However the physical exertion of the laugh was too much for his withered lungs. The chuckle instantly dissolved into a violent agonizing fit of coughing.

"Hack! Cough! Gah!" Klaus hunched forward with his frail shoulders shaking violently as he coughed into his right fist.

"Master!" Mirela panicked, instantly dropping the intense seduction act and shifting back into caretaker mode.

She stood up, gently but firmly patting his back to help him clear his lungs.

"I’m... I’m fine," Klaus gasped, catching his breath with a weak smile playing on his deeply lined lips.

He looked up at her. "It’s a deal. If I make it back... I’ll hold you to that."

Mirela’s face finally flushed a bright, beautiful crimson. She offered a watery, brilliant smile and nodded firmly.

"Come on," Klaus grunted, bracing his right hand against the edge of the mattress. "Help me up."

He tried to push himself onto his feet.

His legs, completely devoid of the Beast’s Vitality that usually fueled his movements, instantly buckled under the weight of his own body.

He would have collapsed directly onto the cold obsidian floor, but Mirela and Anya were there.

Mirela quickly slid under his right arm, wrapping it securely over her shoulder, bearing the majority of his weight.

Anya stepped to his left, her small hands glowing with faint purple magic as she supported his hip, acting as a tiny supernatural crutch.

Together, the demi-human maid and the six-year-old Shinigami lifted the withered dying Soul King off the floor.

The ascent was agonizingly slow.

Every single step up the massive, monolithic spiral staircase felt like climbing a mountain.

Klaus’s breathing was a loud wheeze that echoed continuously against the dark stone.

Sweat beaded on his wrinkled forehead. His boots dragged heavily against the obsidian...

He didn’t have the strength to generate sonic booms nor did he have the strength to call upon Valeria or even the spirit.

He was just an old man, taking his final walk to the executioner’s block, supported entirely by the two people who refused to let him fall.

They climbed higher and higher with the silence of the tower broken only by their synchronized breathing.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity of grueling effort, they rounded the final curve of the staircase. The dark corridor leveled out, opening onto the wide, flat landing.

Looming at the very end of the hall, radiating an aura of blinding, suffocating, dense white light, were the massive double doors of the trial room.

The threshold was waiting for him.

"Master... please take care."

"Papa, don’t make me an Orphan."

Mirela and Anya stopped a few feet away from the boundary with the sheer pressure of the divine magic pushing back against their bodies.

They gently lowered Klaus, allowing him to stand on his own two shaking feet.

Klaus didn’t look back at them. He knew if he looked at Mirela’s tear-filled eyes, or Anya’s fearful expression, his resolve might fracture.

He tightened his jaw, ignoring the screaming agony in his joints and the throbbing pulse of his broken wrist.

Klaus squared his withered shoulders, staring directly into the blinding whiteness of the Second King’s trap.

He took a slow, agonizing step forward, and crossed the boundary into the light.

WHOOSH!

The threshold of the trial room offered absolutely no resistance.

There was no violent shockwave of displaced magical energy and no sudden, crushing gravitational pull.

As the withered, frail, dying body of the Soul King crossed the boundary of blinding white light, the heavy silence of the Endless Tower simply faded away, melting into an sensory-depriving vacuum.

’Again...’

Klaus stepped into the endless white void.

The transition was seamless, but his physical body was utterly ruined.

His legs, trembling violently from the exertion of climbing the monolithic spiral staircase, immediately gave out the exact millisecond he cleared the boundary.

Klaus didn’t even try to fight the collapse... He didn’t have the muscle density or the stamina left to keep his knees locked...

He let his knees hit the invisible, frictionless floor.

A dry agonizing wheeze escaped his pale lips as he sank into a seated position, his spine curling forward.

Klaus rested his hands on his thighs, staring down at them through half-lidded eyes.

He didn’t have to wait long...

