Die. Respawn. Repeat.

I start by pouring Firmament into Quicken Mind so I can assess the situation. The other looper is on nearly the opposite side of the cavern we're in. He's similar to the silverwisps, in a way. Like them, he looks like he's made of living energy. Unlike them, that energy is tightly controlled and contained into a defined humanoid form. There's no ethereal flame, no silvery mist—just a bright-blue pulsing energy shaped like a person.

A very angry person, in this case. He stands there like a living star, ablaze with fury and despair in equal measure, and though he's a member of a species I've never seen before, it isn't hard to tell exactly how he feels. Heat radiates off him with every pulse. I'm almost certain I can see the ground melting beneath his feet.

He's talking to someone. There's a pile of collapsed rubble he's facing, no doubt a result of the explosion I heard; small cracks spread along the wall from the point of impact, spreading along the walls of the tunnel.

"You said you'd remember." The words come out trembling, like he's using all his strength to speak instead of fight. Considering the flames that burst to life and lick their way up his arms, I don't think he's nearly as under control as he's pretending. His hands are clenched into tight fists, and he takes a single, shaky step forward.

I can't quite make out who he's talking to, given that they're obscured within a pile of smoking rubble, but my Firmament sense tells me that they're very much alive and probably pissed.

In fact, considering how strong that Firmament is, I can guess exactly who this Trialgoer is confronting.

The rubble shifts. To my surprise, most of what I'd assumed was just rubble is, in fact, a person. Several larger pieces of stone reconnect with one another, humming with Firmament and rearranging themselves until they form a vaguely humanoid shape with arms nearly as its legs.

Another species I haven't encountered yet. Guard stiffens the moment he sees her, and I wince, already knowing what he's about to say.

"That is Soul of Trade," he hisses. He doesn't seem to have entirely recovered from whatever it is he saw—I can feel the turbulence in his Firmament like an erratic storm—but he's putting it aside for the moment to focus on the fight. "She is the Trialgoer that manages Inveria."

Yeah, that's about what I expected.

This is going to be a problem.

It's not the fight I'm worried about. This past looper is a second-layer practitioner at best, and while his Firmament is bent powerfully toward destruction, there's only so much he can do to us. Soul of Trade is likewise just barely into her third layer and unlikely to have anything that can threaten me. I'm not writing them off completely—not when either of them might have skills that could turn the tides—but I'm a lot more worried about the cracks slowly spreading along the walls than I am about the two of them.

"I'm afraid I don't," Soul of Trade says. She shrugs nonchalantly, dusting off the dirt of the impact like it barely hurt her; from the looks of things, it barely did. I doubt she's particularly vulnerable to physical damage, in fact. "I don't even know your name."

"I am Fyran, and you promised me escape." That explains the fire-man's anger, at least. He takes another step forward, blue flames licking all the way up to his shoulders, and it's only with a tremendous effort of will that he stops himself from attacking her again. A part of him recognizes the problem he's created, I think—I see his gaze flicking to the cracks on the walls, to the panicked civilians running for shelter.

There's a part of him that wants to care. There's a part of him that wants to help. But right now, his anger overrides everything else, and he takes another step forward.

"You told me you'd have a way out for me if I gave you my credits," he says. I'm beginning to get a clearer picture of what happened here. "You told me to come back to you in the next loop."

"And you agreed to that?" Soul of Trade waves a hand in the air, and I feel the Interface reacting; she scans an invisible screen in the air for a moment, and then she snorts. "If you agreed to that, you deserve it. What made you think I'd be able to remember a deal? How many loops have you been through?"

"Hundreds." I can feel Fyran's fury rising. The heat is now palpable enough that I can feel it all the way from here. Soul of Trade doesn't seem to care, but everyone else in the tunnels do—they're all scrambling for an escape, to get as far away from the growing fight as possible. Ahkelios, Guard, and Gheraa slip away to quietly help with the evacuation, and I feed small tendrils of Firmament into the walls to help them stay together. "You don't care." 𝙛𝒓𝒆𝙚𝒘𝒆𝓫𝙣𝓸𝙫𝓮𝒍.𝒄𝒐𝓶

Soul of Trade looks bored. "If I kill you, I get even more credits," she says. "If I fail, the loop will eventually reset, and both me and my City will be fine. There is no situation in which you win, Trialgoer."

