The return was a violation so profound it stole the air from his lungs. One moment, he was watching the grey dawn light filter through the jungle canopy, the cold smile of a newfound purpose still etched on his face. The next, he was choking on the wet, rotting stench of the ossuary district, the greasy chill replaced by the oppressive, humid heat of the nightmare. The manacle was a familiar, hateful cold around his ankle. The chain rattled.
No.
The thought was a silent, shattered thing. He had been so close. Not to escape, but to understanding. He had a hypothesis, a direction. And the universe, the Spell, this damned loop, had snatched it away. It felt… personal. Like a cruel child kicking over a sandcastle just as the final turret was placed.
He stood rigid in the line, his hands, both of them, clenched into white-knuckled fists. The phantom sensations of a torn throat from the panther were gone, but the memory of the idea—save them all—remained, a fragile, precious shard in the vast, frozen tundra of his mind.
He looked at the back of Kael's head, at the set of his shoulders. He looked at Elric, his lips already moving in silent, desperate prayer. Lyssa, her gaze hollow. Rorke, his eyes already assessing the guards with a watchman's instinct. They were all here. His assets. His responsibility. His impossible task.
The horror wasn't just the reset. It was the memory of the Cursed Terror, the blood woven. The words from the Spell's notification echoed in his memory. It wasn't just a "Terror." It was a ranked entity, a classification he had never heard whispered in the slums or by the PSO. The creatures people knew—Web-Spinners, Gloom-Stalkers, Corpse-Feeders—were common horrors. A Cursed Terror sounded like something from a deeper, older layer of hell, a thing that should not be in a First Nightmare. The sheer, wrong-scale power of it, the way its mind had felt like a desert of ancient, starved malice… it was an error. An impossibility. And it was waiting for him.
He couldn't face it. Not directly. Not again. The memory of its consciousness scraping against his, of his arm being unmade from reality, was a psychic wound that had never healed. His new hypothesis demanded he keep everyone alive. Leading them to the Terror's clearing was a guaranteed failure. It was a slaughterhouse.
His mind, a machine honed by one hundred and ninety-three cycles of analysis, began to whir. If he couldn't defeat the end-boss, he would avoid it. He would run. But not like before. Not a panicked flight into the unknown. This would be a tactical retreat. A strategic exodus.
He would take them somewhere the Spinners couldn't follow. Somewhere they could dig in, fortify, and face a single, predictable threat. He would turn this nightmare into a war of attrition, and he would win it by not fighting the enemy's strongest piece.
The rebellion at the narrow pass was swift and brutal, a rehearsed ballet of violence. He didn't wait for the perfect distraction. He created it.
"Kael," he hissed, his voice low and urgent. "The guard with the club. On my signal, he's yours. Rorke, the one with the spear—disable him, don't kill him. We need his armor intact."
They looked at him, startled by the specific, commanding tone. But they nodded. The air was thick with imminent change.
Adam didn't stomp the beetle nest. Instead, he focused his [Mimic] aspect, not on a sound, but on a feeling of imminent, terrifying danger. He projected it towards the flanking guards, a wave of psychic pressure that made them snap their heads around, their weapons coming up towards an empty patch of jungle. It was a subtle, draining use of his power, but it worked.
"Now!" Adam barked.
Kael moved like a sprung trap, his immense strength focused. He didn't roar; he was silent, efficient. He grabbed the club-wielding guard from behind, one arm snaking around the man's neck, the other wrenching the weapon from his grasp. There was a sickening crack, and the guard went limp.
Rorke was a blur of practiced motion. He ducked under a wild thrust from the spearman, closed the distance, and drove the heel of his palm into the man's helmeted nose. The guard staggered back, blinded and gasping. Rorke disarmed him with a swift twist and slammed his head against the mossy boulder. He slumped, unconscious.
The remaining two guards, confused and leaderless, were swarmed by the other slaves, their fear transmuted into a sudden, vicious mob justice. It was over in less than a minute. Four guards. Two dead, two unconscious.
"Don't just stand there!" Adam's voice cut through the stunned silence. "Strip them. Everything. Armor, weapons, belts, boots. It all matters now. We are not slaves anymore. We are an army. And this is our first supply drop."
