The encampment had settled into the temple's entrance hall.
Marble floors, cold beneath bedrolls and supply packs. Columns rising to a ceiling lost in shadow. The dungeon's wrong light filtering in from the entrance behind them – an abnormally sharp blue, the day still bright and burning in the late afternoon. A heavy, ornate door sat at the back of the hall, sealed and still. Strange, monstrous iconography dotted the doors like a mural warning invaders that what was inside would lead to inevitable death. Whatever waited behind it was waiting patiently.
The scouts had confirmed the entrance hall was clear. No creatures. No traps. Just the cold marble and the columns and the door. The monstrous flower they had culled was an effective enough guard dog, until now, it seemed.
Rena had made the call – three hours. Rest, triage, cycle the guides and healers across the force. The raid needed it and she knew it.
She moved through the encampment now, low and efficient, checking in with squad leads, pulling assessments, making calculations. She had been running on less sleep than was reasonable for longer than she'd admit, the day starting too early when the dawn scouts had discovered the temple – but it was too early for everyone as well. Joel fell into step behind her when she crossed his section – his squads in better shape than most, his commands having been clean throughout the flower fight.
The healers and guides cycled through the injured.
Ophelia, Emerson, Therain, and Anna, the healers, were thorough. Carefully working through the worst injuries with focused patience and practiced triage. The goal was functionally healed – not fully healed. Hibiscus and Eaton supported them when their own mana got too polluted. The rest of the guides, including Violet and Sera, were making their way through the rest of the injured espers in the triage area.
Rian lay against the base of a column nearby.
The burns had been stabilized – Rena's work first, fast and decisive before she had to move on to lead. The corrosive residue pulled, the worst damage addressed. Tissue reforming and scars slowly building once the majority of the pollution was removed. S-rank's privilege, a body more capable than most. However, the damage was still too extensive. Stable. Functional, eventually. But he needed more guiding.
Rena ordered it, short and fast, and the guides and healers complied. Skin contact only, she had said, with a domineering command – knew that Rian didn't like intimacy.
He was aware of them distantly – the rotation of hands, the varying quality of mana, the work proceeding in orderly shifts. Aware of the encampment moving around him. Aware of Arlen somewhere close, a cool hand touching his cheek or shoulder every once in a while.
Aware of none of it, at the same time.
He was sinking.
✦ ♡ ✦
Not falling – sinking. Rather slowly.
A strange heaviness pulled him down. Not gravity, more like a large hand, dragging him forward, through the resistance of black water into the deep. The darkness thickened around him as he descended, a permeating absence of light, pressure increasing every second he fell downward. A sensation of squeezing on his vessel.
Down.
He had been here before, in the slightly reminiscent way one had been somewhere in their dreams – not the memory of a certain experience but the recognition that something was repeating.
Deja vu – or maybe, reunion.
He kept sinking.
The cold increased. The pressure became a clenched fist around his soul. And the absence of sound, a silence of something very far below the world he knew – below the dungeon, below the gate, below the marble floor of the temple and the jungle and the wrong-blue sky and all of it. Below everything. Into what felt like oblivion.
And then – at the bottom.
Something glittering.
He couldn't have said what color it was. The light that reached him didn't process correctly – arriving in a frequency his eyes refused. His mind kept sliding off it the way a hand found no grip on wet stone. Looking without looking. Seeing without ingestion. He was staring at it directly, but the visual wouldn't register in his mind.
But he was moving toward it.
Or it was moving toward him.
Or both – the distance between them collapsing in a slow, assured way. Inevitability – no rush – no usual correspondence between space and time.
And then it was simply – there.
A god.
His god.
The one who had cursed him.
The shimmering figure was still. Robed in something that wasn't fabric but seemed to behave like gossamer – something that moved with the current at this depth, the light glittering off it in ways that made no sense, that changed depending on which part of his vision tried to catch it. The face he couldn't see. The presence he'd always known was there, at the edges of forty-four lives, watching.
Cold and assessing.
Not hostile – something more absolute. The attention of something taking stock that made Rian's back prickle. As though Rian were a problem or a toy it had been watching develop for a very long time and was now, considering whether it wanted to continue to tinker with him.
He had imagined this moment.
In his twenty-third life, between regressions, lying in a field in the middle of nowhere, he had thought about what he would say if he ever stood in front of the thing that had done this to him. He had composed speeches. Indictments. The passionate articulation of someone who had been wronged and had a great deal of time to catalogue the specifics.
