After returning to the real world, I sat down beside the feeble old man.

He stared at me as if one of the Goetia had settled in next to him. In order to keep my mind sharp and avoid having an awkward conversation, I reversed time in a continuous five second loop. The maintenance required more concentration than expected.

I discovered remaining in the same contemplative pose made it easier than having to mentally adjust to sudden changes in my positioning. I settled into the lotus position, though it was awkward on the narrow row of seating.

Entering a meditative trance while simultaneously focused on looping time proved near impossible.

My mind was in chaos after the fight against Felix. The disorientation from the actual combat left my mind in a fugue. A large part of it must have been due to the difficulty of adjusting to the unnatural and immediate switches in my own positioning with each reversal.

My body felt strangely massive, grotesque. Nothing was wrong with me physically, but my mental image of myself had grown corrupted.

Paranoid, I glanced down at myself to make sure. I looked as normal as ever, though I could not shake the idea that I should have dozens of phantom arms and legs frozen in various states of motion. The idea made me nauseated, as if I had been transformed into some demonic abomination--an orgy of limbs locked in violent embrace.

Over the last year, I had a variety of experiences that left me afraid, hopeless, lost, but nothing had evoked the same visceral disgust as I felt at that moment.

No matter what happens, you are still a human. You are Leones Ansteri, son of Jansen and Milena.

I repeated this mantra in my head, soothed more than anything else by the thought of my parents. The forest of phantom limbs retracted one at a time. Too slow for my liking.

I imagined drawing my own silhouette in the lotus position. The initial lines were sloppy, but just the distraction of fixing them helped.

Lyra would have laughed if she could have seen my amateur sketch.

After managing to regain most of my wits, I turned my thoughts toward the future. My tentative plan to take advantage of the tesseract’s time dilation had not survived long. I wanted to use the tesseract as a temporary sanctuary, and in the end I had retreated back to the real world.

The trial by combat was a potentially excellent training method, though there was a limit to how much I could realistically gain from it. If I managed to beat Sensi, was Brother Augur my final opponent? He could turn me inside out with a thought.

Winning may not even be in my best interest. The trial may be a deterrent for anyone unsuited to entering the true depths of the tesseract. Within the heart of the four-dimensional construct, the real Brother Augur and the incarnation of a demon lord bided their time. Grinding out a tactical victory by exploiting the void may put me in a situation I was in no way prepared for.

Before delving deeper into the tesseract’s mysteries, I needed to know more about what awaited me in the real world. I should scout ahead before exhausting more of my reserves. The sparring match with Felix had drained a fifth of my time energy and a tenth of the void. Not bad, but it was impossible to judge if the insights I gained were worth the cost in the short term.

Dropping the five-second loop eased the final burden on my mind. I felt somewhat normal again, my internal clock recalibrated and my sense of self returned. I was as prepared to face the future as I would ever be. Sometimes, waiting for the perfect moment was no better than paralysis.

“You’re a boy, aren’t you?” The old man blinked up at me. Cloudy blue blindness had consumed most of his pupils. “You appeared out of thin air. One of the Winds? No, no…”

I patted him on the shoulder reassuringly. The old man frowned. Had I come across as condescending? Did it matter?

A quick search of the crowd revealed a guardsman slumped nearby. Bloody gouges had ruined most of his leather armor, but the sword sheathed at his hip looked serviceable. I mistook him as a corpse at first until I noticed the slight movement of his chest. Shallow and irregular breaths, followed by a weak, congested cough.

Alive, but probably not for long. My mother had imparted some of her medicinal wisdom on me over the years. Truthfully, I had remembered the morbid details more than anything else, especially her stories of treating soldiers on the battlefield. When she was in a particularly dark mood, she would recount how some of them deteriorated and her futile attempts to save them. Her descriptions of the hopeless ones matched the guard’s appearance.

My mother had been adamant that it was a grave sin to rob or desecrate a corpse. On the bright side, the guard was not yet dead.

