Emelia arrived almost directly in front of him. He hadn't even had time to get his bearings or come to terms with the fact that Belamouranthe would once again not be returning with him.

Before she could open her mouth, he said, "You can't just show up like this without warning."

"You said I could come back," she replied.

"I didn't realise you meant as soon as the Stage was done."

"It's how I've always done it," she argued.

Adam frowned.

Emelia paused, realising what she'd said.

He took a deep breath, deciding that it was for the best if he told her how he felt.

"Listen, I've really enjoyed your company—"

"But?" she immediately interrupted.

"You clearly want something out of this, but I don't even really know you."

Her expression darkened and she suddenly looked really sad. Adam felt bad for her, but she'd only get hurt more if he continued to play along for his own gain. And he had to consider his own feelings too. Besides, it was just too complicated for time-loopers to get involved in the way she was seeking. Surely she had to know it wouldn't last.

She took a step towards him and he instinctively stepped back.

Emelia paused and asked, "Do you fear me?"

"I would be a fool not to," he replied. "The first time we met you treated the death of my brother-in-law like it didn't matter and you threatened me with the Challenge Stone. We've had fun since then and I consider you my friend, but that first impression isn't something that's easy to forget."

She frowned, but instead of apologising she asked, "What about Willow? If you had the Visiting Stone and she hadn't blocked you, wouldn't you have wanted to visit her? Even though she doesn't know you in this loop."

Adam clenched his jaw. It was a fair question, although it felt hypocritical for her to bring that up now.

"Our relationship was never more than a friendship," he replied.

"Well, ours was!" she shouted. "Until you came here and fucked it all up!"

The image of her threatening to use the Challenge Stone on him popped back into his mind and he summoned his barriers in front of himself. "It's not like I had a fucking choice!" he replied, his own temper rising. "But you do! You can control everything in this universe because you've got the Divine Relic on your side!"

Tears ran down Emelia's face, but she didn't come closer. Instead she summoned something into the palm of her left hand.

Adam froze, wondering if she was about to attack him. Until now they'd been friends, but maybe he'd pushed her too far.

She stooped and placed the object on the ground, almost like an offering.

"Maybe you'll understand if you use this," she said. Then the Visiting Stone appeared in her hands and she vanished.

< < Visiting Stone Deactivated > >

< Player Emelia has left your Dimension >

Adam let out a deep sigh.

Well shit…

Maybe it would've been better if I'd said something when she showed up earlier instead of waiting until now.

The object remained where she'd left it. He was fairly sure it wasn't possible for her to give him any of the Relics she carried, unless the Eye had lied to him about trade between Players, or the Visiting Stone created a loophole.

He cautiously approached the item, worried it might be a trap. He relaxed when he saw that it was like a pearlescent and glittering scale a bit smaller than his hand. It reminded him of Luvicidix's scales for some reason.

"Shitbox, what is that?"

The Eye did not reply. Maybe it couldn't if this was an object obtained from the denizens it had no awareness of, like the moth sisters or someone Adam might not yet have discovered.

"Loot," he said, wondering if that would work.

< < Loot ­> >

< Scale of Remembrance >

A scale?

Despite his apprehension, he picked it up off the cobblestones to look closer.

< < Scale of Remembrance > >

< Would you like to access the memories stored within? >

Adam blinked.

Is this what I think it is?

He swallowed hard, then mentally prompted the scale in his hand, expressing his consent.

The world froze.

"I'm Adam," he said, introducing himself to the five people that'd appeared around him.

The world was a blur of white, light-blue, brown, and gold, but the details were missing. The people around him were all blurry shapes as well, and their voices were garbled and unintelligible.

He couldn't feel the ground under his feet nor the wind, sun, or anything else.

Is this a memory?

"My name is Emelia," someone responded and he looked past the blurry figures and saw her standing there, the only piece beside himself that made any sense.

Can I only see me and her?

The surroundings skipped ahead.

Adam charged forward with a two-handed sword, cleaving through some enemy that was a blur like everything else. He slashed through two more in his way before he saw the figure lying on the ground, bleeding and unconscious. She was like a light in the blurry world, the only thing he could see.

Around him, the shapes of his group members surrounded and protected them.

"I've got her!" Adam yelled, pulling a Medium Healing Potion from a Potion Belt Relic he was wearing.

He pulled out the stopper and fed it to the unconscious Emelia, who quickly woke up.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

She looked up at him, her face the only thing he could see.

Her eyes weren't purple spirals.

They were blue-green like gems.

This is before she became a time-looper, he realised in the disembodied part of him that just watched everything unfold.

