The mirror swallowed Damien without moving him at all.
Fortunately, there isn’t any mind-frying pressure I’d felt while traveling to Murim.
The plaza just lost its color around him. John, Martin, the barriers, the towers, all of it flattened into a silver image, thin as paper.
Then the reflection stepped forward, and Damien felt the strange, cold sensation of passing straight through his own face.
Cold crossed his skin. The world went black. His boots hit stone a moment later.
He raised the First Blood Dagger and waited for something to attack. Nothing did.
He stood in a circular chamber close to forty meters wide, smooth grey walls curving around him with no windows anywhere. A single staircase ran up the wall and disappeared through a square opening cut into the ceiling. Thin bands of mirror ran through the floor like veins, throwing back pieces of Damien from angles that didn’t match where he stood.
One showed his hand bare, even though his cloak covered it right now. Another showed him without the dagger at all. A third showed his eyes closed. He stepped off that one fast.
Notifications opened in the empty air.
➤[You have entered the Trial of the Borrowed Self.]
➤[Clear Condition: Ascend the tower and eliminate the boss.]
➤[Each Floor Guardian will replicate a percentage of the challenger.]
➤[Replication Rate: Floor Number × 10%.]
➤[Replicated properties include attributes, skills, appearance, and accessible memories.]
➤[Titles cannot be replicated.]
➤[External communication disabled.]
➤[Floor 1 initiated.]
➤[Guardian Replication Rate: 10%.]
The mirror lines under his feet filled with white light. Something climbed out of them, roughly his height, one shoulder sitting a fraction higher than the other, black hair over a pale face built from mostly correct pieces. The nose sat too narrow. The jaw leaned slightly left. One eye carried Damien’s dark circle. The other looked perfectly rested, like it belonged to someone who’d slept a full night once in his life.
Like an artist drew me off a bad description John gave secondhand.
It wore a loose black copy of his clothes and carried a blunt silver imitation of the First Blood Dagger.
The thing examined its own hands. "You came alone," it said, its voice deeper than his own, arriving half a second behind the movement of its mouth.
"That was the entry condition."
"You’re afraid."
"That’s also normal."
Something like disappointment crossed its face, both facts having failed to actually wound him. Then it attacked.
Ten percent of his improved speed was still enough to cross a few meters fast. Ten percent of his new strength wasn’t enough to make the strike matter.
Damien stepped aside. The false dagger passed his ribs by a comfortable margin. He caught its wrist, twisted, and felt weak bone shift under artificial skin. The fake Damien tried the same knee strike he himself used whenever someone grabbed his weapon arm.
He’d already seen it coming. He shifted his leg, pulled the guardian off balance, and drove the First Blood Dagger up under its jaw.
No resistance at all. No blood. Silver cracks spread out from the wound across its borrowed face, and the whole thing broke apart and rose into the air, dissolving before it reached the ceiling.
Four seconds, start to finish.
➤[Floor 1 cleared.]
➤[Level Up: 22 → 23.]
➤[Available Stat Points: 09.]
The staircase brightened. Damien checked his status before moving toward it. The new level had handed him points but restored nothing else, no health, no stamina. Whatever damage he took on one floor would follow him straight up to the next, while every new guardian would apparently be built from his maximum stats rather than whatever condition he actually showed up in.
So it’s not ten fair fights. It was designed to make the opponent stronger while he wore down underneath it.
He thought about spending the three points right there, then closed the panel instead. Whatever he strengthened now would probably get mirrored back at twenty percent on the next floor, and copied in full by the time he reached the top. Until he understood exactly how the final guardian actually got built, unused points felt safer than a visible edge the tower could just steal for itself.
He looked at the empty space where his first copy had stood a minute ago. "Expected a little more emotional damage, honestly."
The tower didn’t apologize. He climbed.
The square opening led into a forest. He stopped on the last stair.
Moonlight fell between trees that looked almost right. Damp grass covered the ground, crude wooden barricades ringing a dead campfire, and past them sat the dark shape of the tutorial field, the same one where twenty terrified strangers had once learned that dying could turn into a temporary inconvenience if you were lucky.
Not an exact copy. The trees stood too close together, and the campfire sat on the wrong side of the barricade. Still, the smell of wet soil and old smoke pulled something tight underneath his ribs before he could stop it.
A body lay beside the fire. His own body.
The dead Damien wore the clothes he’d entered the tutorial in, four stone-blade wounds torn open across his chest, eyes staring straight up at the moon. He’d only ever seen his own corpse for a second or two before revival kicked in and dragged him back. The tower, apparently, had studied it a lot more carefully than he had.
➤[Floor 2 initiated.]
➤[Guardian Replication Rate: 20%.]
The corpse sat up. Its wounds closed as it stood, and this face looked more like his own than the first guardian’s had, though the eyes sat too bright and the mouth carried a nervous twitch he’d lost years ago without noticing.
It picked a wolf-fang dagger up off the grass.
"You died because you were scared to fight."
Damien stayed on the stairs. "I died because a goblin stabbed me."
"You froze up."
"Yeah, that helped the goblin a lot."
The second reflection tilted its head. "John saved you."
"Several times."
"Without him, you never make it past day one."
"Probably not."
The tower had clearly built this thing expecting a denial, and hadn’t accounted for agreement being the more inconvenient answer. It rushed him.
Faster than the first, and it actually understood the dagger’s reach this time. Damien gave ground as it stabbed, letting his own boots leave obvious tracks in the damp soil behind him.
The false Damien smiled. "Running again."
"Walking. Quickly."
"Backward."
"Direction’s a personal preference."
It followed him past the dead fire. Its attacks carried twenty percent of his actual technique, which meant they looked like real decisions he might genuinely make, just without the speed behind them to finish any of it.
He blocked one strike and left a gap near his shoulder open on purpose. The guardian saw it and took the bait exactly like he’d hoped, its focus narrowing hard enough onto that one opening that it never once noticed the loop of rope he’d already traced through the grass on his way back.
It lunged.
Damien dropped low. Its forward foot found the shallow loop waiting for it, and the rope snapped tight around its ankle, rope that had never existed in his inventory at all. It belonged to the remembered barricade instead. The tower had built an environment he could actually use against it.
The guardian went down. Damien rolled over its back, pinned the weapon arm flat, and cut clean through its neck.
Silver light burst from the wound. The whole tutorial field shattered like glass around them.
➤[Floor 2 cleared.]
➤[Level Up: 23 → 24.]
➤[Available Stat Points: 12.]
Grey stone returned under his knees. He stood and wiped a blade that had never once carried blood on it.
The first two guardians had been weaker than him by absurd margins, and their purpose clearly hadn’t been to win. They were introductions, poor sketches slowly learning where his real features belonged.
The staircase to Floor 3 waited across the chamber. As he crossed toward it, a voice dropped down from somewhere above him.
It sounded exactly like his own. "You’re getting better."
He looked up. The square opening in the ceiling reflected one tired eye watching him.
"So am I," the voice added.
He started climbing anyway. "That seems unfair."
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