Die. Respawn. Repeat.

The city Naru rules is apparently called Carusath. The name's familiar to me—it's the one Tarin cried out when he was pretending to be working for Naru, back in Isthanok—but what I wasn't expecting is how hot the place is. We're not even in the city itself and I can feel the heat radiating out from the literal crater the city is built in.

"You live here?" I ask in disbelief. Naru glares at me.

"And?" There's a note of challenge in his voice.

"Just... nevermind." I shake my head. I'm not going to get into it with him. I prefer my climates cold, but considering Naru can apparently boil a pond just by diving into it, I assume he has a different relationship with heat than I do.

My gaze lingers on what little of the city I can glimpse over the edge of the crater. It doesn't look like it's the most well-maintained place—the buildings are full of cracks, each one looking like they've been haphazardly pieced together from broken and crumbled stone. They're kept together only barely by plugs of golden Firmament that seal the cracks together.

There's the sound, too. It doesn't sound like any city I've ever been to. Isthanok is loud and bustling, and even the crow village is often filled with the chatter of the villagers. Carusath, by contrast, sounds... angry. The few voices that rise far enough out of the crater to reach me sound violent, and my Firmament sense confirms bursts of power that feel like people fighting.

No surprise that the city looks half-destroyed, if this is the norm. I glance to Naru to see if he's at all concerned about it, but he doesn't seem to care.

"We're not here for you to tour the city," Naru grunts, noticing the look I'm giving him. "You can sightsee some other time."

"That's not exactly what was on my mind," I say dryly. "There are people fighting down there. Aren't you worried?"

Naru gives me a blank look. "Why should I be?"

"You're not worried about people fighting in your city?"

"Not if they have a good reason for it." Naru shrugs. "They can do what they want. It's not my job to stop them."

He-Who-Guards makes a strangled-sounding noise. I spare him a glance—he's clearly trying to hold back his commentary on this, and not entirely succeeding.

"And what exactly is your job?" I ask.

"Paperwork. Making sure trade is in order. Hiring guards." Naru seems faintly irritated by this line of questioning. "Don't you know anything about running a city?"

"Do you?" I ask.

I'm not even trying to needle him. It's an honest question, at this point.

"It's running, isn't it?"

I sigh. Clearly, this particular line of questioning isn't going to go anywhere. Even Ahkelios looks affronted, and I don't think he particularly cares about the intricacies of running a city.

"The Tear is just ahead," Naru says with a grunt. I glance at the Hotspot Tracker in my Interface—it's been a while since I've pulled it up, but it's working as well as ever. Thankfully, being disconnected from the Integrators hasn't removed any features for me, just... reorganized them.

"Looks like half of it is intersecting with Carusath's borders," I note. It's right on the edge of the crater. Now that we're close enough, I'm able to run my Firmament sense along the borders, and what I feel makes my breath stutter for a moment.

Versa and Naru aren't wrong. This thing feels like it shouldn't be here. The name Tear is an accurate one—it feels like something's ripped a hole through the fabric of Hestia and blown it wide open into an entirely different time and place. A wound left behind by a cosmic meteor.

The analogy makes me wince. It's... unfortunately apt.

"That's why I need you to get rid of it," Naru half-growls the words, like he hates saying the 'I need you' part of that sentence. "I don't know how much it's grown, but I don't let anything touch my borders. So if it's grown this much then I've missed it for several loops."

"Because you can stall it but not remove it," I mutter. "But I can remove them?"

"They're part of your Trial," he says.

"That's not the full picture." I step closer to the Tear, examining the edges of it; the sensation makes my skin prickle, like a part of me is physically reacting to this border etched into the world.

It reminds me of... The Empty City's final logs described something like this, didn't they? I vaguely remember the mother who wrote those logs describing a dome manifesting around their city—one that became solid over time, trapping anyone left within.

"It is," Naru insists.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"Don't forget," I say. "We aren't connected to the Integrators anymore. My Interface reverted to the default, same as yours." I don't need to mention the ANCHORED HERITAGE protocol or Kauku's involvement in it. I don't trust Naru that much.

It seems enough to get the point across, at least. Naru is silent for a moment. "...Your actions in the Trial are deemed more significant by the Interface because you're the Trialgoer," he tells me reluctantly. "And your position means you're partially exempt from time. From the loops. Even if you're using the default Interface, completing the Tear and whatever its requirements are should reduce its influence."

"In other words, I can affect it because I'm not a part of the loops," I surmise. Simple enough. It also means that Tarin and Guard might be able to repair some of these Tears, but without the Interface to guide them...

It's a moot point, as far as Tarin is concerned. I don't need or intend to pull Tarin into any more of this. Guard is another matter entirely, as long as he's willing; his proxies give him an advantage no one else has.

More importantly, though, I wonder...

I reach out with Temporal Link, and there's a reaction.

