The void was cold again.
Hine blinked as her eyes opened to the familiar blackness, her lungs straining for breath that never came. She remembered this version of the loop. The crushing void. It started with silence so loud it rang in her skull, then the inexorable pressure that folded her bones like paper.
She did not scream this time. She just stared into the nothing, letting her mind drift as her ribs cracked inward one by one. She counted them, the way she counted in the fire loops, the ice loops, the abyssal drops. Numbers were the only things that still belonged to her.
One… two… three…
And then it was over. Darkness claimed her again, and the world reset.
The next time was fire. Always fire.
Flames tore across her skin before she even opened her eyes. She heard her own voice break into raw sobs as the inferno consumed her, nerves screaming until they burned away. She could taste the iron of her blood as her throat tore.
Above the roar, Ronova's voice was sharp, distant, amused.
"Still clinging on? Let us see how long before you beg for the end."
Hine's vision blurred. Her hands clawed at the ground, leaving molten streaks of flesh in their wake. She could smell herself burning. It didn't matter anymore. She thought of her sister, of the last time she saw her face, and whispered her name like a prayer before the world blinked out.
Cold.
So cold it cut like knives.
This loop was always worse than fire. The ice crept beneath her skin until her bones felt brittle, cracking with every trembling breath. She tried to move but the frost held her limbs in place like chains.
Her tears froze against her lashes as she whispered, "Not yet. I won't stop. I can't."
The ice tightened, a cruel reminder of her helplessness. Her heart slowed, the beat growing sluggish, weak, until it simply stopped.
Darkness. Again.
The abyss.
She hated the abyss.
The endless fall with no ground, no walls, no sound. Just the infinite drop and the terrible weightlessness that left her stomach clawing at her throat. She screamed until her voice was gone, until her mind began to break from the nothingness that stretched forever.
Sometimes she wished the bottom would just come faster, even though she knew what awaited her when it did... the sickening crunch, the twisted pain that never truly killed her until the void decided it was time.
The loops blurred.
Fire.
Ice.
Abyss.
Void.
Crushing gravity.
Drowning in ink-thick waters.
Being torn apart by creatures that didn't exist in any reality she remembered.
Ronova was merciless. Every death was creative, tailored to strip another layer of resistance, another shard of dignity. Every reset brought her back just alive enough to suffer again.
And still, she endured.
On the edge of another loop, she caught a glimpse of Naberius, always watching from somewhere beyond the horizon of her agony. His expression was unreadable, his posture calm, but his gaze carried something heavy. Regret. Or maybe expectation.
"You said I would have infinite lives," she whispered, her voice hoarse.
"And you will," Naberius said softly. "Until you either give up… or prove you never will."
She wanted to hate him for that. She wanted to hate both of them. But she didn't. Hatred would burn too quickly. Hatred would make her collapse.
She clung to the thought of her sister instead. The memory of her laughter, the way she used to hold her hand on stormy nights. That was her anchor. Her reason.
The rulers watched her quietly.
Even among the cruelest, the spectacle had begun to shift from entertainment to something else. Whispers rippled through the courts of Teyvat, silent questions no one dared voice aloud.
How is she still standing?
Why hasn't her will broken?
Is she human, or something else entirely?
Ronova sneered every time she heard those whispers. She would silence them with another brutal loop, another creative display of her power.
If Hine bled, she bled more.
If she screamed, she was silenced in worse ways.
If she resisted, she was crushed harder.
And yet, Hine rose every time. Sometimes broken, sometimes trembling, sometimes sobbing into her own hands... but she rose.
One loop, she woke in a chamber of mirrors. The reflections showed her deaths, every one of them, repeating endlessly.
Ronova's voice echoed from all directions.
"Look at you. Weak. Fragile. Pointless. Why do you fight for a sister who does not even know you live? Why not surrender, Hine? Why not let me end you for good?"
Hine stared at her own reflection... blistered, broken, crying... and for the first time, she smiled.
"I fight because she is out there," she said. "And because you can't take that from me."
Ronova's rage ignited.
The next deaths were worse. They were designed not just to hurt but to humiliate, to shatter. Every possible pain a mortal body could endure, she suffered. Every way a mind could bend, hers bent but never broke.
Loop after loop.
Until even time lost meaning.
But there was a change.
A subtle one, barely noticeable at first.
Every time Hine returned, she rose a little faster. Her breaths steadied sooner. Her hands trembled less. It was not strength, not yet, but it was something deeper — a quiet, unyielding resolve that terrified those who saw it.
Even Ronova hesitated when their eyes met between loops, though she would never admit it aloud.
"You will break," she hissed one cycle, dragging Hine by the hair through a battlefield of shattered corpses. "Everything breaks."
"Then I will break a thousand times," Hine whispered, blood dripping from her mouth. "Until there is nothing left to break. And still… I will keep walking."
The montage of death never stopped.
The rulers kept watching.
The world kept spinning.
And Hine, caught in the endless rhythm of pain and rebirth, began to change. Something deep inside her.... deeper than flesh, deeper than soul... hardened into something unbreakable.
Not strength.
Not yet.
But the seed of it.
Waiting.