Reincarnated as an Apocalyptic Catalyst-Chapter 116: Reflex Against Reflection
Chapter 116: Reflex Against Reflection
The corridor ahead seemed to stretch on and on, though the strange amalgamation of crystal and flesh that surrounded us, did well to keep us alert with its mere presence. Crystalline walls expanded in rhythmic pulses, their patterns shifting in tandem with our steps as if the dungeon was adjusting itself around us. This wasn’t architecture meant to intimidate, it was more of a nervous system reacting to stimulus, and we were the spark running across its synapses.
Vance walked beside me, his posture tense, eyes flicking across the refracting surfaces like he expected one of them to grow arms and punch him in the face, which would have been absolutely hilarious. "So, do we think the dungeon’s getting prettier because it’s gaining taste or because it’s preparing for company?"
"Could be both," I replied absently, watching the shifting light refract across the smooth floor like spilled mercury. "I mean, naturally, that does nothing to improve my trust in this murder machine, if trust were even possible to begin with."
Up ahead, the hallway branched into three crystal-lined arches, each leading into separate chambers. There were no markings, indicators, or even subtle runes telling us which path led to less trauma, just some weird geometric shapes--A sphere, a cube, and a spiral.
Ronan stepped forward and placed his hand on the center wall between the two outermost paths. The moment his fingers touched it, the surface pulsed faintly—soft lavender bleeding into deep violet.
"It’s likely still aware of us. No matter our choice, we cannot surprise it," he said.
"Was it ever not? From what you’ve said, from what it said itself, it’s just been fucking with us from the moment we entered." I pointed out.
"It was quiet before," he replied, tracing something invisible with a single fingertip. "Now it’s focused." I didn’t move closer to the platforms, at least not yet.
The sphere pulsed as if it sensed hesitation, its glow quickening. The cube remained stoic, unchanged, as if it didn’t care whether I picked it or left it to eternity. The spiral... that one still hadn’t made up its mind. It flickered with light and began to rotate in the air, never quite settling into place. That one was up to something, I knew it.
"They’re all traps," I said, and not because I was feeling particularly insightful, it just seemed logical based on everything we had been through. "The real question is what kind."
Nythera stepped to the edge of the room, staying well away from the platforms but studying them with that sharp, quiet concentration she always wore when she was trying not to panic. "They’re keyed to resonance," she said. "I can feel it. They’re waiting for something specific."
"It reacts to our intent," Ronan said casually.
"Intent," Vance repeated. "That’s good. That means we can trick them."
I gave him a side glance. "That is the opposite of what it means. If we plan to fuck them over, that’s intent. Even if we think about something else, I feel like we won’t be able to sneak one past these... Things?"
"No," he said, raising one finger. "It means we just need to lie convincingly enough that the dungeon believes us. Lucky for you, I lie like a champ."
"That’s a lie, and I don’t believe you," I muttered, stepping between the platforms now, careful not to brush any of them. "You, the guy that can’t keep a single emotion close to your vest, is the best possible person to lie convincingly enough to beat some magical computer shapes. I still don’t know what the hell these things are."
I turned toward Ronan. "You getting anything from these?"
He didn’t speak at first; he was watching the spiral—his head tilted slightly, his eyes narrowed as if reading a language buried inside its folds. "I was incorrect earlier," he said hesitantly.
I stared wide-eyed at Ronan, not sure if he had said that before.
"It is similar. They seem to be reflections, taking key elements of the dungeon and ourselves, while reflecting them in the form of these corridors."
"Reflections of what?" Nythera asked.
"Possibility. Constraint. Instability."
"...Okay," Vance said, nodding slowly. "So in dungeon terms, that’s what? Aggression, defense, and some wild card."
"Not sure that’s entirely accurate, but let’s go with that for now," I responded.
Ronan took a slow breath. "They respond to who we are. Not who we say we are. I do not believe we will be able to proceed as a group."
That sent a slow crawl of unease down my spine. The dungeon had already seen too much. Every move, every reaction—it had been cataloging us from the moment we stepped into this place. Now it wanted a confirmation directly from us. It wanted us to define ourselves.
"Well shit," I said flatly. "I guess we don’t have a choice."
"Which one are we touching?" Vance asked, his blades already sheathed, a sign of his resignation to this task.
I looked at each construct again. The cube was obvious—structure, clarity, no surprises. This would likely be what Ronan selected.
