Ezekiel's tenth year of life began with a hunt that very nearly became his last.
Following the half-rotted map from the dead mage's journal, the boy pressed on toward the central part of the Upper Tier. The tunnels here grew wider and the walls sturdier. The ordinary grey slate had given way entirely to monoliths of dark, specular obsidian. At times, it felt to Ezekiel as though he were walking inside a giant, faceted labyrinth carved from a single block of black glass.
He was looking for a mountain lake marked on the map as a safe zone. Instead, he wandered right into the territory of the true master of these depths.
The Blind Gnasher.
This monster stood at the absolute top of the Upper Tier's food chain. Unlike the primitive scavengers and needle-rats, the Gnasher possessed a semblance of intelligence and an incredible speed that was unnatural for its size. The creature's body, resembling a hairless panther with disproportionately long front legs, was covered in segmented chitinous armor. Four inward-curving fangs capable of crushing granite protruded from its maw.
Ezekiel froze in a narrow crevice when his [Mirror Sight] caught movement in the obsidian wall to his right.
A massive silhouette emerged in the reflection of the black monolith. The Gnasher wasn't running—it was sliding silently across the cave ceiling, shifting its clawed paws. Its vulnerable point, visible in the mirror spectrum, pulsed with a deep crimson color right at the back of its head, between the armor plates. But for a ten-year-old—even if slightly grown, still an emaciated child—reaching it was physically impossible.
The Gnasher stopped precisely above the crevice where the boy was hiding. A drop of viscous saliva, smoking with acid, fell from its maw onto the floor.
Ezekiel tried to crawl backward, but his heel brushed against a small piece of stone debris. A barely audible click echoed through the tunnel.
For the Gnasher, that was enough. The monster plummeted from above with the speed of a cannonball.
Ezekiel instinctively rolled to the side. The predator's heavy carcass slammed into the stone floor half a meter away from him, kicking up a cloud of sharp glass dust. The shockwave threw the boy against the wall, knocking the wind from his lungs, and his obsidian knife slipped from his numbed fingers.
The Gnasher spun around instantly. Its face, devoid of eyes and nostrils, consisted entirely of radar-like ears that caught the child's ragged inhale. The monster let out a soul-chilling ultrasonic click and swung a massive paw tipped with thirty-centimeter claws.
The boy was pinned against an absolutely smooth wall of pure specular obsidian. There was nowhere to run. There was no weapon. Primal terror paralyzed his body.
"If you want to survive, stop looking at the world directly. Allow your soul to become a mirror. Refract the flow within yourself," the lines from the mage's journal surfaced in his memory.
Ezekiel stripped the fear from his face. He opened his coal-black eyes wide and slammed both palms hard against the icy obsidian wall behind his back. Instead of resisting the stone's chill, he flung open his internal channels, literally sucking in all the mana, all the raw Amalgam that had accumulated in this ancient monolith over thousands of years.
His veins beneath his pale skin instantly blackened, filled with the liquid silver of mana. The pain was as if molten glass had been poured into his blood, but Ezekiel didn't make a sound. He redirected this fierce, icy torrent from his body straight into his pupils.
A deafening crystalline chime rang inside his consciousness, drowning out the monster's roar.
[Versum System: Warning!] Primordial Amalgam Absorption: 100%. Mana channels are fully formed. You have reached Level 1: Initiation (Glint). Active Skill available: [Glint] (Level 1).
The Gnasher was already bringing its paw down, intending to tear the boy's ribcage open. There was no time to think.
The spell required light. A couple of meters away on the floor grew a small colony of luminescent moss, emitting a dim, barely noticeable greenish light. Ezekiel looked at this moss through the reflection in the wall, intercepted those weak, scattered photons, and by the power of his awakened Amalgam, concentrated them into a single point on the obsidian panel right in front of the predator's face.
"Glint," Ezekiel exhaled.
The faint light of the moss, refracted and amplified by the Amalgam through a perfect natural mirror, exploded.
This was no ordinary illumination. It was a focused, blindingly white laser pulse of colossal intensity. In the absolute darkness of the underworld, where the Gnasher had spent centuries developing its hypersensitive receptors, this flash was akin to the explosion of a supernova.
The monster let out a frantic, choking howl. The light literally burned out its delicate auditory and thermal radars on its face. The chitinous plates around its head began to smoke.
The Gnasher completely lost its orientation. It began to thrash around the cave in a panic, slamming at full speed into the walls, crushing its own bones, and tearing at the obsidian pillars with its claws. It could no longer hear Ezekiel. It was blinded and deafened by its own pain.
The boy dropped heavily to one knee. Thin streams of dark blood trickled from his nose and the corners of his eyes—the backlash from his first spell had nearly burned out his own mind. But the gaze of his black eyes remained ice-cold.
He crawled to the spot where his obsidian knife lay and gripped the handle tightly.
The Gnasher, exhausted from pain and blood loss after battering itself against the walls, collapsed onto its side, breathing heavily and hoarsely. The back of its head, where the crimson point of vulnerability pulsed, was right in front of the boy.
Ezekiel approached from behind. There was neither pity nor triumph on his pale face. He simply raised his hand high and, with a dull thud, drove the obsidian blade up to the hilt exactly between the armor plates into the base of the beast's skull.
The monster shuddered, straightened its legs, and went still forever.
Ezekiel yanked the knife out. The Gnasher's black blood splattered across his face, but he didn't even wipe it off. He sat directly on the carcass of the defeated king of the Upper Tier and closed his eyes, feeling a new, pure silver power settle and crystallize within him.
He was no longer a defenseless child running from hounds. He had become a Mirror Mage. The first in this world.