Pariellete district.
Max walked without a care in the world, hands tucked in his pockets, taking in the city like a tourist who'd already learned all its secrets and just liked visiting anyway.
A kid up ahead stumbled, his ice cream cup tipping dangerously in his hand. In the blink of an eye, Max was behind him, palm steady against the boy's shoulder, setting him upright before a single drop could hit the pavement. The boy blinked, glanced around in confusion, and kept walking as nothing had happened at all. Nobody around them had seen a thing.
Max grinned at the little ice cream shop across the street and figured he'd earned himself a reward. He bought a cup of chocolate, and just as the spoon touched his lips, something lurched in his chest. Eric was in danger. He didn't need a second warning to know that much. He dropped the cup without a second thought and ran toward Eric's district.
He made it three steps before he slammed into something that wasn't supposed to be there.
His shoulder bounced off empty air, hard enough to stagger him back a step. He raised his hand and pressed forward again, slower this time, and felt the wall take shape beneath his palm, thin and cold, as plastic wrap stretched tight over a bowl. The second he pulled his hand back, it disappeared completely, as if it had never existed.
Around him, people kept walking, in and out of shops, going about their day without a single one of them stopping or even glancing his way, as if he wasn't standing there with his hand pressed against nothing.
"Great. Looks like I'm the only lucky one trapped here," he muttered to himself, not even bothering to hide the sarcasm.
There was no danger warning going off in his head, and no one was rushing at him with a weapon. That should have been a relief, but it wasn't. If someone wanted him dead, he'd already be dead. Whoever set this up wanted him stuck here, watching, waiting, unable to do a damn thing while Eric was out there dealing with whatever this was. That thought alone made his blood boil more than any attack could have.
He pressed his palm against the barrier once more. A purple liquid, threaded through with tiny black particles, seeped out from his skin and sank into the wall like ink spreading through water. A green bubble rose to meet it from the other side. He pulled his hand back and threw a punch instead. His fist sank into the wall up to his wrist and stopped there, like he'd hit solid bone underneath skin.
"An Aura user, and from the Dimension Pathway no less," he said under his breath, eyes narrowing. "And ranked higher than me too. Just my luck."
He pulled his hand free as the green bubble sank back into the wall and vanished, as if it had never been there at all.
...
Back in the mirror room, Eric stood at the center of it all, hands clenched and ready at his sides. His eyes glowed with a bright pink energy, four downward arrows circling his small black-dot pupils.
"A domain card from the Inversion Pathway," he murmured, glancing around. "So the enemy's from that pathway too. Question is, what can they actually do?"
The room stretched out around him in every direction, walled and floored and ceilinged, covered entirely in mirror tiles, each one reflecting the space on itself until there was no telling where the room actually ended and the reflections began. It wasn't just one wall of mirrors, or four. It was above him too, and beneath his feet, and behind every tile was another tile catching the light and throwing it somewhere else. The effect should have been dizzying, endless reflections multiplying into infinity, but there was one mercy in it: nowhere in that maze of glass could he find his own reflection staring back at him. If he could see himself in a thousand directions at once, he'd have lost his sense of where he stood within seconds. His vision would have narrowed to nothing but glass and confusion.
"I am lucky I can't see my reflections." Eric couldn't help but feel glad at this moment.
The silence pressed in on him. No footsteps, no breathing but his own, nothing but the faint, hollow hum that seemed to come from the glass itself, like the room was holding its breath along with him. He stayed still, muscles coiled, eyes tracking every tile within view for the smallest shift, the faintest shadow that didn't belong.
One second passed. Then two. Then three.
His eyes suddenly moved to the movement off to his right, from a corner he hadn't been watching closely enough.