The sphere was speed, momentum, power, and grace. It could be me, or it could be Vance.
The spiral? It had to be some sort of representation of chaos and danger. The shape itself was somewhat chaotic. It seemed to shift and evolve. It was somewhat unreadable, which naturally, forced me to be drawn to it more than the sphere.
I didn’t really know Nythera enough to figure out where she would likely go, maybe the cube? That would be up to her, though.
I took a slow breath, letting my hand hover just above the spiral. It didn’t react immediately, didn’t surge toward me or flash in warning. But the moment I committed, letting my palm lower into the energy field surrounding it, the entire room responded.
Light filled the chamber—not bright, not blinding, but complete. It came from the walls, the floor, even the very air. The platform beneath the spiral vanished, replaced by a shifting plane of mirrored crystal that reflected not our forms, but our movements. Echoes of our intentions flickered across the floor beneath us, trailing light in erratic, unpredictable arcs.
"Oh," I muttered. "It’s a simulation."
"Of what?" Nythera asked quickly, backing toward me.
Ronan was already drawing his weapon. "Of combat instinct."
"Wait, so we aren’t being split up?" No one responded to my question as our reflections sprang forward to attack.
They weren’t physical forms, but rather shadows of ourselves pulled from our movements, like memories given just enough substance to become dangerous. I watched my own stance echoed in front of me—dagger drawn and gleaming—but the thing behind the reflection moved faster. It lunged, and I barely dodged in time.
"We’re fighting ourselves?" Vance shouted, blades already clashing against a twin that didn’t sweat, didn’t hesitate, didn’t make jokes.
"No," I called back, slashing low and watching my shadow phase through the blow. "We’re fighting how the dungeon sees us." Which could very well be much worse, because it had seen everything.
Ronan’s double moved in perfect rhythm with him—like a mirror image designed to counter every spell, every shift in stance.
Nythera’s opponent was more subtle, defensive, shadowing her spellcraft instead of directly attacking. Her greatest weapon was healing, and it was using that against her—reflecting her magic backward, distorting it.
I ducked under a swipe from my copy and twisted around its guard. Phantom Edge connected, but the feedback was jarring—like hitting something that wasn’t quite real but definitely hated me.
"They’re learning," I snapped. "They’re adapting mid-fight."
"Big surprise," Vance shouted, deflecting a strike to his ribs. "The whole dungeon’s a cheating piece of--" He was cut off by a blade lunging at his neck, forcing him on the defensive.
We had to fight smarter, not harder. The key wasn’t overpowering them—it was outthinking them. Moving in ways we wouldn’t normally, breaking patterns, rejecting predictability, all of which was harder than it sounded.
When your instincts were the problem, trying to fight them meant becoming something else, it required sacrificing fluid, practiced motions and manipulating them into something new.
I took a breath, slowed my thoughts, and for the first time in the fight, stepped away and did nothing. The shadow hesitated. Not for long, but enough.
"Nythera!" I shouted. "Redirect your spells! Don’t follow the same flow!"
She caught on instantly. Her next spell curved off the wall, spiraled outward, looped through Ronan’s fight, and clipped her double at an angle even the dungeon hadn’t accounted for.
It screamed—high and flickering, not from a throat, but from the magic itself.
Ronan cast next, but with a wild twist in the glyph, bending the arc like a snake eating its tail. His double didn’t react fast enough. It cracked like shattering glass, energy bleeding into the mirrored floor.
"Unpredictable patterns," I said. "That’s how we win."
"Guess we’re gonna have to fight ugly," Vance muttered.
"Finally," I said, throwing my dagger at full speed at the enemy that already began to move to dodge my strike. I tore an opening into the void and the dagger sailed into it before it slammed shut. With another wave of my hand, another opening to the void manifested behind my reflection, the blade driving deep into the back of the base of it’s head, causing it to explode into energy and drain back into the mirrors it came from. "Something we’re good at."
Nythera kept her staff raised, but her grip had changed. It wasn’t the frightened, desperate hold she’d had before. She wasn’t simply reacting anymore, she was preparing, she was really taking on this whole ’team player’ bullshit we tried to exude. Beneath all the trauma and exhaustion, there was steel in her now.
"I don’t like choices when I know none of them are good," she muttered, glancing at the three passageways. "So which one of these gets us through the next trial without a soul-crushing encounter with our repressed memories?"
Vance gave a theatrical shrug. "I vote left. It looks less smug than the others."
