‘Encore for the wicked.’

Backdrop of granite sky and dark winds. She stands above us, leering with an expression somewhere between curiosity and anger. Malachite eyes sparkle brighter than anything in the night sky.

“Oh, my dear, lovely Marie. You have a real penchant for being forgetful.”

Erika keeps her distance as she speaks, pacing a few steps back and forth. She stops and places a gloved hand on her cheek, waiting for a response.

It takes all of my energy to straighten my frayed nerves and put on a brave face. “Tonight is a learning experience,” I say with a forced shrug. “This should be fine, right? I’m not going to be very happy if you kill this guy after all the effort I’ve put in to not kill him.”

“If this is enough to cause your resolve to falter…” Erika takes a few steps towards us — each step summons a nearly invisible ring of force to exude outwards. “I suppose I’ll have to follow my obligations and teach you yet another lesson.”

My mind instinctively cringes. Those lessons stand out in the black sea of my mind, inscribed in scars across my body and psyche, the stitches that keep the girl known as Marie Weiss together.

“You said I should take care of tonight by myself, didn’t you?” I push away the encroaching thoughts and concentrate on Erika’s silhouette. “I think I handled tonight pretty well. It won’t hurt anybody until we just push things off to tomorrow. So come on, let’s just all go home and I’ll tell you everything on the way.”

The winds carry Erika’s sigh. She looks more annoyed than angry. “My services only extend to you, Marie.”

“Just look over this, would you? Please?”

“...You’re being serious about all of this, aren’t you?”

Our gazes meet in the cold spring air. My resolve withers with each passing moment, but I have plenty of fighting spirit left over.

I could never tell what goes on behind those gemstone green eyes. Do those eyes carry love? Hate? Our destinies are intertwined, but I still barely know her. Even now, does she despise me for defying her will? Or is she surprised that I’m able to think for myself?

“Listen,” I say, waving Erika off, “I’ve already made my decision. I’m not going to kill this guy tonight. Maybe tomorrow, but definitely not tonight.”

The girl in black cocks her head at me — there is no emotion on her face. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

The question has multiple layers. I’m not sure if I can process all of them at once.

“Of course. This is just another night, isn’t it?”

“I see. I think I understand.” Erika nods, then clasps her hands together. “You wish to jeopardize our future over this boy’s life. I will have to kill him as dictated by the edicts that control our lives. This puts us in direct conflict, yes?”

She isn’t wrong. It’s foolish to do all of this for virtually no gain. It’s idiotic, stupid, and absolutely beyond shortsighted. But if I didn’t do trivial things like this, I don’t think I’d be me.

“I suppose it does.”

My chances of beating Erika are zero. No sugar coating this one. I know better than anybody else the depths of her sorcery — I’ve been a mage for around a decade. I don’t even know how long Erika has been alive.

But I don’t have to beat her to win. I take a step forward and steel my resolve. “One day, I’ll have to move on without you.”

A black circle appears underneath Erika’s feat. The air around her sparks with tears of shadows — she gives a tired shrug. “Well, then. Show me how much you’ve learned.”

She raises a hand overflowing with liquid shadow and fires.

Felix has been watching this conversation with the vague sensation that his rights as both an American citizen and human being are violated. They’ve completely forgotten about him for the most part — they seem to be fighting over something else. And it seems quite rude to just walk away in the middle of a conversation between sisters.

Suddenly, the girl in the black dress does something that causes Felix to completely freeze up.

It’s not a curse. After experiencing one already, he can tell that it’s something more in line with pure shock from fascination.

Marie’s magic, for the lack of a better term, made sense. She raised her arm and fired projectiles that destroyed whatever was in front of it. She empowered her body and lay devastating strikes into her targets.

However, the thing he faces now causes a critical synapse to pop and explode in his mind. He can only watch with abject awe as the other girl’s attack emerges.

Coming towards him at eighty miles an hour is a BMW E53 crossover SUV. It has somehow managed to drive into the mall street and is charging towards him. And just as the object is processed in his mind, it’s erased by a spear of pure blue light.

I turn and fire a follow-up bolt at Erika — a whizzing ballista filled with the kinetic energy of a missile. It smashes into a translucent protective barrier and dissipates into a rain of white and blue light; a shockwave kicks up a small wave of dust between us.

“Is that all you’ve got?” I holler, charging up another shot. It might be a bad idea to provoke Erika further, but I can’t help myself. I don’t hate her. I can’t hate her.

Our relationship, in theory, should be one of the most simple relationships in all of arcane theory.

One of us is the master. The other is the slave. The contract that binds us cannot be broken by mundane means — the sorcery that keeps the equivalent exchange functioning is a magic that comes close to a ‘miracle.’ This contract between a witch and her familiar allows our particular tradition of casting to stand above the others: a witch need not necessarily rely on her own strength.

Our relationship should’ve been a simple one. But, just like many other things in life, reality and semantics often gums up the works and causes everything to get real messy.

Just like the thing I destroyed, not everything is as it seems. That car was not real — it was just a reflection. Not like that makes it any less dangerous; such is the nature of my mentor’s magecraft.

“You humans never cease to amaze me. Always fixated on the strangest things. But let’s make this a bit more exciting, shall we?” Erika closes her eyes, places a hand over her chest, and begins an incantation.

“Unveil, derail, prevail. Seal pseudo-release: converge unto one.”

This was the basic incantation she was trying to teach me earlier. I can feel every word reverberating in my soul — my knees falter as some part of her untethers from me.

“Fragile night and broken decrees, fall. Mirrored world and reflections, reveal all.”

Sometimes, those who understand an incantation or spell on a fundamental level can change out words. A spell is a mutable thing, the spark of creation in the hands of the caster.

I fire off several more vain blasts in an attempt to interrupt her spell. Distorted reflections of everyday objects interrupt my shots. Shopping carts, elevators, bicycles; my magic doesn’t even reach her barrier.

