"Ashen. I hate you."
"You should disappear from my life!!"
"I wish that I had never met you!!!"
"..."
*
His eyes opened, and a tired sigh slipped from his lips. The short nap he had intended to take had been disturbed again by the memory of that day.
"Ash! You're finally awake~ I was getting bored reading on my own."
His gaze drifted toward the voice. There she was, the one who had haunted his nightmares, looking as innocent as ever.
"Seraphine."
"Yes…?" She tilted her head.
"...Nothing. Let me see what you're reading."
She scooted closer beside him, book in hand. As she animatedly explained the contents of a book he had long since read and known by heart, Ashen felt himself slipping back into that nightmare.
It had started with him wanting to learn spellcasting. That part had gone well.
He had listened to the Kingmaker's lecture and taken it to heart, so he already had a starting point. Add to that this era's sages as teachers and the greatest library he had ever seen at his disposal, and his progress had been bound to be swift.
Another twenty loops later, he had become competent enough not to be ashamed of calling himself a genuine magician.
But as the loops went on, the instincts whispering that this was far from over only grew stronger.
Ashen was, of course, happy that the loops had not stopped, since he still had not found a cure for Seraphine's eventual death.
It was just that… the idea of an endless time loop made something in him shudder whenever he thought about it.
Even so, he did not collapse mentally. Ashen had taken Seraphine's words to heart. He did not want to disappoint her, and more than that… he knew, deep down, that he could handle it.
He was the man who had held a rock for a hundred years. He would not break from repeating the same span of time for a few years.
...Even if he was forced to watch her die over and over again.
And as if the caster of the loop wanted to test that resolve, time kept rewinding as though its supply were endless.
Ashen was forced to live the same three months countless times, and Seraphine had to accompany him as he carried the memories of each new loop like a relay and fed them to her.
True to his word, Ashen soldiered on, even as he felt a part of his heart die with Seraphine each time the loop repeated.
His eyes grew dull, and even the golden luster in them seemed to fade. He became taciturn, and spoke less and less.
Even then, he never stopped searching for a way to save her.
Loop 50… loop 60… loop 100… loop 200…
The accumulation of those three months turned into decades, and when Ashen reached loop 250, he finally felt it.
It was like waking from a muddled sleep. Suddenly, he could feel change in motion. Every moving object, he somehow sensed it. And when he focused, he could even faintly feel particles shifting through space.
A concept.
He did not know the details exactly, because there was no system to spoon-feed him the answer, but he thought he could slowly uncover what it was.
One thing he felt for certain was that it had something to do with time. After all… he could feel it clearly now, the force behind the loops. And he could also sense its vast capacity.
It was exactly as his instincts had told him. This phenomenon was nowhere near over.
Ashen soon learned the essence of the concept by the end of the next loop. It happened when Seraphine was about to die again, and his newly learned concept reacted violently.
For a single moment… he saw it. Time faltered for a fraction of a second beneath his unwillingness before resuming, completely indifferent to his desires.
Nothing changed in that fraction of a second, but an idea came to Ashen.
What if time could be rewound for Seraphine's body to a point before it had been tampered with? Of course, he could not do that now, nor could anyone else at his disposal.
But that was now. He had time on his side. He could train as much as he wanted until he got it right.
The insane idea of rewinding time began to appeal to him more and more the longer he thought about it. Because he felt it then. This was finally it. The ticket that would let him save her once and for all.
Rewinding time would probably take more than a hundred years of research, but so what? As long as he saved her, he was willing to go mad in the process.
Ashen shared his plan with Seraphine, and as always, she accepted it with a smile. Though this time, the smile never quite reached her eyes.
***
After two hundred loops, Ashen had become skilled enough to earn the title of Magician.
That was what the elven sages said after testing his competence, at least.
So it could be said that he had a foundation for what he was about to do next: time rewinding.
That was right. He was creating a spell to rewind time.
To make things easier on himself, he set the range to a small bubble first, one he would gradually expand until it covered Seraphine's body.
But he got stuck on the first step: knowledge.
For a spell of this magnitude to work as intended, imagination and feeling would never be enough, no matter how much mana he poured into it. He had to at least map out a logical path for the spell.
If he tied it to physics, then he would need to track the position of every particle in the bubble, its velocity, and its interactions with everything around it.