"It’s not smug, it’s misleading," I said. "Smug would be glowing gold and pretending it’s a save point. This one’s just smug enough to lure you in with false symmetry before turning into a boss fight mid-walk."
"Ah," he nodded, thoughtfully. "Classic hallway betrayal. My favorite."
I stepped closer to the arches, taking in the slight differences—minute shifts in crystal alignment, tiny variances in the pulse of light. The middle one hummed lower than the others, almost like it had a heartbeat of its own. That was... not ideal.
"We take the right," I said.
"Sure?" Vance asked.
"No," I replied. "But it hasn’t tried to whisper my name yet, so that puts it ahead of the competition."
We moved into the chosen path, the air thinning slightly the moment we crossed the threshold. Not in a suffocating way, but more like we were stepping into pressurized space—controlled, observed. The walls here weren’t just decorative. They radiated a quiet intelligence, like they were remembering our footsteps for later review.
Every so often, the crystalline veins in the walls shifted color. Faint, almost imperceptible flashes of data in motion. I could feel them scanning us—not our appearance, but our presence. Our mana. Our thought patterns.
"This isn’t a dungeon," I said quietly. "It’s a study."
Ronan glanced at me, something thoughtful flickering in his usually unreadable expression. "Or a library that doesn’t mind burning its books."
We continued forward, the air around us now humming with subtle energy. Static brushed against my fingertips, and Phantom Edge pulsed once—an acknowledgment, maybe. Or a warning.
At the far end of the passage, the walls widened again—another chamber, circular like the last, but smaller and filled with a low, harmonic resonance that seemed to buzz just beneath the threshold of comprehension.
In the center of the room stood three platforms, each one carved from translucent stone, etched with unfamiliar glyphs and faintly illuminated from within. Hovering above each was a different shape: a sphere, a cube, and something in-between—part spiral, part helix, always turning.
"Well," Vance muttered, rubbing his jaw. "This screams ’pick your poison.’"
Nythera frowned. "Is this another test?"
"Looks like it," I said, stepping closer, careful not to touch anything. "And it wants us to choose."
Each construct pulsed as I approached, responding to proximity. The cube shimmered with steady, unyielding light. The sphere radiated faster, and there were more volatile surges. The spiral flickered erratically, like it couldn’t decide what form it wanted to take.
"This feels familiar," I murmured. "Like something’s watching to see what kind of decisions we make under pressure."
"It’s not watching," Ronan said quietly. "It’s learning."
Of course it was.
The sphere pulsed as if it sensed hesitation, its glow quickening as it swirled in place, spinning faster and faster. The cube remained stoic, unchanged, as if it couldn’t care less what I chose to do with it, as it knew I wouldn’t change a thing. The spiral... that one still hadn’t made up its mind. It flickered like a wild rave party, twirling haphazardly, never quite settling into place. I hated it immediately.
"They’re all traps," I said, and not because I was feeling particularly insightful. I just knew better. "The real question is what kind."
Nythera stepped to the edge of the room, staying well away from the platforms but studying them with that sharp, quiet concentration she always wore when she was trying not to panic. "They’re keyed to resonance," she said. "They’re waiting for something specific. It feels like they are trying to understand us. I can feel some type of mind magic trying to determine our... Intent."
"Intent," Vance repeated. "That’s good. That means we can trick them."
I gave him a side glance. "That is the opposite of what it means."
"No," he said, raising one finger. "It means we just need to lie convincingly enough that the dungeon believes us. And lucky for you, I lie like a champ."
"Right," I muttered, stepping between the platforms now, careful not to brush any of them. "Well, until they start extracting our worst memories and projecting them into a live arena, I say we keep guessing."
I turned toward Ronan. "You getting anything from these?"
He didn’t speak at first. He was watching the spiral—head tilted slightly, eyes narrowed as if reading a language buried inside its folds. "They’re not choices," he said finally. "They’re reflections."
"Of what?" Nythera asked.
"Possibility. Constraint. Instability."
"...Okay," Vance said, nodding slowly. "So in dungeon terms, that’s: defense, aggression, and wild card that does whatever it wants?"
"A decent guess, nothing to add here," I added.
Ronan took a slow breath. "They respond to who we are. Not who we say we are."
That sent a slow crawl of unease down my spine. The dungeon had already seen too much. Every move, every reaction—it had been cataloging us from the moment we stepped into this place. Now it wanted a confirmation straight from our minds. It was going to force us to let it into our heads.
