The bubble fell. The little sliver of reality that had protected their troupe shimmered, broke into shards, and vanished. Brilliant golden light from the Justice forced Alyssa to squint as it chased away the moonlight. It felt all the brighter now that she had spent an hour in relative darkness. A small Light spell that they had sparked up couldn’t compare.

At least the bubble had done its job. Alyssa, along with her companions, sat on a small patch of untouched land. All around them, trees, earth, and boulders had plowed across the landscape. What had once been a relatively scenic, if wet, landscape now looked like it had been attacked by a thousand lumberjacks who had been ordered to break the trees rather than cut them. They had been followed by a massive rototiller that just laid further waste to the area.

As ravaged as the land had been, the Astral Authority looked untouched. If anything, they looked even more numerous. But that was probably just because of how far Alyssa could see now that there wasn’t much in the way.

With the trees felled, there was nothing obscuring the fight between the Justice and the demon. In her unleashed form, the demon was definitely much better off. Alyssa had thought that the demon’s movements had been quick at Owlcroft, but now, she could barely keep track of the demon. She was more of a black blur with some glowing red streaks surrounding her.

The demon darted around, dashing from foot to arm to hip to shoulder, slicing and cutting all without doing any real damage. Even had Alyssa been staring through her binoculars, she doubted she would have seen anything.

But the Justice wasn’t having an easy time of it either. It had seemingly decided to forgo using its sword for the time being. Perhaps it was just a bit too unwieldy, even for such a monstrous being, against the demon as she was now. Its current tactic involved shifting between trying to grab the demon with its hands that were always in multiple places at once and trying to swat the demon out of the air.

It came close to hitting the demon three times while Alyssa watched. All three in the span of a second. A few seconds after each attempt, a heavy wind just about made Alyssa take a step back. Not strong enough to send trees or even people flying, but…

When it next used its sword, it surely would send her toppling through the air.

Alyssa kept a firm grip around Kasita’s arm to ensure that the mimic wouldn’t go flying off again.

They were still toward the far end of the larger sliver dome, still contained within.

Which was a relief to see. Alyssa had been nervous that they would have escaped completely and gone on a rampage outside. If they could be redirected back to Owlcroft, that might be fine. But Alyssa had a feeling that the demon had been leading it closer toward the city, rather than away from it.

Or perhaps just closer to Alyssa. The Taker had said that his master wanted something from her. At the time, Alyssa had thought it was something more sinister, but she now had to consider the possibility that the demon just wanted a distraction. Or an ally?

Alyssa scowled as she walked right up to the edge of where their smaller bubble had been. Pristine forest floor shifted so abruptly into turned up dirt that it felt like she was stepping over the threshold of some portal. Her fingers tightened around Irulon’s tome as she took one more step.

“Ufu~” Kasita’s usual giggle was lacking in enthusiasm. “What a mess.”

“It is probably going to get a lot worse before this is over. I just hope the spell over the battle holds tight. And that they don’t use portals to escape.”

“Tenebrael was plotting to disrupt those. Perhaps you could do the same?”

“Using Tenebrael’s power?” Alyssa asked, raising an eyebrow at Kasita. “I’d have everything in this bubble after me in an instant. Probably things outside the bubble too, given how quickly they reacted to me the last time they showed up. I’d rather keep them ignoring us as long as possible.”

“And when they do turn their eyes our way?”

Alyssa looked around while keeping an eye on the Justice—just in case it swung its sword again. There were simply too many of the lesser Astral Authority to count. Most were far enough away that they were just little fireflies. The mirrored dome didn’t make it any easier. Some parts of the dome made it hard to tell whether she was seeing a reflection or the actual thing.

“We’ll have to trust Irulon.”

“Don’t worry. You can rest assured that I will do my utmost to keep us all intact. Stay safe,” Irulon called from behind. “I will send a message when I am ready.”

“So you said,” Alyssa mumbled as a smaller mirrored dome started forming up again.

She blinked her eyes for just one second.

