Whispers gathered around the broken window, now a gaping wound in the mansion's second floor facade. It was Karmen's study. The sight made everyone below stand still, their faces thick with worry. But their concern was not something that mattered to the scene unfolding inside.
"Young master!"
"No, my little boy!" Lady Livia's voice rose in a panicked cry from below.
"What in Alisia's grace is happening?!"
"Karmen!" his brother Lyle yelled, his own voice full of terror.
It was indeed something straight out of a nightmare. The dust settled inside the ruined room. Lucid shielded the girl's lifeless body in his arms. She had been a young, lively maid who had served and accompanied him with her quiet presence, even though their moments together had been short. Normally, Lucid did not care about anyone inside a rift. He knew they were all conjured illusions, replicas of a timeline. But this, this was starting to affect him. These people did not matter to him, specifically, but to Karmen they did. And since he was reliving life as Karmen, he was essentially starting to care about them. But that was not the worst of it.
Each cycle, each second going by, he started feeling things he normally would not. He was growing adapted to Karmen's body, his instincts, his memories. The most frightening thing of all, he remembered things he had no recollection of ever seeing since arriving in this rift. It was as if he had known them all along.
'No,' he realized with a cold dread. 'At this rate, I am not repeating Karmen's life. I am becoming Karmen.' And that was something he could never let happen. Not ever.
"Sadness of loss. Anger from misunderstanding. Bewilderment. Shock. That is what you must be feeling," Ivy stated, her voice a calm, venomous contrast to the chaos she had wrought. She stood amidst the debris, untouched. "However, rest assured, I will capture you alive. Our Empress has a special ceremony for the ruling families of conquered lands. It is an honor."
Honor. He had heard that word a million times by now. It was always the last thing they had to say when their masks broke, the final excuse for their reasons. Ivy now reminded Lucid painfully of that imperial guard he had met in the sentrum rift, the one he had barely survived.
'These people are so insufferable,' he managed to think through the haze of grief and rising fury.
"You value honor, right?" Lucid yelled, his voice raw.
"Then throw me that sword!"
Beside Ivy, on the wall, hung a longsword as a decoration. It was their family heirloom, passed down by that ancestor who broke away from Materna and fought for independence. Now that he looked at it, the weapon looked terribly familiar. He had seen it in that rift, wielded by a man fighting for his life.
Ivy glanced at the sword on the wall and then back at Lucid, her expression one of pure condescension. She walked to it, pulled it smoothly from its brackets, and tossed it toward him.
"Very well."
Without a single moment of hesitation, a projectile was thrown through the air. It was almost too fast to see, a long sword pointed at his heart, traveling at great speed. Had it been Lucid from the first cycle, he would be dead. It was unexpected for an Enlightened healer to carry such physical prowess, the Enlightened were beings far above any human, so it did not truly surprise him.
Still holding the girl in his arms, he bent his legs slightly, making a low stance. As the thrown blade neared, he moved, his free hand snapping out to intercept it in mid-air by its hilt. The motion was not entirely his own. Intuition, knowledge, memory, something crashed back into his mind like a torrential storm, bringing with it muscle memory and combat forms he had never studied. A sharp wind seemed to cut through the air around his movement.
He felt a slight tremor, a sense urging him to dodge. He turned his chest to the side just as an invisible slash of energy tore past him, gouging a huge cut into the wall and splitting apart chunks of wood and plaster. He quickly dashed to the corner of the room and laid Jane's body gently against the wall. He faced her for a bare second, a pang of something sharp and human striking his chest, then turned back to face his enemy.
She was gone.
'What? Where did she go?'
A sickening realization rose in his stomach, a cocktail of disgust, fear, shame, and frustration.
"No, not them!" Lucid, or Karmen, who knew by now, cried out. But one thing was for sure. Lucid was already running, dashing with all his might toward the shattered window. He jumped out through the settling debris and smoke, hitting the warm summer light outside.
He landed with a soft thud, rolling on the manicured lawn and coming up immediately into a crouch. Another sharp cut of air, too fast to see or hear, was already heading his way. It passed through the fabric of his sleeve on his left shoulder, slicing skin. Pain tensed up his arm immediately, and he gripped his wounded shoulder, wincing. Another attack followed, this one aimed for his neck. He was quicker to react this time, ducking beneath the cleaving air.
He looked up, readying the heirloom sword in his hand, settling into a defensive stance. Lucid was deeply focused, every inch of his body and mind concentrating on the battle. Or perhaps it was Karmen.
Then he saw it.
He looked past Ivy, toward the garden. It was Lyle. His older brother was on his knees, a glowing, ethereal scythe held below his neck by a faint, shimmering strand of magic. Beside the stone bench, their mother lay by the base of a large oak tree, a smear of blood trailing down the bark as if she had been thrown against it. It was a horrific scene. Around them, servants, maids, and butlers were on the ground. Gerald, the old head butler, was on his knees, deeply wounded, looking at the scene with a terrified expression.
Karmen, the part that cared, stopped dead in his tracks. But that was not the case for Lucid. He wanted to push forward, to give Ivy a piece of his mind, to tear her apart even if Karmen's family was at stake. He did not realize that letting Lyle die would result in his own death before he could take another step. He wrestled for control, while Karmen desperately clung on, trying to take over their shared body.
"I see you are wavering," Ivy observed, her head tilting.
'Wait, what is happening? Why can I not move?' Lucid thought, fighting the paralysis of conflict.
"This is something between you and me," he finally said, his tone slow, deliberate, and low.
"You are mistaken, Karmen. This is between me and the House of Valrious. I gave your mother a quick death. I thought you would put on more of a spectacle."
Lucid was used to it by now, seeing Karmen's family members dead or incapacitated. But that was not the case for Karmen, who still clung on, his grief a palpable force alongside the silent presence of Alice.
"Oh, you are crying," Ivy said, her voice low and intrigued.
His left eye was slowly tearing up, releasing a steady stream of tears as he looked at her. No, his eyes kept wandering to the side where his mother was disposed of. Lucid tried to rub his eye, shaking the tear away. They were in front of a mortal enemy, and one wrong move could mean death. Not for them, but for Lyle, and that would activate the cycle's penalty.
He sniffed, confused and furious, not knowing where this emotion had come from.
'Damn it, Karmen, you crybaby. Come on. Stop crying!'
Another slash of sharp, compressed air was projected at him. It cut deep into the left side of his chest. A fatal wound for most, but Karmen's body, at the peak of its past conditioning, was strong enough to keep him standing. Agony bloomed hot and bright, but he did not fall.
"Surrender, Karmen. What do you hope of gaining? You are but an Awakened. This is fate. Mother Fate wanted this. You either give up your land, ensuring your legacy lives through your older brother, or you die, giving us the land we promised to our Empress."
"You are telling me to choose a lesser evil," Lucid spat, blood trickling from the corner of his mouth.
"If you put it like that, yes."
He looked at her, directly into her violet eyes. His own blue eyes, Karmen's eyes, held an unwavering determination that reflected Lucid's own cold clarity and perseverance.
He smiled then, a pained, bloody, but defiant grin.
"I choose my own destiny, all the way to fate's final destination. And that is the journey I choose."
"So, no."
He raised the ancestral sword, its point aimed at her heart. "Release him, or you will meet an end worse than any fate could devise."