A figure stepped out from behind him, quiet as the room itself, and Eric turned just in time to get a look at her. She was young, barely out of her teens by the look of it, with silver eyes and hair the grey of lead. A bodysuit the color of the mirrors around her clung to every inch of her body, skin-tight and silver-white, leaving only her face and the upper half of her neck bare, like she'd been made to blend into this place rather than simply sent into it. Her eyebrows were drawn tight, her expression fierce and focused, and in her right hand she carried a short sword, already closing the distance toward him with the clear intention of driving it into his back.
Eric's danger premonition had become much weaker after coming into this domain, but luckily, this domain was a rank lower than his; otherwise, his premonition and intuition would have been completely neutralized, leaving him vulnerable to surprise attacks.
The moment she revealed herself, Eric was already moving. His premonition had come late, too late to give him any real warning, so he could only react once she was already closing in, but that was enough. She drove the short sword toward him, aiming to pierce straight through.
Eric swung his right leg into its path instead, meeting steel with the pink liquid coating his skin like a second layer of armor.
Her blade was coated too, a thin layer of silver liquid flecked with white particles, but the coating was thinner than his, the shell of it less solid, less certain. When the sword struck his leg, it left nothing behind but a spiderweb of cracks across the surface of his armor, nothing close to the damage she'd clearly been expecting.
Eric didn't waste the opening. He swung his right arm around, coated in the same pink liquid, aiming to catch her before she could recover, but she was already gone, her body dissolving into a reflection and slipping into the mirror tile beneath her feet like water running into a drain. He didn't let the momentum go to waste. His leg came down hard on the tile she'd vanished into, shattering it into a hundred glittering fragments across the floor. It didn't matter. The pieces pulled themselves back together within seconds, reforming into a fresh, unbroken tile as though nothing had happened at all.
He wasn't in a good position, and he knew it. The environment favored her completely; every mirror was a door she could walk through and he couldn't, every reflection was a place to hide that he had no way of reaching. He'd lost the initiative the moment this domain closed around him, and there was no getting it back through force alone. This was going to be a long game now, whether he liked it or not, and there was no use pretending otherwise. He'd learned a long time ago not to expect anyone to come running to save him. If help was coming, it would come. Until then, he only had himself to rely on, same as always.
He didn't want this to drag on any longer than it had to. The faster this ended, the better his odds of walking out of it. Escaping the domain outright had been the first thought that crossed his mind, but that door had already closed the second he'd found himself trapped in here with no way out. That left only one option worth considering: fight her, and finish it. Talking wasn't going to save him here. She hadn't come to negotiate. If she'd wanted words instead of a blade in his back, she never would have attacked him in the first place.
It might have looked like Eric had nothing going for him in that clash, but he'd walked away from the earlier clash with something valuable all the same. He'd felt it in the strength of her blade against his leg, in the thinness of her coating compared to his own. She was a rank below him. Her domain was a rank below his too. Which meant this wasn't a fight where either of them was guaranteed to die. It was a fight over time, over who ran out of it first, and between the two of them, that was always going to be her.
"And she knows it too," he thought. "That's exactly why she's not wasting a single move. Every strike she throws is aimed to end this fast, going straight for my vital points, because she doesn't have the luxury of dragging this out the way I do."
Once he understood that much, understood exactly what she needed and exactly why she was fighting the way she was, he let the thinking go and gave himself over to the fight completely.
He scanned the room, but there was no trace of her anywhere, no shift in the glass, no shadow out of place. In an environment built entirely of mirrors, she could be behind any tile in the room, and he had no way of knowing which one until she chose to show herself. But he wasn't going to give her that choice. He wasn't going to stand there and wait to be picked off whenever it suited her. He had no way to teleport out of this domain, and no way to reach Max either, not with the golden liquid cut off along with everything else this place had sealed away from him.
A pink flame burst to life across his right shoulder and died out just as fast, gone before it could even fully catch. Eric rose off the ground, floating now, eyes sweeping the room from a higher vantage point. The room looked different from up here, darker somehow, like a shadow had settled over the glass itself. In every tile he could see, distorted black figures stood staring back at him, twisted, human-shaped things with no faces worth the name, and it felt like every single one of them was looking straight at him no matter which way he turned.
