"I think it's time to put an end to this, it had already grown boring a long time ago. Farewell Mr. Edevane."
In the middle of a street of a city in ruin, three entities with an overwhelming presence were standing before an injured human.
'Farewell? What the hell are these bastards saying?'
Alwyn fell on one knee, laboriously gasping for air, as if his lungs had collapsed.
Clang.
His weak hand dropped the sword on the asphalt and, shaking with pain, reached for the burning chest. In the meanwhile, a second voice addressed the first one.
"Wait! I haven't finished playing with him yet! Just another round, please!"
Alwyn tried to ignore them and, as he couldn't feel anything with his numbed hand, he gradually lowered his head to inspect the wound that one of the three entities had procured him on the chest.
"To think you were the one who said watching was better than playing... What a hypocrite!"
And found a hole as big as a football right where his heart should have been.
"Come on, that was hundreds of rounds ago! Tastes can change, can't they?"
Splat, splat.
Alwyn's innards started falling to the ground, painting the dry asphalt red in a symphony of grotesque sounds.
'Huh?'
With a confused expression, he collapsed and slammed the head into the hard asphalt, procuring himself a concussion.
He had no strength left in his body.
"I guess tastes can change, however- Hey Alwyn, are you still with us?"
Muffled words came out of the entities' mouths. His sense of hearing was worsening with every second that passed.
"Wait, I have a brilliant idea. Have you seen what's happening in the Twenty-third Realm? Why don't we-"
Until Alwyn could hear no more.
However, that was not important right now.
'I was so close.'
A faint smile appeared on his face.
'The next round will definitely be the last.'
His eyes grew heavy, until all he could see was black, and before he knew it, his conscience had already abandoned his body.
Alwyn Edevane had died.
But had he, really?
When his sight was restored, he found himself surrounded by a familiar blue void, the intangible place he could almost call home.
Ding.
Just like always, a blue panel opened before him, containing the three words that he now knew by heart.
[Regression Skill Activated]
Under his feet a giant blue clock, made from the same material of the void he was immersed in, soon materialized. The clock hand twitched a couple times and then started rotating counterclockwise, faster and faster, until only afterimages could be seen.
Alwyn Edevane was a Regressor. A person who went back in time every time he died. It was a common trope in popular novels, but this was not fiction.
His goal was to kill Space, Time and Fate, the three gods that had slain him just now, and the ones that put humanity through hell for their own entertainment. Space, for example, opened Gates throughout the planet. Monsters came out of them and invaded Earth, reaping lives without facing any kind of resistance. Humans were powerless against monsters.
Still, Alwyn's grudge wasn't because of what they did to mankind. It was for the death of his parents and of his only friend. But those gods were also the ones who gave him a chance to fight back. Fate gave him the System, so that he could grow stronger, while Time's gift was the Regression Skill.
Why they chose him in particular was still a mystery.
They had probably just randomly selected him among billions of people, but he was extremely grateful for that, because it meant that one day he could kill the three bastards with his own hands.
Sure, it took him a myriad of rounds to get where he was now, but all that suffering would soon be worth it.
His revenge was just a regression away.
Experiencing those five years of life one last time was surely a hassle, but he just had to repeat every single action like he always did, with utmost precision. He was used to it now, after doing so for thousands of rounds.
Alwyn Edevane was no simple human anymore, but a machine that ran on hatred. Or at least he thought he was, as only humans can feel emotions. The truth though was much darker and repulsive.
'Regressors only die when they ultimately give up. With the power to defy death and rewrite the past, they must keep battling until they reach the perfect ending.'
That was Alwyn Edevane's belief, and it was why he would never give up.
To do so, however, he must maintain his humanity. The moment he loses it, he will never be able to reach his goal, no matter how much he struggles.
However at that moment, without prior notice, the floating blue panel closed, and he had to interrupt his train of thoughts.
The clock hand had also stopped moving.
Alwyn was dazed, a perplexed look plastered on his face.
'Strange.'
Such an occurrence had never happened before.
"Hey, System! Activate Regression Skill!"
Ding.
[Regression Skill Ac-]
But the panel's image only lasted for a fleeting instant. It had once again been forcibly closed.
"A-Activate Regression Skill! Now!"
Anxiousness could be discerned in his trembling voice.
But still, nothing happened.
