Rieren was ready for this, in a sense. When she had found the token lying neatly upon her blade, she’d known something was wrong. There had to have been some sort of catch. It had to be a trap.

But there hadn’t been any signs back then. She had attempted to peek at it in the same manner she was doing now, with her eyes infused with Essence. There had been no literal strings attached. Nothing that had been visible either through her naked eye or with her Essence-infused ones.

Of course. The monsters she had been dealing with throughout this reprise of the first round had been smart. They wouldn’t want to be caught so easily.

The trap must have been set while she had been journeying. Somehow, along the way from the point where she had picked up her sword and her token to reaching the brazier’s location, a monster had strung her token with its string.

A very specific monster.

Rieren wasted no time slicing her sword through the string. Or, she attempted to do so, at least. But her blade didn’t cut through the Aetherian’s glimmering thread. It made it bend, much like how Forys’s Domain had done so under pressure, but it didn’t snap or tear off. It was strong enough to withstand Rieren’s blow.

More of the golden line revealed itself, stretching back all the way to the disembodied hand floating in closer from the distance. There it was. The monster she had known.

Rieren would recognize that limb from anywhere now. It was the same construction of compressed ash strung together with more golden strings keeping it together. But it wasn’t just the arm that was headed in her direction.

The closer the arm got, the more of its original body regenerated from nothing behind it.

Rieren had to blink as the rest of the Aetherian slowly came into view. First, the arm grew and lengthened until it was an entire limb jutting from a free-floating shoulder. Next came the monster’s chest and back, followed by its legs and the neck that ended in a crushed head with hundreds of strings floating upwards like flyaway hair.

She had thought that the monster’s reformation would give her an interesting view of its innards. Its regeneration followed the same procedure that her perk did—creating bones first, then going slowly outwards.

But instead of any sort of actual bones, all Rieren saw acting as its base framework was more golden strings running through its body.

Albeit, Rieren had to admit that the ones inside its body looked like they were compressing together to form a simulacrum of bones. The only difference was that they glimmered gold instead of dead white like a human’s would look.

“You actually went and did it,” the monster said, walking towards Rieren while still preventing her from pulling the token back towards herself. Its many voices warbled together into one. “I refused to believe it at first, but you proved me wrong. You proved all of us wrong. I was warned that this would happen, but I didn’t wish to believe it. What a waste.”

“Keep your babbling to yourself, Aetherian,” Rieren said. “And release my token.”

“You think you earned that? It was given to you, on the condition of your continued goodwill to the kind who you truly belong with. Instead, you chose to betray your brethren and cling to what shreds of your old false identity you possess. How pathetic.”

Rieren would have answered, but she wasn’t given the chance. The Aetherian had readied his attack. Even as he pulled hard on the token, he summoned a shaft of concentrated Divine Essence, glinting with deadly auric light.

His swing came in hard and powerful, but Rieren was able to block without too much difficulty. Her strength had grown well, after all.

Nevertheless, the blow made her concentration sit up and take notice. She was once more in a life-or-death fight. A mere pace away from submitting her token, and she had been stopped once more. When were these Abyss-cursed interruptions going to end?

Batcat had already leaped off her head, leaving Rieren free to fight without worrying about the little Spirit Beast. Hopefully, the cat had gone far enough not to get caught in the crossfire.

The Aetherian continued attacking.

Rieren was in no condition to get dragged into yet another devastating battle. Dealing with Essalina had fatigued her. She had managed to keep the fight with Rykion short enough not to let her fatigue play a part. Now that it had come to another bout with this overpowered Aetherian, she was certain she had no other recourse than to end it as quickly as possible.

A part of her had to wonder why she had to bother with things such as fatigue when she was no longer human. It was oft-stated how monsters could go on rampaging and destroying forever ceaselessly.

But as the battles had dragged on, she had realized it wasn’t the sort of physical fatigue that normally plagued humans. No, the one Rieren had to be wary of was more of a spiritual thing.

She could only draw upon and channel so much Essence in a short period of time. Her corruption could convert the natural Essence she was drawing into Abyssal and Divine Aspects, but they were certainly not present in nature as much. She was forced to expend a great deal of her own spiritual energy to create her own.