When she opened them again, there was no sign of a second dome. Irulon, Izsha, Musca, Fela, and Catal were nowhere to be seen either. The ground went from torn up earth with twigs and debris to more torn up earth and more debris. The patch of untouched forest was gone. If she took a step, she would end up moving a good twenty feet, she knew. But…

“How does that spell work?”

“Asking the wrong mimic.”

“Is there a right one?”

“If I am allowed further access to spells and research materials, maybe me one day!”

“When we get back to Lyria. For now… Let’s test the spell.”

“Sure thing,” Kasita said. With a forced smile, her form shifted. A large rock, large enough to hide a small deck of cards, appeared in Alyssa’s open hand.

Alyssa pulled out a spell card of her own after pocketing the rock.

Just in time for the Justice to make contact with the demon. An open-palm strike sent the molten woman flying higher in the air. Without any wings or methods of propelling herself, she couldn’t stop. Faster than a blink of an eye, she met her reflection in the mirrored dome.

The sound of a thunderclap ripped across the landscape, followed by a shockwave. More debris got knocked up in the air.

The world around Alyssa slowed down, dropping to a near standstill as Accelero’s effect took hold. Bits of earth, wood, and even shattered glass all froze in the air. There wasn’t as much as when the Justice had swung its sword and most of it wasn’t anywhere near her, but better to be safe than sorry.

The falling glass had her worried. She stopped and stared, fingering a Message card. Irulon had said that Messages wouldn’t work between the domes, but she was only saying what she knew to be true. For Alyssa, someone who had a penchant for unexpected outcomes when using spells, contacting Irulon might just be possible. And might be necessary. If the outer dome fell, both the demon and the Justice could more easily flee. Even if they stayed in the same general area, their attacks on each other were too destructive to the surrounding environment. Moving even a little closer to Illuna could wind up cataclysmic.

Around the point of the demon’s impact, concentric rings of the shattered sliver spread out like a spider weaving its web. Alyssa sucked in a breath as she watched the cracks form.

But the dome didn’t shatter and fall apart.

Rather, the vast majority of the dome remained intact. The mirrored wall still reflected the ground, Astral Authority, and even Alyssa somewhere up there. Yet there were definitely shards falling from it.

Some facets of the mirror between the cracks around where the demon had struck, where the mirrored surface had once reflected the ground and nothing more, there was something else. Something ominous. An abyss of darkness spread along with the cracks, lit only by the same dark red lines that marred the true demon’s skin. Staring into them made drained all sense of motivation from Alyssa. It was like being at the bedehouse or the pit, except a thousand times worse. All she wanted to do was lie down and curl up in on herself.

Even with Accelero active, Alyssa thankfully didn’t have time to watch and worry over the mirrored ceiling any longer. The Justice moved at a much slower pace than it had before, but it still moved. Focusing her attention on the Justice brought back a mild warmth, driving out the despair of those darkened panels.

Grasping its sword with both hands—all while the scales remained in one of them—the Justice swung from the ground straight up to the ceiling. A blade of wind followed the tip of the sword, rippling through the air slow enough that Alyssa could tell it wasn’t aimed at her.

The hard metal of the Justice’s blade slammed into the same spot that the demon had struck.

Where the demon had caused only a few dozen rings of broken mirror expanding out around her, the sword caused ripples to form across the entire surface, from the crown of the dome all the way down as far as Alyssa could see. Explosions of shattering glass followed the rippling all the way down after a short delay. The entire dome cracked and broke, looking like a massive kaleidoscope.

Light flooded into the world around Alyssa.

The shattered dome still reflected the normal world, but only in a third of the total space. The rest was split between the red-veined utter oblivion that had surrounded the demon and… something new. A world of gold and crystal towers, prismatic light glistening with eerie iridescence. Colors that Alyssa couldn’t even name danced around like little fairies in the mirrored surfaces. The buildings were so tall that Alyssa wasn’t sure whether or not there was actually a ground for them to stand upon. Every second, the buildings seemed to collapse and twist in on themselves like they were shards of Fractal Mirror.