“Nothing is fake. Everything is real. I hold the mirror that reflects the world — Einzahl im Manifold! [Singularity in Manifold: The World Rejected by Reality]”

Erika’s spell activates: shimmering cracks form along the ground and walls and skies. The sound of unlimited glass shattering — the broken reflection of the world shifts and fragments into a kaleidoscopic view of today. Broken shards of previous moments fall before us, falling and falling and disintegrating into luminescent dust. Me and Felix are left suspended in a blackened void, the only things that still remain.

In the moments that follow, I look at Felix, who is taking this all with surprisingly calm slack-jawed indifference. Casual ambient noise is a thing of the past — I can hear both of our hearts jumping up and down in an erratic beat.

“Oops,” I say, forcing myself to take deep breaths.

Felix is back on his feet. “Was… that really a car?” he says, attempting to deal with his newly gained ochophobia.

Confirming that would be a bad idea, so I just shrug and deflect the question. “Well, now that we’re here, I’ve got good news and bad news.”

“There’s good news?”

“Believe it or not, yes.” I put my hands together and focus on keeping my circuits ready. “The good news is that Erika would’ve killed us both if she really wanted to. I wouldn’t even be able to react — in two seconds flat, there would be nothing left of either of us.”

Felix gives me a look steeped in resignation that it could belong to somebody who just had to put down their pet cat. “That doesn’t sound like good news.”

“Oh yes. It is. Erika isn’t one to ever say what she wants directly, but I think I’ve gotten pretty good at reading her.”

“Have you?”

“Probably.” I look directly upwards into the nothing and nod slowly. “What she’s saying is that she wants to test me. If I can beat this trial, then, well, I think she’ll let us off. Hopefully.” I bite my lip. “I really hope so.”

“...What’s the bad news, then?”

“The bad news is that I cannot think of a single positive thing to this entire situation.”

Felix stares at me with an expression that says he’s trying to look for the joke. When he realizes I’m quite serious, he looks away with a disappointed “Oh.”

To a witch who’s barely a witch like myself, Erika may as well be a god. I can only hope her benevolent side peeks through tonight.

Then, just as my thoughts settle on her, I hear a faint snicker and a warped smile.

“You know me too well, dear. So. Let’s take a walk down memory lane, shall we?”

Wisps of cool air tickle my hands. The failings of mundanity flee, submitting to what would be. Somewhere, lights on.

It starts with a single flash — an explosion of neon and metal expands out from us in all directions. Debris and destruction disappears. Blank storefronts corrupted with colour. Four stories multiplied into infinity. Man-made canopy of consumerism. Thundering lights and bright noise. A wave of colour transforms and warps the halls around us, scintillating and cruel.

In a single moment, the dead mall is resurrected. Life returns to the dead. Decay inverts. What could’ve been is no longer a bygone dream — it is staring us down in mannequins and animated vehicles. The endless maw of capitalism dares us to escape.

Never in my life have I seen such a display of magic. I knew the basic theories behind the spell she used — it was only an incantation that could summon alternative versions of an object. If a tool was broken, the spell would fix it temporarily.

But this is something else. Erika has elevated such a simple incantation into something brand new — something that turns reality itself into her play thing. This is the first time I’ve ever seen one of her spells at full power; I can’t stop the choke of disbelief that comes from my ragged throat.

It is ridiculous. It is ridiculous in so many ways — I would’ve vastly preferred a nightmare shadow realm with chains and torture and scary creatures. But this is just the true nature of Erika’s magic. It’s entirely possible to convert mana into electricity and repower everything, but it takes much more than raw energy to reverse decades of decay and multiply progress until reality fails to make sense.

At the end of the hall, Erika smiles a smile full of affection and disdain, love and pity. “You already figured out what I had plotted for you. Good work. Consider this an exam — if you pass, I’ll defer to your judgement from now on. If you lose, well...” She trails off, green eyes sparkling, already knowing full well the end result of something like this.

A hundred different tracks bleed from speakers. Lights blend into lurid visual gunk. Million footsteps and animated automata. Gelatinous air, brimming with mana.

“W-What’s going on?” Felix asks, inching closer to me.

“We’ve come to a disagreement and have decided to settle it with a fight. If I lose, then you’ll die and I’ll get brainwashed again or something,” I say in the most nonchalant voice I can possibly speak in.

“You two really need to work on your interpersonal communication skills,” mumbles Felix underneath his breath.

“Probably.” I raise my arms, aim at Erika, and tap into my Sigils without hesitation. Thunder courses through my body — I fire a test shot for experimentation’s sake.

Even though my Sigil has no cool abilities, I can still use it to cast basic spells at the speed of thought. They allow me to shuffle and redistribute mana through my body — this ability has already saved my life twice tonight.

Two bolts streak through my palms, shattering bulbs and glass. They don’t even reach halfway to Erika; mannequins dressed in last year’s designer fashion spill from storefronts and break apart into alabaster heads and limbs. None of them have any eyes, just hollow holes that track me and Felix unerringly. Near Erika herself, several mannequins are conglomerating into a single massive creature made of arms, legs, and way too many heads — there are heads decorating its body like pustules.

I’d like to think I know when I’m beat. But this is a spell. Spells can always be broken, and my intuition tells me that this phenomenon has a weakness — I just have to find it.

“Marie? We’re being surrounded!”

Felix’s voice redirects my attention to the more immediate threats. There are mascots, living advertisements, even more mannequins — this entire place is trying to kill us now. I watch Felix swing the caliper and crush an automata with a leather jacket and sunglasses before I start blasting.

“Make a break for it!”

“Where?”

“Just go!”

I swap to my scatter-shot bursts and start firing in a staccato rhythm, blowing away whatever abominations that are in our path. Mana conservation is of no matter to me anymore — Erika has finally decided to get serious. That means I’ve gotta shape up as well.

