Date: 6/23/2001 – Time Unknown
Location: The Hall of Youth – Cathedral of Mirrors
Perspective: Kaiser Everhart
The white corridor didn't lead to a room. It bled into a cathedral.
The ceiling was lost in a height that made my head swim, replaced by a swirling vortex of grey mist. The floor was a shallow pool of liquid shadow—viscous, cold, and clinging to my feet.
Then, the mirrors arrived.
They didn't hang on walls. They erupted from the floor, towering slabs of black glass that rimmed the path. There were hundreds of them, each one pulsing with a dull, rhythmic light.
"They're not reflecting us," Amelia whispered. Her voice was steadying, but her hand was still a vice on my arm. "Look at 000042."
I looked. A few yards ahead, a girl known for her high aptitude in bio-organic chemistry stood before a mirror. She was a genius.
But as she stared into the black glass, her genius crumbled.
In the reflection, she wasn't a child. She was a woman in a suit of cracked mana-armor, trapped in a cockpit that was melting. I watched the "future" her scream as the oxygen in her environment vanished.
It wasn't just a fire; it was "dead air"—a vacuum created by a localized atmospheric collapse. She clawed at her throat, her skin bubbling as the heat turned the very air into a kiln.
She died slowly, her eyes bursting from the pressure before the glass went dark.
The real girl let out a jagged, breathy sob. She didn't die, but the mental torture was visible in the way her knees buckled. She had seen her ending.
"Rule One," Void's voice announced, rattling the glass. "Every mirror shows a future that will happen if you continue existing."
"Rule Two: To advance, you must personally destroy every future but one."
"Rule Three: You may not lie to yourself. The mirrors will reject false resolve."
I felt 01 step up beside me. He didn't look at the sobbing girl. He looked at the mirrors with a clinical, predatory focus.
"It's a filtration of probability," 01 said, his voice a low hum. "The Void isn't showing us 'the' future. It's showing us 'a' future based on our current trajectory. To break a mirror is to kill a timeline."
"But the reflections feel it," Amelia added, her eyes darting across the room, cataloging every scream.
"I can hear them. When a student breaks a glass, the scream doesn't come from the room. It echoes inside their head. It's a sensory feedback loop. Every time you reject a death, you have to experience the pain of it."
I looked at the shadow pool at my feet. My mind began to process the deeper layer.
The mirrors reflect endings.
These are not just predictions. They are 'imaginary truths'.
This trial is about fiction vs reality.
"It's about the heart of fiction," I said. 01 and Amelia both looked at me.
"The Void mentioned 'watching over the threads of fiction'. These mirrors are the possible stories of our lives. If we want to win, we have to decide which story we are willing to live through—and which ones we are willing to murder."
"Alliances are allowed," Amelia noted, his eyes narrowing. "Comfort is allowed. Saving each other is allowed."
"That's the cruelty," I countered. I looked at Amelia, then back at the golden-haired boy.
"If I save you from a mirror, I'm helping you choose a future. But if that future leads to my own death, I've sabotaged myself. The Void wants to see if our empathy will make us pick a 'happy' ending that results in a collective loss, or if we'll be heartless enough to pick the 'winning' ending, even if it's tragic."
"Amelia," I said, my voice calm, anchoring her. "Your memory. You've seen the deaths of the others. Is there a pattern? A common thread in how they die?"
"They all die... incomplete," she whispered, her brow furrowed in deep concentration. "The chemist died of a vacuum. The boy before her died of a mana-overload. They die because they reach their limit."
"None of them die of old age."
"Because the Foundation doesn't let us get that far," 01 said.
I stepped toward the nearest mirror.
"We don't pick the 'best' future," I said, my gaze hardening.
"We pick the one that lets us keep alive. I don't care if the ending is a battlefield or a throne. I only care that I am the one standing at the end of it."
I reached out, my fingers brushing the cold surface of the black glass.
"Let's go," I said. "Let's see which version of me has to die so I can live."
We moved as one, stepping into the first arc of the mirrors, our reflections waiting to scream.
The future is written by me.
I stopped in front of a jagged pillar of black glass. I didn't look into it yet. I needed to understand the mechanics first.
"The Void isn't just showing us deaths. It's showing us the logical conclusion of our current nature. If we don't change, we become the victim in the glass."
"It's about the fiction we choose to believe in," 01 added. He stood a few feet away, his arms crossed. "The Void calls reality a weight and fiction a thread. To advance, we must cut the threads that lead to our ruin."
Amelia didn't join the analysis. She was staring at a mirror to our left. Her eyes were fixed, her pupils dilating until the emerald of her irises was almost gone.
"Amelia?"
She didn't answer. Her breathing had become a series of sharp, shallow hitches.
I looked into her mirror.
The transition in the glass was seamless. At first, it was just her—a version of Amelia only a few years older. She was standing on the deck of a ship during a storm that looked like the end of the world. The sky was a bruised, sickly violet.
Then, the deck tilted.
In the reflection, the older Amelia fell into the churning, ink-black water. There was no splash. The ocean didn't behave like water; it behaved like a hungry, living throat. She sank instantly. The light from the surface vanished in heartbeats, replaced by a crushing, absolute pressure.
I watched her struggle. I saw her lungs burning, her mouth opening in a silent plea for oxygen. But she wasn't alone in the deep. From the crushing dark below, massive, pale tentacles—slick with a bioluminescent slime—slid upward. They didn't just grab her; they claimed her.
They wrapped around her throat and limbs, dragging her further down into a trench where the very concept of light was a forgotten myth.
She was being absorbed. Drowned not by water, but by the weight of the abyss itself.
