I was screaming before I even realized I was alive again.

The pain was all-consuming, more intense than anything I had ever felt in my life; it was like every nerve in my head was being cut to tiny pieces then tossed into a raging wildfire. I couldn't even remember the last time I screamed normally, but this pain instantly had me tearing my throat to shreds as my mind was battered by the pain crashing into it like boiling water.

As I fell to my knees I saw the Leh'hah freeze mid-step with a blink. Rose had her eyes open wide in surprise, the most surprised I had ever seen her. Hilda had a horrified expression and was already moving towards me. But that was all I could manage to take in before I covered my face with my hands, scraping my cheeks as I screamed, and screamed, and screamed.

By the time I came back to my senses, my head was resting on some kind of soft, squishy pillow. I nestled my head into it, not wanting to open my eyes yet. It felt like someone was stroking my hair, but I just wanted to spend a minute healing in the warmth surrounding my head.

Eventually, I opened my eyes and saw... more blackness. Or more like, there was a black ceiling over my head. I sat up, trying to gauge my surroundings, but I hit the ceiling face-first. It was unbelievably soft, and heavy enough that my limp attempt to sit up wasn't enough to push through.

"Ow," I said aloud, falling back onto the soft pillow.

"Oh! You're awake!" a voice exclaimed. It sounded like Hilda.

And then I realized my head was resting on her lap. The ceiling above me was her enormous chest. OK.

I kind of rolled to the side and sat up. Hilda was sitting there, on her knees, having been forming a lap pillow for me. We were in the inn, on my bed, with Rose meditating on the other bed like normal. It felt like it had been a long time since I had seen them, somehow.

"Feeling better?" Hilda asked.

"Yeah. Thanks," I said, not even having the energy to joke about the booba chokeslam.

There was a pause as I rubbed my forehead and got my bearings.

"So," Rose eventually said, making eye contact. "What happened there, Malcador?"

"I stubbed my toe."

She rolled her eyes. "A real answer, please."

"It's..." I trailed off. It would be hard to explain the circumstances without revealing the loop, which I didn't want to do, and I didn't want to lie, either. "It's not important," I finally said. "I'm better now."

"It seems important to me."

"I'll be fine. It probably won't happen again. I'll be more careful."

"Be more careful regarding what?"

I waved a hand. "Stuff."

"Do you..." came a quiet voice from behind me. I turned and saw Hilda trembling a bit. "Do you not trust us?"

I faltered. I mean, I... What was the answer to that?

"Of course I do," I said. "You're my companions. We went through hell on that battlefield and came out on top together. I couldn't have done it without you two."

"THEN WHY WON'T YOU TELL US ANYTHING?!" Hilda yelled, hysterical.

"I mean—I... I. Why are you yelling?"

"I just watched you scream like you were dying! I thought you WERE dying! I thought I had lost you! And now you're, you're saying it was nothing, it'll be fine, we don't need to know! That's terrible! Do you trust us or not?!"

"I..." I faltered again. She was right, I... The only reason I wouldn't tell them was a lack of trust, a fear. I said it before. A fear of an imbalanced relationship, of me knowing more about them than they knew about me. A fear of them losing their trust in me. Was that the key behind it all? I was afraid of them losing trust in me? Why, why, why... What did it all come down to?

Finally, I found it. Deep inside of me. The stake in my heart keeping it locked shut.

"Hilda, do you trust me?"

"Yes! Of course I do!" she cried.

"Well, you shouldn't. Because I manipulated you," I said, putting it all out there just like that.

"No. You didn't," she finally replied.

"Yes! I did. At the fort. I said, I said those things. About how I saw you in the dream world, about how I liked your fashion, and... I said all those things because I knew they would make you like me. They were lies. I tricked you. You shouldn't trust me," I said.

I felt kind of pathetic, but the truth was, this really was eating away at me. I came into this world feeling nothing, both for other people and about how I treated them. I wasn't used to having friends, or even people I cared about. Everyone was just tools to be manipulated, a list of facts to memorize and then exploit. Not that I was any good at it, to be clear, but it was just how I approached things. And now I felt like shit about it, because Rose and Hilda were... They were good people, and I cared about them by this point. Call me shallow, call me a hypocrite, but I never had anyone in real life, and these girls... They were taking a bigger and bigger place in my heart. They were showing obvious affection for me, something no one had done for me before. I couldn't even pretend Rose's affection was fake, since the fucking game system itself was showing me numerical facts of it existing. But Hilda? Hilda was manipulated. I tricked her into being like this. I lied, she bought it, and now her brain was broken. How could I open up to her when I was terrified of her finding what was inside me?

