The chrome blade slid from Kaisen's chest with a soft, wet sigh.
There was no pain—only the final, chilling emptiness as life drained out of him. His vision, rimmed with red, darkened at the edges, and his body crumpled onto the luminous stone.
The sound of impact was dull, almost insignificant.
The Appraiser stood over him, motionless—a featureless statue of polished metal. With mechanical precision, it sheathed its sword.
No triumph or disdain. Just completion.
It reached to its side and retrieved a flask made of the same seamless chrome, cold and impossibly smooth.
Then it bent, gripped Kaisen by the neck, and lifted him as easily as one might lift a child.
The flask touched Kaisen's slack lips, as it's content was poured into his mouth. The liquid inside was clear and cool.
For a fleeting moment—nothing.
Then, agony.
Kaisen convulsed, jerking upright in the Appraiser's grip as a scream tore from his throat. The cool liquid turned molten inside him, his veins igniting in white-hot torment.
It didn't feel like healing. It felt like being reforged.
He felt his chest knit back together, his shattered sternum fusing, the hole through his heart sealing—each process a fresh wave of unbearable pain. The wounds closed without warmth, hissing with the sear of metal branding flesh.
He thrashed helplessly.
Then, it stopped.
The Appraiser released him, and Kaisen dropped to the ground, gasping. His hands flew to his chest. Smooth skin. Whole fabric. No scar.
Only the echo of death in his nerves.
He looked up, wild-eyed and disbelieving. He had died—he knew he had.
The Appraiser kicked his cheap sword toward him. The sound of metal skittering across the floor was too loud in the silence.
One word followed.
Cold. Toneless.
"Again."
---
Confusion clashed with instinct.
He didn't understand. He didn't need to.
He had died—but the sword was there, and the killer waited.
No time for thought. With a strangled cry, Kaisen snatched the blade and lunged.
It was clumsy, desperate. A wild swing, telegraphed by fear.
The Appraiser moved—not fast, not slow—just inevitably.
Kaisen's head left his shoulders before he even finished his step.
Darkness.
Then—the flask. The grip on his neck. The liquid. The fire.
Screams. Resurrection.
The sword before him.
"Again."
He died a third time, trying to dodge.
A fourth, trying to block.
A fifth. A tenth. A twentieth.
Each death came faster than thought, and each rebirth felt longer than eternity.
He'd awaken on the floor, gasping, the Appraiser waiting, flask in hand.
The cycle never faltered.
"Again."
The first forty attempts were meaningless. He achieved nothing. Each fight was a storm, and he—a leaf torn apart in the wind.
Pain became his language. Death, his punctuation.
His body learned pain at the cellular level; his mind eroded under despair. By the forty-first death, something shifted.
Not thought—instinct.
As the Appraiser lunged, Kaisen's arms moved. His sword lifted—not enough, not well, but before the strike.
The mirrored blade split his skull, but in that instant—he reacted.
And that, somehow, mattered.
---
From the periphery, the observers watched.
"He's hopeless," Iris said. Her white hair gleamed against her dark tactical coat, arms folded. Her tone was detached—curious, but unconvinced.
Eros, lounging against a pillar, let out a quiet laugh. "Hopeless implies there was hope. This is… tragic entertainment. A mouse challenging an elephant."
The cycles blurred. Dozens became hundreds.
"He blocked," Iris noted during the two-hundredth attempt. Her tone had softened, curiosity replacing scorn.
"Barely," Eros replied, though his posture had lost its ease. "But yes. That's new."
They became unwilling witnesses—grim scorekeepers of suffering.
"Three seconds that time," Eros murmured. "He's learning to roll with the impact."
"He's reading the lunge now," Iris said later, her voice quiet. "But the feint still kills him."
And so, the commentary marked time where no time existed. Death after death. Thousands of repetitions, each a thread woven into Kaisen's unraveling humanity.
---
The milestones were written in blood.
After hundreds of deaths, Kaisen began to move.
After thousands, he began to fight.
He could dodge—barely. Parry—poorly. Survive—momentarily.
His muscles remembered what his mind could not. His stance hardened. His grip steadied. His fear dulled into calculation.
"No sane man would last this long," Iris muttered.
Eros didn't laugh this time. "No sane man should. But… why does he keep getting up?"
At the forty-two thousandth attempt, everything changed.
Kaisen deflected sixteen strikes before falling, his sword ringing like a desperate heartbeat.
When he collapsed, bleeding from a deep cut across his thigh, the Appraiser approached with the flask.
Kaisen raised a trembling hand. "Give… me that."
The Appraiser paused, then tossed it.
Kaisen caught it, drank, endured the fire, and tossed it back.
No words. No hesitation.
They resumed.
It was an unspoken pact.
Executioner and victim were gone. What remained were two warriors—locked in the cruelest training ever conceived.
---
The numbers became meaningless.
Ten thousand deaths. Twenty. Fifty. A hundred thousand.
Kaisen no longer hesitated.
He moved. He read. He anticipated.
His cheap sword became a seamless extension of him.
He learned to hear the silence before a strike, to feel the tension ripple through the Appraiser's motionless frame.
He stopped surviving and started fighting back.
At the 137,643rd attempt, they were equals.
Steel clashed against mirrored chrome in a storm of sound and light. Their movements were pure instinct, their rhythm perfect—a duet of death.
The chamber trembled with each exchange. Kaisen's clothes hung in tatters, his body a map of half-healed wounds, his eyes burning with something far beyond defiance.
Iris and Eros were standing now, every trace of detachment gone.
"This… this is different," Iris breathed, her hand unconsciously on her sword.
"Yes," Eros said softly. "He's no longer just trying to survive."
Both fighters bled—Kaisen from his ribs, the Appraiser from a crack leaking silvery light.
They didn't stop.
Until—
The Appraiser overextended. A single flaw, a single heartbeat of imbalance.
Kaisen's body moved before his mind could name the opportunity.
His blade pierced the gap, sliding clean through the Appraiser's chest.
A sharp crack rang out. The mirror surface split, spiderwebbing from the wound. The Appraiser shuddered, knees hitting stone, then went still.
A system prompt appeared in Kaisen's vision:
[ You Have Slain Entity: Appraiser ]
Iris exhaled sharply. "Finally."
Eros dragged a hand down his face. "It's… over."
But Kaisen didn't celebrate.
He stood over the fallen being, chest heaving, eyes hollow. There was no joy—only understanding.
He knelt, grabbed the Appraiser and raised it, unhooked the chrome flask from the Appraiser's waist, and forced open its lifeless jaw.
Then he poured the liquid in, and tossed the Appraiser back.
The Appraiser convulsed violently. Cracks sealed. The silvery fluid ceased to leak. It rose again, silent and whole.
A new message blinked before Kaisen's eyes.
[ You are now in the presence of: Appraiser ]
Iris stared, eyes wide. "What… the fuck?"
Eros shook his head, disbelief giving way to something close to awe. "The crazy bastard brought it back."
Kaisen rolled his shoulders, exhaustion and purpose woven into every motion.
He kicked the mirrored sword toward the Appraiser. The blade skidded across the floor, stopping at its feet.
He met its blank gaze, his voice rough but steady—burnished by 137,643 deaths as he gave a single command:
"Again."