Before he took an arrow to the knee, Kent had once been an adventurer himself.
His strength had only ever been average, but it was enough to make a living. Then came an arrow imbued with cursed magic, and when it found his knee, his path forward was cut off completely.
Abandoned by teammates, looked down on by friends, his lover stolen by another man — Kent reflected deeply on all of it, and somewhere in that bitterness found an epiphany. From that point on, he stopped chasing brute strength entirely.
Instead, he turned to strategy and knowledge, arming himself with everything there was to know about dungeon exploration until he had become a walking encyclopedia of the craft. That was when his fame truly ignited, and his legendary career as a dungeon exploration master began.
Why was he suddenly thinking about all of this now?
Because after decades of never once lifting a blade, he was currently fighting on a battlefield — and absolutely loving it.
"Uwooooh—!"
He howled as he watched his body move across the field. Every swing of his limbs brought blood and screaming. He was an efficient, joyful killing machine, and there were thousands of maniacs exactly like him spread out across the battlefield.
With that many Carthus warriors gathered in one place, one could only pity their enemies.
The opposing soldiers wore armor Kent didn't recognize. He couldn't tell what era or nation they belonged to, and it no longer mattered.
"Hahaha!"
He laughed.
Did people think he had stopped using a sword because he wanted to?
No. His body had simply stopped allowing it.
But now, feeling the exhilarating rush of cutting through enemies like they were nothing, the passion that had spent decades lying dormant inside him roared back to life. Whatever this strange world intended, all he wanted was to keep going.
Almost instantly he stopped being Kent entirely and became a Carthus warrior, screaming "For the High Lord!" as he carved through the enemy lines.
The scenery shifted. Again and again.
Different battlefields. Different enemies.
The Carthus Legion had fought countless wars, their iron boots trampling nation after nation into the dust.
Kent fought among them, his mental state gradually unraveling, eyes bloodshot with something that had long since stopped being excitement and started being something darker.
No matter what enemy faced them, Carthus always won. Their vicious swordsmanship combined with sinister pyromancies made entire armies tremble before a single charge.
The killing intent of war really could reach inside a person and rearrange things.
He witnessed Carthus's atrocities firsthand. He watched fallen comrades be dragged back by forbidden Abyssal power, resurrected into something that was no longer quite themselves.
And strangely — he felt no revulsion toward any of it.
Even though he had once condemned Wolnir's methods.
He had lost count of how many wars he had fought in. As long as the killing felt good, that was enough. Even the thought of being trapped here forever had stopped bothering him.
Carthus grew more terrifying by the day, destroying nation after nation. When Wolnir finally donned the crown marking the apex of his conquest — when Carthus stood at the absolute peak of its power — the now-undead Kent, reduced to a skeleton restored through resurrection, heard word of a new enemy.
Something called… the Undead Legion.
That name tugged at something distant in his memory.
Had he heard it before?
Years of slaughter had smeared his recollections into something unrecognizable. Didn't matter. These people would fall beneath Carthus's fist like everyone else.
Kent marched out with the army and finally laid eyes on the so-called Undead Legion across the field.
A military force that matched them in scale.
Ghrus, sorcerers, all manner of specialized troops — and at the very rear, figures in pointed hats that radiated a pressure entirely different from anything he had encountered before.
Something was wrong. He could feel it instinctively, even if he couldn't name it.
These enemies were different from every previous one.
Forget it.
Time to kill.
The two armies collided.
A magnificent, earth-shaking war — and Kent, within it, was as insignificant as a single grain of sand.
The moment he crossed blades with the enemy, he knew.
These opponents were stronger than anything that had come before. He could no longer cut through them like grass.
That simply would not do.
If he couldn't mow people down, what was even the point?
He immediately fixed his sights on the pointed-hat warriors — the Abyss Watchers. One look was enough to mark them as elites. Taking their heads would send Carthus's morale soaring.
"Take this! Die!"
He launched himself into the air, great blade sweeping down toward one of the Watchers.
A flash of white filled his vision.
When it cleared —
"Huh? Why hasn't the battle started yet?"
Time had rewound to the moment before the armies met.
"What just happened? I only saw a flash of light."
He scratched his head, confused.
Forget it. Back to killing.
He targeted the Abyss Watchers again.
Ten minutes later —
"Why am I back here again?"
A few minutes after that —
"Back again?"
A few seconds later —
"Still!?"
Even an idiot would have pieced it together by now.
The bloodlust clouding Kent's mind finally began to thin.
"So they killed me just now?"
In the latest loop he had finally caught one of the Watchers move — a casual punch that had caved his skull in like a demolition hammer.
Which meant he had already died four times.
"This doesn't make sense."
He began to doubt himself.
"Carthus is clearly this powerful. Why can't we stop the Abyss Watchers?"
The war horns sounded again.
This time he learned his lesson.
He buried himself in the crowd instead of charging, and watched the Abyss Watchers carefully. He finally saw them fight clearly — a casual sweep of a Farron Greatsword reducing several Carthus warriors to scattered piles of broken bone. A few more swings, and corpses blanketed the ground.
Kent stared.