"That's not true," Hilda said.

"It is! I lied at the fort and manipulated you. See? I'm being honest with you."

"Do you even realize how selfish you're being right now? How self-centered? I love you, and that's just a fact. There's no manipulation here."

"But I..."

"I don't care what you thought when you said those things. What matters is what I thought, and what your words meant to me. I was going to die there in the fort, you know. I was sad, lonely, and nobody liked me. When I saw the Sword of the Noon in the air, I thought, finally, a way to die without effort. But then you rushed in. You saved me. You said I was important to you. And at this point, it doesn't matter what you were thinking, or what you felt. What matters is that I stood up, and for the first time in my life, I felt alive. I had a purpose. Someone who mattered. You!"

"But, it was all lies, I didn't..."

"It doesn't matter whether you meant everything you said back then. What matters is how we feel right now. And right now, I love you, and I know you feel something for me too. Maybe you thought you were lying when you said those things. Who cares? Maybe you lied about liking my robes, but that's not why I fell in love with you. Maybe I didn't visit you in a dream world, but that's not why I fell in love with you. I love you because you were there for me in my time of need, and ever since then, you've been everything I could ever want. You don't mock or try to hurt me like other people. You don't hate me because I'm a Cursed mage. You see me as a woman, even if you don't go all the way with me because you feel guilty about this. I feel happier than I've ever been, and I don't even really stammer anymore. I'm getting more confident. I'm becoming my best self with you. Who cares if you tried to manipulate me at the start? What matters is what we have now. And we have a connection. I care about you. You care about me. What happened in the past, and what exactly led to this, doesn't matter to me. I care about the now. I care about you. I trust you. And I want you to trust me!"

I fell silent, taken aback.

Never once had I thought about Hilda's perspective on this. I just kept thinking about how I had manipulated her, how she would never forgive me if she figured it out, how the relationship was poisoned from the start. But from her perspective? All she cared about was that I was there for her, that I was nice to her, and that, over time, we had grown closer. A lifetime of abuse and loneliness exploding in an instant when a knight in shining armor saved her from essentially a suicide attempt, and then became the man of her dreams.

There was no singular correct way of looking at something. Everyone had their own perspective on events; we could be trapped in our own perspective, even, and when stuck in our own heads our singular reality seems like the only possible reality there could be. To me, there was only manipulation, and nothing else. It was all fake. But to Hilda, it was real. The entire concept of manipulation wasn't even in her head. She didn't care about mind games or machinations or some artificial definition of "fake." She cared about the present, about feelings, about being there for each other.

(Not to kill the mood, but me being very muscular and handsome by this point probably played a non-insignificant part in this. Okay sorry for killing the mood pretend I didn't say that.)

In other words, not being honest with her here was worse than any "manipulation" I could ever have done. Trying not to include her in the battle here, despite relying on her so heavily in the first loop, was worse than any "manipulation." That was the real betrayal, not a transparent lie about dream worlds or robes.

I felt a little dot of warmth form in my heart, then blossom. My cold, dead heart was filling with warmth, just like that. Hilda had just rejected my entire world view. Heck, she had probably rejected the world views of a lot of people. How many people could stare down lies and manipulation and just flat-out reject them? Say she doesn't care, she hardly even believes in the concept of manipulation to begin with? She wasn't objectively right here. Her opinion wasn't a universal fact of reality. But it was how she saw things, and in the end, she still loved me no matter what I thought about how I had manipulated her. It was only right that I love her back. That I stop being a fucking edgy loser and embrace the feelings I was desperately pretending not to have.

I leaned forward and hugged Hilda. She hugged me back, crying. I patted her back.

"I'm sorry for taking this long," I said. 'I was stupid."

"You were."

"I was being selfish."

"You were."

"I was stuck in my own head. I wasn't thinking about you at all. But now, I get it. I trust you. And... Thank you for trusting me."

We hugged for a while, then broke apart. Hilda blinked tearfully with a smile. I smiled back.

"But," I said, "My situation is really complicated. It's hard to explain, and it might not even be worth the time it takes to explain. It's—"

"Time travel," Rose interrupted.

I turned. "What?"

"You're time traveling," Rose said simply.

"How...? What? How did you know that?"

She smirked. "First of all, I saw your body morph a bit moments before you started screaming, as if you had gotten marginally more muscular and handsome out of nowhere. Almost like you were a version of yourself from the future. Second, it would explain how you knew things about Hilda's school days and the like before she told you anything. You have let slip a number of minor facts you shouldn't know. Third and most importantly, it was a complete guess based on weak evidence, but you just confirmed it by asking how I knew about it."

