Forgive me Father, for I must sin.

At the start of all this, I gave myself a little rule: Treat each loop like it's your last. It was less a moral code and more something that just seemed logical to me, and even then it was something I constantly strained against, always looking for excuses to violate it. How could I not, with the level up system tantalizing me so? "Progression RPG" and "time loop" go hand in hand together, or really, they're interlocked in sweaty, passionate intercourse that nine months later produces a baby called "OP protagonist." In my dreams, I am that baby.

In conclusion, when I opened my eyes and saw the orc, I launched an uppercut instead of ducking to the side.

Skill Up! Unarmed Combat Level 2

The green beast let out a roar and stumbled back, largely unhurt but seemingly in enough pain to stumble back.

You see, a lot of knowledge coalesced and morphed together into one mother of an ugly conclusion last loop: skill milestone bonuses are fuckin' unreal, and it was important to grind up even ones I never planned to use just to get them. This necessitated some fairly illogical actions, including but not limited to fistfighting an orc instead of grabbing a sword. Or even its axe.

I trusted the guidance of my skills and attempted a roundhouse kick for the first time in my life, which landed and knocked the Orc a bit to the side. I followed up the momentum with a backwards elbow—Skill Up! Unarmed Combat Level 3—then followed up that momentum with a flurry of straight punches (which could only be called a "flurry" while generous) to the face. The first uppercut hadn't done much, but already the two level ups were making a difference, and its face was blooded. On the one hand, physically dominating this much-larger creature made of muscle and sinew filled me with confidence, but on the other hand, this was probably among the weakest monsters—Skill Up! Unarmed Combat Level 4— in the entire planet or something. Lesser Orc, I think it was? Maybe bottom 10%. Point being, the fact I wasn't exploding its skull with a single punch and needed to (presumably) lower its HP for so long indicated some significant weakness.

I jumped up and kneed its nose so hard it died.

Lesser Orc Defeated!

Skill Up! Unarmed Combat Level 5

Bonus: +5 base STR and DEX!

Mission Accomplished. That didn't take as long as my monologuing made it sound. Which means...

I held out a hand. "Hantai ike," I chanted, and the arrow went flying back.

Goblin Archer Defeated!

Skill Up! Mysticism Level 9

It wasn't as cool or impressive the second time, surely, but I had to show off my mastery of the loop (and soul bond with that goblin) somehow, didn't I? Hmm, actually, let me try something new.

I bent over to the orc, unseathed a jagged-looking dagger from its crude belt, and without even looking threw it at the orc fighting the Farmer Second-Class dude.

Jeffrey Smith defeated!

Skill up! Throwing Weapons Level 3

Level up! All Attributes Increased

Hell yeah. Wait, Jeffrey Smith's a weird name for an orc.

I glanced over and saw the human tumbling over with a jagged-looking dagger sticking out of the side of his head. Oops. He died so that I could live, one level stronger.

Despite the immense emotional trauma I was experiencing over having accidentally killed a living, breathing human (believe me, I was well and truly devastated, just an absolute mess), I somehow managed to force myself to briskly jog to the deceased plate-armor guy and grab the sword. I had my milestone for Unarmed Combat and while I could no doubt get it higher, considering pounding a single orc for so long got me that many levels, it was sacrificing actual levels and EXP (which seemingly came only from killing things.) Given the whole exponential growth thing, I wanted those more than anything, although milestones were important.

With my trusty helmet, sword, and belt of daggers equipped for what felt like the first time in a long time, I turned to face the orc horde. A strange feeling washed over me. In my mind, this was a death run. A suicide run. Kill shit, level up, come again. I didn't want to have to do this, but the massive Greater Troll that got summoned when we successfully retreated made one thing loud and clear: Rose was not getting out of this alive until I was strong enough to kill it. She was strong enough to escape on her own, but her strong moral code didn't allow her to sacrifice her men for her own life, and as far as I could tell, she couldn't kill it on her own. So this was a death run, a suicide run for me to get stronger and kill it for her.

But for some reason, something was nagging at me. Something in the back of my mind.

