The daylight was harsh, sudden. Peter had in one instant been in the murky darkness of the White Whale fog and then found himself standing in front of Emilia. She was one step above him on the carriage steps and it almost made up for their difference in height. The glint of sun off of her silver hair was almost blinding to him.

He remembered this exact moment. In fact, he remembered it twice. He had only just been showing Aunt May a photo of the girl in the picture that she had forgotten and now he was standing in the very spot that happened only minutes after it had occurred.

"Please don't make this more difficult for me than it already is."

He knew the words before Emilia said them and he knew what came next. She touched him in her very deliberate and proper way, her guard was still up. Though that faltered when she brushed her hand over his cheek.

"May the spirits bless and protect you."

Those were the words, Peter guessed, that must have done whatever this was. Either knowingly or unknowingly Emilia had bound him to this moment, like a Save State in a video game. Something she had done had granted him do-overs to get this right.

Peter wasn't sure what the exact win condition for this whole thing would be though.

Her lips, when she spoke, had brushed over his skin and they lingered there. He didn't remember this lasting for so long, but he also couldn't have reacted this way before. In piecing things together he was actively changing the course this day took.

The first time he had gone on trying to do what he was told and he just remembered May and Emilia dead. Rem and Ram too. And everyone in the village near the manor.

The second time he wasn't quite sure what had happened. He had been back at school—

Sure you know what happened, your Spider-Sense went berserk because of whatever was happening to you.

"Um, thank you for that," Peter said. "But—I can't let you go," he said looking at Emilia and then May.

"Peter, it's really sweet. I know you're worried about me, but I'll be okay," Emilia said with a reassuring smile that told him already that she wasn't experiencing this day over. He blinked back the thoughts of his Aunt crumpled over on the floor and holding a lifeless child who had her eyes gouged out.

"It's not that," Peter said.

He jumped onto the carriage, feeling the vehicle rock beneath his feet and causing the driver to glance back at him and the rest of the eyes in the garden to turn upward and look at him.

"I can't explain how, but something is coming," Peter said. There was a tightness in his chest with a pang of something else. "Look, I lived this day already and died and um, most of you died in one way or another too. Uh, uh, May I saw you holding Petra and—and Rem and Ram were dead too. All because the Witch Cultists—"

Suddenly it was quiet, the world around him had gone still with time locked in the single moment. Peter couldn't move, his whole body felt as if it were just not there. Though he could still see his hand from where he was gesturing frozen at the side of his vision.

Purple and black smoke filtered in through the front gate of the mansion and rolled over the walls hiding the street and rising up overhead to blot out the sky.

For some reason Peter could still move his eyes and he looked around in a panic, eager to know what was happening.

Then he saw her—a ghostly black figure that was made of writhing smoke with tendrils licking at the air around. Her eyes were little more than white voids that were far too big for her face.

If his lips could move to speak, they would have said her name because he already knew it well. It was the name that others were afraid to say above a hushed whisper.

Satella.

She hovered up to him. Her wispy, smoke body spreading to become larger right before his very eyes. He didn't try to avert his gaze from her blank eyes.

He could hear her now, the familiar chant started as an utterance and grew in volume and intensity.

"I love you. I love you. I love you. I love you…"

Something tightened inside of Peter's chest, he would have gasped if he could still move his lips or had need for what his lungs were doing. The grip on the thing deep inside of him grew ever tighter and finally where was a pop. Peter was allowed to taste the warm, metallic blood. He could feel his life draining away as he faded into the black.

Peter sat up with a start, his body feeling light and sluggish. Slowly he moved to sit up rubbing at his face. It was then that he realized the Iron Spider mask was covering his face, so he let the mask slip away from him to unfurl until it was down around his neck. The sky was a dusty red as he looked around and he remembered the massive metal structures that towered over a craterous lake set into the red dirt.

He was back on Titan looking out over the colossal buildings left behind by a long gone civilization. It was the same vista where had Thanos had stood when he spoke of his plan and the lost of his home-world to bureaucrats who refused to act in the face of oncoming doom. Though it might have been more that the plan he set forth was a horror they couldn't imagine.

There was a another figure that had taken Thanos's place now in an odd juxtaposition of his two lives. He at first thought that it was Emilia, but the stance which she held was different than what he would think of as one that Emilia would take.

He wanted to say her name, but he wasn't quick enough to really speak the word before she started to talk.

"I don't know what this place is," Satella said now, her silver hair billowing out behind on the wind. "I've taken it from the vague hints of places in your memories—this isn't part of your home, is it?"

"No," Peter said getting to his feet. "It's the place where I first died."

Satella closed her eyes, but still turned her head to look at the ancient ruins of a civilization that was far too advanced in a way that she had very little understanding of to decipher. "I see things, but a lot of it is unclear—your memories they don't make sense," she said finally.

"You really shouldn't go looking through someone's memories without—you know without their permission," Peter said.

The Witch turned to him, a look of shock on her face and for a brief moment he could see something of Emilia in her. Peter had to wonder if Satella had ever really been reprimanded—he would bet that if she had that it had been hundreds of years since anyone had spoken to her like this. Part of him thought to rescind the words, try to take them back before he drew her ire. Before he could she answered him.

