Die. Respawn. Repeat.

Vahrkos had never been tired before. Not to this extent. It was rare these days for anything to tire him out—ever since he'd experienced his Convalescence, it was like his Firmament was three times as efficient. Slipstreams were easy for him to navigate like they had never been before, and Firmament flowed along his joints with just a whisper of a thought.

It was saying something, then, that he was tired. The so-called raid seemed never-ending; no sooner did he fight off one meteor did the next arrive, fresh and full of disruptive, powerful Firmament.

The worst part was that it almost felt like they were learning. He didn't know how they were learning—it wasn't like they talked to one another, as far as he could tell—but the new ones seemed to know how he fought, would act to block blows that the first ones hadn't seen coming.

"Vahrkos!"

He-Who-Wanders seemed so worried about him all the time. Vahrkos didn't know why. He was the one that should be worrying about Wander! The silverwisp didn't know how to protect himself; if a meteor so much as hit him, the man would just evaporate. At least the worst that would happen to him was the loss of an arm or something.

"I am fine." Vahrkos was vaguely aware that his reply sounded too much like a lie—he was breathing too heavily, and he tripped up over the word 'fine' because he stumbled over a rock. He-Who-Wanders caught him, slinging an arm over his shoulders.

"You are not fine," Wander insisted. "You've been fighting non-stop for nearly an hour. I don't care how efficient your Firmament is, you're going to die if you keep going."

"I will not," Vahrkos replied shortly, though his difficulty standing seemed to disagree with that statement. "I have fought for longer and survived."

"Not against Firmament-absorbing meteors!" Wander said, exasperated. "We need to find some shelter—"

"We do not have time," Vahrkos grunted. He peeled himself away from Wander—an act that required significantly more effort than it should have, because Wander was warm and comfortable and everything a soldier in the middle of a battle did not need offered—and slammed a punch into a living meteor as it lumbered toward them; it shrugged off the blow, as it always did, and he ducked beneath its counterblow. It was a familiar dance, at this point.

Except the counterblow caught him in the side and sent him flying. Vahrkos slammed into a wall, feeling dust and dirt puff up around him, along with all too many shards of disintegrated glass. He coughed twice, pushing that dirt back out of his lungs, and forced himself to his feet.

It learned again. Changed its patterns. He couldn't just follow the formula he'd developed—he needed to react, keep an eye on the changes, figure out how his opponent was choosing to fight.

Wander was in front of him.

Wander was—why was Wander in front of him?!

"Wander, you will get out of the way," he ordered, though it felt like a useless order even as the words fell from his lips; Wander wouldn't listen, obviously. And he didn't. The stupid, stubborn silverwisp stood in front of the meteor like he could protect him. "Wander, move! If it hits you—"

A swing. Vahrkos yelled internally at himself to move, to get in front of the blow before it could strike at the man he had yet to admit was his Anchor.

He could not move. He realized, somewhat belatedly, that his legs were broken.

The meteor struck a silvered head. Vahrkos felt his heart hammer in his chest; there was too much dust for him to see what had happened. He could catch a glimpse of silver Firmament. He could see the guttering flames that spoke of injury.

...but it wasn't Wander that stood in the dust.

Vahrkos stared, confused. In front of him, She-Who-Whispers stood in front of the meteor. The strike had hit her in the head; He-Who-Wanders was collapsed beside her, terrified but no worse for wear.

"Hmm," She-Who-Whispers said. She stared at Vahrkos. "Maybe you would've made a better general than that brute."

"I would not fight for you," Vahrkos said, the words slipping out before he could control them.

She-Who-Whispers smirked at him. "I know, my dear," she said. "Perhaps Isthanok needs a little more of that sort of thing, hm?"

Vahrkos narrowed his eyes warily. "What game are you playing?"

"No game," She-Who-Whispers said. "I am simply... re-evaluating my loyalties, as it were."

A cough. The dust got into Vahrkos's lungs again, and he spent a moment to hack up the dirt. She-Who-Whispers waited patiently as he did, and the morphling couldn't help but think about how surreal, how impossible this conversation was. He'd always thought that if he ever got the chance to speak with her, it would be at the other end of a blade.

Metaphorically. He didn't fight with blades. The point stood.

"Helping us doesn't repair what you've done," Vahrkos said.

