The return was not a shock anymore. It was a dull, grinding inevitability, like a rusted gear in a broken clock snapping back into place. The manacle. The mud. The chain. Kael's back. Elric's prayers. The script was so deeply engraved upon his soul that Adam felt he could recite it in his sleep. Perhaps he had, in some other loop.
Cycle 32. The number echoed in the silent, frozen cavern of his mind. He had survived for eleven days in the last loop. He had built a community. He had won. And the universe, or the Spell, or whatever cruel god governed this place, had simply erased the board. It wasn't a test. It was a cage. A cage with no door, and he was the only one who knew he was in it.
A new kind of horror settled in, colder and more profound than the fear of teeth and claws. It was the horror of absolute, inescapable futility.
He stood in the line, his body whole, his mind a scarred landscape of a thousand deaths. The memory of the silent, peaceful unmaking—the one that hadn't even come from a monster—was somehow more terrifying than the Bog-Leech. It meant the rules were arbitrary. There was no logic to appease, no challenge to overcome. He was a rat in a maze where the walls could change at the whim of an unseen hand.
*Log, Cycle 32. Primary Hypothesis Nullified. Long-term survival is not the escape condition. The regression is externally triggered, non-violent, and arbitrary. New working theory: The regression is tied to an external timer or the completion of a hidden objective. Survival is merely a means to extend the experimental period.*
The thought was a cold ember. If survival wasn't the key, then what was? He had no answers. Only questions, and an endless supply of time to be tortured by them.
As the line trudged forward, a plan formed in the frigid emptiness of his resolve. It was not a plan for escape. It was a plan for data. If he couldn't break out, he would learn the dimensions of his prison. He would map its every cruelty, its every possible permutation of suffering. And he would use the only tools he had: the bodies and the lives of the people around him.
He looked at Kael, not as a man, but as a source of kinetic force. He looked at Elric as a sensor for fear-based reactions. Lyssa was a repository of resilience, Rorke a module of basic combat programming. They were not people. They were components. Variables in a grand, bloody equation he was doomed to keep solving.
This time, after the rebellion—a perfectly executed, emotionless affair that left the guards dead and the slaves looking to him with a familiar, desperate hope—he gave the command.
"We run," he said, his voice flat, carrying none of the inspiring fervor of previous cycles. "Away from the path. Deep into the jungle. Stick together. Your lives depend on the group's survival."
He didn't elaborate. He didn't paint a picture of hope. He stated a fact. They followed, because in the face of the unknown, any command from someone who seemed to know the rules was better than none.
He led them on a brutal, direct route, one he knew would avoid the immediate predators but lead them into the territory of the night-walkers. He needed to observe the hunters again. He needed to see if their patterns changed, if the presence of the patterned commander was a constant. He was buying time, not for their lives, but for his observations.
They ran for hours, until the light began to fail. He guided them not to the safe crevice, but to a different location—a small, defensible hollow surrounded by the pulsating, bioluminescent fungi he knew the night-walkers used.
"We make our stand here," Adam announced, his tone leaving no room for argument.
Kael looked around, his brow furrowed. "This place is… open. And these glowing things…"
"The creatures are coming," Adam interrupted, his voice cutting through the growing panic. "They are tall, insectoid, with blades for arms. They see by this light. They are fast and they are coordinated. Form a circle. Backs to the center. The mud from the stream—use it. Throw it at the glow on their faces. It blinds them."
His instructions were clinical, a set of commands for operating a machine. The slaves, terrified and exhausted, scrambled to obey. They gathered mud, formed their ragged circle, and waited.
The clicking started as the last vestiges of purple faded from the sky. It was the same melodic, horrifying chorus. The same sound that had preceded his dismemberment so many times.
Then, they emerged. Slender, graceful, and utterly merciless. Their glowing head-slits cast shifting patterns of sickly light on the terrified faces of the slaves.
"Now!" Adam yelled, not out of fear, but as a signal to commence the experiment.
Gourds and handfuls of black mud flew through the air. Some found their mark. A night-walker shrieked, clawing at its smeared face-slit, its movements becoming erratic. Kael, roaring with a fury that was both genuine and useful, charged forward and brought his club down on the creature's leg, the chitin cracking with a sound like snapping branches.