I was going into this expecting to die. It was just pragmatic. Kill orcs, Rose probably dies nobly, I quickload, and the cycle resumes until the Greater Troll is dead. Why hesitate? What's the problem? I mulled it over in my mind, then realized. I was going into this assuming I would die and lose. There was a 100% chance of failure (and I would guess Jeffrey over there would beg for this to be a failed loop), so I expected to fail. It was basic logic. But someone had told me that basic logic was, at the very least, not something she subscribed to. And it seems that little display of moral grandstanding had stuck with me a bit.

"Okay," I said aloud. "I will win this."

100% chance of failure, but I was going to win.

Hm. Doublethink doesn't feel as bad as I thought.

I stepped forward and thrust the sword forward, stabbing through the back of an orc's throat and—Lesser Orc Defeated! Skill Up! One-Handed Blades Level 3—killing it instantly, it seemed. I pulled it back and slashed across the chest of another orc, stepping forward steadily to the right rather than the left, immersing myself in the dance. Another slash, another slash, another slash—Lesser Orc Defeated! Skill Up! One-Handed Blades Level 4—and I was ducking to the side to avoid a downwards-slamming axe. I hit the side of its skull with the pommel of my sword, hearing some cracking, then stabbed downwards once it fell to the ground. I leapt over it and did a downward slice on another orc, just to see how it felt, and split its skull in two.

Lesser Orc Defeated!

Skill Up! One-Handed Blades Level 5

Bonus: +5 Base STR + DEX!

Level up! All Attributed Increased

The numbers were rolling in. I hated to admit it, but this little situation had definitely been designed for me to do this from the start. It was a little perturbing, actually. Fast level ups, easy enemies, exponential growth... Was this just the tutorial, or was I about to have a bad time? Would some incarnation of game balance appear and hit me over the head with a trauma-mace after the troll died, just to remind me who's really the boss here? I'm sorry, God of Game Balance, I never lost faith in you. Please don't hit me with a trauma-mace.

I killed quite a few orcs while monologuing and boosted some combat skills, plus got Athletics to 7 from jumping around. The thing about "don't monologue on a battlefield" was that it mostly applied to newbies standing still. I, with my mighty Dodging Level 4—Skill Up! Dodging Level 5 Bonus: +5 Base AGI + END!—my mighty Dodging Level 5 could dodge slow axe swings and stab my sword all but effortlessly. It was like driving a car, except you were driving into an increasingly dense field of green trees, and the trees were actively trying to kill you with axes.

You know, sometimes analogies just don't work.

My plan here, to some degree, was to reenact my Finest Hour with the dodging skill and grind it up by dodging a flurry of axe blows from orcs while stabby stabbing and magicy magicking to boost my attack shit. The more orcs there were the better. They really swung slowly. If you wanted, you could say the initial orc lifting its axe so slowly that even I, a not-so spry Earth guy, could dodge away was foreshadowing that these orcs moved slow as shit. No wonder the humans won easily wthout the mage support and subsequent troll. Thinking about it, these orcs were probably just to hide the presence of the orc mages in the back. I felt a little bad for them now. First they were born to be meat walls, and now they were just EXP fodder for an increasingly powerful demigod of the world. (Not trying to be cocky, I just assume anyone with the "Hero" class in a fantasy world is a demigod. It's right more often than you'd think.)

I found a suitable spot that both didn't have any humans and wasn't quite so densely packed with orcs that they could stab me from behind, which for our purposes meant the back right of the orc army, my back to some more hills. I inhaled, then began as a horde rushed me. Thank god they were so large they had to line up like dominoes. Only a few could reach me at a time without going around me, and I had means of stopping that.

Stab. Stab. Lesser Orc Defeated! Duck. Slice. Lesser Orc Defeated! Jump. Darkness Ball. Skill Up! Curse Magic Level 4! Stab. Lesser Orc Defeated! Skill Up! One-Handed Blades Level 6! Reverso on the sneaky one. Skill Up! Mysticism Level 10! Bonus: +5 Base INT + WIS! Duck. Throw dagger. Throw another dagger. Skill Up! One-Handed Blades Level 7! Darkness ball. Green Orc Defeated! Skill Up! Curse Magic Level 5! Bonus: +5 Base INT + WIS! Duck. Stab. Stab. Green Orc Defeated! Level Up! All Attributes Increased!

