Gwen stood frozen before the ancient masonry, her gaze snared by the mural etched into the cold stone. It was no larger than a man's forearm, yet it held a gravity that seemed to pull at her very soul. The carving depicted a Silver Snake, its scales shimmering with a faint, ghostly luster, coiled in a perfect, unbroken circle. It bit its own tail—the Ouroboros, the symbol of the eternal return.
However, it was the center of the coil that sent a paralyzing chill through her veins. Within the serpent's loop lay a grisly mound of carved spider corpses. Surrounding this central pile, the mural depicted a frantic, prehistoric war. Spiders were shown weaving intricate, jagged webs to ensnare their foe, while others shriveled in agony, caught in a perpetual, losing struggle against the sovereign snake.
The imagery was too vivid, the craftsmanship too hauntingly real. The stone seemed to pulse with the echoes of that ancient violence. Suddenly, a violent wave of vertigo washed over Gwen. The cathedral walls seemed to tilt and liquefy. Her head throbbed with the weight of a thousand overlapping memories, and she clamped her eyes shut against the blinding dizziness.
When Gwen opened her eyes, she was standing in the center of the ruined main hall. Her breath came in ragged, panicked gasps.
She remembered.
The cold realization hit her like a physical blow: she was trapped. She had seen this hall before. She had seen the Black Knight rise. She had felt the spray of blood and heard the final, rattling breaths of her companions. She was caught in some twisted, temporal knot—a time loop that defied every law of the Dream Realm she understood.
The horror of it clawed at her throat. She tried to scream, to warn them, to cry out against the cruelty of fate, but no sound escaped. Her voice remained a prisoner of her silence.
The cohort turned to her, their expressions shifting from focus to deep concern. Fors was the first to react, sprinting across the cracked marble. She grabbed Gwen's shoulders, her voice urgent. "Hey, hey! Gwen, look at me! What happened?"
Klaus gripped his whip, his eyes darting toward the shadows. "I'll watch the perimeter. The Devil might be close."
Artemis stepped forward, her brow furrowed. "Gwen? What is it? Talk to us."
Gwen couldn't find the strength to sign. The tears she had shed in a dozen different "deaths" finally broke through, streaming down her face in a silent torrent. She stood there, trembling, unable to bridge the gap between the nightmare she had lived and the reality they were currently standing in.
After several agonizing minutes, Gwen lunged forward. She threw her arms around Alista and Fors, pulling them into a desperate, crushing hug. She held them as if they were made of smoke, terrified that they would vanish into ash once more.
Alista and Fors exchanged a bewildered look, but they didn't pull away. Gently, they patted her head, trying to soothe the girl who seemed to have lost her mind in a matter of seconds.
"What... what happened in there?" Fors asked softly, her voice laced with worry.
Gwen finally released them, her hands shaking as she began to raise them to signal the truth. But before her fingers could form the first word, Klaus's voice cut through the air like a blade.
"Incoming!"
The main hall of the Ruined Cathedral was a cavern of absolute silence, broken only by the flickering of the ghostly torches. At the far end, bathed in a pool of living shadows, stood the Black Knight. The anthracite steel of its armor seemed to drink the light, and the twin red flames behind its visor pulsed with an ancient, murderous hunger.
Alista Tudor adjusted his grip on his sword. Beside him, Gwen's hands trembled on her whip. She felt a phantom chill—a lingering trauma from a memory of a fight that hadn't happened yet, or perhaps a premonition of their doom.
"The soul is in the blade," Alista whispered, his voice steady. "Focus everything on the sword. If that steel remains whole, we die."
The Black Knight didn't herald his attack with a cry. He simply vanished into the darkness and reappeared like a thunderbolt in the center of their formation. His massive claymore swung in a silent, terrifying arc.
"Artemis! Heavy!" Alista roared.
Artemis slammed her palms toward the floor. [Gravity Field: Tenfold]. The air turned to lead. The marble tiles groaned and pulverized as the Black Knight was slammed into the ground by the sudden surge of weight. Even for a Fallen Devil, the pressure was immense.
"Now! Klaus!"
Klaus lashed his whip at two shattered stone pillars. [Life-Form Animation]. The marble pillars twisted and reformed into jagged, multi-limbed stone golems. They lunged at the Knight, pinning his arms to the floor, their rocky bodies cracking under the strain of holding back the Devil's strength.
Fors Wall was already moving. Blink. She appeared on a high balcony. Blink. She was behind the Knight. She drew her bow, her eyes glowing with a cold, blue light as she began to rain arrows down, aimed specifically at the joints of the black armor.
Despite the gravity and the stone golems, the darkness began to flow into the Knight's wounds, repairing the anthracite steel as quickly as Fors could chip it. The Knight began to rise, his strength mounting.
Alista stepped forward, reaching into his pouch. He threw a handful of glimmering Soul Shards—not at the Knight, but into the pool of shadows at its feet.
[Aspect Ability: The Bribe].
The effect was subtle but devastating. The Black Knight, an entity of perfect, cold slaughter, felt the invisible tether of the bribe. A surge of unnatural arrogance flooded its mind. It stopped its methodical defense. It saw these humans not as threats, but as gnats to be swatted.
With a metallic roar, the Knight ignored the stone golems, letting them tear at its shoulders while it focused solely on Alista. It raised the claymore high, leaving its guard wide open for a finishing blow.
