Die. Respawn. Repeat.

My Trial has changed my relationship with death time and time again. For once, though, I feel like I'm finally in control of those deaths.

Not that I'm under any illusions. I'm well aware that as much time as I've spent training—as much as I should be above any new problem the Fracture might throw at me—I'm not invincible. Neither are any of my friends, even if they're quite possibly three of the strongest Firmament practitioners on the planet.

The difference now is that I'm not afraid. Even if it happens, I know exactly what to do and where to go. The Integrators made a mistake when they gave me the power to come back from death.

Call it a Premonition.

We stand at the edge of the Fracture. It's enormous—larger than I remember it being, in fact, and I can't tell if that's because of all the ways my senses have grown or if it's actually gotten bigger. It's a chasm rent into the planet on a continental scale, stretched out over the horizon farther than I can see and so deep that even with the sun directly above, the bottom is nothing but a featureless black.

Then there's the sheer volume of Firmament practically gushing out of it, so much that it threatens to match the quantity found in the Intermediary. The only difference is that there's so much more space here that all that power is diluted. If it were any more concentrated, I can only imagine the kind of impact it would have on anything and anyone that lived nearby.

Like the Cliffside Crows. I grimace at the thought. I suppose that explains, in part, the artifact they were able to give me. As far as I can tell, it contains a truly baffling amount of information—far more than it should, given what Tarin and the others have told me about how they created it.

I suspect it's going to be critical to navigating the Fracture, once we get a little deeper.

"Uh," Ahkelios says. He gestures awkwardly at the flow of Firmament pouring out in front of us. "Was it always this... powerful?"

"No," He-Who-Guards answers. He steps closer to the edge of the Fracture, optic flickering as he runs a series of scans. I hear the telltale whirring of his systems as he processes the data. "It is larger by 37 percent, and its baseline Firmament output is an order of magnitude greater than its recorded baseline."

"That doesn't sound like a good thing," Ahkelios says worriedly.

"We've been in this loop for a while without getting reset," I say, pulling up the Interface to check. "22 days, not including all that time we spent training. The planet doesn't survive past 180, but we know that any action that disrupts the Fracture can accelerate that timeline. I'm assuming the whole time-dilation-training thing wasn't great for planetary stability."

"Great for us, though!" Gheraa interjects cheerfully. I turn to look at him, and he has the grace to look vaguely embarrassed. "What? It's true."

"Gheraa," I say with a sigh, and then shake my head. I can deal with him later. "Look, the point is, we're going to have to be ready for anything. We're going deeper than we have before—deeper than anyone has before. Call out if you even think something is wrong, got it?"

All three of the others nod. I turn back to the Fracture, then promptly take a step backwards as a Premonition screams at me.

A moment later, a concentrated blast of pure Firmament roars through the chasm of the Fracture, so bright and charged it leaves spots in my eyes. I blink a few times, and Gheraa makes a noise that's halfway between fear, awe, and...

"Do not say that was hot," I say before he can say anything.

Gheraa looks startled, then offended. He crosses his arms over his chest, putting on an indignant scowl. "Do you think I go around being attracted to every large beam of Firmament?"

"Yes," I say.

"Yup," Ahkelios adds.

"Correct," Guard agrees.

Gheraa sighs dramatically. "Woe is me," he says. "It seems I will never live that down. If only you could be distracted by an even more embarrassing moment." He takes a step back—

—and falls backward into the Fracture. We watch him as he falls, saluting the whole time.

"You know," Ahkelios says. "I like that guy a lot more than the Integrator I got during my Trial."

"He is different than I imagined the Integrators to be," Guard admits. "Though I understand that he is something of an exception?"

"Let's just go after him before he does something to get himself killed," I say with a sigh. "I don't think I trust him with the real world just yet."

One thing we learned about him during all that training: Gheraa's experience with anything other than Integrator society is entirely restricted to his observations of various planets and Trials during Integrations. That means his practical experience of reality for the rest of the galaxy is limited at best.

"I still think we should put a collar on him," Ahkelios mutters. "Maybe one with a bell."

