Loopshard Novel Chapter 49

Elia arrived almost directly in front of him. He hadn’t even had ti to get his bearings or co to terms with the fact that Belamouranthe would once again not be returning with him.

Before she could open her mouth, he said, “You can’t just show up like this without warning.”

“You said I could co back,” she replied.

“I didn’t realise you ant as soon as the stage was done.”

“It’s how I’ve always done it,” she argued.

Adam frowned.

Elia paused, realising what she’d said.

He took a deep breath, deciding that it was for the best if he told her how he felt.

“Listen, I’ve really enjoyed your company—”

“But?” she imdiately interrupted.

“You clearly want sothing out of this, but I don’t even really know you.”

Her expression darkened and she suddenly looked really sad. Adam felt bad for her, but she would only get hurt more if he continued to play along for his own gain. And he had to consider his own feelings too. Besides, it was just too complicated for ti-loopers to get involved in the way she was seeking. Surely she had to know it wouldn’t last.

She took a step towards him and he instinctively stepped back.

Elia paused and asked, “Do you fear ?”

“I would be a fool not to,” he replied. “The first ti we t you treated the death of my brother-in-law like it didn’t matter, and you threatened

with the challenge stone. We’ve had fun since then and I consider you my friend, but that first impression isn’t sothing that’s easy to forget.”

She frowned, but instead of apologising she asked, “What about Willow? If you had the visiting stone and she hadn’t blocked you, wouldn’t you have wanted to visit her? Even though she doesn’t know you in this loop?”

Adam clenched his jaw. It was a fair question, although it felt hypocritical for her to bring that up now.

“Our relationship was never more than a friendship,” he replied.

“Well, ours was!” she shouted. “Until you ca here and fucked it all up!”

The image of her threatening to use the challenge stone on him popped back into his mind and he summoned his barriers in front of himself. “It’s not like I had a fucking choice!” he replied, his own temper rising. “But you do! You can control everything in this universe because you’ve got the divine relic on your side!”

Tears ran down Elia’s face, but she didn’t co closer. Instead she summoned sothing into the palm of her left hand.

Adam froze, wondering if she was about to attack him. Until now they’d been friends, but maybe he’d pushed her too far.

She stooped and placed the object on the ground, almost like an offering.

“Maybe you’ll understand if you use this,” she said. Then the visiting stone appeared in her hands and she vanished.

Visiting Stone Deactivated

Player Elia has left your Dinsion

Adam let out a deep sigh.

Well shit…

Maybe it would’ve been better if I’d said sothing when she showed up earlier instead of waiting until now.

The object remained where she’d left it. He was fairly sure it wasn’t possible for her to give him any of the relics she carried, unless the cube had lied to him about trade between players, or the visiting stone created a loophole.

He cautiously approached the item, worried it might be a trap. He relaxed when he saw that it was a pearlescent and glittering scale a bit smaller than his hand. It reminded him of Luvicidix’s scales for so reason.

“Shitbox, what is that?”

The cube did not reply. Maybe it couldn’t if this was an object obtained from the denizens it had no awareness of, like the moth sisters or soone Adam might not yet have discovered.

“Loot,” he said, wondering if that would work.

Loot

Scale of Rembrance

A scale?

Despite his apprehension, he picked it up off the cobblestones to look closer.

Scale of Rembrance

Would you like to access the mories stored within?

Adam blinked.

Is this what I think it is?

He swallowed hard, then ntally prompted the scale in his hand, expressing his consent.

The world froze.

“I’m Adam,” he said, introducing himself to the five people that’d appeared around him.

The world was a blur of white, light-blue, brown, and gold, but the details were missing. The people around him were all blurry shapes as well, and their voices were garbled and unintelligible.

He couldn’t feel the ground under his feet nor the wind, sun, or anything else.

Is this a mory?

“My na is Elia,” soone responded and he looked past the blurry figures and saw her standing there, the only piece beside himself that made any sense.

Can I only see

and her?

The surroundings skipped ahead.

Adam charged forward with a two-handed sword, cleaving through so enemy that was a blur like everything else. He slashed through two more in his way before he saw the figure lying on the ground, bleeding and unconscious. She was like a light in the blurry world, the only thing he could see.

Around him, the shapes of his group mbers surrounded and protected them.

“I’ve got her!” Adam yelled, pulling a dium healing potion from a potion belt relic he was wearing.

He pulled out the stopper and fed it to the unconscious Elia, who quickly woke up.

She looked up at him, her face the only thing he could see.

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Her eyes weren’t purple spirals.

They were blue-green, like gems.

