Chapter 14: The Grafted Ambush
With Roderika safely guided toward Stormveil's exit, Gara and Nepheli pushed deeper into the castle's twisted heart. The architecture grew more disturbed with each level they descended—walls that pulsed with organic rhythm, floors carpeted with what might once have been skin, ceiling fixtures that blinked when observed too directly.
A courtyard ahead opened like a wound in the castle's flesh, its center dominated by a familiar horror that made Gara's hands shake with involuntary recognition.
Another Grafted Scion.
This one was larger than the tutorial specimen, crowned with more arms, armored with plates that had been harvested from knights and nobles who'd sought audience with Godrick. It crouched in the courtyard's center like a spider made from human components, multiple eyes tracking their approach with intelligence that felt disturbingly familiar.
"I really hate these things," Gara muttered, his voice carrying the weight of forty-three tutorial deaths and accumulated trauma from fighting their siblings throughout the castle.
Nepheli studied the creature with professional assessment. "Grafted Scion. Bigger than most. Probably uses the extra limbs for grappling attacks, coordinated strikes. Standard tactics won't—"
The Scion ambushed from above.
It had been waiting, poised on architectural features that defied physics, using patience learned from whatever human components had been grafted into its consciousness. The creature dropped with gravitational enthusiasm, all eight arms extended, targeting the spot where they'd been standing with predatory precision.
Gara saw it coming—peripheral vision catching movement, pattern recognition screaming warnings based on tutorial hell and subsequent Scion encounters. Without conscious thought, he shoved Nepheli aside and took the full impact himself.
Eight grafted hands closed around his body with crushing force. Ribs snapped like kindling. His spine compressed until vertebrae ground against each other. The Scion's weight drove him into the courtyard floor with enough force to crater stone and redistribute his internal organs into configurations never intended by any divine architect.
But in the darkness between heartbeats, something fundamental changed.
Death #100.
The round number carried weight beyond mere counting. As consciousness faded, Gara heard whispers that had never been present before—voices speaking in languages that predated human speech, discussing cosmic mathematics in terms that bypassed rational understanding.
Golden threads materialized in the void, connecting this death to every previous one. He could see the pattern now—ninety-nine previous deaths forming a web of experience that stretched back to the Chapel of Anticipation. Each death was a node in a network of accumulated knowledge, and this hundredth death completed some circuit he hadn't known was building.
"Critical Death Memory unlocked," the whispers informed him in tones that felt like divine revelation and cosmic joke simultaneously. "Designation: Lock this death for perfect recall."
Understanding flooded through him like liquid lightning. He could preserve this death, replay it with frame-by-frame precision, analyze every detail from perspective and angles that hadn't existed during the original experience. The Scion's attack pattern, Nepheli's positioning, environmental factors—everything captured in perfect fidelity for future reference.
The power activated without conscious choice. Death #100 locked into his memory with weight that felt permanent, immutable, accessible forever.
Then he was gasping at Grace, body whole but mind reeling from revelations that rewrote his understanding of what resurrection actually was.
Nepheli knelt beside him, her face painted with concern and confusion. "You were crushed. Completely crushed. There wasn't enough left to..." She stopped, studying him with intensity that bordered on intrusive. "What are you?"
"Persistent," Gara croaked, his voice raw from screaming he didn't remember doing. "Really, really persistent."
But even as he spoke, his mind was replaying death #100 with supernatural clarity. Every microsecond of the Scion's attack, analyzed and categorized. The creature's jump trajectory—predictable once you understood its weight distribution. The timing of its arm coordination—vulnerable during the 0.3-second window when it committed to the grab. Nepheli's positioning—perfect for a flanking strike if she moved precisely when the Scion landed.
Armed with perfect death memory, Gara began orchestrating their return engagement like a conductor directing lethal symphony.
"It jumps from the northeast corner," he said, pointing toward architectural features that would conceal a creature of the Scion's size. "Three-second windup while it calculates trajectory. When it commits to the leap, dodge left and circle toward its landing zone. I'll engage from the front to maintain aggro—you strike the legs during the recovery phase."
Nepheli blinked at the tactical specificity. "How do you know its exact attack pattern? You barely saw it before—"
"Experience," Gara said, tapping his temple. The lie felt natural now, worn smooth by repetition. "My family's techniques include perfect recall of traumatic events. Death tends to focus the mind wonderfully."
They moved back to the courtyard with coordination that felt almost choreographed. The Scion waited in the same position, same patient crouch, same predatory stillness. But this time, Gara could see the tells—muscle tension in its grafted shoulders, weight distribution that favored the jump-attack, micro-movements that betrayed its intentions before conscious thought formed.
