The sky above the mirror city never changed. It remained an eternal twilight—an expanse of electric purple and indigo that seemed to press down on the crystal spires, as if attempting to drive them back into the ground from which they had violently erupted. Hayjin and Zhilian advanced along the main avenue, a wide road paved with a black, polished stone that reflected their silhouettes like a dark mirror.
The surrounding environment was a symphony of impossible geometries. The palaces were not built; instead, they seemed to have grown naturally, following the raw laws of minerals. Balconies of blue quartz jutted into the void like jagged blades, and arches of translucent amethyst connected towers that defied gravity, curving upward like claws ready to snatch the passing clouds. The hum of the crystals had long since become white noise a deep, constant vibration that Hayjin could feel radiating inside the very fillings of his teeth.
"Look over there," Hayjin whispered, gesturing with a sharp nod toward the interior of a ruined portico.
Among the shadows of the crystal columns, distorted silhouettes moved with a dreamlike slowness. They resembled wild cats, or perhaps monkeys, but their bodies were entirely covered in a thick crust of blue crystalline formations that sprouted from their skin like mineral scales. Their eye sockets were hollow, filled only with a pale, luminescent glow that followed their every movement.
"What are those things, Zhilian? They look like... moving crystals," Hayjin asked, feeling a cold shiver run down his spine.
Zhilian tightened her grip on her light scepter, never taking her eyes off the creatures. "I don't know, Hayjin. There's no trace of creatures like this in the bestiaries of Opes. They are probably wildlife that adapted to live here over millennia or perhaps the dungeon itself consumes organic flesh and turns it into glass. In any case, stay close to me."
Hayjin stopped in his tracks, leaning his hands on his knees as he panted heavily. The air in this dimension was incredibly thin, heavily charged with ozone and fine mineral dust. "Zhilian... wait. I'm exhausted. My head is spinning, and this sword weighs as much as an anvil. Let's stop for a moment. Let's just catch our breath, please, just for a second."
The princess turned around, her gaze stern but subtly veiled with a hint of genuine concern. "We can't, Hayjin. We're in a race. Doeken is already navigating their own dungeon, and Adeline was clear: the first team back wins. We need to figure out where the magical object is hidden before we allow ourselves the luxury of resting. Once we've identified the target, we'll find a safe corner, I promise. But not right now."
Hayjin huffed, running a hand through his sweaty hair. "Always the workaholic... alright, you convinced me. But if I faint, you're dragging me back by my feet."
Just as he braced himself to stand up, a sharp sound, like breaking glass, echoed right behind him. From the shadows of a massive pile of debris, a crystal wolf a terrifying mass of sharp edges and razor quartz teeth leaped out with frightening speed, angling directly for the boy's throat.
"Hayjin, down!" Zhilian shouted.
Without even turning her body fully, the princess unleashed a concentrated bolt of pure light. The projectile struck the wolf mid-air, exploding in a blinding white flash that instantly pulverized the creature into a thousand inert fragments of diamond and crystallized blood. Hayjin fell backward onto the stone, his heart beating like a crazed drum.
"T-thanks," he muttered, quickly checking his limbs to see if he was still in one piece. Then, forcing a trembling smile, he added, "You're certainly the flashy type, aren't you? Couldn't you have just given it a kick?"
Zhilian let out a short, crystalline laugh. "This is just a basic trick for me, idiot. You should have more faith in your bodyguard."
"Wait... shouldn't I be the one who's supposed to protect you?" Hayjin asked, his voice dripping with suspicion.
Zhilian countered with a mocking, playful smile. "Yes, but let's just say, given your current athletic state..."
The smile died on her lips. Behind her, a giant lynx made entirely of transparent crystals and dotted with lethal, jagged points emerged noiselessly from the ceiling of a collapsed building. Before Hayjin could even scream a warning, Zhilian performed a fluid, practiced pirouette, conjuring a blade of solid light between her palms. With a perfect vertical slash, she severed the lynx into two symmetrical parts before the beast could even hiss.
"See? I told you," she said, seamlessly extinguishing her magic and brushing an imaginary speck of dust off her shoulder. "I'm a prodigy. Admit it."
Hayjin stood up, dusting off his pants. "Yes, yes, you're great. A bit too arrogant for my taste, but great," he replied, using a forced smile to mask the lingering shock.
However, their truce lasted only a few seconds. From the dark side streets, dozens of sharp blue reflections began to converge toward them. More wolves, lynxes, and horribly deformed creatures all forged from that same sentient mineral were crawling out into the open avenue.
"Okay, there are definitely way too many! Running? I vote for running!" Hayjin exclaimed.