"System-"
Just then, the giant clock under his feet vanished, as if it had never existed to begin with. Only then did he remember the last words of Time.
'...Farewell Mr. Edevane…'
They echoed inside his head like a bad omen.
'Wait, don't tell me-'
"Fuck!"
Had the gods taken the System back? And if so, what about the Regression Skill? Were the two things tied together? What if… they were done toying with him?
This could very well be the end of his journey.
"...What a fool I am."
He had started relying too much on what the gods had given him. He got so accustomed to using those powers that he took them for granted. The thought that the current round could have been his last had never crossed his mind, so he had never played it cautiously and wasted many opportunities.
Alwyn immediately looked down to his feet, but where the giant clock should have been, now only an endless expanse of blue void remained.
A long series of profanities came out of his mouth, like a waterfall of hatred.
Hatred towards himself.
In the end, Alwyn Edevane could not avenge his family.
He had had many chances in the past, but each time he ultimately decided to regress, obsessed with the dream of achieving a perfect ending.
He had deceived himself, made himself believe to still be human, to have an ardent desire to avenge both family and his friend... But that was all a lie.
'Regressors only die when they ultimately give up… What a load of bullshit.'
He had never given up, but what he experienced couldn't be called living, it was a nightmare that slowly consumed him from the inside. It was a prison he alone had created for himself.
That was his sin and the reason for his current predicament.
Regression became his reason to keep going. He died in order to reach something unreachable. He died in order to die again, and not to live. All he had done in those thousands of years, was running away from his responsibilities.
Living, instead, was walking forward without looking back. Accepting your mistakes and trying to make up for them.
Now it was too late to do so.
Death.
The word that previously evoked no emotion in him now made him tremble with fear. Strangely enough, this time the emotion was genuine.
Only in death did Alwyn Edevane, the heartless Regressor, finally manage to be human again.
"Why… Why is this happening to me?!"
He already knew the answer to that question.
A tear rolled down his cheek, and when it fell from the chin, something changed in his surroundings.
Perplexed, Alwyn stared at the immaterial ground, which was slowly contorting itself, stirring, moving in a spiral and gradually increasing the speed.
As the ground was not solid, that phenomenon did not affect Alwyn's body, because that as well was something immaterial. The entire place was just a projection of his soul. So he stood still and observed.
In a matter of seconds, the void below him, where the clock originally should have been, had become a giant whirlwind of blue nothingness.
Only then did he realize that the unfamiliar event symbolized the activation of a Skill. Which one he did not know, he had never seen such visual effects. He only knew that it resembled the Gates the monsters came out from.
Looking straight into it, Alwyn sensed something calling him from beyond the vortex.
And then his eyes, the real ones, opened again.
A dim grey sky entered his view.
The freezing wind burned his skin, and its howl chilled him to the bone.
He was lying down on hardened dirt, his clothes soaked in a sticky liquid.
Alwyn could not believe his eyes.
"I'm not dead! Eat shit assholes!"
He had regressed.
However, the grin on his face did not last long.
He felt something was off.
That was not how his regressions usually started.
'What is…'
A pungent smell of blood tingled his nostrils.
Alarmed, Alwyn got up in a hurry, but his legs promptly failed him.
He fell on his face, breaking the nose.
The pain was nothing compared to what he had experienced in other rounds, so he easily shrugged it off. Then he looked at his legs to understand what had just happened, and he spotted the problem.
It was a horrifying sight.
From above the knee down there was no skin, no muscle, no blood vessels or nerves, only white splintered bone, as if something had broken his legs and chewed the meat off them. And by the looks of it, the wound was still fresh.
Inspecting it closely he noticed something wriggling. His legs… were slowly regenerating. That was not a power of his.
'Why-'
And then it hit him. Like a flash, his nervous system registered the pain in his stumps.
"Fuck fuck fuck, god it hurts!"
Fighting against the agony, he sat up, trying to assess his surroundings.
Piles of wooden planks lay scattered around him, and on his left, ten feet away, he could recognize a broken cartwheel. Here and there he spotted dirty cloth rags and deformed pieces of metal stained with blood, probably the only things that remained of some unfortunate victims.
And by the looks of it, Alwyn had been one of those victims, at least before waking up.
"System! Hey System, can you hear me?! System-"
No matter how many times he tried, no panel opened before him.
'What the hell is happening?!'