Die. Respawn. Repeat.

I'm met with a familiar scene when the Tear finishes materializing around me. A lizard points a blaster at another one of her species, someone that looks pretty much like he could be her brother. It trembles in her grip.

"I'm sorry," she says. The pain in her voice is real, but so is the determination. The certainty that she has no other choice.

"Don't do this," the other lizard pleads. "Please, we can figure this out together! Haven't we always?"

"We can't," she says, squeezing her eyes shut.

"How do you know?!" he cries.

"Because we already tried." Her grip on the blaster tightens. Her voice becomes a little more manic. "You can't grow. You're weak. You hold me back every time, no matter how we try to get it done. I need to get out, and I can't—I can't do it with you."

"What makes you think you can do it without him?" I ask curiously, keeping my voice deliberately light. I ignore the way she jumps, the way the other lizard slumps against the wall in something like relief, though he gives me a wary glance. "No, wait, I know what you're going to say. The Interface says so. Kill that guy enough times and you'll have a way to get out of the loops, right?"

She whirls on me, eyes wide in fear and guilt, pointing her blaster at my chest. "Who are you? How did you get in here?" she hisses.

I can practically hear her heart pounding in her chest. I glance around at my surroundings. The vision I had when I used Temporal Link on the Guilty Chimera was faded at the edges, with almost everything except the two lizards barely recognizable. The Tear, on the other hand, shows me every detail in perfect clarity.

This place is a home. It's a bit of a slapdash one, admittedly; the walls look like they're barely holding together, and the shelves and beds make for a crass imitation of the Firmament-imbued furnishings I've seen the crows use. The Firmament imbued into the "beds"—if they can be called that—looks to be barely enough to hold them together, let alone dampen the feeling of lying on a bed of sharp sticks.

None of that changes what it is, though. There are pictures on the walls that depict younger versions of the two lizards, along with two older ones I assume are their parents.

"I asked you a question," the lizard woman says. "You shouldn't—you can't be in here. This is ours."

"Not much of an 'ours', considering what you're doing," I say, nodding at her blaster. She flinches in response.

"You don't understand!" she shouts. "I have to do this! I have to—"

I walk over to the other lizard, ignoring her for the moment. She seems thrown off enough by my presence that she's not attacking. She could barely convince herself to kill her brother in the first place, and my abject dismissal of her isn't helping. I can feel in her Firmament how thrown she is.

"You're siblings, aren't you?" I ask. "What are your names?"

"Don't tell him," she says. Her brother glances between me and his sister, then swallows fractionally.

"We are. I'm Reyfa," he says. "She's... Her name is Eyka. Don't hurt us, please. She doesn't know what she's saying. She's still young, she—"

"Don't worry." I sigh, glancing between the two, and then frown when I realize Eyka's still pointing the blaster at me. "Put that thing down, will you? You're going to take someone's eye out."

"You haven't told me who you are," Eyka says, still trembling.

"He got into our domain," Reyfa says tiredly. "That means he's stronger than both of us combined. That blaster isn't going to do anything to him. Put it down, sis."

"I..." Eyka hesitates. Her eyes dart between the two of us for a moment, and then she squeezes her eyes shut again; I can tell what she's about to do even before she does it. "It doesn't matter! I can just try again!"

She fires. A bolt of Firmament-imbued plasma fires toward her brother, who I can see flinching in fear. He looks certain he's about to die. 𝘧𝑟𝑒𝑒𝘸𝘦𝘣𝑛𝑜𝘷𝑒𝓁.𝘤𝘰𝓂

I reach out calmly and catch the bolt, watching as it fizzes out in my palm.

"Put it down," I say again.

This time, she doesn't argue.

She does throw the blaster to the other side of the room, then curl up by the wall and start crying, her shoulders shaking as the weight of what she tried to do sinks in. She throws up more than once.

To my surprise, her brother moves to comfort her. I consider joining in, but... no.

This might take a little while.

Once Eyka's calmed down enough, I manage to extract their story from them both and share my own. Their situation is bizarrely unique among Integrated planets—their species, it seems, has a natural ability to create something not unlike a dungeon. It's a shared dimensional space that any of their kin or bonded mates can access. That innate ability meant Trialgoers from their cycle could call for help.

Unfortunately, that ability interacts poorly with the temporal barrier around Hestia. Reyfa is trapped within their domain, unable to leave except into Hestia with his sister, and he's reset along with everything else when a loop is triggered.

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Still, it explains how Eyka was able to stay in contact with her brother. What it doesn't explain is what she said about the Interface telling her that killing her brother will strengthen her enough to survive the loops. The Integrators are almost never that direct. Either her overseer is particularly violent, or...

I grimace in disgust.

The Integrators would have known about that ability prior to Integration. They would have had time to come up with a countermeasure. And what better countermeasure could there be than intentionally driving a wedge between those with the Interface and those without? I doubt they use the same strategy for every Trial, but they don't need to.

All they need to do is make sure that the gap between Trialgoers and those that would help them slowly widens. Make the prospective Trialgoers feel like they were being held back by the others, like they would better serve as credits than as allies. Even if it doesn't work in all cases, it's clearly worked in this one.

