Chapter 3: Panic

My lungs filled, and I could finally scream.

“RUAH!”

The sound tore out of me raw and savage, a noise with no shape except pain. It bounced off canvas, off stone, off the cavern ceiling high above the camp.

I jolted upright so hard my back protested. For an instant, I was still there. Still in the corridor beyond the gate, still dangling in the air while the Wyvern shook me apart.

My mind refused to understand that I’d stopped dying.

My hands flew over my body in frantic, shaking sweeps. My throat. My ribs. My stomach. My arms.

No wounds at all.

That discovery didn’t calm me. It made the panic worse because the agony was still inside me, roaring through my nerves. Even though nothing was broken, my mind replayed the moment with perfect cruelty.

A voice from a nearby tent cut through the aftermath.

“What’s your problem? Some of us are trying to sleep!”

Another joined in, muffled by canvas. “Quiet down, will you?”

Their complaints should have pulled me back to reality. They should have been proof that I wasn’t alone, proof that I hadn’t fallen into some private hell.

Still, I barely heard them.

Adrenaline surged through me. My fingertips tingled. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

It was only a memory.

Only.

The word felt wrong.

It hadn’t been a dream. My brain had recorded every detail, every second. I could remember perfectly everything I’ve done, thought, saw the last day. Yet, it insisted on replaying it with the same intensity as the first time.

I was sitting on a bedroll in a sagging tent, surrounded by the restless murmur of an underground camp, but my mind was still bleeding out in the jaws of a wyvern.

Each time I died, the world snapped back. Each time I woke up whole. And each time, the pain stayed behind in my head like an echo of my mistakes.

I pressed the heels of my hands into my eyes until I saw stars.

My voice came out small, barely more than breath.

“I… I have to get out of here.”

The words felt like truth the moment I said them. My whole body agreed. Every instinct screamed for it. Anything that wasn’t that gate, that corridor, those wings beating above me.

Run. Hide. Live.

But the next thought followed immediately, cruel in its own way.

“But if I leave,” I whispered, “they’ll die. All of them.”

The camp around me was full of students. Young men and women who didn’t understand what waited. Who would march when ordered. Who would chant and cast and trust that their training meant something.

Some of them would survive behind shimmering shields.

Some wouldn’t.

And if I had knowledge, if I had even a sliver of warning, and I chose to use it only to save myself…

My stomach twisted.

I’d spent my first life learning what fear sounded like. I’d heard it in people trapped behind doors and under beams and inside buildings that were about to fall. I’d felt it in myself too, every time heat rolled over me and smoke swallowed my vision and my mind begged me to turn around.

I squeezed my eyes shut and forced myself to breathe, not the frantic, shallow gasps my body wanted, but the disciplined rhythm that had once been drilled into me until it became muscle memory.

Inhale through the nose.

Hold.

Count.

Exhale through the mouth.

I did it again.

The first few breaths shook. The next few started to steady. My heartbeat, still brutal, began to slow. The tingling in my fingertips eased.

I was still terrified.

But terror no longer owned my mind.

As my breathing settled, my thoughts sharpened enough to form a plan.

This is a curse, I thought, and the words tasted bitter. Or a nightmare. Or a spell.

But the brief messages… they hadn’t felt like hallucination. They had felt like rules.

[Initiating Curse]

[Restarting Day]

Rules meant patterns.

Patterns meant learning.

I opened my eyes and stared at the dim canvas above me.

If time were looping, then the day was mine to spend again and again.

Information was mine to gather.

Mistakes were mine to make, if I could survive them.

“I need to find a way back,” I murmured, voice steadier now, though it still trembled at the edges. “But until then… I can’t abandon them.”

I let the words settle into me like a vow.

If this was punishment, then I would turn it into training.

If this was a trap, then I would learn its shape.

And if death was going to keep taking me, over and over, then I would start taking something back each time.

If this is a curse, I told myself, then I have to use it.

I pushed myself up onto my knees on the rough blanket that served as my bed.

If I was trapped in a loop, if I was going to keep dying and waking and dying again. I needed to move forward. To move I needed answers.

I started tearing through my belongings with the single-minded urgency of a man searching for a way out of a burning building.

I dragged the mud-stained clothes into a pile and patted down pockets, feeling for anything hard, anything useful. Anything at all.

My fingers closed around several slender objects.

For an instant, hope sparked.

I pulled them free and stared.

Pens.

A handful of them, bundled together like someone had stuffed them into my pocket in a hurry. They were shaped almost exactly like the cheap ballpoint pens I’d used back on Earth. But these were heavier. Their casings were metallic and etched with tiny symbols that ran in neat lines along the barrel.

I rolled one between my fingers, half expecting it to click or leak ink onto my hand.

