Roya and Lucas walked in silence, taking a series of lefts and rights through the towering, flower-covered hedge walls. The sweet, heavy scent of the garden was beginning to make Roya dizzy.
"Well," Roya said, wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead, "we haven't encountered anything unusual yet."
"Let's keep going," Lucas replied smoothly, his eyes scanning the thick greenery.
Ahead of them, the narrow path finally widened, bathed in the perpetual afternoon light. "There's an opening," Roya pointed, picking up her pace. "Let's go."
But the moment they stepped through the gap, Roya froze in absolute shock.
It was the white marble fountain. The stone benches. The swings.
And the knights.
"We are all gonna die!" Sam's hysterical voice echoed across the clearing. The young knight was pacing frantically, violently gripping his own hair. "Our food is running out! We can't find a way out of here! We're just walking in circles until we starve!"
Lucas let out a heavy, incredibly irritated sigh. "This won't work."
He stepped forward, his hand gripping the jeweled hilt of his sword. He drew the blade, the steel ringing sharply in the air, and raised it toward the towering wall of spiked vines blocking the path to the castle.
"Wait! Don't do that!" Sam yelled, rushing forward. "We already tried cutting our way through! The vines—they're alive! They just keep going deeper, and they swallow whatever strikes them.
One of our men nearly got swallowed whole trying to chop them down!"
Lucas's eyes narrowed. He didn't lower his sword, fully prepared to strike the plants anyway.
"Wait," Roya interjected, stepping in front of him and placing a hand on his arm. "Let's think about this first. If brute force gets swallowed, we need a different approach."
Lucas clicked his tongue, sheathing his sword. He walked over to a corner of the clearing and sat down lazily on the soft pink grass, leaning back as if making himself completely comfortable. "Do whatever you want."
Sam looked at Roya with desperate eyes. "But what can we do?"
Roya didn't answer immediately. Her clinical mind was racing. (It's a spatial loop. Every path bends back to the center. So, how do we track the bend?)
Suddenly, something clicked.
She walked toward the center of the clearing and sat down cross-legged on the soft grass. She took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and focused the Aether in her core. Slowly, incredibly thin, dark threads of Aether seeped from her fingertips. Like invisible serpents, they slithered across the grass and disappeared into one of the maze's dark openings.
Sam took a step back, his eyes wide. "What... what are those? Some kind of threads?" He squinted, feeling the heavy hum in the air.
"They have a similar energy to the aura of a high-level swordsman!"
At this point, Sam had already seen a blood-red lake and a loop that defied time; a village girl emitting lethal Aether threads barely even registered as shocking anymore.
Roya tuned him out, focusing entirely on the microscopic feedback from her threads. She had never used her powers like a radar before. She pushed the threads further and further into the maze.
Suddenly, she felt a distinct, sharp jolt in her mind—a ripple in the space her Aether was traveling through.
"Hey..." Sam pointed, his voice trembling. "Your threads are coming out of that opening over there!"
Roya snapped her eyes open. He was right. The dark Aether threads she had sent into the northern path were currently slithering out of the eastern path, right back into the clearing.
She immediately canceled the Aether, the dark threads dissolving into mist.
"Did you find out anything?" Sam asked eagerly.
"Nothing much," Roya breathed heavily, wiping her brow. "But I did feel a light jolt of energy right before my threads looped back around."
She closed her eyes again. "I need to do it again. But this time... everywhere at once."
She slammed her hands against the grass. Dozens of dark Aether threads exploded outward, shooting into every single opening of the maze simultaneously.
The mental strain was instantaneous and horrific. Roya's face went pale. It felt like her brain was being stretched in fifty different directions. Sweat poured down her face as she mapped the invisible, spatial walls of the garden. Ten minutes passed. Then fifteen.
After twenty agonizing minutes, Roya finally released the Aether.
Her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed backward, her body completely giving out from the immense pressure.
Before she hit the ground, a strong hand caught the back of her head.
"Don't overexert yourself, idiot," Lucas said softly, kneeling behind her.
Roya slowly sat up, pressing a trembling hand over her fiercely throbbing forehead. She pointed a shaky finger toward the center of the clearing.
"The fountain," Roya gasped, her voice hoarse. "That fountain... I feel the exact same kind of energy jolts coming from it. It's the anchor for the loop."
Lucas's eyes sharpened. He immediately stood up, his hand going for his sword to destroy the marble structure.
But Captain Jigan, who had been listening from the shadows, beat him to it.