"Well... Fuck," I said flatly. "Let’s do it."
"Which one are we touching?" Vance asked, his blades already sheathed, a sign that he had already resigned to the task at hand.
I looked at each construct again. The cube was obvious—structure, clarity, no surprises there--likely Ronan’s first choice if I were a betting man.
The sphere was speed, momentum, and power? I felt like this one worked well with Vance and I.
The spiral was clearly dangerous, it wasn’t just in the physical form that seemed to wobble and jerk about as it spun, but it seemed to radiate chaos itself. Naturally, I was drawn to it as thoughts of the sphere left my mind. My entire existence here had been chaotic, and even I wasn’t always sure what I was going to do next. Hell, I was brought here to be an agent of chaos, a catalyst for the apocalypse.
I took a slow breath, letting my hand hover just above the spiral. It didn’t react immediately, didn’t surge toward me or flash in warning. But the moment I committed, letting my palm lower into the energy field surrounding it, the entire room responded.
Light filled the chamber—not bright, not blinding, but complete. It came from the walls, the floor, even the very air. The platform beneath the spiral vanished, replaced by a shifting plane of mirrored crystal that reflected not our forms, but our movements. Echoes of our intentions flickered across the floor beneath us, trailing light in erratic, unpredictable arcs.
"Oh," I muttered. "Clone fight... Fucking sweet!"
Ronan was already drawing his weapon. "We will have to endure our own combat instincts."
And then our reflections attacked.
Not physical forms—shadows of ourselves pulled from our movements, like memories given just enough substance to become dangerous. I watched my own stance echoed in front of me—daggers drawn, blades gleaming—but the thing behind the reflection moved faster, quite a bit faster than me. After all, it was pure intent, and didn’t have to think over any of its actions--it could just fight.
It lunged, and I barely dodged in time.
"We’re fighting ourselves?" Vance shouted, blade already clashing against a twin that didn’t sweat, didn’t hesitate, didn’t make jokes--So, a better, cooler Vance.
"No," I called back, slashing low and watching my reflection nimbly dodge the blow. "We’re fighting how the dungeon sees us." I felt like the dungeon was cheating; if it saw us as a bigger threat than we actually were, we would be facing insurmountable odds, which is kind of how it was playing out.
Ronan’s double moved in perfect rhythm with him—like a mirror image designed to counter every spell, every shift in stance. Nythera’s opponent was more subtle, defensive, shadowing her spellcraft instead of directly attacking. Her greatest weapon was healing, and it was using that against her—reflecting her magic backward, distorting it, all the while healing her allies any time they were hit.
I ducked under a swipe from my copy and twisted around its guard. My blade connected, but the feedback was jarring—like slicing through a low-voltage electrical cord.
We needed to fight smarter, not harder, at least that’s what everyone said about work, and this was definitely work.
The key wasn’t overpowering them—it was outthinking them. Moving in ways we wouldn’t normally, breaking patterns and rejecting predictability.
It was a lot harder than it sounded because when your instincts were the problem, trying to fight them meant thinking about every strike, taking precious seconds to adjust your movements. Our enemies didn’t have to think about anything, they just struck.
I took a breath, slowed my thoughts, and for the first time in the fight, stepped away, and did nothing. The shadow also hesitated--not for long, but enough.
"Nythera!" I shouted. "Redirect your spells! Don’t follow the same flow!"
She caught on instantly. Her next spell curved off the wall, spiraled outward, looped through Ronan’s fight and clipped her double at an angle even the dungeon hadn’t accounted for.
It screamed—high and flickering, not from its lungs or vocal chords, but from the magic itself.
Ronan cast next, but with a wild twist in the glyph, bending the arc like a snake eating its tail. His double didn’t react fast enough. It cracked like shattering glass, energy bleeding into the mirrored floor.
"Unpredictable patterns," I said. "That’s how we win."
"Guess we’re gonna have to fight ugly," Vance muttered.
"Finally," I said, throwing my dagger at the clone that was already moving to dodge my strike. I tore open a rift in the void and my dagger sailed through it before the rift closed shut, my enemy passing through where it was and aiming to deal a fatal strike to me. I opened another rift behind it and watched as the dagger rushed at an impossible speed from behind the mirror-image before embedding itself deep in the back of the base of the skull of evil-me. "Something we’re good at."
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