Die. Respawn. Repeat.
Chapter 254: Book 4: What Hides Within

The first Compressive Pulse I throw against the other Ethan explodes with so much force it hurls him back down the tunnel he emerged from, obliterating half the chamber wall in the process.

It's not enough to stop him, of course. It wouldn't be enough to stop me. By the time the Pulse hits him, he's layered half a dozen Force Constructs and a Verdant Armor to stop it, and even though he's visibly hurt, he cancels his momentum with a Warpstep and shapes another eight Force Constructs into spikes to throw at me.

Which is a distraction, and we both know it. Force Construct isn't enough to hurt me. I have a significant advantage over him in the fact that I can inhabit the Knight Inspiration and he, apparently, can't—or if he can, he hasn't yet shown me the ability to do so.

I'm hoping he isn't keeping a card like that from me. If he is, then all else being equal, I've got less Firmament than he does. His core even feels like a copy of mine, though there's something off about it. Its color is a little different from my own, for one thing. Firmament Sight reveals a chaotic amalgam of colors that only vaguely mimics the light blue coloration of my own.

Not a perfect copy, then. It's using the sheer quantity of color its drained from the Empty City to somehow mimic the behavior of Firmament.

I can't use that. Not directly.

On top of that, I only barely have the time to keep up with what's happening with Ahkelios and Gheraa. I catch glimpses of their fights out of the corner of my eyes—Gheraa doesn't seem to need the help, but Ahkelios is missing a weapon that's quite as effective as the one his mimic has.

Hopefully, the sphere I tossed him works the way I intended. I can see him gaining ground, at least. He's no longer being fought to a standstill.

Then the other Ethan slams shoulder-first into me, and my thoughts dissolve back into the fight. There's a torrent of flame around me—he's used a Firestep, and while the flames don't hurt, they burn with a strange emotional light, trying to seep into my core with the anger they contain.

Another distraction. There's a Compressive Pulse in his left hand, wielding all the collected energy of the last few seconds of the fight; Premonition warns me of what he's about to do a split second before he moves to do it. He flings the pulse up, aiming to collapse the tunnel around both of us.

He's trying to buy time.

We're running low on seconds. There are 23 left before the Ritual stage is complete, and he's had his fun in the battle. If he tries to go after the Seed now, I'll stop him, but if he takes me out—if he manages to trap me for long enough, even if he doesn't kill me—then he can get to the Seed, and neither Ahkelios nor Gheraa will be able to stop him.

I'm trying to buy time too, albeit for the opposite reason. I only need to last long enough for the Seed to finish being "watered" and for the Ritual stage to complete.

22 seconds left to go. It feels like too much. At the speed we're moving, it takes only a second for us to exchange half a dozen blows, each one shaking the tunnel around us and threatening to make the whole thing collapse. Breaking through the stone wouldn't normally be a problem, but considering it's blessed stone I can't just Phaseslip through and he has access to the same skills I do...

I curse under my breath. Fundament is a powerful skill for me, but it's going to be more of a boon for him, if he manages to get me trapped in some rubble. That kind of Firmament reinforcement would take precious time to get through.

A series of carefully angled Force Constructs deflects the Compressive Pulse he aimed farther back into the tunnel, causing an explosion and a rumbling collapse of stone; I slide beneath the punch my mimic follows up with, elbowing him viciously in the stomach in the process. A boost from the Generator Form drives us both forward.

Before I can slam him into the ground, he grins at me, a wild and uncontained expression that looks frankly disturbing to see reflected back on my own face. Thick vines tangle around my arm, and then he spins, using my own momentum against me and throwing me hard back into the chamber.

Warpstep. I come to a stop just in time to see the other Ethan's fist driving directly toward my face; I catch that fist in a Distorted Crux, trapping him with a slowed arm and then yanking. There's a distinct pop, and I smile with a grim satisfaction of my own.

Indestructible bones, as I've learned in the Grove, don't mean they can't be dislocated.

Unfortunately, the other Ethan barely seems to react. He's already in the process of coalescing a new Amplified Gauntlet on his uninjured arm, swinging it toward me. I let go of Distorted Crux and let him think he'll hit me, then Warpstep above him a split second before it would have made contact.

Accelerate.

In this position, I can use the skill like a gravitational multiplier. Premonition warns my mimic to look up, but he doesn't quite manage to use a skill in time to stop me from slamming down onto him like a two-ton anvil. There's a strangled groan as the air is forced out of his lungs, a whispered mockery of my own voice. The stone beneath him cracks and splinters, creating yet another crater in the ground.

All that happens within a grand total of 2 seconds. That leaves 20 seconds left to go.

My mimic cocks his head at a near-impossible angle, then gives me an unsettling grin. He doesn't say anything still, which I'm quietly grateful for, but I can feel the power gathering in his fist. That one isn't just an Amplified Gauntlet. It's a Causal Shattering.

And with all the blows we've exchanged so far, if I let him crack my timeline, I'm going to feel the impact of a dozen blows at once.

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I hold perfectly still. He swings his fist toward me—

Distorted Crux. Temporal Static.

It's not quite the same thing as solidified time, but it's close enough. I can only imagine what the fight looks like from the outside. At this point, I'm relying on Temporal Link to navigate almost as much as I'm relying on my actual vision. Everything around the two of us splinters into fragments of distorted time. Causal Shattering shines like a beacon in the midst of it all, a concentrated pulse of Temporal Firmament.