And once he had a clear picture of the system's state, he would have to rewind all of it.
Every atom, every electron, every photon… even heat and radiation. They would all have to return perfectly to where they were, without a single deviation.
The task was practically impossible. Ashen knew it, and Seraphine knew it too when she thought about it. But he still chose to go through with it.
Along with madness, stubbornness had always lived inside Ashen. Unfortunately for him, someone else did not share the same traits.
Loop 359… Loop 489… 560… 602… 678…
Seraphine's condition kept deteriorating with each loop. Despair threatened to consume her as she watched him try and fail at the first step of their plan. But what truly crossed the line was seeing him lose his mind in the process.
Just the sight of his half-lidded eyes as he kept mumbling about atoms in delirium broke her heart into a thousand pieces. The sadness threatened to swallow what little reason she had left.
She would have accepted a permanent death if it meant freeing him from the endless torment of trying to save her.
And lo and behold, as if the universe had heard her plea, the chance appeared.
It started with Ashen explaining one of his skills on a whim.
"...you know I have this skill that lets me hide from the concept of time itself for a brief moment."
"Do you think I can get some inspiration from it since it also deals with time indirectly?"
"Now that I think about it… after I save you, we might be able to use it to leave the loop."
"Leave the loop…?"
It was the first time in years that she had heard him this talkative, and she might have welcomed the change if the contents of his words had not swallowed all of her attention.
"Yeah. We could hide from time using BlindStep the moment the rewind occurs, and see what happens."
"..."
"Sera? You alright?"
No, she was not. But it did not matter, because she had finally found it. The path he needed to take.
But how could she convince him? Seraphine knew it was unlikely he would listen to reason.
In the end, she settled on a simple and ugly solution. She would make him believe that she hated him. She did not know whether it would work. Her mind was stretched taut by more than a hundred and twenty years of accumulated memory, and her reason threatened to snap at any moment, but this was the best she could come up with.
The biggest reason he stayed was that he loved her, right?
But loving could never be one-sided. It had to go both ways, right?
Ashen would be freed from the misery of watching her die repeatedly, and she would be freed from the fate of endlessly dying.
All she had to do was make him believe that she did not love him anymore. And all he has to do is realize how unnecessary saving her becomes after that.
And so, as the end approached, she killed all of her feelings and said in a cold voice, "Ashen. I hate you."
"...?"
The words came out of nowhere. They had no build-up or visible reason. They were dry and illogical, but that didn't diminish their lethality.
"You are the reason I'm suffering in this hell. You brought me here. And now I'm stuck with a fate worse than death."
"Do you know what it feels like to die, and die, and then keep dying some more?"
"It's quite a mix of feelings. At first, I was frightened. The visions were deeply traumatic. I dreaded the coming of the third month every single day."
"Thankfully, I got used to it after a while, but that came with its own problems. Now I'm almost apathetic to my own death."
"I can imagine it and laugh about it. I can also kill myself now without batting an eyelid. Probably."
"So I hate you. The one who brought this upon me."
"I wish I had never met you."
"..."
Ashen never got the chance to answer, for she chose the time just before her death to inform him of her supposed feelings.
He only looked at her corpse with dead eyes.
*
The next loop, against his better judgment, he gave her the memories anyway, perhaps in a desperate attempt to hear that she had only been joking. That it had all been a prank. That she loved him as always...
And it did happen. Ashen was happy for exactly one day.
Because the next day, he found that she had killed herself by detonating her brain with mana.
And for the first time since the loops began, time rewound before three months had passed.
But Ashen's thoughts were not on that discovery. All he could think about was the regret of agreeing to let her sleep on her own.
***
As he watched her animatedly talk about how vampires could live as long as they had blood in them, Ashen was pulled out of his reverie.
From that loop onward, he broke his promise and stopped granting her the memories.
He later discovered that all the hurtful words and suicide attempts had been an effort to make him leave her and save himself, but hearing them still hurt all the same.
So Loop 678 Seraphine became a locked existence that he would rather never summon again.
Either way… she did not need those memories to be saved.
'...Just wait, Seraphine. I will save you. There is no need for you to suffer through this. And… there is no need for you to accompany me.'
He could do it alone. He was Ashen Hart. The man with infinite willpower.
If there was one thing he knew how to do best, it was…
Endure, and overcome.