“Sorry,” I muttered as I fumbled with his scabbard.

Bloody spittle leaked from his mouth.

Grimacing, I finally managed to unbuckle the weapon without jostling him too much. The blade turned out to be standard steel, well-maintained. I kept it at the ready, with the sturdy leather scabbard clenched in my off-hand.

Damn, it felt good to hold a blade again.

I relaxed my overly-tight grip on the hilt. A sign I was afraid, seeking comfort like a child clutching their favorite stuffed animal.

Curious. I still felt emotionally numb besides the vague, unresolved resentment festering in the back of my mind. Despite all my careful, detached plotting, my body language expressed a tension I was not consciously aware of.

I forced my muscles to relax and walked toward the nearest exit. The gently sloped ramp led directly toward the ground floor. I descended in a crouch, one slow step in front of the other, ready to reverse time at a moment’s notice.

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The metallic stench of blood wafted up from the lower level. Dread crawled across my skin as I rounded the corner. At first glance nothing seemed too out of the ordinary. The more I explored, the more I realized I was mistaken.

Without the usual crowd milling about, the area seemed curiously hollow. The twilight leaking through the high windows formed eerie shadows.

Most of the stalls in the area had been reduced to a scattering of debris. The few that remained displayed their wares with pride. A glass case housed an array of brittle blades sheathed in rust. The next one belonged to the man who sold sweetbark, Caedius’ favorite concoction. The large wooden bowl and its ladle were deformed with rot. Most of the liquid had spilled out, staining the wooden counter wine-dark; a small puddle of fetid slime, riddled with fungal blooms, had congealed in the center of the container.

I covered my nose against the stench. Had the accelerated passage of time done this, or was it the result of some corrupting presence? Likely the latter. As far as I could tell, time was no more distorted here than anywhere else in the Amphitheater. The bowl of sweetbark had rotted away, but the rest of the wooden stall was untouched.

Time, by itself, was not so deliberate.

A high, persistent buzzing grew louder as I continued on. Frowning, I shifted my grip on the sword. Dry husks crackled my boots with each step. I squatted down and slid my blade along the floor at a slight angle, scooping up the offending material for a closer look: desiccated insects, mostly flies. A live one buzzed past my face.

Suppressing my disgust, I approached the likely source of the infestation, a statue in the middle of a shattered fountain. In the dim lighting, it looked like a crawling blanket covered every square inch of the figure.

A few swipes of the sword scattered a cloud of flies. Gaps appeared in the writhing mass, revealing an empty eye socket, a mottled shoulder, a crescent of pale throat. An adult male, judging from the size. The insects surged back into position, their incessant buzzing a touch more agitated.

Frowning, I focused on detecting any strange energies around the horrifying figure. For some reason, I was better at detecting human magic compared to demonic techniques. The latter tended to be far more insidious, corrupting and distorting reality itself.

Nothing caught my eye, but I could not shake the feeling I had stumbled upon something profane. More than a random display of cruelty. Its proximity to the arena, where Astaroth was meant to manifest, meant it could either be a sacrifice or a guardian.

An unnatural force anchored the corpse in place, preventing it from falling over. The insects were strange as well. Most of their kind had disappeared during the long winter, presumably in hibernation or killed off by the cold. To see them active in such numbers, as if this was some carrion pit broiling with sweltering heat, felt wrong.

Well, this was not my problem. I was trying to find an escape route, not clean up the city. I backed away, unwilling to expose myself no matter how spiritually inert the corpse and insects appeared.

My knees buckled from sudden weakness. Cursing, I used the scabbard as a cane and hobbled away, mind blank with panic as I attempted to put as much distance between myself and the corpse statue as possible.

Within a few seconds I regathered my wits. What had that been? Some sort of instantaneous curse? The weakness was not only physical--the assault had likewise slipped through my mental defenses, sapping my focus and even my determination.

To my horror, my reserves of time energy had shrunk by another tenth. The void remained untouched.