The presence of others provided a minor benefit, but it was also a major hindrance. This many cultivators gathered in one location meant that the natural energy of the world present all around them would be used up quite fast. It was actually rather wonderous that they had managed to fight so long without significant drawbacks so far.

Likely had to do with the tournament’s setup. The officials and organizers wouldn’t want participants to run out of natural Essence too quickly, after all.

Still. In the end, Rieren’s reservoirs were emptying fast. She would soon be too bereft of any spiritual energy to do much of anything, much less fighting in the manner she had been doing for so long.

So, as the Aetherian charged at her, lancing in with its spear of sizzling Divine Essence, Rieren resorted to brute force.

She held herself back for the minutest amount of time. Just enough for the Aetherian to reach her exact location. At just the last moment before she was hit, Rieren dodged a single step to the side and twisted around.

The charging Aetherian collided hard with her back, but her own defence was strong enough to prevent her from being thrown forward. Its spear and the ashen arm holding it jutted forward at her left. Rieren wasted no time wrapping her free left arm around her opponent’s to lock the limb close to her, holding the Aetherian in place.

Before it could react, she stabbed her Receptor sword into herself with her free hand.

The blow was strong that it crushed through her guts and went through the monster trapped to her back at the same time. Livid pain roiled through her lower torso, but Rieren bit down against it. Her work wasn’t done. She had to take advantage of her enemy’s shock and pain.

Her next step involved twisting her leg around to kick out the Aetherian’s feet from under him. Well, the one she could reach while still maintaining some balance.

As soon as they both began falling—Rieren was still keeping them locked together—she activated Fray Passage. The skill imparted a tremendous boost to the momentum any sort of motion, even it was at an awkward backwards angle.

Rieren shot backwards with the speed of a thunderbolt, facing the sky as she did so. With her went the surprised monster at her back. They crashed into the ground so hard, Rieren was certain she would have cracked several ribs and possibly even snapped her spine if she had struck it directly.

As it was, the Aetherian was quashed between the earth and herself. The powerful impact created a shallow crater around them, sending up dust and debris in a radius of a few paces around the point of contact.

Despite the blow no doubt hitting hard, the Aetherian was finally able to recover enough to counterattack the only way it could. Its right arm was still free. Another sizzling bolt of gold materialized in it, ready to crash into and destroy Rieren, possibly in an attempt to tear apart the Abyss-Aspected Essence within her.

She had seen it coming, though. Leaving her sword stuck in her guts, Rieren snapped her right arm to the side, grabbing her opponent’s only free limb before it could strike her.

Now, they were locked in truth. It was turning into a contest of strength, a struggle for both to keep hold of their own power while surpassing their opponent’s. There was one small difference that the Aetherian wasn’t aware of, however. Rieren could raise her strength.

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Activating Reaver Stance sent up a boiling crimson aura around her. Strangely, just as last time, it was flecked with black and gold. Her new Aspects affected everything.

Her wound wasn’t so bad to make Reaver Stance turn her an almost an entire realm stronger. But the gut wound was still severe. Left unchecked, it could kill her, had she been a mere mortal. As such, the boost to her strength was substantial enough to eclipse the Aetherian’s with no difficulty.

With a roar, Rieren ripped the monster’s right arm off entirely. In the same fluid motion, she twisted off it, letting her blade slice even more through them both. The trajectory pulled the Receptor sword out of the monster, but Rieren was too fast for it to even consider attempting to escape.

Keeping a hold on its other arm, she slammed back down, facing the creature this time, faster than the blink of an eye. Her returning slam was accompanied by her crushing the torn-off ashen arm right where its accursed head should have been.

Unfortunately, the monster had no mouth, so that didn’t shut it up as Rieren might have wished.

“Monster?” The Aetherian laughed. Despite its condition, despite being trapped and torn, it had the audacity to roar in Rieren’s face with laughter. “Ha. You fight like one of your animals when cornered.”

Now that she was facing forward instead of backwards, Rieren could manoeuvre herself with more ease. Keeping one arm trapping the Aetherian’s torn-off limb against its shattered skull and wild hair, she trapped its other arm with her leg. That freed its legs for a mere second, before Rieren had pulled out her sword from her body and stabbed it through the monster’s thigh to lock the leg to the ground.

Throughout the whole process, the Aetherian hadn’t screamed once. Instead, it kept jabbering away. Rieren hadn’t realized just how annoying disembodied mouths could be.