I achieved a strange zen state while stabbing and blasting my way through orcs, some of which were stronger, bigger forms of the initial orcs. All of the above happened in like 10 seconds, and I was so palpably getting stronger from skill milestones and levels that I felt the seething energy within me surge. The exponential gains in power were creating an increasingly more destructive avalanche of death and magic second by second. It was immediately clear that this would continue until all the orcs were dead, or they didn't give meaningful EXP. I got the distinct feeling that I was a farmer, and they were my EXP crop, green like grass and ready to be scythed away. At last, I understood how JRPG protagonists viewed mob battles that interrupted them on their way to the boss.

Unfortunately for me, this was not a JRPG, and enemies outside of the battlefield could attack too. Did you ever wonder why there was only a single goblin archer? Well, the answer was that it was scouting the hills. The goblins probably weren't summons from the Excursed "Totally-Not-The-Final-Boss" Summoner, if they were scouting, but maybe it was some advanced trick. Either way, a fairly large number of goblin archers had reached the hills behind me. How did I know when I hadn't turned around and was focused on the orcs? The five-some arrows in my back.

Affliction: Poisoned!

I spat out blood and stumbled. Not even a decent-ish level in beginner dodging could save me from a surprise attack I didn't see coming, which made a lot more sense while I was in the process of saying it. An orc came swinging its axe at me, but I was strong enough by this point I still had it in me to backstep to avoid it. I sprinted away from the thickest group of orcs, almost stumbling in the process, and found myself confronted with the line of orc mages, each holding the hands of those next to them and chanting. In short, they were actively in the process of casting meteors.

Arguably, this was the worst possible situation. I couldn't even really save time by reversing the meteors since I was probably close to death due to poison. And low on MP from spamming Darkness Balls. Actually, I can check that. "Check status," I muttered while getting behind the orc mages. They were the back row, at least, and I didn't see more arrows coming. I had some seconds.

General Information Attributes Skills Name Malcador Name Value Name Level Species Human STR 243 One-Handed Blades 18 Sex Male DEX 243 Curse Magic 16 Age 18 AGI 224 Dodging 12 Class Hero (Level 8) END 224 Mysticism 11 HP 205/448 (-2/sec) INT 243 Athletics 8 MP 17/486 (+2.43/sec) WIS 243 (more...)

Damn, talk about powering up. AGI and END were lagging behind since they weren't associated with direct combat skills, but still. That's over twice as many stats just from getting to level 8—like I said, exponential stat growth with leveling up is insane. That was honestly what concerned me more than any of this time loop business.

Anyway, that discussion could wait until I wasn't 100 seconds away from death and behind enemy lines. Keeping the status window up, I muttered imasug naore and started using my basic bitch level 1 healing spell to try to generically heal myself. It probably didn't cost that much MP while it was so low-level. And as for the results...

>HP: 168/448 (+.01/sec)

Perfect. It just about equally cancelled out the poison, it seemed, and I got two sweet Restoration level ups in the process, since I had barely used the heal spell before. It looked like my MP was remaining more or less static, so I could guess the heal spell was matching my native MP regen (either on purpose to keep itself going in perpetuity, or just coincidentially needing exactly that much). Either way, I was now not dying, but due to needing to keep the heal spell up I was basically stuck at the verge of death with no MP. And no MP meant not reversing the meteors.

In a way, I kind of just wanted to let myself die. It was grim, but also not due to the whole time loop business. I had my levels—why not just die and start anew, stronger? It would be more efficient. But at the same time, it would require giving up. To approach matters assuming I would lose. In a way, planning to fail was more likely to be effective than planning to win, but Rose's dying words were nagging at me. She said I didn't get it. Maybe I would if I tried to follow it, and then I could discard it, like I had discarded so many things already.

I decided to do the best I could with what I had. I had been jogging away from the contingent of orcs following me this entire time, and now stuck my sword out beside me, at neck-level for the orc mages, and just ran down the line from the middle. Their heads popped off one after another. There was a reason these mages were at the back row, not the front. And that reason was fragile, fragile necks. Plus, the more I killed the more the aura around them faded, and by the last one it was all but gone. It seemed like they were powering each other up through physical contact, which honestly was unsettling. They were literally using the power of friendship and mutual trust to defeat us, and I had just cut off like 10 of their heads since said power of friendship distracted them. For a second I had to ask if I was the baddie.

