"This had already grown boring a long time ago. Farewell Mr. Edevane."
'Farewell? What are these bastards saying?'
Alwyn fell on one knee, gasping for air, his weak hand reaching for the burning chest.
"Wait! I haven't finished playing with him yet! Just another round, please!"
But as he didn't feel anything to the touch, he gradually lowered his head to inspect the wound.
"To think you were the one who said watching was better than playing. What a hypocrite!"
And found a hole as big as a football where his heart should have been.
"Come on, that was hundreds of rounds ago! Tastes can change, can't they?"
Splat, splat.
Alwyn's innards started falling to the ground, painting the dry asphalt red in a symphony of grotesque sounds.
'Huh?'
With a confused expression, his body fell and he slammed the head into the hard asphalt, procuring himself a concussion.
He had no strength left in him.
"I guess so- Hey Alwyn, are you still with us?"
Muffled words came out of one of the bastards' mouth.
His sense of hearing was worsening with every second that passed.
"Wait, I have a brilliant idea. Have you seen what's happening in the Twenty-third Realm? Why don't we-"
Until he could hear no more.
However, that was not important right now.
'I was so close.'
A faint smile appeared on Alwyn's face.
'The next round will definitely be the last.'
Then his eyes grew heavy, until he could see no more, and before he knew it, his conscience had already abandoned his body.
He had died.
But did he, really?
When his sight was restored, he found himself in a familiar blue void, the intangible place he could almost call home.
Ding.
Just like always, a blue panel opened before him, containing the three words he knew by heart.
[Regression Skill Activated]
Under his feet a giant blue clock, made from the same material of the void he was immersed in, soon materialized. The clock hand then started rotating counterclockwise, faster and faster, until it only left afterimages. It was called the Clock of Regression.
Alwyn Edevane was a Regressor. A person who went back in time every time he died. It was a common trope in popular novels, but this was not fiction.
His goal was to kill Space, Time and Fate, the three gods that had slain him just now, and the ones that put humanity through hell for their own entertainment. Space, for example, opened Gates throughout the planet. Monsters came out of them and invaded Earth, reaping lives without facing any kind of resistance. Humans were powerless against monsters.
Still, Alwyn's grudge wasn't because of what they did to mankind.
It was for the death of his parents and of his only friend.
But those gods were also the ones who gave him a chance to fight back. Fate gave him the System, so that he could grow stronger, while Time's gift was the Regression Skill. Why they chose him in particular was still a mystery.
They had probably just randomly selected him among billions of people, but he was extremely grateful to them for that, because it meant one day he could kill the three bastards with his own hands.
Sure, it took him a myriad of rounds to get where he was now, but all that suffering would soon be worth it.
His revenge was just a regression away.
Experiencing those five years of life one last time was surely a hassle, but he just had to repeat every single action like he always did, with utmost precision. He was used to it now, after doing so for thousands of rounds.
Alwyn Edevane was no simple human anymore, but a machine that ran on hatred. Or at least he thought he was, as only humans can feel emotions. The truth though was much darker and repulsive.
Regressors only die when they ultimately give up. With the power to defy death and rewrite the past, they must keep battling until they reach the perfect ending.
That was Alwyn Edevane's belief.
To do so, however, one must maintain his humanity.
The moment he loses it, he will never be able to reach his goal.
'It's like a law of the world-'
At that moment, without notice, the floating blue panel instantly closed, and his train of thoughts was interrupted.
The clock hand also stopped moving.
Alwyn was dazed, a perplexed look plastered on his face.
'Strange.'
It had never happened before.
"Hey, System! Activate Regression Skill!"
Ding.
[Regression Skill Ac-]
But the panel's sight only lasted for a fleeting instant.
It had been forcefully closed for the second time.
"A-Activate Regression Skill! Now!"
Anxiousness could be discerned in his trembling voice.
Still, nothing happened.
"System-"
Just then, the Clock of Regression vanished, as if it had never existed to begin with.
The last words of Time echoed inside his head like a bad omen.