"It's not something that I can control," Satella said.

"There could be, like, private stuff up there. Like really strange stuff," Peter said. He tried to avoid thinking about anything of the type. Really, he tried to avoid thinking about anything at all for fear that she would pick up on it. He couldn't be sure how it worked, how much she could see and the like.

Satella turned to look at the collapsing building over her shoulder, she kept her eyes locked on that for long enough that Peter calmed down. He wasn't sure why she was looking there and after a while he decided to ask her about what had happened to him. "Did you bring me here?"

She didn't answer him, preferring to step down from the high point where she had been standing and walk along the edge of the cliffs. Peter went to move closer to her and he couldn't feel himself walk, it was more like his body was a camera gliding through a space until he got slightly less distant.

"What happened to me?" He asked.

"You died," Satella said plainly.

Peter grimaced. "And you're bringing me back all of these times?"

Satella turned to look at him, her purple eyes laden with tears. He didn't quite understand the feeling, but he knew it well. He wanted to protect her, to be there for her to run. The attraction felt supernatural, the onset of it had such a ferocity that he had to believe it couldn't have come from his own mind. Was this one of the powers of the Witch of Envy or had he become so smitten with Emilia that even facing her doppelgänger had become too complicated.

"How is it that I can come back to life? How many times is it going to work?" Peter asked.

Satella put her finger to her lips as if to shush him. Her silver hair caught a strong breeze from behind and in a massive torrent of air the world around them turned black taking Satella with it. Within the darkness nothing had shape or form. There was no light, but still Peter could perceive something, almost like a darker darkness writhing against everything around him.

On the area below him, on what he would have called the floor if he still felt that he had form, a kind of shadow appeared. It was a space that was darker, solid, and clearly defined. The shadow grew until a fissure opened up beneath Peter, forking and spreading out from that one spot until the area it covered was so massive that portions of the darkness collapsed in.

Within the collapsed space was another void, this one deeper and darker than the current space with one difference: there were stretch marks in the walls of reality itself. Purple varicose lines rippled through the place around Peter before he was yanked down through the expanse to return to the familiar scene.

Light, more jarring than ever now that he had been in a place where the very idea of light seemed so distant. He couldn't quite remember what he had seen or what had happened, but there was something left over from his time in that place. The vague hint of an idea that it wasn't Satella that was causing him to loop in time like this and that the white eyed visage that assailed him at times was distinctly different than Emilia's doppelgänger.

Peter fought the urge to raise his arm and shield himself from the light of the sun.

"Please don't make this more difficult for me than it already is," came Emilia's words.

And he was right back where he had started.

Think, think. This is a puzzle, you like puzzles.

Despite being in the middle of the large planning meeting with all of the others who were taking part in the White Whale Hunt, Peter was mostly concentrating on how he was going to deal with the issue of his Save State ability. He assumed, at least he hoped, that the fact that he had not completed the task that had been set out in front of him meant that he had more of these Save State resets left.

Ricardo was talking now, Peter remembered the sentiment from his first loop, but he couldn't concentrate on the words.

The real question in his mind was how why had the last of his resets been triggered. Sure, the smoke thingy had killed him, but he didn't know whether it was because he tried to talk about his Save State or because he tried to deviate from the the day.

This could be like some kind of play. I act out my role, I do what's needed and then I make it through?

If that was the case when was the right time to deviate or improvise. He let Roswaal and Emilia go back to the manor, because he didn't see any way to stop them without revealing either that something was happening to him or having that smoke creature murder him again. Acting out what he would have done originally is what had brought him to this very place. He had died in the mansion, frozen to death by…what he thought might have been Puck. He would have to set that aside to worry about later.

The attack on the mansion and the town, the White Whale—this time there was even more at play.

"Everything that we have so far says that the big boy is going to make its appearance here in the next few days, so we solve the puzzle or we kiss our chance goodbye," Ricardo said, his palm down flat against the large map in the center of the table. He spread his fingers out to emphasize his point .

"By all accounts, this might be an incomplete picture of the Whale's movements even in recent years," Wilhelm said.

Oh, right.

"I know where the White Whale is going to be," he said. Sure, the time that he had died because of the White Whale he couldn't see their location, but before he died the first time Rem had pointed out that the fog had been spotted along the route back toward Roswaal's domain. It was because of that fog that they were forced to take the much longer way around.

All eyes in the room were on him. He had to think of some reason fast.

Come on, Parker, you already know the answer just work the question backwards. Solve for X.

He glanced down at the map, eyeing the route that he had taken the first time that they had ever gone from the capital to the manor. Past Fugel's Tree and into Roswaal's domain. Looking at it with the definite answer, he could see the solution laid out before him now. He might have even considered it before, but the uncertainty of it all made him reluctant to say anything for certain.

He grabbed up a pencil from the table, working the math out in a number system that no one save for Steve had a chance of understanding. He leaned out to draw an arrow at the route to Roswaal's manor.