Somewhere among all those thousands of black shapes, one figure stood out in yellow, restless, shifting from tile to tile, never quite settling anywhere long enough to be caught, and never quite looking his way either.
That was her. It had to be.
Undeterred, Eric kept going, smashing and kicking every tile within reach, one after another, refusing to let up even as each one reformed itself right in front of him like nothing had touched it at all. It didn't matter how hard he hit, or how many he destroyed in a row. The glass always came back whole. He was burning through his strength for absolutely nothing, and somewhere in the back of his mind, he knew it, but he didn't stop.
From within the tiles, the girl watched him work himself into exhaustion, and even she couldn't make sense of it. There was no strategy she could see in what he was doing, no method, nothing but a man throwing everything he had at glass that wouldn't stay broken. It didn't look like a plan. It looked like desperation.
Eventually Eric dropped back to the ground, breathing hard, sweat running down the side of his face. He wiped it away with the back of his left hand and stood there for a moment, chest rising and falling, scanning the room again like he was trying to find something he'd already lost track of.
That was the opening she'd been waiting for.
"There it is," she thought, a flicker of excitement cutting through her focus. After years of training, years of waiting for a real mission, and here it finally was, unfolding right in front of her exactly the way she'd hoped it would. She wasn't about to let a moment like this slip past her.
She waved her hand around as multiple reflections of her formed around her, looking exactly like her with the same short swords in their hands. She coated each short sword with her reflections in the same silver liquid and sent them out to attack Eric from all directions.
Eric saw every reflection clone coming at him. The first one came close and slashed at him; Eric grabbed its left arm and punched its face, making it disappear into nothingness. To save himself from the second clone, which was coming to stab him from behind, he did a backflip and, using his power, was able to stay in the air for a few more seconds. He grabbed the head of the second clone and smashed it into the ground. For the third, he made it fall by kicking its leg, and for the fourth, he uppercut it. However, what was draining was not their strength but their number, which seemed never-ending.
Seeing Eric distracted, the girl decided to finish her job once and for all.
Every reflection of Eric that the mirrors had ever caught came pouring out all at once, tearing free from the glass like something had finally let them loose. They weren't like her clones, calm and controlled, moving with purpose and intent. These things came at him like animals, feral and starving, snarling toward their only target with a hatred in their eyes that made no sense for creatures that had never lived a day outside a mirror. They looked at him like he'd taken something from them, like he'd torn their families apart with his own hands, and now it was finally their turn to make him pay for it.
In the middle of all that chaos, the girl slipped one more reflection into the mix, indistinguishable from the rest, and kept working, spinning out clone after clone of herself while she tracked his every move from the cover of the crowd.
Eric fought through it, cutting down her clones one after another as they came at him, but from the corner of his eye he could see the rest of it building, hundreds of copies of his own face rushing toward him with murder in their eyes. His stomach dropped. Mirror wraiths. He'd never been able to see his own reflection in this place, not once, but somehow he could see these. Somehow, now that they wanted to kill him, his reflection had found a way to look back.
His premonition screamed at him, relentless, refusing to let up for even a second, but he forced himself to ignore it anyway, to look straight through the wraiths like they weren't even there and keep his focus locked on the clones instead. It was the only choice that made any sense to him in that moment, even if every instinct in his body was telling him otherwise.
It didn't take long for the wraiths to catch up to him. They tore into him from every side, teeth and claws and every twisted version of his own hands raking across his skin, leaving him bleeding from a dozen different places at once. He staggered under it, confusion written across his face as he spun around trying to track an attack he'd told himself not to see, and that confusion cost him. One of the girl's clones found the opening it needed and drove its blade straight into his left side.
