Chapter 28: Errors
"Eleanor, wait—"
She was already moving, out the door and down the corridor at a pace that made Lucas jog to keep up, and he caught her arm before she reached the main hall.
"Slow down. Just... think about this for a second."
"I have thought about it." She didn’t stop walking, just pulled her arm free and kept moving. "Jed said fifty people die when we move. He didn’t say the timing was fixed. If moving in three days is what he saw, then moving tomorrow changes the conditions entirely. Different day, different outcome, different everything. It’s the only plan I’ve got."
"Or it changes nothing except how prepared we are when it happens." Lucas fell into step beside her, urgency bleeding into his own voice now. "Eleanor, people need time. Supply checks, formation drills, actual rest before a fight this big. You can’t just compress weeks of planning into one night."
"I don’t have weeks. I have three days, and apparently that’s exactly when you die." Her jaw was set, the same hard resolve he’d seen settle over her the moment she’d decided anything since he’d arrived. "If moving early is the only variable I can actually control, I’m going to control it."
"That’s not a plan, that’s a gamble."
"Then it’s a gamble I’m making." She reached the hall doors and pushed through them before he could argue further
Lucas had no choice but to follow, dread already settling low in his chest.
***
"Tomorrow," Eleanor announced, once the hall had filled and quieted enough for her voice to be heard. "We move for the Gateway at first light tomorrow, not in three days as originally planned."
The reaction was immediate — murmurs rippling through the crowd, alarmed glances exchanged, someone near the back audibly groaning.
"Goddess, with respect," one of the vanguard captains said, stepping forward, "we haven’t finished formation drills. Half our fighters haven’t even—"
"I’m aware," Eleanor cut in, tone final. "We move tomorrow regardless."
Mark caught her arm gently as she turned to address the rest of the logistics. "Elle. Can we talk about this? Just for a second?"
"No."
"Eleanor—"
"I’ve made the decision, Mark." Something in her voice left absolutely no room for continuation and Mark simply exhaled and stepped back.
"Right," he muttered, mostly to himself. "Noted. For future reference. Once she decides something, that’s just... that’s the decision now." He glanced sideways at Lucas.
It had been like that since college actually. Eleanor was the stubborn and determined type. One who once decided on something, was almost impossible to change her mind...
Eleanor continued issuing instructions...supply distribution, marching order, defensive formation, each one delivered with an, unyielding certainty that made it clear this wasn’t a discussion anymore.
By the time she finished, the hall had settled into the particular, anxious quiet of people preparing for something they weren’t ready for at all...
***
They moved at first light, exactly as she’d commanded, the fortress’ gates swinging open onto a column of over a hundred survivors stretching back through the trees.
Lucas walked near the rear of the formation, watching the line of fighters ahead of him with a knot of unease he couldn’t fully shake. Iris fell into step beside him after a while, Bertram, Callum and Lora trailing a short distance behind.
"You look like a man waiting for something to go wrong," she said.
"Because I am." He admitted.
"Wanna talk about it?"
"Not really." He managed a tired smile. "Just... hoping I’m wrong."
The first several hours of the march passed with surprising ease. Clear terrain, no beast encounters beyond a handful of dispatched quickly by the vanguard, the whole column moving with a rhythm that almost, *almost* let Lucas believe the early departure might actually pay off.
They saw it...
The Gateway stood in front of them in between two spires. Energy crackling in between them in faint, blue lights.
The faces of everybody brightened as they realized they were finally about to leave this nightmare.
Eleanor herself was struggling to keep the relief she felt from showing toon much.
She glanced at Lucas and smiled. A smile that quietly told him : ’told you so’.
Then the ground began to shake....
Not the rolling tremor of a horde. Something heavier, single and deliberate, each impact driving through the earth like a hammer and the column marched to a halt as a shape emerged from the treeline ahead that made everyone present stares in horror.
[Warning: Hestia Class entity detected.]
[Objective: Successfully Pass through the Gateway]
[Survival probability: 41%]
It was enormous... built like some grotesque fusion of a lion and a saber toothed tiger. Its hide thick with fur that seemed to smolder rather than burn, a mane wreathed entirely in living flame that cast harsh orange light across the column’s front ranks. Fangs curved from either side of its jaw, longer than a grown man was tall, and when it roared, the sound alone staggered several fighters back a full step.