"Alright, let's run!" Zhilian agreed instantly.
A frantic, desperate chase began through the ruins of the glass metropolis. Zhilian fired rapid discharges of light backward, striking down the monsters in the front row, but for every creature that shattered, three more seemed to emerge from the crystalline floors. They were utterly relentless.
"They never end! They'll crush us like ants!" Zhilian cried out, the physical fatigue finally starting to sap her stamina.
From the deepest shadows emerged creatures that looked like nightmares born from a broken prism: Crystal Spiders as large as tower shields, their razor-sharp legs screeching horribly against the pavement; and skinless Silica Hounds, their muscles visible as bundles of pulsing, translucent fibers.
"Damn it, they're everywhere!" Hayjin yelled, sprinting forward as a massive spider plummeted from a portico ceiling, missing his shoulder by mere millimeters.
The pursuit immediately dissolved into a chaotic hell of blinding reflections and flying shards. Zhilian ran ahead, clearing their path with short bursts of light that forced the enemies to falter, but the city itself seemed to actively play against them. Every time they turned a corner, the street layout seemed to unnaturally stretch or shrink.
"Left! Get into that passage!" Hayjin shouted, pointing to a narrow gap wedged between two leaning buildings.
They ducked into the tight alley, Hayjin feeling the frozen, mineral breath of the hounds snapping at his heels. One of them lunged, catching the hem of his heavy cloak with its quartz teeth.
"Get it off me!" Hayjin roared.
Zhilian twisted mid-air, firing a point-blank light bolt that pulverized the hound's head, but the kinetic impact threw her completely off balance. Hayjin caught her on the fly, dragging her forward by the arm just as a wave of spiders swarmed over the hound's fresh corpse, using it as a launchpad to leap toward them.
"They don't stop! The more we kill, the more the dungeon generates!" Zhilian panted, sweat beading heavily on her forehead. She threw a broad trail of white fire behind them to create a temporary barrier, but the crystal monsters, entirely indifferent to pain, crossed right through the flames, letting their mineral limbs melt away just to avoid losing their prey.
They burst into a grand, circular square surrounded by statues of ancient knights crystallized in states of agony. It was a psychological dead end. The creatures were jumping down from the surrounding roofs, completely encircling them. The ambient noise had become unbearable a deafening, metallic screeching of thousands of crystalline legs converging toward the center of the square.
"Zhilian, the barrier! Now!"
The princess erected a glowing dome of protective light, but the monsters began to slam their bodies against it with suicidal ferocity. Crack. A sharp fissure appeared on the magical surface. Crack. Another one spiderwebbed across the top.
"I can't hold it much longer, Hayjin! There are too many of them, the sheer pressure of their mana is consuming mine!" Zhilian sank to her knees, her hands stretched upward, the muscles in her bare arms trembling violently from the exertion.
Hayjin looked around frantically, desperately activating his analytical vision. He scanned their surroundings with the eyes of a condemned man searching for a mathematical miracle. His mind began to process environmental data at an insane speed: sound frequency, tower angles, structural debris mass. Finally, his eyes darted to a titanic tower soaring right in front of them, leaning dangerously over the avenue. Its structure was furrowed by deep cracks at the base, held together only by large blocks of crystal under immense pressure.
"Zhilian! See that tower? We have to make it collapse!" Hayjin yelled, pointing to a specific structural junction where three support pillars intersected. "If we hit that exact junction point, the entire structure will collapse onto the street!"
"It's a gamble! If we time it wrong, we'll end up buried underneath it!" she replied, flinching as a wolf's claw scraped against the exterior of her barrier.
"Trust me! Prepare your most powerful strike, charge it with all the light you have left!"
Hayjin drew his resonance sword, feeling the high-frequency vibration of the dungeon flowing directly through the hilt. He began to run toward the edge of the dissolving barrier just as a hound managed to slip a clawed paw through a widening crack.
"GET READY!" Hayjin screamed.
As Zhilian's barrier shattered with a sound like breaking glass, Hayjin did not retreat. Despite his near-nonexistent mana pool, he channeled that tiny, residual bit of wind magic he possessed, forcing it to vibrate at the crystal's precise natural frequency. When they were just a few meters from the tower, Hayjin struck the weak point with surgical precision. The metal of his sword rang out beautifully, transmitting a destructive, oscillating vibration that violently amplified the existing cracks.
The sword drove deep into the critical node of the tower's crystalline structure. VROOOOM. A low-frequency hum shook the city's very foundations.
"NOW, ZHILIAN! STRIKE IT!"
