Okay. So that was…bad…but the body is still there and also she can load her save if she has to. So it’s fine. She gets up and makes her way towards it again.

Slips in a patch of blood and worse substances, but that does not actually matter once she picks herself up again without being sniped.

Gets to Terendelev and throws the oil on her eviscerated cadaver.

The towering pile of flesh shrinks down to the size of a large dog.

And Lucy can lift one of those! Not well, but the Game doesn’t care about that!

“Inventory,” she breathes, and then bolts.

Demons notice that! Not all of them, but Terendelev’s body was freakin’ enormous, and when it shrank down that was extremely visible, and a human running away from the scene is kind of conspicuous!

Of course, not all of the ones who notice care, but that’s at least partly because they don’t feel like competing with the demons who have decided to care, over who can rip her head off fastest.

IT WOULD BE REALLY NICE IF SHE HAD A RIFT IN THE GROUND TO JUMP INTO RIGHT NOW.

“Scared as shit” may run faster than “madder than hell” but she is not in great physical condition.

The first demon who catches up to her is wielding some kind of blunt object. She’s not stupid enough to turn to see what kind, but neither does she die fast enough that she can’t feel it shattering her spine and ribs on its way through.

Ow ow ow—

She remakes her save and heads for the body again. Maybe if she tries it from a different angle she’ll be harder to see.

When she tries throwing the oil from a relatively concealed position, Terendelev’s shrunken body ends up somewhere she can’t get to it before the demons do.

Rrrrrrrgh.

Okay. What if she…hm…

She spends an iteration going around and inventorying as much leftover festival booze as she can. She would have guessed more of it would have been stolen by the demons, actually. Or maybe she’s underestimating how much there was to begin with.

She’s cut down in that loop by a horrible thing with a scythe, but the next time, she manages to get a reasonable quantity assembled in one spot.

…And then she gets eviscerated by something with big claws while she’s trying to light it up.

It takes three more tries before the thing that kills her is something that throws fireballs, and then another five tries before she works out how to provoke it to blow up the booze without herself getting fried. But once she manages that, she can sneak back over to Terendelev, shrink her, and make off with her with only one assailant in hot pursuit, and she manages to lose it when she goes through someone’s house and it gets distracted finding something objectionable about the owner’s surprisingly lovely furniture.

She makes as sure as she can that she’s actually alone before she allows herself to fall to her knees. “Save game. Yes I want to overwrite,” she gasps.

She’s so tired. She’s not sure how long today has been, she’s had better things to do than keep track of how long any given loop has been, but she’s sure it must have been more than twenty-four hours by now. And she’s been running around and in pain and murdered, several times, not that the handful of accidental deaths were necessarily better.

But…

She doesn’t want to not be here.

She’s personally unhappier than she would be at home, right now, but if she were at home she couldn’t help any of these people. Maybe someone else would be here if she weren’t, but she…doesn’t want to bet lives that whoever else it would be would be better at it than her. Like, maybe they’d be some hyperoptimizing powergamer who wouldn’t have moved their save forward over chest pain, that first time, but maybe they wouldn’t even care about saving people instead of increasing their level.

And she can’t…really pretend that she isn’t excited by the idea of the power available to her. She hasn’t resurrected anyone yet, but she will. She has options besides entropy-bounded physics! Sure, she’s been killed a lot today, but none of them stuck. And if the excitement feels distant, next to the fear, right now—well. In time this too shall pass.

She’s pretty thoroughly lost, by now. Probably she could find her way back to the square if that were her priority, but she’s not actually sure how, besides savescumming wandering off in different directions.

And she’s not actually sure what to do, next. She’s been so focused on “get Terendelev’s body” that she didn’t really consider what comes after that point.

“Are you okay?”

Lucy looks up.

“I’ve been better.” “Ember” doesn’t seem like an especially demonic name, so it’s probably safe to be frank with her, within reason. “It’s been a stressful afternoon.”

Ember sits down beside her. “That’s not surprising.”

“Well, mine was probably longer than most people’s. Although, like, I am, at this point, not dead, so that limits my ability to complain.”

“The people who died today are mostly going to Heaven, or Nirvana, or Axis. They’ll be okay.”

“Ooh, hey, can you tell me more about the afterlives? I know they exist, but not a lot more than that.”

“Sure! What do you want to know?”

“Well, like, what…are…they. You mentioned three names, but, um—I’m from really far away, and I didn’t speak this language yesterday? And they’re translating sort of oddly. Like, Heaven is the afterlife good people go to, and Nirvana is a state of non-existence and/or oneness with the universe that you reach by achieving enlightenment, and an axis is…something that something rotates around.”

“How strange. There’s nine afterlives—well, eight, really, for most people, but there’s really nine, but one of them’s mostly just for babies. That one is called the Boneyard.”

“Hm! Don’t love that!”

“Nobody does! It’s just hard to keep babies from dying.”

“…Not where I’m from. Infant mortality has gone way down, in the past couple of centuries.”

“That’s wonderful! Do you know how?”

“I know…some things. I will try to see if I can know more things than that.”

“Okay. So I told you four of their names, and the other five are Hell, Abbadon, the Abyss, the Maelstrom, and Elysium.”