Free Web NovelChapter 31: Ruinspiral Point, Shared Zone
Aidan moved before the blade finished rising.
He didn’t meet it. He wasn’t going to trade blows with something whose stats climbed every second he wasted.
He needed the thing distracted, blind, and dead. In that order. In seven seconds.
’Second one’s gone.’ His mind went cold and fast. ’Buy time. Go dark. Build the kill.’
He splurged his Mana without a shred of restraint.
Divine-10 Health gave him a reservoir his weak Attack could never drain, and for once he opened the tap all the way. Blood energy and wind and lightning poured out of him at the same instant.
Six copies of himself tore into being around the clearing.
Blitzer clones, stitched from Attraction and Wind and a skin of blood, each one wearing his face and his coat and his lazy grin. They scattered the moment they formed, sprinting in six directions across the petal-lit grass.
’Two down. Eight seconds.’
The Warden’s head snapped toward the nearest clone.
It couldn’t tell which was real. Six Aidans, all moving, all flaring the same aura, all shouting the same taunts. The monster’s certainty cracked into confusion for the first time since it walked out of the light.
It lunged at one copy and cut it in half. The clone burst into blood mist and wind.
But another was already behind it, and another to its flank, and the Warden had to turn, and turn again, its climbing Speed spent chasing ghosts.
’Three.’
While it chased, the real Aidan wrapped himself in camouflage.
He didn’t have his mask. He’d left it with Solenne. So he built the concealment from scratch, out of his own aspects, the way he built everything now.
He wove wind into a shell of dead, silent air, folded his aura down to nothing with sheer control, and stepped sideways into the drifting petals where the blue glow blurred his outline. No sound. No presence. Just another shift in the falling light.
The Warden spun, blade flashing, and shredded a second clone. Then a third. Its stats were monstrous now, four seconds of stacking making it faster and heavier with every breath.
It didn’t matter how strong it got if it never found him.
’Four seconds. Three clones left. Three seconds till I move.’
Hidden in the glow, Aidan built the technique.
He’d never made this one before. He was making it right now, on the clock, the way he made all his best work, out of aspects and need and no time to be careful.
He reached into his Power Bond, into everything the pacts had given him, and started stacking.
Blood, for the core. Bleed, to open the wound. Nether, to rot whatever it touched from the inside. Spiral Flow and Spin, to compress the whole thing tighter and tighter into a single screaming point. Attraction, last, so that once it flew it could not miss.
’Five.’
The Mana cost was obscene. He paid it and didn’t blink.
He wove the aspects into a lance the length of his arm, black and crimson and violet, spinning so fast it hummed, a spear of pure decay wrapped in blood and drawn to its target like a magnet to iron.
He gave it a name in the half-second he had left, because he always did.
’Ruinspiral Point.’
The Warden killed the last clone.
It stood alone in the center of the clearing, blade dripping light, stats stacked to a terrifying peak, and for one heartbeat it went still. Searching. Hunting the real one at last.
That was the opening.
Aidan dropped his camouflage and fired.
Ruinspiral screamed out of the petals in a spiral of black and crimson, Attraction locking it onto the one target that mattered, too fast to track, too focused to block. freewebnσvel.cøm
The Warden turned. Too slow. Its huge Defense meant nothing against a point built to unmake defense itself. freewebnovel.cσ๓
The lance hit the center of its chest and did not stop.
It bored through the petal-forged plate, and the Nether ate the armor from the wound outward, and the Spin drilled the decay deeper, and the Bleed tore the hole wide, all in the space of a blink.
CRRRKKKZZ.
The Warden’s whole body came apart around the wound, rotting and scattering into blue light before its self-destruct ever reached zero.
’Seven,’ Aidan thought, breathing hard. ’Beat the clock.’
The clearing fell quiet. The petals began to fall again.
[Tier-1 Zone: The Whispering Maze. Cleared.]
Aidan let out a long breath and rolled the ache out of his shoulders, staring at the spot where the Warden had been.
’One-shot at second seven,’ he thought, a slow grin tugging at his mouth. ’Made a whole new technique to do it, too. Not bad.’
[Your energy resevoirse is at 43%.]
He’d burned a mountain of Mana on clones and a spell he’d invented on the fly. Worth it.
[Advancing to Tier-2 Zone.]
The maze dissolved into light around him, and the ground fell away.
Aidan quickly took out the chunks of meat and devoured them into his mouth by breaking them down with spirit energy.
After eating tens of tons of meat, he recovered upto 100% of his energy.
’Let’s see what’s next. A shared one or a common one?’
The light set him down on glass.
Aidan’s boots met a floor so black and polished it threw his reflection straight back at him. No grass this time. No trees. No petals.
He stood in a vast circular chamber under a dome of pure dark, and the only light came from below, from the floor itself, which was not glass at all.
It was water. Still, black, mirror-flat, stretching out in every direction, and he was standing on top of it as if it were stone.
’Huh.’ He crouched and pressed a finger to the surface. It held, solid as ice, cold as nothing. ’Walkable water. Cute.’
A chime. Text unfolded.
[Tier-2 Zone: The Mirror of Vorkapar.]
[Status: Shared Zone.]
Aidan’s brow lifted. ’A shared one already. Second zone.’
[Another Transcendent Player has entered with you. Only one of you may advance. The other is cast out of the raid.]
He straightened and looked around the empty dark. No other player in sight. Just the endless black mirror and his own reflection staring up from beneath his feet.
Then the text finished, and the trick of the zone landed.
[Clear Condition: A reflection will rise from the Mirror. It wears your face and your power, drawn from your own soul. Defeat your reflection to advance. The player whose reflection falls first, wins.]
’...Oh, that’s mean.’ Aidan looked down at the copy of himself lying flat beneath the surface. ’I have to beat me.’
The water under his feet rippled.
His reflection sat up.
It rose out of the mirror without breaking it, standing where no one had stood a second ago, and it was him. Exactly him. Same coat, same face, same lazy eyes, the Netheraxin knuckle dusters gleaming on the same hands.
It even wore his grin.
"Well," said the reflection, in his own voice. "This is going to be annoying for both of us."
Aidan blinked. Then a slow smile crossed his face, and the copy mirrored it a half-beat behind.
’It talks. And it’s got my whole kit. My aspects, my Mana, my tricks.’ He rolled his neck. ’A perfect copy. Same weaknesses, too.’
Somewhere across the black expanse, out past the edge of what he could see, another player was standing on this same mirror, facing their own reflection, in their own private duel. He couldn’t see them. Couldn’t reach them. The zone had split them into two mirrors and set the same trap in each.
Whoever killed their own reflection first walked forward. The loser was thrown out of the raid, back to the world, one free entry burned.
’So it’s not really a fight against me,’ Aidan thought, eyes sharpening. ’It’s a race. Beat myself faster than the stranger beats theirs.’
The reflection tilted its head, reading the exact same thought off the exact same face.
"You get it," it said. "Somewhere out there, some poor player is duelling their own reflection right now, sweating, careful, treating it like a real match." Its grin widened into his. "The one who wins isn’t the better fighter. It’s the one who stops hesitating first."
"Yeah." Aidan cracked his knuckles, and so did it. "Funny thing about that."
He’d spent a billion years in a place that made copies of him. Broken ones, cruel ones, versions of himself built to break him. He had looked into more of his own faces than any mind was meant to survive.
He knew, better than any player alive, exactly how to kill a version of himself without flinching.
"You already know how this ends," Aidan told his reflection.
"Yeah." The copy’s grin didn’t waver, but something behind its eyes did. "I do."
They both moved at once.
