Chapter 2: Dying Is Half the Battle
Death #7 ended with the Scion's blade sliding through his throat like he was made of paper. Gara felt his windpipe collapse, tasted metal and endings, then found himself gasping at the Site of Grace with phantom copper coating his tongue.
The golden light seemed dimmer now—or maybe that was just his imagination trying to find patterns where none existed. He touched his throat, found it whole, then pulled out his notebook with hands that barely trembled anymore.
Death #7: Grafted Scion. Throat severed. 4/10 - quick but messy.
Seven deaths in what felt like an hour. Seven perfect memories of different ways to die, archived in his brain like a horror movie collection he'd never asked for. But something was changing. The panic was fading, replaced by something colder and infinitely more dangerous.
Analysis.
"Three-second windup on the jump attack," he muttered, walking back toward the chapel. "Left-side swipes always follow the roar. That grafted arm moves slower than the others because—"
The Scion's claws punched through his spine.
Death #8.
He respawned at Grace, made another note, walked back. The pattern was becoming routine: die, document, repeat. Each death taught him something new about timing, about positioning, about the way video game logic translated to horrifyingly real consequences.
Death #15 came from overconfidence—he'd successfully dodged the jump attack only to walk straight into a follow-up combo he hadn't seen coming. Death #20 happened because he'd tried to attack during what looked like an opening but turned out to be a feint. Death #23 ended when he finally dodged the jump properly but laughed so hard at his success that he forgot the Scion could still kill him in forty-seven other ways.
His IT troubleshooting brain had fully engaged by then, treating the Scion like a particularly stubborn server that needed the right sequence of inputs to make it behave. Each death was a bug report. Each respawn was another chance to test his hypothesis.
Death #30: Grafted Scion. Overcommitted to attack. 3/10 - rookie mistake.
Death #35: Grafted Scion. Wrong dodge timing. 2/10 - getting predictable.
Death #40: Grafted Scion. Actually hurt it this time. 7/10 - progress.
The notebook filled with increasingly clinical observations. Somewhere around death thirty, he'd stopped seeing the Scion as a monster and started seeing it as a puzzle with claws. Somewhere around death forty, he'd realized the most disturbing thing of all—he was getting good at this.
Death #43 began like all the others. The Scion charged, arm-blades gleaming in impossible sunlight. But this time, Gara's body moved without conscious thought, muscle memory carved from forty-two failures guiding his feet in a dance of millimeters and microseconds.
Dodge left. Duck under the follow-up swipe. Roll backward as the grafted arm swept through the space his head had occupied. Three seconds of perfect execution, and suddenly he was behind the thing, close enough to smell the grave-dirt and old gold that clung to its armor.
His fist connected with something that felt like rotting meat wrapped around iron bars. Pain shot through his knuckles, but the Scion staggered, golden light leaking from the impact point.
"Holy shit, I actually—"
The second punch landed before he finished the thought. Then a third. The Scion turned, faster than something that size should move, but Gara was already rolling away, forty-three deaths of timing burned into his reflexes.
It lunged. He dodged. It swung. He ducked. They moved through a choreography written in blood and repetition, and for the first time since waking up in this impossible place, Gara felt like he might actually win.
The killing blow came when the Scion overextended on a heavy swing. Gara stepped inside its guard and drove his knee into what passed for its solar plexus. Armor cracked. Golden light exploded outward. The thing stumbled backward, wavered like a broken hologram, then collapsed into motes of fading radiance.
Gara stood over its dissolving corpse, hyperventilating, his hands painted with liquid gold that felt warm against his skin. The light sank into his flesh, flowing through his veins like molten sunshine, and something fundamental shifted inside his chest.
Power. Real, tangible power, flooding his system with heat and possibility. He could feel himself getting stronger—not just in some abstract RPG sense, but actually stronger. Muscles that had ached from seven deaths suddenly felt ready to run marathons. A mind fogged by fear and exhaustion cleared like someone had replaced all the lightbulbs in his skull.
"Runes," he whispered, watching the last traces of golden light disappear into his skin. "I just absorbed actual runes."
The knowledge hit him like a physical blow. If runes were real, if respawning was real, if dying and coming back was real, then everything else...
A slow clap echoed across the chapel courtyard.
Gara spun, adrenaline spiking, to find a figure in white approaching from the direction of Limgrave's golden fields. The mask was unmistakable—porcelain features frozen in aristocratic disdain, holes where eyes should be, everything about it designed to unnerve.
Varre. The bloody finger himself, looking exactly like his in-game model but somehow worse in person. More predatory. More real.
"How... resilient you are," Varre said, his voice carrying the kind of amusement that preceded very bad things happening to people. He tilted his head, studying Gara with the intensity of a cat watching a particularly interesting mouse. "Forty-three attempts. I counted. Most Tarnished die once and learn to avoid their betters. But you..."
He gestured at the space where the Scion had fallen, then at Gara's still-glowing hands.
"You treat death as education. My lord would find you fascinating."
Every gaming instinct Gara possessed screamed danger. This was Varre's recruitment speech, the first step down a questline that ended in blood magic and worse things. But he was also desperately, pathetically grateful to see another person—even a psychotic cultist person—after forty-three deaths alone with his thoughts.
"Your lord?" he managed, trying to sound casual while his heart hammered against his ribs.
Varre's laugh was like silk hiding razors. "All in good time, Tarnished. For now..." He gestured toward Stormveil Castle, its towers visible in the distance like broken teeth against the sky. "Do try not to die too quickly. It would be such a waste."
He turned and walked away, leaving Gara alone with questions that multiplied like viruses in his head. But Varre's parting comment stuck like a barb: Do try not to die too quickly.
Not don't die. Don't die too quickly.
Like dying was inevitable, just a matter of timing.
Gara looked at his hands, still faintly luminous with absorbed runes. Then at his notebook, filled with clinical documentation of his own deaths. Then at the golden path that led away from the chapel, stretching toward adventures that would probably kill him in increasingly creative ways.
"Forty-three deaths to learn one fight," he said to the empty air. "This is either going to be the best game ever, or the worst way to go insane."
The Site of Grace pulsed behind him, patient as always. Waiting for his next death, his next lesson, his next small step toward whatever he was becoming in this impossible world.
Gara Smith, IT support technician, closed his notebook and walked into Limgrave proper. The tutorial was over. Time to see what the real game had in store for him.
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