Nothing leaked.

I set the pens aside carefully, as if they might be more valuable than they looked.

Then my gaze dropped to the bottom of the pile of clothes.

I retrieved them with both hands, brushing dirt from their worn covers with my thumb.

The first book was heavy for its size, and when I opened it the pages were crowded from edge to edge with dense writing. Not a single margin left empty. The script was unfamiliar. None of it meant anything to me.

Not yet.

The second book was thinner, its binding softer, as if it had been handled more often. When I flipped it open, I realized why almost immediately.

It wasn’t full.

The writing stopped abruptly halfway through, as if the author had been interrupted mid-thought and never returned. The last page looked… wrong, compared to the rest.

The ink on it glistened faintly when I tilted it toward the light.

Not fully dry.

My breath caught in my throat.

For a moment, I just stared, my mind trying to place the feeling crawling over my skin. The page looked like it had been written minutes ago.

“A journal?” I heard myself say aloud.

I flipped through the earlier pages, faster now. The handwriting was consistent, quick in places, more personal than the rigid precision of the first book. And the alphabet…

It made my brain itch.

It looked like it wanted to be familiar. Like a cousin of the Latin letters. I could almost convince myself I recognized shapes, but when I tried to read the words, they slid out of meaning.

Still, a few fragments caught.

Today.

Or something close enough that my mind insisted on it.

Tomorrow.

Maybe.

Or maybe I was just desperate to see something I could understand.

I swallowed, throat still dry, and opened the journal to a blank page. If I couldn’t read the world, then I’d force the world to let me write in it.

I chose one of the pens at random.

The tip looked like polished metal. No ink reservoir. No stain. I hesitated, then pressed it to the page.

Black ink appeared instantly, smooth and dark, as if it rose from the paper itself to meet the point. My hand jerked in surprise. I lifted the pen.

No smear. No blot.

I lowered it again and wrote.

What do I know?

Saying the words out loud made them feel more real, like driving a nail into unstable ground.

“My name is Kaspar,” I murmured as I wrote it.

It was still strange to claim it.

I paused with the pen hovering above the paper. The camp outside rustled faintly, but no one disturbed me.

Not yet.

I wrote the next line.

I remember the previous days.

The words looked too simple for what they contained. My memories weren’t vague impressions. They were sharp, brutal snapshots carved into me. Fire pouring from the ceiling. The weight of a wyvern’s jaws. The taste of smoke. The sensation of dying.

I stared at what I’d written, then scratched a line through it and amended it, my hand tightening around the pen.

I remember everything from the previous days.

That was closer to the truth.

I am in a world that has magic. But I don’t know how to use it. They say I have no mana.

Magic here was as common as breath. Rings forming around arms, shields flaring in the middle of slaughter and I was the only one standing in a world of swimmers while I drowned.

I wrote the next fact, the one that mattered most.

Opening the gate leads us to a room full of monsters.

My hand hesitated.

I underlined the sentence hard enough that the pen tip scratched slightly into the paper.

Then I stared at the underlined words until my eyes blurred.

Monsters.

Wyverns.

Death.

Over and over.

I forced myself to turn the page to a fresh section.

What I don’t know:

What’s an artifact?

The word had been whispered with greed. As if finding one was worth any risk.

Why don’t I have mana? Or rather, how does one use magic?

I tapped the pen lightly against my chin, thinking, listening inward. The other students didn’t look like they were straining. They didn’t look like they were forcing something. They simply… did it.

Was it a muscle?

A sense?

A door in the mind you opened?

Or was it something you were born with, and I had simply been born without it?

Can I get any weapons or shields?

If magic was beyond me, then steel might not be. Something with an edge. Something with weight. Something that didn’t require mana to function. Even a cheap knife was better than bare hands.

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Can we prevent ourselves from entering the room?

The simplest answer was often the one everyone refused to consider.

Don’t go through the gate.

Don’t open it.

Don’t march into the corridor.

It was whether anyone would listen.

A sigh escaped me, quiet and tired.

“Maybe I can convince someone of the danger,” I murmured.

“It wouldn’t hurt to try,” I told myself.

However, it did hurt.

Not hypothetically.

---

The first attempt had been a disaster.

I could still see it.

I forced myself through the camp, past rows of sagging tents and half-awake students, straight toward Blut von Omstr.

He stood exactly where men like him always stood: in the center of motion, surrounded by ass-kissers. His gray uniform looked plain compared to the gaudy nobles I’d seen, but the long green cape draped over his shoulders made him impossible to ignore.

“Sir,” I’d said, and the word tasted like sand. “We mustn’t open the gate. There are wyverns inside. Creatures that will attack as soon as it’s breached.”