A few feet in front of him, the flawless whiteness of the void began to violently ripple and pool. The thick viscous mercury of the spatial magic drew itself upward from the invisible floor, fighting gravity as it solidified, flattening out to form the massive, floor-to-ceiling mirror that separated the Observer from the Participant.

Klaus slowly, agonizingly raised his head.

His stark white, thinning hair clung desperately to his sweating, deeply wrinkled forehead and his neck popped audibly with the effort.

Staring back at him from the other side of the glass was Regret Klaus.

The younger avatar was exactly eighteen years old, dressed in his messy, slightly oversized high school uniform but his demeanor had entirely, catastrophically shifted.

He wasn’t smiling... He wasn’t flushed with the narcotic euphoria of his fake, slice-of-life romance and he wasn’t carrying the arrogant sneer that he had wielded during their previous violent encounter in this void.

Regret Klaus was pale...

He was trembling so violently that the fabric of his uniform vibrated. He was staring at the man sitting across from him in paralyzing horror.

"What..." Regret Klaus stammered.

His teenage voice cracked, dropping into a harsh, terrified whisper as he instinctively scrambled backward, away from the glass.

He brought a trembling hand up to cover his mouth with his brown turning eyes wide and bloodshot. "What the hell happened to you?"

Real Klaus looked at his younger self. His dull, exhausted, sunken dark eyes carried no anger... There was no fury left in his withered frame...

"I’m paying the toll," Real Klaus rasped.

His voice sounded like dry leaves scraping against a tombstone.

"You got your head ripped off... You let her get close... and the trial reset the loop. My life force was violently siphoned away to fuel this dream... That’s so many years, gone in a fraction of a second."

Regret Klaus stared at the sagging, paper-thin skin.

He stared at the stark white hair.

He stared at the fragile, bone-thin shoulders of his older counterpart that looked as though they would snap under the weight of a heavy coat.

The reality of the parasite’s trap suddenly bypassed his denial and became a physical horrific reality.

"F-fuck..."

It wasn’t just a game.

It wasn’t just a system penalty that deducted experience points or temporarily lowered stats.

He was literally, actively watching his own future self wither away, rot, and die, just to sustain an illusion of a happy family... In essence, he was murdering himself.

Real Klaus took a slow breath.

The air in the void tasted like nothing, offering no comfort to his burning lungs.

He didn’t have the energy for anger anymore... He didn’t yell... He didn’t scream or violently demand control like he had in the previous loops...

It was quite pointless.

"Before we do this," Real Klaus said quietly, leaning his frail torso forward slightly, resting his weight on his trembling wrists. "Before we decide who walks out of this void... I need to know. Where did the trial pull you from? What is the definitive last thing you remember before you woke up in that burning house on the very first loop?"

Klaus was very sure that if this was him before he reincarnated then he would have been done with this... so this must be a younger version of himself.

Regret Klaus swallowed a massive, painful lump in his throat. His eyes darted nervously around the infinite white expanse of the void.

The defensive walls of denial he had built to protect his fake reality had completely crumbled under the crushing weight of his own severed head.

"I... I was in my apartment," Regret Klaus whispered. His voice was incredibly small, echoing with the devastating vulnerability of a lost child.

He slowly sat down on the invisible floor, pulling his knees to his chest, unconsciously mirroring the defeated posture of his older self.

"I was in my apartment," Regret Klaus continued with his eyes glazing over as the suppressed memories of his actual reality flooded back. "But I wasn’t going to classes. I hadn’t gone outside in... I don’t know how long. The room was pitch black. I had nailed blankets over the windows. There were empty takeout boxes everywhere, rotting on the floor. The only light was my computer monitor. I had just... I had just logged into that new VR game. Artemis Online... I put the headset on because I wanted to play something, anything, where I didn’t have to think about the real world. Where I didn’t have to exist as myself anymore."

Real Klaus listened closely, his aged eyes watching the boy’s face.

The fragmented, traumatized timeline clicked perfectly into place in his aged mind.

"How long had it been?" Real Klaus asked softly, his voice devoid of any judgment. "Since the accident."

