Marth descended the staircase in silence. His boots tapped softly against stone, each step too slow, too distant. The descent felt longer than it should. He knew why.
Temporal dilation, he thought.
Subtle. Barely noticeable unless you'd experienced it before. He had. Many times.
He whispered a command:
"Stability Field."
A faint pulse of spatial energy rippled out. Time reasserted itself, and the stairwell returned to normal. A trick of the ruin, testing for sensitive minds.
He didn't smile. He didn't speak again.
He simply moved.
The corridor below was narrow and dark, lit only by dying crystals embedded in the wall. As soon as he passed through the threshold, a sudden pressure clamped down around him.
Spell suppression.
His mana light blinked once, then flickered out.
He didn't react.
Instead, he reached into his belt and pulled out a palm-sized crystal: a carved mana decoy. A bait core.
"Detonate."
It floated forward. The field swallowed it. The hallway buzzed, crackled—and then went still. The suppression field destabilized as it tried to consume more than it could process.
He walked through the collapsing spell like it was mist.
The room ahead was circular and wide. In the center, atop a cracked stone platform, stood a humanoid construct. Limbs jagged, face bone-white, its body flickered with the broken light of an old defense array. Runes along its joints pulsed erratically.
It turned to face him.
"You are not authorized." Its voice echoed with fractured layering.
Marth raised a hand, more out of form than need.
"Time Lock."
The air warped around the construct, slowing it.
"Shadow Bind."
Black tendrils erupted from beneath it, holding it in place just long enough.
"Flame Lance."
"Dimensional Pin."
The lance of fire collided with its chest as spatial magic forced the construct to exist in two points at once.
It collapsed—shattered into dust and discarded mana.
Marth didn't watch it fall. His eyes were on the runes etched into the walls and floor.
He moved closer to the center and crouched near the scorch marks.
They weren't scars—they were ritual burn patterns. Spell formulas etched not by hand but through thousands of castings. Precision through repetition.
"Obsession," he muttered. "Or desperation."
He studied the traces for only a moment longer, then stood and approached the pedestal at the back of the room.
Hovering above it was a metallic relic—part lens, part containment ring, marked with the fractured crest of the Cognitive Shell Project.
It pulsed with a slow rhythm. One that resonated faintly with his own aura.
He reached toward it. His hand didn't hesitate.
The pedestal glowed faintly, revealing a phrase:
Observation Node – Type-0 Authority Only
He recognized the phrasing, the tiered security. It meant he wasn't supposed to see this.
So he took it.
No alarms triggered. No glyphs flared. The ruin simply let him.
Marth stored the artifact and cast a containment veil around it. Quietly, precisely.
Further in, the air grew colder. The corridor narrowed. Glyphs began appearing along the walls, shifting as he passed, watching him as much as he watched them.
He felt the pressure change before he saw the door.
It wasn't a door, exactly—it was a membrane. A threshold between logic and something else.
He passed through.
And found himself face to face with a mirror.
But it wasn't glass. It was living mana, shaped to reflect. To mimic.
And it reflected him.
Expressionless. Unbothered. Still.
The mirror-Marth didn't speak.
Not at first.
Then its head tilted, and its lips curled into something almost human.
"She cried when she left this place," it said.
The voice was his. But not.
Marth blinked slowly. "Is that supposed to move me?"
The reflection didn't answer. Instead, it flickered. Another face appeared beside it—an old woman's, gaunt and quiet.
His grandmother.
Or the ruin's memory of her.
The real one had died decades before his reincarnation. Quiet. Alone.
He hadn't visited her funeral. Not because it hurt. Because it didn't.
She had been kind to him once, in the old life. But kindness didn't outweigh mortality. She had died. Like everyone else. Like he would, eventually.
Still, he remembered the smile he wore when he saw her in the past. Polite. Warm. Carefully practiced.
Now he wore none of it.
"She feared this place," the mirror said. "She feared what it meant."
"She feared dying," Marth corrected. "Nothing else."
The mirror tilted its head. "And you don't?"
"I've already died once."
It paused.
Then the voice dropped in tone—deeper, almost unfamiliar now.
"Then why do you still pretend?"
He didn't respond.
Because the answer didn't matter.
Pretending was useful.
People trusted what they recognized—warmth, empathy, grief. So he wore it like a cloak when he needed to. But here, there was no one to fool.
Not even this thing.
The mirror shimmered again. Cracked.
Then it whispered, "You shouldn't have come."
Marth's hand moved instantly.
"Anchor Disk."
He dropped it to the floor. Spatial energy flared, latching him to the stable reality of the first floor.
A fail-safe. Always.
The mirror fractured. Not glass—space.
The wall behind him twisted into a non-Euclidean spiral. Angles that didn't belong here warped outward, swallowing sound.
"Slip Field."
He blurred sideways, stepping just out of sync with the attack.
A lesser caster would've died there. Even most high-level Espers wouldn't have reacted fast enough.
Marth simply dusted off his shoulder and stepped back toward the ripple where the mirror had been.
It was gone now.
But not forgotten.
That wasn't a defense mechanism.
That was a test.
Not of power, but of identity.
And it had seen enough to try and shake him. Dig up roots that no longer existed. Dead feelings. Broken blood.
He reached for the anchor disk, reclaimed it, and muttered, "Still works."
The spell core pulsed faintly.
He stood in silence for a moment longer, then turned his gaze toward the far corridor.
If the ruin thought it could manipulate him with flickers of his past, it was mistaken.
There were no attachments left to sever.
Only the layers ahead.
And the truth buried beneath them.