The loop reset again.
There was no sound. No flash of light. No cosmic reel spinning backwards.
Just the snap—a sensation deep within the core of his being, like a vital thread inside his chest being pulled taut beyond its limit and then severing. It was a silent, internal rupture.
He staggered forward in the non-space between realities, a hand clutching at his sternum where his heart should have been. His breath came in ragged, phantom gasps, a pointless habit of a body that didn't exist here. The aftertaste of the last death—a crushing by rotting stone—still coated his mind like psychic grime.
Something was profoundly wrong.
Not with the world. The Nightmare's stage reset with machinelike precision: the same jagged mountain silhouette, the same bile-yellow moon, the same frozen chain waiting to be inhabited.
The wrongness was in him.
In the early loops, the resets had felt clean, if brutal. A total rewind. A mercy of oblivion before the agony began anew. Now, they felt… incomplete. Jagged, like a broken bone set poorly. The transition scraped.
Memories no longer existed in discrete packets. They bled together at the edges. The cold of the mountain seeped into the memory of the void's fall. The monster's rancid breath lingered in his nostrils alongside the scent of ozone from the instant of reset. Emotions, too, refused to be neatly cataloged. The sharp terror of a claw through his chest now carried a bizarre footnote of the numb resignation he'd felt three deaths prior when he'd simply sat down and waited.
Pain developed echoes. The initial, shocking agony of a wound would vanish with the reset, but a ghost of it—a deep, muscular memory of trauma—would twinge in the corresponding limb as his new body formed. A psychic bruise.
That strange, persistent hollowness he'd felt upon first waking in this world, the numb ache he'd dismissed as mere exhaustion or spiritual jetlag… it now bloomed into a dreadful certainty.
His soul was fraying.
Every loop wasn't just an experience; it was an erosion. A violent transaction. He wasn't dying and being perfectly restored. He was being used. Each death, each reset, tore something loose and left it behind in the grinding gears of the mechanism.
It wasn't his memories being lost. Those remained, horrifyingly sharp, a library of countless failures. What was being stripped away were the subtler, foundational layers of self. The ingrained resolve that had carried him through six years of concrete hardship. The instinctive, animal certainty of his own boundaries—where he ended and the world began. The reflexive, unshakeable knowledge that he was a coherent, continuous entity. These were blunting, sanding down against the relentless whetstone of repetition.
He pressed on anyway. What was the alternative? To stop moving, to stop trying, was to accept dissolution. Action, even futile action, was the only proof of continued existence.
So he tested the loop's boundaries with a methodical, desperate cruelty towards himself.
Die quickly. Reset.
Die fighting, prolonging it. Reset.
Don't die. Wait. Hide until the caravan vanished, until the monster grew bored and left him alone in the silent, eternal mountainscape. Eventually, a deep, systemic lassitude would overtake him, a sense of the scenario powering down, and then—Reset.
Each time, the external world snapped back with flawless, indifferent precision: the same moment on the road, the same position in the chain, the same quality of silent despair in the air.
But he did not arrive whole.
A permanent, fine tremor had taken up residence in his hands. It wasn't from fear or physical weakness. It was structural damage, a flaw in the sculpture of his spirit, vibrating through each iteration.
The realization was a cold void opening beneath him:
The loop wasn't rewinding him.
It was copying what remained.
A degraded imprint, layered over the fading ghost of the previous one, again and again and again.
The visceral unease from the previous chapter—that subtle, pervasive wrongness he'd felt upon entering—that wasn't narrative foreshadowing. It was direct evidence. It was his soul's early-warning system screaming into a void he hadn't yet learned to hear.
Despair, when it finally settled in, did not come with screaming or dramatics. It was quieter, more insidious. It was the slow, creeping crystallization of a thought:
What if there is no way out? Not a hidden solution, not a clever trick. What if the only variables are the speed and manner of erasure?
His own thoughts began to betray him, looping independently of the world. He would catch himself midway through an internal monologue—'The cliff face is six paces away, the wind shifts after the third scream'—with the chilling certainty that he had already thought these exact words, in this exact order, in a prior loop. It was psychic déjà vu on a catastrophic scale.
This terrified him more than any death.
Because death reset.
This recursion of his own mind did not.
Still, he pushed. The ember of defiance, fanned by a cosmic being's amused respect and six years of grinding survival, refused to be fully extinguished. It glowed in the dark of his decaying self.
He began to observe not the world during the loops, but the transient space between them. That infinitesimal, nearly nonexistent instant where reality fractured and snapped back into place. He poured his fraying attention into that gap.
And for the first time, he perceived it.
It hurt.
Not a physical pain. It was a metaphysical abrasion. It felt as if the core of his identity, his very "I-ness," was being forced through a narrowing cosmic aperture, scraped raw against its edges. The sensation was of limitless consciousness being crammed back into a fragile, predefined mold, and the mold was now cracked.
He screamed, a soundless rip in the fabric of his being.
The loop reset, hauling him back to the mountain.
But the echo of the scream stayed with him, a silent resonance in the chamber of his soul.
And in the wake of that perceived agony, he noticed it.
A flaw.
Not in the mountain, or the monster, or the chains.
A flaw in the pattern.
The reset didn't originate from the event of his death. Death was merely the most common, most efficient catalyst. The reset triggered from a point of certainty. The moment the scenario reached a resolved, stable state—a fixed outcome with no active variables—the loop's law enforced itself. His death was a definitive end. His survival until the scenario's energy dissipated was another, quieter kind of end. Both were conclusions. The loop was a mechanism that rejected conclusions.
Which meant—
He wasn't trapped because he kept failing.
He was trapped because the system required inevitability.
And inevitability, in this closed system, demanded infinite repetition.
The realization didn't enlighten him; it shattered him.
Because the implication was far worse than simple imprisonment.
This loop wasn't a punishment for inadequacy.
It was maintenance. A self-sustaining process.
And his soul?
The raw material. A consumable resource burned to fuel the cycle's endless turn.
He laughed then. A broken, wet, hysterical sound that seemed to echo in the frozen air longer than it should have, contaminating the start of the new loop. The slaves nearby flinched, eyeing him as one already lost.
Each loop wasn't just damaging him.
It was feeding something else.
The mountain? The monster? The very Spell itself? The distinction blurred.
That parasitic relationship was the first real clue.
Not to an exit.
But to a purpose.
And if the loop needed him—or more precisely, needed the process of him being worn down—to continue its function…
Then the way out wasn't to escape the cycle.
It was to break the cycle's fundamental requirement.
He had to become indigestible.
To introduce a variable of such profound uncertainty, such unresolved chaos, that the system could not reach a stable state to reset from.
To break before the loop could complete its copy.
To corrupt the data of himself so utterly that the system could not find a clean save-point.
To become—
Unfinished.
The thought was not a plan. It was a terrifying aperture. A door labeled not 'exit,' but 'void.' To stop trying to solve the Nightmare and instead aim to become an error within it. To not fight the monster, but to break the game it was a part of.
He looked down at his trembling, fraying hands, then up at the monstrous, indifferent mountain. The next loop was beginning. The wind screamed. The chains clanked.
This time, he didn't think about survival, or observation, or patterns.
He thought about corruption. He thought about introducing a bug.
He took a step forward, not as a slave, but as a virus.