It closed the distance too fast.
Too familiar.
Cael stumbled back instinctively, but his spine scraped cold stone—wall behind him. No escape. No time. The mimic's boots hammered across bone tile, each footfall perfectly synced with Cael's heartbeat.
No, not synced. Lagging.
By half a beat.
It didn't move like a monster. It moved like a memory—one that had trained as hard as he had, bled the same days, broke the same way.
Cael raised his arm to guard.
So did it.
Then—change.
The mimic twisted its angle mid-stride, shifting the attack into a slide. Not a mirror. Not a copy. A decision. Its own.
It's learning.
Cael's knees bent wrong. Not biologically—strategically. He ducked low and invoked—
[Fragment: Hallow Step] [System Warning: Spatial Realignment Unsafe | Thread Integrity: 48%]
Pain tore down his right arm like a glass river.
Reality skipped.
His body vanished—and reappeared sideways, torso-first—then slammed into the chamber wall with a crunch of bone and breath.
The mimic followed, trailing after-image pulses. But it missed. It struck empty space and skidded across bone dust.
Cael didn't celebrate. He couldn't. His lungs weren't working right.
He coughed blood into his glove. His fingers twitched like marionette wires losing tension.
One more use and something snaps for good.
But it didn't matter. The mimic had adapted once. It would do it again.
It stood.
Its prayer shard pulsed in time with Cael's heart.
And then, softly—it grinned.
Cael froze.
That grin—it didn't belong to a monster. It was too specific. Too earned. It was the same crooked grin he wore after besting Riven during blade drills. The grin that meant: "I know something you don't yet. And I'm going to enjoy it."
It's not just mimicking technique anymore, he realized. It's drawing from me. From my instincts. My reflexes. My pride.
Was that part of the Fragment? A side-effect? Or had the Gate stitched some part of his discarded self into the bones of this thing?
Another thought festered: What if this isn't a creature with a piece of me——but a piece of me that wants to stop being a creature?
He staggered to his feet, wiping blood from his lip. It was hard to tell which tremor belonged to his nerves, and which to the bone-deep pressure seeping from the walls.
"System," he muttered through grit teeth, "give me probability feedback. Is this a hallucination?"
[Neuropathic feedback suggests high coherence threshold: 92%][Entity shares 87% of motor reflex pathways and 1 known training routine.][Classification: Non-Severed. Not native. Not external.]
Then what the hell is it?
The mimic tilted its head again.
Same angle. Same curiosity.
And then it twitched forward.
The mimic twitched forward—and Cael moved on reflex.
No thought. Just pain and angles.
He ducked left, rolled hard—and felt something tear in his side. His left arm spasmed halfway through the motion, jerking out of sync. The momentum dropped him to one knee, ribs screaming.
The mimic didn't capitalize.
It mirrored his fall… and then twisted it—flipping mid-roll to launch itself off the wall at an impossible angle.
Cael didn't think. He invoked again.
[Fragment: Hallow Step][Warning: Thread Integrity 31% | Spine Drag Detected][USE AT RISK OF SPINAL COLLAPSE]
Too late.
He blinked—
—and space tore sideways.
His body skipped through position, dislocated from gravity. His knees hit wall, then ceiling, then settled in midair for half a second of impossible suspension.
His vision rippled like submerged glass.
The mimic landed where he'd been—with a downward fist that cratered the floor.
Cael dropped ten feet in freefall—twisting just enough to catch the pillar below on his back, rather than his skull. The impact burst stars into his eyes.
He rolled. Spat blood.
Laughed once. It hurt.
It's not trying to kill me clean, he realized. It wants to prove it's better.
The mimic stalked toward him again—no longer rushing. Studying. Pacing itself.
Cael's body screamed for rest.
But he forced one knee up. Then the other. Still breathing.
"You want to be me?" he rasped. "You forgot one thing."
The mimic paused. Tilted its head.
Cael grinned—crooked, sharp, familiar.
"I'm a bastard when I'm dying."
He charged.
He launched himself at the mimic like a prayer hurled into fire.
They collided mid-sprint—metal scraping bone, arms locking, knees slamming against tile. Cael shoved forward with his good shoulder, forced the mimic back half a step.
Then he did something stupid.
He dropped his guard.
The mimic didn't hesitate—it threw a hammering elbow into his ribs.
The same ribs Hallow Step had already twisted.
White fire exploded in Cael's side. His legs buckled. His lungs screamed in reverse. But he kept his eyes locked on the mimic's.
It faltered.
Only for a breath.
But it wobbled.
The elbow it had thrown came back around—into its ribs.
Same spot. Same angle. A perfect reenactment.
It was echoing his pain.
[System Notice: Fragment Recursion Detected][Mirror Instinct Loop Forming | Trigger Threshold: 84%][Feedback Window: <2.3 seconds>]
Cael coughed up blood. His jaw ached from gritting it shut.
But he smiled.
So you feel what I feel, he thought. Let's make that mutual.
He twisted, dragging the mimic with him—slamming both of them into a wall of brittle bone fresco. A ribcage cracked. Neither of them knew whose it was.
Then Cael dropped to one knee and slammed his prayer shard into the floor.
The glyph erupted—not with light, but fracture.
Reality bent.
The mimic screamed—not in sound, but in posture. It jolted, arms contorting backward, like it had just been dropped into cold water.
[System: Proximity Shard Surge Detected | Feedback Unstable][Warning: Internal Hemorrhage Detected | Vision: Redshift]
Cael's body convulsed. His right eye filled with liquid heat. His hands trembled.
But the mimic froze.
It was stuck. Looping a recoil it hadn't finished. Replaying his pain. And glitching between decision points like a puppet caught in two scripts.
Cael staggered forward.
This was his moment.
He didn't think.
Thinking hurt more than moving.
Cael wrapped both hands around the mimic's neck and drove it into the pillar behind them. Bone cracked. A prayer glyph disintegrated in a spray of glowing dust.
The mimic didn't resist.
It tried to—its limbs twitched, like they couldn't find the right moment to act. Every time it moved, its body flickered—caught in partial rewinds. A second late. A second early. Never now.
[System Notice: Loop Disintegration Imminent][Reflex Instinct Chain Broken]
Cael raised one elbow high—then brought it down with every gram of pain he had.
The mimic's skull collapsed into the pillar with a wet crunch.
The bone choir sang.
No… shrieked.
Every rib in the mural walls flexed outward. The entire chamber pulsed once—like an organ exhaling.
Then it split.
A vertical fracture raced up the wall. Reality flinched.
And something behind the world looked in.
The vault's far wall unraveled like damp cloth. Space peeled back to reveal a corridor not made of stone—but of reflection. A spiral of endless steps made from fractured scenes.
Cael saw himself.
Hundreds of him. Thousands. All limping. All bleeding. All holding the same broken shard. Some smiled. Others screamed.
One version stared directly at him and mouthed:
"Don't go further."
Too late.
The Gate pulsed.
[Gate Signature: Direct Contact Achieved][Reverse Path Triggered: Unauthorized Access]
Cael fell to one knee. His nose poured blood. His skin sizzled.
[You are the wound.]
He laughed. Or maybe cried. Or maybe the world tilted.
[You are the recursion.]
A second later, he collapsed.
The mimic's corpse dissolved into static.
And the fracture… closed.