Chapter 11: The Rampart Massacre
Stormveil's outer ramparts stretched before Gara like a death trap designed by someone with a personal grudge against basic survival instincts. Narrow walkways carved from living stone offered precisely no safety features—no railings, no cover, no acknowledgment that people might want to traverse them without dying horribly. Ballista emplacements lined the walls like mechanical predators, their operators tracking movement with professional enthusiasm.
For normal Tarnished, this would be suicide.
Gara had died eighty-two times. "Normal" had left the building somewhere around death forty.
"OSHA violations," he muttered, studying the gauntlet ahead with the clinical detachment of someone who'd learned to see danger as educational opportunity. "Every single safety standard violated simultaneously. No guardrails, no warning signs, no emergency exits. Someone's getting sued. Eventually. Probably posthumously."
The first ballista bolt erased him from existence with surgical precision.
The projectile was less arrow than guided missile—six feet of iron-tipped death launched with enough force to punch through castle walls. It caught him center mass while he was still cataloging architectural failures, reducing his enhanced physique to component atoms scattered across a fifty-foot radius.
Death #83: Rampart Ballista. Vaporized. 8/10 for raw destructive power.
He respawned at the rampart's base, body whole but memory perfect. The ballista operators were already reloading, their movements mechanical with practiced efficiency. Professional soldiers doing professional work with professional-grade weaponry designed to make traversing the ramparts impossible.
Timer: three seconds between shots. Predictable firing pattern. Operators track movement but can't adjust mid-flight. Solution: speed and timing.
The second attempt lasted longer but ended identically when he mistimed his sprint and caught a ballista bolt through the skull.
Death #84: Rampart Ballista. Headshot. 7/10 for accuracy, questionable fairness.
The third attempt required everything he'd learned about stat manipulation and tactical patience. Gara shifted every available point into Endurance, turning his body into an engine optimized for sustained speed. The transformation was nauseating—muscles reorganizing themselves, cardiovascular system rewriting its fundamental parameters, bones creaking under redistuted stress.
Then he ran.
The world became mathematics. Ballista firing intervals calculated against sprint velocity, trajectory analysis mapped against available cover points, margin of error reduced to microseconds and millimeters. The first bolt missed by inches, wind pressure ruffling his hair. The second passed close enough to trim his beard. The third would have bisected him if he hadn't thrown himself into a diving roll that carried him behind stone cover with approximately zero dignity intact.
He reached the far end of the gauntlet laughing like a madman.
The sound echoed off stone walls, high and brittle and completely inappropriate for someone who'd just survived impossible odds through applied mathematics. But the laughter wouldn't stop—relief and adrenaline and something darker combining into hysteria that made his chest ache.
"You're the mad one they speak of."
The voice cut through his breakdown like ice water. A Godrick knight stood twenty paces away, sword drawn but not yet raised, studying Gara with the expression of someone cataloging an exotic disease. The man's armor was pristine, his stance professional, but his eyes held the kind of fear usually reserved for things that violated natural law.
"The one who doesn't stay dead," the knight continued, his voice carrying across the ramparts like a prayer to malevolent gods. "The ghost in flesh who walks Stormveil's halls, dying and returning, dying and returning, until even death grows weary of his presence."
Gara's grin felt unhinged, stretching his face in ways that probably looked more feral than human. "Want to see it again?"
The offer hung between them like a challenge written in golden light. The knight's grip tightened on his sword, but uncertainty flickered behind his visor. How do you fight something that treats death as inconvenience?
"They're talking about me," Gara realized with crystalline clarity. "Word's spreading. The impossible Tarnished who keeps coming back. I'm becoming a legend, a horror story soldiers tell around fires."
The knowledge should have disturbed him. Instead, it felt like vindication.
More knights were approaching—reinforcements summoned by the commotion, professionals responding to threats with coordinated efficiency. Their armor clanked in rhythm as they formed a defensive line, weapons ready, faces hidden behind steel that couldn't quite mask their unease.
Perfect. Research opportunity.
What happened next would haunt Gara's dreams for years to come, if he still had dreams when this was over. With knights bearing down on him and nowhere to retreat, he made a decision that crossed lines he hadn't realized existed.
He stopped fighting back.
Death #85: Godrick Knights. Sword through chest. Experimental parameters: Do runes drop here or at Grace? Result: Here. Useful data.
The respawn brought him back around the corner, invisible to the knights but close enough to hear their confused discussions. "Where did the body go?" "His runes are still there, but..." "Should we report this?"
Death #86: Godrick Knights. Let them grab me first. Experimental parameters: Can I shift stats while being held? Result: No. Grapples lock stat distribution. Important limitation.
Death #87: Godrick Knights. Tried to resurrect with pre-loaded stat configuration. Result: Partial success. Can influence initial distribution but not perfectly control it.
Each death was a data point. Each resurrection was another line in an equation he was building through systematic self-destruction. The knights' confusion grew with each iteration—how do you process an enemy who lets you kill him, then returns minutes later for another round of experimentation?
