The chamber trembled.
Not from footsteps. Not from explosions. But from something far worse—presence.
Lazeril stood at the heart of the sanctum, robes billowing despite the still air. Black mirror runes rippled like living tattoos across the stone walls behind him. His arms were outstretched, as if welcoming an old friend back to the pit.
Opposite him, Echo descended the stone steps like a falling guillotine—measured, inevitable, lethal. His black coat fluttered behind him, and from his back, two ghostly mirrorsteel blades hovered in an unnatural orbit. They shimmered with silent fury.
"Do you feel that?" Lazeril whispered, his voice like silk sliding across a knife. "The gate. It hums for us."
Echo's face remained unreadable, but his body—gods, his body—radiated control like a ticking bomb. His eyes gleamed like shattered obsidian, face half-lit by the silver pulse of his own aura.
Echo's power was more than brute force. He controlled reflective dimensions like they were puppets on strings—dimensional weaving. At his peak, Echo could split his presence between mirrored realities, stepping through surfaces, multiplying himself through fractured timeframes, and bending physics like a child molding clay.
Where others used reflections to manipulate, he commanded them. He could disappear into a shard and reappear a mile away. He could bend your own reflection to betray you.
And Lazeril—the man molded by madness—had learned too much.
His own powers came from a corrupted evolution of Echo's teachings: Refraction binding.
Lazeril didn't step into mirrors. He shattered them and used the broken edges to stitch together cursed copies—replicas, illusions, echo-shells that obeyed him. He could weaponize fear, turn sound into fracture, and manipulate ambient light into blades. If Echo was a maestro of mirrors, Lazeril was a lunatic with a broken orchestra that still somehow played.
Suddenly, Echo flicked a finger.
One of the mirror blades snapped forward, impossibly fast.
Lazeril's lips barely twitched, and with a tilt of his head, he redirected the attack with a shimmering hand-sign. The steel sliced past him, embedding into the far wall and cratering the stone.
The air shifted again. A sonic pressure flattened the walls. The very floor beneath them cracked.
"You've grown reckless," Lazeril said, chuckling. "But you haven't lost your flair."
Echo moved.
He was everywhere. The twin blades danced around him like thoughts given form—cutting arcs of sheer energy that distorted the light. Lazeril spun his staff, summoning mirror clones from each surface in the room. They moved in unison, chanting. The runes blazed.
"I trained you," Echo murmured, low and terrifying. "You're using my tactics."
Lazeril grinned. "Then I learned from the best."
They collided.
The resulting shockwave shattered the entire sanctum. Stone burst apart. Runes flared, warped, broke. One wall collapsed entirely into dust.
Far down the hallway, Kael flinched as the explosion rocked the base. Dust rolled like a wave. He coughed and pressed his back to the wall, eyes wide.
"What the actual hell... was that?"
Through a collapsed doorway, he saw it.
Two beings. One cloaked in night, controlling the very space around him. The other—Lazeril—surrounded by dancing reflections, bending reality like a funhouse turned deadly.
Kael's jaw dropped.
"Echo's been hiding that?" he whispered.
He couldn't stop staring. The sheer majesty of the fight was terrifying. Echo wasn't just strong—he was precision wrapped in apocalypse. A conductor of a deadly orchestra.
And Lazeril wasn't far behind.
Every strike between them shattered reason. Sigils flared mid-air. Weapons clashed with soundless thunder. The room bled energy.
Echo disappeared—reappeared behind Lazeril—and kicked him across the sanctum. Lazeril bounced, laughed, and retaliated with a prism of razor-thin light.
Kael forced himself to look away.
Arlen. Focus.
He ducked into the side corridor. The chaos behind him raged like gods waging war.
---
In a quiet, locked cell, Arlen groaned.
His hands were chained above his head, wrists raw. His face was swollen from beatings, eyes nearly shut.
The door creaked.
Kael stepped in, coated in dust, breathing heavily.
Arlen blinked once. "You look like shit."
Kael rushed forward. "Takes one to know one."
He crouched, inspecting the lock. "Can you walk?"
Arlen nodded slowly. "I will walk. Even if I have to crawl."
Kael sliced the restraints with a mirror shard summoned from his palm.
He caught Arlen as he stumbled.
"They said... they needed your blood." Arlen coughed. "Something about the gate—"
"I know."
Another quake rumbled through the halls.
Arlen leaned against him, groaning. "Kael, what the actual fuck is happening? I was just vibing through senior year, and now I'm in a dungeon with a guy in cult robes who thinks you're a demigod. What the hell did I miss?!"
Kael snorted. "Honestly? I think I blinked one day and reality glitched."
"...And now we're storming mirror castles?"
Kael glanced toward the still-raging light show echoing down the corridor. "Mirror castles, warlords, secret powers, creepy reflections, very attractive psychopaths—you name it. We've got the deluxe apocalypse package."
Arlen sighed, half-laughing through a wince. "Okay. Cool. Just making sure I didn't accidentally do shrooms or something."
Kael grinned. "If this is a trip, it's got a terrible Yelp review."
Another explosion rocked the base.
They limped toward the exit together.
And far behind them, the titans continued their war