"But there is a situation in which you suffer," Fyran growls. I see him step forward again. I feel his power growing. Firmament gathers around him in great swirls of concentrated power, pouring into his core with a sudden clarity that pushes his core forward—

He's about to phase shift. I come to that realization at almost the same instant the Thread of Purpose coalesces; it pulls taut, dragging me toward both Fyran and Soul of Trade, and I know with abrupt certainty why we're here.

Not to stop Soul of Trade. Not even to prevent Fyran from making the deal in his prior loop, though I imagine that might have helped. In a better world and in better circumstances, I might've been able to do that instead.

But here and now, it's about this moment. The third phase shift is the moment a practitioner defines their Truth, and Fyran is about to make that decision while consumed by raw, blinding rage. I can see the red creeping over his core, the fundamental shift in self that's about to happen.

There's a pervasive sense of wrongness in the air that apparently comes with these types of phase shifts, the kind of shift forced into being by anger and fear instead of any drive for truth. Ahkelios, Guard, and Gheraa have all turned toward Fyran. They might not know the specifics, but they know that something bad is happening.

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I stay where I am.

Inspired Evolution: Knight. Generator Form.

The transformation happens faster than it ever has before. I barely feel the pain of my bones turning into armor and my flesh igniting into solidified Firmament. The point of the Generator Form is that it's inherently connected with Energy, an entire pillar of power; with it, my Firmament Control is stronger than it is in any other form.

And just in case it isn't enough...

[Thread of Control activated!]

The Thread of Control was one of the harder Threads to comprehend, and even now I'm not entirely comfortable with it. I do not, by default, desire to control everything around me. But right now, I can't say I'm unhappy about Ahkelios pushing me to grasp it.

I wrap the Thread around my right arm, feeding it through the skill construct that is Firmament Control. Then I reach out, grasping at a single wisp of Firmament in the air that tries to rush past me and toward Fyran, and pull.

With that one gesture, every drop of Firmament in the cavern freezes in its tracks.

"Let's take a moment to breathe, shall we?" I say. My voice carries across the width of the tunnel, albeit with the help of a small current of Firmament I allow to move.

Fyran makes a sound not unlike a pained gasp, collapsing to his knees as the Firmament he needs for his shift suddenly refuses to arrive. He tries anyway—I can feel his will clawing at the Firmament around him, trying desperately to steal it back. Soul of Trade, on the other hand, looks wary for perhaps the first time in this conversation.

She's aware, I think, of the kind of power it takes to stop a phase shift as it's happening. She's very aware of the kind of Firmament I'm currently wielding at my fingertips. Her instincts are screaming at her that she's out of her depth.

I take my time making my way across the cavern. It's large enough that I'm not going to walk the whole way, but I make sure to take a minute or two, using Warpstep to cross huge swathes of distance every time Soul of Trade blinks. She flinches every time, but does an admirable job keeping her composure.

By the time I arrive next to them, Fyran has managed to recover somewhat, even if he's only barely standing. He stares at us warily, unsure what to make of us.

Soul of Trade, on the other hand, is visibly more unnerved.

"I don't know you," she says. "Should I?"

I raise an eyebrow. "Where was that politeness when you were speaking with Fyran, I wonder?"

Soul of Trade lifts her chin. "He is not worth consideration."

"Maybe not to you." I examine her for a moment. Her Firmament is erratic. Scared, I think. I can see a tint of yellow, if I use Tetrachromacy. But more interesting than that are the Threads carefully wrapped around her core—she's no stranger to the Web of Threads herself, evidently, and she's carefully using them to help her achieve her goals.

Unfortunately for her, my arrival's thrown her off-balance, which means it's a simple matter for me to steal control of those Threads from her. I have to disable some of mine in the process, but it only takes me a moment to unravel her own Thread of Purpose and see what she intended.

