Rewind: A Grimdark LitRPG Series (Pyresouls Apocalypse, Book 1) by James Callum (reading tree .txt) 📕

the open air, Camilla placed a hand on his shoulder and forced him to spin around.

“Tell me what’s going on, Jacob.”

“It’s hard to explain,” he answered.

“Uh-uh,” she said, cutting him off when Jacob tried to keep walking. “That’s not going to cut it. Tell me what has you so bothered, and why you were imprisoned by the Vile Covenant, or this will be the last you ever see of me.”

That brought Jacob up short. Partly because he didn’t want to be alone with his own thoughts, partly because he enjoyed her company, and most of all because Camilla clearly thought that was a strong enough bartering chip to make him talk.

He stuffed that tidbit of information away for another time. Right now was neither the time nor place to be examining how Camilla viewed whatever their relationship was.

“All right, but we walk at the same time.”

Camilla stepped aside as Jacob hurried along the winding alleyways. In her lighter garb, it was easy for her to keep pace with him as he filled her in on everything about the Collapse, Earth, and his bitter entanglement with the Vile Covenant.

Finding a small pile of crates, Jacob clambered up them, pulled himself up onto the roof, and offered a hand to help Camilla up. He needed to reach the southern Fog Gate but the last thing he wanted to was to get ambushed by any of Mack’s goons if they were still about.

As he crept slower on the rooftop, scanning the nearby tiled roofs for threats, he continued to fill her in. “I know it sounds crazy, time travel and all that but it’s-”

“I believe you,” she said earnestly. “Time entanglement is not an unknown concept to my people. Nobody has had the power or proper ritual to pull it off, however. And if they did, they saw fit to tell nobody about it and left no witnesses.”

Jacob chuckled. “Well, that’s the bulk of what’s going on. I had nine days to get to the Smog Rifts, then to Journey’s End, and to kill the Burgon Beast to stop this whole thing.

“Now I only have about three. If I don’t get there before Alec, he’ll summon it first and it’ll destroy the Pyre at Journey’s End before I ever get a chance to fight it.”

“Why does it matter?” she asked. “If all you need to do is kill it, why not work with Alec?”

“Because… well, I don’t know how this works for you but people from Earth are fragmented into copies of Lormar. Only at the Crossings - the areas covered by Fog Gates - can we easily interact. I could try to invade his shard but it would be a shot in the dark, using an item I don’t have.

“Plus, he doesn’t know me in this time. He has no reason to believe me. Worse, he would likely think I’m a rival trying to screw him over.”

“Okay, so you can’t work directly with him. Well, even if you do defeat it, who is to say you didn’t just beat a single aspect of it? What if all of your humans in this place have to beat their own version of it?”

Jacob shivered at the thought. It wasn’t like nobody thought about that but at the same time, there was not enough information. Their best guess was that if it was defeated once, it would be defeated everywhere.

Its ability to leap from one Pyre to the next and destroy it, removing any players bound to that Pyre across all shards, lent a bit of credibility to that theory.

He explained as much to her, and added, “The greatest reason? It follows a very particular path. From what we were able to piece together, it follows the inverse path that the player who summoned it took to reach it.

“I didn’t follow Alec’s path directly. I took a more circuitous path. And I won’t be bound to the Journey’s End Pyre when I summon the Burgon Beast. It’ll be a chore, but if I can constantly bind myself at the next Pyre in its path then go out to meet it, I should be able to stay ahead of the Burgon Beast.

“It might kill me a dozen or more times, but I’ll keep coming back, wearing it down. Or, that’s the plan at least. Unfortunately, it’s the best I have.”

“Sounds like you don’t have enough information to know whether or not it will work,” she pointed out.

He conceded her point with a nod. “It’s better to try with partial information than to accept the slow decay of our world.”

It was Camilla’s turn to nod, her ridiculous black, wide-brimmed hat flopped as she did so. “It focuses my magic,” she said defensively, watching Jacob tilt his head up to look at the brim.

“I didn’t say anything,” he reminded her.

“You didn’t need to.”

Jacob turned to scout the alleyway on the southern side. It all seemed clear so far. If they both hopped down and made a run for it, they should make it. Even if people were lying in wait to ambush them.

The clinking of armored feet caught Jacob’s attention and he ducked back behind a crumbling chimney. Running down the alleyway about to pass directly below him was a familiar set of gold armor. Its owner was a knight he knew well.

It was Alec. And he could only have that armor if he had already been to the Desecrated Catacombs.

At that moment Jacob’s mind whirled back to a story of Alec’s. One he liked to tell about Hollow Dreams and the time he was randomly killed. He never saw the person who did it, he just died as he was trying to exit the Crossing.

It was a particularly brutal death because the last place he had bound was in the depths of the Desecrated Catacombs. The death had cost him, by his estimation, at least a day.

Across the alleyway, another figure was watching Alec’s jogging figure with interest.

Jacob’s instincts told him to warn Alec but he knew