"Who says I'm trying to repair anything?" She-Who-Whispers asked casually. She hauled Wander to his feet, grabbing him by the collar and pulling him up roughly, and Vahrkos started forward, his instinct to protect suddenly moving into overdrive. Whisper laughed.

"Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt him," she said easily. "I was just... curious, that's all. Here, you can have him."

She tossed Wander at him, and Vahrkos held back the scream of pain as he caught the silverwisp. She'd tossed him at his broken leg.

"Bastard," he hissed.

"I do have a reputation to maintain," Whisper said, light amusement in her voice. "Consider this a favor owed, yes?"

"Absolutely not."

She-Who-Whispers didn't seem to care. She vanished, her Firmament flowing up and around her, carrying her into the sky. Vahrkos noticed, perhaps a little belatedly, that she wasn't moving one of her legs very much. And that the flames of her Firmament were... weaker than he remembered.

Even Trialgoers weren't gods, it seemed.

"Is she gone?" Wander whispered to him. Vahrkos sighed, unsure what to think of the strange encounter, but deciding to focus on it later. Ethan had told him, after all—any death here would be permanent. He had more important things to focus on.

"She's gone," he confirmed. "And... you're right. I'm not okay. Let's... find somewhere to hide until I recover."

"Finally." Wander—very slowly—helped him to his feet, and Vahrkos winced as fresh pain blossomed in his foot.

He wasn't okay. Not by a long shot. But as long as he had his friends, as long as he had Wander...

...

He paused.

"Hey, Vahrkos?" Wander's voice was light, but there was a nervous note in it. A terrified one. "Am I imagining things, or did the whole sky just change colors?"

"You are not imagining things," Vahrkos said. He clutched Wander a little closer, staring up into the sky.

"...Do you think we can get away in time?" Wander spoke quietly. He knew the answer, but he wanted Vahrkos to say it. Vahrkos didn't know if he could.

"I think," he said quietly, "that our only hope is the Trialgoer."

"You think he's coming?" Wander asked.

"Yes."

It was the answer Wander needed to hear.

Vahrkos didn't know if he was lying.

"Woohoo!" Thys cheered. "I never realized this thing was so good at punching! Hey, Thaht, did you know how good at punching this thing was? You should've let me use it sooner! It's super unfair that you're the only one that gets to use it in the Arena, you know."

"Thys," Thaht growled, his snout buried in his hands. "Please shut up."

"We're fighting for our lives here!" Thys protested. He fiddled with the controls, and the entire mechanoid suit they were in lurched in a way that made Thaht want to puke; he didn't know how Thys wasn't already puking, in fact. Thaht was already telling himself that he needed to keep bags inside the mech specfically for this situation. "If I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die saying everything I want to say!"

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"You're not going to die," Thaht said, trying not to snarl. "This suit is impenetrable. It's made of—"

"The hardest materials we could steal, yes, I know!" Thys said cheerfully. "It's the hardest suit we have. We should give it a name, you know. Not the Arena name. A proper name, like the kind we'd use if we were saving the city from an invasion of alien meteors. A hero name."

"Thys, focus—" The suit lurched again, spinning around on its heel in a maneuver Thaht hadn't even known was possible without making the whole thing collapse. The fact that Thys was a natural at controlling massive robotic suits didn't even come as a surprise to him—Thys had an affinity with machinery Thaht couldn't even hope to come close to, as ditzy as he often came off—but he hadn't imagined that he'd be stuck inside the same suit while they were fighting.

It hadn't been built for two! And now he was being rattled around very cramped internals while Thys made the suit do things he was pretty sure his brother couldn't even do in his actual body. The fact that he could make the suit do it was deeply unfair. And was the reason he'd needed the practice more than his brother.

"I am focused!" Thys argued. He launched the suit into a kick, propelling it higher than its thrusters had any right to be able to lift it, and deflected a meteor before it could slam into a civilian home. "See? Focused. Now, what do you think is a good name for the suit? I'm thinking something that reflects how strong it is. Like, Hard Man, or something."

"We are not calling the suit Hard—" Thaht couldn't even finish a sentence without his brother making some sort of acrobatic leap. By all the kobold gods, if leaving the suit didn't virtually guarantee death-by-crushing, he'd have been gone a long time ago. "Thys! You don't need to somersault everywhere you're going!"

"How else will the people of Isthanok see how cool we are?" Thys argued. He opened his mouth to speak again, but Thaht interrupted him.