At the bottom of the ocean, the speeches didn't arrive. Felt the words catch in his throat. Couldn't speak. No, he thought, anger beginning to stir in his gut. Not allowed to speak. Something in this domain prevented him from action.
A god's domain, he felt instinctively. And he was a mortal. Mortals obeyed.
There you are, his god said.
The words arrived without arriving – tolling like church bells, resonating through his body. He felt his will cave – an instinctual feeling to submit before a being greater than him, when he felt the words echo through his soul.
The rage came instead of the words.
Forty-four lives of it. The same morning. The same bed. The same crushing certainty that he would have to do it again. The quiet thought he kept letting go of. The burns on his face that would never undo themselves in this current life. The exhaustion of someone whose agency had been systematically eroded by a force he had never been able to confront directly.
Until now.
At the bottom of everything. In this hellhole.
His hands clenched into fists.
His eyes blazed and he glared at the thing he couldn't see directly.
He felt the god's gaze burrow through his flesh.
Hate me, do you?
Not a question. The figure already knew. The stillness didn't shift – the detached, analytical attention continuing, unhurried, as though his rage were data being catalogued alongside everything else. As though it had been expected. As though it, too, had been watched by him.
That was somehow worse.
To have his rage seen and received without reaction. To have the accumulated fury of forty-four lives acknowledged and held without flinching, without responding, without anything except that cold precise attention.
He wanted to say something. Wanted to scream, spew vitriol, rage desperately against the suffering that he had been living endlessly on repeat.
He had nothing. His body wouldn't listen. Could only be there, exposed in front of this god, and listen to whatever arrogant language it had to say.
A small smile on the god's mouth.
Not warm and not cruel. Something that had moved past both of those things a very long time ago and arrived at something quieter.
Well, it said. It raised its arm, iridescent robe slipping and revealing a dark, scarred hand. The glittering at the bottom of the ocean shifting fractionally.
What can you do?
It flicked its wrist – and Rian was dragged upward.
Fast – the depth rushing past, the pressure releasing in a snap, the blackness becoming violet becoming blue becoming the particular wrong light of the dungeon filtering through a temple entrance. The cold of the deep replaced by the cold of marble. The silence of the bottom replaced by the bustling noise of the encampment – breathing, hurried voices, the distant measured cadence of Rena giving instructions somewhere in the hall.
He surfaced.
✦ ♡ ✦
Marble ceiling.
Columns rising towards the shadowed ceiling. A heavy, detailed door in the back, sealed and patient.
His fists were still clenched at his sides.
He was breathing harder than the triaged burns warranted – the chest rising and falling with the rhythm of someone coming out of a nightmare. His rage was still present, roiling, compressed into something with nowhere to land. His god's face he hadn't been able to see. The hand he couldn't process yet knew exactly the shape of. The words he hadn't been able to say. The small smile that had made him want to scream.
What can you do?
Nothing, he thought. Forty-four lives and nothing.
He stared at the ceiling. Let his vision recover back to reality. Let the rage sit where it was.
And then he felt it.
Hands on his chest.
Light. Careful. The gentle cycle of guide work – pollution drawing out in clean, albeit, he noticed, rather small, increments. His system responded without being asked, letting the pollution leave easily, and accepting the purified mana in grateful gulps. And then – beneath that, underneath the work – a push. A push? He blinked. More mana than pollution. Scale tipped in his favor – magic added to his store with the focused intention of someone doing something carefully, precisely, beyond what was necessary.
He didn't move.
He kept his breathing even and slowly brought his eyes down.
He registered Sera in pieces – the way he registered everything, cleanly, in sequence.
The bandaging first. Wrappings around her torso, her arms. The strip of white linen around her head, concussion and injury most likely from the tentacle that had caught her during the flower fight. She had taken damage – he had seen Yoru catch her, had seen them both limping toward Ophelia – but seeing the evidence of it up close was different from knowing it. Up close the damage was specific. Real.
She was injured.
He was glad she was alive.
He stayed still. Let her think he was still asleep.
She shifted slightly – adjusting her position, redistributing her weight – her eyes still focused on his chest and the mana she was pushing through it. Her movement carried a faint cool scent – some kind of flower, he thought. It arrived and was gone before he could fully register it.
He looked at her – carefully, unhurried, taking in the details and features of her face. The crease in her brow, the careful evaluation through her red eyes, the curve of her eyelashes and the soft parting of her lips as she focused. Rian had no reason to look away and no intention to announce his current consciousness. This close was different from the distance he had been keeping – the peripheral vision he had been operating the past week. Up close, her features were real. Present. Adding story to the impression of her that had been building in him since Arlen had first mentioned her existence.