It's a subtle one. Temporal Link is one of my stranger skills, even now, and the information Inspect gives me is... limited at best. The skill allows me to make a connection with things that aren't entirely synchronous with the timestream. Its main manifestation—the ability to create a duplicate of my past self—comes from the fact that I'm out of sync with time.

And then there's Ahkelios. There are the monsters scattered throughout the loops, some of them echoes of past loopers. Remnants.

And now... these. The Hotspots. Tears, as the Hestian Trialgoers call them. It explains why Naru was investigating the appearance of a new Hotspot so desperately—the Integrators must've been spooked by the acceleration of Hestia's decay.

There isn't anything I can do with the link—not yet—but I'm willing to bet that'll change once I do whatever's expected of me within this Hotspot.

"So," I say without looking up. "Does this mean I have your official approval to enter Carusath? The Tear does cross your borders."

Naru gives me a bewildered look. "What are you talking about?"

"Well, according to Versa, you kill people who cross your borders without permission." I raise an eyebrow.

"I am right here. I am giving you permission." The look the crow gives me is flat, like he doesn't understand why I'm suddenly pressing on this point. It's probably worse since I'm doing it right outside the Tear, when he's close to getting what he wants out of me.

"Yeah, but I don't have the papers. Neither do Guard and Ahkelios," I say. "I wouldn't want to be given special treatment just because we're friends, you know?" 𝑓𝘳𝑒𝑒𝓌𝘦𝘣𝘯ℴ𝑣𝘦𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝑚

"We're not—" Naru cuts himself off mid-sentence, his expression somewhere between a scowl and absolute bewilderment. "Why are you bringing this up now?"

"Did you expect me to forget?" I shrug. "We weren't crossing the border before. Now we are."

"I'm giving you permission," he grinds out through a gritted beak, repeating himself.

"Right, right," I say. "But if this goes to court, I'm not going to have any papers to back me up. We should go through the proper channels. Wouldn't want to give you an excuse to maul me when I'm not looking."

Naru looks like he has no idea how to respond or what to do with himself. I'm enjoying his reaction, honestly. But I'm not just messing with him for the sake of it.

Part of it is that I don't really want to just let this go. Naru's attitude toward life is so different from mine that it's going to result in a conflict sooner or later; I need to figure out a way to get past it, especially if we end up working together for more than one loop. A Hotspot is one thing, but anything that involves actual lives, or if a Raid starts here in Carusath... I need some kind of lever I can work with, and this is my best opportunity to try to figure him out.

The second reason is that I should still be able to use the dungeon to preserve any approval papers he signs, or failing that, replicate it with one of my Temporal Link clones. It'll make getting into Carusath easier, if I need to do it in the future.

The third thing I'm doing is buying time while I analyze the Tear through my Firmament sense. It's a solid dome of Firmament through which everything looks normal, but I know from experience that stepping in will cause it to activate. If I'm going to be clearing these regularly, I want to see if there's anything I can use from the outside to determine what's on the inside.

And I do.

It's subtle, but it's present—a pattern I've seen again and again now that I've noticed it the first time. Right at the base of the dome, buried into the rock and dirt surrounding Carusath, there's a small, complicated structure of Firmament. Not quite an imbuement, not quite a skill, but very distinct in its overall shape: a point spreading outward.

Strength, if I'm reading it correctly. It's incomplete, though: instead of forming a complete construct that loops in on itself with a stable input-output pattern, the way Interface skills do, this one explodes outward into a mess that stabilizes only barely into the shape of the Tear.

Bizarre.

It occurs to me that this is why the Interface is so crucial to skills. Outside the example of the Seedmother's ability to use skills and imbuements explicitly performed by Trialgoers, I've seen at least two examples of skill constructs going haywire without the guidance of the Interface.

The first lies in the way Virin's stone just falls apart of Firmament isn't fed into it correctly—I shudder to think about what would happen if that skill was embedded into a person, without the Interface to guide where Firmament should be fed into it and where it should emerge.

The second is here, where whatever this construct originally was has exploded outward and mutated in a way that skill constructs are almost certainly not meant to mutate. It all begins to paint a picture about skills, and about the Interface's role in managing them in particular.

What that picture is, I'm not sure yet. But I don't like the feeling that's beginning to build in the pit of my stomach.

"Fine," Naru growls. "We'll get your stupid paperwork done."

I smile, innocent as I can. "Glad to hear it."

There's a fourth reason for all this.

It's the placement of the Tear. It's not just right over the border to Carusath—it covers one of the few paths down into the crater, in particular a now-abandoned guard station that presumably functioned as border control. Naru might not care enough to remember, but...

Firmament Sight does a few things for me. It lets me see Firmament, yes, but a part of that is that it lets me see the world painted in different shades. Every object, every distinctive thing has its own innate Firmament. Some things are more distinct than others.

Like the traces of blood scorched into the dirt.