Grimaldi: Allies from the Night

Chapter One

Death terrifies Kaia more than anyone. Not in the simple, instinctive way most people fear it, but in a deeply personal, almost intimate way—like something she has already met too many times to ever unlearn its shape. No matter how exhausted she becomes from living, no matter how many nights she spends staring at ceilings she can no longer trust to remain permanent, dying never becomes a solution to end her suffering. It is not an escape. It is a return. A reset. A punishment she cannot refuse.

At least, not until after the world ended, or rather, after it changed.

She has experienced death not once, not twice, not even thrice, but countless times. The number itself no longer holds meaning. It is not something she can count anymore, only something she can feel—like scars layered over scars until the original wound is no longer visible beneath them. The causes were always different. Sometimes it was monsters tearing through her chest. Sometimes betrayal came from people she trusted. Sometimes it was her own trembling hands pulling the trigger too late or too early. But every death, regardless of form, carved the same thing into her mind and soul: pain that never faded.

Pain that remembered her even when she tried to forget.

In her first death, she lost her sanity before her life. The world around her had twisted too quickly, too violently, and her mind simply… broke. She remembered screaming at things that were no longer there, begging for systems that refused to listen, begging for a reality that did not care. In the second, another player ruined her carefully laid plan, and what should have been a controlled escape turned into a m******e—blood everywhere, names she had memorized disappearing one by one. In the third, she killed herself. Not out of bravery. Not out of cowardice. But out of desperation, believing she could force a reset that would finally make sense of the chaos.

After that, everything became harder to recall, as if her memories were slowly eroding at the edges, like ink bleeding through wet paper. Faces blurred. Timelines overlapped. Conversations repeated in different orders. Kaia no longer understood why she kept regressing when she could not even finish the first quest, no matter how hard she tried. It felt like she was trapped inside an endless loop designed without a key, a door that only opened inward into more suffering.

And yet she always returned.

However, all the suffering she had endured—every scream, every broken breath, every moment of helplessness—was nothing compared to the pain she felt every time her loved ones died in front of her. That was the part that never dulled. That was the part that stayed sharp no matter how many resets passed.

She had watched them die again and again until the idea of permanence itself became foreign. Faces she grew to trust would eventually become memories she was forced to relive from different angles: sometimes as a witness, sometimes as the cause, sometimes as someone who arrived one second too late. She began to think she was cursed—not in a poetic sense, but in a mechanical one, like the system itself had flagged her existence as an error that refused correction.

Still, she had one advantage.

She knew the future.

Or at least, fragments of it.

And she believed—no, she forced herself to believe—that knowing was enough to change it.

(⚠) WARNING

[ YOU DIED ]

(⚠) WARNING

YOU FAILED.

(⚠) WARNING

PUNISHMENT LOADING...

(⚠) WARNING

SYSTEM ERROR!

(⚠) WARNING

SYSTEM ERROR!

The alarms echoed inside her mind without stopping, not as sound but as pure sensation—like metal scraping against bone, like electricity crawling under her skin. Kaia clutched her head in agony, nails digging into her scalp as if she could physically hold herself together. She screamed, but the sound never felt like it left her body properly, as though even her voice was being intercepted, rewritten, delayed.

Her breathing shattered into uneven fragments. In, out, broken, incomplete.

It felt like her body was being pulled apart and dragged somewhere beyond her control, stretched across dimensions she did not have the vocabulary to understand. That sensation was familiar—the same feeling she always experienced when passing through the system’s portal—but familiarity did not soften it. If anything, it made it worse. Because it meant she would feel it again. And again. And again.

For a brief, terrifying moment, she thought about giving up.

Not in the dramatic sense. Not as a declaration. But as a quiet surrender. A thought that slipped through the cracks of her endurance: Why must she suffer like this? What does the system even want from her? Was she a test subject? A bug? A punishment for something she could no longer remember doing?

Then, suddenly, everything stopped.

The pain vanished so abruptly it felt like it had never existed at all. Her lungs filled with air without resistance. Her heartbeat stabilized. The alarms faded like distant echoes being swallowed by an ocean.

Kaia let out a weak, broken breath.

“I really hate dying,” she whispered, her voice barely more than a thought.

There was a place where there was nothing at all.

No sound.

No light.

No scent.

No warmth.

No direction.

No time that could be measured.

It was a void that existed inside the universe yet outside the world itself, as if reality had folded inward and forgotten to include meaning. Kaia found herself there once again.

