There's no one at the rendezvous point when I go to check on it, which means I'm either going to have to wait or check in on the rebels myself. I choose the second option, because there's a risk their efforts will be for nothing if they aren't able to get whatever information they find to me before the loop ends.

Bimar's up first. She's apparently visiting a hidden underground lab somewhere near the outskirts of Isthanok. It's the most secure and dangerous location on the list, and although she claims she can navigate it just fine without any help, Thaht doesn't seem to be as convinced.

"It's where she used to work, so she knows how to get around the security," he explains to me. "But she hasn't worked in that place for years. They must have updated whatever security measures they use."

I agree with him, so Ahkelios and I head off to find this so-called hidden lab. It's not very hard to find with the directions Bimar left behind—honestly, even without them I probably would've noticed the concentration of Firmament flowing downhill. The entrance itself is pretty well-concealed, though.

That said, it turns out Hestians aren't much better than humans when it comes to updating their security measures. The codes Bimar left us open the doors just fine.

"Did they just... not update the entrance codes?" I mutter in disbelief. "After they had people leave?"

That, or Bimar just has someone on the inside that fed her the updated codes. I shake my head, walking in and taking note of the dim lights—most of the lab doesn't seem to be powered, and it's surprisingly empty for a supposed high-security base.

Then the sound of an angry crow cuts through the air, accompanied by several blasts of some unspecified weapon. I grimace and start running. The sound of an angry crow is, at this point, a sound that I'm pretty familiar with.

I prepare myself for a fight, loading up some Firmament into Compounded Mind just to have that little bit of accelerated perception in case I need to deal with fast-moving opponents. What I'm not prepared for is the sight of Bimar holding off two frog-looking people with what looks like a tiny knife as soon as I round the corner.

"Ethan!" she squawks, spotting me. "Catch!"

I'm not prepared for the way she reacts to my presence, either, which is to say she rolls beneath one of them, grabs him by the arm, then throws him at me.

That's one way to create distance, I suppose. Fortunately, releasing the prepared Compounded Mind gives me more than enough time to adjust. I grab the frog-man midair, then use an Accelerate-boosted spin to send him flying into the nearest wall. "I thought you said you could handle this," I grunt, my eyes darting around. There's something else here.

"These guys aren't part of the base!" Bimar throws herself out of the way of another blast from the guy she's fighting—she's not using Firmament, I notice, or at least she's not using it the way Tarin and Mari do. She's using it with her knife, at least, but she's not reinforcing herself at all. Strange. Can she not do it the same way they can?

Fortunately for her, the assassin isn't reinforcing himself, either. They're both fighting on more or less equal footing, though Bimar's weapon is a little more unwieldy. There's some kind of trick to her knife. I watch as she ducks beneath a blast, slices toward the frog...

...The Firmament causes the knife to extend a little farther than it should, and it cuts into her opponent's skin. I can sense a small Firmament mark left behind, imprinted into his body—and then it abruptly contracts, crushing an inchwide sphere of organic material.

I wince. Painful, but not debilitating, at least not where she'd cut. If she'd been able to inject any more Firmament in there, though, it could very well have been deadly.

Her opponent's more or less handled, so I take my attention off her and to the something else I sensed before. There's more of them—more of these frog people, scattered all over the room. My Firmament sense highlights each of them against the walls and the floor. One of them is even on the ceiling, hidden between the pipes with what feels almost like a blowpipe poking out between the struts.

A memory flashes back to me—I remember one of these trying to kill me back when I first tried fighting in the Craven Arena. They're assassins of some kind?

Judging by that encounter and this one, their main strength is hiding. Being able to go invisible probably makes them excellent assassins to anyone without a Firmament sense. I almost unleash a barrage of skills to take them out, but manage to stop myself just in time.

Why aren't they attacking? Ahkelios's mental voice filters through our link to me—he's noticed the same thing I have. I narrow my eyes, using the extra time granted by Compounded Mind and Quicken Mind in tandem to try to figure out what their goal is.

The one I threw at the wall is unconscious. The one that's fighting with Bimar is trying to shoot her, but his aim is clumsy—almost too clumsy, if I watch him carefully. He isn't aiming at anything vital, and he hesitates for a split second more than he should every time he moves to fire. It's just enough to give Bimar time to dodge or deflect the upcoming blast.

He's a distraction.

Ahkelios agrees, based on what I can feel through our Temporal Link. The ones hiding near the walls and floor are each holding some sort of dart-based weapon; three of them are aimed at Bimar, and the other three have now pivoted to be aimed at me.

Which means they aren't trying to kill her or fend off an intruder—they're here to capture her. I suppose the fact that three of them are aiming at me means I'm now also on the list.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

Well, we can't have that, can we?

Bimar isn't aware of them, judging by her singleminded focus on the guy in front of her. I could wait for the six of them to make a move before taking them down, but that seems needlessly dramatic.

Ahkelios. I send a mental signal through our shared link, and then we burst into action all at once.

A feint toward one of the assassins aiming at me causes all three of them to fire, trying to get at me before I can move; I Warpstep behind them, closing my eyes to avoid being disoriented by the sudden change. My Firmament sense helps me plant my elbow directly into the neck of the frog that's now behind me. I pivot, drop down low to drop the two new darts subsequently being fired in my direction, then Triplestep and Accelerate to fling the second assassin into the third.

