The long-sealed stone door was pushed open. Inside the circular burial chamber, a handful of flames ignited on their own, throwing light across the carved humanoid pillars ringing the walls and illuminating an octagonal star pattern etched into the floor beneath their feet.
A raw, primal energy surged outward — the kind you'd expect from an arena built for slaughter.
"Just as I thought."
Nanoda stepped inside. A waterfall of long hair. A familiar silhouette, back turned toward her, gazing at the great vault door.
Sealed behind that door was the master of this labyrinth — the Water Mirror Demon. And the figure standing before her was its final guardian.
Nanoda couldn't help thinking: if only someone had set a white chair and a tachi sword in front of it, the whole scene would have radiated an entirely different kind of menace.
The footsteps of the intruder reached it. The mirror duplicate turned around slowly.
In an instant, Nanoda felt the sensation of being fixed in the gaze of some primordial leviathan.
The figure before her was her mirror image — and yet, not entirely. To be precise: it was the Other's mirror image.
The worst-case scenario had materialized.
The only difference between that thing and herself was a single detail: It had a pair of horns.
At that moment, Nanoda was profoundly grateful she had left Yuna outside. If Yuna had been here, there was simply no way she could have spared her any attention.
In the very instant Nanoda was still sizing It up, the Other vanished from the spot without a sound.
When It reappeared, It was already directly behind her — while to Nanoda's eyes, the image of It still standing motionless in its original position hadn't yet updated.
Every instinct she possessed detonated at once. Every single cell in her body screamed: danger.
A blade-hand strike that seemed to slash across the fabric of space itself came driving in from behind, wrapped in a mana that annihilated all it touched.
Swish.
On pure reflex in that razor-thin instant, Nanoda wrenched herself aside and avoided the killing blow — barely. The blade grazed her neck, and blood welled from the cut.
She had nearly been killed on the first exchange.
Forcing herself to stay calm, she twisted her body and swung her broken horn in a wide arc, slashing at the empty air behind her.
No contact. No weight behind the strike. She had hit nothing but an afterimage.
Staggering back to a stable stance, a fierce, searing pain blazed from her neck — enough to crease her brow.
And the Other simply stood where It had always stood, as though It had never moved at all. From beneath the curtain of its hair, vertical pupils regarded Nanoda with a cold, unblinking stillness — an invisible pressure radiating from every inch of its frame.
So this was what beings of the Mythical Era were capable of. Truly, unfairly overwhelming.
If she hadn't once wielded that kind of power herself — firsthand, in her own body — the instinct that had saved her a moment ago would never have surfaced at all.
In a certain sense, Nanoda's instincts had already reached a level that transcended some of this world's fundamental rules.
And magic, at its core, was precisely that: the act of making the impossible possible, of breaking free from the constraints the world imposed.
Nanoda was certain: the Other could employ Mythical-Era Magic with effortless ease. As for what that magic actually was — she herself wasn't entirely sure.
The first time she had used it was when she had killed Wolf in an instant. All she had felt in that moment was time slowing down around her, her own movements becoming faster than she had even intended, and her strikes — at full force — actually distorting space itself.
She had always assumed the original body's Mythical-Era Magic was some form of enhancement or interference-type ability.
It burned through mana at a ferocious rate — but as long as ambient mana existed nearby, Nanoda could draw on it indefinitely.
To preserve her emotions, to keep from being swallowed whole by instinct, she had always kept her own power suppressed. But the thing facing her now was the Other — running at full, merciless output. There was simply no path to victory.
It was only now that she truly understood: she herself was the biggest trap in this dungeon.
The Water Mirror Demon had replicated the Other — nearly perfect, down to the last detail. She had assumed it would at least produce a broken-horn version like herself. Instead, this full-horned replica was operating at a level that completely outclassed her.
"Only one play left," Nanoda murmured quietly.
Outside the vault door, Yuna was locked once again in battle with her own mirror duplicate — just as before, a dead stalemate, neither side gaining ground.
Sweat dripped from her brow. Unlike the tireless construct that was her duplicate, Yuna could feel herself beginning to strain.
At that very moment, the great door behind her burst open, and a figure covered head to toe in wounds came hurtling through.
Nanoda's "secret technique" was, in fact, quite simple: of the Thirty-Six Stratagems, running away ranked first.
"Run!" she shouted at Yuna.
A single Ordinary Offensive Magic bolt fired as she passed — and Yuna's mirror duplicate died. Again. For what felt like the seventh time.
Before Yuna could even begin to ask what had happened, Nanoda had already seized her by the wrist and was hauling her into a sprint toward the exit, never once looking back.
Inside the burial chamber, the Other — guardian of the vault door — made no move to follow once Nanoda had fled. The Water Mirror Demon's directive was simple: hold the vault. Kill any intruder who attempted to breach it.
With Yuna in tow, Nanoda ran all the way until the entrance of the Fallen King's Tomb was within sight.
"Ha... hah... Lady Nanoda, what on earth happened in there?"
When they finally stopped, Yuna doubled over, gasping for breath.
"I'm sorry, Yuna. Because of me, we probably can't clear this dungeon after all..."
Yuna opened her mouth to say something — and then she saw the state of Nanoda, and her words died in her throat.
"How did you get hurt this badly? What happened in there?"
"I ran into my mirror duplicate. I couldn't beat it, so I grabbed you and ran."
Nanoda stated it as plain fact, without further elaboration. The truth was she had come within inches of being sliced into pieces by her own mirror's blade-hand, and had been completely unable to land a single hit in return. It was, frankly, a little humiliating.
"I see... well, it doesn't matter, Lady Nanoda! It's not like we came away empty-handed!"
As she spoke, Yuna gave a shake of her shoulders — and the enormous pile of ancient artifacts she was carrying shifted and clattered.
"That's true. Even if we didn't finish it, this was still a genuinely fun adventure."
Nanoda managed a smile. Falling short at the very last step stung a little — but she had gathered more than enough of the romance and wonder that adventure had to offer.
The two rested briefly, then prepared to leave the Fallen King's Tomb. Yuna showed no sign of dwelling on the failed conquest; she simply kept repeating, with firm insistence, that Nanoda absolutely had to see a healer once they got back.
Nanoda privately thought her own constitution was probably fine on its own — and that any healer who discovered she was a Demon might very well decide to act as an agent of the Goddess and attempt to eliminate her on the spot.
Not to mention, the Goddess's magic probably couldn't heal a member of the Demon Race who lived outside the Goddess's blessing to begin with.
"Sure," she said, swallowing every one of those thoughts and giving a quiet nod.
As the two of them walked out of the labyrinth, the Other — which had stood vigil at the vault door — faded gradually into nothingness.
Deep within the tomb, in the treasury at its furthest reaches, a blue-violet gem of octahedral form floated in the dark, radiating its cold luminescence.
Crack.
A hairline fracture appeared across its surface.
The radiance that had blazed so brilliantly a moment before dimmed — just a shade.
It flickered. Once. Twice.
It looked, for all the world, like sulking.
____
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