We follow the blaring red information signs, chasing after the exit without so much as looking at each other. As easy as it would be to give up and blast him right now, my fight is now with Erika. She didn’t even have the common decency to hold back against an amatuer like me. However, if we could make it to the end of the spell’s range, we could escape.

We are outnumbered. But we certainly aren’t outgunned. Felix is putting his weight in — he’s swinging that caliper like a barbarian with a club.

Bullets, ballistas, and arrows explode into light. Spinning signs come down like flashy guillotines. We run into the mall’s 20ft tall mascot who wields a pair of sunglasses like a blade. Death comes in pointed aviator form.

My lungs explode into a scream. “Nope, nope, nope, other way, other way, other way…!”

We run. Our fights carve themselves into the walls and ceiling in bursts of light and broken automata — I have to swap to my fists when they get too close.

Our escape reveals itself after a solid minute of running and fighting: two grandiose glass doors backlit with heavenly white light at the end of a quarter-mile long hallway.

“Did we make it?” Felix shouts, charging towards the doors.

I keep pace with him and ready my shoulder for bashing. “Go…!”

Together, we hurtle towards the glass doors, forcing ourselves into one final maddened dash.

She watches them through the mirror, ants surrounding a fallen crumb of bread. Her raven familiar pecks at her shoulder, squawking noisily.

“Yes, yes, I know,” Erika says, nudging it away. It chirps in protest, hopping two steps backwards on the bench she’s seated at.

But she has to agree with what her messenger said. Maybe she’s being a bit rough on Marie.

In truth, neither of them were true witches. Both their magics stem from an origin that is certainly unromantic in nature.

Fundamentally, Marie does not have the aptitude to be a witch. When it comes to any of the conventional mystics or arcane theories, Erika might as well be teaching mathematics to a dog — as ironic as that thought may be. Even after a full decade of tutelage and rituals to refine her body and mind, she just doesn’t have the aptitude for anything beyond brute force.

Not that Erika is actually a witch. This is one of the situations where looks can be deceiving. To a layman, magic is simply magic; the execution of the impossible. But there are some very fine subtleties that separate the various castes of mage. Not that she belongs to any of them in the first place.

But if Marie can prove her wrong, then perhaps she would have to redesign her approach. Though she doesn’t like humans in general, there are a few that she’s grown rather fond of in her time. She would slaughter and reap endless lives for that girl. The contract that binds them bestowed many things, and one of them was the intrinsically irrational sensation of love. Bliss beyond comprehension. Warmth that causes one to go mad. Lust that destroys reason. Such sensations are a curious thing, a newfangled toy for her to play with.

That’s why Erika needs to test her. If Marie is capable of spreading her wings, she can do nothing but help her take flight. But until then, the songbird sings in its cage, coddled and spoiled rotten with love.

We break through the glass, basking in the rain of splintered crystal — only to end up in another infinite mall street. WELCOME TO THE BEST TIME OF YOUR LIFE -- GRAND OPENING, a banner says, almost mockingly. I let the pent up pressure explode into a cry.

“God fucking damnit…!”

I knew it would never have been that easy. We were never going to be able to walk away from something like this — I don’t even know why I thought it was a good idea in the first place.

We managed to claw out some breathing room, but little else. In both directions, nothing but empty noise and eye-gouging lights. Although mana has been artificially supplementing my body, Felix has been fighting nonstop with nothing to restore his energy reserves. He’s staggering forward, starting to wheeze and heave wet coughs.

“This place goes on forever,” Felix sputters, bracing against his knees. “I know this goes without saying, but… all of this is impossible.”

“Yeah. Get used to it.” My eyes dart around the scene for anything of value. “This place is entirely impossible — it doesn’t exist in reality. It’s like a dream tethered to the ground. Keep an eye out for anything that looks, well, real.”

Too much light. Too much colour. A commercialized fever dream, borne from the congealed residue of foreign nostalgia. Hyperreal tears.

I take it back. How could anybody spot anything in a nightmare like this one? I clutch at my forehead, trying to stem the headache suddenly splitting my cranium. This is more than a simple migraine or premonition ache — something is trying to divide me in two.

Somewhere stares at me from above. There is no sky, but that is no matter. Eyes penetrate through logic.

Ba-dump. Ba-dump. Heart in head — something high above pulses. Blue dress. I look up into the endless floors, looking for something visually viscid. Nothing. Nothing? Nothing.

Lucidity stabs me like a chilled blade. In a witch’s world, nothing happens without coincidence. Some days, fate itself transpires against us. This headache has haunted me ever since I was little. Was I being hunted all this time? I keep staring up and up, craning my neck back and back and back and back—

Firm hands on my shoulder. I’m tilted back at a forty five degree angle, caught mid fall. Felix’s stupid face blots out half my vision, grey eyes practically sparkling.

“Marie... you’re a genius!”

Wait. What?

I push him away and stand back on my own two feet. “You idiot. The hell are you going on about?”

Gesturing wildly, he points to the checkerboard patterns all around us. They’re clean, pristine, and practically as reflective as a mirror. “The shadows. Look! I should’ve seen it earlier — they’re all the same!”

I stagger back and look around me. I don’t see as much of a single smidge of a shadow; it’s all blotted out by false colours. Then, just as I’m about to ask for clarification, I look down.

My shadow is directly beneath me. A revelation like this should be common sense, but for me, it causes everything to snap into place. I take a few experimental steps with my hands raised and bear witness to the abnormality in this world.

No matter where or how I move, my shadow is always completely perpendicular to me. Despite all the gratuitous signs and bright lights, an overpowering source of light shines from above — even if I can’t see it. The presence I sensed is gone, but the facts don’t change.

I clasp my hands together and heave a very long sigh. “Ah. So that’s the game Erika is playing.”

“Did you figure it out?”

I answer by aiming upwards and launching two blue bolts — they smash into the walkways on the upper floors, one after another. The structural integrity doesn’t stand a chance. The bolts stop at the tenth floor and the lower levels all end up tumbling down as the floor above it collapses — we end up with a small pile of rubble to our east. I clamour up to a piece of rubble I can identify as being from the top floor. “Get on! Hurry up, before anything else catches us.”

