I Can See Evolution Paths

The cavern had gone strangely quiet. The remnants of the battle with Rokkaku were everywhere, cracked ice covering sections of the floor, black threads scattered through the chamber, the corpses of the puppeted beasts destroyed, and everyone thoroughly exhausted.

The Water Mirror floated above its pedestal, its surface nothing like the Fire Mirror’s, no violence to it, just a perfectly still body of water suspended vertically in the air. Arthur watched it for several seconds, Eden nearby, Star resting against his leg, before he finally walked toward it.

"Wait! Why are you touching it again?" Sun called.

"Isn’t it better? I have experience dealing with the Mirror."

"That’s not exactly comforting."

Arthur smiled. "You nearly disappeared into the Fire Mirror."

"But I came back."

"That’s your argument?"

"It worked," he shrugged.

Sun wasn’t joking anymore, the memory of the Fire Mirror still fresh, and the others looked just as uneasy.

"Experience with one Mirror doesn’t necessarily mean the others operate the same way," Athena said, studying it carefully.

"I know."

"Then why are you so confident?" Mithra asked.

Arthur looked at the Mirror, his expression sobering. "I’m not confident that I’ll pass it." Everyone paused. Then he smiled. "I just believe I will."

"Damn it, that isn’t a good answer!" Sun groaned.

Remembering the arrangement from the Fire Mirror, Arthur looked toward Athy. "How long did it take me to pass the Fire trial?"

"I... don’t remember," Sun admitted.

"Ten minutes," Athy said immediately.

Everyone looked at her.

"Right. Her memory is terrifying," Sun said, pointing.

Arthur chuckled.

"We agreed that if you hadn’t returned by twelve minutes, we would try to pull you out of the chamber," Athena continued.

He considered it, then raised a finger. "Then let’s make it twenty this time."

"You want us to interfere if you don’t come back?" Mithra caught on immediately.

"If I haven’t passed after twenty minutes, smack me in the head."

"That’s your plan?"

"It’s a good plan."

"No, it’s an awful plan."

He laughed. "It should pull me out the same way our attacks pulled me out of Rokkaku’s fight."

"It is possible," Athena admitted.

"And if you come out before then?" Mithra asked, arms folded.

He looked toward the Mirror. "Then I’ll tell you what I learned."

"Fine."

He turned to the group. "If I make it through, I’ll give you a warning before anyone else tries."

"I still don’t like this," Sun sighed.

"Then wish me luck," Arthur smiled.

Kong raised a fist.

"You’re actually encouraging him?" Sun stared.

Kong nodded enthusiastically, Star wiggled in agreement, and Arthur laughed as he placed his hand against the Mirror’s surface.

The cavern vanished the instant his fingers touched it. No explosion, no flash, the world simply became water.

He found himself falling, water surrounding him from every direction, and tried to swim upward on instinct. Nothing happened. His body felt strangely heavy, arms and legs answering to nothing at all, no visible floor, no ceiling, no direction to anything.

His first instinct was to activate his abilities. Before he could, glowing golden-blue words appeared in front of him.

[You have adapted to what you know.]

He stared at them. Another line followed.

[Now adapt to what you do not.]

His expression shifted. "...That’s new."

The water disappeared. He dropped, and before he could react the environment changed again, the entire space turning to ice, and he landed hard on a frozen surface.

"Okay..." He took one step, and the ice melted beneath him instantly. He fell through, but the water froze again before he could hit anything, and gravity reversed. He shot straight upward. "Oh, come on!"

He slammed into the ceiling, ice cracking beneath him, and pulled himself free to look around at rules that no longer applied. Water became ice. Ice became water. Gravity flipped, and even the flow of mana changed direction.

He tried releasing mana through his body, and instead of moving outward it pulled inward, his own energy suddenly working against him. He stopped immediately. "So brute force isn’t going to work."

He tried Guardian Shield instead, and the barrier formed for a moment before the altered environment twisted the mana structure and collapsed it, dropping him among chunks of ice. He sat there a second, then started laughing. "I get it."

He looked around at the constantly shifting space. The Mirror wasn’t making the enemy stronger, wasn’t throwing more monsters at him. Every time he found an answer, it just changed the question.

