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This chapter ended up kind of long as well, but it was a fun one to write, so I didn't mind letting it get away from me a bit.

There's going to be 3 chapters in total this week, and probably the next one as well. So that's Monday / Wednesday / Friday. Eventually I'll finish this damn editing, but it's like pulling out teeth, I swear.

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Chapter Two-Hundred-and-Eighty-Five

Adam hovered in the air as the enormous panda pulled itself high enough to rest its chin on the edge of the island, right next to Sprite’s lab.

The panda stared at Adam, before slowly panning its gaze across the buildings.

“WOOPS!” its loud voice blared. The sound was dopey like it belonged to a fat cartoon character.

Adam was glad he didn’t have eardrums anymore, because its voice slapped into him like a shockwave, pushing him backwards in the air.

The panda pulled more of its body into view, but as it did, it slowly shrank down, until it was able to climb onto the island.

Adam gaped at the absurd sight of the ten-metre-tall panda as it walked across the garden to where he hovered in place. Whoever had designed it had gotten the anatomy completely wrong, because the panda’s arms and legs were extremely long, while its chubby round torso was normal sized.

“Do you even know how difficult it is to get the dimensions of this body right?” the panda asked him.

It didn’t sound anything like the voices Chaos had used before, but Adam knew there was no one else it could be.

“Why did you come back?” Adam asked as the panda continued to shrink, its legs and arms retracting like periscopes until it was just two metres tall and had the right proportions.

“We got interrupted last time, didn’t we?” Chaos replied. “I told you not to do it, but you know what they say: curiosity killed the cat.”

“But satisfaction brought it back,” Adam added.

“What?” the panda asked confused. Even though it was close to the same size as Adam now, it continued to shrink down even further, stopping only when it was the size of a teddy bear.

“That’s the full quote,” Adam explained, looking down at his patron.

“I didn’t realise there was more to it.”

“A lot of people don’t,” Adam said. “Everybody basically uses that saying incorrectly.”

The panda pinched the bridge of its snout. “Do you even understand how often I use that saying? This has really ruined my week.”

“Are you making me collect cores in order to make a Godstone?” Adam asked bluntly, changing the subject.

Chaos pulled a balloon pipe out from behind his fluffy black ear and stuck it in his mouth, before inhaling deeply and releasing a sigh of bubbles instead of smoke.

“That’s not quite what we’re doing,” he said. Instead of elaborating, he told Adam, “Don’t use the challenge stone on Emelia or Becky.”

“Why not?” Adam asked.

“Because it’s what she wants you to do, obviously.”

“She’s going to use them against me if I let them live. She’s going to keep torturing them just to spite me.”

“She already has. You can’t change that.”

Adam frowned. “If you want to persuade me, you’ll need a better reason.”

“Don’t get pissy with me, young man,” the panda scolded him, pointing up at Adam with its pipe.

“I know you like to joke around, but you’ve gotta understand why I need to do this.”

“Frankly, I don’t care what happens to your friends. You have to accept that this universe is kaput. The Flayed Lady has made sure every player alive has a strong desire to kill you, even if she’s not in direct control of them any longer and can’t invite them up to her freaky penthouse for some R&R. That kind of mind-fuckery doesn’t go away. It stains the soul.”

“So, what? I’m supposed to just wait until she uses my friends against me?”

“Yes.”

“Fuck that,” Adam said and flew off towards the player house.

Before he could travel more than ten metres, he was suddenly enveloped in a bubble and unable to go any further.

“Knock this shit off,” Adam told Chaos.

“I’ll keep you here until the next stage begins if you won’t listen to me,” the panda replied, waddling up to where Adam was trapped in the bubble.

“At least give me more than just some vague bullshit as a reason for not saving Emelia or Beck from more suffering,” Adam pleaded.

“Have a look at your own reaction, Adam,” Chaos told him calmly. “Those kinds of emotions are exactly why the Flayed Lady is doing this to you.”

Adam sagged within his bubble and it floated down towards the ground and popped, releasing him.

“I don’t want them to have memories of me hurting them,” Adam admitted. “I don’t want them to be fed traumatic memories if I give them a scale of remembrance.”

“Too late for that,” Chaos told him.

Adam’s legs gave out from under him and he sat down on the cobblestones. “Even though I knew it wouldn’t be the same, I was hoping to give them back their memories of me. Emelia, Beck, Kat, as many of them as possible.”

“You know it wouldn’t be the same, so why bother?” the panda asked him, patting Adam on the head.

“Because they asked me to.”

Panda snapped the fingers of his right paw, somehow, and they were suddenly sitting in red velour chairs in the back row of a small cinema.

“I don’t usually do this, because dwelling on the past is a form of madness I don’t endorse, but I’ll do this for you, Adam.”

He looked at the panda, who had to stand atop his chair to see the projection screen. “What are you talking about?” Adam asked.

Chaos pointed at the screen. “Just watch.”

A countdown in black and white appeared and the lights in the ceiling dimmed until it was the only thing he could see.

Then Adam appeared inside his player house, wielding a sword and shield while practising against the target dummy. Shitbox floated next to him.