"You were paid to do this," I say. She flinches, taking a step back and bumping into the wall behind her. I pay it no mind. "The Integrators promised you credits for corrupting Fyran, I take it?"

"I..." she starts, then falters. She stares at me. "How do you know this? Who are you?"

"Corrupting me...?" Fyran asks. He stares, looking between me and Soul of Trade. "What does that mean?"

The others finally catch up behind me. Gheraa answers for me, to my relief—I'm not sure exactly how to explain what the Integrators try to do to their Trialgoers. "It means she was paid in credits to make you more manageable," he says bluntly.

Soul of Trade stiffens even more at those words. Her eyes dart from Ahkelios, to Guard, and finally settles on Gheraa; she very clearly recognizes his species, because she somehow manages to go pale. Which is impressive, given that she's made of rock. She seems to forget entirely about me and turns her attention to him, clasping her hands together in an informal sort of bow.

"If I have angered the Integrators, I can atone," she says. "You need only tell me what to do—"

Gheraa seems to find this initially uncomfortable, but that comfort switches rather suddenly to amusement. I catch the spark of mischief in his eyes a split second before he turns to me, ignoring Soul of Trade entirely. "Master," he says, clasping my hand in both of his own. He leans in for a conspiratorial yet far-too-loud whisper. "I will eliminate her for you, if it pleases you."

I stare at him. He stares back at me innocently, somehow adopting a perfectly subservient persona entirely at odds with how he usually behaves. It takes a gargantuan effort to resist the urge to facepalm.

In the meantime, Soul of Trade realizes her mistake and stares at us in naked terror. I can only imagine what she's thinking: that she ignored an Integrator's "master" and is about to get punished for it.

"Just make her leave," I say, giving Gheraa a look that he entirely ignores. Instead, he claps his hands together cheerfully.

"You heard him," Gheraa says. "Begone! Before I vaporize you."

Soul of Trade gives us an utterly confused, terrified look, then vanishes into the walls. I watch the process with interest—whatever skill she uses allows her to meld with the stone of the tunnels, and it seals the cracks behind her. I'm assuming that's part of why she didn't seem particularly worried about the damage.

Then again, without my intervention, the walls would almost certainly have collapsed, so who knows what she was thinking.

I turn my attention to Fyran, who seems just as confused and definitely wary of both me and Gheraa. "What did you mean, make me more manageable?" he asks, glancing between the two of us, then at Ahkelios and Guard. "Are you really that Integrator's master? Who are you people?"

I rub my temples. "No, he's just a friend who thinks he's funny," I say, ignoring Gheraa's immediate gasp of outrage. Ahkelios snorts to himself in the background, and Guard pats Gheraa gently on the shoulder, as if to comfort him. "As for the rest, it's complicated, and kind of a long story."

If nothing else, Gheraa's gambit there appears to have confused Fyran enough to settle him. The storm of Firmament around us has calmed enough that I can release it from my grasp, and when I do, it's like the air around us breathes a sigh of relief.

"I have nothing but time," Fyran says. He sounds tired more than he does angry now, though there's a sense of defeat in his voice. He looks around at the Firmament that would have formed the third layer of his core, and when he speaks again, his voice is quiet. "If I completed that phase shift, it would have changed me."

"It would have," I say, watching him.

"I would have forgotten." The realization is a pained one, and Fyran begins to tremble slightly as he realizes what he might have become. "I just wanted to see my daughter again. Soul of Trade promised me she could make it happen. I thought... I thought it would be done. I thought this would be the last loop."

"That's what they do." I glance at the others—they're mostly trying to give Fyran some space, for which I'm grateful. "I understand more than you think, believe me."

"How could you?" Fyran asks doubtfully. I tilt my head, then reach out with Temporal Link; the moment that Temporal Firmament makes contact with his core, both recognition and surprise flash in his eyes. "You're..."

"It's complicated," I say again, standing up and offering him a hand. "Come on. Let's talk. Maybe over some food. I'm sure you could use something to eat."

Even as I say the words, I see Guard glancing back toward the spot on the wall he'd been staring at before. The Thread I called on earlier lingers around him, waiting.

We aren't done here yet.