Chapter 142: The Trial (1)
"Finally. God, finally..."She knew she should be more anxious. This was the part of the story where things spiraled. The volume’s final stretch. The moment where all hell traditionally broke loose. And yet...
Could you really blame her?
After all the deaths, the regressions, the warped timelines and shattered choices just to make it this far, just to survive, it felt surreal. She’d had a few brief moments of respite, sure. But the universe seemed practically engineered to grind her into dust. Her only real coping mechanism had become dangerously simple:
Endure.Endure until the nightmare stopped. Endure until the credits rolled.
"I’m honestly shocked the system barely nags me anymore..."
Then again, she wasn’t exactly a toddler needing babysitting. There wasn’t much for it to say now, aside from reminding her to survive these damn trials.
She’d gone from fixing Evelyn’s spine to managing the unstable cast of heroines, navigating the whims of self-insert chaos goblins, and eventually... dealing with her own spiraling self. And now, here she stood, on the threshold of the final trial of the first semester.
First.As in, not even close to done.
"Seriously? Only the first semester? What kind of masochistic narrative pacing is this?"
This was a team-based event.
But during the initial phase, every participant had to endure the trials alone, isolated, tested individually before they could reunite with their teammates. She remembered that clearly now.