“Why are the Trials so intent on ‘fairness’?” Adam’s onscreen double asked.

Shitbox floated only a couple metres from him and started to answer, just as Adam blinked and rammed his sword right through the guiding eye.

“[Urrr—]” the cube screamed, before a very familiar explosion followed.

Time froze just as a dimensional shard from the dead cube was about to tear through Adam’s thigh, and suddenly the panda who stood next to him appeared in the scene, redirecting the shard so that it would collide directly with Adam’s heart instead.

“It’s always so weird to see myself on camera,” Chaos remarked.

“I had pieced together that you were responsible for me obtaining my looping power, but I didn’t realise that you were right there when it happened,” Adam said.

“Even though no one detected me, everyone still knew…” the panda replied with a disappointed sigh.

The scene skipped forward to Adam falling out of the apple tree in stage one and being speared to death by a slime.

“Is this a highlight reel of my deaths?” Adam asked in dismay. “How is that supposed to cheer me up?”

Chaos handed him a large soda cup with a straw and a box of popcorn. “How about now?”

Adam sighed and took the snacks, although he just put them on the seat next to him.

The scene skipped again, this time to Adam’s death in stage five during his third loop. As he bled out from his afflictions caused by Ilya’s many spears embedded in his body, Ilya himself was eaten to death by the corrosive slime that Adam had fired at him.

“I won’t lie, that was a pretty cool moment,” Chaos commented.

Instead of skipping to Adam’s next death immediately, it next showed Mórrígan in the Floating Sea, fighting against the Voidspawn Apex. She was clearly much stronger than Emelia had been, despite using the same build, but even with that she was no match for the ever-adapting boss. Her fate was nearly identical to Emelia’s, as she was pierced through the mouth by a hair-like tentacle, before it went all the way down into her body, killing her.

“Who became the time-looper instead of her?” Adam asked.

“Not someone you know,” Chaos replied. “But fun fact about that death. She worshipped the Tome Keeper in that loop, because he was made available to her thanks to her encounter with you. The Tome Keeper wanted you to worship him, and he was clearly pissed that she got you killed, so he sent her on that errand to go die to the Voidspawn, just like you and Emelia.”

The scene skipped forward to that moment, but instead of showing how they had both died in his fourth loop against the same enemy, the panda clicked a remote it was suddenly holding, and the Voidspawn’s chamber in Alepheria’s secret lab was replaced with the interior of the dimensional tavern, where Gladwyn and Beck were sitting opposite each other, both of them holograms.

“They’re dead…” Gladwyn muttered in disbelief.

“Guess it’s up to us to become time-loopers then,” Beck told his friend with a reassuring grin.

“In case you’re wondering,” Chaos said, “Gladwyn is the one who gets the Self-Devouring Eye in the end. They both made it to the Singing City though, which is impressive, considering they were meant to die before stage six according to that universe’s seed. Also, yes, Gladwyn looks for you in the following loop but can’t find you, of course. Then he meets up with Beck, Emelia, and James again, and the four of them make it to the Singing City together.”

Adam smiled. “Even if that’s all a lie, thank you. That does make me feel better.”

“Well, hold on to your hat and goggles, because next comes the part I like to call ‘Adam’s depression arc’. It’s not a great viewing experience.”

The next scene showed Adam dying twice in the challenge arena against Hiroshi Sakurai, during his first proper Fool attempt. He had managed to kill Hiroshi in that fight with a corrosive bear hug, which Chaos was thoroughly impressed by.

“That psycho survived thirty loops in a row before that,” he explained. “And then he dies to you like that after stage one. Now that’s cinema.”

Adam laughed.

The next scene showed Adam jumping off of Interim Island following the second stage.

“It’s not actually that difficult to patch the hole you leave behind when you die,” Chaos said as the scene continued to play while Adam’s lifeless body fell like a ragdoll through a seemingly endless expanse of clouds.

“It’s just kind of irritating having to fix your deaths when you don’t even die in a meaningful way. If each of your deaths had happened after taking on some boring by-the-numbers time-looper, then I wouldn’t have bothered to sick the System after you, but it pissed me off to see you waste my beautiful gift like that. If you’re gonna die, at least make it cool. That’s all I’m asking.”

“Noted,” Adam replied.

Out of nowhere, the clouds themselves formed into a maw that swallowed up Adam’s ragdolling dead body, before the screen went black.

“Oh right, I forgot I made the clouds do that,” the panda remarked, scratching his left ear with his paw like he was a cat. “There was an issue early on where players who had cheat death were reviving after passing the automatic kill zone in the clouds below Interim Island. So, I gave the bottom-most clouds sentience to ensure no one can escape the island between stages.”

There was a lot to unpack in that sentence, but Adam instead decided to ask, “When I got my Loop Shard, how many times had the universes looped by then?”

“I’m not sure there’s a point in me telling you,” Chaos said.

“Why not?”

“Alright, you’ve convinced me. It was the one-hundredth-and-twenty-third run of the Trials of Defiance. One-two-three, get it?”

Adam reeled back in his seat.

That explains why Yenna said it was more times than she could count.

I can’t imagine what it must be like having the memory of so many lives.

