The mirror world remained shrouded in mist, but inside the apartnt, the three diners and their feline companion were all quite satisfied with their lunch. Miss Capet had grown up in the church and Miss Knight hailed from an ancient noble family, so both young won ate with practiced elegance. Jenkins, however, was a visitor from another world, and Chocolate was a poor abandoned cat; compared to the ladies, their table manners were a bit rough around the edges.
"I hadn't wanted to kill the lion right away," one of them explained. "We were trying to get information from it on how to find the exit, but it clearly wasn't going to cooperate. It fed us so unreliable tips and then tried to fight back, so we had no choice but to kill it. After all, if it had broken free, none of us could have stopped it."
Though it wasn't obvious from their conversation, both Miss Knight and Miss Capet were injured. After finishing his al and resting for a bit, Jenkins set about treating their wounds, and in the process, learned of their next steps based on the information the lion had provided.
"The circus folk are hiding in different mirror worlds to evade the Orthodox Churches. They seem to have answered so kind of summons and are preparing for sothing big. They've been able to level up so quickly because they hunt their own mirror images, but we couldn't tell if that part was a lie."
"ow~"
That wasn't a lie, Chocolate said.
"Opening a mirror passage at different tis leads to different worlds. Theoretically, opening a passage at a precise second should lead to a specific mirror world, but errors can occur for various reasons. Moreover, opening a passage from within a mirror world only grants access to a limited number of other mirrors. The lion gave us three different tis. One of them supposedly leads to the Church's designated mirror, Number 14. It demanded we release it before it would tell us the correct one, but unfortunately..."
Miss Knight shrugged, implying that with Jenkins unconscious, the two won hadn't been confident they could keep the lion contained.
Observing her up close, Jenkins noticed that Miss Knight's eyes still had vertical, dragon-like pupils. They were the eyes of an animal, a beast—even more feral than Chocolate's adorable, wide eyes.
But Jenkins knew he shouldn't point it out. Won, after all, tended to be sensitive about their appearance.
The thought made him suddenly miss his "friends." He had been missing for a full day now. Today was Tuesday, the day of the Ruen gathering. Hathaway and Briny probably didn't know he was gone yet, but if Alexia found out, she would be terribly worried.
While Jenkins had been unconscious, Miss Knight and Miss Capet had already explored this mirror version of Nolan City. It clearly wasn't their destination, but fortunately, it hadn't been overrun by malevolent entities or anything of the sort.
All three options the lion provided were extrely unreliable; it was possible all three tis led directly to horrifying worlds occupied by evil things. After a careful discussion, the three of them agreed they couldn't risk trying any of them. Since the circus had explored fewer than fifty mirror worlds, they reasoned that by traveling randomly, they would eventually find the one the Church was using.
This approach was also quite dangerous, of course, but it was better than blindly trusting the lion's options.
By three in the afternoon, Jenkins felt he had mostly recovered and suggested they move on to the next step. The trio reaffird their agreent to et at the clock tower next ti, then stepped one by one into the shattered mirror.
When the sensation of falling faded, Chocolate was, as expected, gone. Jenkins looked around and found himself standing on an unfamiliar street. At least his luck was holding out—he was surrounded by a thin mist, not a fog so thick he couldn't see his hand in front of his face. This ant he was still in the city's inner circle.
Ahead, he could faintly make out a dark figure. A monocle appeared silently over his eye, allowing Jenkins to see a version of Hathaway with two heads and four arms. The left half of her body was dressed like a noble maiden attending a ball, while the right half was clad in the black robes commonly used for nocturnal activities. One of her left hands cradled the severed head of a woman; one of her right hands held the head of a man.
Both heads looked eerily familiar.
He understood in an instant what this mirror image of Hathaway represented, and a complex expression, caught sowhere between a smile and a grimace, crossed his face.
"So, you've been struggling with this too, huh."
He drew the white sword and, with a single swing, cleaved through an incoming energy blast shaped like a musical note. He then thrust the blade into the monster's left breast.
But the expected sound of shattering glass never ca. Instead, rapidly regenerating muscle clamped down on the blade, trapping it inside the body. Four arms shot out, seizing Jenkins's own, and lifted him into the air. Both heads opened their mouths wide and lunged for his shoulders.
It seed Hathaway's mirror image was far more physically durable than Papa Oliver's had been.
But the sword, trapped in muscle, vanished in the next instant, only to reappear between Jenkins's feet. He executed a clean forward kick, driving the blade unimpeded into the center of the monster's torso.
The heart at its core was instantly pulverized. As the sound of shattering glass echoed, Hathaway's faint voice drifted into Jenkins's ear. It was brief, just a single sentence:
"For them... my heart is in the sa place."
"It's a good thing Hathaway is a woman," Jenkins mused. "Otherwise, that would be the classic line of a two-tir."
Jenkins felt a pang of sadness, but also a flicker of warmth. He bent down, picked up a shard of the mirror, and tucked it into his pocket. Then he began to wonder what his own reflection in the mirror world would be like.
"Wait, that's not right," he thought. "I'm practically a pseudo-god. If the mirror world could create a reflection of a god, that would be sothing else. This is an unreal world, after all, not a truly existing plane like the Shadow Realm or the Astral Plane."
A ow sounded from a distance. Jenkins looked up toward the thin mist down the street and, sure enough, saw Chocolate trotting happily toward him.
"Could it be Chocolate's reflection?"
As he wondered, he crouched down to catch the leaping cat. He curled his right index finger and gently scratched under the cat's chin, and Chocolate's eyes imdiately narrowed in pleasure.
"Even if it were Chocolate's reflection, it probably wouldn't have much power," he reasoned. "Chocolate is so content with life, it's impossible for her to have a dark side... which ans, if a reflection of Chocolate did appear here, I'd suddenly have two cats!"
"ow~"
The cat opened its mouth and nipped his finger. Of course, the young cat didn't have much strength, and it only left a faint tooth mark. Jenkins stroked Chocolate's head. Now he was certain this was really his cat.
The tallest building on the street was three stories high. Jenkins climbed to the top with the cat and looked around. With so effort, he finally spotted the faint, looming shape of the city's clock tower through the depths of the mist. He now had a rough idea of his location; it seed he was quite a distance from their eting point.
Reviews
All reviews (0)