Sprinting down the street, my head was filled with self-recrimination—not to mention a fair amount of rage at Sori for teaching me illusions in such a stupid way.

I'd known invisibility wasn't always a viable illusion, but I'd wanted to find a way to use it anyway. If I had more than pseudo-instinctual knowledge for creating illusions, I was sure I would have known better than to use invisibility on those poor people. If I could actually remember learning illusion magic, I might have known to place the illusion between the monster and the fleeing pair rather than over the fleeing pair. They'd been dropped into the dark with hope as their only protection. If I'd used an illusory wall or something instead, they could have kept running and gotten distance on the bear monster—distance I could have used to get closer and draw the creature's attention onto myself.

I told myself that their deaths weren't really my fault. I'd failed to save them, but I didn't cause the situation. I also knew that they wouldn't stay dead, so there wasn't much point in mourning their deaths. Still, after everything that went down at the hospital, I knew better than most how damaging these kinds of things could be, even without clear memories.

Behind me, I could still hear the sounds of the bear tearing flesh and breaking bones. I was just grateful that no one back there was living through that. I knew better than to look back, but I assumed that, like other monsters I'd seen, the giant bear wasn't looking for lunch so much as it was looking for memory crystals. I didn't understand why humans had memory crystals; I just knew that we did—or at least, others did. Presumably I did too, but it was hard to be sure. Universally, when monsters caught people, they went for the brain.

I was desperately trying not to think about the third brain there. I couldn't help; I'd seen enough to know I was already too late for all of them.

The gorge rose in my throat, and my anger tried to fight it down by demanding action, but I couldn't.

I didn't cause this. It wasn't my fault. I wasn't just trying to soothe my guilt and rage; I needed to keep my head if they were ever to have any chance.

I didn't know if I'd been here before—done this before. I wasn't used to being the one to lose memories.

Whether I'd been here before or not didn't matter because the scene behind me had undoubtedly happened repeatedly, maybe since the first loop. I had to get away before the wisps came. If I didn't, I'd forget most of what just happened, and my failure here would mean nothing. It made me feel like a coward, but unless I could get away without being taken by the Wisps, it would happen again.

With Sori, I'd managed to escape a Wisp by tricking it into my Shadow before escaping and closing the door behind me. Still, it was clear that wasn't the first time a Wisp had come for me, but it did seem to be the first time I'd escaped with my memories intact.

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When the Wisps had appeared at the start of the apocalypse, I'd somehow been pressed to the ground with such force I hadn't been able to move a finger. When I tricked them into my Shadow, I hadn't experienced any such thing. My only guess was that they couldn't use that ability in my Shadow Alcove. Considering that Sori had repeatedly reiterated that I needed to be ready to run inside at a moment's notice, it seemed plausible, if not something I really wanted to put to the test.

So far, I wasn't exactly enamored with Illusions. Or maybe I was just pouting. What had happened to those people was horrific but ultimately fixable. Even if it lingered as trauma for them, I knew more than one way to erase those memories if necessary. Not that having everyone in town who'd been traumatized leap from my stone ship into the plasma sea was practical. Still, it wasn't the only method I knew; we'd figure it out. I couldn't let the experience distract me.

I rounded a corner to get out of sight of the trauma-bear, and took a moment to open my Shadow door and step inside. One of the many things I didn't know about illusions and Wisps, was if Wisps could track Illusions back to their source. When I'd pierced Hands's illusions in my assault on the physical therapy pool, I hadn't seen any Wisps show up to deal with Hands for me. Hopefully, that was because they couldn't trace them.

I told you, he's a dolphin and dolphin's cheat, Sori's voice echoed from my memories, reminding me that I couldn't take it for granted that I knew what to expect.

As I stood poised to run deeper into my Shadow Alcove, watching for any sign of the Wisps, I changed my appearance to that of a human. The last thing I needed was to draw fire from a passing deputy or aspiring monster hunter.

The more I thought about it, the more I kicked myself for dropping the pair into invisibility. Even if the creature hadn't immediately sniffed them out, their own confusion and doubt about the appearance of the sudden darkness might have been enough to break the illusion. Not that I could be sure without more testing, but it was another reason I shouldn't have even tried that illusion. What I needed to do, if I could somehow find the time, was develop a handful of versatile illusions for the most likely situations I might find myself in. The visualization part wasn't especially difficult, probably because I already did something similar when drawing, so I should be able to customize them on the fly. It was something to consider later, when I was sure I'd survive past the next few seconds.

I stood tensely in my Shadow for more than five minutes before deciding it was safe to leave. Either the Wisps weren't coming, or they hadn't been able to track the broken illusion back to me.

The trauma bear would still be around, though, and I wasn't eager to face it either, especially not for anything as useless as punishment that it wouldn't understand anyway.

Animalistic monsters like the bear didn't seem to retain any more memories across loops than people. Maybe less, since people did seem to retain some things. I'd killed monsters like Slender Hopper the same way so many times that, when I lost memories, Nia knew my technique well enough to teach it back to me.

I wouldn't be able to deter the bear. So, if I wanted to stop this tragedy, I'd either have to find its originator and convince them to embrace their trauma—something that could easily go terribly wrong—or I'd have to feed the memory crystal to the Gremlins. The only other option that seemed feasible was to return here in a future loop and change the pair's spawn point, which would just put someone else at risk from the creature.

Groaning, I started to grab some shotgun shells. I was running low, so I could only hope it didn't take too much to put the creature down. I had a few ideas for Illusions that might help. Hopefully, using additional illusions in the same area wasn't a terrible idea.