Cael stared at his distorting reflection, looking at the azure rings revolving around the pupils.
The brown surface of the pupil glowed with a white hue at its edges. It radiated ethereal light similar to the glow of liquid darkness and the mirror-like glow of the black figure.
The way his reflection stared back at him with those abnormal eyes — while black-green lines of glitches flashed over it — made for an unsettling scene, making him flinch.
'Is that me? What is this?'
For a moment, Cael thought that he saw what he was not supposed to in his reflection — the weave of timelines woven together by the Archive and its simulations.
The various versions of himself across parallel worlds.
He snapped.
'What does it mean? Has my consciousness been taken over by other versions of me? Or was I the one who overtook this one?'
Sparks of electricity went wild; even the glitches on the shattered rooftop went crazy.
The black veil waved in the air, revealing the raven-black hair of the mysterious figure, falling like silk from their head to their upper back.
Their face was not visible, but Cael had much more pressing issues to consider.
'The seed, the voices, the visions, the glitches. What did it all mean?'
At that moment, Cael felt his body reacting differently. The flow of something, like a foreign essence circulating and enhancing his core, made the strange feeling from before more stabilized, alongside his whole body.
The feeling cooled his mind, helping him reason through the events. He saw his reflection in the distortions again; this time, the glow in his eyes emanated a mystical surge as if that energy was influencing the very world itself, and in turn, himself too.
The thought made him shudder.
'No… I'm forgetting something. Before those visions raided my consciousness — what exactly happened?'
I remembered the Record Break and stumbled upon a part of the original script. Then that person — that figure, whatever they are assaulted me.
'Back then I thought that they came to erase me from the timeline, but…
Gulping, Cael looked at the kneeling abomination drowning in a rain of sparks, struggling to keep its weight and stand up. The black figure was staring it down as the sword finally undone itself and dissolved into nothing.
The distortions and glitches obscured the black figure, slowly growing intense with each passing second.
…that can be the case.'
[KikikKirkkikoqu]
At that moment, the monster began walking toward them, producing a noise. Its steps were frail and slow now, its left side slowly repairing itself from broken shards of mirror-like jewels. With a hunched back, it was now at a height similar to that of the black figure.
"You see it now, don't you?" The figure's voice was a rasping echo, their silhouette flickering against the crimson sky.
Cael couldn't answer. His vision was bifurcated — one eye saw the ruins of the rooftop; the other saw a cascading waterfall of binary.
He looked at the monster and didn't see a beast. Its grotesque limbs, its faces, the white dust bleeding from it — all he saw was berserk code leaking and corrupting endlessly.
It was a chilling experience, viewing the world from such a unique angle. The flickering code also looked like a heat map of something, something which was neither alive nor truly dead either.
The monster was truly an amalgamation.
He chuckled.
"What now? Don't tell me I have to fight that thing."
The figure did not respond for a long time. In the silence, though it was not truly silent, the glitches still rampant — the monster continued its march. With every step it took, the surrounding air grew heavy, as if bending to the presence of the monstrous wraith.
Meanwhile, the black figure almost dissolved in the glitches and white sparks, their body becoming translucent for fleeting seconds.
'I'll be… damned.' His face turned deathly pale with horror. The shock made him pause, and his mind wandered.
All of this is just a bad dream. Right! A dream. No way is all of this real! Maybe I'm already dead; the Record Break may have scattered me across space-time. But no, all of this was as real as real can be.
Because—
The monster lunged forward, dashing in a long arc. Its movements were slow and imperfect now, not so flawless as before but still superhuman. Waterfalls of white dust also flowed more smoothly from its sides.
It ignored the black figure and twisted its broken body toward Cael, its blade-arm stretching unnaturally wide, threatening to split him in half.
There was almost no time to react. Even so, Cael bent backward, trying to save his torso from the attack but this only left his neck as a perfect target for the slash.
The world slowed down as the mirror blade closed the distance between its sharp edge and his vulnerable neck.
The glitches, the sounds, the whimsical presence of the distorted portals everything slowed down as if frozen in time, only the oppressive feeling in his body remaining as usual.
Then, it happened again. Something in his core and very being changed. His mind shattered like glass only to reform whole again in an instant. Countless visions, the dreams of unknowns, the forgotten memories. Everything spun before his eyes.