Not with a lecture, although he was tempted. Something in the edge of his peripherals caught his attention, and he grabbed Thys's arm and pointed; the kobold, realizing he was serious, immediately calmed.

One of the Shards was falling. An entire floating castle, its fundamental Firmament presumably disrupted by a meteor strike. If it landed, it would take out several blocks, killing untold numbers of civilians—

"On it," Thys said, suddenly perfectly calm. He ran—ran normally, without any acrobatics or stunts—and engaged a half-dozen levers Thaht hadn't even known existed. Firmament surged into the metal. The suit's heels dug into the ground, and pipes and roots burst out of its soles, burying themselves into the dirt. "Brace!"

Impact.

The sheer force of it made Thaht's teeth ache. Part of him thought this was it. They had never tested the integrity of their design with this much weight; there was a possibility that even if the metal remained intact, the joints would fail, and they would be crushed along with every civilian in the area.

For a moment, he wondered if he should have told his brother to run away instead of toward.

But his instinct had been the same, really.

"We need to feed it some of our Firmament," Thys said rapidly. "This isn't going to hold on its own—"

"On it," Thaht said, pushing back his fear. He inserted his arm into one of the suit's receptors, and Thys inserted his own into the other.

The drain was intense. Thaht saw silverwisps and kobolds and frogs and crows and a half-dozen other species all come out, cowering beneath them when they realized what this huge, mechanoid suit was doing. There were a few that recognized them from the arena—a few scattered cheers—but more significant than that was the looks of relief on their faces.

Thaht's heart hammered. He could die here, he knew. He didn't have that much Firmament, had never really trained for this, and yet...

What was the point of it all, if he couldn't even do this? How could he hope to rebel if he couldn't protect the city he was doing it for? They still had brothers and sisters, scattered throughout the city, some living underground and others above. He thought he could see one of their brothers in the crowd below, but it was hard to tell.

It didn't matter.

His body ached and weakness began to spread from his arms and into his limbs.

It didn't matter.

The pull of Firmament hurt. They'd never designed the suit to handle this much strain, to output this much power. Thaht didn't even know how they'd put the building down safely. People were evacuating, trying to create a space, but it wasn't like the meteors had stopped raining down—if anything, the building they were holding ended up being a sort of makeshift shelter.

It didn't matter. They would hold on as long as they could, until something changed—

Thaht looked up, and he felt his resolve crack. He stared up at the sky, his heart in his throat. The cheers beneath them died down.

His Firmament flickered.

"What we're doing," Thaht said. He fought to keep his voice steady. "Is it going to matter?"

Thys touched his shoulder. There was fear in his eyes, too, but he was pushing it down.

"It will," he said. "Let Ethan handle that. We just gotta focus on this."

Thaht's breathed. His Firmament steadied.

"That's his problem," he agreed. "We do our job, he'll do his."

He-Who-Guards was many.

It wasn't something he was used to yet—so much of this workload had previously been done by Whisper's commands, and he'd never really had to do it all by himself before.

He still wasn't all by himself, of course. The technology that had gone into his body was complex, and Guard suspected that even Whisper didn't entirely understand what had gone into it.

Specifically, the AI core she'd installed into his body to "help". It took on a lot of the cognitive load he'd otherwise have to endure, delegating and managing tasks, prioritizing, speeding up his mind so that he'd have the time to work on everything one by one and still look like he was doing all of it simultaneously.

—

//PROXY 023:

Guard hears a sound that doesn't belong. It's the faintest hint of a whimper, emerging from the dust and debris surrounding him. A processor logs the event, sorts it, and prioritizes it.

Priority: YELLOW 𝐟𝗿𝐞𝚎𝚠𝐞𝚋𝕟𝐨𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝕔𝕠𝚖

Event: Child (age undetermined, species undetermined; estimate 8-12, estimate etherea) trapped beneath unstable rubble. High likelihood of imminent collapse. High likelihood of death.

Guard moves. He exercises a control of Firmament that would have been impossible had Whisper still been in control—threads of his power slide into the rubble, pulling it apart and holding it steady. It's not long at all before he pulls out a crying child. A silverwisp. She's clutching a doll tightly, looking up at him with wide eyes.

"You're safe now," he says gently. That's something he wasn't able to do before, either. Speak. To tell people that he wanted to help.

