“Who—” Raine asked.

  Of course, his first move was to directly confront the suspicious man, being the protagonist and all. Alira didn’t wait for him to finish, let alone for the man to respond. She grabbed Raine and Lillian in each hand and bolted.

  She kept her ears perked up, listening to any movement that indicated that they were being chased. None. He’s not following us...for now. The cultist was most likely summoning his minions to join the hunt. Fuck. Why would they include a summon spell upon trigger? Weren’t the cultists worried about a professor or someone alike triggering it instead?

  Oh, shit.

  Biting on her lips, she couldn’t help but think how she could have seen this coming. The setup was too perfect, too obvious. She was being too indulgent with her own logic and assumptions.

  She should have known better than that. Too careless.

  Now they were in a worse situation than the worst-case scenarios she’d imagined. The entire safe zone of the forest was now under Lock spell. The cultist had chosen to attack during the test period to ensure that no one would be inside the spell-locked area. They barely saw the entire First Class as a rock that could trip them.

  The event in the novel had been pushed forward. Except now with only three students around—only one of whom knew anything about fighting. As it’d been quite some time since they split off from the group, Professor Sigor and the other students had most likely already left the forest. No one else, other than Professor Sigor, was aware of the three missing.

  This was literally a pot of gold from the sky for the cultist. For the three of them, it was a rain of knives.

  “W-What’s going on?” Lillian yelled, almost tripping every step as she was literally dragged like a sack of potatoes. She struggled, wanting to turn around and look behind.

  Alira squeezed her hand tight as a warning, earning a wince from the girl. Hybrids were far more physically capable than the average person in terms of raw strength and speed. Lillian’s slender wrist felt fragile in Alira’s grip. Easily broken.

  “Keep quiet,” Alira hissed, eyes shooting toward all directions to make sense of their location. She knew she was being too harsh on the girl, but her anxiety bared its fangs to the closest person anyway.

  Her eyes found the vague direction toward the underground burrow. Compared to the open ground, they had a better chance in the complex cave system—even if it meant she was trapping themselves and leading the cultists toward the artifact as well.

  “Hide,” Alira panted, trying to gather herself. “Think of this as we’re playing hide and seek,” she said, “where being found by them means we die.”

  Raine wriggled his hand out of Alira’s grasp, but he didn’t slow down, keeping up to her pace. “Alira. Explain. Now.” He whispered through gritted teeth.

  This isn’t how it should have gone. Alira swallowed down her grumble. “You saw that, right. The...unnerving crest on that the guy’s cloak.”

  To call it unnerving would be an understatement. The crest was a distastefully soft pink colored womb with the heads of two reddish black snakes in place of the fallopian tube. The snakes knotted on themselves and tangled with each other. Bizarre. Discomforting. It was the symbol of Mother.

  Alira licked her dry lips to wet them. “Your mother...” The same symbol was found etched into the woman’s deceased body, at least what remained of it.

  Raine ran alongside Alira without speaking a word for a long time. If not for her ears picking up his masterfully hushed footsteps and the tension oozing out of him, she would have thought he had disappeared off on his own. Finally, she heard a suppressed sigh from him. “What’s the plan?”

  “There’s...uh, something tells me that there’s a cave-like hideout around here. We don’t stand a chance against them if we come face-to-face with them. So, we hide.”

  Lillian fake-coughed to bring the two’s attention to her. “Back—I mean, my Role allows me to turn invisible. I won’t be noticed by someone unless I try to intervene with something. I don’t want to, but I could split off and go look for the professor?”

  Despite the bad initial and overall impression, not to mention the fact that Lillian was partially responsible for this situation, Alira felt herself softening up to the girl. Lillian was clueless as a pebble about the current situation, but she still read the room perfectly—clearly she had perfected the art as someone born and raised as a noble. Alira admitted she might not be able to think rationally and kept her cool, despite the perceived danger, like Lillian if she were in her shoes.

  “No.” Alira held onto her hand, refusing to let go. Lillian was the first to die in the novel. Things were completely different now, but the purple-eyed girl still got involved somehow. It was as if fate was stirring its invisible hands around in ways Alira could see but couldn’t prevent.