"Don't tempt me," I say dryly.

We follow after him. Fortunately, we find him quickly: he's waiting for us on a ledge just out of sight. I'm both surprised and grateful that he remembered all our discussions about how we're going to approach this delve.

"What're we waiting for?" he says cheerfully. "Let's go!"

Not long after that, we run into the first problem.

It's a problem we anticipated, at least. Most of the monsters in the early layers of the Fracture are, at this point, easy enough for any of us to deal with. Most of them.

And then there are the Time Flies.

They were able to wipe our entire group the last time we encountered them. We were lucky enough not to run into them when we came down to release Rotar and Ikaara, but given how long we intend to spend in the Fracture this time, it's not likely we'll be able to avoid them again.

So we've come up with a plan.

The flies are little monstrosities that reach through time and into the past to steal Firmament from their victims. They can't be dealt with in any conventional way—we can't attack something that isn't even there yet, after all. Thankfully, I have not one but two skills that can deal with this now.

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The first is Temporal Static, which causes a sort of localized temporal storm; it creates pockets of disrupted time that fluctuate into both past and future. It's an incredibly situational skill I haven't had much of a chance to use, but this one is pretty much perfect for it.

The second, of course, is Timestrike. What better way to deal with future parasites than a skill that punches into the future?

All things considered, that plan goes surprisingly well. When He-Who-Guards reports that his systems are reporting a drastic and sudden reduction in Firmament, we know what we're dealing with, and I flood our little corner of the Fracture with Temporal Static.

Once it's active, ghostly images of grotesque, bug-like parasites flitter around the small platform we stand on, flickering in and out of sight. We take the opportunity to strike them whenever they become visible, with Ahkelios and I alternating between using Timestrikes whenever they fade away. It's a lot easier to hit them when we know where they are, because after that, all we need to do is figure out when they are.

"That... was a lot easier than I expected," Ahkelios comments when we're done. There are small piles of bug corpses scattered all around us, slowly dissolving back into Firmament. I try to ignore the sight. They're parasites in time, and frankly I've had more than my fair share of dealing with parasites in these loops.

Gheraa feels the same way, judging from his expression. The usual cheer is gone from his face, and in its place is something troubled. No doubt he's thinking about Rhoran again.

"Gross," he mutters.

Or not. Though the word could apply to Rhoran, I suppose.

Neither of us had pegged the possibility of his erstwhile supervisor being petty enough to turn himself into a Firmament parasite just to hound us. We certainly hadn't accounted for him somehow managing to infect an entity like the Sunken King, who is—best as we can tell—so far above even the strongest of the Integrators that we may as well be ants to him.

If all goes well, by the time we face him, I'll have completed my next phase shift and stand as a fourth-layer practitioner. That by itself won't be enough, but...

Well, we'll worry about it when we get there. The warning I sent back to myself echoes in my mind.

I don't have many options left. I'm sending back this warning so you'll have one more choice that I didn't have—but you're not going to like it. You'll know what I mean when you get there.

We've talked it over time and time again, but none of us are entirely sure what it means. With the way Paradox Warning works, we're probably only going to figure it out when it's time for me to send the warning back to my past self—self-fulfilling paradox and all that—but not knowing is like having an itch I can't scratch.

I know I need to be ready. I know what's coming. I hope that'll be enough, because from the tone of that warning, whatever conclusion I came to?

I must've hated it. I know what I sound like when I'm trying to hide the truth, especially from myself.

"Yeah," I agree after a moment, turning back to Ahkelios. "But from here on out, we don't actually know what else we might run into, so let's be careful."

The upper layers of the Fracture are a series of stairs and ruined buildings carved into the cliffside, the apparent remnants of a long-dead civilization. Even with how ancient the remains are, there are clear hints that something great once occupied this space. The still-surviving golem constructs are a part of it, but so are the skill fragments.