Zhilian did not hesitate for a fraction of a second. She gathered every single ounce of her remaining mana; her eyes flared until they resembled two miniature suns. The princess fired a massive, concentrated beam of light exactly where Hayjin had created the vibrating breach.
The effect was devastating. The foundational crystal exploded, and with an earth-shattering roar of stone and glass violently splintering, the tower began to tilt. The two students accelerated to their absolute absolute limit, sprinting past the base of the structure just as it came down with an apocalyptic crash.
For a single, breathless instant, time seemed to stand still. Then came the true roar of the collapse.
The tower gave way completely, leaning over with a majestic and terrifying slowness. The crystal creatures, for the very first time, ceased their relentless attack, raising their glassy heads toward the disaster falling from the sky.
"RUN!" Hayjin grabbed Zhilian's hand and pulled her along as tons of glowing rubble and razor-sharp crystal dust rained down behind them, crushing the entire army of monsters in a single, definitive chime of mineral death.
They emerged on the other side of the massive dust cloud, covered in fine blue ash, coughing and trembling, while an eerie silence returned to reign over the square, now buried under a literal mountain of broken glass.
A massive cloud of blue dust rose, blanketing everything in sight. When visibility finally returned, the road behind them was completely blocked by tons of dense rubble. The monsters had either been entirely crushed or were trapped on the other side of the collapse.
Zhilian, carried away by the pure rush of adrenaline, grabbed Hayjin and pulled him into a sudden, suffocating hug. "We did it! You were a genius, Hayjin! A real genius!"
Hayjin, blushing violently and catching a distinct scent of Zhilian's hair despite the suffocating dust, stood completely petrified for an instant. Noticing his reaction, she let go immediately, turning away in a flurry of movement as she frantically fixed her hair, her cheeks burning bright crimson.
"Uhm... yes, well, there's no time for these things right now. We have to keep moving," she said, her voice trembling slightly as she desperately tried to regain her royal dignity.
"Yeah... though you did all the heavy lifting with that final shot, anyway," Hayjin muttered, scratching his head awkwardly.
They turned to resume their path and froze instantly. Before them, at the far end of the avenue, loomed a structure that made the tower they had just felled look like a mere toy. It was a titanic spire made of a black, transparent crystal that actively seemed to absorb the surrounding light.
At the very peak of the tower, perched like an ancient sovereign, sat a gigantic Wyvern. Its wings were broad membranes of solidified, shimmering light, and its massive body was covered in crystalline scales that faded violently from a deep blood-red to an electric blue. Its eyes were two burning beacons of pure energy, staring down toward the small intruders below.
"Incredible..." Hayjin murmured, his eyes wide with awe. "It's a magnificent dragon. Look at how it reflects the light..."
"Stupid!" Zhilian interrupted him, giving him a sharp flick to the back of his head. "That's a wyvern, not a dragon! Wyverns only have two legs and wings; dragons have four legs! It's an elementary distinction!"
"Oh come on, they're basically the same thing they breathe fire and they fly," he retorted, rubbing the sore spot on his head.
Zhilian ignored his biological ignorance, staring at the creature with absolute seriousness. "It's him. The guardian of the dungeon. And if the traditional logic of these ancient places hasn't changed... the mysterious object is being kept right up there, beneath its claws."
The wyvern spread its massive wings, emitting a crystalline roar that shook the entire city, only to settle back down a moment later, folding its wings to return to its rest.
The roar of the tower that had collapsed behind them was still faintly echoing through the distant glass palaces a metallic wail that was slowly dying out. The blue dust, fine as magical flour, floated lazily through the air, settling on Hayjin's shoulders and in Zhilian's hair. Yet, despite that auditory cataclysm that should have shaken the entire dungeon, the creature at the top of the black spire had barely moved an inch.
The two remained motionless, holding their breath as they stared at the imposing, dual-colored silhouette of the Wyvern of Two Lights. Its red and blue crystal wings were folded against its body symmetrically, casting a purple reflection onto the tower's dark surface.
"It's absurd," Zhilian whispered, still convulsively gripping her scepter, ready to evoke an instant barrier. "It's... it's impossible. We just knocked down a building of at least ten stories. How could it not have noticed us? Even a deaf dragon would have woken up with a racket like that."
Hayjin didn't answer immediately. He brought a hand up to his face, narrowing his eyes to focus his vision. He activated what little analytical perception his brain allowed him without the aid of his familiar technological tools, closely studying the creature's massive head. He noticed a strange, glassy reflection a sort of translucent veil covering the wyvern's enormous eye sockets. It wasn't that its eyes were closed; it was something else entirely.
