Die. Respawn. Repeat.

The more Versa tells me about the Great City of Palus, the more I appreciate the effort she put into coming here to warn me about it. I've gotten an overview from Guard before, but not in this much detail—Teluwat keeps most things about his Great City under wraps.

Even then, what Guard could tell me about it wasn't exactly encouraging. Palus is the least inhabited of all the Great Cities, with minimal traffic moving in and out of it. Pretty much everyone knows what Teluwat is capable of, and most Trialgoers forbid the people in their cities to visit lest they spread Teluwat's rot within their domains.

But Versa's different. She doesn't lead a Great City, and so she doesn't have a domain she needs to protect. Instead, she acts as a mercenary, performing odd jobs for the other Trialgoers and keeping operations between the Great Cities moving smoothly. There's a lot of political maneuvering involved, and according to her, she enjoys it.

I can't help but raise an eyebrow at that. "You enjoy it?"

"What?" Versa folds her arms across her chest. "Can't a girl enjoy some politics?"

"I... You know what? Sure." I'm not going to argue with her on it. All I know is that trying to maneuver around Whisper was a political nightmare I have no intent on repeating. Ever.

The result is the same either way—Versa's the most well-traveled of the Hestian Trialgoers. She's encountered most of what every Great City has to offer, and more importantly, she's apparently had to fight through Palus and its defenses more than once.

She's also apparently kept a record of every incident, despite the slowly mounting cost in credits it takes for her to maintain that information. I find myself somewhat begrudgingly impressed by this.

"What you need to understand is that Teluwat has had nothing but time," she says. "Every single loop Hestia has experienced is an opportunity for him to reinforce Palus and mold it to his liking."

I frown. "The Integrators allowed that?"

"As long as he doesn't go outside the range of his Great City, they don't care what he does with it," Versa says with a shrug, although I notice Gheraa looking a little uncomfortable. I raise an eyebrow at him, and he shakes his head in an "I'll tell you later" sort of way.

"So the entire city is dangerous," I say.

Versa nods. "We don't know how the loop works, but we know that some things persist across the loops," she says. "That includes the changes he makes to his city."

It makes a lot of sense, given what I know. Hestia's loops can only reset things as far as the Firmament of a given object or person remembers it—it's the reason there are so many anomalies, the reason some things persist through the loops. Some forms of damage or change, however, are so complete that its Firmament no longer remembers what it's supposed to be.

Teluwat uses Assimilation to fold things together in ways that should be impossible. More than that, though, the effect we've been seeing has to be him using Assimilation temporally. He integrates the past and the present so that his changes persist across the loops.

Which means he's had more than 300 loops to rewrite his Great City to his liking.

The result, according to Versa, is a city that's practically alive. Every building and structure within the swamp city of Palus can rearrange and alter itself to make moving through it an impossibility. She's seen buildings merge together into massive walls, seen the streets rearrange themselves to direct travelers away from Teluwat's secrets. She's seen enormous trees collapse into swarms of biting insects while the floor turns into a sticky sludge that makes movement impossible.

"I've even seen the whole thing turn into Firmament," she adds with a grimace. I stare at her.

"Firmament constructs?" I ask, trying to imagine an entire city turning into pure energy. She just nods.

"When I tried to Phaseslip through the walls to get to Teluwat, it all just kept phase with me," she explains. "Made it impossible to just move through the city the way I normally would. I think it's a recent change, too. My notes don't say anything about it." 𝕗𝐫𝚎𝗲𝘄𝐞𝕓𝐧𝕠𝘃𝕖𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝚖

She grimaces slightly as she speaks, reaching down to rub one of her shins in discomfort. I narrow my eyes.

"You made it work anyway, though," I say.

Versa blinks at me, surprised. "Yes," she says. "I have some stealth-related skills that prevented Palus from keeping phase with me. How did you...?"

I nod at where she's rubbing her shins. "Were you using Phaseslip when he did that to you?"

Versa pauses. "I don't know," she says. "I didn't make a note of that part. But... probably, yes."

"It was a trap, then," I mutter, half to myself.

Phaseslip turns its user into Firmament, and Gheraa's said it himself—anything made purely out of Firmament is uniquely vulnerable to Concept-based attacks. That includes Rhoran's parasitism, even if I haven't directly encountered that yet.

Apparently, that also applies to Talents themselves.

That, in particular, is interesting to me. I turn that thought over in my mind. I'll need a bit more practice with Anchoring, but...

I might be able to do something with that knowledge. Teluwat isn't exactly using Assimilation as intended—I already know that in a direct contest, my Anchoring is going to beat out his Assimilation.

That sparks the seed of a plan.

It does make things more complicated, though. Especially since Gheraa is made out of Firmament and is therefore uniquely vulnerable to what Teluwat can do. I turn to eye him for a moment, and he shifts uncomfortably under my gaze.

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"What?" he asks.

"Maybe you should sit this one out?" I suggest.

"Wha—absolutely not!" Gheraa glares at me, offended. "You think I'm going to get rewritten by Teluwat, of all people?"

"You were worried about it when you first came back, weren't you?" I point out. He falters at that.

"Yeah, well," he mumbles. "I changed my mind."

I raise an eyebrow. "You can still help me out, you know," I say. "I'm going to need practice with Anchoring. If you prove you can resist that, you can come along to Palus. Otherwise, it might be best if you sit out."

Gheraa hesitates, clearly conflicted for some reason, but he eventually nods. "You do realize your Anchoring is harder to resist than his Assimilation, right?"

I shrug. "I don't want to risk you, Gheraa."