"Seriously? Oh my god. Rose, why do you have to be such a frosty bitch?"

"You know you love it."

"I do."

She winked. I winked back. Motherfucker.

Love Point Gained! Rosalyn +1

Milestone Reached! Crush has become Infatuation!

The bond between your souls has strengthened.

Wait... Why was that a milestone?

"Also," Rose began. I looked up and saw her cheeks flushed, ever so slightly. "I have this... this memory, of another timeline, perhaps. It started floating in my mind as soon as we came to this city. In it, I was... I was advising you on why we couldn't have come to Koh'rin with an army, and perhaps due to prior experience, I was expecting you to refuse to admit your mistake, or perhaps just blow me off with mockery or even anger. But you didn't. Instead, you accepted my wisdom without reservation. It caught me off guard, and I admit, ah, I felt a flush of warmth in my heart. Even now, I feel it. The flush. The warmth. It's as if the memory was so impactful to me that it was burned into my soul, and not even the reversal of time could take it away from me. Even now it... Ah, what am I saying? I'm babbling like a schoolgirl. What I mean to say is, I have no context for this memory, but it is a part of me, and feels as real as any memory has ever been. You time traveling would be a very natural explanation for it. That is all," she concluded, then looked away.

"I see... Well, that makes a lot of sense. And thank you for sharing that."

"Far be it from me to withhold critical information from my companions," she said, turning back with a smirk. She was back in control of herself.

I threw my hands up. "Sorry, sorry. I know. I was being dumb. I guess, I just... I couldn't find it in me to accept all this. Going from my old life to killing orcs and blasting magic was somehow an easier transition to make than trusting people and opening my heart. Even killing people came easier to me than just... Okay, now I'm the one babbling. Sorry."

Rose waved a hand. "What matters is that you change your behavior, not that you dwell on how you used to be. Now. Let's hear about the circumstances of your time travel."

"Yeah! How many times have I successfully seduced you?" Hilda asked.

"None. Actually, the first time we met, you hit me in the head with a Darkness Ball."

"And you still like me! See? That's why I love you, Mal."

Mal. A nickname. It tickled my heart a little, I'll admit. It was also tickling me to actually say this stuff. I had kind of decided to keep it a secret forever, but... When you trusted people, keeping secrets just didn't feel right.

"Anyway. The long and short of it is, when I die, I go back in time. I died in a really bad way last time, and woke up in so much pain I screamed. I kind of don't really want to go into any more detail since, well... What time is it?"

Rose pulled back the curtain to the window. It was dark outside. "Late," she replied.

"Right. Well, I'm pretty sure I'm already fucked in this timeline. It's too late. I'll be going back, you guys won't remember any of this, and it will have been something of a waste of time to explain. Oh, but you may remember me saying I love you for being a frosty bitch, Rose."

"Lovely. May the memory last forever in my increasingly-cramped soul."

"Why is it too late?" Hilda asked, hugging me from the side as if she was afraid I would disappear.

"I see visions... Visions of me being crushed by boobs..."

"Haha, shut up. What really happens?"

"The elf princess gets assassinated, and long story short, if any of the five royals die, I die too."

Rose gave me a thoughtful look. "So your life is in my hands, then."

"Please spare me, mistress. Also, you just let it spill that you're a princess."

"Fuck."

Hell yes. I win.

"Anyway, I probably don't have much longer here. A couple hours at best. Then I'll be back in time trying to stop the assassination, again."

"All three of us can't stop the assassination?" Rose asked.

I winced. "Er, well... I've actually been trying to stop it myself. So you two, uh, don't get hurt, or something." Even I felt I sounded lame by the end of that.

Both Rose and Hilda were giving me flat looks. There was a long stretch of silence as they stared. I counted the number of wooden boards used in the ceiling. There were about thirty. Good to know.

"Are you stupid?" Rose finally asked.

"Look, I have emotional problems, okay? I come from a troubled home. 'If you want things done right, you have to do them yourself,' as my dad always used to say after beating me for not mowing the lawn correctly. My mind always just hyper-focuses on how I can do things on my own. I got too caught up in my head. Sorry, okay?"

"Don't let it happen again," Rose said, pointing at me. Hilda nodded firmly.

"Okay, okay."

"Now, describe this upcoming assassination attempt to us in detail, so we can work on a plan for how to get out of this mess. Together."

"Alright."

And so we did.

Oh, what was the plan? Sorry, telling the plan would be spoilers.