I’ve managed to completely confound Felix. He looks at me with blank apprehension, then, as something very loud clatters towards us in the distance, scampers up beside me.

That’s enough for me. I raise my Sigils and pull in the ambient mana around me — there’s no shortage in a place like this. Palms to floor, stabilize current. Focus channels, let the sensation of falling take hold. Eject.

I force a constant stream of mana into the debris of the upper floors. The concrete and twisted metal whine and protest, but slowly, the entire affair begins to raise off the ground. A levitating cloud of rubble, a dust storm trapped between two cliffs of storefronts. And fortunately, we happen to be riding on a piece of platform destined for the tenth story.

I didn’t see any elevators or escalators. So I figured I may as well make my own. It wasn’t too hard after I managed to figure everything out with all the contextual clues — I’d even dare to say that Erika made this too easy. And now that we’re moving in relative safety, I collapse on my ass and take a deep sigh of relief. This isn’t a very efficient elevator, but it’s a slow and steady ride. So slow and steady that time itself seems to slow down.

“Alright, strategic break. We should have at least a little to rest like this — this Manifold will slowly catch up to the main mass. Until then, we’ve got a break.”

Felix sits against a still-standing railing and stares expectantly at me. “Manifold?”

“It’s accurate. A little bit weird sounding, but hey, somebody came up with the name at some point. Sensibilities differ between ages.” I gesture to the world in slow motion around us. “But in terms of all this? Close enough. We’re safe here.”

A break like this one is a more than welcome reprieve. I’m not even sure what time it is anymore — feels like I’ve been fighting for a week straight.

“Alright, so quick version of what’s happening: we’re dealing with a spell called Einzahl im Manifold. Roughly translates to Manifold Singularity.”

“You know German?”

I shrug. “As a kid, I spoke a bit of it. Erika prefers English, so we’ve been speaking that ever since we got here.”

“Erika?” He glances backwards. “The girl trying to kill us?”

“Yep. That girl trying to kill us is both my tutor, torturer, sister, and mother. I’m fully aware of how messed up it is, but honestly? I got off lucky. You should see how bad some other scions have it. At least she cares about me. Technically.”

I can practically see his imagination running wild. Can’t say I’ve made any efforts to give him a good first impression of magic. “Yikes,” he says, nodding his head.

“Anyways, the spell we’re dealing with is simple.” I lean forward and draw a circle in mana on a white tile. “So, in the simplest terms possible, we are currently in a mirror realm that is caved in on itself. There may or may not be some non-euclidean space in there.”

“I do have an intermediate understanding of mathematical theory.”

“Simplicity is probably best in a situation like this.” And his intermediate knowledge is the thing I’m afraid of. I know for a fact that I’m going to get at least a few terms wrong and look like an absolute idiot. “I’ll fully explain it later.” After I figure out how to explain it with all the mathematical proofs this guy will ask for.

A manifold is a topological concept that describes a set of points that can approximate another kind of space. One dimensional lines. Two dimensional planes. Three dimensional shapes. Things beyond.

A singularity describes a point where an object is no longer defined.

A space where reality breaks down. A place where the laws of our world are loose enough for fantasy to invade. That is the nature of this artificial realm.

To date, I might be one of the only souls who’s allowed to know how it functions. And that’s only because Erika went out of her way to explain it.

“To summarize, Manifold Singularity is a spell that takes a place and expands out the ‘what if’ into an infinitely looping realm. It’s effectiveness varies on a lot of other factors, though. It’s highly effective here because this place was bustling and full of people maybe a decade ago. Wouldn’t get the same results if you did this in, say, the ancient ruins of the city.”

A highly niche spell whose only purpose is to make an mirrored realm that runs perpendicular to reality. It builds off a particular snapshot of time — which is why forcing mana through objects returns them to their original positions. Like a mirror frozen in time.

Felix places his finger in the middle of the mana circle. Then he looks up. “And no matter where we go, we’ll always be directly underneath the source.”

A perfect sphere of unreality, anchored by a single point of tangibility. “You’ve got it.”

That leaves a very pungent unanswered question in the air. How do we stop it? Understanding is one thing. Counteracting is another.

Up is down and down is up. The floor is the ceiling. The ledge we ride on returns to its natural perch. I lean over the safety rail, staring down at the artificial automata trying to climb up the walls towards us. Felix joins me and grimaces at the grisly masses.

I’m glad that he hasn’t asked the obvious question. I don’t think he’s ready to hear why everything seems to be out to kill us. I take another brief glance upwards into the endless levels, already knowing the rather unpleasant answer.

Some things should never be said out loud.

“Yep.” Turning my attention back to the ground, I eye the distance between each level. “There should be enough space to make a really big exit from here.” I glance over and raise an eyebrow. “Are you afraid of heights, by any chance?”

Felix looks at me, at the ground, then back at me. “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”

“This is the easiest way out. An exit will open up for a few seconds, but I can probably time it just right. Even though I have to stay up here to, y’know, be the door knocker.” I take a tiny flip knife out of my pocket and hold it above my palm. “So, c’mon. Get ready to get going, will you?”

Even though there’s plenty of mana in the air, aligning it for a spell is going to be another problem. Luckily for me, a witch’s body makes for an excellent inductor. I can probably spare a few more cups of blood.

“...What about you?”

I scowl. “What about me?”

“How are you going to get out of here?”

I haven’t thought that far yet.

The fear of what’s to come lurks behind my defiant spirit, a gaping hole behind me that only gets bigger by the second. This is the first time I’ve ever defied Erika like this. Even though my mind can’t really remember everything that’s happened to me since I was a kid, my body certainly does. Memories of perversion. Rewriting, rewiring, depravity on a level philosophers would only dare think of in the darkest corners of their studies.

