Chapter 73: Failures

Having climbed half the tree, I jumped.

Twelve feet of open air separated me from the branch, more distance than any normal person should have been able to clear, but Thunder Sunlight’s warmth was still coursing through my legs, and my body answered without hesitation. I closed the gap in a single arc, blade angled, dagger ready, wind screaming past my ears, everything I had narrowed down into one single moment of intent.

Choez tried to overlap its shadow with mine.

I felt it before I saw it, a cold, slick pressure sliding against the edge of my own shadow like something testing a lock, patient and probing even mid-combat. It wasn’t going to get the chance to finish.

"Got you!"

I threw Voice of Death.

The bell left my palm in a smooth, practiced arc, and the moment it passed close enough to Choez’s skull, it rang.

The sound wasn’t loud. That was the horrifying part. It was barely a whisper of a toll, thin and clear, and yet it cracked through the space between us like something reality itself flinched away from. Choez’s whole body seized mid-motion, wings locking, strings freezing halfway through their unspooling.

For one glorious second, suspended in the ringing silence that followed, I actually let myself think it. ’Got him.’

Then my mind exploded.

Not metaphorically. I felt it happen, felt the Domain crack open somewhere behind my eyes, thoughts scattering apart mid-sentence, and the last thing I registered before the world went white was Choez’s head tilting, unbothered, patient, already reaching past the ringing bell and straight into whatever was left of my consciousness.

Everything went black.

’Well. That’s one way to find out the bell doesn’t work.’

I didn’t even have time to catch my breath before I was moving again, feet carrying me toward the same mistake, Arthur shouting my name right on cue, like clockwork, like a very concerned, very repetitive alarm clock.

Second attempt. I adjusted.

This time I didn’t throw the bell in the open. I waited until I was close enough to press it directly against the base of its skull before letting it ring, hoping proximity would matter more than surprise.

It didn’t.

Choez’s strings found me half a second faster than before, like it had learned something from a version of me it had never technically met, which, considering the circumstances, felt deeply unfair. My body locked up in midair, still climbing, still falling, still helpless. The Calfeeth waiting below finished the job exactly the same way. Teeth. Darkness. Seven stars.

I opened my eyes at the tree again. The snake had eaten further still.

’Two down. Great. Really building momentum here.’

Third attempt. I tried Hunger of the Creepy Dagger instead, betting that a spirit-attack might slip past whatever protected Choez’s mind the way ordinary steel couldn’t.

For a moment, it actually worked. The dagger sank into the creature’s chest with none of the usual resistance, its golden hilt flaring bright and hungry, and Choez screeched, a sound that finally resembled real pain instead of mild irritation. Small victories, I told myself. Very small.

But its strings were already moving, and this time they didn’t bother with my limbs at all. They went straight for my head, straight for the same fragile, undefended place they’d broken into twice already, and the last thing I felt before the world dissolved was something close to respect. It had learned to skip the theatrics entirely.

’Three. Okay. New rule. No more just stabbing the angry murder-bird and hoping for the best.’

I stood there afterward for a long moment, not moving, not speaking, letting Arthur’s shout hang unanswered in the air behind me while I actually thought, for the first time in three attempts, instead of just reacting like a man late for his own funeral.

Brute force wasn’t working. Every version of me that tried to out-fight Choez ended the exact same way, buried under strings faster than my hands, my dagger, my blade. Every clever trick I threw at it only bought me a few extra seconds before it adapted, learning from deaths that, as far as it was concerned, had never happened.

Except they had happened. To me.

Which meant, annoyingly, that I was still the only one in this fight actually paying attention.

I thought back through every version of it, every wasted swing, every second I’d spent throwing steel at something that could unmake my mind faster than any blade could unmake its body. I thought about the way its strings always reached for my head last, only after I’d already committed to an attack, only once it had decided I was close enough to be worth the effort. It never opened with the mind. It always closed with it, like a killing stroke it saved for the moment it was certain of.

I thought about the mountain. The sea. The way it always went straight for that same undefended stretch of water, over and over, like a predator that had found one soft, exposed vein and simply refused to try anywhere else.

If it always went there, then that was the one place I actually knew it would be.

The thought settled into place slow and cold, nothing like the desperate, half-baked plans I’d been throwing at this fight since the very first loop.

I didn’t have a way to beat Choez in a straight fight. Not yet. Maybe not ever, not with steel alone, not with three or four humiliating deaths already stacked up as evidence.

But I had one thing it didn’t.

I knew exactly where it was going to strike before it struck. And for the first time since this whole nightmare started resetting itself around me, that felt like something I could actually work with.

I looked up at the tree, at the snake steadily eating itself loop after loop, patient in a way I could no longer afford to be, and let myself smile, small and a little unhinged.

"Let’s try this again," I murmured, quiet enough that none of the others heard me.