Death became Luca's teacher.

  By the twentieth reset, he had learned to identify Grask's footsteps among the cacophony of the arena—the distinctive three-beat rhythm that preceded the demon's first swing. By the fiftieth, he could dodge that initial strike, though the second still caught him every time. By the hundredth, he sometimes sted a full minute before the inevitable end.

  "Interesting," Duke Razakel remarked during one reset, seeing Luca fight for what he believed was the first time. "Most new sves curl into a ball and weep before Grask even reaches them. This one attempts to fight, despite his obvious disadvantages."

  His lieutenant, the serpentine demoness Sythia, remained unimpressed. "A curiosity at best. Still dies every time."

  What they couldn't see was the accumution of knowledge behind those blind eyes—a catalog of sounds, movements, and patterns growing more detailed with each reset.

  On his one hundred and seventy-third attempt, Luca finally nded a blow on Grask.

  It was a gncing hit, barely breaking the demon's thick hide, but the crowd's sudden hush told him he had accomplished something unexpected. Grask's surprised snarl confirmed it. The moment of triumph was brief—the enraged demon recovered quickly and dispatched Luca with brutal efficiency—but it was a milestone nonetheless.

  Reset one hundred and seventy-four began like all the others: the same awakening, the same introduction to Vex, who had no memory of their previous encounters, the same expnation of the demon pne's hierarchy. By now, Luca could recite Vex's speech word for word in his mind as the other sve delivered it.

  "We fight. The winners advance in rank. The losers die, and their essence is absorbed by the victor."

  "And if I refuse to fight?" Luca asked, maintaining the pretense of this being his first conversation, though he'd spoken these exact words nearly two hundred times.

  Vex's ughter was predictable down to the precise cadence. "Then you die anyway, but slowly, and with much more pain."

  The horn bred. The guards came. Luca was dragged to the arena. The monotony of it all had become its own special torment.

  But this time, armed with the knowledge of one hundred and seventy-three failures, Luca sted nearly three minutes. He avoided Grask's first five strikes, nded two blows of his own, and even managed to roll away from what would have been a killing blow. The crowd's reaction shifted from bored contempt to murmurs of surprise.

  "The cripple has some fight in him after all," someone shouted from the stands.

  The end was still inevitable. Grask's experience and four-armed advantage were too much to overcome, especially with Luca's twisted body and blindness. When death came, it was both a defeat and a strange relief—another chance to begin again, to apply new lessons.

  During each reset, Duke Razakel would observe the match as if for the first time, making the same observations about Luca's unexpected competence, never realizing he'd made identical comments hundreds of times before.

  "It's as if he's fought Grask before," Razakel often remarked, not knowing how literally true his statement was.

  On reset three hundred and forty-two, the impossible happened. Grask, overconfident and increasingly frustrated by his opponent's uncanny ability to anticipate his moves, overextended on a powerful swing. Luca, sensing the shift in air currents that betrayed the demon's imbance, ducked under the attack and drove his sword upward with all the strength his malformed body could muster.

  The bde found the gap in Grask's armor that Luca had identified over hundreds of deaths—a vulnerability he had spent countless resets trying to exploit. This time, his aim was true. The sword plunged into Grask's throat, severing vital connections. The demon champion gurgled, stumbled, and colpsed.

  The arena fell silent. Luca stood over his fallen opponent, blind eyes staring at nothing, chest heaving with exertion. Then came a sensation he had never experienced before in this realm—a rush of energy entering his body, Grask's essence transferring to him as the rules of the arena dictated.

  Strength flowed into his twisted limbs. His lungs expanded more fully. The constant pain of his deformed body lessened slightly. He wasn't whole, wasn't healed, but was incrementally better than before.

  "The blind one wins," Duke Razakel announced, his voice tinged with genuine surprise. "Advancement granted to the sve formerly known as Lucathral, henceforth to be addressed as Lucathral the Victor."

  The crowd erupted in a mixture of shock and approval. Some had pced wagers on the seemingly impossible outcome and were celebrating their windfall. Others simply appreciated the novelty of such an unexpected result.

  For Luca, the victory brought something he hadn't anticipated—memory integration. As Grask's essence merged with his own, fragments of the demon's knowledge became accessible to him. Combat techniques, arena strategies, even a rudimentary understanding of the demon pne's geography filtered into his consciousness.

  But his triumph was short-lived. The moment of victory was immediately followed by death—not at Grask's hands this time, but at the hands of the next opponent, a whip-wielding demon with six arms who dispatched him in seconds.

  When Luca awakened, he was back in the sve pit once more. The cycle had reset completely. Vex approached with the same introduction. The horn bred. The guards came. And there stood Grask—alive again, with no memory of ever being defeated.

  Luca had to start from the beginning.

  The cruel reality of his curse became clear: each victory was temporary, each advancement immediately erased. The only thing that persisted through the resets was Luca himself—his memories and, strangely, the essence he had absorbed from defeated opponents.

