We came in ready for a fight, but we hadn't been prepared for Levin himself. Completely unprepared, we walked in thinking it would be a simple distraction mission. That changed when Levin himself came out to get us. We split up to take them down, myself taking on The Dead and the two of them chasing after Levin. They then tried to ambush and kill him, which would have worked perfectly had everything gone according to plan, which it didn't.

Replicate the necessary ingredients.

Returning through time, reconstituting things, and generally resetting everything to how it was before. I considered for a second that this was against the natural order of Magecraft, that this would be a Sorcery, and that I could not possibly have enough prana to live after creating this.

And then I realized that if I pulled it off successfully, none of that mattered. And so I continued.

Bring forth the knowledge required for execution.

Simply I needed everything. I needed to know where we were, every step, every movement. I breathed in, trying to relive the moment we had begun our patrol through the city streets, when we had still been preparing. I tried to remember exactly what we had worn, what we had brought with us, the temperature, the smell of the air. I had learned that although there was a large margin of error for repetition, the more exact the recreation the better.

Calculate the action and the reaction; make real the vision.

I came up blank. There was no way to do any of these things. The only thing I could think to do was to trust.

Trust in the power that I had held for so long, the power that had kept me alive and well since the day I was born, the power that pushed me through day after day of endless toil.

This body, saved time and again by the endless cycle of repetition. This man, merely recreating the past to defeat the present.

This world, that seems to repeat itself ad infinitum, a world that knows only how to repeat its own mistakes. As part of the great cycle of life, the ups and downs of victory and defeat, there can only be repetition.

What's one more?

I whispered the words, like a quiet oath taken before a mission, the soft whisper that carries in it more determination than a scream on the battlefield.

"Event Repetition: The Moment of Impact."

It was totally and completely different from any repetition I had ever done before. Strange, for a magecraft that involved complete and total copying to form something unique for once.

Because this time, I watched the events happen. My body out of my control, it began to repeat the movements I had done to form the repetition.

In reverse. But as if to torture me, the rewinding of time was no faster than how it had ben wound. In fact, it was probably slower, as my hands fell slowly, ritually, almost ceremonially into their position.

Whatever I decided now did not matter. Only that which was about to happen, or rather, happen again, mattered.

I watched Yagi walk backwards, a sight that was equal parts comical and unbelievable. I felt myself fall, being forced back to the ground, as if by some invisible hand that was telling me to lie down. It was a gentle push, more like a falling leaf than a rough push. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, Yagi walked backwards, turning around, and giving me a sight I thought I would never see.

Tears falling up. I thought. That's new.

I didn't bother to listen to the strange, backmasked version of Yagi telling me exactly what happened. But that wasn't how it happened. I had walked to her and asked her, squatting down so that I could hear her voice. I watched her as she squatted down and spoke, the same way I had seen her but from a different angle, my view centered on the side of her body rather than her head and shoulders.

Then I realized that I wasn't rewinding through events as if I was there. I had been… removed, so to speak, from this progression of events, and was instead watching it from the sidelines, no longer myself.

Detachment. Complete and total detachment.

I watched as I stood up and walked back, then fell back onto the ground. Yagi followed after, walking towards me and squatting down to look at me, then walking perfectly naturally and very strangely, backwards, away.

Then came the part I didn't want to feel. The waiting. All I did, and indeed, all I could do was stare forward, straight at the little elevated sidewalk, at the trash, at the point where the walls of the makeshift houses met the floor, at the trash in the streets.

The intolerable waiting, the spell burning away at my prana and making me weaker, my body heavier, trying to lull me into a deep sleep, a dark and comfortable peace.

It was just a sense; a fleeting thought, like a first impression of a person. But I was convinced that if I let my guard down and gave in to that sleep I would be lost completely and irrevocably. The darkness just felt too deep, too peaceful, like my body would immediately surrender and sink into it forever.

I forced myself to stay awake, steeled myself against the boredom, the prana slowly draining away from me. I kept mind focused, attempting to stay out of the darkness threatening to take me, even as I felt my strength slowly, slowly wane.

This sucks. I'm fighting a losing battle I can't possibly win.

What followed was utter frustration, every moment seeming longer than the last. I sat there, unmoving, unwavering, always thinking of what must be happening right now, the tension. When Yagi was still here, when she was still moving backwards in her bizarre dance that looked like a rewinding tape, I was sure that I was doing something, I was sure that my magecraft was taking effects.

But now I was lying on the ground, staring straight at a still life ahead of me, shifted only by the wind and by the movements of the moon, reversed repetitions of a dance already completed. And only now did I notice.

Only now did I notice the lack of prana slowly eating away at my limbs, numbing the sensations until they didn't feel like they existed. I already couldn't feel my legs or my arms, and already the lightheadedness was beginning to set in. In response I grit my teeth.

I stopped caring about time. My eyes were open, but I could not see. My ears were working, but they could not hear. My nose was working, but I could not smell. I was a puppet inside my own body.

It was all a blur as I fought the Dead again, only in reverse. They flew forwards to my position as I put my pistol to their heads, watching the parts of them reconstitute and fly back together before moving away, in a strangely comical retreat that had all the speed and killing intent of a charge, only moving in the wrong direction.

I was shocked. It was completely absurd, watching gunshots fly backwards and zombies reconstitute themselves, the blood and guts that I had been lying in flying back into the bodies they belonged to. It was so surreal that my eyes blurred, probably themselves doubting that they were seeing something real and not a hallucination.

It didn't matter. Cruel mistresses that they were, time and reality continued to move forwards, or rather, backwards. As such, my eyes were treated to surreal sights, available only to those with recordings of zombies exploding in real life, barely a meter from their own heads, with a gun that was out of ammunition.

Precious few people, now that I thought about it.

The moment went by, I heard Yagi and Kouhei's footfalls as they returned to the scene of the beginning of the battle. I snapped back into position, moving up along the wall of the house I had been slumped on.

And then I was forcefully drawn forward, right up to Levin's arm as he punched me with his amazing strength. I was forced to relive the slow and excruciating moment of pain that he put me though, the shock that broke ribs and crushed internal organs with the force. But in a second, it all disappeared like it was just a dream, pulling me forward to a standing position and Levin flying back, launched by the repetition.

Our heads snapped back to ignore Levin, and we walked backwards, as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

We continued to move backwards, surreally undoing our kill on the first of The Dead. Watching wounds seal up while they were cut open, watching Black Keys fly backwards, hilt-first, away from their target.

And finally, we continued to walk backwards until we reached the house.

Event repetition: Complete.

Time began to move forward again. Instead of walking backwards we were walking forwards, myself in the lead, and the two in the back as if we had only started our patrol.

It was a good thing they were behind me.

If they could see the way I smiled, my grin wide open as if begging for more, they would have certainly thought that I was crazy.

I wasn't entirely sure that the last part of that statement was inaccurate. And strangely, I didn't seem to mind the possibility.