"Three... two... one..."
The Scion leaped exactly as predicted. Gara and Nepheli scattered in opposite directions, their movements synchronized by knowledge purchased with crushed bones and shattered organs. The creature hit empty stone, its devastating attack missing by margins calculated to the millimeter.
What followed was precision violence. Nepheli's axes found the Scion's leg joints during its recovery phase, hamstringing the creature while it was vulnerable. Gara engaged from the front during its confused reorientation, using his enhanced Strength to drive his blade between armor plates that his death had revealed as weak points.
The Scion died without either of them taking serious damage.
Runes flowed into Gara like liquid vindication—substantial quantities that spoke to the creature's enhanced nature and his own growing efficiency at converting death into power. But beneath the familiar warmth, something felt wrong. The absorption was slower than expected, less complete than previous encounters.
Nepheli stared at him with awe that contained disturbing undertones of suspicion. "How did you know exactly what it would do? Every movement, every timing, like you'd fought that specific creature before."
"Experience," he repeated, but the word felt hollow now. How many times could he invoke that excuse before even his willingness to believe it eroded?
That night, they rested at a Grace deeper in the castle, golden light providing sanctuary from horrors that pressed against the darkness like hungry predators. Gara checked his stats with obsessive precision, finally paying attention to totals rather than distributions.
The numbers didn't make sense.
According to his accumulated rune absorption, he should have stats in the forties. Instead, his totals barely broke thirty. Significant power was missing—enough to represent substantial character progression that had simply vanished.
One hundred deaths. One hundred stat points lost.
The realization crashed over him with geological force. Every single death had cost him a stat point—randomly selected, invisibly stolen, his potential hemorrhaging away each time he'd treated resurrection as educational opportunity rather than last resort.
"I've been fighting crippled this entire time," he thought, staring at numbers that revealed the true cost of his tactical approach. "Every death literally steals my potential. I've been spending my future to learn the present, trading what I could become for what I needed to know."
The laughter that escaped sounded broken even to him—high and brittle and completely inappropriate for someone discovering they'd been systematically robbing themselves of power. But the absurdity was overwhelming. All this time, he'd thought resurrection was free. Instead, it was the most expensive education possible, paid for with fragments of capability he'd never recover.
"What's wrong?" Nepheli asked, concern replacing suspicion in her voice.
Gara struggled to compose an explanation that wouldn't reveal everything. "Just... remembered something important I lost. A long time ago. Nothing I can fix now."
She studied him with the intensity of someone who specialized in reading people under stress. "You look like someone who just discovered they're dying."
"Worse. I just discovered I've been dying all along, one piece at a time."
But he couldn't say that. Instead, he closed his eyes and tried to calculate how much more of himself he could afford to lose before the equation stopped balancing, before the cost exceeded any possible benefit.
One hundred deaths. One hundred lessons written in pain and purchased with potential. He was stronger now than when he'd started, but weaker than he should have been. Smarter about combat, but dumber about consequences. More capable of surviving individual encounters, but less capable overall.
The journal entry that night was shorter than usual:
Death #100. Finally understand the price. Every time I die, I lose a piece of who I could have been. How many deaths until there's nothing left to take? How many lessons until the student disappears entirely?
Total deaths: 100. Total cost: Unknown. Total stupidity: Immeasurable.
Note to self: Learn to stop dying so much. The universe is apparently keeping receipts.
He closed the journal and stared into Grace's light, watching golden flames dance with patterns that almost made sense. Somewhere in their movement, he thought he could see the threads connecting all his deaths, the network of experience he'd built through systematic self-destruction.
Critical Death Memory pulsed in his consciousness like a tumor made of knowledge—death #100 preserved forever, available for replay whenever he needed to remember exactly what crushing felt like. A gift and a curse wrapped together, indistinguishable from each other.
"Two hundred deaths to go before I really understand the system," he thought with bitter humor. "Assuming there's enough of me left to care about understanding anything at all."
The castle groaned around them, settling into configurations that might have been architectural but sounded increasingly organic. In the distance, Godrick's workshops hummed with productive malevolence, processing fresh materials into tomorrow's horrors.
And somewhere in that sound, Gara heard an echo of his own future—efficient, optimized, successful at achieving goals through methods that left him fundamentally altered. The question wasn't whether he'd survive the journey.
The question was whether the thing that survived would still be human enough to remember why the journey had mattered in the first place.
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