  She couldn’t let Lillian go alone with a death flag fluttering above her head. “Professor Sigor will come for us regardless. There’s no need for you to go. We just have to stay hidden before he comes.”

  That was what she said, but Alira hoped Lillian didn’t notice her hand trembling. Unlike the two, she knew they were within the area under a Lock spell and understood thoroughly how it worked. The spell couldn’t be broken from the outside. Now that the caster was present, they couldn’t break it by destroying the medium either.

  They had to kill the leading cultist. There were also his henchmen, but it was either the cultists or themselves. Both Lillian and Raine were worth a head each. But if they got to Alira, it would quickly become a very long night of ceaseless bloodshed. Thanks to the duke’s bind, she was carrying the lives of thousands on her head.

  Dread. No gory horror movies or bloodcurdling novel scenes had ever really terrified her. She had forgotten fear like this since that day years ago.

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  No, I’m different. I’m not the same kid I was back then.

  Alira sank her teeth into her bottom lip until it stung with copper taste. She grabbed Raine by his sleeve and sped up. Right. She had the protagonist with her. That meant the power of indestructible plot armor was on her side. She simply had to bathe herself and Lillian in his holy halo.

  Trees, trees, and yet more trees. Each of the wooden giants hovering above felt like judges from hell as they were sentenced to an eternal confinement inside the forest. At last, Alira caught a glimpse of the one specific tree—one with a barely visible green fabric tied to a branch, hidden amongst its leaves. She’d almost missed it despite squinting those eyes of hers that had been enchanted to see better in the dark as a perk of being a cat-girl.

  How the heck did Raine notice that whilst injured, losing blood, and on the run?

  The tree had a hollow opening at the base of its stem where exposed roots curved around. A reminiscence of the rabbit hole Alice had jumped into. Alira shoved Raine inside first in case there was any death trap. The protagonist would no doubt survive even if there was one. A whistle echoed out of the hollow, signaling that the ground was clear.

  Then, Alira proceeded to push Lillian down, ignoring the girl’s obvious reluctance to dive into a random hole. She felt the same hesitation when it was her turn, staring down at the dark hole that was barely wide enough to crawl into.

  Alira took a deep breath, inhaling a lungful of fresh air in case there was a lack of it underground. She raised her foot to drop down. Her ears flicked at something her brain failed to register. The air cracked as what looked like a whip shot through the darkness from behind.

  Raw, sharp ache pierced through her before she could react or even make sense of where it was coming from. A rigged, solid-red rod went through her back to reappear out of her chest.

  “A-Augh!” Alira’s vision blurred for a second as she was hooked like a fish, the small spikes along the rod digging into her flesh. Pained whimpers escaped from her, crawling out of her throat without realizing it herself. The very real agony kept her thinking straight. As soon as she felt the rod drag backward, Alira angled herself to jump down the hollow, effectively removing it.

  A burst of delirious pain exploded like fireworks in her chest, shoulder, and along her torso. Alira landed the wrong way onto the muddy ground, twisting her ankle to fall on her butt. The pain from her lower half was negligible compared to the torn hole in her chest. Her clothes, soaked from warm, fresh blood, clung to her body—from Raine and Lillian’s ghastly face, she knew she wasn’t quite a pleasant sight to see.

  “Scram!” Alira shouted, struggling back onto her feet to scrabble away from the hole above. “Raine, close—!”

  Raine pulled Alira, yanking her further away from the entrance where a shadow loomed over, seemingly deliberating whether to follow or not. From the outside, it was impossible to tell how deep the hole actually was.

  Raine stood a safe distance away, closing his eyes in concentration before streams of water materialized from the rich mana around. The water with a bright blue glow lit up the dirt and roots all around, flowing around Raine like a celestial river. It shot towards the hole like a spear and splashed against the opening to turn into a shield.

  A rod—the same one still dripping with Alira’s blood—drilled into the layer of water. Raine stepped back just in time to escape getting his foot impaled. He murmured a Transform Spell in Ancient Tongue, casting the spell in half a second. The water froze, grabbing onto the rod when it began to pull back.