He moved among them, a gaunt general directing his troops. He himself worked on the guard he'd had Rorke incapacitate. The leather armor was tough, cured hide reinforced with bits of bone. It stank of sweat and old blood, but it was intact. He stripped it, finding it was too large for his frame, but he took the boiled leather cuirass and the bracers. He left the unconscious man in his underclothes.
From the guard's belt, he took a sheathed knife and, his prize, a second short sword. They were crude things, the metal dull and nicked, but they were real steel. He slid one into his rope belt and held the other. The weight was unfamiliar, but the memory of his Forgotten Sword style, the bastard form born of a thousand deaths, whispered in his muscles. He would learn.
Kael now wore the club-wielder's heavier armor and wielded the man's namesake weapon with a grim satisfaction. Rorke had the spear and the second set of leathers. Other slaves armed themselves with the fallen guards' knives, using strips of cloth to make makeshift grips. They looked less like a army and more like a band of desperate, ragged brigands, but they were armed. They were armored. It was a start.
"Listen to me," Adam said, his voice carrying over the group. He stood on the base of the mossy boulder, looking down at their twenty-three faces, now smeared with mud and splattered with blood, their eyes wide with a mixture of terror and a wild, newfound hope. "The path we were on leads to a nest of creatures called Blood-Silk Spinners. They are not animals. They are a culling force. They will shoot threads that will punch through this armor, through your bones, and pull you apart to feed their young. And they are led by something… worse. Something that should not be here."
He let the grim truth settle. He saw the hope in their eyes flicker, threatened by the darkness.
"But I know this jungle," he continued, his voice flat, factual, making the impossible sound manageable. "I know its territories. The Spinners cannot follow us where we are going. Their bodies are not built for the terrain. For the first week, we will only have one enemy to face. One we can prepare for. One we can beat."
He pointed away from the path, not towards the deep jungle or the swamp, but along a route that skirted the base of the weeping iron-bark trees, a path he knew led to a high, rocky plateau. "We go there. To the Stone Teeth. The climb is hard, but the ground is solid. The night-walkers, the blade-limbed hunters, they rule the lowlands. They hate the open rock. We will be safe from them there. For a time."
There were no questions. No arguments. He had killed the guards, provided weapons, and offered a path away from the certain death he described. He was their leader now, by default, by deed, by the terrifying certainty in his sunken eyes.
They moved out, a grim, determined caravan. Adam led from the front, his dual short swords feeling alien in his hands. He set a punishing pace, but he also enforced rest, made them drink from the streams he knew were safe, showed them which fungi could be used to staunch bleeding. He was no longer just a survivor; he was a quartermaster, a scout, a strategist.
The climb to the plateau was as difficult as he remembered, a steep, grueling slog up crumbling rock faces and narrow ledges. But they made it. As the last of them hauled themselves over the final ledge, the world opened up. They stood on a wide, flat expanse of grey stone, swept clean by a constant, dry wind. The oppressive canopy was below them now, a sea of bruised purple and toxic green. The air was cooler, easier to breathe. For the first time since arriving in this hell, they could see the sky—a vast, swirling canvas of bruised violet and sickly orange.
They had made it. Week one.
The first attack came on the third night. As Adam had predicted, the night-walkers did not climb the plateau. But the jungle had other denizens.
It started with a chittering from the cliffs below. Then, a wave of sleek, six-legged shapes flowed over the edge of the plateau. They were the size of large dogs, with matted black fur and heads that were all needle-filled maw and lidless red eyes. Razor-Beaks. They hunted in packs, and they were fast.
"Form a circle!" Rorke bellowed, his voice echoing in the open space. "Spears out! Keep them at bay!"
The group, drilled by Adam and Rorke over the past three days, moved with a cohesion that would have been impossible in their first hours of freedom. They formed a tight ring, the spearmen—Kael with his club now acting as a brutal area-denial weapon—on the outside, those with knives and shorter weapons in the center.
Adam did not stand in the front line. He moved inside the circle, a ghost in the chaos.
"Jonn, your left! Thrust, don't swing!" he snapped at the boy, who was holding a spear with trembling hands. Jonn obeyed, jabbing the point forward and forcing a leaping Razor-Beak to twist aside.