This is before she beca a ti-looper, he realised in the disembodied part of himself that was watching everything unfold.

The scene skipped to later in the stage where Adam and Elia were fighting side-by-side against sothing. Only two of the incomprehensible shapes of their group mbers were with them now. The thing they fought towered over them, but it was impossible to tell what it was.

Adam swung the two-hander with efficient moves. When the enemy sent an attack his way, he quickly pulled the potion belt off and used it to block with.

What the hell?

Is he using that relic as a shield??

Elia looked at him in awe, before surging forward with a mace. She was using the Priest Class.

After they defeated the enemy, the four of them gathered around sothing, high-fiving.

“Well fought,” Adam told them.

The way Elia looked at him made it seem like he was the only thing in the world she could see.

I suppose this past version of

did save her, which must be how she was able to go on to get the divine relic after eting Arturo. It explains her obsession with trying to have

survive the stage where I died in her first loop.

The scene switched to Adam and Elia sitting opposite each other. Even though everything was still blurry, it was clear they were in the dinsional tavern.

“Your last na is Bell?” Adam asked, maybe comnting on a connection request that stated her full na.

Her na is Elia Bell?

“It cos from Old French and ans ‘beautiful’,” she replied.

Adam grinned.

They proceeded to talk for hours, discussing food, their past lives, their hobbies, and so on. Elia explained how she was from a small town called Pont-en-Royans, but had moved to Lyon with her father at age five. Her favourite pastry was chausson aux poms. She liked helping at an animal shelter on the weekends. Her best friend was an old widower who lived in an apartnt on the floor below hers. She had been an optician before the Trials of Defiance.

Eventually, when the tavern closed, they parted ways, promising to talk after the next stage and wishing each other good luck.

The mory rewound, or so it seed.

“I’m Adam,” he said, introducing himself to the five people that’d appeared around him.

Is that it??

I died right after that?

That ans we t in stage seven, since I’m apparently destined to die in eight.

“My na is Elia,” she responded, once again the only thing not a blur around him.

Wait, is this the sa as before?

The scene skipped to Adam fighting his way through enemies to where Elia lay unconscious and bleeding.

It’s the exact sa!

The rest of the mory played out like the first, ending with them promising to et again.

The mory replayed again, and again, and again, and again.

The first eight tis it was the exact sa thing he was shown.

Maybe the scale of rembrance was a trap. This will never end!

The ninth ti, there was a slight difference. Elia had an armour relic, the forlorn cuirass to be precise, though she still ended up unconscious and needing to be saved.

In the tenth rerun it was back to normal, sa as the eleventh.

The twelfth ti, the mory playback did not end after their talk following the stage. Instead it skipped ahead to another conversation between them sitting across from each other inside the tavern. They both expressed relief that the other was alive.

Sothing happened to save

from stage eight!

Elia and Adam both continued to chat like their first eting in the tavern, most of it innocuous stuff, though they were both opening up more to the other.

Elia told him about her mother who had died from cancer. Her family had moved to Lyon so that they could visit the hospital where she was being treated. It had been hopeful at first, as the disease showed signs of remission, but then it ca back stronger. The funeral had happened only two weeks before Elia’s seventh birthday.

Adam talked about his dad, who’d lost his mories following a risky brain surgery to save his life. He expressed the deep-seated sadness he felt every ti he looked into his father’s eyes and saw a different person looking back. So early mories from his dad’s childhood remained, but he had almost entirely forgotten about Adam and his sister Helena, though he was aware that he had children.

I’ve never told anyone about that…

But that disembodied part of him that observed these mories knew why he’d opened up to her. It had just felt right, and Elia, the only thing not a blur in the mory, had watched and listened without judgent as he poured his heart out. He was starting to understand how the Elia and Adam of this universe were drawn to each other. If not for the Trials, they would never have crossed each other’s paths, but here they were linked together.

Then Adam said, “I don’t think I would have survived Moonport if not for Souleyman’s help.”

Elia asked, “Who is Souleyman?”

Adam went on to describe the person as a kind African man with ominous purple eyes that looked like a never-ending spiral.

I’ve never even heard of this guy. But he was clearly a ti-looper in this world.

They talked until the tavern closed and then the mory restarted from stage seven.

Even though I survived eight, I perished in nine? Or maybe Elia did? It’s hard to tell since I can only see the mories where she is present.

The mory loops continued, with more than thirty nearly-identical ones back-to-back, though there were minor differences in several of them, mostly just in what relics both of them carried. It was as if soone was making tiny changes, and those changes sohow rippled outwards to affect very small things about their builds.

