Chapter 149: Shadow Clones
Floors two and three were brutal but manageable.
Floor two was a swarm corridor. Hundreds of small, fast Abyssal Ratlings poured out of wall vents in an endless stream. Emric held the bottleneck with his shield while Renna and Lyra fired into the mass. Holden stayed behind them, picking off anything that slipped through.
It took forty minutes and a lot of arrows, but they cleared it without injury.
Floor three was a puzzle room.
Pressure plates, disappearing floors, and a ceiling that slowly lowered while Abyssal Wraiths drifted through the walls.
Emric solved the plate sequence in six minutes. Lyra froze the Wraiths solid, and Renna shot the frozen creatures off the ceiling before they could fall on anyone.
Holden watched and ate a protein bar.
Then they climbed the stairs to floor four and everything changed.
The door opened onto a nightmare made of mirrors.
The room was enormous, maybe a hundred feet across, with a ceiling that disappeared into shadow. Every wall, every surface, even the floor was covered in polished black glass.
It reflected everything.
Team Soup’s images multiplied into infinity, stretching into endless dark corridors that didn’t actually exist.
"Do not look at the walls," Emric said immediately. "Mirrored environments cause disorientation and spatial confusion. Keep your eyes forward and track by sound, not sight."
"Too late," Renna muttered, swaying slightly. "I already can’t tell which way is up."
Holden stepped onto the glass floor.
His reflection stared back at him from every angle, copied a hundred times, stretching into the darkness.
Something was wrong with them.
They were half a second behind.
Holden stopped walking.
The reflections stopped a beat later.
He raised his hand.
The reflections followed a moment afterward.
Then one of them didn’t stop.
The reflection directly in front of him stepped forward instead of backward.
Holden’s eyes narrowed. The reflection placed its hand against the glass.
Then it pushed through.
The surface rippled like water as the figure emerged into the real room, its body made entirely of solidified shadow.
It looked exactly like Holden.
Same height. Same build. Same jacket.
But its skin was dark gray, its eyes were empty black pits, and in its hand was a sword that looked like a negative image of the Solar-Forged sword.
Behind him, three more shadows emerged from three different mirrors.
A shadow Lyra, carrying a spear made of frozen black ice.
A shadow Emric, holding a shield formed from darkness.
And a shadow Renna, gripping a bow that pulsed with negative light.
The clones moved in perfect synchronization, each one turning toward its original.
"Shadow Clones," Emric said, his voice tight. "Abyssal mimicry magic. They scan your aura and create copies matched to your capabilities."
He swallowed.
"This is extremely bad."
"You think?" Renna said.
The shadow Emric raised its shield.
The shadow Lyra leveled her spear.
The shadow Renna drew an arrow.
The shadow Holden drew its black sword.
Then they attacked.
The room exploded into chaos.
CLANG!
Emric met his shadow’s charge head-on, shield against shield.
The impact sent cracks spreading across the mirrored floor. Emric braced himself, pushed back, and tried to angle his shield to create an opening.
The shadow didn’t fall for it.
"It knows all my angles!" Emric shouted, deflecting a strike that perfectly mirrored his own defensive technique. "Every counter I try, it anticipates because it has the same tactical knowledge I do!"
CRACK!
Lyra’s frost met shadow-frost in the center of the room.
The two techniques collided and canceled each other out in a burst of freezing mist. Lyra pressed forward, thrusting her spear toward the shadow’s chest.
The shadow blocked with exactly the same form.
Then it countered.
Lyra barely twisted away from the spearpoint.
"It fights exactly like me," she said through gritted teeth. "Every pattern and weakness I know about my own style, it knows too."
Twang!
Twang!
Renna had ducked behind a pillar of mirrors and was trading arrows with her shadow.
The problem was that her copy was just as fast and accurate as her.
Every arrow Renna fired was met by a shadow arrow that knocked it out of the air. She was pinned down, unable to find a clean shot.
"This is so unfair!" she shouted. "It’s like fighting myself but meaner!"
Holden stood in the center of the chaos, facing his own shadow.
The clone was good.
Scary good.
It mirrored his aura perfectly, radiating the same dense pressure. It moved with the same fluid efficiency, shifting its weight and positioning its blade with a precision that matched Holden’s own Gale-Step footwork.
It was a perfect copy.
Except it wasn’t.