"The first thing you need to know is that the Interface lies," I tell them both. Eyka clenches her fists when I say the words, and her brother hugs her close, as if to calm her. He's forgiven her remarkably easily.

After what he's told me, though, I understand.

Both their parents are gone. All they have is each other. And as much as I could never imagine even thinking of doing what Eyka did... well, it's not like I don't have my own baggage in that department.

"You're saying I would've killed him for nothing," she whispers. "I would've killed him and kept killing him and it would've done nothing."

"You might get some credits," I say quietly. "But you get credits when you push yourself. You get them when you fight for your life. The greater the risk, the greater the reward."

"And..." Eyka swallows. She knows what I'm getting at. "There's no risk here."

"I watched this happen," I say. "Reyfa never fights back."

That knowledge only seems to hurt her even more. Reyfa shakes his head.

"Don't push her any more, please," he says quietly. "She's still young. I became an adult only last cycle, and she has four more cycles to go."

Children. The Integrators brought in children as Trialgoers in this cycle. I force myself to suppress the anger and nod tightly, taking a deep breath.

"And she has to face the Trial by herself." I sigh. Reyfa might be able to help her, but after a few more loops she's going to accelerate ahead of him, and they'll have a different problem on their hands. "I'm guessing it's been hard."

"I died a lot," Eyka whispers. "Never got much credits for it. I thought... the Interface said it was because I wasn't fighting hard enough. But I was, I swear."

On second thought, her overseer might also be a sadist. I frown in consideration.

"You'll get more credits if you train before you try to fight a monster again," I say. "Or do some sparring. Something that pushes your limits in the direction of each stat category. You have a domain and a sparring partner—that'll push you farther than killing will, no matter what the Interface claims."

"Will that be enough?" Eyka asks quietly. She seems mostly subdued now. "You said you're a Trialgoer on Hestia like me. You showed me with that skill of yours. Doesn't that mean I... that we fail?"

I eye her and consider my response. "Technically," I agree after a moment. "But maybe not."

I was able to extract Ghost at the end of his timestream, after all. There's no reason I wouldn't be able to do the same for Eyka.

No reason other than time, that is. There's no guarantee I'll be able to find them within the limits of my loops, and even if I could, what Ghost has isn't really complete. Not until he finds and absorbs one of his Remnants. Eyka would have to do the same, and her brother isn't even in the loops, which means I can't pull him along. I don't even know what would happen to him if I managed to bring Eyka through.

But I do have an idea. As risky as it is...

"There's something you can try," I say eventually. "Have you heard about phase shifts?"

I leave them with a set of strict instructions, both on how to trigger their first phase shift and to always be by one another so they're ready when it happens. As far as I can tell, they're both surprisingly close to it. I tell them exactly what to expect and what to do when they're consolidating that shift.

If they're lucky, they'll be able to replicate something similar to what happened with Tarin when I hit phase shift. Hopefully, neither of them will have to get close to death for it to work.

Technically, Tarin only managed to join the loops because the Interface tried to kill him and left a shard within him when he recovered. Even then, it was a shard I needed to beat into submission during my own phase shift.

What they need to do is something like the reverse. Reyfa needs to trigger his phase shift, and Eyka needs to contribute some of her Firmament when that happens. Because she has the Interface embedded within her core, that should mean that a small piece of the Interface will accompany it... which means Reyfa can integrate it, as long as he's on the lookout for it.

Nothing's certain, of course. I haven't exactly had the chance to test this before. But they'll be able to get a feel for it when Eyka hits her first shift, and hopefully be ready by the time it's Reyfa's turn.

Just in case, I leave a small piece of a Thread of Evolution looped around them both before the Tear fully dissolves. My meeting with Ghost tells me that what I do in these Tears matters, so... well, hopefully that will make a difference.

In the moment before the Tear fades, I notice something strange. There's an imprint in space not unlike the one I saw when I entered the crack in time in the Fracture—the one that led me to Inveria. There's that the same impression of a hole that created this crack in time, a hole that looks like someone tore time open with a fist.

In fact, it almost looks like it's the same hole. I frown and take a step forward to examine it further, but before I can, it's gone. The Sewers are back around me, the valve waiting innocuously just ahead.

"That was weird," I mutter.

Ahkelios blinks. "What was?"

I shake my head and walk up to the valve. "Nothing we can do anything about. Just thought I saw that crack in time again," I say. "Everyone ready?"

Everyone nods.

[Align the Sewers: 3/3]

And just like that, something in the air changes. I feel a surge of Firmament—

—and almost immediately forget about the crack, because to my alarm, the amount of saturation recorded by the Interface begins to tick up, even without any of us using any skills.

[Firmament saturation: 72%]

And it's moving rapidly.

[Firmament saturation: 76%]

"We have to get to the Seed," I say. Armor bursts through my skin and wraps around me as I call on the Generator Form. "Now. This way!"

[Firmament saturation: 80%]

This time, the Sewers don't try to stop me, but that only worries me more.

[Firmament saturation: 84%]

I push myself even faster, hoping against hope that we can get there in time.