And there are so many skill fragments. The upper layers of the Fracture feel like a gold mine to my Firmament sense—they glitter with the scattered pieces of dozens if not hundreds of different skill constructs. They're tucked away into corners that would've been impossible for me to sense before, buried under layers of stone and circuitry and charged with only the faintest hint of power, but now I can see the sheer extent of their spread.

"Should we gather them?" Ahkelios asks when I bring this up. I shake my head, laughing a little when he stares at me with disappointed, pleading eyes. I can see the appeal for him, but...

"If we had infinite amounts of time, I could maybe see it being worth it," I say. "But it'd take a hundred pieces for us to make one complete skill, and there's no telling what rank it might be. Maybe if we find out about a skill that's here that we want, we can try to dig it up, but gathering them at random? It'd take days for us to get them all, and that's not counting the time it would take to put them together."

"I know that you're right, but I hate it," Ahkelios grumbles. He stares longingly at the ruins above us.

"It is strange that there are skill fragments here at all," Guard comments. He tilts his head. "Gheraa. Do you know what this place may have to do with the Interface?"

"What?" Gheraa blinks like he's surprised that he's being asked the question. Then he brightens, twirling his cane around. "I'm glad you asked! Hestia isn't mentioned anywhere in our records prior to Integration, and there's nothing in its history that should link it with the Interface that we know of."

"So you have no idea," Ahkelios says.

"Well, yes, but I wouldn't put it like that." Gheraa sighs. "If you read through the anomaly log, there are one or two prior Trialgoers that have managed to put together a skill from the Fracture. Ethan?"

"I haven't had the chance to read through the logs," I admit. It doesn't feel like the best excuse, given all the time we've spent training, but there's always been something more pertinent.

That and altogether too many people use those logs as a place to leave their final words. It's... unpleasant.

"Suffice to say the skills here are strange, specific, and unlikely to be worth recovering," Gheraa says, giving me a look. "I believe one of the skills allowed for pottery creation."

Huh. I frown a little, turning that thought over in my mind before pulling up the Interface and skimming for the log in question. It takes a while for me to get there—there are a lot of logs—but eventually, I find the entry. It talks about how the skill feels clunky, different from all the others. It takes more Firmament and more time for less of a result...

Something clicks.

"Prototypes," I say quietly. "They're prototypes for the skills that eventually went into the Interface."

Ahkelios, Guard and Gheraa share disbelieving looks. "Are you sure?" Gheraa asks.

"Think about what you told me," I say. "The three gods—Kauku and the two we don't have the names of. We know they had to experiment to make it work. I bet this was one of their test sites. It must've been how they learned how to make skills."

"That..." Guard pauses, then frowns. "I do not like how plausible that is."

"Does that mean we could learn from them?" Ahkelios asks hopefully. "Figure out what they did?"

"Maybe," I say. I'm not hopeful. Time has ground this place down into little more than dusty remnants of what was; if not even a single intact skill remains, I doubt we could say much more of the research notes. The fact that none of the logs in the Interface mentions anything of the sort corroborates that idea.

But that context lends a different perspective to this place.

The homes built here are small. There's not much room to navigate between them—no real location that might hold a town square or anything of the sort. Without the ability to climb or fly, the people here would be stuck navigating tiny, dangerous pathways.

I thought I was looking at the remnants of a great civilization. There are signs everywhere that the people here lived as best as they could—remnants of art and culture, ingenious technology implemented via Firmament.

Now I can't help but wonder if I'm in fact looking at the remnants of a prison of sorts, abandoned and then reworked into something of a functioning society. I really need to get the truth out of Kauku, one way or another. Find out exactly what it is those so-called gods did in their pursuit of power. To do that, though...

There's a lot more Fracture waiting.

"Let's head further down," I say. "I want to see how much deeper we can go. We can come back here when we have a better idea of what's waiting for us in the depths."

As I speak, I begin to draw Firmament into myself. I'm close enough to the fourth phase shift now that I can initiate the process as soon as I find that final, foundational element—but that doesn't mean extra Firmament is useless to me.

On the contrary, every drop of Firmament I take in makes the ocean of power I call my core grow slightly deeper.

I will be prepared for what's coming. I have to be.