Tears instantly, violently welled up in the younger boy’s eyes, spilling over his lower lashes and tracking through the grime on his cheeks.

He hugged his knees tighter to his chest, curling into a tiny, miserable ball of pure, unadulterated guilt.

"Three days," Regret Klaus sobbed, his voice breaking into a jagged, agonizing wail. "It had been exactly three days since I pushed her. Since she stepped off the curb and that car... that car hit her. Her funeral was that morning. The church was just down the street but I couldn’t go. I couldn’t put a suit on. I couldn’t look her parents in the eyes and tell them I was sorry... because I killed her. I killed her just like I killed Mom and Dad."

Regret Klaus buried his face in his uniform trousers as his shoulders heaved with the force of his weeping.

"I was sitting in the dark," the boy choked out, his words muffled by the fabric. "Staring at the ceiling. And I was wishing... I was wishing with every single, pathetic fiber of my being that I could just find a way back. That I could just reset the clock. That I could give up my own life if it meant fixing it and then... I woke up in the fire."

Real Klaus closed his eyes.

A wave of pure empathy washed over his withered chest.

He hadn’t been fighting an arrogant, stubborn, selfish young man who just wanted to play house and ignore reality...

He had been fighting a literal manifestation of himself at the indisputable lowest point of his entire mortal existence.

The trial had taken the Klaus who was actively starving himself to death in a dark, rotting room.

It had taken a boy drowning in suicidal ideation... crippled by a suffocating putrid guilt, and it had forcefully injected him directly into a flawless paradise where all his regrets were magically forgiven.

It had handed a starving man a grand feast and told him he never had to leave the table.

Of course he hadn’t wanted to wake up... Of course he had fought the Real Klaus...

To a boy in that much agonizing pain, the illusion was infinitely, undeniably better than reality, even if the illusion was actively killing him.

"I understand," Real Klaus whispered, slowly opening his aged eyes. "I really do. I spent years trying to run away from that exact same dark room. I built an entire personality out of sarcasm and apathy just to avoid feeling what you’re feeling right now."

The old man slowly, agonizingly raised his trembling, frail right hand.

The joints popped and ground together. He pressed his wrinkled palm flat against the cold, magical surface of the mirror.

"But you know it’s a trap now," Real Klaus continued.

His voice was incredibly gentle, like a father speaking to a terrified son.

"You know Melanie isn’t really Melanie. She’s a parasite. She’s a tyrant god playing with our grief. She doesn’t love us. She wants to wear our skin. If you go back in there and let her run the script again, she will kill you. She will rip your spine out again and when she kills you two more times, the very last, meager dregs of my life force will drain. My heart will stop. We will both die in this tower, completely alone, and she will take our body to the surface."

Regret Klaus slowly lifted his tear-stained face.

He stared at the wrinkled hand pressed against the glass. He rested his own youthful forehead against his knees, crying silently, the tears dripping onto his shoes.

"I need you to give me control of the avatar," Real Klaus asked, laying his soul completely bare. "I need you to let me integrate. If I take the wheel, the rules change. I can access our combat skills... I can access our Soul Mana... I can take revenge on the Second King for what he did to us... I can kill the god that is mocking our famil but I can’t do it if you don’t voluntarily let me in."

The silence in the void stretched on, broken only by the muffled pathetic sobs of the teenager.

"I know it’s a fake world," Regret Klaus cried.

He looked directly at the withered old man.

"I knew it the exact second she grabbed my head. I knew it when I felt my spine snap. I know it’s just code and magic. I know none of it is real."

Regret Klaus uncurled one of his arms. He reached a trembling hand out, pressing his smooth, unblemished palm against the glass, perfectly aligning it with the wrinkled, dying hand of his older self.

"But the pain in the real world is too much," Regret Klaus whispered. "The apartment is so cold. The silence is so loud it makes my ears ring. Even if it’s fake... even if it’s a lie built by a monster... they were warm. My mom hugged me. She smelled like laundry detergent and coffee. My dad smiled at me. He patted my head. Melanie held my hand. For a few hours, I had my life back."

