Rise Of The Mirror King

Chapter 2: Incomplete Sync

Either the girls were too afraid to react, or this wasn't the first time they'd seen a man decapitated. They didn't flinch. Their eyes only flickered with a faint ray of hope.

“You just killed the son of Emperor Callibus. Do you know what you've done, Symon of BlackWood?” the other man yelled.

I should have been frightened by the fact that I'd just taken a man's life, right? I wasn't. I wasn't frightened by the deformed giants that had started to circle me either.

Instead, the veins on the back of my right palm gripping the sword stood out.

Am I angry? But why?

“You dare lay your hands on her,” I said, the words escaping my mouth before I could stop them.

Whatever anesthesia the doctors had given me, I was going to ask them never to give me that dose again.

“You have no idea what witch you're protecting.” The man pointed his sword at the girl with silver hair. She shuddered and hugged her companion tighter.

“Take your comrades and leave while you still can.” My mouth was moving, the voice was mine, but the words weren't.

He didn't listen. Instead, he pulled a book strapped to his waist. It floated before him, and its pages began flipping on their own.

“I saw you cast a mind-sealing spell,” he laughed crudely. “How do you plan to defend against my attack without your knowledge?” An evil grin stretched across his lips.

“Blood manipulation, six-fold general!” he yelled.

The entire book glowed red. What happened next made me leap backward. The five beasts disintegrated into piles of flesh and bones, then reassembled into a single body.

The creature snarling at me was tall, with thick arms and long claws on both its fingers and toes. Its skin was indigo, and dark purple smoke rose from its body like steam.

It had a single eye in the center of its forehead.

“You'll pay for this!”

The creature's eye glowed with that same dark purple energy. It let out a roar, then swung its massive blade.

My hand moved on its own, and my sword caught the blow. The two blades sparked. The impact sent a shockwave through the air and pushed me backward.

It gave me no time to recover before lunging at me again. Its speed was blinding. In that instant, my entire body felt light, and heat spread from my chest throughout my body.

The world slowed again.

My body moved without my control. I watched as my hands slashed with the sword more than four times in a single second.

When time returned to normal, the creature let out a shrill cry as its limbs separated from its body along the cuts I'd made.

I turned toward the man. His eyes were sunken deep into his skull, his mouth hanging open as he struggled for breath.

Then his expression hardened. His teeth clenched so hard I heard one of them crack. His eyes shifted from me to the girls.

Then he screamed.

“Argos!”

A whirlpool opened behind him, and he vanished through it.

I kept staring at the space even after he was gone. Did he just vanish through a literal portal?

Around me, the ground was covered in a pool of blood and dissolving flesh, and the smell had already begun to rise.

I turned. The girls were still holding onto each other. The one in black was looking pointedly at me, her lips slightly curved into a sneer.

“Are you okay?” I asked, finally speaking on my own.

Neither of them answered. The silver-haired girl slowly nodded.

“How did you end up here?”

I got no reply. They simply glanced at each other, then back at me.

Perhaps they didn't comprehend English? I raised my left hand.

“Me.”

Then I placed it against my chest.

“Simon Ward...”

“We know who you are,” the silver-haired girl answered. Her voice was barely audible, dry and broken.

“Good. That clears things up…”

I stopped. My mind finally registered what she'd said. They knew me. But I'd never seen either of them in my life.

“You know me?”

They looked at each other, then back at me.

“Whatever game you're playing, it's not funny, Symon,” the black-haired girl finally said.

She approached me and stopped only a foot away.

“You're still carrying your sword.”

I looked down. The blade was still in my hand, stained red with blood.

“Oh.”

I laughed nervously. I knelt beside the headless body and wiped the sword clean against the man's robe.

I flourished the sword and slid it back into its scabbard with practiced ease, as though I'd done it a hundred times before.

“Amelia, I think we should get out of their territory before we're attacked again,” the silver-haired girl said.

Amelia.

The name echoed somewhere deeper than my memory. A vision flashed through my mind.

She was on a bed, framed by the rough, cool stone walls of the room. Her hair was swept over one shoulder, catching the dim light. She looked straight at me and flashed a playful wink—a brief, intimate moment that vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared.

I did know her, but how?

“Symon, are you listening?”

“What?” I snapped back.

Amelia hissed. She had knelt beside the headless body and pried through the pockets of his robes.

She suddenly looked up.

“We're in demon territory. Did you hit your head somewhere?”

Demons? As in actual demons?

I looked back toward the tree line of the dense forest. Something about this place felt wrong. I wasn't dead. No, this all felt far too real to be a hallucination.

I must be in an alternate reality or something close to it.

I'd watched enough isekai content to recognize that at least three things didn't add up: there were two moons, another presence in my head, my body moved as though it had been fighting for years, and there were literal demons.