“How long are you going to keep me trapped here?” the Aetherian asked. “Were you not supposed to claim your place in the next round?”

“I understand,” Rieren said. Her voice was closer to a growl, but now that all she was doing was contending directly with her opponent’s strength, she could modulate it back to a normal tone. “I know why you cannot regenerate any further.”

That made the monster still for just a moment. Then it restarted struggling again. “What in the Aether do you mean?”

Rieren grinned. She wondered how mad it looked on her monstrous face. “The reason you use those strings of yours to tie yourself together is because your body cannot regenerate while parts of it still exist. Unless and until they are destroyed utterly, crushed to nothing so that no iota of them remains, your body will not regrow them.”

“What does that have to do with anything, Destroyer?”

It tried to fling the moniker as an insult, but Rieren didn’t miss the first hint of unease in the monster’s voice. The Aetherian knew exactly what part that fact had to play.

“It means the only recourse left to you know is to use your threads,” Rieren said. “But we are both aware they will no longer work on me. Not when I can manipulate my own.”

Just as she had done against Essalina in the heat of their final exchange, Rieren focused her concentrated Essence as narrowly as she could outside herself. There wasn’t enough to recreate her armour in full. Nowhere close.

But there was enough to construct just about a dozen of those thin, sharp threads of pure Essence.

With no hesitation, Rieren made them all stab into the Aetherian at the same time. That the monster didn’t respond vocally, only threw out its own threads to counter hers, proved that she was on the right track.

The Aspects she would have normally imbued them with wouldn’t work. When her target countered with the same ability, Rieren knew that neither Abyss nor Divine Aspect would get past the threads the Aetherian was throwing out in response. Aetherians could overwhelm Abyss-Aspected Essence with great ease, and they were made of Divine-Aspected Essence.

But Rieren had one small thing she hadn’t used properly yet. With her front now facing the monster, all it took was a little jerk of her own body before the small pouch containing the Anachron powder flopped out of her robes. It spilled what remained of its contents after their last battle all over the Aetherian’s torso.

“Deceit and trickery,” the monster’s many voices screamed. They were discordant and broken so that the same words rang in Rieren’s ears over a dozen times in quick succession. “That is all you have ever been capable of. Lies upon lies upon lies!”

It had truly begun to struggle now. With the dust spilled all over it, the monster’s entire torso had begun to crumble, the ash disappearing to nothing. That meant it could start to regenerate. Thankfully, Rieren could summon a weaker version of her Domain underneath them both to prevent it from reforming itself, the water constantly interfering with its threads.

“Is this what you lay your claim to?” the Aetherian screamed at her. “Treachery after treachery? Does your life have no other meaning?”

“You know nothing about my life,” Rieren said. “You, a mere monster, what could you possibly ever know of what my life should be like?”

She needn’t have replied. The spikes of emotion surging up at every vocal barb the Aetherian speared her with fell apart in moments. Her new emotional state refuted the very existence of almost every feeling.

Yet, she couldn’t help it. She had to answer the creature, had to prove it wrong beyond a shadow of a doubt. This wasn’t a matter of her feelings. It was the Abyss-cursed truth.

“Oh, I know enough,” the Aetherian said. “I thought this would work. I believed that you truly were seeking something more than just a reprise of the past, more than just the destruction visited upon the world by your hands in the last timeline. I truly believed that you would understand the plight of the monsters. That—”

“That I would lead them? That I who spent my entire life annihilating your kind, would suddenly start helping you out of the kindness of my heart?”

“No. That you would understand. That you would see the need for something different and act accordingly. That you would know that you were not the only seeking a different path in this second chance that we all received.”

When it finally sank in what exactly the Aetherian was talking about, Rieren froze. It was the realization alone, of how much she did have in common with all these Abyssals, Aetherians, and Arisen in the Trials of Ascendance, that forced her hands to still against her current target.

The monster was right. All these creatures fighting so desperately in the tournament were doing so to stop needing to fight outside. Ostensibly, if monsters could be trusted, they were seeking a path that would no longer require them to continue rampaging and massacring.

“You betrayed us,” the Aetherian said, desperately trying to reconstruct itself as Rieren’s threads went still. “Despite possessing the same goal. The same dream. The same hopes and wishes. You caused our destruction. You possess no sympathy, no kindness, no ability to think and empathize with any beyond your own self and what you think is right.”