But others missed. A scythe-arm flickered out, and a man Adam knew only as the Limping Man fell silently, his head toppling from his shoulders before his body even knew it was dead. Chaos erupted. The perfect circle broke. The machine was failing.
Adam stood his ground, his stolen spear in hand. He watched, analyzing. He saw the way the night-walkers moved in pairs, one distracting while the other struck. He saw how they prioritized targets who were isolated. He saw the patterned one—the Commander—standing at the edge of the fray, its phosphorescent markings shimmering, its clicks directing the symphony of slaughter.
He fought, but his heart wasn't in it. His thrusts were precise, born of Rorke's lessons and his own gruesome muscle memory, but they were defensive. He was protecting his own data-collection vessel—his body—not the lives of others. He parried a scythe blow, the impact jolting up his arms, and thrust his spearpoint into the joint of a creature's leg. It screeched and fell back. He didn't press the advantage. He stepped back, watching the larger pattern.
One by one, the components of his machine were dismantled. Elric died, his prayers ending in a wet gurgle as a scythe punched through his chest. Lyssa fought with a fierce, silent desperation, using a sharpened stone to gouge at a creature's abdomen before being bisected from shoulder to hip. Kael, a whirlwind of rage, killed two of them, his club a blur of splintering chitin and spraying ichor, before a coordinated attack from three night-walkers severed his weapon arm and then his head.
Soon, it was just Adam again. Backed against a giant, glowing mushroom, the spear feeling heavy and useless in his hand. The patterned Commander clicked, and the other hunters held back.
It advanced on him alone, its movements a terrifying, elegant death sentence. Adam set his feet. He knew how this ended. He had lived it. He had logged it.
The creature feinted high. Adam didn't fall for it. He knew the low sweep was coming. He tried to jump, but his malnourished body, pushed to its limits, was too slow. The scythe swept through his left foot at the ankle. There was no pain at first, only a tremendous impact and a shocking sense of lightness. He looked down, saw the stump, saw the blood fountain, and collapsed.
The pain arrived a second later, a white-hot brand that stole his breath. He gasped, trying to push himself up with the spear as a crutch. The Commander loomed over him, its glowing slit regarding him with that cold, alien curiosity. With deliberate, cruel precision, it brought its other scythe-arm down on his outstretched left hand.
Chop.
The sound was final. His hand was gone. He stared at the twin stumps, his mind retreating into a numb, observational state. Log: Dismemberment. Left foot, left hand. Pain threshold: high. Cognitive function: impaired.
The creature leaned in close. The ozone-and-chitin smell filled his nostrils. The scythe-tip darted forward. A burst of impossible pressure, then a sudden, permanent darkness on his left side. His eye.
He lay in the mud, a ruined thing. The world was a tunnel, shrinking down to the single, glowing slit of the Commander. It gave a final, dismissive click, and turned away, leading its kin as they faded back into the jungle, dragging their dead and their trophies.
He was alone. Broken. Bleeding out. The frost in his soul was absolute. There was no fear. No despair. Only the cold, hard data of his own destruction.
"Thank you," he whispered, the words a bloody bubble on his lips.
Blackness.
Cycles 33 - 192: The Forging of the Forgotten Sword
The returns bled into one another, a kaleidoscope of suffering and reset. Adam stopped counting precisely after Cycle 50. The numbers were meaningless. Only the data mattered.
He became a ghost in the machine of the nightmare, a phantom director orchestrating tragedies for an audience of one. His goal was no longer to survive the loop, but to extend each cycle for as long as possible, using the slaves as a living shield and a research team.
For one hundred and sixty loops, his primary strategy was the same: initiate the rebellion, command the group to run, and use their collective mass to buy time. In these cycles, he managed, through cold, ruthless efficiency and the sacrifice of countless pawns, to stretch his survival to an average of four months.
Four months in hell. Four months of watching the community he built and rebuilt starve, sicken, and be hunted. Four months of studying the jungle's rhythms, the migration patterns of the lesser predators, the fruiting cycles of the non-lethal flora. He became a master of this damned world, its foremost and only scholar.