Blut’s gaze cut into me.

“Nonsense,” he snapped, loud enough that a few nearby students glanced over. “How could you possibly know that? Return to your duties at once.”

He didn’t ask why I believed it. He didn’t ask what I’d seen.

I tried again. That’s what you do when you know people are about to walk into a burning building. You don’t stop after the first refusal. You push harder.

“Please,” I’d insisted. “If you open it, you’ll doom the students—”

His patience snapped like dry wood.

“You’re a coward,” Blut said coldly, eyes narrowing, “just like a Bastard should be.” He didn’t spit the word like a simple insult. He spoke it like a classification. Like a stain I couldn’t wash off.

He raised his voice and didn’t even look at me anymore, as if I was already a solved problem.

“Guards. Escort this man to the holding cells until we have time to judge him.”

Hands closed on me. I fought the instinct to pull away, because pulling away only made them tighten their grip. They dragged me through the camp while students stared, their faces a mix of curiosity and relief that it wasn’t them being hauled off.

The holding cells were carved straight into the stone, crude and functional. The air down there was wet and stale, thick with the smell of old sweat and cold metal. Bars of dark iron divided the corridor into narrow cages. Runes had been cut into the stone above each door.

When the door slammed shut behind me, the sound rang through the rock like a coffin lid closing.

I gripped the bars and listened.

When the gate opened, I couldn’t stop it.

All I could do was hear it.

Even from deep underground, the groan of the colossal doors reached the cells. Then came the chaos: distant shouting, the thunder of wingbeats, the roar of fire.

Screams rose and multiplied, echoing through the dungeon corridors. Smoke seeped in, thin at first, then thicker, bringing with it that familiar acrid bite. Burning cloth, burning hair, burning flesh.

I didn’t die at the gate that time.

I died in a cage, helpless, choking on the proof that I had been right.

---

The day restarted anyway.

The second try, I changed tactics.

Don’t go to the officers. They’ll silence you. Go to the people.

I climbed onto a supply crate in the middle of the camp while everyone was rushing through preparations.

I stood tall enough that heads turned, and for a heartbeat, I could pretend I was addressing a crowd that could still be saved.

“Beyond the gate, there’re wyverns!” I shouted until my throat burned. “If we open it, we will all die!”

Faces turned toward me. Pale in torchlight, eyes heavy with sleep and fear. For one brief moment, I saw uncertainty flicker. I saw minds trying to decide whether I was a warning or a threat.

Then the murmurs started.

“Madman.”

“Heretic.”

“Shut him.”

The words struck harder than I expected. Not because they were cruel, but they were familiar kinds of cruelty. I realized how badly they wanted someone else to blame for their fear.

Guards pushed through the gathering. Their armor clinked and glowed faintly with embedded runes. They seized my arms, yanked me down from the crate so hard my boots skidded on stone, and hauled me away while I kept shouting until my voice broke.

Accusations of insanity followed me like thrown stones.

Once again, the holding cells swallowed me.

Once again, I heard the gate open.

Once again, the world above became fire.

---

The third time, I waited.

They won’t believe you until the threat is right in front of them. So don’t waste your breath early. Save it for the moment their eyes are forced open.

I stayed in the crowd when the gate began to groan, when the darkness split the doors. I pushed forward with everyone else.

As the corridor swallowed us, as the ceiling vanished into darkness above the pillars, I turned to the nearest students.

“Run!” I screamed. “We have to get away before it’s too late!”

They stared at me like I was infected.

Some edged back. As if my panic might leap from my mouth into theirs.

Then the first wingbeat shook the air.

Heads tilted upward.

Doubt finally cracked.

I watched their expressions shift in real time. Confusion turning to recognition, recognition turning to terror. Mouths opened. Spells flared. People screamed.

But by then, the corridor was packed. Soldiers blocked the rear. The crush of bodies made turning around its own kind of trap. Escape stopped being a choice.

Fire poured down.

Wyverns dove.

Even though I’d predicted it, even though I’d seen it twice already, the helplessness hit me like a physical blow.

Knowledge didn’t save us.

Not when no one trusted the one who carried it.

I died again.

I always died again.

---

When I woke alone in my tent afterward, the first thing I did was rub my temples, trying to press the pain back into my skull where it belonged. My thoughts felt bruised, like someone had beaten them with a club.

I tried to force myself to be clinical. To treat these loops the way I’d treated disasters in my old life.

Assess, adapt, act.

The first thing I’d learned was simple, ugly, and consistent.

No one trusted me.

Not Blut. Not the guards. Not the students. To them I wasn’t a messenger, I was a problem to be contained.

Part of me wondered, in a tired, bitter corner of my mind, if it was even worse than prejudice.