Most of what I saw from the scale of remembrance is gone. I just remember the highlights, but thinking back on those visions, over a hundred seems about right. The majority of those loops just blended together into one.

I wonder just how many time-loopers every universe must’ve seen, if so many loops have happened. And still, none of them beat the final stage…

Chaos sighed. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you. You’re having an existential moment right now, just like I knew you would.”

“It’s just…”

“Yep, makes you feel insignificant, doesn’t it?” Chaos replied.

Adam nodded slowly.

The panda had the remote out again and with a click the ‘movie’ continued with Adam’s seventh loop. It showed him using the visiting stone before ending up in Nwetrou’s deep ocean.

As Adam died to Nwetrou’s unkind gaze, Chaos tweaked the remote to zoom in on a tiny black-and-white angler fish with a red glow-bulb on the dangly bit in front of its hideous face.

“That’s me,” Chaos said. “That blind fat-ass didn’t even notice me down there.”

The panda clicked the remote to speed through four identical deaths where Adam jumped over the edge of Interim Island, before getting to the twelfth loop where he was forcefully reset by the guiding eye. He was told by the System that if he died before stage five again, he would lose all his memories and progression.

“That’s still in place, in case you were wondering,” Chaos remarked. “I can’t turn it off, because the Sovereign Oculus knows you might beat the Trials thanks to my gift, so it wants to slow you down by keeping this rule in place. It knows you’re your own worst enemy, so it is quite fond of this limitation we placed on you. Since I can’t give a good reason to turn it off, it stays on. That’s my very friendly way of telling you to lock the fuck in, Adam. No more self-sabotaging bullshit.”

“Understood, loud and clear,” he replied.

“You humans always say you won’t do something, and then you’ll turn around and do it anyway.”

Adam couldn’t really deny that, but he would do anything in his power to not die before the altar and receive a punishment he couldn’t recover from.

The thirteenth death showed Adam fighting off the slug dragons summoned by the destruction of the cloud leviathan.

Chaos stomped his panda feet into the seat of his red velour chair.

“Now that’s what I’m talking about! This is how you die in style!”

“I would’ve preferred to get out of that one alive.”

“You definitely could have, if you hadn’t let the leviathan grow to its full size,” Chaos told him. “Your mistake was waiting for your combo to recharge. This thing is like a weed. You’ve gotta exterminate it early and be persistent so it doesn’t regrow.”

Adam kept that advice in mind, since there was an exceedingly high chance of encountering a cloud leviathan again in the next stage.

After his death in the tower of mirrors, the scene switched to the interior of the tavern where the holograms of Beck, Kat, Lasse, and Seo-Yoon sat together. None of them said anything, and the sight made Adam’s heart ache.

“Who became the time-looper? Beck?”

Chaos nodded. “Kat and Lasse both made it all the way to the Flesh Prison, but Beck was the only one who survived it. You’ll be happy to know that in their universe, which is playing out right now, Beck has been able to survive the Forbidden Altar with Gladwyn. They’ve gotten in contact with several of your friends as well, and it seems like Nwetrou has even given up trying to harass that universe since the Flayed Lady is no longer goading him on.”

“What about that Hercal guy who was responsible for my death?” Adam asked.

“Beck killed him in stage fifteen.”

The screen dimmed and the lights came on in the cinema.

“That’s it for the show,” Chaos said. “But come back in an aeon or ten and I’ll put on the sequel. Hopefully it’ll be a lot less depressing.”

With a snap of his bear fingers, they were back in the garden next to where Yenna, Meilo, and Parvillo had been frozen in time. The heart spire tree had grown almost half a metre in the interim, since Meilo’s spell had continued uninterrupted.

“Huh,” Chaos remarked as he saw that her spell was still circling the sapling. “Apparently I can’t pause that magic.”

Adam’s mind immediately started to churn through ideas about how to potentially use that to his advantage.

“Stop that,” Chaos told him, bapping him on the leg with his tiny arm.

“Why did you turn Yenna into a wasp?” Adam asked as he looked at the musician. “My true sight shows that she’s really a mermaid.”

“I’m not a fan of fish,” the panda replied. “I prefer wasps.”

“But she’s your child.”

“She’s not my child,” Chaos replied. “Only the moths are mine. The rest are just thematically improved for the roles they’re playing.”

“That’s… pretty fucked up,” Adam said.

“Okay, that was a lie, Yenna is the only one that wasn’t originally an insect kin. Promise.”

“Why does she turn into a humanoid wasp when she receives a vanity though? Shouldn’t she turn into her true form?”

“Buddy, I’m not going to let a siren wander around on Interim Island all willy-nilly. She’s already trouble enough as is with that damn memory song I can’t get her to forget.”

“She said it was taught to her, but she doesn’t know from where.”

“And thank fuck for that,” Chaos remarked. “The Absolute of song is a real piece of work. Why do you think I had to make him difficult to worship?”

“Do you mean the Keening?” Adam asked.

“I’ve clearly said too much,” Chaos replied. Then with a snap of his panda paw, he vanished and time immediately unpaused.

Yenna and Meilo both staggered in place, and Parvillo spun around to look at Adam.

“Don’t ask,” he said.

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