And in that time, he trained.
He had long since given up on finding a master swordsman among the slaves. Rorke was the best he'd encountered, and his knowledge was that of a brawler with a stick. So Adam became his own teacher. He took the crude, practical basics Rorke had shown him—the stance, the grip, the simple thrust—and he began to evolve them.
He practiced for hours every day, in every loop. He practiced until his muscles screamed and his hands were raw and bleeding. He practiced against trees, against shadows, against the memories of every creature that had ever killed him.
He remembered the fluid, impossible grace of the night-walkers. He couldn't replicate it, but he could analyze it. Their movements were all economy and precision, no wasted motion. He tried to incorporate that. His thrusts became faster, sharper, aimed not at center mass, but at the vulnerabilities he had catalogued: joints, eye-slits, the gaps in chitin.
He remembered the brutal, overwhelming power of the Cursed Terror. He couldn't match it, but he could learn to redirect it, to use an opponent's strength against them. He practiced dodging and weaving, using his smaller size as an advantage, letting larger attackers overextend.
He remembered the deceptive strikes of the six-legged panthers, the swarming tactics of the razor-beaks. Every death was a lesson, every predator a instructor in a different school of violence.
Slowly, agonizingly, a style began to emerge. It was not beautiful. It was not graceful. It was a bastard form, cobbled together from a hundred different sources. It was ugly, efficient, and utterly ruthless. It used feints and misdirection born from his [Mimic] aspect—a feigned stumble that was a copy of a dying slave, a guttural roar stolen from Kael to distract an opponent. It used the environment—mud in the eyes, attacks from behind cover, the use of treacherous terrain.
He had no name for it. It was simply the way he had learned to fight in this place where every fight was for his life. In the silent ledger of his mind, he referred to it as the Forgotten Sword. A style with no master, no history, remembered only by a boy who was himself being forgotten, loop after loop after loop.
He implemented theory after theory. He tried leading the group to build a permanent fortress. It was overrun by a coordinated assault of night-walkers and Spinners, something he hadn't known was possible. He tried leading them on a mass exodus to find the "edge" of the jungle. They marched for three months until they reached a range of impassable, sheer black mountains that hummed with a malevolent energy. Those who tried to climb them were struck by lightning from a clear sky. He logged it.
He tried to hunt the hunters, setting elaborate traps for the patterned Commander. He succeeded twice, killing it with a pitfall lined with sharpened stakes and a coordinated ambush. Both times, the regression still came, weeks later, silent and absolute. Killing the commander was not the key.
He stopped seeing their faces. He stopped learning their names. They were assets. "The Strong One" (Kael). "The Watchful One" (Elric). "The Resilient One" (Lyssa). They were tools to be used, parts to be spent in the great engine of his research. When they died, he felt nothing but a flicker of irritation at the loss of a useful resource. His empathy had been scoured away, replaced by the sterile logic of the laboratory.
Cycle after cycle, the result was the same. A breakthrough in survival duration, a new understanding of the ecosystem, a refinement of the Forgotten Sword. Followed by the silent, inevitable unmaking. The reset.
The horror had become a constant, humming background noise. The futility was a stone in his gut. He was the most knowledgeable being in this world, a god of practical survival, and he was powerless.
Cycle 193: The Smile in the Dark
The return. The manacle. The mud. The chain.
Adam stood, his mind a vast, silent archive of failure. One hundred and ninety-two cycles. Over six subjective years of relentless, brutal existence. He was sixteen, and he was ancient.
This time, as the line trudged forward, he didn't immediately begin his calculations. He simply walked, his consciousness a flat, grey plain. He ran through the data, again. He had tried everything. Everything.
He had survived alone. He had survived in a group.
He had fought. He had hidden.
He had killed the Terror. He had killed the Commander.
He had explored every square inch of the accessible jungle.
He had mapped the weather, the stars in the bruised sky, the tides of predatory activity.
There was no variable left to manipulate. No lever he hadn't pulled. The only consistent factor, the only thing that changed from loop to loop, was…
The slaves.