He saw variations of himself, people he knew, people he didn't, all somehow connected to his different versions across the timelines. It felt like a fever dream. Then —
The single familiar ringing buzzed in his ears. A soft chime, and after a few moments which felt like an eternity, it hit again.
Rejected memories spun before his eyes, filling his inner vision with flickering fragments. The world was still slowed down; Cael didn't know if it was just him perceiving the world differently, or something beyond his comprehension nor did he care at this moment.
He scanned the fragments with weary eyes, feeling joy, sorrow, sadness, and various other emotions all at once. It all felt natural to him. Then, he stopped.
He locked onto one of the forgotten scripts of his other lives, feeling the very essence of that forgotten memory.
The life of a younger him in a distant war between rulers of the world and revolutionaries at the end of that world. He was a skilled survivalist who knew how to endure and thrive in an apocalypse.
A true combatant, someone with varying levels of skill and power and people just like him to rely on. A child forced to become an adult before his time, executed for his defiance against the world.
Cael was lost in that memory, its distant echo calling out to him to accept it, to embrace the reality left behind by the other him, to fill it once again and free it from the curse of being forgotten.
He stumbled slightly but regained his composure immediately enough to make the world flow a little faster.
The fragment drifted in the air, like a flickering piece of code ready to disappear at any moment, just like the part of the original script he had found after the Record Break.
Cael caressed it on his fingertips, feeling the imaginary warmth within it and the much deeper coldness emanating from it.
At that moment, the mirror blade finally moved half an inch. The distortions shifted almost imperceptibly, and time was coming to terms with what it had been before.
The vague space separating him from the distorting reality of the rooftop was slowly being undone and he knew what he had to do.
Before time had the chance to fully return to its normal state, Cael gripped the fragment tightly in his fist, dispersing it into white dust. The dust glowed whitish-blue, illuminating his wrist, and disappeared and as it did, the world returned to normal.
The blade arm brushed across his cheek, leaving a slight sharp scar, missing his neck by a hair's breadth. He dove down and twisted his body with reflexes he should not have known but still did.
Driving his elbow into the monster's core with all the strength he could muster, his body carried movements which felt borrowed as if someone else had left them in his muscles.
The feeling was vague and alien, but still carried a faint familiarity. After all, he remembered how these movements had felt.
The monster shrieked, its voice splitting into a chorus of corrupted commands. The monster and Cael carried the momentum and passed through the distorting portals and glitches.
The electrical sparks went berserk and assaulted them both, but Cael didn't stagger this time. Instead…
…his consciousness blurred between his current state and that of the young warrior of the apocalypse.
For a moment, he felt a chill run down his spine. He felt heavy!
Heavy to move, heavy to think, heavy to carry forward, as if someone were tying him down.
'W-What-?'
A disturbing thought crossed his mind. He felt the cold weight of something pressing on his back, leaning on him to drag him down.
Cael's breathing grew shallow and his neck grew heavy, as if someone were strangling it with their hands.
The feeling of being in that vague slowed space returned — but this time, someone else was moving normally within it.
Cael opened his mouth and closed it, then opened it again and closed it, unable to say anything.
"…It's too cruel," the voice came cold, full of sadness, loneliness, and maybe even jealousy, whispering in his ear. It was his own voice.
"Why did I have to go through all that? While you lived your way to adulthood peacefully…"
Goosebumps were not enough to explain what he was experiencing. Cael felt cold, oppressively cold, as the hairs on his arms stood up.
A failed version of himself — its memory was strangling him to death! He knew how this 'Cael' had lived his life, what trials he had faced, and how bitter the end of his script had been.
After all, his life had unfolded like a random chapter of a novel — not too important in the grand schemes of things, a fable ending up forgotten despite being read.
"Hhhey… tell me. Why?" The memory whispered in his ears again, the dread coldness in that voice oppressive but Cael resisted it desperately.
'Ah!'
He felt his consciousness dim, as if drowning in a sea of emotions.
It's useless. It's all useless. I can't escape this… the weight of the memory, the guilt. It's too heavy.
Why was my life so easy to navigate, while this child suffered throughout his?