The child looks at him. She's confused at first, unsure, almost afraid—the AI core logs and reads information to him that he doesn't want to know, although he knows it's trying to help.

And then... a pivot. Uncertainty becomes gratitude.

"Thank you," she tells him. She tries to give him her doll, and he gently refuses, putting it back into her arms. He tells her to take his hand and tells her he'll find her parents.

It's more than he's ever been able to do before.

—

// PROXY 041:

There's a meteor attacking a family, detected by a camera. A processor logs the event.

Priority: RED

Event: Group (ages undetermined, species avaria; estimate age range 3-62 across individuals) under attack by Integrator threat. High likelihood of immediate death across the board. Small percentile chance for the youngest to survive initial hit.

One of Guard is close by. A blade unlatches from his arm, and he cuts through the falling shard of Ishtanok that's blocking his way. There's a part of him that recognizes how absurd such an act would have been before he'd acquired this body: his Firmament may have been immense, but the precision required to shape it into a blade would never have come to him.

Now he cuts through reinforced crystal like it's nothing more than liquid.

He arrives a fraction of a second—0.0132 seconds, the AI core tells him—before the meteor's punch would have crushed the eldest crow. He crosses his arms and digs his feet into the ground. The impact rattles his armor but fails to do anything more.

His counterattack sends it flying.

"Are any of you injured?" he asks, turning to the crows. They stare at him, awed and confused all at once.

"You can talk?" one asks. A younger crow—a teenager, if he's reading their ages right. "Mom, he can talk! I told you he wasn't just some puppet!"

"Be careful," the mother says, gathering her child to him, looking at him warily. Guard bows his head.

"I was a puppet," he says. "But no longer."

Something in her relaxes. She nods to him, a fractional, wary acceptance. "What was done to you... it was wrong. I hope you know none of us supported it," she tells him. "Some of us, the older ones—we remember you. From... before."

Guard feels warmth, strangely. The words should remind him of how much things have changed, should bring up memories that sicken and hurt, but somehow, it's the reassurance that sticks. The idea that others remember, that he wasn't forgotten and overwritten into a part of Whisper's sick play.

"If we could have done something—" she begins.

"It is no matter," Guard says, kneeling. "It isn't safe. My proxies are holding them off in south Isthanok, near the Emarat streets. There's a cordon of safety there."

"...You are him." The mother sounds disbelieving, then relieved and fascinated, all at once. "I thought... I was sure it was a trick."

"As always, the arrival of a new Trialgoer changes the shape of things to come," Guard says. He smiles, his one optic glowing brighter. "This one might be a good one."

The mother's eyes darken, in contrast. "I will have to see it to believe it."

—

//ALL PROXIES

The color of the sky has changed.

Priority: REDREDRED

Event: ENDENDEND—

He-Who-Guards shut off the feed before the strength of the last alert could blind him; it rang in his head with what felt like the force of a collapsing star, giving him an instant migraine.

He looked up at the sky.

"That... is certainly an end," he muttered to himself. It took him a moment, but he commanded all the proxies he had with him—every single one—to join him in the effort to stop it.

There was a sole streak of white that was heading up to the meteor along with him. She-Who-Whispers. Part of him didn't want to talk to her, didn't want to work with her; there was a reason he'd avoided her as much as possible. Even his proxies stayed away from her, and she seemed to sense that his desire to be left alone, because she didn't try to interact or interfere with him.

This, though? This was bigger than the both of them. Quite literally.

Fortunately, he didn't need to speak to her for them to know what to do. A long, long time ago, working together like this would have been second nature for them—and there was a small part of each of them that remembered, perhaps, falling into lockstep.

Guard remembered what Whisper had once told him about raids. That they were tests. That they began with a number of smaller fights that pushed a Trialgoer to their limit, but at the end of it all, there was a boss.

And if the smaller fights here were meteors, then it was no surprise that the boss was an asteroid.

He stared up at the sky. This was large enough to crush all of Isthanok, and the impact would likely level all the Great Cities as well. He knew without even trying that all his proxies and Whisper together wouldn't be enough to stop the thing. Perhaps if it was just an ordinary rock, they would be able to.

But this thing was full of Firmament. Angry, hostile Firmament, like nothing he'd ever felt before.

They needed to try anyway.

If nothing else, maybe they could slow it down.