Then there ca a loop where suddenly there were only three other mbers in their group, with one of the blurry shapes of another player missing. There was no eting in the tavern, as the last part of the mory was them both bleeding to death next to each other.

The next seven were much like the ones before and their group went back to full, but they were followed by an eighth where two of the shapes of their group mbers were different, as though the people had been replaced by others. In that one, Adam didn’t save Elia in the sa place as usual but instead caught her before she was about to fall off the edge of sothing. He then saved her again later in the stage when she was almost dead from so brutal attack, which had torn open a large portion of her torso. After that they worked together to take down a different boss than the one they always fought at the end of the stage. They t at the tavern afterwards, their conversation basically the sa as before, and then the mory ended and the next began.

Maybe two of the players normally there died early, while these other two are people who normally died but who instead survived this ti.

I think I understand what’s happening here… A ti-looper, maybe Souleyman, maybe soone else, is ssing with various thods of saving people’s lives. They’re causing new ripples to see what happens. Like a trial-and-error involving people as nothing more than simple numbers…

Countless mory loops followed where this new pattern held true with no deviations, neither big nor small. The naless blurry mbers of his group never returned, permanently replaced with the two new people.

Okay, maybe those two were actually sacrificed to Nwetrou using the abyssal tooth, unless whoever is looping back is repeating the thing that made them switch places…

Then, suddenly—

Elia sat opposite Adam in the blurry tavern.

This is different!

“Do I know you?” Adam asked. He was unsettled by her spiralling purple eyes.

Elia looked at him and smiled sadly. “No,” she said. “But I know you. I know you very well.”

She almost exactly replicated the back and forth that the disembodied Adam watching the mory had had with Willow after his second loop back in ti. From the context clues he could gather, they were talking after stage one, though she was doing a terrible job of explaining the situation to him. But then she pulled out the visiting stone.

The scene skipped to Adam and Elia staring at each other in what seed to be the centre of Interim Island. She held the scale of rembrance in her hands.

Holy shit, she’s done this to

before!

If I hadn’t broken the cycle this ti around, she would’ve given

this after stage one when she first contacted

in the tavern.

She led Adam behind the player house after he’d experienced the rembrance and gifted him the kindling fla to create the lighthouse.

Then they went to the tavern together, where they talked about what Adam had experienced when he used the scale.

“Arturo gifted

one as well,” Elia revealed. “It’s how I knew that you’ve always saved

every ti we t. If nothing had changed, you would’ve continued to save

in every future loop.”

She then explained the future stages to him and what to expect, but a lot of her words were garbled and unintelligible.

What the fuck! Why is the System censoring this!?

After they finished talking, the scene skipped forward in ti to the next day where Elia and Adam t in the island’s centre. They walked through the market together as though they were on a date. It ended at the tavern, where they talked more about future stages, once again incomprehensible to the disembodied Adam observing them. After the tavern closed, they walked together to the centre of the island and shared a goodbye kiss.

Another skip forward and they t at the centre of the island again, visited the market, sat and talked in the tavern, and then went to the player house where she helped him improve his fighting style and practice with various relics he was using. She’d told him not to pick the potion belt, which he’d always been using in past mories.

Instead of saying goodbye, they shared the bed together, with the blurry outline of sothing at the foot of the bed indicating that Belamouranthe was sleeping there too.

Another skip, another date, advice, and training session. This ti they were alone at night and ended up having sex after lying in the bed and talking for hours.

The next day they brought dinner from the tavern to the edge of the island and watched the sunset while sharing stories.

It feels inappropriate to watch all of this unfold, even though I’m viewing this through the eyes of myself.

I hadn’t even realised how serious past

and Elia had been about each other.

The skip forward continued, each new day spent differently. The two of them fell deeper and deeper in love, until stage seven where they fought together like in all the past mories, although Elia was totally mopping up the enemies and barely leaving anything for Adam and his team to do. They also went around and did more things in the stage, fighting what seed like several different bosses, and also collecting a ton of different loot.

Though he couldn’t see their faces, the other party mbers seed extrely excited.

After returning from the stage, they t at the island centre yet again and did so intensive shopping and planning, since it seed Adam had a bunch of points to use. Then they had food brought from the tavern to the player house, where they spent the rest of the day in each other’s naked embrace.

The mory ended with Elia sobbing while Adam held her tightly against his chest. She begged him not to die in stage eight.

The world unfroze.

Adam looked around as the scale in his hand turned to lighter-than-air fragnts that were carried off into the clouds above, glittering like silver rain.

The world looked so bright and colourful for a mont, but then he stumbled onto his ass and blacked out.