Cael drowned in these thoughts, his mind nearly on the brink of exhaustion. But at that moment, he remembered.
'No…'
Cael slowly swam out of the sea of despair. The vague sense of separated space dimmed and time slowly began returning to its normal state.
I had my own trials too. I had my own hardships. What does he know about my life? Nothing! Even if he is me, he doesn't have the right to judge me.
'Criticism without introspection is just projection in disguise.'
Cael pulled himself out of the sea of despair and resisted his mind against those foreign emotions.
The feeling of the imaginary grip around his neck disappeared and he regained his senses. The vague space crumbled into fine powder; Cael felt the cold presence and its weight vanish with it too.
"Selfish bastard…"
Cael grinned. "I am!"
Then, everything returned to normal or rather, not normal. His elbow was dunked deep into the center of the monster, most probably its core, as they were dragged through the electrical sparks and glitches in the air.
The situation was still tense, both physically and mentally. Yet he felt a little at ease.
'At least my mind is not split between visions now.'
Cael pursed his lips and let out a fierce growl. Then he staggered, almost falling on his face. The impact of his fall was absorbed by his knees, though they were brutally bruised.
Kneeling some distance away from the edge of the rooftop, he forced his battered body to move.
Then he heard the sound of a mirror cracking. He looked behind and saw the monster kneeling too — the difference being that its knees contained faces carved from silver crystal instead of joints.
The monster's core was destroyed, leaving a wide hole in its place, white dust dripping endlessly from the grievous wound. Sparks of electricity assaulted its abominable figure.
[ Excessive Memory leakage ]
[ o-O-overloooad…kikirkki…over… ]
Boom!
The world shuddered when the abominable mirror fiend exploded into fragmented shards. Dust formed of numbers and letters sprawled where it had been. The monster was gone just like that.
The glitches and distortions began diminishing slowly, and Cael felt an emotion of esteem, joy, and satisfaction — albeit not knowing why those emotions felt so strong.
He breathed heavily, looking at the remains of the mirror fiend.
"You remembered the memory of a True Reflection."
"An echo stirs in your depth."
***
Cael turned around and faced the direction from which the voices had come. There, the black figure stood some distance away, their face still hidden behind the black veiled hood.
They were still partially obscured by glitches, making their silhouette half translucent.
"That sounded oddly familiar," Cael replied, blood dripping from his nose and mouth.
"…"
"Not going to say anything, are you?"
His lips curled up and he spoke in an amused tone.
"Let me guess. This has all happened a few times before. Maybe with some minor changes, but it happened and I had no recollection of those memories, only a sense of déjà vu since you planted some kind of seed in my…
Uhh… in my-? Myy… what exactly?"
"You are somewhat correct." The figure said, almost immediately.
"Somewhat-?"
They sighed, and when they spoke, their voice sounded feminine.
"Listen, debugger. The so-called reality, the simulation you know, is not as what you expect it to be. Yes, it has all happened a few times with changes in events, timelines, space-time, and other things but it is not the same."
They paused and continued as weak sparks of electricity danced around their figure.
"I don't have much time left, so I will cut to the chase. This Record Break was not natural. It was caused by an anomaly. The anomaly known as Cael Ardyn. And that monster was a True Reflection, sent by the Archivists to eliminate the cause and restore order to the simulation. This has happened 89 times already, making this timeline the 90th, at least among the ones where I intervened. In any case, your perfor—"
"Wait — wait, wait! What did you just say?"
He raised his hand and spoke hurriedly:
"An anomaly — I guessed that much. But an unnatural Record Break? What did that even mean? And those numbers — no, wait! You said you don't have much time left. You expect me to believe that?"
They replied:
"You are just wasting time. I am not omnipotent, nor omniscient, nor do I have the power to resist the Archivists' will now."
The rooftop became normal again; only the sky retained some of the changes from after the Record Break. The black figure was now the only source of those strange glitches and flashes. They continued:
"That reflection was no mere memory, it was an echo, and a complete one at that, filled with its own will. Facing it and jumping timelines cost me too much essence."
'That sounded reasonable, I suppose.'
Cael straightened himself and looked into the eyes of the black figure. Only the eyes were indifferent to the strange phenomenon happening to their master carrying their mystical glow and presence.
It was time to end this arduously long day.