The world trembled like glass stretched too thin. The crimson veins that threaded beneath the city's corpse glowed brighter with every step Reiji and Kaede took. The hum in the air wasn't just vibration—it was a pulse, a rhythm trying to match the beat of a heart that shouldn't exist.
They moved through corridors that no longer remembered what they were built for. The walls were cracked mirrors, showing distorted versions of themselves—Reiji walking ahead, Kaede behind, and countless others beside them, silent, overlapping, flickering like a broken reel of film. Every reflection seemed to breathe. Every breath seemed to watch.
"Reiji," Kaede whispered, her tone tight, "the reflections… they're delayed."
He looked to the side. In the fractured mirror, his reflection turned a heartbeat after he did, its eyes lingering on him with something like recognition. Reiji's hand went to the hilt of Kagetsu. "This place remembers too much," he said. "Let's make sure it forgets us."
The corridor ended in a dome of black glass. Its surface was covered in sigils drawn in blood and ash, the same symbol from the tower—the crownless throne surrounded by seven blades. The mark pulsed as they approached, light moving through it like breath through veins.
Kaede ran her fingers across the sigil's edge. "Each line is a link," she murmured. "Seven marks, seven bearers. The Monarch isn't one person—it's a reflection built from them."
Reiji's eyes hardened. "And one of them looks like me."
Before Kaede could answer, the floor shifted. The glass beneath them cracked like ice. From the fissures bled red light—thin, searing, alive. The sound was like a thousand whispers overlapping, chanting something too soft to understand but too heavy to ignore.
A voice rose above it—familiar, sharp, almost tender.
> "Reiji… you left me in the dark."
Reiji froze. The words weren't from Kaede. They came from the mirror to his right. Within its fractured surface stood a woman—her form half mist, half memory. Her eyes were a mirror of his own.
"Kaori."
The name left him before he could stop it. His chest tightened, the years folding into this single instant. Kaori—the partner who vanished during the first collapse, when the Court still called them heroes. She had died—or so he had believed.
But the woman in the reflection smiled with a softness that didn't belong in this place. "Did you think the shadows wouldn't keep me? You taught them too well."
Kaede's gaze flicked between them. "Reiji… she's not real."
"I know." His voice trembled once, then steadied. "That's what makes it worse."
Kaori raised her hand against the mirror, and the cracks spread outward like veins in marble. "You took the first vow, Reiji. You sealed the Monarch's blade yourself. And now you wear its mark again." Her tone sharpened, almost pleading. "You can't undo what you began."
The mirrors around them began to ripple. Reflections of Kaede multiplied, each one taking a different stance—some turning, some watching, some bleeding from eyes that weren't theirs. Reiji drew Kagetsu in a single, sharp motion.
"Enough."
The blade's edge caught the red glow and refracted it, splitting the chamber into beams of shadow and light. The mirrors responded like living things—shards pushing out from the walls, spinning midair, aligning into a jagged ring around them.
Kaede ducked as one shard sliced past her face, cutting a line through her cheek. "They're trying to trap us in reflection!"
"Then we break the world before it closes."
Reiji moved—fast, deliberate, each strike a memory carved in steel. His blade met the shards, shattering one after another. Each one burst into a scream—a voice pulled from someone who had once stood here, each echo colliding into the next. The noise became unbearable, like glass crying.
Kaori's reflection began to fracture. "You can't kill what remembers you," she said, her voice splintering with the glass. "The Monarch is already awake. You only need to look long enough to see him."
Reiji stopped. His reflection stared back, its eyes glowing faintly red. And then it smiled—something his real face didn't.
Kaede shouted his name, but the sound came too late. The reflection lunged outward—through the glass, through the barrier—and became flesh.
Two Reijis collided, blades crossing with a sound like thunder cracking stone. The reflection fought with precision, a perfect mimicry of his movements but devoid of hesitation. Every strike Reiji made was answered, mirrored, refined.
Kaede circled, looking for an opening, but the two shadows were too close, too fast. Sparks lit the chamber in flashes—steel and red light dancing in chaos.
The reflection spoke between blows, its voice identical to his own. "You can't kill me. I am the part of you that wanted the throne."
Reiji drove his knee into its chest and threw it back against the sigil-covered wall. "Then die as the mistake you are."
The reflection laughed—a hollow, human sound. "Mistakes remember longer than victories."
Reiji's eyes burned. He lunged, blade first, driving Kagetsu through its chest. The reflection's smile didn't fade. It whispered as it dissolved into shards of crimson glass:
> "Every Monarch begins with a reflection."
Silence swallowed the chamber again. The mirrors dulled, the light fading to a faint red glow. Kaede approached slowly, breathing hard. "You okay?"
Reiji wiped blood from his cheek—he wasn't sure if it was his or the reflection's. "It's never that simple," he said. "Every time we cut them down, they leave another version of me behind."
Kaede touched the broken sigil on the wall. The lines were bleeding light now, trickling upward like reverse gravity. "If these marks connect the seven bearers," she said, "then you're one of them—by design or by theft."
Reiji stared at his reflection in a fragment on the floor. It blinked a moment late. "Then we find the rest," he said. "And we end this before the mirror finishes rebuilding itself."
Outside, thunder rolled again, followed by the low toll of a distant bell. The city's skyline trembled, its towers bending like dying trees. A thin rain began to fall—black, glinting faintly red under the lightning.
Kaede turned her hood up. "Rain of ash."
Reiji sheathed his blade. "No. This is the Monarch's blood."
They walked toward the sound of the bell, the fractured mirrors dimming behind them. In the shards left on the floor, their reflections lingered for a moment longer than they should have—watching, breathing, smiling.
And when they were gone, the reflections turned their heads toward one another and whispered:
> "The edge has cracked. The Monarch bleeds through."