The golden light comes again, lower this time, aimed at my legs instead of my chest.
I shift my weight onto my left toes, just barely, just enough.
It passes a hair's width from my shin. I can feel the wind of it pull at the hem of my pants.
Missed.
I don't have time to feel anything about it. Onyx is already swinging again, a third strike, faster than the last two, and this time the angle is wrong for any small shift to save me.
I throw my whole body sideways instead, toes screaming with mana, and the blade catches nothing but air where my throat used to be.
Three.
I almost laugh. I don't, because Dead Time is still running and laughing costs focus I don't have spare.
Onyx straightens.
He doesn't look frustrated. He doesn't look like anything. But the way he straightens, the way his grip shifts on the hilt of his sword, tells me he's done testing the blade.
"…Crap."
His other hand rises.
A small sphere of golden light gathers at his fingertips, condensing, folding in on itself the way Vororin folds light into nothing, except this is the opposite. This isn't taking light away.
This is concentrating it into something that doesn't need to swing or chase or predict.
It just needs to exist in my direction.
I throw myself to the side on instinct, toes burning, but the sphere doesn't move like a sword. It doesn't telegraph an angle I can read.
It simply expands.
The golden light swallows the space I'm standing in, the space beside it, the space I was about to dodge into.
There's no slash this time. No clean line. Just light, and then there's nothing at all, and the darkness of the void greets me before I can even register what killed me.
[ Death Count: 50 ]
- - -
I open my eyes in the void and don't bother grinning this time.
"A spell. Of course he has a spell."
Three dodges and he just skips the sword entirely and turns the air itself into the weapon. I should've expected it. I did expect it, somewhere in the back of my mind, and it still wasn't enough to save me.
Well, I managed to make him reveal one of his skills, but—
"Ok. New problem."
Dodging a line is one thing. Dodging something that doesn't have a line is another.
The light beneath my feet begins to spread before I'm even finished thinking it through.
Fang.
I call out through the link without really meaning to, just out of habit, and—
He answers.
I freeze for a second. The link is just there, warm and present, exactly the way it was before any of this started, like the empty, off-feeling space where he used to be was never real to begin with.
Right.
Of course it's back. Whatever happened to him last death didn't happen this time. None of it did.
This is a new death. A new start.
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding.
"…Good to have you back."
Fang doesn't answer, obviously, but I feel something through the link anyway. Steady. Present. Whatever counts as relief for a dragon who doesn't remember ever being gone.
I sit with that for a while before the battlefield returns.
- - -
[ Death Count: 67 ]
I try expanding my mana shield the instant the sphere forms, hoping to buy half a second.
The shield doesn't even finish forming before the light reaches it.
Ok blocking it is ineffective.
- - -
[ Death Count: 89 ]
I try Ghost the moment his hand rises.
[ Skill: Ghost Activated ]
It works, for about a second and a half. Long enough to watch the sphere pass straight through the space where my body should be and erase the ground beneath it instead.
After a brief moment, the light disperses and my vision return. I look at Onyx but he doesn't even flinch. He instead sticks out his hand and it glows a bright golden light.
He pushes and a halo of golden light makes its way towards me. The very air seems to scream as it rips through the space between me and Onyx.
I can't dodge this. That's the only thing though that appears in my head.
So with that I attempt to try and tank it. For the moment Ghost allows me to be impervious to any attacks so if I keep this up, maybe just maybe I can survive this as well.
But—
I can feel my body slowly cracking like an egg as my bones shatter and my internal organs burst.
Huh? Guess this was a failure as well.
- - -
[ Death Count: 112 ]
I try running the second his hand rises, putting everything I have into Sonic Leap, putting actual distance between us before the sphere even finishes forming.
I get further than I ever have. Maybe sixty miles. Maybe more.
It doesn't matter. The sphere doesn't chase. It just grows, and grows, and by the time I think I'm clear, the light has already eaten the sixty miles I thought I'd bought myself.
- - -
[ Death Count: 130 ]
This time, when the sphere finishes forming, Onyx doesn't fire it.
He just lets it sit there in his palm.
I don't move. He doesn't move. For a few seconds, nothing happens, and some small, stupid part of me actually starts to hope this is a death where he's decided not to engage at all.
Then the sphere collapses inward, and the air around me starts pulling toward him instead of pushing away from his hand.
I'm being dragged.
Not erased. Dragged, fast, my feet skidding across cracked stone toward a man who hasn't moved an inch.
I hit the edge of the light at full speed.
That one's quick, at least. I'll give it that.
- - -
[ Death Count: 140 ]
I try summoning Astra to intercept the gravity-well version, hoping her speed lets her cut the pull before it builds.
She doesn't even get the chance to swing.
The pull catches her mid-step, and I watch her flicker once—her form destabilizing the way it always does when she's pushed too hard, mismatched eyes losing focus for half a heartbeat—before the light takes her too.
I die a half-second after she does.
- - -
[ Death Count: 156 ]
Onyx doesn't use the sphere this death, or the gravity pull.
He just disappears, the same way he did the very first time I ever saw him move, and reappears behind me before I finish turning my head.