Temporal Static wraps around it like a distorted spiderweb. Distorted Crux bends in a way time absolutely should not. There's a loud, echoing crack, a splinter, a fracture in time.

The resulting paradox burns away in an explosion of force that sends us both flying back.

18 seconds left. I groan in pain, vaguely aware of the cracks that have somehow formed in my armor. That shouldn't be possible—my external armor is near invulnerable—but evidently whatever that was is something even more fundamental than my bones.

Still, I force myself to my feet, searching for my counterpart with a pulse of my Firmament sense. He's actually still stunned, though whether that's because of minor differences in our selves or because his arm was at the center of that explosion I'm not entirely sure.

Either way, this is a chance I'm not going to get again. I Warpstep over to him, Chromatic Strings erupting from my fingers and wrapping around him to tangle around his arms and legs, locking him in place. They can't cut him, but they do begin to glow softly as they drain him of his innate color.

Then I activate a skill I haven't had cause to use in a while.

Hueshift.

It's the skill that evolved from Color Drain. With it, I could technically shift Firmament into any hue I choose; the only reason I haven't used it more frequently is because shifting the hue of Firmament has such unpredictable effects. In this case, though, the other Ethan is using color to mimic the core of my power. If I change it...

There's a lot of color to change. I grit my teeth even as my counterpart begins to struggle. I'm not trying to shift it to any specific hue—I'm trying to drain it. Desaturate it. My Chromatic Strings grow brighter and brighter as they absorb all that discarded color. The more they shine, the more they begin to cut into his skin.

It's working, I can tell. His movements are slowing. The distortion I'm introducing is interfering with his ability to move and act, cutting off the flow of his Firmament. If I can just manage to hold him like this for long enough—

Premonition flickers in my soul, and I feel the weight of a Concept bearing down on me.

Shit.

I hadn't expected him to be able to use those skills. The Submerged skills are still dangerous for me to use. Not as much as before, sure, but it consumes the majority of my Firmament to use even one of them. Nor have I needed to. Those skills are imbued with Life. If I hadn't been using them against a counter-Concept back in the Empty City, they would have just healed my target.

I increase the force of my Hueshift, thinking as fast as I can. What's my counterpart planning to do, heal me to death? That can't be it.

Which means—

[You have activated the Thread of Insight!]

—It means I'm not his target.

The goal of the Ritual stage is to make the Seed grow. All the Ritual stages so far have been patterned after that. Water the Seed is very clearly about giving it what it needs to thrive down in the Sewers. The prerequisite about Firmament saturation is most likely about making sure it doesn't get too much of any one thing; the ecology of the Sewers, down to the Root Acolytes and the Seedlings, are designed to deliver Firmament to the Seed at exactly the right rate.

If he hits the Seed with a Life-imbuing blow, it's going to push it further down its growth cycle. He's trying to force the issue, in other words. To oversaturate it at a distance, using a skill that makes it grow.

Worse, the amount of oversaturation that this skill is going to cause...

The multiplier would scale exponentially past 300% saturation. It might even be enough for the blowback to hit every single ongoing Trial.

The level of power in a Submerged skill is more than enough to exceed 300%.

I wrap a new Chromatic String around his neck. It cuts through his skin, but not nearly enough. Hueshift isn't going to drain him fast enough to stop this, either. He's right where I need him, but the Timestrike I prepared earlier, hiding a skill activation away—it's still not enough to kill him.

Or perhaps more accurately, it is. I can feel his heart exploding around my fist, an echo through time as the displaced punch strikes him in the center of his chest. But the sheer Life he holds as the skill activates is more than enough to instantly heal him from even that type of damage.

He's not even phased. I can see it in the bloodied grin he wears.

No choice, then. I force a transformation from Generator Form to Projector Form, feeling the plates of my armor begin to realign.

Then I begin layering Force Constructs as fast as I can, pouring as much Firmament into them as I can muster. My core begins spinning faster and faster as I do so—it's growing under the strain, I realize distantly, but I don't have time to focus on it.

Once it's spinning fast enough, I activate the Great Filter, and feel half my Firmament drain out of me in a snap.

It doesn't hurt me as much as it usually does. I'm acting more out of instinct than anything else, but that whole process—"spinning up" my core and making it better at dispensing Firmament—helps a lot with using these high-cost skills, it seems. Without the sudden draw of Firmament, the usage of the skill is less jarring, less debilitating.

Even then, it still makes me stagger slightly.

And Premonition's warning hasn't gone away.

It takes me a second to pinpoint why. I'm using almost everything I have to sustain this number of skills, but this other Ethan?

He doesn't have to. He doesn't need to stay alive after this. He doesn't even need to keep his core intact, because he isn't going to come back in another loop. Even with my Chromatic Strings and my Hueshift draining him, even with a dozen Force Constructs and a Submerged skill locked around him, the amount of power he has available to him by pouring his entire soul into a suicide skill...

It's more than I can stop alone.

The other Ethan grins at me again. It's a mad sort of grin, the kind that makes me wonder if some of my own fatalistic fighting style has seeped into what little personality he's managed to copy.

His mouth opens, and then as if to rub all this in, he speaks.

It's a grotesque imitation of speech, really. The vines writhing in his throat distort the words, and they come out halting, like he isn't used to even the idea of speech. It is, however, very clearly my own voice.

"You. Lose." His tone is smug. "Primordial. Foray."

There are a full 15 seconds left. Not enough for me to stall, and too long for me to hold with Eternal Moment.

He swings forward, unleashing the skill.

And as he does, Life erupts all around him.