Chapter 166 – Death Loops

[Samuel Frost]

[1372 Deaths]

It was dark. Pitch black. No… he thought. I can’t even tell if it’s pitch black. Sam could feel nothing. He could see nothing. He could hear nothing, taste nothing, sense nothing.

He had no idea how long it had even been. He wanted to sit down. To scream. To cry. To break something. He might actually be doing all of those things right now. He honestly wasn’t sure; it was so hard to tell if his body was actually moving or not.

You’re spiraling again, Sam thought, chastising himself.

He tried to refocus his thoughts. 1372 deaths, he chanted it in his mind. The number was rising, and he clung hard to it like a lifeboat in a storm.

One… Three… Seven… Two…

He focused on the number, on his death count, until it was the only thing running through his mind.

Gradually, he began to calm down. He couldn’t feel his heart, but he imagined it beating steadily. He imagined breathing in, and letting out a slow, calming exhale. Sam had died 1,372 times---but he was not currently dead.

I will be soon though, he grimaced, trying to orient himself within the oblivion that held him hostage.

What was I supposed to be doing again? He asked himself, his mind clearing. Something about a target. I need to find the target.

Sam reached to his side and grabbed his sword. Or maybe he didn’t. His senses were still completely blinded to him. At this point the only tool available to him was his intuition. He spun in circles slowly, hoping for a change in the oblivion he existed in, but nothing made itself apparent.

After a few minutes, or maybe hours, he just picked a direction and started walking. He couldn’t see his feet. Couldn’t feel the ground beneath his feet. For all he knew he had just walked off a cliff and was plummeting to another death. Wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened.

He paused briefly. He felt something. No. Felt was too strong a word. Sensed maybe, but even that felt far too optimistic.

He didn’t know why, but he grabbed his sword in both hands and swung as hard as he could.

He was rewarded with an actual sensation that time. The sound of two latches unclasping on either side of his head rang through his ears. A moment later, a helmet came tumbling off his head, crashing to the ground.

Sam heaved in a desperate gulp of air, gasping for breath as he fell to his knees. He was covered in cuts, scrapes, bruises, was somehow sweating profusely and shivering at the same time. He fell forward onto the ground, staring at the helmet that had been his torture moments before. It was a thick gray metal helmet. It looked as though it had been forged by an amateur blacksmith who didn’t quite know how to work a hammer. It had random dings and markings and a few misplaced rivets running through it. The helmet lacked eye sockets and a mouth. It was designed in two pieces, one to cover the front of the head, the other to cover the back. It latched together at the sides and when it encased your head, it deafened your senses completely.

It had been the object of his torture for the past hundred or so deaths.

Better, a voice whispered in his head. Sam pushed himself up off the ground, falling once and rolling onto his back. The sky was blue, and the air was fresh. He slowly pushed himself up once more, leaning against a tree and glancing at his target to see if he hit his mark.

His sword was buried into a tree halfway through. The target dummy he was supposed to hit was about twenty feet to its left. He let out a long, dramatic sigh.

Do not be hard on yourself. This is a good thing you have done. This is the closest you have gotten yet.

“But it means I’ve got to put that helmet back on,” Sam complained, kicking the face of it across the ground.

I have told you once before, and I will tell you again. That helmet is going to be a part of your life for a very long time.

That was the last thing Sam wanted to hear. The helmet wouldn’t be so bad if not for the fact that in addition to cutting off all of his senses, it cut off his air supply as well. Technically he could survive off mana, supplementing it for basic bodily functions, but again, the helmet cut off all sensations, including his mana sense. The number of times he had died to suffocating inside that helmet was embarrassing.

“How long was it?”

Seven days. A new record, the voice said with a note of pride.

Sam made his way through the forest, in search of the voice whispering in his head. He found Tien, sword resting on his lap, floating about five feet in the air in a transcendent sort of meditative pose.

He took a moment to stare at the man. He had his own helmet similar to Sams that covered the entirety of his head, although his was of much finer make. It was form fitting and polished to a mirror finish. His skin was bandaged from top to bottom, and he wore a loose-fitting black robe. Judging by his feet though, he definitely wasn’t human. Some sort of primate maybe.The man Sam was inspecting was Tien, the silent sword, and possibly the best swordsman in existence. It was also his current teacher.

Tien had been thrust into a cursed dungeon midway through his Tower climbing career, obtaining the cursed sword that sat in his lap. It was dingy, rusted katana that didn’t even come with a sheath. The edges were chipped and the handle was frayed. That sword could cut through anything in existence, smooth as butter. The caveat being it robbed him of every singular sense he had. How did he manage to survive? Simple.

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He developed telekinesis.

It didn’t take long for Sam to realize how absurdly powerful of an ability that was. Calling it an ability was the wrong thing though if you wanted to understand it. It wasn’t like he was using mana or a system based ability. No. he developed something completely outside of the system. Something that allowed him to survive and interact with the world around him when he was robbed of his senses.

For a long while, Sam didn’t think the man could use mana. It wasn’t like he needed to. He had developed his telekinesis to such an extreme extent that he didn’t need to use mana. When he did layer his mana and system abilities on top of that though, he became a nigh unbeatable powerhouse.

Supposedly this technique could be learned by anyone, which is why Sam was putting himself through this type of training. But it was slow going. It was painful. It was tiring.

But this is what you wanted, he told himself.

He had been second guessing himself since his first death in the training realm. In theory it was all so easy. Enter the training realm and push himself to his absolute limits because dying was no longer a concern. Oh, how many times he had imagined being in this very scenario. How he told himself he would take advantage of every opportunity and become the strongest. It seemed so easy when he read about it in stories.