Holden watched the shadow circle him, black sword raised, empty eyes locked onto his face.
The movements were right and timing were right. Even the pressure coming from its body felt right.
But something was missing.
Something behind the movements.
The shadow attacked.
Gale-Step.
The black blade came in at an angle that was mathematically optimal, the exact strike Holden himself would have chosen against an opponent like him.
Holden smiled.
The dungeon could copy his body.
It could copy his aura, his techniques, his weapon, even his footwork.
But it couldn’t copy the System.
It could react to what Holden did based on the information it had copied, but it couldn’t process ten thousand possibilities per second. It couldn’t adapt to something it had never seen.
It was fighting from a pattern.
Holden wasn’t.
The black blade went toward his neck.
Holden raised his sword as if he were going to parry.
The shadow immediately adjusted its strike, anticipating the counter.
But Holden wasn’t parrying.
He shifted his weight a inch to the right and abandoned the block entirely.
The shadow’s adjusted strike cut through empty air.
Its body overextended.
Exactly as Holden had planned.
He brought up the Solar-Forged Sword.
Hellfire Cleave.
White light filled the chamber.
The blade caught the shadow across the torso.
A thin, blinding line of heat passed through the shadow’s body.
The clone froze.
A white line glowed across its chest.
Then its body cracked.
Black dust poured from the wound as the entire clone crumbled and dissolved.
[Ding!]
[Shadow Clone (Rank 2, 8-Star) Defeated!]
[+2,500 KP]
[2x KP Booster Applied!]
[+5,000 KP!]
Holden didn’t stop.
He turned and launched himself across the room with Gale-Step.
The mirrored floor cracked beneath his feet as he blurred toward Emric.
The shadow Emric had just landed a heavy strike that drove the real Emric to one knee. Its dark shield rose for the finishing blow.
Holden’s white-hot blade caught it from behind.
The shadow didn’t even have time to turn.
Hellfire Cleave passed through its back and out through its chest.
The clone dissolved before it hit the ground.
[Ding!]
[+1,000 KP!]
"Lyra, left!"
Lyra didn’t question him.
She threw herself to the left just as Holden’s blade swept through the space where she had been standing.
The shadow Lyra had been preparing to drive its spear into Lyra’s exposed flank.
Holden’s slash caught it across the weapon arm.
The shadow-frost spear shattered.
Before the clone could recover, Holden spun and brought the blade across its neck.
Its head separated cleanly from its body.
The entire clone dissolved into black dust.
[Ding!]
[+2,000 KP!]
Renna’s shadow was the last one.
It turned toward Holden, it’s bow raised and arrow drawn.
For the first time, the empty eyes seemed to pause.
It had watched the others fall. It knew Holden was different.
Holden crossed the distance in two steps.
The shadow released its arrow.
Holden’s sword cut through it mid-flight.
The arrow dissolved.
So did the shadow.
One horizontal slash tore through its torso, and the clone vanished before it could draw another.
[Ding!]
[Shadow Clone Pack Defeated!]
[+2,000 KP!]
Four piles of dark dust slowly scattered across the cracked glass floor.
The reflections in the walls returned to normal, once again moving passively with Team Soup.
Renna slowly poked her head out from behind the mirror pillar.
"Is it over?"
She looked around.
"Please tell me it’s over. I was running out of arrows and patience."
"It’s over," Holden said, dismissing his sword.
Renna stepped out.
"Good. Because fighting myself was horrible."
Emric pushed himself to his feet, breathing hard. His shield arm trembled from the sustained blocking.
"That was profoundly unsettling."
He adjusted his glasses.
"Fighting an opponent with identical capabilities but no psychological limitations is a nightmare."
Lyra brushed frost residue from her spear.
Her eyes remained on Holden.
"You destroyed all four of them in about eight seconds."
"Nine," Emric corrected.
Lyra looked at him.
"You counted?"
"Obviously."
Renna stared at him.
"Why?"
Emric frowned.
"Why wouldn’t I?"
Renna opened her mouth, thought better of it, and closed it again.
Holden shook his head.
"They couldn’t think. Copies without a brain are just patterns. Patterns are easy to break once you figure out how they work."
He looked toward the far wall. A new stairwell had appeared there, glowing with a steady green light.
Floor five.
Holden started walking.
"Let’s keep moving."