Kenji took Ayla to her room. Sarah wanted to follow, but Damien held her back. Ayla studied Kenji’s expression with a frown.

’Why is he acting so happy?’

She wondered silently as he closed the door behind them and locked it. He turned and pulled her into a hug so tight that his consciousness went dark within the second.

[You have been slain.]

[Ayla rejected your regression request.]

He came back to life with both hands raised in surrender.

"Why are you so excited?"

Ayla licked the blood off her lips. The sight of his own brain matter on her mouth no longer horrified him the way it once had, though it remained a strange image to look at first thing after returning from death.

’Because you will finally be away from my family.’

She read the thought clean off the surface of his mind. A practiced look of hurt crossed her face. Kenji blamed his mother for that one.

Sarah wore the same expression every time Damien refused her something she had decided she wanted. Ayla had picked it up from her over breakfast.

"Enough lies. The actual reason."

She crossed her arms. The crossed arms had also come from Sarah. Kenji had watched it happen across the dinner table and now he was on the receiving end of it. He shrugged.

"Before I explain Vanguard Spire, you need to understand the Crusade."

Ayla’s interest sharpened. She sat on the edge of his bed and pulled her knees up to her chest.

The Crusade was a realm that connected the galaxies of the universe together into a single continent. The continent was so vast that the millions of races living inside it had explored less than a hundredth of one percent.

"Why is that? The races have small populations?"

Kenji shook his head.

"No. Some races outnumber humans by a hundred to one. The land beyond what we have explored is infected with a particular kind of monster. We call them Darklings."

Darklings were the natives of the Crusade. For a race to claim territory, the race had to clear a Darkling structure called a Spire and convert it into a Vanguard Spire.

Once a Spire turned Vanguard, the territory around it became the protection of the race that had cleared it. Inside the protected zone, the race could not be harmed.

"Even a Conqueror cannot invade a Vanguard."

"Conqueror?"

"There are eight known power ranks. Iron, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Ace, Conqueror. The strongest human alive is a Conqueror."

Ayla filed the ranks. She was currently Iron rank, but she could reach Bronze after integrating with the Bronze metal core. The remaining six ranks stretched away from her like a staircase she had not yet seen the top of.

She wondered, briefly, whether the Emotion Weaver had been a Conqueror. Her instinct said no. Her instinct said the Weaver had stood somewhere above the staircase entirely.

If that was the case, then the thing that had hunted the Weaver and cut it into six pieces was something the staircase could not measure at all.

She wondered, even more briefly, what the brain of that thing would taste like. She licked her lips again.

Kenji continued.

"We are the last race to join the Crusade. Every other race already had Conquerors when we arrived. The system grants newcomer protection to new races, otherwise we would have gone extinct in our first century. We held on long enough for a hero to rise. He cleared his way to Conqueror and became the first of ours. After him, the threat of extinction from other races faded."

He paused.

"But."

By the time humanity had produced a Conqueror, the older races had already claimed every Spire near the human entry zone. Humanity had to search beyond the occupied territories for an unclaimed one.

The search cost millions of lives across decades. Eventually they found a Spire no one had ever stepped foot in. It sat at the edge of the Endless Sea, the ocean that bordered the entire occupied Crusade.

"That is the Vanguard Spire of humanity. We call it Bastion."

Even after finding it, humans had not been able to clear it.

"Are humans that weak?"

Ayla had been leaning on Kenji’s shoulder as she listened. Her cheek pancaked against the bone of his collar. Her gold eyes were wide. Kenji exhaled slowly.

’Does she even know the difference between a girl and a boy?’

"Of course I know. A boy has a pen-"

He clamped a hand over her mouth before the sentence finished. She blinked at him aggrievedly above his palm.

"It is not that humans are weak. The Spire itself is of a higher quality than any other Spire that has been claimed."

Which meant the Darklings infecting it were exponentially more dangerous.

"So the human Conqueror is weak. That is why he cannot clear it."

Ayla rolled her eyes.

"Clearing and conquering a Spire is not the same as clearing a tunnel."

Spires were remnants of a fallen world. Anyone who entered was assigned a role by the structure itself. People who entered with the goal of clearing it received roles inside the same faction.

People who entered with conflicting goals received roles in opposing factions. No one could read another person’s true intentions.

With a race as varied as humanity, the factions inside Bastion fractured the moment they formed.

That was the first reason the Spire had not been cleared. The second was the Ghouls.

"Ghouls are the race nearest to us in the Crusade."

The Ghouls had learned about Bastion at the same time humanity had. Their own Spire already protected them. Ours did not.

The Ghouls had declared war. The war had bled humanity for years. The Government had committed most of its registered Crusaders to the frontline, which left fewer resources for the slow grinding work of clearing Bastion.

Five years after the discovery, humans had cleared less than twenty percent of it.

By the time Kenji finished speaking, he glanced down to find Ayla had fallen asleep against his shoulder.

Her breathing was even. Her cheek was warm where it rested against him.

Not once during the explanation had her face shifted into anything resembling concern. To her, the war and the Spire and the eight ranks were a story. The kind of story a child fell asleep to.

She was not human. For her, none of it carried weight.

For him, it did. After all he was a human. The duty was his.

The image of a woman rose in his mind without his permission. Dark hair pulled back at the nape. A laugh he had not heard in three years.

A name he had not let himself speak aloud since he had walked into the tunnel at the start of the loop. His eyes lost focus.

"Wait for me, Amanda. I will be there in a week."

His gaze drifted toward the door. A shadow at the gap beneath it shifted, then withdrew. He had sensed its presence the moment he had entered the room. He wondered who that would be.

’Is it Alex? Or Salma?’

Kenji dispelled the idea to look further into that. He would rather use that time more productively.

He picked up Ayla and put her in the bed. After tucking her inside the blanket, he left to his own room.