Not as individuals, but as a set. Their survival rate. In the loop where he had lasted eleven days, almost half had survived the initial night-walker attack. In the loops where he lasted four months, he had, through ruthless triage and strategic sacrifice, usually kept a core group of five or six alive for the duration.
But he had never, not in one hundred and ninety-two attempts, managed to get all of them to survive the first night. Not even close. The initial attack by the night-walkers or the Spinners was always a bloodbath. He had always considered those first casualties inevitable, the necessary cost of initiating the experiment.
What if they weren't?
The thought was so simple, so absurd, it was almost laughable. What if the key wasn't his survival, or killing a specific monster, or reaching a specific place? What if the key was… them?
The Third Special Directive demanded surrender to prevent a gate from opening. The policeman had said, "If you die in there… you open a gate." The Spell was a trial, but it was also a filter, a safeguard for reality.
What if this First Nightmare wasn't just a test for him? What if it was a test of something else? A test of his ability to… lead? To protect? The thought was alien, repulsive. He was an ossuary rat. He took, he scavenged, he survived. He didn't protect.
But the logic was inescapable. It was the only variable he had never truly controlled for. He had used them, spent them, managed them. But he had never made their survival his primary, absolute objective.
A slow, cold smile spread across Adam's face. It was not a pleasant expression. It was the grim, skeletal smile of a scientist who has just discovered the fatal flaw in a lifetime of failed research.
He didn't have a plan yet. But he had a direction. A new hypothesis.
Log, Cycle 193. New Primary Hypothesis: The regression is triggered by the death of one or more specific individuals within the slave group, or by failing to achieve a minimum survival threshold for the cohort. The trial is not individual, but collective. Previous methodology was fundamentally flawed. The subjects were treated as disposable. They are not. They are the objective.
The rebellion at the pass was a work of brutal, instantaneous art. He didn't whisper. He acted. He stomped the beetle nest, and in the chaos, he moved like a phantom. He didn't just free slaves; he protected them. He shoved a woman out of the way of a guard's wild swing. He used the [Mimic] aspect to replicate the commander's shout, creating a split-second of confusion that allowed Kael to disarm a guard without taking a wound.
He got the keys. He freed them all. Not a single slave was lost in the rebellion. A first.
"We run," he said, his voice still flat, but now with a new, undercurrent of purpose. "But we run as one. No one gets left behind. Your life is as valuable as mine. Do you understand?"
They stared at him, confused by the strange pronouncement. But they followed.
He led them not on the most efficient path, but on the safest. He used his encyclopedic knowledge to guide them around every hazard, no matter how small. He foraged for them, found water for them, and when night fell, he led them to the safest, most defensible location he knew—the original root-hollow, far from the night-walker's territory.
He stood watch all night, his senses stretched to their limit, the Forgotten Sword style humming in his nerves. Nothing came.
Dawn broke. They were all there. All twenty-three. Alive. Unharmed.
He looked at them, these people whose names he had forgotten, whose faces had been data points for so long. He saw the hope in their eyes, fragile and new.
And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that it wouldn't be enough. Keeping them alive for one night was just the beginning. The jungle would throw everything it had at them. The Terror, the Spinners, the night-walkers, the leeches, the flora… it would all come. Keeping them all alive through all of it? It was an impossible task.
But it was the only task left.
He sat down, the cold smile still etched on his face. He had spent one hundred and ninety-two loops learning how to survive. Now, he had to learn how to save.
He didn't know how. The sheer scale of the challenge was overwhelming. But for the first time since Cycle 2, he felt something other than despair or cold analysis.
He felt a target.
The jungle, the Nightmare, the Spell itself—it had thrown an impossible problem at him. And he, Adam, the crazy ossuary rat, the Mimic, the cartographer of hell, would solve it. He would break the loop not by escaping it, but by beating it at its own game. He would save every last one of these worthless, precious pawns.
He looked out at the rising sun, filtering through the toxic canopy.
"Thank you," he whispered.
This time, it was a vow.
He died later that day, a rare and foolish mistake during a skirmish with a six-legged panther, his throat torn out. But he died with that same, cold, determined smile on his face.
The blackness took him, and he welcomed it.
He was going back. And this time, he would win.