Chapter 131: Stay in Formation

The air hummed with violent energy as the fifty-foot rift spun above Sector A.

Behind them, the outer wall was already secured. Guild Master Walter and his ten cured hunters stood shoulder to shoulder with their heavy tower shields planted into the rubble. Behind their iron line, void hounds snarled in vain, unable to push past the shield wall into the city.

Evren looked up at the swirling purple vortex. "Stay close," he said calmly. "We don’t know what the interior looks like."

Amber nodded, gripping the hilts of her twin dragon-bone sabers.

Zephyra adjusted the wrist-strap of her mechanical Shadow Whip-Blade. Her silver hair fluttered in the cold wind.

"Ready when you are, Chairman," Zephyra said softly.

Evren kicked off the stone rampart, and the three of them shot straight into the swirling purple tear.

—

A strange weightlessness washed over Evren as space twisted around them.

A split second later, their boots touched down on a smooth, cold surface with a crisp metallic clink.

Beneath their boots lay a sheet of polished black mirror-glass stretching out like a frozen lake. Above them was an endless pitch-black void dotted with distant purple stars.

Hundreds of giant mirrors floated in the empty space around them. Some were ten feet tall, while others towered like huge crystal monoliths. Each translucent purple mirror hovered at an odd, tilted angle.

"What is this place?" Amber asked, looking around in astonishment.

Everywhere she looked, she saw reflections of herself stretching into the distance like an infinite corridor. Beside her, infinite copies of Evren and Zephyra filled the glass walls.

"It’s a fractured dimensional space," Evren said. "Space itself shattered like glass, forming a prism."

Zephyra stepped forward, her boots tapping against the floor. As a former shadow assassin, she had spent years studying angles, reflections, and blind spots.

"Chairman," Zephyra called out in a low whisper. "Look at that tall mirror to our left."

Evren looked over. In the glass, Zephyra’s reflection lowered its hand half a second after she had already lowered hers.

"The reflections are lagging," Zephyra warned. "Some aren’t reflections at all."

Right then, a chilling scrape echoed from inside the mirrors.

SKRRRRK.

Fifteen feet ahead, a dark shadow moved inside a crystal pane... a sleek, four-legged beast made of smoky black glass with jagged purple spikes along its spine.

"Careful," Zephyra whispered, her body tensing as she tightened her grip on her whip-blade. "It’s not walking on the floor. It’s prowling inside the reflection."

"Above you, Amber!" Zephyra shouted.

In a floating mirror angled over Amber’s head, the reflection of the glass beast lunged straight down at her neck.

Amber spun around, slashing her right saber upward in a brilliant arc of solar flame.

CRASH!

Her burning blade shattered the glass into purple shards, but no monster fell. "It’s not in that pane!" Amber gasped.

SWOOSH!

From a completely different mirror behind Amber, a real claw of black glass burst out, aiming straight for her spine. The beast had attacked in one reflection to step out from another behind her. Amber was mid-swing and couldn’t twist back in time to block.

"I’ve got it," Evren said calmly, using Kinetic Flow (Predictive Sight) to track the real displacement of air currents.

BOOM!

Evren vanished, reappearing behind Amber with his hand shooting out.

SNAP!

Evren’s bare fingers locked onto the Mirror Stalker’s throat right as its claws reached Amber’s shoulder. The beast shrieked, trying to phase back into the glass, but Evren squeezed with his SS-Rank strength.

CRUNCH!

Its glass neck shattered into powder. Evren slammed the thrashing body down and crushed its chest with his heel.

The Level 58 stalker exploded into purple shards, dissolving into gray mist.

Amber lowered her blades, breathing hard. "Thanks, Evren. These things fight dirty."

"They use reflections to hide their true attack angle," Evren said. "Track the air, not the glass."

Right then, dozens of scraping noises echoed all around them.

SKRRRK! SKRRRRK!

About thirty Mirror Stalkers appeared in the glass panes, pacing back and forth inside the reflections with glowing red eyes.

"If they all strike from different panes at once, we’ll get flanked," Zephyra said, crouching low.

"Then we don’t let them hide," Evren replied calmly. "Amber, light this room up."

Amber’s eyes lit up with understanding. "Use the mirrors against them?"

"Exactly," Evren nodded. "Mirrors reflect light. Blind them."

Amber planted her feet, crossed her twin dragon-bone sabers in front of her chest, and released the full power of her S-Rank Valkyrie core.

Two massive wings of crimson-golden fire erupted from Amber’s back, expanding twelve feet wide. Pure solar mana flooded the chamber like a miniature sun bursting open in the dark void.

The blinding golden light hit the nearest floating mirrors, bouncing off the polished glass in thousands of directions at the speed of light! Within a second, the dark void turned into a blinding cage of radiant sunbeams.

SCREEEEECH!

Agonized shrieks tore through the hall.

The Mirror Stalkers could not stand the bright light reflecting off every mirror. Their shadowy cover vanished, and they fell out of the reflections onto the hard floor.

"They’re out!" Amber shouted.

"Leave the flanks to me," Zephyra said, already moving with terrifying speed.

She dashed across the smooth dark glass like a streak of silver. With a swift flick of her wrist, she released the twenty feet of razor-sharp diamond-steel wire from her Shadow Whip-Blade.

The wire wrapped around a floating crystal pillar, using the tension to whip Zephyra into a high-speed spin. As she flew past three stunned stalkers, she yanked the trigger on the grip.

SNAP!

The high-tensile wire contracted with force, slicing through the necks of all three glass beasts in a single clean sweep. Their heads detached, crashing to the floor and shattering into fragments before their bodies even hit the ground.

Zephyra landed gracefully, retracted the wire with a click, and immediately darted toward the next group.

Meanwhile, Evren walked forward through the center. Every time a blinded stalker scrambled toward him, a simple palm strike or a sweeping kick obliterated their glass bodies into dust.

Within two minutes, the entire pack of thirty Mirror Stalkers was completely wiped out.

The radiant sunlight slowly faded as Amber retracted her wings, grinning with satisfaction. The black floor was littered with thousands of glittering purple crystal shards.

Zephyra wiped a thin smudge of glass dust from her cheek, walking back to Evren’s side. "Area clear, Chairman."

"Great work, both of you," Evren said with a warm smile.

Amber looked over at Zephyra, a proud expression on her face. "That wire trick was incredible, Z. You didn’t even need mana to take down three S-Rank rift beasts."

"I spent years fighting in the dark," Zephyra replied, a rare, faint smile curving her lips. "Reflections and angles are just geometry. But thank you, Amber. Your light gave me the opening."

"We move as one," Evren said, nodding to both of them.

He looked ahead.

Now that the lesser monsters were cleared, the infinite reflections parted like glass curtains, revealing a path of crystalline bridges stretching toward the center of the void.

Beneath the narrow bridge lay an endless abyss of frozen purple stars, where a single misstep meant falling forever into empty space.

At the end of the bridge stood a colossal floating fortress made of tall, dark amethyst mirrors. It pulsed with heavy pressure that distorted the starlight around it.

THUMP.

A deep, rhythmic tremor rumbled through the glass floor beneath their boots, sounding like a massive heart beating in the darkness.

Evren narrowed his eyes. Through his hyper-perception, he could feel a suffocating vortex of S-Rank void mana swirling inside that fortress in a dense, predatory, and unstable.

He rubbed his thumb lightly brushing the silver band of his spatial ring and in a second, the five-foot Frost-Bane Cleaver materialised in his hand. "The boss is right ahead," he said, stepping firmly onto the crystal bridge. "Stay in formation. Let’s go finish this."