The wound didn't bleed. It didn't even stay flesh. His abdomen began to turn to glass right where the blade had struck, spreading outward from the wound, and the pain that came with it was unlike anything he'd felt yet.
From a distance, the girl watched him stumble through the wraiths, confusion written all over his face, and something clicked into place. He couldn't see them. That was it; that was the whole reason he kept getting torn apart by attacks he wasn't even trying to dodge.
A grin spread across her face. One more advantage in her pocket, on top of everything else already working in her favor. She'd been warned before this mission, told more than once to be careful with this one, to not underestimate him no matter how the fight looked. Looking at him now, bleeding and disoriented, she couldn't help but feel a little insulted on his behalf. So much for that warning.
In her head, she was already past this moment, already picturing herself walking back and reporting a clean kill, already hearing the praise that would come with it. That image alone was enough to make up her mind. She wasn't going to let her clones finish this for her. She wanted to be the one who ended it, and she wanted it done fast enough that she'd still have time to disappear before anyone came looking.
She broke into a run, closing the distance in seconds, blade ready for the final strike.
And then, just as she raised her arm to bring it down, every alarm in her body went off at once. Her premonition tore through her like something physical, sudden and violent, the kind of warning that didn't whisper but screamed. Death, close enough to touch. Fear she hadn't felt once since stepping into this domain came crashing in all at the same moment.
She looked up at his face, and Eric was already looking back at her.
The smile that met her wasn't the confused, panicked expression she'd been watching for the last several minutes. It was small, and it was calm, and it was exactly the kind of smile a hunter wears the instant his prey finally steps into the trap he's spent the whole fight setting. He held her gaze for a moment longer, unhurried, like he had all the time in the world now.
"Got you," he said quietly.
His right hand rose as he spoke, middle finger and thumb pressing against each other.
The snap cracked through the air, sharp and clean, and the moment it did, an invisible weight slammed down over the entire room, pressing everything, everyone, flat toward the ground. The girl tried to bolt for the nearest mirror tile on instinct, desperate to slip into the glass and disappear, but the pink liquid still clinging to her from their earlier clash had other plans. It caught hold of her the second the gravity spiked, dragging her down before she could so much as touch the mirror's surface, and whatever ability let her turn to reflection died with it.
The pressure kept building, and her body couldn't keep up with it.
"Ahhh!" A gut-wrenching, shrill scream tore out of her before she could stop it, raw and involuntary, as she felt her bones start to give way beneath the weight, splintering into dust from the inside. Her molars cracked next, shattering one after another in her mouth. Blood began to well up from her nose, from her ears, from the corners of her eyes, until her whole vision washed over in red and she couldn't tell anymore what she was even looking at.
Around him, the wraiths went with her, every last one of them, the same crushing pressure snuffing them out before they could even manage a final sound. One moment they were still tearing at him, feral and endless, and the next there was nothing left of them at all, gone as quietly as they'd come.
Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the pressure let go.
She dropped to her knees, mouth hanging open, eyes rolled halfway back in her head, and for a moment she couldn't do anything but kneel there and shake. Golden liquid flecked with silver began to leak out from somewhere inside her, working its way over her wounds and sealing the worst of them first, the ones that would have killed her if left alone even a few seconds longer.
Eric reached under his arm and drew the revolver from its holster, unhurried, and walked the short distance over to where she knelt. He stopped in front of her, raised the gun, and pressed it against her forehead.
The revolver barked once, twice, three times, the sound splitting through the silence of the mirror room like thunder trapped in glass.
Bang!
The first bullet met her defenses head-on, the silver-white liquid coating her skin reacting on pure survival instinct even through her half-conscious haze, catching the shot and turning it away before it could touch her. But Eric hadn't fired it to kill. The bullet hung in the air for a heartbeat after the deflection, spinning, correcting itself, and shot forward again on a path of its own, burying itself cleanly into her left knee. She hadn't even seen it coming. She hadn't been given the chance to.
Bang!
