He made it to the well. Some instinct — Kaelen's, his, he couldn't tell anymore — put the well's stone wall between him and the thing, and it stopped.

  He looked at it over the lip of the well. It looked back with the head that was facing him. The other two heads were oriented elsewhere — one toward the houses, one toward the sky. Their eyes moved independently. Their mouths did not close.

  It was waiting.

  He feinted left and it moved with him — not lunging, tracking. Anticipating. There was something behind the eyes that was not animal. He pushed that thought down hard and focused.

  He moved right. Quickly. Got his back to the lane and put distance between them and ran for the gate. He heard the thing begin moving. He ran harder. The gate was ahead, the squad visible beyond it, and he thought — he genuinely thought, in the last moment — that he was going to make it.

  The thing hit him from behind.

  It came in low and fast and the impact took him off his feet and he hit the ground and rolled and when he came to a stop on his back the thing was above him, blocking out the sky, all three heads looking at him now, and the rune on its back was glowing — actually glowing, a dull arterial red — and the blood moon was above it, larger than the ordinary moon had any right to be, and the rune and the moon were the same colour and he had time to understand that this was not a coincidence before the thing made a decision.

  He didn't look away.

  He wanted to. He made himself not.

  He looked at it, all of it, the full wrongness of it, and he committed it to memory — the rune, the pattern, the way it moved, the way it had tracked him, the intelligence behind the eyes — because he was going to die in the next moment and he needed to carry as much as possible back with him to the other side of it.

  He thought: the rune. He thought: fire. He thought: it stopped when I put the well between us.

  He thought: it's afraid of something.

  — ? —

  ——————————————————————————————————

  ◆ SYSTEM NOTIFICATION ◆

  ——————————————————————————————————

  Level 0

  Death count: 3

  Way of death: Killed by a Follower of the Wild Cult.

  [Resistance to Mind Enslavement: Level 1 → Level 2]

  Level up further to gain additional skill slots.

  ——————————————————————————————————

  He woke up and lay still.

  Sky. Platform. Chain.

  He had a rule about this now — he allowed himself thirty seconds of stillness after each death, thirty seconds to feel whatever it was and then set it down, before he started thinking. This had not been a policy in Loop 1 or Loop 2. He'd developed it somewhere between the boot and the sword and the thing's weight coming down on him in the lane of the stopped village. The deaths were not going to stop. They would keep happening, probably for a long time, and if he responded to each one by flinching away from it he would spend his loops flinching instead of learning.

  So: thirty seconds.

  He lay on the cold boards and breathed and allowed himself to know, fully and without managing it, that he had just been killed by something that should not exist. That it had looked at him with three faces while the blood moon lit the rune on its back. That Sera had screamed and then hadn't. That the whole village had stopped at a single moment because something had stopped it — not attacked it, stopped it, simultaneously, comprehensively — and that the bones around the well had been placed there in the same pattern as the altar in the forest.

  The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  He allowed himself to know all of this.

  Then thirty seconds ended and he started thinking.

  — ? —

  What he had.

  The village was a trap, or a container — something was held there, or the village itself was part of the mechanism that produced the thing. The bone patterns connected it to the altar in the forest, which meant the Cult of the Wild was the common thread. The thing he'd faced was not feral; it had tracked him and waited and made decisions. It had a rune on its back. The rune had reacted to the blood moon. The blood moon had been enormous, wrong-sized, and the same colour as the glow.

  The thing had stopped at the well. He'd put stone between them and it had waited instead of coming over or around. That could mean many things. It could mean it was cautious. It could mean it was patient. It could mean it couldn't cross running water — but the well was dry, or it appeared dry. It could mean it was performing, buying time, making him commit to a direction before it moved.

  He didn't know which. He filed it as a question.

  The rune. He could picture it clearly — the angular geometry of it, the way it had been cut in and healed over. He had no framework for what it meant. In his old life he'd have Googled it. Here he had Kaelen's memories, which contained exactly no information about demonic runes, and a camp full of soldiers and a healer he hadn't met yet and a Baron who would not appreciate being told that his disposable scout had opinions about occult symbols.

  He needed to find someone who would know.

  He needed to survive long enough to find them.

  He needed, before any of that, to understand what the thing was afraid of.

  Because it was afraid of something. He was certain of it. He had looked at it in the lane and it had stopped and waited and that was not patience — that was the stillness of a thing at the edge of a boundary. Something had held it. Something about the lane, or the gate, or the well, or some element of that specific geography had checked it, and if he could identify what —

  Below, footsteps on the platform stairs.

  He knew the sound of them now.

  Aldric appeared at the top of the stairs, took in Josh lying flat and looking at the sky with the chain loose around his wrists, and stopped. Something crossed his face — the same adjacent-to-concern expression from Loop 2, slightly more pronounced.

  "You're already awake," Aldric said.

  "Yes."

  "How long?"

  Josh considered. "Long enough."

  Aldric crossed the platform and crouched beside him and looked at his face with the evaluating expression of a man who has seen people in various states of damage and is attempting to classify this one. Whatever he saw he kept to himself. He began undoing the chain with his usual efficiency.

  "Bad night?" Aldric said.

  Josh looked at the sky. The hawk was there. Same circle. Same patience.

  "Aldric," he said. "The village. When the first scout went in — did he come back with anything? Any information at all before he died?"

  A pause in the chain-undoing. Brief.

  "He came back," Aldric said carefully, "once. Said the village was empty. Said there was something wrong with the air. That's all."

  "Did he say anything about the square? The well?"

  The chain came free. Aldric stood and looked down at him.

  "Why are you asking about the well?"

  Josh sat up. Looked at Aldric directly. In two loops he had established, without quite intending to, a fragile currency of partial truth between them — enough honesty to produce real answers, not so much that it invited questions he couldn't answer. He spent some of it now.

  "Because when I was in there," Josh said, "I found something I didn't understand. And I think it matters."

  Aldric's expression went through its rooms.

  "The well is a warding well," he said finally, quietly. "Old. Pre-dates the village. Church built the village around it because of the well, not the other way round. The warding stones in its wall are supposed to — " He stopped. Started again. "Are supposed to make the ground around it hostile to demonic presence. Within a certain radius."

  Josh looked at him.

  "How certain a radius?" he said.

  Aldric looked back.

  "I don't know," he said. "I'm not a priest."

  Josh stood and rolled his shoulders and looked at the camp — the mud, the tents, the blue falcon, the pine trees pressing in from every side. The morning smelled like woodsmoke and frost and horses. Normal things. Ordinary things. Things that did not have runes cut into their backs.

  He had died three times. He had a skill that resisted something that had killed him in his first loop, a layer of iron over his skin that hadn't been enough to save him, and now a fragment of information about warding wells that might be the thread he needed.

  He had the shape of the rune behind his eyes.

  He had thirty minutes before the Baron expected to see him.

  He thought: I know what it's afraid of. I know one place it won't go.

  He thought: that's not enough. But it's something. It's the first something that's actually mine.

  "Thank you," he said to Aldric.

  Aldric grunted. Then, as Josh moved toward the stairs: "Boy."

  Josh stopped.

  "The previous scout," Aldric said. "The one who said the air was wrong." A pause. "He didn't come back the second time. Nobody does."

  He said it in his particular way — not as a warning. As a fact that he was extending the courtesy of sharing.

  Josh nodded slowly.

  "I know," he said. "I'm working on it."

  He went down the stairs and into the camp, and behind him Aldric stood at the top of the platform and watched him go, and said nothing, and did not look away.