I’m scared that I don’t even know what I’m scared about. Erika has always been nice to me, but that’s only what I can remember. In my dreams, I can still recall the time where Erika wasn’t Erika — the time where I had to be broken before I could be born again.

There have been other mages and creatures that have tried to intrude into our territory. Their remains lie at the bottom of our swamp, scattered to the winds, cast to the edges of our world. Merely entertaining the thought of failure will paralyze my mind.

“I’ll probably be fine,” I say, forcing the most casual expression I possibly can. “I can’t guarantee victory, but I can get your dumb ass out of here.”

Felix doesn’t buy it. A look of determination darkens his face as he steps away from the rail. “I still need you.” He looks down at his watch with a strangling look. “There’s so many things I don’t understand, but… I’ll be killed, no matter who wins this. Staying here is my only chance at getting what I want.”

I guess I really am a terrible liar. Can’t even convince him that I can win a skirmish like this.

“What could you possibly want that’s worth your life?”

He looks away, almost embarrassed. “I can’t tell you that yet.”

Ah. This guy is completely and utterly hopeless. I wonder what kind of secrets he’s got under his sleeves — they better be good, if he saw reality breaking down in front of him and still hesitates to say. He’s kept his head on his shoulders this entire time. An ordinary person would’ve freaked out by now.

Neither of us were normal from the start, I suppose.

That just pisses me off even more than anything that’s happened so far. There’s nothing I hate more than people giving contradictory answers for their actions.

“I’m not the only witch out there, you know. You could find anybody else to give you your damned answers — why are you doing all of this?”

All of this would’ve been so much easier if I didn’t have to deal with this bastard. I just want to deck him and get it over with.

“I think I like you.”

Instead, I’m the one who’s decked. Verbally. I stagger back for a few seconds of silence, wondering how to process that. It’s even more potent than Singularity Manifold’s reality-warping powers. I’ve never heard such ridiculous words in my entire life — I’ve kicked the shit out of people for less.

“You think? What? The hell is that supposed to mean? You’ve got a perfectly good nun with eyes for you, you know that?”

But Felix just smiles, resting his caliper on his shoulder, cryptic as ever.

I’ve been outsmarted once again. His statement makes perfect sense — I can’t find any faults in his logic. Even mere friendship can push people to uncharacteristic extremes, and this guy is already the strangest one I’ve ever seen. What kind of person would work with somebody who’s been trying to kill them for the past few hours?

I can only shrug and turn away. “Whatever. If you’re sticking around, let’s just get this over with. I’ve got a plan.”

“You’re the boss. I’ll do whatev—”

Something cuts Felix off. I turn and see him staring at something on the lower floors.

“Eh?” I say, joining him near the rail. “What’re you…”

Hundred arm amalgamation. Three dozen heads with empty eyes. Moist pupilless whites staring at us from an alabaster mass that is clawing its way up the floors. Mascots and vomit-inducing visuals. They’re halfway to us.

“Still got your phone?”

We nod to each other, then enter another lap in the marathon for our lives.

The raven returns, flapping its wings. It seems to have found a hot dog somewhere.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Erika says.

She’s opted for a change in scenery: a nice perch back in the real world, a rooftop overlooking the abandoned mall. The night time sea breeze is a very nice change in pace. And she can still peer into what’s going on in the Manifold Singularity’s mirror realm through her pocket mirror.

There’s no magical signatures in the air out here. This is good. That means the layman can’t tell that anything’s happened; only a bit of cleanup work left to do after all this.

Between gobbles, the raven relays what it’s heard from scouting. Such is one weakness of a mirror — reflections don’t have any sound.

Despite her minor grievances with her minion’s table manners, she listens intently.

“So she’s already figured it out? Good for her.”

Things would be boring without one final twist, though. Erika closes her eyes and focuses on the connection to her creation.

“I’m releasing the last of my seals on you,” she calls out to nobody in particular. “If you want to live, you’ll have to fight for it. It’s either you or the humans — if you’re lucky, maybe the world will allow you to take their place.”

And the world on the other side of the mirror grumbles and shifts, as though replying with a resounding ‘yes.’

The plan they concocted on the go was a very haphazard plan that could barely be called a plan. But it’s better than nothing.

“Take my blood and align it vertically,” Marie said as they ran. “I’ll be relying on you for both set up and protection during casting.”

When he tried to question her, she only presented him with five bloodied rags. She didn’t hesitate in cutting her palm open — she lifted the hem of her strange uniform and cut strips from her t-shirt to soak up all of the red. Then, after making him repeat the instructions several times, she leapt down to the ground floor.

Frankly, the situation is a thousand times more ridiculous than Felix anticipated. Not even the wildest spasms of his imagination could have prepared him for a death brawl like this. He leans over the railing of the tenth floor over a macabre mall, strips of bloodied cloth fluttering in an unseen breeze from his fingers.

Many people have probably seen a caliper and wondered how well it would perform as a melee weapon, but he might be one of the first to push the limits of the mathematical tool’s durability. Then again, this couldn’t possibly be a normal caliper — everything about it is suspect. Everything about this entire situation is dubious.

He can’t possibly imagine how mere bloody rags could perform the miracles he’s been bludgeoned over and over with.

Secrets worth killing for. Power worth dying for. A crippling loneliness in pursuit of the unknowable. He gets the feeling he’s only seen the surface of what magic takes away from somebody.

“What a lonely world this must be.”

Murmuring a thought out loud, he releases those bandages. They drift away from him, twisting and turning like fragments of a lost dream.

Amidst all the noise and visual clutter, the tattered bloody rags stain the air with dullness. An oasis of boring tranquility. I almost feel bad for destroying such a picturesque scene, reaching out and projecting my desires through the air.

Pieces of me, scattered through the air. I thread the needle and let gravity shred—

“Initiate: Crest formulae. Establishing connection — invoking catalyst now!”