And right now, amidst the action of the raid force in triage, she was entirely his.
This view – was only his.
Something in him – quiet, small, not examined – felt pleased.
He felt her push more mana in, it came in gentle waves, traveling through his veins into his vessel. He wasn't sure he would have been able to notice the extra push before this evolution.
That was the nature of his blessing – or his curse, depending on the life he was in when he thought about it. He could not grow through practice. Could not improve through repetition the way Arlen improved, methodically, each hour of training adding a fraction to something cumulative.
His ceiling was fixed at the point the blessing had found him.
Forward progress gated entirely behind his suffering – each evolution unlocking capabilities that should have been available to him from the beginning, that any esper with his output could have developed naturally, that he could only access by dancing close enough to death that the threshold opened. Forty-four lives did not accrue esper experience, it only accrued the memory of suffering. Every death, he was back to square one.
He had talked to Arlen about it. In his thirty-second life, as vaguely as he could so the blessing wouldn't mute him. Sitting in Arlen's room at two in the morning after a bad gate, told him he couldn't improve like the rest. Arlen had listened without interrupting – which was unusual enough that Rian had known he was actually listening.
The first evolution had unlocked mental shielding. His vessel and mind suddenly armored in a way it hadn't been before – the ease of the skill coming after the unlock like he had known it all the time. A particular protection he had come to rely on – critical for the future gates ahead.
Arlen had been the one to notice it. Arlen, who was always noticing things.
And then now – some lives later, in a combat room, Arlen had mentioned something else. Casually. The way he mentioned everything.
She wrecked me, Rian.
The guide. The new one. The way she moved mana – the tendrils she threaded outward, searching, the particular precision of her guide work that went beyond what guides were supposed to be able to do. Arlen had described it with the joyful excitement of someone who had found a puzzle worth solving. The mana threading. The vessel searching. Things that required a sensitivity Rian hadn't had in this life yet.
That had piqued his interest. In past lives, Arlen only learned about it, on his own, after the gates had already started. This time, he had learned it from someone else.
Rian could feel it – the new ceiling of his power settling into place with the particular solidity of something structural rather than temporary. The shielding and his control were now both more powerful and more precise. His awareness of mana in the space around him, sharper and more realized. The sensitivity the evolution had unlocked sitting in him like a new sense coming online.
He remembered when he had looked at her profile – on the stage, day of the wyverns.
Arlen had been interested. He had probed her – Rian hadn't asked for details, hadn't wanted them – and had found something that had kept him so interested he would talk both Rian and Rena's ears off about mana control for the next foreseeable dinners. A heightened mana adaptability that didn't match her registration. Something underneath the surface that the profile didn't capture.
Blessing? Rian had considered that.
Nothing particularly damning in the profile itself. He paused, thinking now, maybe that redacted status effect.
After all, Arlen was so very interested. And now, after his first evolution, he had the sensitivity Arlen had been using. The threading. The searching. The capability.
And she was right here. Still close. Ruby eyes looking down, her hands on his bare chest, probably aware, in some form, of his heartbeat.
Rian stopped thinking.
He closed his eyes. Gathered his mana – careful, precise, the new ceiling making the control available in a way it hadn't been before. Threaded it outward slowly. Not the blunt instrument of his previous attempts but something finer than that, something that moved through the space between them with the delicacy of something that didn't want to be noticed.
It passed from his vessel, through his heart and towards the space between them – toward her hands on his chest, traveling tenderly through her fingers, and winding delicately up her wrists.
Felt something cool and red come up to meet him, something there – something that had registered his threading mana and–
His finger twitched.
He didn't want it to.
It moved anyway – the small involuntary shift against the stone floor. The body making decisions without him again. The same body that had turned toward her when the tentacle came. The same body that had smiled before the darkness took him.
The work stopped and the hands on his chest lifted fractionally from his skin.
He felt her go still.
Slowly, he opened his eyes.
Sera was looking at his face.
The bandage around her head. The wrappings at her torso. Her red eyes – direct, unguarded, the performance not running the way it usually ran. He looked back, violet eyes steady and calm.
They had both been doing something, on their own. And both had been caught – mid-act. Sera and the unexplained extra mana she had pushed into his body. Rian and his mana that had managed to travel into her body and up her wrists before being caught.
The faint scent of lilies hung between them.
Neither of them said anything.
The heavy door sat in the dark at the back of the temple. The raid force moved quietly around them – guides cycling, espers resting, Joel's voice somewhere distant.
Neither of them looked away.