Luckily for me, philosophy found its home in times of peace, not war. One could hardly muse about the ethical implications of their arguable mass-murder when a gang of orcs was chasing them down. Since I was probably a clean hit or two away from death, I looped back around the other side of the orc army (having come along the right side from the human's perspective, and now on the left), and started sprinting. Low HP and MP didn't stop my still-novice level athletics from carrying me... somewhat fast and true alongside the side of the army. The lack of meteors implied I had killed enough orc mages to interrupt their ritual, though there was no way of knowing whether or not more orc mages would be abruptly summoned. I got the impression something was limiting the Excursed, since they held off on summoning the troll, and bulk-summoned weak orcs rather than an army of ancient vampires or something, but maybe it was just general pragmatisim. Waste not, want not.

As I ran, I saw the orcs quickly thinning out. The humans were getting steady ground on them. That made sense; the orcs were weak and largely existed just to shield the orc mages from sight while they did their ritual-thing, such that a surprise Meteor attack could catch Rose off guard and weaken her enough to be shanked to death (presumably). The humans had been winning in the first loop before I even came, and this time I had killed maybe 1/5th of the entire orc army in a whirlwind of death and destruction. Not that the Excursed could have known, but it had been a big mistake to populate the battlefield with essentially perfect grind fodder.

By the time I reached Rose's little camp, I already had a plan. It wasn't necessarily a good plan, but I didn't know what else to do this loop but die, so I gave it my best shot.

"Ma'am!" I declared with a salute. She turned. "Malcador, Farmer Second-Class of the Torso squadron. I went deep into enemy lines and was shot in the back by goblin archers. May I request an antidote, Paladin Rose ma'am!"

She gave me a silent look. Her ice-blue eyes first fell on my bloody face, then moved to my incredibly bloody sword, then to my bloody fists. Her eyes rested on the green healing glow of my off-hand for a bit, and then finally locked onto the still-visible pop-culture reference on my T-shirt. Her eyes narrowed a fraction, and it was clear about a thousand different gears were turning in her head. I waited a solid thirty seconds with her staring at me, feeling tense. I still didn't know the name of a commanding officer to give. If only my good friend Jeffrey hadn't been tragically slain in battle, I could have asked him. Life is a bitch, and then you die.

Ultimately, Rose unbuckled a potion from the utility belt wrapped around her ornate armor and stepped forward. She forced it into my hand, then walked to my back. "This will hurt," she said, and before I knew what she was doing, she started ripping the arrows out of my back. She was smart. It did hurt, and the only thing that stopped me from yelping in pain was the oft-described deadness of my heart. Pain, too, could be controlled with enough practice. Once the arrows were out, she walked back to my front, and curtly said "Drink." So I did.

Affliction Cured! You are no longer poisoned.

Smart to remove the arrows before they just re-poisoned me. With that, I dropped the healing spell and let my HP and MP regen. Rose was still giving me a careful look with her eyes narrowed. A lesser man might have balked beneath the cold glare of a stunningly attractive woman, but I already had experience with her stabbing me to death. Nothing short of her drawing her sword could scare me now, and the fact she was debating something internally was a sign that she hadn't immediately marked me as a doppelganger to be executed.

"Think fast," she said, and suddenly threw a rock my way. My hour-ish of rock reversal practice paid off, because I managed to instantly chant hantai ike and reverse the rock back to her hand. Rose caught it in midair, perhaps having expected that, and... simultaenously grimaced and widened her eyes in surprise? It was a complex expression that involved a lot of facial contortions, but it only lasted a second before her face wore an expressionless mask again. I heard some of the captains gasp.

"Are you," Rose began, but I interrupted her. I didn't want her asking me about my commanding officer. Perhaps all doppelgangers were master Mystics.

"Ma'am! Paladin Rose ma'am! How do you kill a Giant Troll?"

"I—What? You... What?" she said. She had on the look of someone who had predicted literally everything I could possibly say, except that. Luckily for me, she was not one to leave a question unanswered. "They regenerate, so you need to either induce magical wounds that can't regenerate, or stab their brains. It usually takes multiple people to beat the regeneration. I... Why?"

I pointed at the fort. "That's why."

The Giant Troll had been summoned.