On the other hand, they had all died. They were all going to die again. It was going to be horrible. Through all the many repetitions to come there were going to die in increasingly terrible ways as they fought desperately to escape the situation. In a single-person loop the main character could simply throw themselves at problems again and again until they were solved. It demanded only one person’s constitution. But Anya knew and had just seen how easily it was to break someone. Luther had died twice, and Melissa was right, he was a soldier. He wasn’t weak, but she didn’t want to imagine what it was like to spend your whole life fighting to be accepted as a soldier and get to that point and then face something like this. It was understandable that his mentality would shatter. It was unreasonable to expect someone to face something like this without fear and doubt, so adding more people compounded that problem. It meant in every loop something was lost. Not just in each person’s mind, as that would happen even if only one person were reincarnated, but their connections to each other would surely weaken as time passed. How could they not? With each person learning what it meant to die alone over and over and over. Even in the midst of your comrades you’d be unable to watch them die as Alex had, focused too much on your own bones dissolving to realize you were sharing a common fate. It didn’t matter in the end. Not really. You were all going to die but the agony was yours alone. There was no way to share that.

  “So where are we going?” Yuna asked, an inch from Anya’s ear, bending down. Anya jumped, startled from thought.

  “Deeper.” She said quickly.

  “I know that,” Yuna sighed, “but deeper toward what?”

  “To the forges.” Anya said absentmindedly. She didn’t know. It didn’t matter.

  Yuna flinched. “The forges you say…”

  “That’s not a bad idea.” Melissa said, surveying Anya’s new body with the kind of lust only a machinist could have. Anya shuddered, realizing again what it meant to be objectified. She’d heard cat-calls before, but Melissa wanted to do more than stick a tiny prick into her to deliver a medicinal load. She wanted to saw things off and poke around inside or replace them wholesale and act like nothing had changed. But Anya’s body wasn’t some fungible commodity to be replaced and upgraded. Besides, it would be… more than a little unpleasant.

  “Uh… maybe no—” Anya began.

  “We should go.” Chris boomed from inside her head. They were already walking, but she understood his intent. He also wanted to go there, and he had a good reason to.

  “Fuuuck.” Anya thought, accepting her damnation to be treated as a test-subject.

  They walked through the halls in silence, jumping at every shadow, but as though the enemy was secretly on their side they were not interrupted. They did always seem to appear late, but there wasn’t any entrance to the base other than the tightly-secured metal sliding doors Anya had closed and locked herself. If they could break those doors it didn’t make sense for them to not have ambushed their party in the weapons depot in the last two cycles. If they could break the front door down it only made sense they could break down any given interior door. But if they weren’t breaking down the front door then they must have been coming from inside. If they were coming from inside it didn’t make sense for them to avoid attacking either… unless of course they were coming from deep within. But the base didn’t have any other entrances.

  They came upon two large metal doors draped in their usual white skin. There were two skin locks with rusty knives attached by tiny rusted chains to draw the necessary patterns with. It was an old style lock…

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “Fuck.” Anya cursed.

  “I hate these.”

  “Don’t worry.” Melissa said. “I know a trick to them.” She walked over and grabbed the far knife, some thirty or forty feet from the nearer one.

  “Do you guys know what she’s thinking?” Luther asked.

  “No idea.” Yuna said. Chris shook his head in silence.

  “Watch this!” Melissa shouted, hefting her rifle in the left hand and knife in the other.

  Her right arm started to move in a stabbing motion, and about halfway there a shot rang out.

  *BANG*

  The lock clicked, doors opening as Melissa jogged back over to the party.

  “What’d ya think?” she asked, grinning.

  “Nice shot for a medic.” Anya said.

  “It helps that I’m a lefty.”

  They walked into the door and regarded the huge room some fifty by two hundred feet in size with a cavernous fifty foot domed ceiling. In the center was a large circular workbench with a thousand scattered tools all over, and a half-finished sheet of midnight-black colored metal, clearly in the middle of reprocessing. Had they interrupted something?

  Anya was certainly interrupted by something she didn’t realize they had— the first echoing screams of the flesh benches and forges whose pregnant stomachs were open with metal sheets spreading them open, cut like angels with closed reverse-facing wings. Their agony reverberated from the dome-shaped ceiling in a room designed with specific intent to amplify their screams. Anya hefted her rifle and pointed it at the first chained victim. Her hair was long and ratty and she wore no clothing. There was hardly a second between seeing the splayed stomachs of the forges and Anya’s first shot, hardly enough time for the chained slave to scream, but no words were needed to know death had been a mercy. No words could have been spoken regardless of how much time had passed for them to plead their fate. The designers had wanted to hear screams, not language, not pleading for mercy and other meaningless words. They wanted to hear rattling chains and pain, so they’d cut out the forges’ tongues, as was tradition in these places. There was no need to hear them speak. Often their mouths would be sewn shut to reduce the noise hazard for workers, but that didn’t seem to be a concern here.

  Two shots rang out before Yuna put a hand on Anya’s rifle-barrel.

  “There’s no point.” She said, but Anya fired again.

  “Ow,” Yuna yelled, pulling back her hand. “Fuck you burned me good.”

  “You know there’s no point!” She yelled in Anya’s ear.

  “Of course there’s a point!” Anya yelled back, firing a fourth shot.

  “You need to stop.” Melissa said flatly.

  Five.

  “Anya!” Melissa yelled at her.

  “We need them to forge weapons, and you know they’re just going to respawn right? If they keep their memories you’re not helping anything.”

  “FUCK.” Anya yelled, putting down her rifle.

  “What’s the fucking point of fighting if we’re going to enslave and abuse so many innocents?”

  “You know they aren’t innocent.” Yuna said.

  “What did you just say?” Luther shouted. There was a long history of questionable sentencing.

  “My Mom was one of them, and she didn’t do nothin’ to deserve it.”

  Yuna flinched slightly and corrected herself. “Most of them aren’t innocent.”

  “Most? Next you’ll say some.” Luther continued shouting. “Or a couple.”

  He didn’t stop. “How many are innocent here, do you think? Five? Ten? Fifty? How long do you think they’ve been chained up like this? How long do you think they deserved? A decade? Two? Three? You can fuck off saying they’re guilty of some crime. There is no crime that deserves this.”

  “And yet,” Melissa said, having allowed Luther to finish at Yuna’s expense. The poor woman looked as if she was about to cry. “We need them.”

  Luther grumbled, but knew ultimately she was right. They did need them. And as much as he would love to set them free, it would do them no good with Death looming closer hour by hour.