Die. Respawn. Repeat.

Chapter 232: Book 4: Debugging

It's not far into the Sewers that we encounter the first real obstacle to our progress. In hindsight, it's a problem I probably should have anticipated.

Monsters.

Root Acolytes, specifically, according to the Interface. They're Rank A monstrosities that look a little like a cross between a tangle of vines and a very irate spider, and the nauseating bloom of tiny, color-packed flowers across their backs doesn't really help. It's probably something I should have anticipated—my Strings are just as likely to locate packs of monsters as they are the expedition team.

It's not too much of a problem, though. To my surprise, the monsters are mostly ignoring us and instead focusing on moving in specific directions through the Sewers; if I had to guess, they're tracking the expedition team, same as us. Why the expedition team is their primary target I have no idea, but it might have something to do with the Interface's challenge here.

Keep the expedition team alive.

Easier said than done, especially if I can't find them. Fortunately, right now, all we need to do is follow the flow of monsters. I'm reasonably hopeful this will lead us to the team and not into some sort of trap. It slows us down, though—the monsters are only moving so fast, and we can't get too far ahead of the few moving steadily onward.

"These things are disgusting," Gheraa complains, kicking at one of the few stragglers that launches itself at him. It goes sprawling, then flips back onto its legs and scuttles off, now entirely ignoring him. I raise an eyebrow, surprised. Normally that would trigger an attack, but that kick seems to have reset it instead.

"I dunno," Ahkelios says. "I think they're kind of interesting. They're nothing like any plants I've studied. I wonder if they're a hive mind, somehow?"

"What makes you think that?" I ask. Gheraa stomps on another one of the few that notice us long enough to attack, creating a very disturbing crunch. Mostly because the Root Acolytes are made of vines and shouldn't have anything to crunch, let alone anything that might make a noise like snapping bone.

I watch them for a moment, squinting against the nauseating saturation. He's right, even if it's hard to see—the flowers blink in patterns, and the Root Acolytes seem to be using them to communicate, in a manner of speaking. More than once, I see two of them stop and stare at one another for a minute, then scamper off in different directions.

The main flow of them still move in a single direction, though.

Oddly enough, the majority of them really don't seem interested in fighting us. The few that attack only do so after staring at Gheraa for a solid 2-3 seconds, the flowers on their backs twitching oddly, and the behavior seems to stop once Gheraa starts actively stomping on any that stare at him for too long. He seems to take a vicious sort of satisfaction in it, and I raise an eyebrow at him.

"Have something against spiders?" I ask.

"Only when they're not big enough to pet," Gheraa says, his eyes narrowed. "Spiders should be bear-sized. Minimum."

"I don't even know how to begin to respond to that," I say dryly. A problem with spiders I can understand, but a problem exclusively with smaller spiders?

Gheraa just mutters a curse and continues stomping on any Root Acolytes that happen to get near enough to him.

Root Acolytes aren't the only types of monsters in the Sewers, either. The deeper we get into the tunnels, the more monsters show up. There are Seedlings, which look like miniature versions of the Seedmother and scurry around with tiny orbs of flickering Firmament on their backs. There are Leechlords, which crawl around on the walls and floor and appear to both clean them and somehow enhance their sense-blocking properties.

Then there are the Treasure Mimics, which are exactly what you'd expect: oddly-placed treasure chests that sit in strange corners of the Sewers. My Interface's new tendency to label them with glowing boxes basically renders them a non-threat, even if they hadn't been so suspiciously placed no sane person would go near them. ṙἈ𐌽𝐨BÊṨ

I pause at that thought, then turn and stare at Gheraa. "Do not

"I wasn't going to!" Gheraa protests, his hands inches away from the mimic. "It's clearly a trap!"

Ahkelios coughs guiltily and takes a step away from Gheraa as if he hadn't eagerly been watching over his shoulder. I sigh to myself, shaking my head—it's not like Ahkelios can't see the label, but then I suppose Treasure Mimics wouldn't exist if they didn't work on some people.

Behind me, I hear a yelp, then the sound of wood breaking. When Gheraa shows up again next to me, there are clear fragments of wood stuck in his robes, and he whistles innocently.

I eye him for a long moment. "Did that satisfy your curiosity?" I ask.

"Yep!" he says cheerfully. "Turns out they're very wet."

"I'm not even going to ask."

"Also, they have those Firmament pearls inside them." Gheraa points at one of the orbs a Seedling is carrying around. That gets my attention, and I frown, turning this over in my mind for a moment.