Yet no matter what facet of the dome she looked into, there was always one particular tower that stood just a little more prominent than the rest. Whether it was in the background, the foreground, behind another building, or completely out of sight, it was somehow still there and just a little more important than anything else.

Alyssa wasn’t sure how long she sat there just staring into the various facets. Something about the prismatic world was just… enrapturing. And, somehow, familiar. There was a warmth coming from it. One that completely suppressed that unnatural feeling coming from the darkened facets.

Angels, she realized. Not just one, but possibly thousands. Looking past the shifting buildings and strange light glistening off their surfaces, Alyssa could see them. Sometimes they were in the foreground, tiny compared to the buildings. Sometimes they were just specks off in the distance. Some had only one pair of wings, some had two. Relieved, Alyssa didn’t see any with the full six wings of the Seraphim, though she did see some massive wheels turning in the foreign sky that she recognized from Tenebrael’s brief dossier on angels as being Ophanim.

Movement from the Justice let Alyssa pull her eyes off the shattered dome. It lowered the sword, slowly at first, seemingly inspecting the tip of it despite the blindfold still being mostly intact over its eyes.

The demon wasn’t pinned to the ceiling or skewered on the sharp point of the sword. Alyssa hadn’t seen her flip out of the way. She could have moved just in the nick of time, flipping away in a direction obscured by the sword itself, but the apparent confusion of the Justice said otherwise.

“Kasita?” Alyssa said, voice barely above a whisper. “Kasita? Are you…”

Irulon had said that Kasita might be able to piggy-back through Accelero if she was on Alyssa’s person at the time of casting. She hadn’t used the word ‘piggy-back’ but the meaning was the same. However, pulling out the rock in her pocket, Alyssa just frowned.

“Kasita?”

It wasn’t the time to play games. Kasita wouldn’t sit around pretending it wasn’t working as a joke. Alyssa slipped the rock back into her pocket with a small sigh. With Kasita’s ability to sense the Justice’s invisible limbs, Alyssa had been hoping that Kasita would notice anything she missed. But…

Alyssa started forward, only to stumble and trip straight into her own clone. She didn’t fall, but the same wasn’t true for the poor mimic.

Kasita tumbled to the ground, only to shimmer. But she didn’t disappear. A second Kasita popped up, staring down at herself. “Something is strange,” she said, all too candidly for the situation.

“You’re still in my pocket,” Alyssa said as she removed the rock. Which had to be Kasita. Alyssa was not in the habit of carrying around random rocks. But… “What’s going on? Are you alright?”

“I can—”

“Kasita?” Alyssa asked, reaching forward.

The mimic stopped moving. Almost completely. There was still a little movement to her, much like the world frozen by Accelero. After a moment of her sitting mostly still, her form shimmered.

Another Kasita popped up beside the other two, crossing her arms with a heavy scowl. “I think I’m falling out of sync with the world. It’s the spell.”

“But you aren’t being hurt?”

“I don’t think—”

Once again, Kasita froze.

Alyssa shook her head and just started moving. When Kasita popped up a few moments later, she didn’t stop. “Keep up as best you can. If you aren’t being harmed, I don’t know that we have the time to stop and figure out exactly what is going on.”

“Yeah. I understand. It’s strange, but I think I’m fine.”

Kasita took two more steps alongside Alyssa before her form froze once again. It was a bit distracting, but Alyssa managed to ignore the trail of Kasitas they were leaving in their wake. She had to keep her focus on the Justice as she walked toward it.

With Accelero active, it didn’t move quite as quickly… at least to her perspective. But it wasn’t moving that much anymore in the first place. Rather, its confusion about the missing true demon kept up. It slowly turned its head, looking around the dome from behind its ruined blindfold. Its movements paused every time its line of sight crossed one of the darkened panels of the dome. It never stayed staring at any one spot for long.

“Is that Earth?” Kasita asked, popping up in front of Alyssa and pointing off toward one of the larger intact shards.

