Die. Respawn. Repeat.

"He is pushing himself too far," Guard said.

Ethan was deep within a Road Not Taken trance. Ahkelios paced around him, clearly anxious, and He-Who-Guards sat with Mari. She radiated with worry about her husband—and her son, although to a lesser extent—and Guard was trying to lend her what comfort he could.

Admittedly, Ethan's repeated failures weren't helping, although Guard wasn't entirely sure that failure was the right word at this point. He'd last heard the human muttering something about completing a shift? He wasn't sure he'd heard it right, but it was very possible he'd once again pushed past "complete the task" into "overachieve the task".

Very Ethan. Guard could guess at his motivations, too; if he was going to leave Tarin behind, let him guard the village, then he wanted Tarin to be strong enough to stop anything else the Trials or the Interface tried to throw at him.

But he was pushing himself too hard. Ethan was clearly exhausted: he'd been sweating enough that the dirt beneath him was now starting to turn more into mud, and "damp" was no longer an accurate descriptor of his clothes. He'd probably be in a worse state if the rest of them hadn't insisted he take breaks to drink water and scarf down some food, but even then, Ethan had been going at this for...

Eight hours and forty-three minutes, his internal clock helpfully supplied.

Yes. That. More than was healthy for any human to strain at a task, Guard was pretty sure, in part because using the skill seemed to put a sort of physical stress on Ethan. He wasn't sure how or why, exactly, but his sensors detected muscle fatigue and lactic acid buildup and microtears just as if he'd been running a marathon for the past eight hours.

And forty-three minutes, his internal clock helpfully supplied again, and Guard sighed.

Yes. And that.