There's a clear oddity here, and it's not just that the Seedlings work together with the Treasure Mimics in some way. Part of it is the fact that none of these monsters seem that interested in attacking us. I have no doubt that might change at any moment, but it's a strange diversion from my encounters with most other monsters so far.

The other part is that these monsters are... well, they're normal.

I've encountered two categories of monsters, generally speaking. The first is the type that's clearly some kind of Remnant—that is, the monster is a distortion of someone that once existed strongly enough to leave an impression on time. The names given to them by the Interface almost always invokes the emotion that created those Remnants in some way; the Broken Horror that was Ahkelios's Remnant, the Laments I encountered during the raid on the Cliffside Crows, and the Guilty Chimeras that began appearing after all fall into this category, not to mention a whole host of others.

I have a feeling that monsters of that type are largely, if not entirely, unique to Hestia and places that have been exposed to Hestia's time loops.

The second is the type I'd more commonly expect from something living within an ecosystem. The Time Flies, for example, clearly evolved in some way off the Temporal Firmament emitted by the Fracture; that's the only thing that explains why they exist displaced forward in time, essentially reversing cause and effect during any of their attacks. The same applies to the boss monster I fought during the first stage of the Ritual—that is, the Seedmother and its apparent symbiotic relationship with the plants of the Empty City.

And now there are all of these. Of the Root Acolytes, Seedlings, Leechlords and Treasure Mimics, only the last feels like it doesn't belong—the others could all very well naturally exist as a result of the ecosystem within the Sewers. Technically, even the Treasure Mimics serve a clear role, though I have no idea why they'd take the form of a treasure chest. Maybe there are other monsters in the Sewers I haven't encountered yet. Ones with a penchant for treasure chests.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

I'm not sure what to make of all this, though. There are implications, I'm sure. The existence of Remnants has to mean something. There's a chance that they're just a natural side effect of the loops, but with everything I've experienced...

Well, somehow, I doubt it.

That crack in time I encountered in the Fracture—the one that led to an alternate version of Inveria—had accompanying, near-invisible splinters in the fabric of time that extended out all throughout Hestia. If the pattern I noticed in the sky is any indication, it's far from the only crack of its kind.

Further, the Tears manifesting on Hestia seem almost like they're trying to contain the effects of that splintering time. The one on the edge of Carusath that I sealed with Naru was on exactly one of those Tears, and it was on the verge of overloading; a few more moments or a failed attempt to seal it, and it would have become yet another Remnant out to wreak havoc.

It all fits together, kind of. There are weak spots in the Fracture that have caused time to splinter, and those splinters lead to eventual Tears that appear across the planet. Those Tears then birth Remnants if they're not dealt with.

It still feels like I'm missing a piece of the puzzle, like what caused those weak spots in the first place. That hole in time looked intentional

I frown to myself, then step across a threshold and into another section of the Sewers, and I no longer have the time to dwell on it.

Ahead of us, the monsters begin to pile into a steady, fast-moving stream, now all headed in a single direction. That can't be a good thing. Not only that, but something finally enters the range of my Firmament senses, and I feel a flicker of power being used somewhere far ahead.

Current saturation: 92%

Definitely not a good thing. In fact, if I had to guess, there's some kind of battle going on. I begin to hurry, but before I can take another step, the ground shakes. A small cloud of dust breaks off from the ceiling.

Current saturation: 93%

On the plus side, the swarm of monsters has picked up enough speed and quantity that we're no longer stuck following just a few of them. The Seedlings, in particular, are incredibly fast when they want to be.

I exchange glances with Ahkelios and Gheraa.

"We should probably pick up the pace," I say.

And then I start to run.

This was not where Adeya wanted to die, but if she was being honest, she didn't see much in the way of options at the moment. In fact, her only two options seemed to be "die horribly" and "die instantly."

Any reasonable person might have chosen the latter, but Adeya rather prided herself on being deeply unreasonable when given two equally unreasonable choices. Which was why she was doing her best to make herself and her friends a very painful, deeply unsatisfying meal for the gargantuan beetle trying to devour them.

The Seedcracker, according to the Interface. Rank SS.

She wasn't entirely sure how this had happened, but there had been a sudden shift in her Wind Sense, like the paths around her had abruptly changed; it happened three times in a row, until it felt like they were closed off in a dead end with only one way out. Adeya had called for a retreat almost immediately—it wasn't the first time the Sewers had tried to close them like this—but it was the first time it had succeeded, in large part because they were now so close to Firmament saturation that using any skill was a risk.