"It should have been more obvious from the start," Peter said. "We guessed that these, um, White Whale attacks weren't random." He could also say for certainty that the Whale hadn't moved from loop to loop. So it was following the same orders and given path that it had followed the first loop.

"The Roswaal domain?" Crusch said.

Peter nodded. "The Witch Cult wants something to do with Emilia, we think they also control the White Whale. So they cut the Roswaal domain off from any kind of assistance, unless there's another fast route to get there, and then they attack while Emilia and everyone else around her suspect nothing."

Ricardo stared at Peter. "Look at the big brain on you, Pete," he said.

Steve shook his head. "I'm pretty shocked that you pieced all of that together," he looked over Peter's work clearly in a state of shock. "The only issue is that we don't know when it will happen."

That was one thing that Peter hadn't considered: the exact time. But it might have been because it was one thing that he already had an easy answer for. When he had gone out that night and left Aunt May alone in the carriage his suit's HUD had displayed the time nestled down in the corner of his vision. He couldn't give and exact, exact time. But he remembered the last time that he saw the clock it was reading around 3:10 PM. All of his stuff was still set to Eastern Standard Time, he had no real reason to change it and there were no cell towers here to do it for him.

Given the time different between what his clock was doing and what the time was in this world he had to guess that it would be tomorrow night that they needed to be in place by. The fight would come in the early morning hours.

Which coincided with what Rem had said about the the fog. The Whale would have moved into place before she got any warning to make sure no one would be able to call for help, Peter guessed. He had to wonder if the Witch Cult knew about what Rem and Ram could do?

Peter pulled his phone out of his pocket, he would need to charge it for sure before too long. "Remember the Metia I had earlier that took the…memory?" Peter said with wavering confidence. "It's because of this that I know the time that the White Whale will come—we're going to need to be in place near Flugel's Tree tomorrow night if we're to catch it off guard."

The old man Wilhelm stiffened up, his shoulders and back pulling back so that he suddenly looked taller and younger despite his white hair. His blue eyes were ablaze with something, Peter could feel them burning through him.

It was Mimi that interrupted things. "Wow, Peter is a genius, maybe he should be teaching Mimi," she said, bouncing up and down now.

Peter absently rubbed at his head. "It's really all just dumb luck," he said with a smile.

That was when he noticed Crusch staring at him, he met her gaze and held it for a moment. There was something intimidating about her, but it kind of gave Peter a sense that maybe things could go well.

"It sound like we have roughly thirty hours to make ourselves ready," Crusch said, her eyes still focused on Peter. "We've got one shot at this—but fate has afforded us a chance to strike true. It's all thanks to Peter here that we could discern the movements of the White Whale, but from here on out we're depending on each other. If that breaks down we'll surely die, but starting right now we're no longer citizens of the Kingdom of Lugnica or the Kararagi City States or even from the Emilia, Hoshin, or my own entourage—we're people of this world that have been oppressed too long by the vile mabeast known as the White Whale," Crusch said.

"And we're ending its reign." Crusch added. There were a rousing cheer from most in the room.

Steve nodded to Peter. "That's a good speech."

"Yeah, good speech," Peter said.

The group started to disperse and as Peter expected Wilhelm sought him out. "Excuse me young man," he said.

"Yes, sir—um, uh, what is it?" Peter asked.

"I just wanted to pay you the sincerest gratitude for what you have done here by giving this old man to the chance to deliver vengeance to the demonic monster that stole his wife away from him all of those years ago." He pressed a fist to his suit lapel clenched tight, the determined gaze on his face seemed more set in on what it had to do than it had before. Peter was kind of worried.

"I'm glad that I could help," Peter said.

Wilhelm bowed toward Peter and made his exit from the room. Peter made his way over to where Steve was talking to Ricardo. "Hey Steve, I think—I think we need to keep an eye on Mister Wilhelm out there. I remember him saying that the White Whale took his wife, but I think he is planning to join her. If you know what I mean."

Ricardo laughed. "You must not have seen him fight before," he said straining to breathe. "Sword Demon Wilhelm Astrea—the Butcher of Buckthorn—they didn't give him all of those names because he lost a lot of battles."

Crusch must have been listening in because she was right next to Peter in that moment commenting. "I'll assure you that Wilhelm is more than up to this challenge—especially with the group we have backing him up," Crusch said.

Peter nodded to her and Ricardo. "I had some devices I wanted to try out—I was thinking that we might be able to hook the White Whale from the ground with something and possibly tether it to one spot to make it easier to hit."

Crusch touched her chin, her yellow eyes moving side to side as she considered his words. "I would like to see this. The one advantage that the thing has is that it could stay out of our reach once there is any trouble for it."

"I'll get to work on it," Peter said. He wondered if he should tell her that it was Wade's idea. Best not to introduce that idea since it was an entirely different life when he had gotten the suggestion.

"Miss Crusch, can I ask you a favor?" Steve said.

"What is it?"

"I need to borrow Bucky and Sam for a little bit," Steve said.

Crusch sighed. "I would really like to ask what for since we're already running short on time here."

"I just need to get someone, but I think that if I tell you who you're really not going to like it."