Aron's legs kept moving before his mind caught up. Still dying. Still remembering every single time.
This isn't stopping. It's repeating.
Same outcome, over and over. But it was more than that.
Every time I die, the world resets—and I still remember all of it.
His breath came ragged, uneven, but his feet didn't stop.
Damn it.
He kept running.
You can do this. We have to get out of here.
Zekai was still standing exactly where he'd left him. Unresponsive. Empty. Like nobody was home behind his eyes.
Aron's jaw locked.
"Come on—wake up, Mr. Zekai!"
Think, Aron. There has to be a way out of this.
[ ...CONDITION... ]
...Loop...Bound... ...Error...
[ WARNING ]
Outcome Fixation Detected
A sharp distortion cracked through his ears, and a blue, half-transparent screen flickered into his vision like bad reception. Then his sight blurred, smearing everything into shapeless color.
"What's wrong with my eyes?"
Each loop peeled back something new. And this time, something felt different.
"It's not going to be me running anymore." His voice came out low, almost a growl. "This time, the King Knight moves for me."
He scanned the ground. A short distance away, dozens of swords lay scattered across the stone, half-buried, forgotten.
"What is this? So many swords." His stomach turned. "Did people like us come through here before?"
There was no other option worth considering. His fingers closed around the nearest hilt.
Heavy. Foreign in his hand. He'd never held a sword in his life. But something about the weight settled into his grip anyway, like his body understood it even if his mind didn't.
"If it's a fight—" His knuckles whitened around the handle. "Then I'll fight."
The sound tore through the air again. That same jagged distortion.
The King Knight arrived behind him.
The air thickened the second it appeared—not pressure exactly, something heavier, like the ground itself bowed to acknowledge it before Aron even turned around. Blue-white armor. Silent. Waiting. But this time it hesitated, a fraction of a second later than before.
His body moved toward Zekai before his fear could catch up and stop him.
The Knight still hadn't moved.
The distortion hit again, and with it, the glitching screen.
[ RESPONSE SUGGESTED ]
— Escape (Failure Probability: High)
— Resistance (Outcome: Termination)
— FREEZE (Unknown)
Aron scrubbed at his eyes, trying to force the blur to clear. When he opened them again, the screen was gone. Nothing left but empty air. For a second, he wondered if the loops had finally started cracking something loose inside his skull—if enough deaths piled on top of each other eventually broke a person the same way they broke a body.
His thoughts scattered, unsteady. But none of that mattered right now.
My only real problem is the fight in front of me.
He didn't know the first thing about swordplay. He gripped the blade anyway, dragging himself forward on nothing but stubbornness.
"Fine."
His foot dug into the ground.
"This time, I'm not running."
"Let's fight."
His hands shook. He forced them still through sheer will.
"Come on, then."
The Knight advanced. Each step landed with weight—unhurried, absolute, like it had already calculated exactly where the ground would meet its foot before it ever moved. No hesitation in it anywhere. No fear to spend.
Aron lifted the sword, forcing his spine straight.
"At least I can push back."
He tried to wear the confidence like armor, tried to stand like a man who wasn't about to die for the fourth time. The Knight didn't react. Didn't care. It stood there, unmoved, like his defiance registered as background noise.
He charged anyway.
The space between them felt wrong the second he crossed it—like stepping forward meant stepping into an outcome that had already been written. But standing still changed nothing either. So he kept going.
He never saw it move.
One instant it was standing still. The next, the blade had already passed through the space where his arm used to be—and his arm was simply gone, the cut so clean his mind hadn't caught up to the pain yet.
Before he could even scream, the Knight closed the last few feet in a blur, appearing behind him like it had skipped the distance entirely. Its leg swept up and slammed into his back with a force that didn't belong to anything human.
His spine buckled. His lungs collapsed in on themselves. The air left his body all at once and refused to come back—no scream, no breath, nothing but white-hot agony ripping through every nerve he had.
"—AHHHHH!"
The world spun.
The Knight threw him like he weighed nothing.
He slammed into Zekai—
—and the blade followed.
Cold steel punched through Aron's back, through his chest, and kept going, driving straight into Zekai behind him.
Everything stopped.
Is there really no end to this?
No matter what he tried. No matter how hard he fought.
It always ended exactly the same.
Darkness swallowed him whole.
—
He snapped back.
"This thing is tearing through me like I'm nothing," Aron rasped, forcing his knees to lock so he wouldn't collapse where he stood.
I can't even touch it.
The reset brought his body back. It didn't bring back what the loop had already cost him. The exhaustion stayed. The pain stayed, layering itself deeper with every death, grinding him down one rep at a time.
He'd been watching from the start, the way he always watched. Everything had a pattern if you looked long enough. Every fighter, every movement—there was always a rhythm hiding somewhere in it.
Not this.
Nothing repeated. Every kill came from a different angle, a different speed, a different method. No rhythm to read. No pattern to lean on.
"...So there's nothing to predict."
The thought settled into his chest like a stone.
"If I keep hunting for a pattern that isn't there—I'll just keep dying the same way."
He forced a breath out, slow, trying to bolt his mind back together.
"Then I fight without one."
He was just a person. An ordinary, sword-clueless person standing in front of something that didn't belong to his world at all.
Nothing I do reaches it.
"Damn it—what am I even supposed to do against this?"
The frustration clawed up his throat.
"Don't I get even one chance?"
The Knight raised its blade. But this time, something shifted.
The moment it moved, Aron's body reacted—not clean, not fast enough, but different from every death before it. He tightened his grip and stepped into the strike instead of away from it, and at the last possible fraction of a second, he twisted his weight to the side. The blade screamed past his cheek, close enough that he felt the air split against his skin.
He hadn't expected to survive it. But somehow, his body had moved. For the first time since this nightmare started, the outcome slipped off its rails.
"...I changed something." His breath caught in his throat, sharp and disbelieving.
It wasn't enough to live.
But it wasn't the same anymore.
End of Chapter 10 - The Kind One II