"This is insane," part of his mind whispered during the brief darkness between death and resurrection. "I'm torturing myself for tactical advantage. This isn't human behavior anymore."
But the data was invaluable. Understanding resurrection mechanics, stat manipulation limitations, enemy behavioral patterns—knowledge that could save him hours of conventional trial and error. The cost was just pain, and pain was temporary.
Everything else was potential.
By death #87, he'd learned enough to proceed with actual combat. The knights were disoriented, demoralized, questioning their own sanity after watching the same Tarnished die repeatedly and return with unchanged enthusiasm. Professional soldiers reduced to philosophical confusion by an enemy who treated death as research methodology.
The actual fight was almost anticlimactic after the experimentation phase. Gara shifted to maximum Strength, weaponized his accumulated tactical knowledge, and carved through opponents who'd already been defeated psychologically. Runes flowed into him like liquid vindication, warming his enhanced frame while memories of professional competence dissolved into statistical improvement.
"I'm treating death as a resource," he realized while cleaning blood from his blade. "Not something to avoid, but something to exploit. That's not strategy—that's madness wearing strategy's clothes."
The revelation should have horrified him. Instead, it felt like finally admitting a truth he'd been avoiding since the Grafted Scion.
Confident in his newfound tactical innovations, Gara proceeded along the ramparts toward Stormveil proper. The path ahead was clear, his methods proven, his understanding of local mechanics comprehensive. Nothing could surprise him now.
A warhawk dive-bombed him off the wall.
"SINCE WHEN DO THE BIRDS?!" became his death scream as he plummeted toward rocks that waited with geological patience for their appointment with his spine.
Death #88: Giant Warhawk. Aerial assassination. 10/10 for surprise, 0/10 for fairness.
He respawned cursing everything avian that had ever existed or ever would exist. The hawk circled overhead with lazy arrogance, waiting for him to venture into range again. Apparently, ground-based tactical expertise didn't translate to aerial threat assessment.
Death #89: Giant Warhawk. Dive-bombed again. Beginning to detect a pattern.
Death #90: Giant Warhawk. Attempted to dodge, fell off wall anyway. These things are persistent.
Death #91: Giant Warhawk. Tried to hide under corpse. Hawks have good eyesight. Who knew?
Death #92: Giant Warhawk. Shifted stats to maximum Dexterity, still got grabbed. Air superiority is apparently significant.
Death #93: Giant Warhawk. Attempted to reason with it. Birds don't negotiate.
Death #94: Giant Warhawk. Getting tired of this. Bird isn't.
By death #94, Gara had developed a phobia so profound it rewrote his fundamental understanding of threat assessment. Giant dragons? Manageable with proper preparation. Grafted horrors? Educational opportunities. Birds larger than horses with aerial mobility and predatory intelligence?
Absolutely fucking terrifying.
The successful crossing happened on attempt eight, when accumulated frustration overwhelmed rational fear and he sprinted across the ramparts screaming "I HATE BIRDS!" at the top of his lungs while warhawks dive-bombed around him like feathered missiles. Fury made him unpredictable; unpredictability made him lucky; luck made him fast enough to reach cover before the birds could coordinate another assault.
Death #88-94: Giant Warhawks. Various aerial assassinations. Overall experience: 10/10 for surprise, 0/10 for dignity, -5/10 for psychological impact. Have developed ornithophobia. Birds are now classified as existential threat.
Standing atop Stormveil's ramparts, wind howling through his hair and the castle's main structure looming ahead like a promise of fresh horrors, Gara looked back at the trail of his bloodstains. Dark patches on stone where he'd died and died and died, each one a lesson learned through systematic self-destruction.
His reflection in a discarded shield showed golden eyes that glowed with accumulated power and accumulated madness. When had they started glowing? When had his humanity become negotiable currency traded for tactical advantage?
"I'm changing," he whispered to the wind. "Into what?"
No answer came from the empty sky or the distant towers or the part of his soul that had once considered death something to be avoided rather than exploited. But as he turned toward Stormveil's depths, one truth crystallized in his mind with uncomfortable clarity:
The thing that emerged from this castle wouldn't be the same creature that had entered it. The only question was whether that transformation would leave him stronger or simply more efficient at being a monster.
Ninety-four deaths. Ninety-four stat points lost to resurrection's invisible tax. But how many pieces of his humanity had he traded away in the process? How many lines had he crossed in the name of optimization?
And why did those questions feel less important with each passing death?
The castle waited ahead, promising fresh lessons in violence and corresponding opportunities for growth. Gara walked toward those lessons with the mechanical precision of something that had learned to see pain as education and death as temporary inconvenience.
Behind him, warhawks circled like carrion birds, waiting for the next fool to attempt the ramparts. They'd be waiting a long time. Word would spread, as word always spread in places like this: the ramparts were haunted by something that laughed when it died and came back hungry for more lessons.
The mad Tarnished who'd forgotten how to stay dead.
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