"Lyssa, the one circling behind Kael! A rock, now!" Lyssa, her face a mask of fierce concentration, hurled a heavy stone. It struck the creature on the flank, making it yelp and stumble. Kael, sensing the opening, spun and brought his club down on its skull with a wet crunch.
Adam's role was not to kill, but to direct. To see the patterns he had died to so many times and break them before they could form. He was the strategist, the mind of the machine. When a creature managed to slip past the spear wall, he was there, his dual swords a flicker of desperate motion. He didn't try to duel it. He aimed for its legs, its eyes, creating an opening for a spear thrust from someone else. He was weak, his blows lacked killing force, but they were precise, irritating, disruptive. He was a parasite on the edges of the fight, ensuring the stronger components of his machine could function.
The battle was short, sharp, and brutal. When it was over, seven of the creatures lay dead on the stone, their black blood staining the rock. Three slaves had minor bites and scratches, but no one was dead. They had won. They had defended their ground.
A ragged cheer went up. They looked at each other, then at Adam, with something akin to reverence.
The next week, they moved. Adam led them down from the plateau and into a region of giant, hollowed-out termite mounds, structures of hard, dried mud that rose like skeletal fingers from the jungle floor. It was the territory of the Bog-Leech, but Adam knew its hunting grounds were specific, tied to the digestive pools. They stayed to the high, solid ground between the mounds.
The attack here was different. The leech itself did not emerge, but it sent its lesser kin—pale, blind worm-like creatures that burrowed up from the soft earth, trying to drag the unwary under. It was a war of vigilance and placement. Adam had them post lookouts on the termite mounds, watching for the subtle shifting of the earth. They lost no one.
Week three, they spent in a canyon of singing crystals, where the wind through the strange, geometric structures created a constant, low hum that masked all other sound. Here, they were hunted by the Sorrow-Maw pitcher plants, which had developed a mobile, vine-like form that could slither and grasp. They fought a silent, terrifying battle against ambushing flora, using firebrands made from dried fungus to drive the things back.
Through it all, Adam trained. Every spare moment, when they were safe, he practiced with his dual short swords. He wasn't trying to become a blademaster. He was refining the Forgotten Sword. He practiced the disarming feints, the low sweeps at ankles, the quick, distracting jabs to the face. He practiced moving in and out of the shadows of the termite mounds, using the environment as a weapon. He was honing himself into the perfect support fighter, a scalpel to be used when the hammers of Kael and Rorke were not enough.
He also planned. He spent hours staring at maps he drew in the dirt, correlating the data from a hundred different loops. He knew the sequence. He knew what was coming next.
On the dawn of the twenty-second day, he gathered them all. They were twenty-two now; a woman named Fara had succumbed to a fever from a minor wound days earlier. It was the first death since the rebellion, and it had hit the group hard. But twenty-two was a miracle. It was a number that should have been impossible.
"It's time," Adam said, his voice quiet. They were camped on the edge of a familiar, stagnant pond, near the rock crevice that had been the site of so many of his failures. "The last of them are coming. The Spinners. And their master."
A cold dread settled over the group. They had faced so much, but the way Adam said "their master" carried a weight of finality and terror.
"We make our stand here," Adam said, pointing to the crevice. "But we do not hide in it. We use it as an anchor. We form our line here, with the rock to our backs. This time, we are not prey hiding in a hole. We are an army defending a fortress."
He deployed them with the cold precision of a general who had fought this battle a hundred times and lost every one. Kael and the strongest fighters formed the center. Rorke commanded the left flank. Elric, whose eyes were still the sharpest, was perched on the rock above with a pile of stones, their early-warning system. Lyssa and the others were in the rear, with spears to thrust between the front-line fighters.
Adam stood just behind the main line, his dual swords held loosely. His heart was a cold, hard knot in his chest. This was it. The final variable. The one he had always failed to control.
He didn't have to wait long.
The skittering began as the first true light of dawn touched the highest leaves of the canopy. It was the same wave of chitinous sound, the same tide of horror. But this time, his group didn't break. They tightened their grip on their weapons, their faces set in grim masks of determination. They trusted the plan. They trusted him.