He stood slowly. "The Fire Mirror wanted me to overcome what was in front of me." He watched the water turn back to ice. "This one wants me to change when what worked before stops working." The realization made him smile, because Arthur genuinely enjoyed the kind of problem that made him improvise.

The environment shifted again, and he found himself deep underwater, a small circle of light far above him marking the surface. He started swimming, and something felt wrong immediately, the pressure enormous, crushing him downward. He tried King Aura. Barely any change. He tried Magic Burst, and the explosion formed only to get compressed almost instantly.

"That’s... absurd." He looked around at the aquatic Beasts moving through the water, unbothered by any of it, gliding naturally where he was struggling.

That was the clue. Instead of asking how to overpower it, he started asking what could survive here that he couldn’t.

He activated Guardian Shield again, a golden dome forming around him, and for the first time the crushing pressure eased off. "There we go." Then he noticed one of the Beasts swimming right alongside his barrier, its body perfectly built for the environment. He reached toward it, already knowing what he was looking for, Evolution Path Vision flickering to life and showing him the trait waiting inside it. He touched it. Golden light rushed toward him.

For a moment he smiled. Then the shield cracked. The pressure slammed back the instant it shattered, the Beast vanishing into the dark as he started sinking.

"Not now!" The barrier gave out completely, dragging him down, lungs already burning, and he reached for the glowing trait still settling into him. Everything blurred for a second before the light finished entering his body.

He felt the shift immediately, not physical exactly, more like his body suddenly understood the water around it. He could move through it now. The pressure that had been crushing him a moment ago barely touched him.

"...So that’s what you wanted." He started swimming.

The surface was still far off, and air was running low. The pressure no longer stopped him, but his lungs kept burning, roughly twenty seconds left by his own estimate. He pushed harder.

Fifteen. The light above kept growing. Ten, his movements turning desperate. Eight, seven, six, the surface finally in sight. Five, and he broke through the water, gasping violently as he rolled onto solid ground, doing nothing but breathe for several seconds.

Then he started laughing. "That was close."

The Mirror didn’t give him time to rest. The world flipped again, his body shooting toward the ceiling, and he twisted himself around just in time to land against the stone overhead. There was no "down" anymore. Water rose from what used to be the floor, ice spikes shooting upward, Beasts moving across the ceiling like it was nothing unusual.

They weren’t struggling with the reversed gravity at all.

"Of course," he smiled, catching the same lesson repeating itself. Don’t force the environment. Adapt to it.

He moved toward the nearest Beast, and it leapt straight at him, close enough that he barely caught it in time. He touched it, Evolution Path Vision activating again, another trait pulled into him as the creature dissolved back into the shifting world around him.

Then something caught his eye, a small white light blinking in the distance, not random, almost like an exit. "There you are."

He didn’t try to fix the gravity or fight the environment this time. He accepted the new rules and started running across the ceiling, awkward at first before he adjusted, using Magic Explosion behind himself to launch forward. Boom. He landed, ran, exploded forward again. Boom. Faster.

Behind him the whole environment collapsed, water crashing across the ceiling, ice breaking loose, stone falling toward him. He ducked under one chunk, slid beneath a spike that crashed down after it, changed direction when a Beast cut across his path, planted a foot against the ceiling and blasted himself sideways with another explosion.

He twisted through the air, landed, kept running. The light was getting closer, but the Mirror wasn’t finished, a wave of water crashing toward him, an ice spike rising beneath his feet, another explosion carrying him past both. The whole space grew more chaotic by the second, and Arthur was no longer fighting any of it. He was moving with it.

He finally reached the light and threw himself into it without hesitating. The instant he touched it, everything vanished at once, the water, the ice, the gravity, the Beasts, all of it.

He landed in a completely empty white space, no floor, no ceiling, no walls, just endless white.

"...Where am I?"

Then a faint scraping sound. Clink.

He turned, and his expression changed instantly. Someone stood several meters away, and for a second he thought it was another Beast before he realized it was him.

Same face. Same body. Same clothes. But the figure’s entire form was made of translucent blue-white ice, even the hair frozen solid, and in its hand was Dusk, recreated perfectly, the golden spear rendered in ice.

The icy copy raised the spear slowly.

Arthur’s smile disappeared. "...You have got to be kidding me."

The copy said nothing, only settled into a stance he recognized instantly.

His own.

Arthur’s grip tightened as the ice copy pointed Dusk straight at him.

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