Alyssa had to stop. The pane that Kasita had pointed out was definitely not a mere reflection of the world around her. There was an asphalt street, red and green streetlights, and cars. The entire image was upside-down, but Alyssa still instantly recognized it. How could she not? Even had she been away from Earth for a hundred years, she was sure that she would recognize modern civilization.

But that one pane got her looking around. She had previously dismissed all the facets of glass that weren’t showing off the prismatic city or the red-veined abyss. They were obviously different from the local area. Now…

The more Alyssa looked, the less she noticed any actual reflections. Several looked like foresty areas, but taking a closer look, the trees were all wrong. There were pine trees or smaller maple-like trees in the reflections where there larger bulky trees… or just debris should have actually been reflected.

One showed off a desert. A sandy, dune-filled desert. No matter what trees were around or what angle she viewed those trees at, there was no way that any single spot in her immediate area could be mistaken for a sandy desert. Even the crater where the demon had been pinned didn’t look anything like a desert.

A city skyline, more than anything else, cemented the fact that at least some of those facets were showing things other than Nod. And maybe not even just Earth. The skyline was like nothing Alyssa had ever seen. She didn’t have a mental library of all the cities on Earth or the silhouettes they created against a setting sun, but she was fairly certain that the skyline she was looking at wasn’t from Earth at all. There were too many narrow, pointed spires. Most skyscrapers on Earth were square and blocky. Or at least they appeared that way when looked at from the side.

This skyline looked like something from the Jetsons. Maybe not quite so cartoonish, but close. It might have been from the angelic world, but Alyssa doubted it. None of the other views of the Endless Expanse showed a body of water. And this particular panel wasn’t iridescent or prismatic at all.

The fractured dome was showing other worlds. Not just Earth or Nod, but completely new places.

The ramifications of which Alyssa wasn’t sure what to think. She knew that other worlds were out there. Nod existed because of Tenebrael. She was but one of many Dominions. So it stood to reason that other angels were out there, running their worlds in a presumably more by-the-book manner.

Just as Alyssa started wondering if the panes were able to be passed through like a portal—something that could be a problem if an Annihilator wiped out some city a world away—the demon returned. It was a black blob of red-streaked light coming from one of the darkened panels of glass. Launching from behind the Justice, it passed through the glowing aureole and slammed into the back of the Justice’s head hard enough to knock it down to its knees.

Before the Justice could retaliate, the demon leaped off the Justice’s head, disappearing into one of the darkened panels.

Like a rocket, she popped out of another before the Justice could right itself. The thunderclap from the first strike rumbled over Alyssa just as its foot further hammered the Justice down. Once again, the demon jumped away.

The Justice tried to reach after her, but where the demon passed through the dome without any obstruction, the Justice’s hand crashed into it, sending more cracks through some unbroken shards, all of which split off into different views of the abyss, the Expanse, and other worlds.

Alyssa winced, worried about the worlds beyond. But the Justice’s fingers didn’t seem to actually disturb anything on the other sides. The street, for instance, was completely fine. Cars drove by, even directly into the shard of glass, without any notice or care. Even the angels floating around the Expanse didn’t seem to notice the windows into their world… or any giant fingers sticking out on their end.

Again and again, the demon popped out of the portals, knocked the Justice around, and disappeared back inside them.

At no point did the Justice come close to touching the demon. And after a few more kicks, it couldn’t do much of anything besides try to keep itself off the ground. The demon was relentless. Even with the Justice down, she didn’t let up.

But she still wasn’t doing any appreciable damage. It was just hit after hit. She didn’t even have her scythe anymore. Most of her attacks were either kicks or punches… with her entire body weight put behind them. And her body weight compared to the Justice was like a toddler trying to punch an elephant to death.

At least she was keeping it down. With the constant pelting, the Justice couldn’t swing its sword.

“Perfect time to get closer,” Alyssa said… to herself. Kasita froze just in time to miss it. Shaking her head, she started forward.

Only to freeze herself as a black and red blur fell out of the sky.

“Going to help?” the demon asked, mouth hardly moving. Her words came out with a hiss of steam. “Or just stand there and watch?”