Six months passed.
Arie let them.
That was the thing nobody understood about preparation, the kind that actually mattered. He trained with the group every morning, ate with them every evening, laughed at the right moments and stayed quiet at the right moments and was by every available measure a reliable, unspectacular teammate who was figuring things out at roughly the same pace as everyone else.
He was not figuring things out at roughly the same pace as everyone else.
Every morning before the group woke up he was alone with his power. Learning its new shape the way you learn a language. You're wrong at first, then less wrong, then suddenly fluent. It was environmental now. Subtle. It worked through the space around a target rather than through the target itself and once he stopped fighting that and started using it properly it was more precise than anything he'd had in his first life.
He spent those six months remembering things he shouldn't have needed to remember.
Every trial layout, every creature pattern, every trap timing. Every hidden corner of Simara that the average warrior never found because they were too busy surviving to look properly. He'd learned all of it the hard way the first time around. This time he didn't need to learn anything.
He just needed to look like he did.
Demi, a sharp woman, started noticing things. That was her problem and his.
Three months in she'd started watching him with that careful calculating attention he remembered too well. It wasn't suspicion exactly. It was more like a puzzle she couldn't quite solve. He was good but not remarkable. Contributed but didn't dominate. Never seemed surprised by anything.
"You're holding back," she said one evening in a flat, unquestionable tone.
They were the only two still awake, the fire between them burning low.
Arie looked at her across the flames. "Everyone holds back in training, you know."
"Not like you."
He smiled."You're overthinking it" he said in an even easy going tone.
She held his gaze for a moment longer than comfortable. Then she looked back at the fire and didn't say anything else.
That was close.
He made a mental note to make more visible mistakes in sparring.
The trial gate opened on a grey morning six months and four days after Arie had sat down uninvited on a low wall and smiled at people who would one day try to kill him. He couldn't get used to it at all.
I mean they did kill me after all. He sighed
He walked through it with his group and felt everything sharpen.
The Ashfield spread out in front of them. Dead grey land, skeletal trees stripped of everything, visibility for miles in every direction. He heard someone in the group behind them exhale with relief at the open space.
He gave them about forty seconds.
"Assume the front formation like we practiced," Demi said quietly beside him.
"Mm." Arie was already scanning the field. He wasn't looking at the obvious parts like the open ground, the tree line, the places where any competent warrior would expect threats to come from. He was looking at the edges. The rocky outcroppings on the far left that most groups never bothered with. The shallow depression about two hundred meters northeast that looked like nothing.
He knew what lived there.
The ground started moving.
There was immediate chaos. Hollow Crawlers breaking the surface in every direction, blind and fast and navigating purely by vibration. Around him his group snapped into the formation they'd drilled for six months.
"BACK LINE HOLD!" Demi's voice cutting through everything.
Arie had chosen this role himself. He did exactly as instructed. He engaged the Crawlers that came his way with just enough force to dispatch them cleanly without drawing attention, kept his positioning disciplined, looked exactly what he was supposed to look like.
When the formation pushed forward he drifted very subtly. A few meters left, then a few more, using the chaos of the front line engagement as cover. Nobody was watching the back when the front was fighting for its life.
He reached the rocky outcropping and dropped into a low crouch.
They were there. Exactly where he remembered them . The hollow crawlers here were different, darker, moving with a specific pattern that set them apart from the main horde. Most warriors never noticed them because most were busy with the obvious threat. In his first life one of his teammates had stumbled across them by accident and come back with gear that had made no sense for where they'd been fighting.
Now Arie understood why.
He reached for his power and let it move the way it wanted to. It dug into the ground, finding the fault lines beneath the creatures, shifting the soil by inches. They lurched, off balance, and he was already moving. Three of them went down before they could reorient. He worked fast and quiet and methodical, stripping the drops before anyone could see, pocketing them without breaking stride. One of the crawlers however reacted differently. Different from the way he had remembered.
Huh that had never happened before.
By the time the front line finished with the main horde he was back in position, slightly out of breath, looking like he'd been fighting a minor skirmish on the flank.
Nobody noticed his absence.
The Guardian was the last thing between them and the insignia. It was needed for the next floor after all.
The guardian was large, slow, and had a specific weakness in its left shoulder joint that nobody in their first run through Simara ever found until their third or fourth attempt. Arie knew about it because he'd watched someone discover it by accident in his first life, had filed it away and never forgotten it.
He let the group work on it for ten minutes first. Let them figure out the basics, establish the rhythm, build the confidence that came from feeling like they were solving something together. That confidence mattered as it would carry them through the harder trials ahead and he needed them functional.
Then he drifted left. It was time to use his previous life's knowledge.
"Left shoulder!" he called out, like it had just occurred to him. "There's something wrong with the joint. Rosh, go for the kill!"
Rosh hit it.
The Guardian staggered. The whole group poured into the opening and forty seconds later it was over.
Rosh was grinning, pulling the insignia from the Guardian's remains. Rest were too but Arie mirrored it a second too late.
"That was you again," he said, looking at Arie. "Oh the shoulder thing? It was just a lucky guess."
"You said that last time too." Rosh tossed him the insignia to register. "Hey I'm a lucky man what can I say?" Arie shrugged.
"During the Crawlers you drifted left and hit something we didn't even know was there." He paused. "You notice a lot of things."
Arie caught the insignia. "Someone has to do it."
Rosh was quiet for a moment. The grin faded into something more thoughtful. He looked out across the Ashfield, at the other groups scattered across the field in various states of success and failure, and then back at Arie with an expression that was harder to read than his usual straightforwardness.
"There's talk. Among the groups that have been here longer than us. About the trials further in." He lowered his voice slightly. "They're saying the difficulty doesn't scale the way the Devas announced at the start. That something has changed. That the trials in the later domains are different from what the first runners reported."
Arie looked at him.
"How different are we talking about?" he asked. Keeping his voice neutral. Keeping his face open and curious and exactly as surprised as an eighteen year old with two years of experience should be.
Rosh shook his head. "Nobody knows exactly. The ones who finished Simara are in Babilon."He paused. "The ones who made it furthest in this domain and came back aren't talking at all."
He said it like it was just information. Like he was just passing something along.
Arie looked back out across the Ashfield and said nothing.
He knew exactly what was different about the later domains. He'd lived it. Died in it. Regressed from it with one less thing in his chest than he'd started with.
But something about the way Rosh had said it sat wrong. The trials Rosh was describing didn't match what Arie remembered. He too experienced a slight change personally today.
He filed that away in the back of his mind.
Well it would certainly be boring if things remained the same.
Something had changed and that was a problem.