Anya didn’t die. She blinked, and noticed the blade had bounced off her skin. That didn’t stop it from hurting like a bitch though, which she said, out loud, repeatedly, as Jessica continued trying to stab her. Jessica, too, cursed impotently with powerlessness at the situation. How funny it was to be a loon trying and failing to commit a stabbing against someone chained and powerless before you. She had been saying Anya had usurped the male position, but now she couldn’t be penetrated. How sad.

  Anya opened her mouth and bit the knife. Her teeth crunched but did not shatter. Her gums felt like they were chewing broken glass (it was metal, much worse!) but did not bleed. She spit the metallic shards in Jessica’s face which started bleeding. The crazed woman screamed, covering her face and turning away, running.

  That didn’t stop Anya from being chained though. She cursed, straining, and while it felt like the chains might give a kick to the stomach by hunger stopped her efforts. She writhed in agony much worse than the attempted stabbing. Much worse than the possibility of being penetrated through the throat by metal. What did it matter? Death? In a place like this it was expected. In a time on the brink of war Anya had been ready to die but her resolve had been shattered. Now it didn’t even matter if she died. No matter how many times she could steel herself with resolve it wouldn’t be enough. No matter how she bolstered Luther with courage it would be spent. He would be shot, chained, freed. Left to die a thousand times and live a thousand more. It had been so few times around so far, but she’d lost count already. A person wasn’t meant to die more than once.

  Jessica had gone insane and for what? Saying something about how Anya wasn’t there? What the fuck was that supposed to mean? Time loops were supposed to be… easy. They were supposed to be something you threw yourself at and they broke. Instead it had been a miserable fall where every death felt like something broke inside. What did it even mean to be human when death had become a foreign thing? Very soon all the precious moments she had lived from before would slip away. All the memories of sweatshop labor and sewing organs into pregnant women chained up and screaming……..

  Maybe she didn’t want to remember at all. But perhaps that was worse. Remembering nothing and living for today. There was a benefit to it in going through the day and week and hour, but past that it made her distant from the person she had been, and from those she had wanted to help. They sat there in chains next to her as Anya sat against the wall impotently. She had allowed herself to be stopped, shooting them, but that had been a mistake. She had put down her gun when she could have stayed prepared— when she could have liberated a few more of these people from their chains. Now they were all stuck waiting for the end.

  Anya was sick of it. She began straining forcefully against the chains, but was quickly interrupted.

  “Woah woah woah there Anya, we can’t have you doing that now.” Peter shouted, quickly entering the room and rushing over to her, smashing her face in with the butt of a barrelless rifle. Anya’s vision blurred and nausea overwhelmed her. She started to wretch as her hearing returned, vision spinning, but there wasn’t any blood or damage. It had rattled her brain a bit, but nothing else. She did spit up some bile. It, too, was cum-white.

  Peter turned halfway from Anya, bringing up a stool and sitting next to her, his barrelless rifle in his lap. From behind him Anya felt more than saw the thing he planned on mounting in place of a barrel. It crackled with power like it would tear the room apart. It burned and sparked like a live wire, casting shadows and blowing out all the other light. It was a plain sabre there, floating in the absence of shadows, brought closer to Peter by Lululu’s magic invisible hands, whose form was only vaguely visible behind the singularity that blotted out all the other light behind it. The sword had no dimension to it, only a void of shining light.

  It came within inches of Anya as she struggled against the chains. Peter didn’t hit her again, perhaps knowing how futile it would be.

  “Sit still. You’ll get your chance to touch it.”

  Anya slumped back, not even having realized she was pressing forward. It had been unconscious, natural, like something in her was called to the sword. Almost like it was the same new flesh she was now made of in this form. But it continued to glow brighter as the shadows disintegrated in the room.

  Peter cursed under his breath as he tried to line up the mount points of his rifle stock without touching the sword. He was going to shoot it like a gun… Interesting. She had no idea how that would possibly work, but it was interesting. It attached to the rifle stock’s little insertable clips with a series of clicks. He pointed it up in the air and pulled the trigger, but it didn’t do anything.

  “See? I can’t shoot it. That’s what we need you for.”

  Anya spat blood at him. It was white, of course, and fell impotently before his feet on the ground.

  “And why should I?” she answered.

  “Well, I assume you want to break the time loop. I don’t see why you’re acting hostile. All we did was rough you up a little and kill some people who are going to come right back.”

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  “If we break the loop they won’t come back.”

  “It won’t succeed, you know, we just have to try what we can and see what works better and worse. That’s the fundamental basis of all science. You break things and watch how the pieces fall, put them back together and try again.”

  Anya shrugged. He was right, she knew. Violence and death was meaningless when all the injuries and grieves reset themselves. Besides, what was the worst that could happen?

