Finding my Parents in Another World-Chapter 57: (Zoe) Breaking the Loop

The greenery stretched everywhere as far as the eyes could see. Zoe blinked, confused. Just a second ago the environment had been scorched earth, with dead bodies strewn everywhere, like a scene from hell itself. Not it was back to the serene, peaceful, quiet environment that had greeted Zoe the first time.

Quiet except for the sounds of laughter.

Trepidition rising in her heart by the second, Zoe walked slowly forward, and peeked around the first hut.

"Down with you evil demon!" The cry of the girl Sarah came once more, the stick again playfully waved towards the boy Zoltran.

As Zoe watched incredously, the same scene played out again word for word, scene by scene.

The playing kids. Sarah’s hope and Zoltran’s despair. The moving mountain. And then finally the scene she dreaded.

The serene village was converted into a scene from hell once more. The huts burned, corpses were crucified to crosses and in the center of it all were the corpses of the two children.

Once more Zoe reeled back, still unable to stomach the scene. As a mother herself, such wanton cruelty towards children hurt her more than most other things. And then.....

And then impossibly everything went back. The green pastures, the playful vibe, the moving mountain in the background.

It was then that Zoe finally realized her terrible predicament. This was not just a memory, it was a memory being played in loop!

And she was stuck in it.

.XX.

Zoe lost count of how many times the memory repeated. It’s not like she didn’t try anything to break it. The first thing she tried was to get the attention of Zoltran or Sarah. It didn’t work, obviously not because this seemed to be a memory. Zoltran or Sarah weren’t actually here, it was someone’s memory of them. No matter how loudly Zoe shouted, no matter how furiously she waved her hands, neither of them even acknowledged her existence.

Next she tried interacting with the environment around her. To her surprise she found she could touch and feel and even move the straw in the huts. Excited, thinking she had made a breakthrough, Zoe immediately ran upto the children and tried touching them.

Her hand passed right through their bodies, as if they were a hologram. Zoe shook her head in frustration. Of course it wasn’t going to be that easy.

But....

If she could touch the huts, modify the huts then what if she could draw the attention of the two kids by destroying the environment? Of course it seemed ridiculous to Zoe, even at that time. If this was someone’s memory, then would she even be able to change details in it? For this was something that had already happened, how could it be changed?

But what other option did she have? Just as Zoltran asked, "Does Apocalypse approach?", Zoe went up to the hut nearest the two and with all her strength pulled at the straw roof.

The roof came off easily enough, but instantaneously, the straw disintegrated in Zoe’s hands. When she looked up at the hut, it stood just like it always had, no change in it visible.

And she was out of time.

The environment changed to the now familiar hellscape, fumes of smoke snaking their way into the air. Zoe sighed, forced to look at the bodies of the crucified children once more. She had learnt that the reset condition was this. Until she looked at the two children on the cross, the hellscape wouldn’t be reset. She had tried not going to the center of the village, staying in the corner, avoiding the horrible truth, but all she had gotten out of it was an extended stay in the hellscape.

Zoe sighed and plopped down on the floor. What was happening? What was the purpose of this?

Yes that was the burning question in her mind. Everything had started when she touched the Spear of the Goddess. But what had this brutal, hopeless scene got to do with the Goddess? Surely there was no divine intervention for these kids. She remembered at the end of the first loop. The voice she had been hearing had said that that is what we must defeat. What was ’that’?

From the scene shown, it was clear that what the voice meant was this ’Apocalypse’. But what was ’Apocalypse’? The way Zoltran and Sarah spoke of it didn’t seem like they meant the usual definition of the word. It almost felt like they were referring to some living entity. And the way the voice said it also confirmed the same. But what entity was it? The moving mountain?

Zoe shook her head. Nothing made sense. The village was deserted. The elders had supposedly gone somewhere. But then where had those corpses come from? What was that mountain? Zoe hadn’t heard either about some entity called the Apocalypse nor these kids from Famina, nor from Father Andrews.

As another cycle of green pastures turning to corpse hellscape passed, the questions in Zoe’s mind continued to accumulate, none of which had any reasonable answer. However all of it seemed to hinge on one point; the nature of the Apocalypse. And also the nature of the moving mountain. Zoe didn’t know whether they were the same entity but she intended to figure out this loop.

Therefore when the environment reset to the pastures, Zoe ignored the village and began walking instead past it, towards the moving mountain. The laughter, and playing of the children soon receded in the distance, but the mountain didn’t seem to get much closer, still being extremely far away.

The environment started changing and Zoe cursed, turning around as the land around her became parched and brown. In the distance she could see the village up in flames. She sighed. It was impossible, she couldn’t make it to the mountain in a single cycle, and she had to return everytime to the village to reset it. She began dejected trudging back when she suddenly stopped in her tracks.

She was limited by time between the green pastures and the hellscape, but she wasn’t limited by time in the reverse scenario. As in, currently she had unlimited time, because her seeing the crucified kids was the reset point. Therefore she could explore this world as much as she wanted in the hellscape form.

She turned around again. As she had noticed the first time, there was no moving mountain now, further strengthening the theory that it was behind the massacre of the village, even if Zoe couldn’t figure out how. But the ground beneath her was similarly defaced as in the village behind her, with a single word.

Apocalypse

As Zoe looked behind her, she saw that the word had been written again and again on the ground till the village. She looked forward and it was written on the ground even ahead of her. There was a trail of Apocalypse writings on the ground stretching off into the distance. Zoe had a feeling that the source of this, where the trail would end in front of her was where the moving mountain had been.

So the moving mountain is Apocalypse?

It could be true. Maybe the moving mountain had a carving beneath it which spelled out that word, and whatever path the mountain took, the ground was defaced with that word.....

Zoe shook her head and almost laughed out loud. It was a ridiculous notion, even for a fantasy world. Even if somehow it were true, how would such a huge mountain be able to crucify children and burn villages? At most it would crush the villages, not run an inquisition over it. No the answer, or atleast the path to the answer lay at the source of these defacings.

Zoe trudged along the path forward. She kept her eyes on the ground, not focusing too much on the surroundings. There weren’t too many other corpses around, but the entire area had been torched to the ground. Carcasses of animals lay abandoned on the roads, severed limbs lay discarded on the road. If any human imagined the worst version of hell, Zoe was certain the result would be close to the region she was walking through right now.

The words on the ground though appeared never-ending, leading Zoe through the scorched remains of a forest, and towards a lake. The water of the lake was red, probably due to the amount of blood dumped in it. Zoe saw the severed heads of men and women floating around in the water. With a gulp, she tried to ignore it and took a step in the water. Unlike the huts in the village, she couldn’t feel the water (or blood) in the lake. She was almost floating over the water.

When she reached the other side, she saw that the carvings on the ground continued past, and then ended abruptly at a cliff. Zoe walked gingerly forward and looked over the cliff. The walls of the cliff were dotted with the same writing, all the way to the bottom. The bottom was barren rock. Zoe stood up and looked over the horizon. It was completely fogged up, with smoke and fumes so Zoe couldn’t see much further at all. She could vaguely make out some huge structures in the distance, which seemed like tall towers but she couldn’t tell how far or what exactly they were due to the obfuscating smoke.

She looked down again. The only thing clearly visible was the rock platform at the very bottom. Even from this distance Zoe could make out the writing on that platform.

Apocalypse

There was only one way forward. Only one way to answer the mystery of Apocalypse.

Taking a deep breath, Zoe jumped off the cliff.