The golden line appears and by focusing mana onto my cervical crepitus, I manage to snap my neck downward and the golden line narrowly misses.
The moment I do, Onyx strikes his hand through my chest and lifts me up.
I died the same way I did the first time I entered this trial.
- - -
[ Death Count: 178 ]
I try not dodging at all. Just standing there, arms open, seeing if there's some trick to simply accepting it that I haven't thought of yet.
There isn't.
That one might be the stupidest death so far. I tell myself that, sitting in the void afterward, and I almost believe it's funny.
- - -
[ Death Count: 190 ]
This death, he raises both hands before I even reach the broken structure, and the air around him turns gold from the ground up, like the whole battlefield is catching fire from beneath.
I don't know what it is. I never find out. The light reaches me before I clear the first ridge.
Why did he suddenly do that instead of what's he's been doing the whole time?
- - -
[ Death Count: 203 ]
I try detonating Void the instant the sphere forms, hoping two unstable, light-devouring things might cancel each other out the way they did with Eclipse.
They don't cancel.
They combine.
I don't remember dying that time. I just remember the void afterward feeling a little colder than usual, like something about that death hadn't quite finished happening before the trial reset it.
- - -
[ Death Count: 215 ]
He doesn't use the sphere. He doesn't use the pull. He doesn't vanish and reappear.
He just swings his sword, slow and almost lazy, and the slash splits into three identical golden lines mid-air, fanning out to cover every angle I could possibly move to.
I get clipped by the one I didn't think to count.
- - -
[ Death Count: 231 ]
I stop trying clever ideas for a while and just count.
Not just the sphere this time. Everything. How many different things he's done so far. How often each one shows up. Whether there's a pattern to which one he reaches for, or whether it's simply whatever he decides, fresh, every single death, with no memory of which one worked last time.
Forty-seven deaths of just counting, just watching, just dying the same way—or a different way—over and over so I can measure something instead of guess at it.
By the end, I don't have a clean answer. There isn't a pattern. He doesn't escalate predictably and he doesn't favor one technique over another. Some deaths he kills me with the sword alone. Some deaths the sphere never even appears.
The only thing I have is a longer list of things I now know exist, and the grim certainty that the list probably isn't finished.
It's not a plan. It's just data.
But it's something.
- - -
[ Death Count: 256 ]
Sphere death. I use the timing data I built earlier, betting the radius needs a half-second to reach me after it starts expanding.
I almost clear it.
Almost.
The light catches my shoulder, and that's apparently enough.
- - -
[ Death Count: 274 ]
Sphere again. Same timing, adjusted by a fraction of a second.
Closer.
Still not enough.
- - -
[ Death Count: 289 ]
Gravity-pull death this time. I don't remember much about it except that I was tired before I even reached the broken structure, and I think that's the first time exhaustion that isn't physical has ever followed me into a new death.
- - -
[ Death Count: 300 ]
Three hundred.
I sit in the void and stare at the number until it stops looking like a number and starts looking like a joke someone's playing on me.
Three hundred deaths.
I don't grin. I don't sigh. I don't do any of the things I used to do when a death count used to mean something.
"…Why am I still doing this."
The words come out flat. Quieter than I mean them to be.
I look down at my hands. Small hands. They've been small for three hundred deaths now, and somewhere in there I stopped noticing.
"I don't even remember what winning was supposed to feel like."
I used to know exactly why I was doing this. Revenge. The gods. Eleven faces smiling, well at least ten of them were while I bled out on a council room floor a thousand years ago.
Right now, sitting in an empty void after the three-hundredth time my body has been torn apart by something that doesn't even remember meeting me, I can't actually feel any of that.
I just feel tired.
"What's even the point."
The thought scares me more than Onyx ever has. Not because it's wrong. Because some small, exhausted part of me isn't sure it's wrong at all.
I think about just sitting here. Not standing up. Not walking to the broken structure. Just letting the void be the void, forever, and seeing what happens if I never choose to die a three-hundred-and-first time.
I don't know how long I sit there.
Long enough that the silence stops feeling like silence and starts feeling like something with weight.
Eventually, I stand up anyway.
Not because I feel better.
Because some stubborn, idiot part of me that used to be a god refuses to let three hundred failures be the last thing I ever do, even if I can't remember right now why that matters.
"…One more."
The light spreads beneath my feet.
- - -
[ Death Count: 312 ]
Sphere death. I try timing the dodge a half-second earlier than 274's attempt, on the theory that maybe I overcorrected.
I didn't overcorrect. I undercorrected. The math was right the first time. I just didn't trust it enough to commit.
- - -
[ Death Count: 326 ]
I clear the radius by what feels like inches.
For the first time since the sphere appeared, I don't die to it.
Onyx just stands there afterward, his head tilting, and I think, for one stupid, fragile second, that maybe I've finally cracked something real.
Then his other hand rises too, and a second sphere starts forming where the first one isn't, and I realize the radius isn't the only number I needed.
- - -
[ Death Count: 341 ]
Two spheres. Two timings. Two radius to track instead of one.
I die faster this time than I have in a while.