The bloody rags burst into blue flames, transmuting into ashes. I close my fist and rearrange the raw energy into circular gates above me. A single blue needle falls back to the ground — I open my palms and slam them into the ground, rewriting the space around me according to my formulae. Blue cracks spread out from my fingertips, shrouding me a sixfold nested magical circle. I kneel at the axis and align the constructs with my own circuits.

To escape this place, I need to destroy the center of this world.

A wise tactician once said that all warfare is based on deception. This realm has twisted itself and hidden its anchor behind countless reflections, rendering it indecipherable. But I can do one better.

I know the general direction of the anchor. Therefore, instead of doing something complicated like counterspelling or unravelling the spell, I can just destroy it with prejudice and let the natural laws of the universe erase this broken world.

The only problem is the fuel source. There’s no way my body alone has enough mana to execute an attack of this scale — but that’s not a problem. Not this time.

From the moment I was forced into this place, I noticed an extreme density of mana in the air. Whatever is controlling this place tried to conceal all of it away from me, but the shadows gave the secret away.

There are so many lights? There is only one directional shadow from above, yet these false shop lights shone bright as stars.

When you eliminate all but one possibility in earnest, the last one remaining is the truth. Even if it’s one you don’t like.

Fist to ground, calibrate intake. “Origin, set. Setting initial, first, second, third to manual. Set energy source to external... now!”

Clock chimes midnight — the constructed sigils in the air and ground begin to rotate. Each layer rotates at a different speed, spewing static sparks — an irregular vortex forms in the middle of the false mall’s street. Blue electricity leaps in arcs and bounds from draining signs and lights, fueling my arcane cyclone.

High above, something shifts. A creature beyond human comprehension breaks free of common sense and extends its limbs. Through the endlessly complicated web of my magic, I watch a beast emerge from its chrysalis.

Undulating structures pulled apart and forced back together. Metal limbs of stores and scales of neon signage. Singular red eye gazing down with the weight of a world’s hatred. An existence stitched together from the impossible and ever axomatic void. Mana from other portions of the circular mall race up the walls and cut across the air, a grotesque rainbow in the making.

The ‘face’ chosen for its defiance. The realm itself understands what I’m doing and is trying to put up a defense against my spell. Much like a rabid animal on death’s door, it has given into its instincts and bears its teeth. Its ‘hands’ come down towards me, the wrath of a dying god’s smite.

I haven’t gathered enough mana yet. At best, all I’d be able to do with a shot of my current caliber is devastate a city block. Disintegrate a skyscraper. Not enough to punch a hole through the world. The ground around me strains, rippling with cracks.

I can’t move from this spot, even if I wanted to. The feedback from suddenly breaking a spell of this size would certainly destroy me and leave not a single trace behind of my existence.

There is no going back. My mind understands this fundamentally — there is no room for hesitation. Erika expects me to win this, and Felix, despite his crippling mundanity, refused to run. This is the first step into the world of witches, wizards, and magic.

I won’t hesitate. Victory will be achieved at any cost.

Thirty seconds until crush. Arms approaching my topmost gate. I spend three-and-a-half seconds consolidating what mana I’ve gathered and condense it into a frozen bolt in my right palm. Then, aim it upwards.

“Sixfold angle prime. Gale.”

Gravity contracts. Heart stops. Vision flickers. The sigils underneath me overlap, many magnifying glasses stacked ontop of each other. A condensed storm propels the bolt from my fingers — each gate accepts the rushing bolt and adds a jolt of accelerated mana. A sound like the sky breaking.

The blue streak pierces through the arm, turning steel and glass and light to dust. It travels through one, two, three, only to meet a wall of saturated pastel light. A barrier created with all of the gathered energy thus far — an impassable rival to my unstoppable spear. Both shatter and break, reduced to nothingness.

It wasn’t enough. Although I already knew that, some part of me wishes that a miracle could’ve happened and that it would just take one shot — I struggle to gather my burnt body and mind. My nerves and bones and veins and circuits and brain scream to stop this torture. But my instinct pushes back even harder — my head nearly goes blank as I reload.

Empty. Empty, empty, empty, empty. Fill. Spiral. Pray. Rewind and accelerate. The beast does the same — the mall plunges into darkness as all the energy is siphoned towards two points.

This is a fight over the remaining magical energy in this realm. Two opponents intend to eradicate the other’s existence — the victor will be the first to fire a decisive shot.

The beast I battle is an anomaly born from unknowing — the chaos of entropy and life manifest. It yearns to live and grow. Big bang. But even if it kills me, another fragment of ‘reality,’ and somehow escapes, it will be mercilessly crushed by the ‘universe’ in place. But none of that matters right now.

In this current moment, we are merely two writhing vines competing for a droplet of sunlight. My roots dig deep through imaginary tile and concrete and overload my body with poison.

25 percent. Blood vessels burst — I swallow half a mouthful of blood and ignore the leak from my nose. Vistas of approaching neon death from above.

50 percent. Velocity of mana passes the speed of thought; time loses its meaning. I’m burning up from the inside out. A galaxy of cogs grinding against one another melts my brain — can’t think clearly. Moments repeat. Pressure is growing. I dare to look up.

Space is being crushed one floor at a time. The face in the metal approaches, sneering.

The sky is falling.

There were monsters, here and there. They reached the topmost level and flung themselves at the pillar of light.

Felix swung. Swings. Crushed. Measured destruction with lacerated hands. Ears ringing from the earlier blast of unnatural lightning, he beats back a tide of marionettes and automata. The coalescence arrives as he drives his sore arms into a backhand swing — chips of plastic are freed from a mannequins hand. He turns to face the abomination.

Hundred eyes, three dozen arms, a churning mass of designer brand clothes and insectile chittering sounds. Ocean blue pollution. He interposes himself between it and the light. His lifeline. Timeline.

She would never see him doing this. No one would bear witness to him swinging until his muscles scream for mercy, dodging lumbering tree trunk arms, receiving broken bones; no one would ever believe him. His body is a distant thing that moves on its own — it follows a primal encoding that drives it into action. Pregenerated instincts.