The scene skipped to later in the Stage where Adam and Emelia were fighting side-by-side against something. Only two of the incomprehensible shapes of their group members were with them now. The thing they fought towered over them, but it was impossible to tell what it was.

Adam swung the two-hander with efficient moves. When the enemy sent an attack his way, he quickly pulled the Potion Belt off and used it to block with.

What the hell?

Is he using that Relic as a shield??

Emelia looked at him in awe, before surging forward with a mace. She was using the Priest Weapon Type.

After they defeated the enemy, the four of them gathered around something, high-fiving.

"Well fought," Adam told them.

The way Emelia looked at him made it seem like he was the only thing in the world she could see.

I suppose this past version of me did save her, which must be how she was able to go on to get the Divine Relic after meeting Arturo. It explains her obsession with trying to have me survive the Stage where I ended up dying in her first loop.

The scene switched to Adam and Emelia sitting opposite each other. Even though everything was still blurry, it was clear they were in the Dimensional Tavern.

"Your last name is Bell?" Adam asked, maybe commenting on a connection request that stated her full name.

Her name is Emelia Bell?

"It comes from Old French and means 'beautiful'," she replied.

Adam grinned.

They proceeded to talk for hours, discussing food, their past lives, their hobbies, and so on. Emelia explained how she was from a small town called Pont-en-Royans, but had moved to Lyon with her father at age five. Her favourite pastry was chausson aux pommes. She liked helping at an animal shelter on the weekends. Her best friend was an old widower who lived in an apartment on the floor below hers. She had been an optician before the Trials of Defiance.

Eventually, when the tavern closed, they parted ways, promising to talk after the next Stage and wishing each other good luck.

The memory rewound, or so it seemed.

"I'm Adam," he said, introducing himself to the five people that'd appeared around him.

Is that it??

I died right after that?

That means we met in Stage Seven, since I'm apparently destined to die in Eight.

"My name is Emelia," she responded, once again the only thing not a blur around him.

Wait, is this the same as before?

The scene skipped to Adam fighting his way through enemies to where Emelia lay unconscious and bleeding.

It's the exact same!

The rest of the memory played out like the first, ending with them promising to meet again.

The memory replayed again, and again, and again, and again.

The first eight times it was the exact same thing he was shown.

Maybe the Scale of Remembrance was a trap. This will never end!

The ninth time, there was a slight difference. Emelia had an Armour Relic, the Forlorn Cuirass to be precise, though she still ended up unconscious and needing to be saved.

In the tenth rerun it was back to normal, same as the eleventh.

The twelfth time, the memory playback did not end after their talk following the Stage. Instead it skipped ahead to another conversation between them sitting across from each other inside the Tavern. They both expressed relief that the other was alive.

Something happened to save me from Stage Eight!

Emelia and Adam both continued to chat like their first meeting in the Tavern, most of it innocuous stuff, though they were both opening up more to the other.

Emelia told him about her mother who had died from cancer. Her family had moved to Lyon so that they could visit the hospital where she was being treated. It had been hopeful at first, as the disease showed signs of remission, but then it came back stronger. The funeral had happened only two weeks before Emelia's seventh birthday.

Adam talked about his dad, who'd lost his memories following a risky brain surgery to save his life. He expressed the deep-seated sadness he felt every time he looked into his father's eyes and saw a different person looking back. Some early memories from his dad's childhood remained, but he had almost entirely forgotten about Adam and his sister Helena, though he was aware that he had children.

I've never told anyone about that…

But that disembodied part of him that observed these memories knew why he'd opened up to her. It had just felt right, and Emelia, the only thing not a blur in the memory, had watched and listened without judgement as he poured his heart out. He was starting to understand how the Emelia and Adam of this universe were drawn to each other. If not for the Trials, they would never have crossed each other's paths, but here they were linked together.

Then Adam said, "I don't think I would have survived Moonport if not for Souleyman's help."

Emelia asked, "Who is Souleyman?"

Adam went on to describe the person as a kind African man with ominous purple eyes that looked like a never-ending spiral.

I've never even heard of this guy. But he was clearly a time-looper in this world.

They talked until the Tavern closed and then the memory restarted from Stage Seven.

Even though I survived Eight, I perished in Nine? Or maybe Emelia did? It's hard to tell since I can only see the memories where she is present.

The memory loops continued, with more than thirty nearly-identical ones back-to-back, though there were minor differences in several of them, mostly just in what Relics both of them carried.