At that, he just nods quietly, looking away. Versa watches all of this with a raised eyebrow of her own, then turns to Ahkelios. "Your friends are interesting," she says. "And slightly less terrifying now, I suppose."

Ahkelios laughs. "Tell me about it," he says.

I ignore them, and instead, launch into a plan that should cover the basics of what we need—getting through Palus's defenses and into Teluwat's lair, retrieving Guard and his son, and hopefully getting rid of Teluwat in the process.

With how he's aligned himself against us and the sheer versatility of Assimilation, there's not going to be much room for error.

When we're done, Versa gets up to leave, but hesitates before she does.

"There's one more thing," she says quietly. When I look up at her, she takes a deep breath. "The Tears are getting worse. A lot worse. Normally you couldn't get us Trialgoers to work together if our lives depended on it, but right now almost everyone's banded together just to stop the Tears from spreading."

"How bad are they?" I ask, immediately on alert. I've known they were getting bad, but I haven't done much exploration of Hestia myself lately. I have noticed more and more strange flashes and flickers each time I watch the world rewind, though. If every one of those is a Tear, we're in trouble.

"Bad," Versa says grimly. "They're getting bigger and harder to deal with. Even when we close them, they come back bigger. I'm not sure how much longer we can hold out, and they're starting to threaten the Great Cities. The only one of us that can permanently deal with a Tear is..."

Versa grimaces, like she doesn't want to say it. "Naru," she admits after a moment.

That's unexpected, I admit. But good on him.

"Something about his Inspirations help him deal with them, we think," Versa continues. I say nothing—I'm reasonably sure it might have something to do with the Interface seed I planted in him instead, but I can't exactly do that for all of Hestia's Trialgoers. "But he can't be everywhere at once."

"Neither can I," I say. "I can try, but..."

To my surprise, Versa shakes her head. "I'm not sure how much you can help," she says. "Even if you close this one permanently, new Tears are opening all the time, faster than we can track them. We've started having to recruit from our cities just to deal with them, and you can imagine how that goes."

Her mandibles are cinched with distaste. I tilt my head. "You were against that, I take it?"

"I might take pleasure in battle and money, but I do not take pleasure in needless deaths." Versa levies a deadpan look at me.

"Right." I close my eyes, thinking. She's right—as much as I might be able to help, if Tear formation itself is accelerating, that's only going to delay the inevitable. It's possible the reason its accelerating is because of all my deaths, but somehow I doubt that's what's going on. All my resets have been short and back-to-back, not the kind of extensive reset that might cause greater damage to the Heart.

It's just reaching its limit, after all this time. I can see it in the cracks all around us. The increased mastery of Temporal Link tells me in no uncertain terms that we're on the verge of something irreversible.

"I'll help out where I can," I say. "I can't promise more than that. But you weren't looking for that, were you?"

"I want to know how long you think your Trial will take," Versa says. "Because this is it, isn't it? There aren't going to be any more after this. One way or another..."

"Hestia won't survive another Trial," I agree solemnly. Versa watches me for a moment.

"I'll help you," she says. She digs around in her pockets and retrieves an odd-looking stone—an imbuement stone, I recognize after a moment. There's a skill construct embedded inside it. "We all will. I know you think we're enemies, but none of us want this planet to die."

I eye the stone. "What is this, exactly?"

"A way for you to get in contact with me," she says. She hesitates for a moment, clearly holding something back, and then decides to admit it. "It's also a way for me to get in contact with you. No offense, but trying to find you is ridiculous."

"Fair enough," I say. I examine the stone for a moment, activating Inspect. "It lets you teleport to me too, huh?"

Versa goes pale. "I..."

"Relax," I say. "I don't care. It means you'll be able to get to me if I do need help, and it also means I can get to you. Just have to reverse the polarity."

"I see," Versa says, forcing herself to recover. "That... That's fine. Thank you for your trust."

Evidently uncomfortable, she immediately turns to leave—but before she does, she surprises me by giving us all a small bow.

"Thank you," she says. "All of you."

"Thank you as well," I say. "Really."

Versa seems surprised at that, but she gives me a shy nod, and then vanishes into the underbrush.

A long moment passes.

Gheraa turns to me, deadpan. "That polarity reversal thing was bullshit, wasn't it?"

I grin. "I mean, I probably could reverse engineer it... but this way, she'll think twice about ambushing us."

There's just one more thing to handle before getting back into the Empty City. I pull out the relic the crows gave me and begin channeling Firmament into it.

This thing takes a monstrous amount of Firmament to use. It is, essentially, data on every single Fracture-related event in the entire history of the crow village, and as far as I can tell that includes a lot of subconscious history. To some degree, the entirety of the Fracture itself is mapped out within this thing through sheer proximity—the crows have lived near it for so long that all that residual temporal Firmament has infected them.

In other words, this unassuming crystal is a database that maps out the entirety of Hestia's timeline through the Trials. Not just my own. Every Trial on Hestia, every temporal anomaly... It's all in this thing. That's the reason it takes so much Firmament to parse.

But I've deepened my core. I've created new Temporal Links, recorded the signatures of at least three other past Trialgoers. We're in a prime loop, and as I understand it, that means that in this more than any of the other loops, time is... fuzzy. There's room for it to twist and turn and double into itself. Room for the echoes of the past to worm their way into the present.

Now more than ever, I can use this thing.

I reach into the relic. What I'm looking for isn't just a regular Remnant. It's what Ahkelios was when I first encountered him—the last echo of a Trial. The final moments of a loop.

A temporal crossover. The kind I can reach into and pluck life from, the way I did with Ahkelios.

The relic shivers in my hands, and finally, finally...

It responds.