The second bullet slammed into the same weakened coating, and though it didn't break through, it left the shell of her defense hairline-cracked and barely holding, straining under a pressure it hadn't been built to survive twice.
Bang!
The third shattered what was left. The coating gave out entirely, and the bullet finished the job, striking true. It wasn't enough to kill her, not quite, but it didn't need to be. It only needed to remind her exactly who she was dealing with.
Her eyes fluttered open, awareness dragging its way back into them, and the first thing she saw was Eric standing over her, revolver still raised, utterly unbothered by everything he'd just done to her. She looked up at him with as much venom as she could still manage, disdain burning through the pain, though she had no one to blame for it but herself. She'd walked into his trap with her eyes wide open and her guard fully down, so certain of her own advantage that she never once considered she might be the one being hunted.
There was nothing left to do but run.
She called on what remained of her strength, the golden liquid answering her, and teleported straight up to the ceiling, already reaching for the nearest mirror, already trying to slip into the glass and vanish before he could touch her again.
She never made it.
The moment she reached for the reflection, she felt it, the strange resistance where there should have been none, the ability simply refusing to answer her call. She looked down at her own shoulder and found it wreathed in pink flame, burning without smoke, without heat that made any physical sense, eating away at whatever thread of power she'd been trying to use to escape.
Slowly, she lowered her eyes to the floor below.
Eric stood there, right hand raised toward her, expression carved from stone, colder than anything she'd faced all night. He hadn't moved from where he stood. He hadn't needed to. The fight had ended the moment she stepped into his domain, and some small, breaking part of her understood now that it always had.
Strangely, there was no panic left in her. Only a quiet kind of stillness, the kind that settles in once a person finally stops fighting the truth in front of them. She was going to die here, in a room full of glass, at the hands of someone she'd been sent to kill without ever really knowing him. And somehow, knowing that, she felt calmer than she had any right to.
There had been so much she still wanted. Small things, mostly. Places she'd never gotten around to seeing. A life outside of missions and training halls, one she'd always told herself would come later, once this was over, once she'd proven herself. She thought of all of it now, all at once, the way people say your life is supposed to flash before your eyes at the very end, and found that hers wasn't much of a life at all yet. Just the beginning of one, cut off before it had really started.
If there was anything close to regret in her, it wasn't fear of dying. It was that she'd been the one to let it happen. She'd been careless. She'd let her guard down against a man she'd been warned about more than once, and now she understood exactly why those warnings had been given.
"He let me see him panic," she thought, the pieces settling into place far too late to matter now. "He let me watch him waste himself smashing tiles that meant nothing, let me think he was running out of options. And when I finally believed I had him, he let me believe he couldn't see the wraiths either, drew me in close enough to finish it himself."
A tired, humorless breath almost escaped her. "I walked right into it. Every step of it, and I never once saw the shape of the trap until I was already standing inside it."
Her thoughts drifted, slower now, further away from the pain and the pressure still building around her skull. She thought of her mother's face, the last time she'd seen it, the promise she'd made before ever taking this job.
"I'm sorry. I couldn't keep it after all." The words felt distant even in her own mind, like they belonged to someone else already. "Maybe I'll get to tell you that myself soon enough."
Below her, Eric's hand began to close, slow and deliberate, fingers curling inward like he was crushing something fragile in his palm. The pressure in her skull rose with every inch his hand moved, tightening, tightening, until there was no more room left for thought at all.
His hand closed fully.
And then there was nothing but silence, and the soft, wet sound of glass tiles catching what was left.
Her head gave way all at once, the pressure finally finding nowhere left to go, and what was left of her collapsed to the floor a moment later, still and silent in a way the room itself seemed to absorb without protest.
The domain didn't wait long after that. It folded in on itself, glass and silence and all of it collapsing down into a single card marked with the image of a broken mirror as the card burned at the edges until there was nothing left of it but ash, carried off on a gentle wind.