There was no child where the skeleton was headed. The skeleton pounded the hallway floor again, hopelessly. Sands gasped and caught her breath. She didn't know how many times this had happened.
The kid in the stripes had obviously figured out how Bonesand was acting. It didn't take Sands long to realize this unpleasant fact. The child dodged out of the way of Sands' summoned gas blaster, a bony, dragon-headed weapon, before it could be fired, and moved on without even looking at the trajectory of the flying bones. Even when she flicked her magic past him and disappeared, he didn't even bother to look around, just found her and locked eyes with her. Each time, it sent a chill down her spine.
The outcome was set in stone. Not in the way she had hoped. His stamina would be drained from repeated attacks that would never work, and when he finally collapsed from exhaustion, he would be forced to allow the blade to enter his body. But I couldn't quit. A child who had only walked the dusty paths of the monsters I'd killed would never accept that one of them had surrendered, and I didn't want to.
Throughout the fight, Sands had tried to convince him, but he hadn't listened to a word she said. He just kept taunting her. No matter what Sands said, there was no change in his behavior, as if he was just doing what he was supposed to do. Maybe he had heard it all before.
After failing to knock him down or convince him to play, Sands decided to use the last trick in his arsenal. Don't give him a turn. He looked at the kid confidently, but deep down, he knew it wouldn't work. The way the kid had been playing against him so far had convinced him otherwise. But he didn't have any other options left.
In the end, Sands got what he expected. Ai had simply destroyed Sands' last move. As the child's knife tore through his clothes and sliced through his bones, Sands realized that this was not the first time this had happened. An unnerving sense of foreboding gripped him.
Something was wrong. As with all living things, there should only be one death allowed for a person, and so far he had died many times.... An insight from an unknown abyss connected all the timelines Sands had traveled through, and soon the world was tangled and shattered, darkening and brightening.
* * *
And Sands sat at his post in Snowdyne. For a moment, he wondered if he'd dreamed, but the unpleasant sensation of the blades cutting into his bones was all too vivid, as were the countless dead memories that followed. He placed a hand on his now-healthy-no, always-healthy-chest, confused, and then remembered the damned continuity of time and space: another absolute irreversibility turned upside down.
But how did he still have his memories?
) The past-or was it the future in the current timeline-which he normally wouldn't remember, was messing with his mind. In every timeline that flashed through his head, he couldn't remember the previous one. But now was different. He remembered not just the one just before, the one where he had been killed by humans, but all the ones before that, all the ones he had been through and forgotten, as if somehow the seals of memory had been broken.
Sands carefully explored his newfound memories. In those complex, vivid memories, he couldn't tell where they came from, the child was Papyrus's friend, his friend, the savior of all the monsters underground, and his filthy little brother's murderer. And at some point, a murderer who had killed everyone and himself over and over again, dozens of times. More times than he cared to count.
Sands noted that last fact. At some point, the child had stopped doing anything but killing monsters. Sands hadn't lost sight of that fact. If that was the case, the child would most likely try to kill him, everyone, and Papyrus this time.
He had to move quickly. To stop the child, to save them all.
...But how?
* * *