'...Farewell… Wait, don't tell me-'
"Fuck!"
Had the gods taken the System back? And if so, what about the Regression Skill? Were the two things tied together? What if… they were done toying with him?
This could very well be the end of his journey then.
"...What a fool I am."
He started relying too much on what the gods gave him. He got accustomed to those powers so much that he took them for granted. The thought that the current round might have been his last had never crossed his mind, so he had never played it cautiously and wasted many opportunities.
Alwyn immediately looked down to his feet, but where the giant clock should have been, now only an endless expanse of blue void remained.
A long series of profanities came out of his mouth, like a waterfall of hatred.
Hatred towards himself.
In the end, Alwyn Edevane couldn't avenge his family.
He had had many chances in the past, but each time he ultimately decided to regress, obsessed with achieving a perfect ending.
He had lied to himself, made himself believe to still be human, to have an ardent desire to avenge family and friends.
That was his sin and the reason for his current predicament.
The fault was only his.
'Regressors only die when they ultimately give up… What a load of bullshit.'
He had never given up, but what he experienced couldn't be called living, it was a nightmare that slowly consumed him from the inside. It was a prison he alone had created.
Regression became his reason to keep going. He died in order to die again, not to live. He was running away from his responsibilities.
Living, instead, was walking forward without looking back. Accepting your mistakes and trying to make up for them.
But now it was too late to do so.
Death.
The word that previously evoked no emotion in him now made him tremble with fear. Strangely enough, this time the emotions he felt were genuine.
"Why… Why is this happening to me?!"
Only in death did he finally manage to be human again.
A tear rolled down his cheek, but when it reached the chin, something changed in his surroundings.
"Why- Huh?"
Alwyn stared at the ground, perplexed.
It was slowly contorting itself, moving in a spiral, gradually increasing the speed.
As the ground was not solid, that phenomenon did not affect Alwyn's body, because that as well was something immaterial. The entire place was just a projection of his soul.
In a matter of seconds, the void below him, where the Clock of Regression originally should have been, had become a giant whirlwind of blue nothingness.
'The Clock...'
Only then did he realize that the unfamiliar event symbolized the activation of a Skill. Which one he did not know, he had never seen such visual effects.
He only knew that it resembled the Gates the monsters came out from.
Looking straight into it, he sensed something calling him from beyond the vortex.
And then his eyes, the real ones, opened again.
A grey, cloudless sky entered his view.
The freezing wind burned his skin, and its howl chilled him to the bone.
He was lying down on hardened dirt, his clothes soaked in a sticky liquid.
Alwyn could not believe his eyes.
"I'm not dead! Eat shit assholes!"
However, the grin on his face did not last long.
He felt something was off.
This was not how his regressions usually started.
'What is…'
A pungent smell of blood tingled his nostrils.
Alarmed, Alwyn got up in a hurry, but his legs promptly failed him.
Crack.
He fell on his face, breaking the nose.
The pain was nothing compared to what he experienced in other rounds, so he easily shrugged it off. Then he looked at his legs, where the strange noise came from, to understand what had just happened, and he spotted the problem.
It was a horrifying sight.
From the knee down there was no skin, no muscle, no blood vessels or nerves, only white splintered bone, as if something had chewed the meat off it.
And by the looks of it, the wound was still fresh.
Inspecting it closely he noticed something wriggling. His legs… were slowly regenerating. That was not a power of his.
'Why-'
And then it hit him. Like a flash, his nervous system registered the pain in his stumps.
"Fuck fuck fuck, god it hurts!"
Fighting against the agony, he sat up, trying to check his surroundings.
Piles of wooden planks lay scattered around him, and on his left, ten feet away, he could recognize a broken cartwheel. Here and there he spotted dirty cloth rags and deformed pieces of metal stained with blood, probably the only things that remained of some unfortunate victims.
"System! Hey System, can you hear me?! System- Shit, it's no use."
And by the looks of it, Alwyn had been one of those victims, at least before he woke up.
'What the hell is happening?!'