and larger until,
Poison burning through veins that had never been my own. The slow paralysis spreading from extremities inward.
The desperate struggle to breathe as muscles refused to respond. I felt my fingers go numb, then my arms, then my legs.
I felt my chest tighten as the diaphragm stopped working. I suffocated slowly, unable to move, unable to call for help.
Fwoosh. Magical fire consumed flesh and bone, and I screamed.
The smell of my own burning, the agony that seemed to have no end. No relief came.
I felt my skin blacken and split, felt muscle char, felt bone crack from the heat.
Drowning in dark water, lungs filling with liquid death. The desperate need to breathe, the involuntary gasp that filled my lungs with cold water, the slow darkening of vision as oxygen ran out.
Suffocating in collapsed tunnels. Bleeding out from wounds that couldn't be closed.
Dying to creatures that had no names, in places that had no maps, in circumstances that made no sense.
Death after death after death.
Three hundred and forty-seven. That was the number, I realized.
The exact count of failures carried by the presence that shared my mind.
Three hundred and forty-seven times someone had tried to prevent what was coming. Three hundred and forty-seven times they had died.
Their memories bleeding into mine across barriers that shouldn't exist.
Each death carried its own lesson. This corridor leads to a dead end. This creature is vulnerable to water. This trap activates when you step on the third stone.
The knowledge was written in blood and pain. A curriculum of survival that had been paid for with lives.
And through it all, one thought persisted. 'These aren't my deaths.'
'These are someone else's.'
The realization crystallized as I surfaced from the last nightmare, dawn light filtering through my window.
The deaths belonged to someone who had lived the same events repeatedly. Someone who remembered every failure, every mistake, every moment of agonizing loss.
Someone whose experiences were now part of me.
A woman, I thought. The presence felt feminine, though I couldn't explain why.
She had died over and over in a dungeon much like the one I would soon face.
She had learned its secrets through fatal repetition, had mapped its corridors in blood, had discovered the weakness of the troll that waited at its heart.
Water. Constant saturation.
Then strike.
The knowledge surfaced like a message from beyond the grave. Her final lesson, the culmination of everything she had learned across three hundred and forty-seven deaths.
'Don't waste your deaths like I did.'
I pulled myself upright, ignoring the trembling in my limbs. The nightmares had drained me, left me hollow and aching.
My body felt like it had been beaten, even though no physical violence had occurred.
But I couldn't afford to be weak. Not today.
Today was the last day.
The combat presence stirred, offering silent concern. It understood pain, understood the toll that violence took on the body and mind.
Its readiness was tempered by awareness of my current state.
The analytical presence assessed my physical condition with clinical detachment. 'Exhaustion from disturbed sleep. Elevated stress hormones, elevated heart rate. Nothing that would prevent function, but below optimal capacity.'
And somewhere deeper, in the place where the death memories lived, something that might have been gratitude stirred.
I had finally understood. Finally seen what had been hidden inside me all along.
Three presences. A warrior, trained to perfection through years of combat. A scholar, analytical and precise, understanding minds and systems with equal clarity.
And a survivor, who had died hundreds of times and refused to stop fighting.
I didn't know their names. Didn't know the full extent of their histories.
The warrior had died protecting children, I thought. The scholar had served something greater than himself.
The survivor had fought through an endless loop of death and rebirth.
But I knew what they offered.
Everything they had learned. Every skill they had mastered. Every death they had endured. All of it was mine now.
I would use every fragment of it to save the people I loved.
I dressed quickly, strapping the sword my father had made to my belt. The weight of it was reassuring.
A tangible reminder that I wasn't facing this alone. The blade was perfect, balanced exactly for my grip, strong enough to survive anything I might face.
My father had poured his love into this weapon. I could feel it in every line of the blade.
Every fold of the metal. He might not understand what I was facing, but he had given me the best tool he could provide.
The village was stirring as I stepped outside. Normal morning sounds, normal daily routines.
People going about their lives, unaware that everything was about to change.
The baker was opening his shop, the smell of fresh bread drifting through the streets. The old woman was arranging loaves in her window, humming a tune she had probably sung for forty years.
A farmer led his cart toward the market, wheels creaking over cobblestones. Children ran between houses, their laughter bright in the morning air.
All of it would be gone by nightfall.
I walked through the village slowly, memorizing everything. The crooked sign on the tavern, the well in the market square with its stones worn smooth by generations of hands.
The temple where Zenith prayed, its doors open to the morning light.
I had spent five years preparing for this day. Five years of training, of building, of trying to save as many people as possible from a disaster they couldn't see coming.
It wasn't enough. It could never be enough.
But maybe some of them would survive. Maybe the rings would work.
Maybe the organization would regroup, would rebuild, would become something that could help in the chaos that was coming.
Maybe, this time, the story would end differently.
I made my way to the hill where I had watched so many sunrises. The orb filled half the sky now, pulsing with light that seemed almost alive.
Its surface shimmered with patterns I couldn't decipher, energies building toward a release that nothing could stop.
The analytical presence stirred with certainty.
'Hours at most. Energy accumulation approaching critical mass.'
I accepted the assessment without question.
Mike found me there, his face drawn with tension. He had been awake all night too, I could tell.
The same exhaustion showed in the set of his jaw and the shadows beneath his eyes.
He didn't say anything. He didn't need to.
We stood together, watching the orb pulse and shimmer, watching the countdown reach its end.
Somewhere below us, the village continued its morning routines. Breakfast was being prepared, shops were opening, children were playing.
All of them unaware that their world was about to shatter.
"Are you ready?" Mike asked finally.
"No," I admitted. "But I don't think anyone ever is."
He nodded, accepting the honesty. We had been partners for years.
Had faced dangers together that should have been beyond us.
This was just one more.
The orb pulsed brighter. The sky began to change color.
And in the village below, someone screamed.
It had begun.
◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ AUTHOR'S NOTE ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆
Want to read ahead? We have 10+ advance chapters available at eternal-lib com!
◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆ ◇ ◆