The reality of it was, dying was incredibly scary, no matter how many times you went through it.

“You look like you’re having fun,” came another voice.

Sam glanced over to see Devin maneuvering through the trees. He wore a white overcoat, a black uniform beneath, and a simple silver longsword sheathed at his waste. If Tien was the best swordsman in the Tower, then Devin had to be a close second. Ten thousand swords Sam had watched him create and move through the air with the mastery of a veteran maestro, conducting a symphony of swords.

“Why are we here?” Sam asked, his voice tired, and tinged with a little helplessness.

“Because you’re in training, and this is the spot Tien picked out for you?” Devin ventured.

Sam shook his head. “You know what I mean. Why won’t you tell me what the hell is going on? What happened to Jack?”

Devin gave him a small smile, and then glanced over at Tien, not saying anything further.

Sam had died over a thousand times in this realm, and he still had no idea what the hell was going on. He barely even knew what he was supposed to be doing.

“When you’re strong enough to know, then we’ll tell you. You want information, you gotta earn it.” Rodeo had barked at him when he first asked.

That was pretty much how things had gone every singular time he tried to get information out of any of them.

“There is only one rule by which you must swear to abide,” Devin told him the first time he arrived, and every singular time after. “If Jack appears, just kill yourself and reset the loop. Under no circumstances can you allow him to catch you.”

Sam had no idea what to make of that, and they refused to elaborate further, so he had to piece together what little information he could on his own.

First, they seemed to have some understanding and general acceptance of the fact they were trapped in a time-loop. So much so that Sam would simply inform them of which death he was on upon reconvening with them. They took it in stride every time, nodding along and putting him back through his paces.

He had done the same types of training so many times over he was teetering on madness it felt like. He did not get to keep his upgrades or improvements upon death, which was to be expected, but losing the progress you made over and over again could be very disheartening.

What he was gaining was something he dubbed soul experience. It wasn’t an actual value he could track or anything, but the learned experience he gained from training did stick around in some fashion. With every loop he got a little faster at the types of training. His body, mind and soul seemed to understand the tasks at hand often better than he did himself. With each death he came back with a deeper understanding and was able to apply it to his training, getting a little further each time.

Devin put him through the paces in basic swordsmanship. Sam had thought he was somewhat talented. Especially after his time with Kilgor. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. It was a full 100 deaths before Devin even let him wield a sword. He made him swing a stick around hundreds of thousands of millions of times, running through a hundred different stances and sword swings.

Then once he had reached an appropriate level of mastery, that’s when Sam’s death counter shot up. Death was the ultimate teacher, so every fight was often an impossible challenge, and when he died he came back to practice the same sword swings over and over and over again until he earned the right for another impossible challenge. Only the second time around maybe he got a little further in the fight before dying. Repeating that cycle over and over and over again is what made up his training with Devin.

With Tien, even though he was the better swordsman, he was far more interested in developing Sam's senses, perception, and intuition. His goal in training was rather straightforward. He wanted Sam to develop the same telekinetic abilities he had. Sam was all over that at first. Gradually though he realized that it might be a fool’s endeavor.

Tien really didn’t have a clear idea on how he had developed his telekinesis.

“It just sort of happened one day,” the man would whisper into his mind anytime Sam asked.

Sam much preferred Devin’s boring and repetitive training to using Tien’s helmet of suffering while he blindly flailed about the woods in search of a target.

Rodeo was the strangest of the trio as far as Sam could tell. Both Tien and Devin often kept a wide berth of him.

The man, for all his talk in the beginning, flat out refused to train Sam, stating he lacked the required willpower to survive even a second under his tutelage.

Instead, Rodeo made himself useful by finding every single potion, reagent, exotic ingredient, rare meats and foods that the Tower had to offer. He would show up with strange greying meats and make Sam eat every bite. He would make him choke down potion after potion or try absorbing weird materials into his core in order to force an upgrade.

Some of it worked, and most of it didn’t, and Sam had a growing laundry list of items he had to tell Rodeo to fetch with every iteration. He was starting to think that maybe it was some sort of weird mental training, giving Sam a list of things to remember and where to find them. But no, Rodeo had simply turned him into a glorified shopping list.

So that made up his current life in the loop. They were all so cagey with information that he didn’t even know what floor of the Tower he was on. Sometimes it felt like this version of the Tower didn’t even have floors. Which brought up a different concern entirely. What the hell was going to happen when he finally escaped the loop? He assumed he would get to keep his upgrades, as that was kind of the point of entering in the first place. But in theory he was going to be dramatically overpowered upon leaving. He wondered if the Tower would let him continue his climb from the third floor, or if it was going to relocate him to a more appropriate level. He hoped it would be the first option. The idea of him getting to conquer the floors as some sort of god-like warrior was one of the few things keeping him motivated.

Sam let out a sigh, falling backwards against a tree and dropping to the ground. “I’m just losing motivation guys,” he told Devin and Tien. “I’ve died 1372 times and I already know I’m going to die 1372 more times. You don’t know how dreadful this is.”

“Have a hint, then,” Devin said, fishing something out of his pocket and tossing it to Sam. Tien did the same.

The objects had silvery glints as they soared through the air and Sam caught them both in his hands. He opened his hand, two tarnished silver rings sitting in his palm. He looked at the ring on his finger. They were all the same.

“You mean…” he started.

“We understand precisely the kind of suffering you are going through Samuel. After all, we suffered through it as well,” Devin smiled.