  When he faced Grask again, Luca could feel the demon's absorbed power still flowing through him. His twisted body was microscopically stronger, his senses fractionally sharper. He defeated Grask more quickly this time—after only twenty-seven resets instead of three hundred and forty-two.

  But the next opponent still killed him. And the cycle reset once more.

  This became Luca's existence: defeat an opponent after dozens or hundreds of attempts, absorb their essence, grow incrementally stronger, face the next opponent, die, and reset to face the first opponent again. With each cycle, he required fewer attempts to defeat the enemies he had previously conquered, but he always had to defeat them again to reach new challenges.

  The psychological toll was immense. Not only did he remember every death, but he also had to endure the same conversations, the same environment, the same preliminary battles, over and over and over again.

  There were moments when madness beckoned. Times when he considered simply allowing himself to be killed without resistance, reset after reset, embracing the futility of his existence. What was the point of this endless repetition when each step forward was followed by a complete return to the beginning?

  During one period of despair, after his seven thousand four hundred and twenty-third death, Luca y motionless on the floor of his cell, unwilling to continue the cycle.

  "You are a most unusual creature," said Duke Razakel during that reset's obligatory inspection of new sves. "Most arrive weeping or raging. You seem... resigned, almost familiar with your surroundings."

  Luca remained silent. What could he possibly say? That he had died thousands of times? That he had defeated Grask hundreds of times, only to face him anew in each reset? That he remembered every single triumph and defeat while the world around him remained oblivious?

  "I sense potential in you," Razakel continued, mistaking Luca's silence for contemption. "There is a saying among the higher demons: That which does not destroy you makes you powerful. But simple survival is not enough here. To truly advance, one must absorb not just the essence of one's opponents, but their knowledge, their experience."

  Luca stirred slightly, his interest piqued despite his despair.

  "Focus not just on victory, but on complete absorption. That is the secret to true power in the arena."

  The duke left, unaware he had provided a crucial insight to a soul caught in an endless loop.

  In his next battle, Luca approached combat differently—not just seeking victory, but full integration with his opponent's essence. When he defeated Grask yet again, he focused intensely on drawing in not just power but knowledge.

  The results were transformative. The essence he absorbed became more potent, more complete. Though his physical form reset with each death, the accumuted power remained within him, growing stronger with each absorption.

  Most significantly, Luca discovered that with each complete absorption, he could defeat previously conquered opponents more efficiently. What once took hundreds of attempts now took dozens, then only a handful, and eventually, he could defeat Grask on the first try of each reset.

  This accelerated his progress through the arena's hierarchy. Though he still had to defeat every opponent in sequence with each reset, he could move through the earlier challenges more quickly, allowing him to focus on new adversaries.

  And with each new opponent came new knowledge. A fire-wielding demon taught him about elemental manipution. A shape-shifter revealed secrets of bodily control. A mind-reader forced him to develop mental shields.

  One particurly significant victory came against a demon schor, whose absorbed memories contained fragments of pnar lore. As the demon's essence integrated with his own, Luca glimpsed something extraordinary—the structure of the multiverse itself, with the demon pne as just one realm among many, all connected by invisible threads.

  For the first time, he understood the scope of his imprisonment and the true nature of his task. The gods had told him he could escape by defeating the demon king, but they had deliberately failed to mention that even after defeating the king, he would still reset to the beginning. The ultimate escape required not just victory, but mastery—becoming powerful enough to break the cycle itself.

  The path would require millions of deaths, millions of resets. A journey that would break any ordinary soul.

  But Luca was no ordinary soul. He had been Queen Lilith's consort, the Wisdom of Highcrest. He had advised kings while blind, raised children while disabled, defied gods while powerless. And now, death after death, reset after reset, he was becoming something else entirely—a creature forged in endless repetition, tempered by infinite defeat, strengthened by perpetual renewal.

  As he climbed the ranks of the arena, Luca established a grim routine. Each reset began with swiftly dispatching opponents he had already mastered. He could now defeat Grask in seconds, the six-armed whip-wielder in under a minute, and dozens of other previously challenging foes with ruthless efficiency.

  This allowed him more attempts against his current obstacle—a teleporting assassin whose unpredictable movements had already killed him over five hundred times. Each death taught him something new about the patterns underlying seemingly random movement. Each reset brought him closer to victory.

  In his ten thousandth reset, as he prepared to face yet another opponent in his slow climb through the demon hierarchy, Luca allowed himself a rare moment of reflection. The gods had meant his curse to be the ultimate punishment, an eternity of suffering without hope of escape.

  Instead, they had given him the one thing a determined soul needed most—unlimited time to perfect himself, to learn, to grow stronger. Their cruelty had pnted the seeds of their own eventual defeat.

  Somewhere in the vast cosmos, Luca knew Lilith still lived. His children, stolen by the gods, might still exist in some form. The thought of them became his anchor, preventing him from surrendering to madness as the resets accumuted into the tens of thousands.

  Luca smiled for the first time in thousands of resets.

  "Begin!" shouted the arena master, and Luca stepped forward to die again, knowing that each death brought him one step closer to vengeance.