Regret Klaus pressed his face against the glass, his hot tears smearing against the magical, frictionless surface, blurring the reflection of the old man.

"Please," Regret Klaus begged. "Just let me see them one last time. Let me walk into the kitchen and say goodbye to them properly. I didn’t get to say goodbye to any of them in the real world. They were just... gone. Snatched away before I could even open my mouth. I just want to tell them I’m sorry."

Real Klaus stared at the crying boy. He felt the sheer, agonizing, crushing weight of that request pressing down on his frail chest.

It was a massive, incredibly lethal gamble.

If the younger avatar went back into the simulation and lost himself in the intoxicating warmth of the illusion again... if the Second King decided to skip the dialogue and simply executed him the second he spawned before the loop officially ended... they were entirely dead.

There were no more retries.

"If I let you have this loop," Real Klaus rasped slowly, his glowing white eyes narrowing slightly. "If I let you walk back into that house and say goodbye... what happens next?"

"I promise," Regret Klaus swore.

His brown eyes burned with a fierce sincerity that cut through his tears.

He wasn’t lying.

"I swear to God. If you let me have this third loop to see them... I will willingly hand over control on the fourth and final loop. I will let you in. You can burn the whole fake world down. You can kill the god. Just... just give me today."

Real Klaus looked deeply into his own eyes.

He saw the desperate need for closure. It was the exact same closure that had eluded him his entire life.

If he denied his younger self this closure, even if he forcibly took control and killed the Second King, that rotting wound would never heal.

He would just be a powerful monster with a broken heart.

The old man slowly, deliberately nodded his head.

"Alright," Real Klaus whispered, his voice steady. "One last time. Say your goodbyes."

Regret Klaus let out a massive breath of absolute relief.

His shoulders slumped as the tension left his body. "Thank you."

CRACK!

A single, jagged fissure ran directly down the center of the white mirror, splitting the reflection in two.

SHATTER!

The glass violently exploded outward, dissolving into billions of particles of pure, blinding light.

The void collapsed inward, pulling Regret Klaus backward into the simulation with the force of a vacuum, while leaving the withered, dying husk of Real Klaus stranded in the dark, silent interstitial space of his own mind, waiting for the final loop to begin.

Regret Klaus gasped, his lungs inflating violently as his eyes snapped open...

He expected to wake up in the comforting familiar warmth of his childhood bed.

He expected to feel the soft, golden sunlight of a crisp autumn morning streaming through the half-open blinds, warming his face.

He had mentally prepared himself for the bittersweet agony of walking down the stairs, smelling frying bacon and fresh coffee, hugging his mother tightly from behind, and telling her how much he loved her one final time before the world burned.

But as his eyes rapidly adjusted to the gloom, a sudden chill violently seized his heart, completely stopping the blood in his veins.

The bedroom was pitch black.

The blinds weren’t just drawn; they were completely, tightly shut, actively blocking out any trace of sunlight, moonlight, or street lamps.

The air in the room was freezing cold, completely devoid of any warmth, carrying the chill of an abandoned cellar.

There was no sound of frying bacon... There was no rustling newspaper from the living room... There was no hum of the refrigerator...

The house was suffocatingly silent.

And the smell.

Regret Klaus sat up in bed, the mattress groaning loudly beneath his weight. His stomach instantly, violently churned, doing a sickening flip.

He gagged, throwing his hand over his mouth and nose as his body’s gag reflex engaged.

The air was thick with a strange incredibly noxious chemical stench.

It burned the inside of his nostrils and stung his eyes.

It smelled like industrial-grade ammonia mixed with heavy concentrated bleach but the chemicals were completely failing to mask a putrid odor.

He knew that scent... It was the distinct horrific scent of something that he never wanted to see ever again...

...It was the smell of a morgue.

"Mom?" Klaus called out.