  Ice cracked as yet another rod slammed right into it. Raine repeated his last steps: gathering more water, sealing the entrance, and freezing it to stack thick layers upon layers until the entire space underground was lit blue from the ice.

  Constant clashing and crashing of ice reverberated through the icy seals. They wouldn’t last long.

  “Alira!”

  “Alira, your...”

  Raine and Lillian spoke at the same time once there was some breathing room. They both frowned the same frown as they scanned Alira up and down. The wrinkles in their face deepened the longer they looked.

  “I’m fine,” Alira spat. All of her injuries were already ‘healed’. She sent a mental apology to Cion, the duke’s mage and first shield, to whom her damages were transferred to. Certainly, he wouldn’t be having a nice time with a hole in his shoulder and a sprained ankle. “We need to hide,” she gasped.

  Alira turned towards the long tunnel behind them. Then, after thinking for a moment, she added, “Lillian, can you use your invisible power or whatever? Follow us closely, but stay hidden just in case.”

  Lillian nodded quite uncertainly. “Alright. You two need to go ahead a bit, and not pay attention to me for it to work.”

  Alira glanced at Raine, and the two walked down the tunnel at a fast but not-too-fast-Lillian-couldn’t-keep-up pace.

  Left. Right. Left. Middle.

  Alira repeated to herself the route Raine had taken in the novel before he miraculously found the artifact. Without a doubt, it had to be the work of some greater beings, like the writer or the plot armor, that he actually managed to stumble upon it by taking just the right path.

  “You seem to know exactly where to go...” Raine murmured as if to himself, but not quite. Alira pretended not to hear it on top of her heartbeats galloping like a loose, wild horse. She glanced behind them to see a long, empty tunnel of dirt. Lillian was right there—if she paid special attention, she could see shallow footprints on the ground.

  Faded remnants of ear-splitting clangs of metal against metal echoed from down the tunnels. The cultists were deliberately making themselves heard, announcing their hunt, and that this was all just a game they decided to play along with.

  What bad taste.

  The path became more solid as cracked stone tiles were layered on top of the red dirt. Despite the cool, damp air beneath the ground, Alira was sweating buckets. The heat from her body might just be warming up the entire cave system. The three, one invisible, stood before the last junction where the path split into three yet again.

  Standing here, Alira knew deep in her soul which path to take, even if she didn’t have the knowledge from the novel. The air was humming—vibrating with what felt like a calling. Alira tasted a salty sweetness on her tongue. Familiar but alien. Similar to the afterschool snacks she used to have, yet totally different.

  She took a large stride to the path on her right, but her step faltered with her foot midair. A whisper, no, a curse. Her face tingled as wordless murmurs hit her. Alira’s ears twitched, the body part feeling as confused as she was. She heard something. But, at the same time, she knew she didn’t. There wasn’t a sound.

  “Did you hear that?” Alira asked, but she didn’t give Raine the time to respond, not quite wanting an answer from him. Instead, she tugged at the artifact in his hand, which he surprisingly let her take.

  The path ended in a large, underground chamber floored with aged stones and faded decorative patterns. Endless, pitch black shadow hid the roof, if there was one—swallowing the light from the artifact.

  “What is this place?” Lillian’s voice came from somewhere beside Raine. Raine didn’t reply. He was too busy admiring the stone statues of headless women every five steps along all four walls of the chamber. From the left of the entrance they came in, the woman statues were younger than the previous ones, regressing with shorter torsos.

  Alira was glad to see him distracted. She quickly found her target. The anomalies. Among all the statues, the last two statues both appeared to be youngest at eight and ten at oldest. Compared to the rest, the two of them stood closer together as well.

  Despite them standing on top of a square platform made of stone, Alira was much taller than both of them, due to them missing their heads. She reached towards the last statue, placing her hand on the rough surface of the statue’s chest. Then, she pushed her palm, which sank right into the stone with little resistance.

  The inside felt nothing like rock—soft, warm, and sticky. Like her hand was inside a bucket of meat. Her fingertips grazed against something solid, a burst of heat exploding at contact. It was the artifact.

  Hollowed Mirror.