"Look closely at the head, Zhilian," Hayjin murmured, never breaking his gaze. "See that kind of glassy membrane over the sockets? Those aren't its real eyelids. They are nictitating membranes, but completely transparent. They function like protective screens. Where I come from, there are animals that have them to protect their eyes while swimming or flying, but here they seem to serve a different purpose."
"What do you mean?" she asked, lowering her guard slightly, genuinely intrigued by his deduction.
"I think it's sleeping. But a deep, almost lethargic sleep," Hayjin explained, running a hand over his sweaty forehead. "Those specialized eyelids probably serve to filter out excessive ambient light or to trigger only in the case of immediate, close-range physical danger. As long as we stay out of its direct sensory range or don't strike it directly, its reptilian brain interprets ambient noises like our tower falling as simple background dungeon events. It's a crazy tactical advantage; basically, the beast is in an automated energy-saving mode."
Zhilian let out a soft sigh of relief, but it lasted only a brief moment. She turned toward the long road separating them from the black spire, and her face darkened instantly.
Before them, the crystal metropolis stretched out in an inextricable tangle of shattered bridges, squares submerged by giant stalagmites, and deep, yawning chasms that seemed to cut the city completely in half. The Wyvern's spire, which from a distance had seemed relatively close, now appeared for what it truly was: a colossus kilometers away, separated by a series of ruined neighborhoods that resembled a labyrinth designed by a madman.
"Damn it," Hayjin snapped, dropping down to sit on a piece of smooth rubble. "Look down there. That main road is interrupted by at least three massive ground fractures. We'd have to go down to the lower subterranean levels, come back up, go entirely around that massive block of buildings... Zhilian, it could take hours. Maybe half a day if we're lucky and don't cross paths with any more giant spiders."
"We don't have that kind of time, Hayjin," she replied, sharp frustration leaking into her tone. She placed her hands on her hips, scanning the shattered horizon impatiently. "Evelyn and Atlas are surely already in the heart of their own dungeon. If we keep walking at this terrestrial pace, by the time we get to the tower, they'll have already taken their object and will be receiving compliments from the Sages."
"Well, unless I magically learn to fly or you decide to carry me on your back and jump from roof to roof, the geography doesn't change!" Hayjin retorted, waving his arms dramatically toward the broad expanse of ruins. "We're on foot, in a city made of sharp glass, surrounded by hostile monsters. I don't think we have many choices, you know."
Zhilian wasn't listening to him anymore. Her sharp eyes were intently observing the structures floating far above them. The blue crystal suspension bridges, though fragile and severely fragmented, seemed to connect the highest points of the city in a much more direct route than the surface streets.
"You're right," she said, catching him completely off guard. "The road below is too long and the ground is a disaster. We have to stop looking down. We need to find a shorter, more accessible path... but we need to find it up high. See those resonance cables connecting the minor spires?"
Hayjin looked up, following the trajectory of the princess's finger. "Are you out of your mind? Those wires look as thin as cobwebs. And they're at a height that makes me want to puke just thinking about it."
"They are magical pathways, Hayjin. If we can reach the main platform of that clock tower over there," she pointed to a structure about three hundred meters above them, "we could use the primary mana flow channels to shorten our journey by seventy percent. We'd arrive almost at the exact base of the Wyvern's spire in less than thirty minutes."
Hayjin stared up at the distant clock tower, then down at his dirty, worn boots, and finally let out a deep, defeated sigh, standing up with visible effort. "Twenty years of sedentary life in front of a computer monitor, and now I have to be a high-wire acrobat on glass strings."
He shook his head, muttering under his breath, "Fantastic. Truly fantastic."
"Stop complaining," Zhilian said with a sly, teasing smile, catching him firmly by the sleeve of his jacket. "Look on the bright side: the view from up there is beautiful. And if you fall, at least you won't have to worry about being tired anymore."
"Your sense of humor is becoming dangerously contagious, and that absolutely terrifies me," Hayjin replied, though he finally began to step forward, following her lead. "Alright, princess. Lead the way to this 'accessible' path. But if that flying lizard wakes up while we're hanging by a thread, I swear I'm using you as a human shield."
"Yeah, yeah, as if you actually had the guts to do it," she retorted, waving the threat away with a flick of her wrist as they began to make their way through the heavy rubble, searching for their very first climbing point toward the crystal skies.
Every single step they took brought them closer to the sleeping guardian, and while the wyvern's quiet continued to reign supreme for now, Hayjin couldn't help but shake the nagging feeling that the silence was merely the calm before a devastating storm.