If a single Watcher was capable of this, then the Undead Legion as a whole was enough to make him despair entirely.
The Carthus army crumbled before them like paper.
Kent died again.
By now a faint, persistent throb had taken up residence inside his skull, but the shock overwhelming the rest of his mind made it easy to ignore.
The repeated deaths had long since scraped away the frenzy that had possessed him.
Calm returned, and with it came the full weight of how absurd his behavior had been.
How had he allowed himself to become so consumed by a dungeon-created illusion?
He had to find a way out.
But before the thought could develop further, the Abyss Watchers charged again and sent him back into another resurrection cycle.
Being killed hurt.
It genuinely, physically hurt — and the unrelenting pain folded him inward as his mind spun desperately.
Think. There has to be a way out. An illusion like this can't trap someone indefinitely — there has to be—
Time was up.
The Abyss Watchers killed him again.
His thoughts reset with his body.
He had long since lost count of the resurrections.
He was numb to it now.
Watching Carthus collapse around him as the Abyss Watchers advanced like grim reapers harvesting a field, Kent simply opened his arms.
Death.
Resurrection.
Infinite repetition.
Whether he struggled or surrendered, nothing could end this so-called illusion. It had completely surpassed his understanding. There was no mechanism he could find, no trick he could apply.
He tried everything he knew. At his best, he managed to bring down a handful of Ghrus. The moment the Abyss Watchers appeared, all he could do was obediently die.
He even tried simply surviving — staying low, staying back, enduring.
After more deaths than he could count, only about one-tenth of the Carthus warriors remained standing.
And then the atmosphere changed.
From behind them came a surging, terrible aura — furious, roaring, vast beyond comprehension.
High Lord Wolnir was finally moving.
Joy broke across Kent's face.
Could Wolnir defeat the Abyss Watchers? Was that it — survive long enough to witness Wolnir's victory, and the illusion would break?
I'm a genius.
The sky darkened. Heavy clouds rolled in from every direction. The battlefield seemed to hold its breath, bracing for the final, definitive clash.
And then —
Kent's vision blurred.
The scenery snapped back to the very beginning.
That was it.
The Painted World never showed Wolnir and the Abyss Watchers fighting.
It never showed the outcome at all.
"…"
Every trace of joy vanished from Kent's face.
The shock was so complete that his jaw — quite literally — detached from his skull and hit the ground.
He stood there for a long time.
Then, watching the Abyss Watchers begin their slow, inevitable approach once more, he did the only thing left to him.
He crouched down and hugged his head, trembling like a frightened child.
Outside the Painted World —
"Where did Master Kent go!?"
Aston had just barely finished killing the second Pus of Man — heavily injured in the process — only to realize Kent had simply ceased to exist in the room. The surrounding mercenaries looked equally lost.
"What are you idiots even useful for!?"
Rage detonated through him.
Power surged from his body as he seized the nearest Pus of Man and attempted to wrench it into a rear naked chokehold. A normal human's bones would have shattered instantly under that kind of grip.
But when life feels difficult, just remember:
Someone once tried to choke out a Pus of Man.
A creature composed largely of living sludge could not be restrained by anything with a conventional skeletal structure. It immediately went berserk, dragging Aston around the hidden chamber and using him to redecorate the walls.
"Tch!"
Each impact made him cough blood. The injuries were severe by any objective measure.
And yet his expression remained oddly composed — as though these wounds were a minor inconvenience rather than a genuine threat.
He reached up and touched the round pendant resting against his chest.
If he used that, this would be over in moments.
But he glanced at the mercenaries around him, and ultimately let his hand fall.
This was a secret shared only among the captains and a chosen few. It could not be exposed in front of ordinary soldiers.
After an exhausting, grinding struggle, the fourth Pus of Man finally went down, and no more darkness seeped from the cracks.
The room was still.
Everyone breathed.
"Captain! The place those monsters came from — it's the exit!"
The mercenaries had found the way out of the hidden chamber.
"And what good does that do us? Master Kent is gone!" Aston ground his teeth.
This entire expedition had been built around Kent. A group of mercenaries operating alone would last about thirty seconds before a trap finished them off.
"I think… I saw Master Kent get pulled into that painting."
A mercenary lifted the painting from the floor.
Silence settled over the room.
Then someone asked the question everyone had been carefully avoiding:
"Can he actually come back out?"
The words had barely finished forming when the painting shattered.
Kent came out.
His hunched figure crumpled to the floor and lay there, trembling.
"Master Kent!"
Aston crossed the room in seconds, dropping to support him, his face cycling rapidly through relief and alarm.
"Thank goodness — are you alright? Were you hurt?"
He already had a healing potion out, fully prepared to pour it down the old man's throat on the principle that healing potions generally helped with something, injured or not.
Kent's body hung in his hands — limp, boneless, utterly unresponsive.
Something was wrong.
Aston turned him over and looked at his face.
The eyes were vacant.
His heart dropped.
"Master Kent?" he called carefully.
Kent responded.
His dry, cracked lips moved slightly, delivering what sounded, in all sincerity, like an acceptance speech:
"Ababa…?"