"N-no..." Amelia whimpered. Her knees hit the liquid shadow on the floor. "I can... I can feel the c-cold. It's so... d-dark. I can't b-breathe, Kaiser..."
She began to claw at her own neck, her photographic memory forcing her to experience the sensory data of the reflection as if it were happening to her skin. She was drowning in the air of the cathedral.
The trauma is the lock.
I didn't hesitate. I stepped forward and drove my fist into the center of the black glass.
The mirror didn't shatter into shards. It rippled like water and then collapsed inward.
The sound hit me instantly—not in my ears, but inside my skull. It was a high-frequency, soul-shredding scream. It was the sound of a version of Amelia dying, a whole timeline being cauterized in a single second.
My brain felt like it was being scraped by a rusted blade. I didn't flinch. I let the scream echo until it faded into a dull, throbbing ache.
"Reject it," I commanded, my voice low and absolute. I grabbed Amelia's shoulders, forcing her to look away from the empty space where the mirror had been.
"That is not your ending. It is a lie you haven't lived yet. Reject it, Amelia."
She looked at me, her face pale and damp with sweat. Her lips moved, but no sound came out for a long moment. Finally, she gave a single, shaky nod.
"I... I r-reject it," she whispered.
01 watched the exchange from the periphery. He didn't offer help. He didn't offer scorn. He simply recorded the data.
"One timeline dead," 01 said, his voice flat. "22 students left. The cathedral is long, 981. How many screams can your head hold before you break?"
"As many as it takes to reach the exit," I replied.
The trauma was just another cost of the race.
I looked down the long hall of black glass.
"We keep moving," I said. "Don't look at the mirrors unless I tell you to. We are not the victims of these stories. We are the authors."
We stepped further into the dark, our shadows stretching out toward the next ending.
We walked deeper into the cathedral. The floor of liquid shadow felt thicker now. It clung to my ankles like it was trying to drag me down. Amelia stayed in my shadow, her eyes fixed on the back of my coat. She was afraid to look at the glass again.
Then, 01 stopped.
He didn't hesitate or flinch. He simply came to a halt before a mirror that was taller and darker than the others. The frame looked like it was made of frozen smoke.
I stood back. I wanted to see what the "Number 1" of the Foundation feared.
The mirror rippled.
The image that formed was a nightmare of biological rot. In the reflection, 01 was an adult. He stood in the center of a black, wet pit. Above him, creatures that shouldn't exist began to descend. They were masses of oily fur and too many eyes, their limbs long and spindly like starving spiders.
They fell upon him.
I watched as the beasts tore into his flesh. It wasn't clean. It was a slow, wet harvesting.
One monster gripped his shoulder and peeled the skin back like fruit. Another buried its face in his chest, muffled growls echoing from the glass as it feasted on his vitals. 01 didn't scream in the reflection. He just stared up with hollow eyes as they ripped his limbs away one by one.
Finally, a beast with a jaw that unhinged like a snake's grabbed his head. With a sickening crunch, it tore his skull from his spine and tossed it into the deep, dark pit below.
The screen didn't go black. It shifted.
The "Future" 01 woke up. But he wasn't an adult anymore. He was a four-year-old child, sitting in a small, white room. He was sitting in front of a mirror, just like this one.
His face was blank. It was a mask of utter nothingness.
On the table in front of him were dozens of paper scraps. Each one had a crude, hand-drawn smile on it.
I watched as the child took a piece of tape and pressed a paper smile over his own mouth. Then he pinned another over his eyes to mimic joy. He sat there, a porcelain doll covered in paper lies, while the shadows of the monsters from the pit flickered on the wall behind him.
It was a different kind of horror. It wasn't about the blood. It was about the fact that he had never been a person.
He was just a collection of practiced expressions.
I looked at the real 01.
He didn't move. He didn't sweat. He didn't even blink. He watched his own head get thrown into a pit and his childhood self mutilate his identity, and his pulse—as far as I could tell—stayed perfectly flat.
He isn't just brave.He is hollow.A man who hides his face so well must have a past made of trauma.
"Is that it?" 01 asked. His voice was a calm, steady blade. "Is that the end of the show?"
"You're not going to... say anything?" Amelia whispered. She was trembling just looking at it. "You saw what they d-did to you. You saw the p-paper..."
"The mirror shows a future," 01 said, turning his head to look at her. His eyes were as cold as the void around us. "If I am eaten, I am eaten. If I must wear a mask to survive the Foundation, I will wear it. The 'how' doesn't matter."
"Only the result does."
He reached out. His hand was steady. He didn't punch the glass like I did. He simply pressed his palm against the reflection of the four-year-old's face.
"I reject the tragedy," he said. "I accept the mask."
The mirror shattered.
The scream that filled my head this time was deafening. It was the sound of a thousand paper smiles being torn at once. It was a high, thin wail of a child who was being told he would never be allowed to be real.
01 didn't even flinch at the noise. He just let his hand drop to his side.
"Let's move," he said. "We're wasting time."
I watched him walk away. He was brilliant. He was a monster of logic.
He had adapted to the emotional trauma before the reflection had even finished dying. He was a true stoic, or perhaps something much worse.
He's like me.But he's had a head start in the dark.
I felt a strange spark of respect. In a world of screaming children, he was a silent statue.
"Kaiser..." Amelia grabbed my hand. "He's... he's scarier than the monsters."
"He's just logical, Amelia," I said, though my mind was already calculating how to eventually break a man who felt nothing. "Come on. My mirror is next."
We stepped over the shards of 01's broken future and followed the golden boy into the deepening fog.
Mhmm me next.