But this is all he has. The numbers won’t get their way as long as his arms still work. Even if the sky is falling, then he’ll fight.

The beam pulsates — sends out a wave of mana that knocks both of them off balance. He rolls and finds himself back on his feet.

Only a few more seconds. He raises the caliper and charges.

There isn’t enough time — I wouldn’t be able to charge up the spell before I’m killed. Even through the reason-inverting pain, I can see that I’ll be crushed. That boy will be killed. I’ll be killed. Space is disappearing. Twenty seconds left.

Mana erodes the last of my reason. I can’t think my way out of this one — there are no written solutions. The spell I’m using cannot fulfill my needs. The theories I’ve learned cannot help me.

Fifteen seconds. Something is watching me. It’s waiting for me to die — I can almost feel something like cold hands taking hold of my neck and gently wringing it. I have something that belongs to them.

But why would I owe anyone anything? The only one I owe anything to is Erika. And perhaps, maybe that boy. I don’t need to listen to anything, anybody, anyone. I don’t owe anything. I am free.

Psychotic clarity. A jolt of determination rends my sober mind asunder. Five seconds stretch out around a black hole.

I can’t beat that thing with brute force. It wields mana by forcing the fantastical into existence — how could I possibly break its defenses and penetrate its core? Erika taught me everything I knew — she told me the foundations of the arcane. She gave me Gale, Burst, and all of their variations. Those were the only things I could ever learn. I never had affinity with the multitude of theories she presented to me — tradition holds no meaning over me.

Therefore, I would have to forge my own path.

Why was I trying to amplify a spell based around converting mana into kinetic force? Why was I intensifying it? Why was I trying to use a spell in the first place?

My thinking was too rigid. Witchcraft, hexes, bubbling pots; magecraft isn’t a science. It may be to others, but I do the only thing that makes sense.

“Decalibrate. Reassign alignments.”

I flatten the constructs and circles around me into a single simple layer and set it to absorb. Converting into kinetic force would waste too much time and energy, so I don’t even bother. I don’t have to collect mana when I can just use the world around me as raw fuel — damn the consequences. This place doesn’t even exist.

Accelerate. Accretion. Artifice.

Immediately, my Sigil seem to settle. They open up, merging seamlessly into the formulae. For the very first time, they feel like a part of my own body.

The greed of humanity knows no bounds.

Mana rampages in serpentine trails around me, lashing out at everything like a Hydra. Head of Medusa. Rampaging Gorgon. I surpass 100 percent — there is no more upper limit.

Nothing is sacred. Anything can be broken. Anything can be remade.

Meaning inscribes itself on my tongue. The sentience bestowed to this realm stretches its fingers, desperate to crush. I raise my palms, calculate for Felix’s location, and crush this world.

“Event horizon, break. Release: Blacklight Cannon! Go...!”

A black ball emerges from my palms. Time freezes; the serpentine tendrils collapse, dragged into the ball. Not even light can escape the manifestations’ grasp — everything is plunged into darkness.

Empty light. Radiation click.

A bolt of raging blackened light races upwards, following the vague suggestion of my aim.

Steel shatters and glass breaks. Annihilation comes to whatever the impossible beam meets, deconstructing faux bodies and mysteries.

Empty realm cries out in pain. The world breaks, falling away like pieces of a broken mirror.

A realm given form, a separate branching reality, is destroyed in a fraction of a second. An errant growth, pruned away by an equally impossible weapon.

And basking in that final glow, I collapse to the ground.

The halls demystify, unfolding back to regular space. Felix pulls back, bloody and bruised from what feels like an eternity of fighting.

He was dueling that creature to the last second. One moment, he was suspended in the moment of a skirmish, airborne in attack, and in the next, it was all erased. And now, he stands, feeling a cold, prickling sensation on his nape. He looks up.

It’s raining. The skies have split open, dumping buckets of black water; the only normal thing in this night. Fresh ozone smell and distant thunder. The most blissful thing in the world.

The evidence of the phenomenon is rolled back — the lingering shapes and colours in all of the mall’s signs fade away, like stars erased by the early morning sun. He finds himself wandering, only distantly aware of the pain inflicting his body. The last time he checked, the nearest hospital was about a twenty minute walk away. Hopefully that hasn’t warped into an abomination when he wasn’t looking.

A few storefronts away, Marie is lying on her back, arm resting over her eyes. He stays in the middle of the isle as he stumbles over to her, ignoring the falling rain.

She’s hurt. Probably as badly as him. They might require some intensive care. Just maybe. Hopefully MIT is willing to cover his bills — he’s not sure how to explain this one to the department. He tests his arms, but they don’t really work right. He’s fully expended all of his strength; dragging her anywhere is out of the question.

She notices him staring after a while. She lifts her arm, exposing a glint of her emerald eyes, then squints them shut.

“Drat. You’re still alive?”

“I think. Is this real? Are we back in the real world?”

“...Yeah, probably.”

Even though nothing tonight went as planned, Felix did get something out of the encounters: he’s confirmed the existence of the unnatural. If magic is real, then there’s no limit to what couldn’t be real.

If that entire nightmare was anything to go by, then there’s a lot he has to reconsider.

There’s a potential that his almost nonsensical awareness of time and the gaps in his memory may be arcane in nature. He may be even more confused than he’s ever been, but he knows that this girl could help him decipher himself. And as though they are aware of his revelation, the numbers leave him alone. Maybe they’re recalculating their plan of attack on his mind. A small victory, amongst all the chaos.

My entire body protests when I try to move and look at Felix — the only things that remember how to work are my lungs, left arm, and mouth. I settle with looking at him in my peripheral.

“Nice work out there. I guess.”

I throw a casual comment out there to break the awkward silence. He’s just been staring in my general direction for the past little while.

