Chapter 96: Her Mirror Cracks

Zion didn’t dream.

It was a system rule, one of the first she had learned in her second run: Players didn’t need to sleep.

Fatigue was a parameter she could toggle off with a thought, like muting an annoying notification.

That’s why she didn’t understand what was happening when she closed her eyes.

The mirror was huge.

It took up the whole wall of a cathedral that didn’t exist on any map she had seen, with black stone columns and stained glass windows showing cracks, irregular lines stretching outward like roots.

Zion stood in front of the mirror.

Her reflection didn’t mimic her.

Instead, there was a boy.

Thin, with pale blue hair stuck to his forehead like he had just come out of the water.

Blue eyes looked at her from the other side of the glass with an expression she couldn’t classify immediately.

It wasn’t hate.

It was something worse.

“Do you remember what you did?”

The boy’s voice sounded muffled, as if the mirror was as thick as a wall.

But Zion didn’t answer, she simply searched in her interface, scanned the figure looking for a name, a tag, a threat percentage.

[ERROR: IDENTIFICATION UNAVAILABLE.]

The boy reached out and touched the mirror from the inside.

The glass cracked.

CRACK.

A fine line started in the center and split up and down, to the sides, multiplying, until the whole mirror was a spiderweb of fractures and the boy was still looking at her from inside with that impossible-to-catalog expression.

“Do you remember?” he repeated.

Zion opened her mouth and the mirror exploded.

ZION SAT UP WITH A JOLT!

The air of the tent hit her face.

Her hands grabbed the sheets tight, and it took her three full seconds to understand where she was.

The Ruins of the Radiant Empire.

Her provisional HQ.

The commander’s tent.

[ANOMALY DETECTED: UNAUTHORIZED SLEEP CYCLE — DURATION: 4 HOURS, 17 MINUTES.]

[CAUSE: UNKNOWN.]

Zion let go of the sheets.

She stayed sitting on the edge of the cot, looking at her hands, her knuckles were white so she relaxed them slowly, one by one.

She had slept four hours without wanting to, without even activating rest mode.

She searched for the boy in her memory with blue hair and blue eyes.

’Do you remember what you did?’

She went over her interaction history from the last few weeks.

There was no NPC with those characteristics pending.

No one she had killed recently with that description.

She discarded the dream, since those were just system background noise, nothing more.

The entrance to the tent opened.

“Liberator.”

Varek entered with the folded report in his hands.

Her lieutenant was a forty-year-old man with a horizontal scar on his chin and a habit of not speaking until she gave him visual permission. So she looked at him and he understood the signal.

“The Church responded to our taking of Kethyr.” Varek extended the report. “They destroyed three villages, used something that witnesses say was like having their souls ripped out.”

Zion took the paper.

She read it in silence.

Her interface processed the content and generated an automatic tag on the right margin of her vision:

[LORE EVENT: CONCENTRATED GIFT WEAPONS. SOURCE: UNKNOWN.]

Zion knew the source.

In her previous run, this didn’t exist.

Extraction crystals were minor ecclesiastical tech, used in minor purification rituals, small things with no tactical importance.

They had never reached the battlefield.

But she had attacked Kethyr and had freed the soldiers instead of eliminating them, this time she had decided to play different.

And the game had responded.

“How many dead?” she asked.

“Three hundred twelve.”

Zion folded the report carefully, following the lines of the original creases. She did it slowly, as if the paper required attention.

’They are just NPCs,’ she told herself.

The phrase came automatic, like always.

The reminder she used to keep focus, to not waste time on irrelevant variables.

In her first run she had repeated it thousands of times and it had worked perfectly.

Now the phrase arrived and stayed floating in the air without landing anywhere.

Three hundred twelve.

Three villages.

Zion clenched her fist with the report inside. “Surviving witnesses?”

“Seventeen that we are already moving to the north camp.”

“I want them interrogated before noon, I need to know how they activated the crystals in open field and what range of effect they have.”

“Understood.” Varek didn’t move. “Liberator, there is something else.”

She looked at him.

“Corporal Eldan, the one we freed in Kethyr.” Varek chose his words with care. “He returned to his village, but it was one of the three destroyed.”

Zion didn’t answer.

“We confirmed it this morning, his name is on the casualty list.”

The tent was silent and outside, the camp was starting to move with the sunrise, low voices, steps on the dirt, the smell of smoke from morning fires.

Zion looked at Varek. “Leave.”

Varek left without making a sound.

Zion was left alone.

Corporal Eldan, with his personal history displayed on her interface when she saw him for the first time.

She had let him go because the math was simple and because in that moment it had seemed like the efficient decision.

And the Church had turned him into a number on a list.

’They are just NPCs.’

Zion stood up from the cot and walked to the entrance of the tent.

She opened the flap and looked at the camp, with hundreds of people moving in the gray light of dawn, making breakfast, sharpening weapons, talking among themselves.

This was her army, her tools.

The boy from the dream appeared in her mind without warning.

’Do you remember what you did?’

Zion closed the flap.

She opened her interface with a mental gesture, searching the completed mission logs of the last few months. Searching for the boy, searching for something that explained the image.

The interface loaded.

And then a message appeared that she had never seen.

Zion blinked.

She read it twice.

[ERROR. CLASSIFIED INFORMATION. INSUFFICIENT ACCESS LEVEL.]

She stared at the message.

In all her runs her interface had been the constant.

The only tool that never failed, never lied, never hid anything from her.

’Insufficient access level.’

Zion tried to close the message but it didn’t close.

She tried again but the message flickered and stayed.

She tried to navigate to another section.

The interface didn’t respond.

The message took up her whole vision like a wall.

[ERROR. CLASSIFIED INFORMATION. INSUFFICIENT ACCESS LEVEL.]

Zion clenched her jaw.

Insufficient level?

She was the only Player.

She was the one who had come to correct this world, the one who carried the knowledge of countless runs, the one who had defeated gods and dismantled empires.

Who had a higher level than her?

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