"So this was the issue!" Jigan roared, charging forward. He drew his massive broadsword and brought it crashing down onto the pristine white marble.
CLANG!
The fountain cracked down the middle, the water instantly draining out.
Everyone held their breath, waiting.
The wind blew gently. A bird chirped. Nothing else happened.
Lucas paused, leaving his sword in its sheath but keeping his hand resting firmly on the hilt. He looked at the panting Captain.
"And this," Lucas said, his voice dripping with absolute disdain, "is why I hate dumb idiots like you."
Jigan's face instantly turned violently red, the veins bulging visibly against his forehead. He gripped his sword, turning his furious gaze to Lucas. "You bastard—!"
VRRRRMMMM.
A sickening, deep vibration suddenly echoed through the air. The entire clearing violently distorted, the colors blurring and smearing like wet paint. Roya squeezed her eyes shut as severe nausea hit her.
In a matter of seconds, the sickening feeling vanished.
Roya opened her eyes. The towering green walls, the fountain, and the stone benches were completely gone.
They were standing in a massive, open courtyard directly in front of the colossal black iron doors of the castle.
The ground beneath them wasn't stone or grass—it was an endless, perfectly flat expanse of shallow, crystal-clear crimson water, exactly a foot deep.
Roya took a step forward, the bloody water splashing softly against her boots. She began to walk toward the massive castle entrance.
"Roya, wait!" Lucas shouted, his voice cracking with a rare, genuine alarm. "Something is wrong!"
But Jigan, completely blinded by his rage and humiliation, couldn't care about anything else. "I'll kill you, brat!" he roared, charging straight at Lucas through the shallow water, two of his loyal knights drawing their blades and sprinting right behind him.
The water in the center of the courtyard began to violently bubble.
In a single, breathless instant, something rose from the crimson depths.
It was majestic. It was terrifying.
A towering Knight, clad head-to-toe in heavy, masterfully crafted armor the color of dried blood, stood effortlessly on top of the water.
A long, elegant, pale-white crest of plumage flowed down from the back of its terrifying, featureless helmet. It was massive—easily a head taller than Lucas—and radiated an aura of overwhelming, ancient death.
Jigan and his two knights didn't even have time to register the entity blocking their path.
SLASH.
It wasn't a swing. It was a flash of pure, red light that cut the very air in half.
The top halves of Captain Jigan and his two knights slid cleanly off their waists, their severed torsos dropping into the shallow water with three sickening splashes. Blood instantly clouded the crystal-clear crimson pool.
Roya screamed.
Lucas moved on pure instinct. He stepped forward, his right hand gripping his hilt to draw his blade.
But the Crimson Knight was already gone.
Lucas's eyes widened, his gaze darting violently to his left.
The towering, blood-red armor was standing right beside him.
SMASH!
The Crimson Knight's massive longsword slammed into Lucas's left shoulder with the force of a falling meteor.
A colossal shockwave exploded outward, blasting the shallow water into a massive tidal wave.
Lucas was launched backward.
He skidded across the surface of the water for dozens of meters, his boots carving deep trenches into the flooded courtyard before he violently plunged his own sword into the ground, anchoring himself to a stop.
Bump.
An insurmountable, blinding pain gushed through his entire left side.
"MR. LUCAS!" Roya screamed, terror ripping through her throat.
Lucas gasped for air, his vision swimming. He looked down at his left arm. The enchanted light armor protecting his shoulder was completely shattered, the faint magical runes sparking and dying as the metal shards fell uselessly into the red water.
The bones in his shoulder hadn't broken, but they felt nearly shattered from the sheer, concussive force of the impact.
(He got me good,) Lucas thought, his breathing ragged as a thin trail of blood dripped from his mouth. (He is impossibly fast. If I didn't have that enchantment active... I would have lost this arm instantly.)
"CAPTAIN JIGAN!" Sam shrieked from across the courtyard, falling to his knees in the bloody water as he stared at the bisected remains of his commander.
Roya didn't care about the knights. She immediately lunged forward, her medical instincts screaming at her to reach Lucas.
But a massive shadow suddenly eclipsed the light above her.
Roya froze, the blood in her veins turning to ice.
The Crimson Knight was standing directly beside her. The towering figure slowly turned its heavily armored head to look down at her. From the dark, featureless slits of its helmet, two piercing, glowing white eyes locked onto her soul.
Across the courtyard, clutching his ruined shoulder, Lucas's eyes widened in sheer panic.
"ROYA! GET OUT OF THERE!"