"He's falling for it!" Klaus shouted.
The Knight swung the claymore with such force that the shockwave sent Klaus and Artemis flying. The darkness in the room swelled, attempting to snuff out their lives.
"Gwen!"
Gwen knew this moment. She felt the weight of the previous "failed" timeline pressing on her soul. She wouldn't let them fall. She snapped her whip in a wide circle. [Healing Sanctuary].
A dome of radiant, golden light erupted, acting as a physical barrier against the shadows. The darkness hissed as it touched the gold, unable to penetrate the field. Within the dome, Artemis's strength returned, and Alista's fatigue vanished.
"I won't let you have them!" Gwen screamed, her whip glowing with an incandescent light that burned the shadows away from the Knight's legs, stalling his regeneration.
The Knight was weakened, arrogant, and trapped in a cage of gravity and light. But it was still a Devil. It lunged at Alista, the black blade descending like a guillotine.
Alista didn't dodge. He moved into the strike. He parried the massive claymore with his own blade, the vibration shattering the bones in his forearm, but he held the position. He trapped the Knight's sword between his own and the stone floor.
"FORS! THE SOUL!"
Fors Wall used her final teleport. She didn't appear near the Knight; she appeared above the hilt of the black claymore, descending like a falling star.
She notched an arrow made of pure essence, pulled the string to the breaking point, and fired it point-blank into the notch where the soul resided. At the same instant, Artemis reversed the gravity in a one-inch radius around the blade.
CRACK.
The black steel claymore shattered into a thousand shards.
The red flames in the Knight's visor flickered and vanished. The anthracite armor, once indestructible, turned to grey ash and collapsed in a hollow heap. The darkness that had filled the hall retreated into the corners, leaving the cathedral cold and empty.
The cohort collapsed. Alista sat in the ash, clutching his broken arm, breathing hard. Gwen dropped her whip, the golden field fading as she wept—this time, with relief. They were all alive.
Alista looked at the shattered remains of the black sword. A single, dark Soul Shard lay among the fragments. He picked it up, feeling its cold power.
"We won,"
The cohort regrouped in the flickering, ghostly light of the hall in the ruined Cathedral, their bodies battered and their spirits fraying at the edges. The air was heavy with the metallic scent of blood and the ozone smell of spent essence.
Gwen moved among them, her face pale and streaked with tears. Her hands glowed with a soft, desperate warmth as she knit together torn flesh and soothed bruised bones. She worked with a frantic intensity, terrified that at any moment, the reset would trigger, and her work would be undone.
Once the physical wounds were closed, Gwen turned to the harder task: explaining the impossible. Her hands moved in a blur of complex signs, her expressions conveying the horror of the repetition. She described the deaths, the restart, the mural, and the trap of time they were caught in.
Klaus leaned back against the cold stone, rubbing his temples. "Are you serious?" he asked, his voice echoing disbelief. "A time loop? Here? How is that even possible outside of a Nightmare?"
Artemis frowned, her tactical mind rejecting the absurdity. "I've never heard of anything like this in the archives of the Great Clans." She pointed a shaking finger at Fors and Alista. "You're saying... these two died? Brutally?"
Gwen nodded solemnity.
Artemis exhaled a sharp breath. "Then the solution is simple. We don't trigger the mural. We don't go back inside. We leave this place immediately."
Gwen's hands hesitated, then she signaled: [Yeah. That is the safest play. We can leave.]
"I'm afraid it isn't that simple," Alista said, his voice cutting through the tentative relief like a blade.
The entire group turned to look at him. His eyes were dark, staring at something none of them could see.
Artemis narrowed her eyes. "Are you sure? Is the Memory inside really worth risking an eternal cycle of death?"
Fors spoke up, her voice quiet but knowing. "That's not what he means, Arty. He means escaping the loop isn't simple. You can't just walk out of a broken record."
Gwen shuddered, a fresh wave of cold washing over her. She signaled: [Why is that?]
Alista looked at them, his expression grim. "Because I have experienced something similar to this before. In my First Nightmare."
A stunned silence fell over the group. Even Artemis, with her noble background, fell silent. The First Nightmare was a personal hell, and for Alista—the man with a True Name—to compare this to his origin story meant the danger was catastrophic. Only Fors remained impassive; she knew the depths of his history.
Alista began to explain the mechanics of his first trial, the repetition, and the inevitability of fate. But while his mouth moved, his mind was screaming with a different realization.
'There was never a thing like this in the original novel,' Alista thought, panic clawing at his gut. 'This is new. This is a deviation. If Sunny were here, he wouldn't have survived this. His shadows wouldn't save him from a conceptual loop.'
His mind raced back to Gwen's description of the mural. The silver snake biting its own tail. The spiders dying in the center.
The answer hit him with the force of a runaway train.
'The Spider represents Weaver, the Daemon of Fate and the firstborn of the Unknown. But the Silver Snake... that represents the Snake of Mercury.'
Alista's breath hitched. 'That is the symbol of the Wheel of Fortune Pathway from the mysteries. That means... a Sequence 1 Angel of the Wheel of Fortune fought against a Divine Daemon here?'
"Holy fuck," Alista whispered internally.
The implications were terrified. Two universes were bleeding into each other.
'The question now is... which one is it?' Alista wondered, staring . 'Is it Will Auceptin or Ouroboros,?'