Rieren’s focus snapped back in place. Goals. She had objectives to achieve. Her fingers tightened on the token between her and her enemy. With the return of her concentration, all the threads she had summoned struck the Aetherian again, digging into its flesh to destroy it. The monster screamed.

“You are correct.” Empathy… her mind pulled back images of how Kalvia had left her. “I have nothing but my truth, my ideals, the identity I set for myself and myself alone. And it is through these things that I believe in that I will reshape the entire world.”

When the Aetherian spoke again, its voice was going faint much like its struggles. Futile. Rieren was not about to relent. With the Anachron’s dust eating away at its body unceasingly and Rieren granting it no space to regenerate, the monster was on the verge of death.

“Your hubris is what caused this in the first place,” its many voices yelled at her, growing fainter by the syllable. “You truly believe that the whole world wanted to go through all this fighting and suffering and senselessness all over again. Was once not enough?”

“I gave everyone another chance to make a better world,” she said. “Everyone.”

“And yet, you are on the path that will lead to the same destination again. You are recreating the very world you hated. You are becoming the reason why you yourself reset time.”

“The plague that is the gods themselves must be excised from the Mortal Realm. There is no other option.”

“And if it leads to the same ending again? If it leads to a destroyed world with nothing saved but ash and dust?”

“Then I will remake it.”

“Reset time… again? How often will you do it? How often until you become the truest evil that must be excised, the one who keeps the existence locked in the same eternal cycle, just for your own pride?”

“Again,” she said. With most of the monster dying, Rieren raised her hand and began striking its arms. Her hands were covered with the Anachron’s dust. That made crushing the remainder of the Aetherian all too easy. “And again. And again. A hundred thousand times, if necessary.”

“Ah.” The Aetherian’s voice was quiet now. Only a few left from its original group. “I thought I was mistaken at first, or that you had hidden your true self when we first met. But that is not the case. I realize that it is your transformation itself that must have turned you… into this. Your thoughts could not have lied in the Aether.”

Rieren froze again. The monster had nearly disintegrated already, but that wasn’t why she had halted. “What do you mean, monster?”

“Have you not realized who I am? That we have met before?”

“We met upon the field of battle. We—”

“No, we met in the Aether.” It was just a single voice now. One that tugged in the back of Rieren’s mind. “Perhaps the name of Demargo will jog your memory.”

It did. A flood of recollections struck out like spikes in Rieren’s head. Demargo. The Aetherian she had spoken with when she had been cultivating through the Enlightened realm and her spirit had reached the Aether itself. The one who had been so affable and welcoming, the one who had granted Rieren as much information as he had been able to.

The one who had assisted her in holding back the other Aetherians’ assault upon the Shatterlands by redirecting many of his brethren’s trajectories.

A friend. A monster she had considered almost a friend.

“Wha—” Rieren wasn’t supposed to have been tied up by feelings like she would have been as a proper human, but the shock made words difficult. “What are you doing here? What in the Abyss-cursed world are you doing here? Why? Why?”

She realized she had begun shouting and snapped her mouth closed. The strange rising sensation within her was finally calming down, dying just like everything else.

Dying, just like the monstrous body underneath her.

Rieren didn’t know how long she remained like that, kneeling over a broken body that was no longer there, its faint remnants swirling in the pool she had created. Time was difficult to keep track of when her mind was still trying to place the information in the right place in her mind. Except, there was no right place.

Eventually, she recalled that she still had a task to complete. Lying here in the water wasn’t going to see it done.

Rieren pushed herself to her feet. The battle was still ongoing from what she could tell. Though, the noise had died just a little. Perhaps the Arisen were finally being killed off, one by one. In the end, the monsters would make a desperate attempt to reach the brazier. Rieren didn’t want to be around when that happened.

She reached the brazier, only to find the tournament official was gone. So, Rieren just stood there, and wondered what else could go wrong on this insane day.

And then she spotted the official about twenty paces away, cowering in one spot. She wasn’t moving. Or rather, she couldn’t move, so was instead vibrating in fear while standing in one location. Batcat stood before her, preventing her from going anywhere.

Wishing she could take a deep breath, Rieren headed over to join them. Her first round was finally done.