The Blood-Silk Spinners emerged from the trees, their grey, hairy bodies and glowing crimson abdomens a nightmare vision. They saw the formed line, the bristling spears, and they hesitated. Their coordination, their hive-mind, was confused. This was not the script.
Then, the forest behind them shook. The smaller Spinners parted like a bloody sea.
And the Cursed Terror, the blood woven, dragged its immense, broken body into the clearing.
It was worse than Adam remembered. The crack in its carapace pulsed with a frantic, pained light. One of its remaining good legs was now a shattered stump, and a weeping, acidic sore covered half its face, melting several of its milky eyes together. It moved with a jerky, agonized lurch, but the aura of ancient, malevolent power was undiminished. It was a god of this small hell, and it was dying. And it was furious.
Its multitude of eyes, those that still functioned, swept over the defensive line. It saw the armed slaves, the defiance where there should have been terror. And then, its gaze found Adam. It recognized him. The anomaly. The one who had shattered its core in a different lifetime. The one who had evaded it, outmaneuvered its underlings, and now dared to stand against it with an army.
A low, chittering hiss, a sound of pure, undiluted hatred, rattled from its maw. The very air grew cold, and the scent of ozone and rotting meat became overwhelming.
The smaller Spinners, energized by their master's rage, surged forward.
"Hold the line!" Kael roared, his voice a bastion against the tide of fear.
The first threads shot out, but the slaves, armored in leather and bone, were ready. They raised stolen guard shields, or twisted aside, the piercing strands ricocheting off rock or embedding in shields with heavy thwacks.
"Now! Push!" Rorke yelled.
The front line advanced as one, a wall of sharpened steel and desperate humanity. Kael's club was a whirlwind of destruction, smashing Spinners aside, their carapaces cracking like eggshells. Rorke's spear was a darting serpent, finding eyes and leg joints. The slaves fought with the strength of those who have nothing left to lose, their screams of effort and rage mingling with the shrieks of the dying monsters.
Adam moved through the chaos, his swords a blur of defensive motion. He wasn't killing. He was saving. He deflected a thread meant for a spearman's neck. He slashed at the legs of a Spinner that had latched onto Kael's armor, giving the big man the moment he needed to crush it. He was the glue, the failsafe, his Forgotten Sword style a dance of preservation.
But he could feel the Terror's gaze on him, a physical pressure. It was not engaging the line. It was waiting. Conserving its strength. For him.
The battle raged. The ground became slick with black ichor and human blood. A slave fell, his arm severed by a scything leg. Another was dragged from the line, his screams cut short. But the line held. They were killing the Spinners, whittling down the horde.
The Terror saw this. It saw its children being butchered. Its pained, frantic clicking rose to a fever pitch. With a final, grating shriek of rage, it began to move. It ignored the front line, its broken body dragging directly towards the center of the formation, towards Adam.
The slaves saw it coming, a mountain of death and chitin, and a wave of pure terror threatened to break them.
"Stand fast!" Adam screamed, his voice cutting through the din. He knew this was the moment. The final test. "It's coming for us! Hold the line! Kill the rest! This is our only chance!"
He stepped out from the protection of the formation, his two short swords looking pathetically small against the colossal horror. He was a speck before a landslide. But he stood his ground, his mind ice-cold, every lesson from one hundred and ninety-three cycles of death crystallizing in this single moment.
The Cursed Terror loomed over him, its shadow swallowing him whole. The stench of its rot was suffocating. Its good legs raised, poised to smash him into paste.
Adam didn't look at the legs. He looked directly into the pulsating, fractured light of the crack in its carapace. He saw the fractal pattern within, the same pattern from the night-walker commander, now writhing in agony.
He had no plan to kill it ,He was too weak. His swords couldn't reach that core.
he could truly only rely on his personal army to do this task but he would definitely get the final blow and make this bastard suffer
The world narrowed to the space between him and the dying god. The sounds of the battle faded into a distant roar. The Terror's leg began its descent, a killing blow that would erase him from this world and reset the loop once more.
Adam took a deep breath, his hands tightening on the grips of his swords.
He was ready.