Suddenly, something resembling a holographic screen appeared in front of me.

If Amelia could see it, she was doing a good job of hiding her reaction.

A robotic female voice spoke.

“Symon Wardreth, health status report.”

Another screen appeared, covered in symbols that didn't look like anything written by humans. I could only make out the number 89 in green and another number, -15, in red.

“You have used the Flowing State Dragon play and the Magma Force. This has cost you one year and three months from your total lifespan. You now have eighty-nine years remaining. Do you wish to see an elaborate breakdown of this expense?”

Huh?

A deduction from my lifespan?

I didn't understand what I'd just heard. I moved, and the screens vanished. My head suddenly felt light, and my eyelids became too heavy to keep open.

“Your nose is bleeding again,” I heard Amelia say.

I touched my nose and saw the red blood on my fingers. I staggered and dropped to one knee, using the sword to support my weight.

The screen appeared again, and what the robotic voice said next made my breathing seize.

“Your incomplete sync with Simon Ward has destabilized your core, and your mana flow is polluted. You need a refined elixir to settle the flow.”

An image appeared on the screen. I guessed the bottle-shaped object displayed there was the refined elixir.

The silver-haired girl bent before me. Her face so close caused another memory fragment to break.

I was in a garden with an ancient oak tree. Amelia chased her around it, yelling, “Astrid, give me back my pearls.”

Astrid, I thought. I knew her as well.

“Are you okay?” Astrid asked.

“Not really.”

My stomach turned, threatening to empty itself.

Astrid crouched beside me instead, a hand hovering near my chest like she was checking if I was about to keel over. Fair concern. I felt like I might.

“His mana's been disturbed,” she said, more to Amelia than to me. “That would explain the memory issue.”

Memory issue. Right.

Because apparently I had memories that weren't mine crammed into whatever was left of my skull.

“You don't happen to magically have a refined elixir on you?” I asked, mostly joking.

Astrid gave a small smile.

“I don't, but we can make one back at the academy.”

She helped me to my feet. My legs held, barely.

Amelia hadn't moved from where she stood over the headless body, something clutched tightly in her hand—a necklace, I realized.

She was staring at the blood soaking into the dirt as though she were somewhere else entirely.

“Your friend doesn't like me much, does she?” I whispered.

The girl looked at me.

“Amelia is my elder sister. You really need that elixir.”

That was one more revelation I hadn't expected. There was no resemblance between them.

“What's her problem with me?”

The animosity reminded me of the way Tiffany looked at me when she was angry.

“We kissed,” Astrid whispered, looking away.

“We did what now?”

Amelia soon caught up with us.

“We're still far from the academy. We cannot use a Janus Gate, not with our depleted mana.”

I looked at Astrid. She explained it was a portal, the same one that the man in the red robe had vanished through, and none of us had the strength to open one.

That meant miles on foot.

I was still trying to piece together what “mana,” “elixir,” and “Janus Gate” meant when thunder cracked overhead, and lightning split the ground ahead of us.

A gate tore open on its own.

Twelve figures stepped through and blocked the path, all dressed in violet hooded robes.

Whoever they were, they looked like they had come looking for a fight.

Something in my chest tightened, and my hand moved to the hilt of my sword.

“No, Simon.”

That was Amelia, her voice cracked and shaky.

“Not now.”

I didn't listen.

My legs were already moving.

A man stepped forward from the group—tall and broad, every footstep cracking the ground as he weighed twice what he should.

The others fanned out behind him without a word, like they didn't need instructions.

He stopped in front of me and looked down at my sword, then at my face, like he'd tasted something rotten.

“This trouble magnet,” he muttered, and drove his boot into my ribs before I could react.

The kick lifted me clean off my feet. I hit the dirt hard, skidding. The wind was punched out of my lungs.

Somewhere above me, I heard Amelia yell something, but my ears were ringing too hard to catch it.

I forced myself up onto one knee, coughing. I tasted iron.

“You mind telling me what that was for?”

I spat blood.

“We have rules for a reason,” he said, not even looking at me anymore. His eyes had already moved past me—to Amelia, to the necklace in her hand, to the body behind her.

“What have you done?” he roared.

Fur rippled up along his arms and jaw. His teeth lengthened into points right in front of me, and it took everything I had not to flinch.

I got to my feet between them without really deciding to.

“He attacked them. He attacked me.”

“And you killed him?”

He crossed the distance in a blink, hand raised—this time I felt my body taking a stance ready for the charge.

Something dropped out of the sky and hit the ground hard enough to shake it.

A deep crimson coat. Gold hair.

I didn't get more than a glance before pain exploded across the back of my skull and the world went sideways.

The last thing I heard, muffled and far away, was a voice—calm and final, almost bored.

“You need to be more careful.”