"Vanguard, forward!" Eleanor’s voice rang out from the front, commanding and the front line surged to meet the creature.
It went wrong almost immediately....
The vanguard’s formation, the one Eleanor had ordered compressed into a single rushed night of preparation fell apart the instant the Hestia actually charged.
Fighters who should have flanked left broke right instead, confusion rippling through ranks that hadn’t drilled together enough to move as a unit and the creature tore through every single one of them like the formation had simply ceased to exist.
A woman near the front died first, caught mid-retreat by a swipe of one massive paw that sent her flying before she hit the ground and didn’t move again.
A man beside her lasted only slightly longer, spear raised in a defensive stance that the Hestia simply walked through, the flames cremating him within seconds...
"Fall back, regroup!" Eleanor’s voice again, cracking now as she watched a plan she’d rushed into unraveling right before her eyes.
It didn’t help. The Hestia moved with a terrible ease through fighters who hadn’t trained together long enough to trust each other’s positioning, its mane of fire burning them as it plowed through the column, screams rising on every side.
[Skill: Ignition has been activated]
Lucas was already running forward, [Ignition] roaring to life around both fists, watching people he barely knew die in front of him because a formation built in one panicked night simply hadn’t been ready for something this size.
"Bertram, left flank Iris, cover me!" He was shouting orders on pure instinct now, dragging what fragments of coordination he could out of chaos that refused to organize itself. "Lora, get the wounded clear!"
A young fighter barely more than a boy, knives shaking in his grip froze directly in the Hestia’s path as it turned, jaws opening wide enough to end him in a single motion.
"Move!" Lucas didn’t think.
He threw himself forward, shoving the boy clear mere moments before the Hestia’s jaws would have closed on him, and felt the impact catch his own shoulder instead, q blow that should have only staggered him, except the creature’s paw came around a moment later, faster than anything that size had any right to move and caught him square across the chest.
[You have died.]
The world went white with pain, a muffled shout of his name somewhere. Then silence...
[Regression Activated.]
***
"...We’ll succeed," Jed said. "The Faction crosses the Gateway. We make it through."
Lucas’s vision snapped back into focus with the same vertigo as every regression before it, standing exactly where he’d been standing in the hall, the meeting still unfolding around him precisely as it had the first time, Eleanor and Mark turning toward Jed with the same
worried attention.
[Player has returned to designated checkpoint.]
[Checkpoint has been restored to the last stable moment prior to death.]
’i came back...’ the thought sprung in his mind... ’I... I actually came back...’
In all honesty, the he was back was something we was relieved about. But him dying was something he would never get used to...
He looked up....
’This is before the announcement. A day bfore she decides to move early....’
The realization hit him with a cold, sinking weight, the pieces of the last several hours reassembling themselves in his mind with brutal clarity.
It wasn’t the Hestia. It wasn’t bad luck. It was the timing...
Eleanor rushing the departure, compressing days formation drilling into a single desperate night, throwing an unprepared vanguard at a beast none of them had trained for. That was what had gotten those people killed. A decision made in fear that could still be unmade.
’She caused it. Trying to avoid the prophecy is what fulfilled it.’
Guilt settled into his chest alongside the realization, heavy and uncomfortable because it was his own death Jed had named that had sent Eleanor spiraling into a decision that got dozens of other people killed alongside him. If he’d never mattered enough to her to provoke that kind of panic, maybe none of it would have happened at all.
’But this time I know. This time I can stop her from rushing it.... Hopefully...’
Small comfort settled alongside the guilt. The quiet, familiar certainty that whatever version of this death he’d just survived, it hadn’t been the one that stuck. He was standing here again, breathing, memory intact, given another chance to get it right.
"At what cost," Eleanor asked, exactly as she had before, her voice carrying the same fragile edge Lucas remembered.
Jed held her gaze, solemn, the hall around them falling into the same heavy silence.
"Over fifty people," he said. "That’s what I saw. Fifty, at least, don’t make it to the other side."
The pause stretched, and Lucas already knew what was coming before Jed raised his finger, before the prophet’s steady, unshakeable voice delivered the words a second time.
"Including him."
Lucas’ eyes narrowed...
’Shit.’
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