  Peter brought the rifle-sword to her chained hand, just close enough to slip her finger through the trigger, which sank softly under its weight. She pressed and it fell back as the air crackled. A pinprick sensation graced her finger on the trigger, bleeding white, pierced for the first time she was aware. It dripped slowly as Peter hefted the rifle to the sky, radiating thick rays of sunlight to all sides. Anya could vaguely see the chained slaves in the room straining against their bindings to cover closed eyes, but it was a futile effort. Some strained to break the irons, but all the efforts were in vain. Pleroma brightened and they dissolved, melting away like snow before the open light of a star, leaving only ash to scatter to the wind as the walls collapsed and the ceiling recessed to reveal a black sky. A ray of white light shone to heaven as Peter hefted the rifle against his upper chest and shoulder, pointing upward. The building blew away, shattered to dust and leaving them in a recessed plain of concrete for miles around. Her chains found themselves equally dissolved, the iron finding itself unable to withstand the up-close light of a star.

  The darkness parted as Pleroma’s white slit pierced it in half. Peter adjusted the rifle-beam and aimed it directly upward. White light radiated from the tip of its beam to all sides that reached the far end of the sky and rebounded, echoing off some unseen barrier that prevented it from traveling to the stars. Where the rebounded rays traveled, the sky began to brighten. Quickly, thirteen rings of light found themselves bouncing off one another in a yellow-tinted off-white sky.

  There was silence as Pleroma stopped firing. Anya could feel the power in the air dissolve itself. Peter shouted. The sun had begun to appear, an outline of a hole forming where the beam had met the sky at first. It would soon darken and perhaps emit the black rays of death that would damn all those who lacked the white flesh to repeat the next loop early.

  Peter celebrated this pulling up of the clock even as he dropped the sword that was still mounted in the rifle-chassis, its night-black metal smoking and melted in places, which embedded itself into the ground beside him. “It worked! It actually worked!”

  “Of course it worked.” Lululu added, still out of Anya’s sight, who remained sitting on the ground. She finally stood and looked at them. Peter was haggard and Lulululululu wasn’t much better for wear. Her pink hair was long and tangled, near matted. She looked desperately in need of sleep and a shower. Her face wore an expression like death, perhaps a shade or two away. On the bright side, perhaps their cure to death would at least partially reset them after the next loop. Or not… given Anya’s present hunger, which rumbled painfully to remind her it had not been satisfied.

  “What was that?” Anya asked them. They didn’t answer her. Lululu continued talking to Peter.

  “The question was never if it would work, it’s what would happen next. The experiment may have already succeeded, and we don't know what effect unleashing Pleroma will have on our situation.”

  “It can’t be worse than looping.” Peter said, clearly wrong.

  “You think looping through time is bad?” Lululu chided. “This was the best possible outcome. We got the opportunity to study the aftermath, but nooo, you wanted us to proceed to the next phase as quickly as possible. Your scientific rigor is lacking.”

  Peter scoffed. “My scientific rigor? We kicked things off, but they’ve barely started. You can’t seriously think the project is complete when we’re stuck in a time loop. It has to resolve itself before we can move on. Until that happens it’s like measuring water boil. You can do it but what’s the point? It will evaporate itself away eventually. The process is well-studied and doesn’t need further observation.”

  “This isn’t a well-studied process, Peter, have you ever seen the sun turn black? Have you ever died before? I would guess this is the first time. There will be plenty more deaths to come. You don’t have to rush them.”

  Anya looked between them. “Well.” She thought. “I guess they did know more than they were letting on. So there’s some kind of ongoing experiment then?” She would need to find out what was going on, but at least there was someone who had outside information. It was possible they could travel a large distance before the loop reset, but there was some upper bound outside which no interaction was possible. This put an upper limit on the amount of knowledge they had inside the loop, and meant it was possible, though now unlikely, they didn’t have enough to get out on their own… at least not without a thousand thousand deaths every mental year over a billion.

  “You need to explain what’s happening and why we’re in this situation.” Anya demanded, standing up and moving between their short human bodies.

  “In the next loop.” Peter said. “There are bigger things to worry about now.”

  “No.” Anya said firmly. “I’m tired of waiting for answers. I want an explanation.”

  Peter turned around and smiled. His face was so tired. “No. In the next loop. What are you going to do, kill me?”

  Anya easily cut through Lululu’s neck with a sideways hand, her head coming off in a loud, wet pop. The motion was easy, almost effortless, and clearly painless. The head blinked on its way down, face dawning with bewilderment and then brief pain as it bounced back up and then thudded again to the ground, covered by her pink, matted hair. The lips moved as if to speak but there was no air.

  “And why not?” Anya said. “After what you did to Chris, Yuna, and Luther, why shouldn’t I?”

  Peter shrugged. “No reason in particular, but it’s hard to get information from a corpse.”

  “I could torture you.”

  “You could.”

  She slapped him on the shoulder. It sank in, deflating, but sustained no damage.

  “Besides,” he began, “Something tells me this loop is about to end on its own.”