Then there came a loop where suddenly there were only four other members of their group, with one of the blurry shapes of another Player missing. There didn't follow a meeting in the Tavern as the last part of the memory was them both bleeding to death next to each other.

The next seven were much like the ones before and their group back to full, but they were followed by an eighth where two of the shapes of their group members were different, as though the people had been replaced by others. In that one, Adam didn't save Emelia in the same place as usual, but instead caught her before she was about to fall off the edge of something. He then saved her again later in the Stage when she was almost dead from some brutal attack, which had torn open a large portion of her torso. After that they worked together to take down a different boss than the one they always fought at the end of the Stage. They met at the Tavern afterwards and then the memory ended and the next began.

Maybe two of the Players normally there died early, while these other two are people who normally died but who instead survived this time.

I think I understand what's happening here… A time-looper, maybe Souleyman, maybe someone else, is messing with various methods of saving people's lives. They're causing new ripples to see what happens. Like a trial-and-error involving people as nothing more than simple numbers…

Countless memory loops followed where this new pattern held true with no deviations, neither big nor small. The nameless blurry members of his group never returned, permanently replaced with the two new people.

Okay, maybe those two were actually sacrificed to Nwetrou using the Abyssal Tooth, unless whoever is looping back is repeating the thing that made them switch places…

Then, suddenly—

Emelia sat opposite Adam in the blurry Tavern.

This is different!

"Do I know you?" Adam asked. He was unsettled by her spiralling purple eyes.

Emelia looked at him and smiled sadly. "No," she said. "But I know you. I know you very well."

She almost exactly replicated the back-and-forth that the disembodied Adam watching the memory had had with Willow after his second loop back in time. From the context clues he could gather, they were talking after Stage One, though she was doing a terrible job of explaining the situation to him. But then she pulled out the Visiting Stone.

The scene skipped to Adam and Emelia staring at each other in what seemed to be the centre of Interim Island. She held the Scale of Remembrance in her hands.

Holy shit, she's done this to me before!

If I hadn't broken the cycle this time around, she would've given me this after Stage One when she first contacted me in the Tavern.

She led Adam behind the Player House after he'd experienced the Remembrance and gifted him the Kindling Flame to create the lighthouse.

Then they went to the Tavern together, where they talked about what Adam had experienced when he used the Scale.

"Arturo gifted me one as well," Emelia revealed. "It's how I knew that you've always saved me every time we met. If nothing had changed, you would've continued to save me in every future loop."

She then explained the future Stages to him and what to expect, but a lot of her words were garbled and unintelligible.

What the fuck! Why is the System censoring this!?

After they finished talking, the scene skipped forward in time to the next day where Emelia and Adam met in the island's centre. They walked through the Market together as though they were on a date. It ended at the Tavern, where they talked more about future Stages, once again incomprehensible to the disembodied Adam observing them. After the Tavern closed, they walked together to the centre of the island and shared a goodbye kiss.

Another skip forward and they met at the centre of the island again, visited the Market, sat and talked in the Tavern, and then went to the Player House where she helped him improve his fighting style and practice with various Relics he was using. She'd told him not to pick the Potion Belt, which he'd always been using in past memories.

Instead of saying goodbye, they shared the bed together, with the blurry outline of something at the foot of the bed indicating that Belamouranthe was sleeping there too.

Another skip, another date, advice, and training session. This time they were alone at night and ended up having sex after lying in the bed and talking for hours.

The next day they brought dinner from the Tavern to the edge of the island and watched the sunset while sharing stories.

It feels inappropriate to watch all of this unfold, even though it's technically my own body I'm viewing this through the eyes of.

I hadn't even realised how serious past me and Emelia had been about each other.

The skip forward continued, each new day spent differently. The two of them fell deeper-and-deeper in love, until Stage Seven where they fought together like in all the past memories, although Emelia was totally mopping up the enemies and barely leaving anything for Adam and his team to do. They also went around and did more things in the Stage, fighting what seemed like several different bosses, and also collecting a ton of different loot.

Though he couldn't see their faces, the other party members seemed extremely excited.

After returning from the Stage, they met at the island centre yet again, did some intensive Market shopping and planning, since it seemed Adam had a bunch of Points to use. Then they had food brought from the Tavern to the Player House, where they spent the rest of the day in each other's naked embrace.

The memory ended with Emelia sobbing while Adam held her tightly against his chest. She begged him not to die in Stage Eight.

The world unfroze.

Adam looked around as the scale in his hand turned to lighter-than-air fragments that were carried off into the clouds above, glittering like silver rain.

The world looked so bright and colourful, then he stumbled onto his ass and blacked out.

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