I should probably press the question as to why he’s doing all of this again, but I feel like doing that would make me look obsessed. Or awkward. He’s already given me a reasonable response to everything he’s done so far, so I can’t really ask again. If only I could look inside his head and skip the whole socializing stage.

But Felix just looks at me and smiles. “You were also pretty cool. That might’ve been the coolest thing I’ve ever seen, actually.”

He answers as if it were the most natural thing in the world. I forcibly prop myself and get a good look at him.

Felix kneeling in the rain, slightly dented caliper in hand, battered from a vicious fight. And somehow, he’s still smiling through all of it.

I click my tongue and look away. That really wasn’t cool at all. I was just flailing around like a wild animal, smashing into things until they broke. This boy managed to keep his calm through all of that. Without any knowledge of magic or the supernatural, he never backed down. I can’t tell if that’s bravery or stupidity, but I can’t help but admire it nonetheless.

If it weren’t for his interventions, I’d probably be dead right now. It only takes a second to push midnight into a new day. Then again, if it weren’t for him nosing around, I wouldn’t have to deal with any of this in the first place. But I’m willing to overlook that for now. My brain refuses to acknowledge complicated topics, so I figure I might get the important stuff out of the way.

“Alright. Well, as you did help me out quite a bit tonight, I’ll let you off the hook. For now. I don’t trust you to not run your mouth, but you get to live.” As I can’t muster the strength to lift my arm, I just glare at him. “So stay here until Erika drags our sorry asses to a hospital. Capiche?”

“Capity-piche,” he replies, nodding twice. “I don’t think I’m moving from this spot any time soon.”

“Good. Saves me the effort of chasing you down. Dork.”

We end up just staying like that for a while, sneaking glances at each other. We watch the mall return to dead grey, a more than welcome change in colour. Thunderclouds rumble above us, blowing rain and wind all around the empty streets halls. But it doesn’t reach us. Not tonight.

I don’t know how much time passes, but I find the strength to sit up. Erika is nowhere in sight — I can still feel the contract in place, but she’s taking her sweet time to get over here. Maybe she’s just enjoying the view. Or maybe she thinks I’m mad at her. Either way, we’ve got a few minutes.

“Say,” I mumble, looking away, “were you serious about earlier?”

He tilts his head a little. “About what?”

“About the thing.”

“What thing?”

My cheeks warm up as I recall the moment he muttered something embarrassing. Not that I’m actually flustered, it’s more out of second embarrassment. Seriously. I’m not kidding.

“I like you?”

Like. Like. Like. Like. The statement, now and then, echoes in my stupid bimbo head. I can’t believe anybody would just say that to me. The way it’s said is just so pure and honest that I just want to smash my face into a wall.

I bite my lip and take a deep breath. “Even though I told you that I’m not interested?”

“Yeah. I don’t know if I love you yet, but I definitely like you.” He looks up, closing his eyes. “I like you a lot.”

I feel violence. You can’t just say these things to a girl. Don’t fucking do it.

This motherfucker is so, so lucky that I’m severely wounded and have lost enough blood to become light-headed.

“Oi. You don’t mean that do you?”

I narrow my eyes at him, but he doesn’t budge. He looks tranquil as a Buddhist monk in deep meditation.

“...Felix?”

A strong wind blows in — almost as if on cue, Felix flops over. He snorts as he hits the ground. Ragdoll science.

“Right.”

That leaves just me. The ground welcomes my head; I try to stifle my murky thoughts and run an analysis on my body.

I’ve used up all the mana in my body. It’ll produce some more over time, but I’m not doing anything fancy any time soon. Probably gonna be sore for a week, too. Although none of my wounds are fatal, I might be in for a hospital stay, assuming Erika doesn’t help out. None of Felix’s wounds are fatal, either. Hope he’s got medical insurance.

There’s still a lot of things I don’t understand right now. I haven’t quite forgotten about the Phantasma that tried to assassinate me, nor the sudden mutation of my magic. Burst, Gale, and my mana regulations were techniques that Erika helped me cultivate. Tonight, I managed to create a new spell using a new theory — I make a note to explore this new territory.

All theories, schools, and traditions are based on some underlying assumption. I never had any compatibility with any of the mainstream ones, so hopefully I haven’t broken anything important in discovering this. Feel like using the stability of reality as a catalyst is something I should never do in the real world. Gotta be something I can do that doesn’t involve ruining things too much.

The Phantasma is a less appealing issue. Although Erika has been protecting our territory, another witch has come. I don’t know what they’re after just yet, but they’ve been able to subvert our barriers with ease. This is only the beginning — I’ll have to keep on my toes in the next few weeks. If they’re only scouting right now, I don’t want to imagine what it’ll be like when they launch an all-out attack.

This is the first time in a proper magic battle. I can’t replicate Blacklight Cannon unless there are extreme circumstances, but I’ve managed to win all on my own. If I had more energy, I’d go and do a little victory dance. But I don’t.

Tonight marks a fundamental shift in me and Erika’s relationship. Although she’s been my familiar all this while, she certainly hasn’t acted like it. She doesn’t need to modify my body any further if I can build my own foundation of witchcraft. She’s taught me all that she can — the rest is up to me. I wonder how she’ll treat me from now on. Hopefully nothing will change too much, but I wouldn’t mind more pampering once in a while.

But I suppose all of that will have to wait for tomorrow. All of this crap is a problem for tomorrow’s Marie. I close my eyes and join Felix in taking a dirt nap.

But first—

“Hey, Felix. You still there?”

No response. He’s conked out — it really is just me. I whisper something underneath my breath:

“Thanks. For everything. Guess things are going to be different around here, huh?”

Around us, the storm continues. But we’ve found a little refuge in a long dead husk, a place useless to anybody besides us. As strange as it is, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else right now.

Well, actually, maybe a hospital bed wouldn’t be so bad right now.

Actually, scratch that. Please take me to a hospital. Everything really hurts. Jesus Christ, I can feel my skin peeling off.

Please? Anybody out there?