She muttered that she hated this place too, her voice dissolving immediately into the emptiness. Her eyes scanned the endless darkness, searching out of habit rather than hope. There was nothing to see. There never was. The void did not change. It did not respond. It simply was.

This was the place where her soul always returned after death.

Or after failure.

Or after the system decided she had reached the end of another attempt.

Her hand moved slowly to her forehead as she tried to process what had just happened. This death felt different from the others. Not in pain—it was still unbearable—but in execution. It had been clean. Efficient. Final in a way that felt deliberate rather than chaotic.

Most importantly, it was the most traumatizing death she had experienced so far… yet strangely painless in comparison.

That contradiction unsettled her more than agony ever could.

She had never encountered that woman before.

But when she finally did, that woman killed her without hesitation.

No warning. No hesitation. No dialogue that might have hinted at mercy or curiosity. Just a single moment where Kaia’s existence was acknowledged—and then erased.

Kaia exhaled softly, the sound almost lost in the void.

She needed to avoid that woman at all costs in her next regression.

Or learn how to kill her first.

Either outcome required survival long enough to try.

“Status Window.”

A holographic screen flickered into existence in front of her, cutting through the darkness with sterile blue light. Lines of data scrolled rapidly, organizing her life, her death, and everything in between into readable fragments the system insisted were “helpful.”

Kaia watched silently.

There she was.

Lying lifeless.

Her body unmoving in a world that continued without her consent.

Beside her, Gail was crying.

Kaia’s chest tightened. Even though she knew this was already past, already recorded, already locked into inevitability, it still hurt. She wanted to reach out and wipe Gail’s tears away. She wanted to tell her it would be okay. She wanted to rewrite the scene entirely, to remove the ending before it could happen.

But she could not.

Like every previous loop, the first quest had failed again.

And her friends—no, her companions, her anchors, the only proof that she was still human—had died mercilessly at the hands of those monsters.

Kaia clenched her fists so tightly her nails pressed into her palms until it almost hurt enough to ground her.

“I won’t die anymore,” she said quietly.

Her voice trembled, but something steadier lived beneath it. Something stubborn. Something unwilling to vanish.

“And I will save everyone.”

The void did not respond.

It never did.

(❕) ALARM

Time until the 100th resurrection: 00:01

(❕) ALARM

Transporting the soul of [PLAYER: KAIA GRIMALDI] back to Dimension 0801, Earth 0399. The player is required to close their eyes during the process.

Kaia closed her eyes.

Not because she wanted to, but because resistance had never changed anything.

Immediately, pain surged through her body once more. It was not physical in the traditional sense—it was existence itself being rewritten. Her limbs felt as if they were being unstitched from reality, thread by thread, while her consciousness was pulled in the opposite direction, stretched across impossible distances.

She screamed again.

But this time, she endured it in silence too.

There was no escape. Only transition.

After what felt like an eternity compressed into a single breath, the pain gradually disappeared. The tearing sensation stopped. The pressure released. Silence returned like a mercy she did not trust.

Kaia had come back to time once again.

(❕) ALARM

Congratulations on your 100th retry. Good luck, player.

The message lingered longer than the others, almost mockingly polite.

Kaia slowly opened her eyes as the familiar system interface faded from her vision. Her breathing was uneven, her body still remembering pain like an echo trapped in muscle memory. For a moment, she did not move. She simply existed, staring at nothing, confirming she was truly back.

Then—

7:00 AM.

The morning bell of reality.

She was already running through a hallway filled with students.

Everything looked normal.

Too normal.

Laughter echoed in careless bursts. Footsteps blended together into a steady rhythm of ordinary life. Conversations overlapped—complaints about homework, gossip about classmates, plans for lunch. The world pretended nothing was wrong, as if it had never ended, as if it had never reset, as if it had never swallowed her whole a hundred times over.

Kaia adjusted her uniform as she moved forward, forcing herself to breathe steadily. Her hair swayed with each hurried step, strands sticking slightly to her skin from sweat that had no reason to exist in a peaceful morning. She looked like any other student rushing to class.

But her eyes were different.

They carried exhaustion that did not belong to someone her age. Exhaustion that belonged to someone who had already lived through endings too many times to count.

She could not fail again.

Not this time.

It was now or never.

Because she already knew what would happen.

And knowing was both her weapon…

and her curse.