Both Dhruv and Taylor needed to layer at least three skills together for an effective hit. Adeya could make do with less, but her lesser skills had skittered off the Seedcracker's shell like it was nothing; even the scirix's weapons weren't proving particularly effective, though the strange ropes of Firmament Novi had set up at least managed to hold it back. She'd placed metallic boxes around the entrance of the little chamber they were trapped in almost as soon as they realized they were trapped.

Adeya hadn't understood why until thick ropes of incredibly charged Firmament burst out of them, wrapping themselves around the Seedcracker.

It wouldn't last long, though. The boxes that held those traps were already beginning to spark and smoke, and there were an uncountable number of smaller monsters piling up behind massive beetle. It was, ironically, the only thing keeping them alive—its thrashing crushed any of the smaller monsters trying to get past it.

Which meant that even if they managed to defeat it...

Adeya studiously ignored the thought. Dhruv and Taylor were watching her nervously—they were each itching to fight, Dhruv a little more than Taylor, but they knew they'd only get one shot at this.

"I do not think there is anything more we can do," Novi said quietly. She sounded oddly steady, despite her words; Adeya caught a glimpse of Firmament swirling around in her eyes, and wondered—not for the first time—exactly how much Novi could see.

She'd called herself a Seer. Apparently, she was the first of the scirix to notice anything wrong in the city of First Sky, and she was charged with recording everything that happened as it fell.

Adeya privately thought that was a bit of a morbid charge, but Novi seemed to take it seriously. She carried a stone tablet around with her, carving words into it with Firmament every so often. Once they were back above the surface, she claimed she would transfer an entry into a bigger monument called the Record.

Right now, though, Adeya wasn't so sure any of them would be getting back to the surface.

None of the scirix looked like they felt hopeless, though.

Novi seemed tired, but she wasn't fearful. Juri—the elder of Novi's children—and his partner Varus stood near the entrance to the chamber, wielding weapons that glowed with Firmament; Juri's was some sort of blazing spear that crackled with electricity, and Varus wielded a glowing hammer that left afterimages with every swing.

Both powerful, effective weapons. Neither had done anything to the Seedcracker.

The rest of the scirix—Yarun, the medic and Novi's other son, along with another three named Bastus, Keria, and Velis—held blasters trained at the entrance.

"I guess we're not giving up," Adeya said with a wry smile.

None of the others had the firepower to deal with the Seedcracker. The smaller monsters that came after, yes. The Seedcracker? That was a monstrosity that had no place in a dungeon like the Sewers. Rank SS was above what the dungeon was rated to handle, even.

But Adeya was no stranger to the Interface breaking its own rules.

She thought quickly. They were at 93% saturation. That left them the space to use six skills, assuming nothing odd caused the saturation to tick up like it had earlier. It would bring them far closer to full saturation than she was comfortable with, but she didn't see any other choice that had even a chance of leaving them all alive.

"Taylor, Dhruv," she said. "You two remember Operation Starfall?"

Adeya privately thought it was a stupid name, but using it seemed to boost morale a little. Taylor brightened, looking far too pleased that she'd used his name for their theoretical combination move. Dhruv was a little more serious about it—he just gave her a nod.

She took a deep breath.

Crystal Wings. Plasma Attunement.

Brilliant wings flared out of Adeya's back, pure Firmament coalescing into solid crystal. A moment later, they began to blaze with heat and energy, hot enough that it would have scorched them all if she hadn't excluded her friends and allies from the effect.

Then Dhruv reached out to touch the left wing, invoking two of his skills. Taylor did the same on the right.

That was the nice thing about the skill. Crystal Wings was an excellent weapon by itself, but it also served as a wonderful substrate for any kind of imbuement. It could carry skills better than most imbuement stones.

And when her fellow Trialgoers used their skills on her wings, she could feel them change.

Her left wing turned blood-red, then began to screech, imbued with some sort of sound-based skill that warped the air around it. Her right wing took on an appearance not unlike a cloak of stars, radiating something simultaneously hot and cold.

Six skills exactly. In theory, this could work and kill the Seedcracker, and it was only mostly likely to kill her. The odds were better than nothing.

The scirix gave her small, respectful nods, then moved out of her way. So did Dhruv and Taylor.

Adeya took three steps back, then ran forward, launching herself off the ground. One flap of her wings made her shoot forward, and then she wrapped them around herself so she formed the shape of a bullet.

A bullet aimed straight into the Seedcracker's mouth.

If she survived this, she'd figure out how to deal with the rest of the monsters after. A part of her knew she was essentially launching herself to her death, though.

Then again, if that were the case... she'd just have to see how many of them she could take with her.