The loss remained even after I reversed time to before I approached the corpse statue. My thoughts were still in the clouds, though the physical weakness had vanished. Gritting my teeth, I leaned against one of the intact stalls until I recovered more.

It was fascinating, in a morbid sense. What had been drained, exactly? My soul? My very being? Whatever it was, it existed outside of time.

The existence of such a thing made sense, after all. I could reverse time to revert back to a perfect physical state, but the same was not true of my mental and magical energy. A long enough duration had to pass from my personal perspective for those resources to passively regenerate. Again, the concept of objective versus subjective time had reared its nebulous head.

Thanks for the insight. I spit in the direction of the corpse statue.

Silver threads of time energy had appeared in its vicinity, gathering around its navel. A few of them originated from where I had been standing when the sudden weakness took hold, but hundreds more formed a current leading back towards the arena. A dark gray scale the size of a thumbnail pulsed deep in the center of the corpse statue’s abdomen, greedily absorbing the silver threads.

“Shit,” I muttered.

Was it feeding on the ambient time energy like a parasite? Or was that simply the limit of what I could notice, now that it had taken a nibble of my own powers? All sorts of esoteric power beyond my senses must have congregated in the area—karma, fate, space, violence, who knew what else?

I rubbed my chin. Could I absorb time energy as well?

Brother Augur’s tesseract had been constructed from a near-infinite amount. Absorbing a tiny fraction of the whole would be more than enough to elevate my reserves to a new level. As tempting as it was, I suppressed my greed. While the tesseract must have been constructed with a significant number of redundancies, unraveling the wrong threads may lead to catastrophic results.

If I could not take advantage, I certainly had no intention of letting this Time Eater feast to its heart’s content. Nothing good would come from allowing that dark seed to fully gestate within its womb.

The vigor quickly returned to my body, but I was loath to approach the Time Eater. Fortunately, it seemed to have no interest in feeding on the void. Paimon’s domain was anathema towards all things magical.

Sighing, I sheathed the sword. Here goes nothing.

I pointed at the corpse with my free hand and fired off a small burst of void in the form of a small beam, restricting its power in case it further empowered the Time Eater. The strands of time energy being absorbed into the seed vanished in the white beam’s wake; a moment later, it struck its mark.

The entire swarm of insects billowed outwards in a black maelstrom, deafening in their frenzy. Their bulk obscured most of my vision, but my mind’s eye revealed the clash of magical energies within the Time Eater. A multitude of cracks broke across the dark seed, leaking brilliant light.

Before I could celebrate, the seed shuddered and repaired itself.

I buried my face in the crook of my arm as a wave of flies crashed into me. They lacked the necessary force to pose a real threat, but they crawled along my skin, attempting to dig into my ears, my nostrils, the corners of my eyes. Now that the Time Eater exerted control over the insects, their presence radiated darkly about me like thousands of obsidian flecks.

Reversing time to the beginning of my experiment offered a second of relief. Unbidden, the swarm surged forward once again, confirming that the memory of this demonic force persisted across time.

A void wave rippled from my outstretched hand; it collided with the swarm, shredding the wicked intent directing their movement. The wave was reinforced with enough energy to engulf the Time Eater, but more insects veered into its path, forming a shield that dissipated the void until only the gentlest touch reached the corpse statue.

Hundreds of flies plummeted to the floor. A decent chunk of their overall number, but I had wasted too much of my void reserves to consider it a victory.

Think. The Time Eater was in its pupal stage, incubating within the corpse statue. Its focus was on area control, preventing me from closing in. Similar to Sensi and her shadows.

Coincidence, or did you see this coming, Brother Augur?

If I was able to defeat the second stage of the tesseract’s trial, I should be able to handle this parasite. I could have snuck past its perimeter, but it would be foolish to allow a time-attuned demon to be born behind my back. Besides, this one had fed on me. That could not be ignored. We had formed a karmic grudge, one that I could not allow to flourish beyond this cradle.