Ahkelios, meanwhile, is dealing with the ones trying to target Bimar. To her credit, she realizes what's going on almost as soon as the first frog I hit crumples to the ground, mottled skin fading into visibility. Her leap to the side saves her from the first two darts that bury themselves into the wall behind her. The third dart Ahkelios quite literally kicks out of the way, using the momentum from that kick to subsequently bounce off the ceiling and into the face of—

[ You have defeated Qu'oark Jidoon (Rank C)! +15 Strength credits. +24 Durability credits. +36 Reflex credits. +20 Speed credits. +20 Firmament credits. ]

—through the face of the assassin. I wince, my eyes going wide. Ahkelios shakes off the splatter of blood easily enough, but...

The rest of the assassins stand down pretty quickly after that.

"Damn." Bimar whistles at the body on the ground. "That was pretty ruthless."

Qu'oark Jidoon. That's not a species, is it? That's a name.

The frog I slammed into the wall isn't moving, although I can tell he's taking quick, shallow breaths. He's alive, but judging by the shape of his skull and the angle of his limbs... only barely.

The other ones I hit aren't faring much better—one of them has a broken neck, and the other two are groaning in pain, barely holding on to what looks like some very broken bones.

The only ones intact are the three that surrendered.

"Not intentionally," I say. My voice comes out hollow.

It's... jarring. The message from the Interface might as well be a bright-red neon sign telling me that I—or Ahkelios, at least—killed a person. Up to this point, my kills have been on things that are at least ambiguously sapient; the harpies come the closest, and even then they're clearly an echo of someone or something else.

I'm not sure how I feel. Guilt isn't the right term for it; I acted in self defense. There's a bit of fear, but more at myself than anything else, and only because despite everything else that's happened, I haven't yet confronted how far I've gone beyond baseline human. The opponents I'm fighting are almost always reinforced in some way.

These ones... aren't. And I shattered them without really thinking about it, because I've never really had to hold back.

"You okay?" Ahkelios asks. He doesn't seem nearly as bothered by all this, but there is a noticeable light of concern in his eyes.

"I will be," I say.

I'm not about to tear myself up over this. It's not the first time I've seen death in the loop, and the fact that it is a loop means all these deaths are going to reset anyway. But that's not a healthy way to think about it long-term, and at some point I'm going to need to sit down and process where I want to stand when all of this ends.

Killing, especially in self defense, isn't a problem—but it should never be this easy.

[ You have defeated Qu'urk Jidoon (Rank C)! +20 Firmament credits. ]

Nor this rewarded. The first one I slammed into the wall just died, I think. I try not to look at his corpse.

And the names... are these brothers?

"Let's talk about it later," I tell Ahkelios, then turn my gaze to the remaining three conscious assassins. They've dropped their weapons on the ground and have backed up against the wall, staring at me with wide, fearful eyes; the mottled burns on their skin reminds me that it's very likely that the position they have isn't voluntary. "Why were you trying to capture us?"

"Orders," one of them chokes out. He's clutching nervously at the wall, and pieces of his skin fade in and out, like he's fighting the urge to turn himself invisible again. I notice the way his eyes keep darting toward one of his brothers, the way he keeps twitching toward them.

"Are they your brothers?" I ask. My voice comes out a little softer than I intend, and the tight, terrified nod the frog-man gives me doesn't help. I sigh. "Go help them."

All three immediately dart away from the wall and toward their brothers. They stop only when I speak again. "But don't move them. Their bones are pretty badly broken. Get a medical team down here if you want to save them."

Well, I say that, but... realistically speaking, they're not going to be able to get a medical team into a secret laboratory in the middle of nowhere. Even if they could, it wouldn't be a good idea to let them. I grimace a bit at the thought.

"What, you're telling me you care?" one of them says in spite of himself, his voice bitter. "You're the one that did this to them."

I did. Part of it is because I don't recognize my own strength. I think, somehow—even without Acceleration or any of my Interface-granted skills—I'm a lot stronger than I was when I was just... human.

I pause a little at the thought. Do I not think of myself as human anymore?

"I did," I say. "And I won't say I'm sorry, because I did it in self defense. But just because I had to defend myself doesn't mean I have to be heartless about it. So yes, I do care. Because I should."

If I'm going to be killing, I can't let those deaths be faceless nobodies. Especially in a time loop, where that mode of thinking would be easier than ever to adopt. The problem isn't the consequences for the world—the problem is the consequences for myself, if I let this become easy.

"Who are you working for?" I ask. Bimar's finally walked up next to me, watching the scene. I can't read her expression. It looks almost like she's still trying to decide how to react.

I expect the answer to be Whisper, or someone underneath her. It would make sense. The only problem is that I'd have to worry about how she knew to send agents here when our movements should have been mostly opaque to her.

"Teluwat," the assassin says instead, and I frown. I don't recognize the name.

Bimar clearly does though. She lets out a squawk of fear and stumbles back. "He's here?!" she demands.

"...Who or what is a Teluwat?" I ask. Not just someone under Whisper, if this is Bimar's reaction. The crow shakes her head, but the tremble in her voice is very, very clear.

"One of our Trialgoers," she says. "The—the first one to finish his Trial. The strongest."