Somewhere in the infinite field of golden portals, the entity of two pairs of footsteps broke the stillness.
Both Albert Newton and Fon Reeze had been split in their ways. Standing across from their own mirror self.
Their clones looked identical, but something behind their eyes was wrong.
The clones smiled in perfect unison.
"You want the real sun." Tom's clone said, voice identical but just slightly delayed, "then follow me."
Albert stared. He knew the rule. The clones were designed to lead the original into death.
He took a slow breath, feeling his pulse climb.
Then, without hesitation, he raised a sharp shard of a broken portal. Its edge shimmered faintly, still glowing with light.
He pressed it to his chest.
The shard slid in cleanly, painlessly.
His hands moved with a surgeon's precision. He reached in and pulled his heart out without thinking. It throbbed weakly in his palm, warm like a living stone.
The clone watched him, expression unreadable.
Albert muttered, "Let's make this fair."
He pulled out a small jar. Labeled in faint silver ink, "CLONE'S." The heart floated inside as the jar sealed itself with a thin, glowing thread.
When the next body-swap came, the jar would switch hands. His plan was simple but cruel.
Offer the heart to his clone.
Let the clone think it owned the real one.
And when the clone hammered it onto the fake anvil, he would steal its tongue mid-scream and forge the true key. A symbolic victory turned literal weapon.
Albert whispered, "Use mine.… I'll use yours."
Somewhere behind the fog, Fon Reeze stood still. Her clone moved gracefully like a ballerina in mist. Fon's eyes darted between the shifting outlines. Two of herself, moving in perfect mimicry.
Which one am I? she thought.
Her lips parted slightly and she smiled.
"I can see what's real."
The clone tilted its head. "Do you?"
Fon didn't answer. She reached into her coat and pulled out a silver flute, sleek and light, engraved with runes. The air around it shimmered faintly as she lifted it to her lips.
This was "Hiten ja",
an artifact of truth and tone able to mark the genuine among the false, to reveal a truth long forgotten, though for only a few moments.
She played a note.
The sound was thin, almost frail, yet it rang through the fog like the crack of crystal.
For an instant, every portal flickered. The clones of both froze.
The note ended.
A single ripple of color surged across the mist. Simply marking one of the Alberts in faint red light.
Fon speared out first. "Found you!"
Tom blinked, realizing too late what had happened. His clone stepped between them but Fon was faster. She dashed forward. Her body was moving like silk in motion.
Her leg whipped upward, hitting the clone in the jaw, breaking its stance. Then her elbow drove forward, pressing against Tom's chest.
She didn't miss a beat. Her hands flowed in a precise patterns. Martial movements drawn from discipline and memory.
Tom staggered back. The fog swirled violently around them by movements.
Her eyes met his. "You're the real one, right?"
Albert smirked faintly through the blood on his lip. "Depends on how you define real."
Fon's flute shimmered again in her hand. Its tone trembled earth which brought a short earthquake in mid-space.
For the first time since the match began, she hesitated.
Because if truth can be marked by music….
what if the song itself was lying?
Ten thousand portals glowed dimly through the golden haze similar to distant eyes half-awake.
An imitation of the sun that could kill without warning.
Fon Reeze with her flute glinting under the strange sky. Her breathing was calm but her eyes were alive. Thoughtfully reading every twitch of motion. She raised Hiten Ja, the silver flute of truth and exhaled slowly before letting a melody spill out.
The sound didn't just mark truth anymore.
It vibrated through the worl of an emotional frequency, searching for the strongest feeling nearby.
Tom felt it hit him like a pulse inside his skull. His Dark System reacted instantly, amplifying every buried emotion. The darker the feeling, the stronger the response. And so the melody roared, feeding on him.
The shadows around him began to move.
Not like zombies. They crawled on walls, whispering, reaching for his throat.
Albert closed his eyes and breathed through it. "Wishing for my fear, huh? Take it. Let's see if you can choke on it."
The hallucinations didn't stop; they multiplied, circling him like ruthless predators of night. He could hear their feet scraping the ground though nothing was there.
Fon, watching him struggle, pressed her fingers along the flute's body again.
Her
" Build: Malfunction "
began its action, fracturing the air around her touch.
Where her fingers brushed, the world glitched. Textures warped, colors inverted, sounds skipped like broken records. She turned one of those warped zones toward a cluster of portals.
Each glitch created a short error zone and when her second clone disintegrated moments ago, its residual sunlight was drawn into those zones, fusing with the distortion.
The result of fake portals reshaped into luminous traps, beautiful and deadly.
Tom's own clone staggered behind him, its skin flickered between solid and translucent, like a video stuck between frames. Both their clones had died twice now; one more death of clone and corruption would consume whichever side it struck first.
Fon glanced at the fake suns. "We could both end this, you know. Step back, live."
Albert laughed under his breath. "You call this living?"
She tilted her head. "What's the point of surviving a sun, if it only burns what is human in us?"
The words hit him harder than her music. For a moment, he remembered faces of Arlong, Grace, Elior—moments of humanity they had traded for logic and peace. His Dark System stirred uneasily.
His mind, however, was clear.
He scanned the rotating portals, every one identical.
Somewhere among the illusions was the real sun—the true death.
The rules were cruel, but exact. If he entered the true portal, he would die instantly.
But there was a loophole.
"If both players are vaporized at the same instant," he remembered the announcer's voice, "the match registers as a draw."
A draw meant no loss, no emotional forfeit, no rune of False.
It also meant Fon would live.
He stepped closer, letting his shadow multiply again. Using the Dark System to mask which one of them was real. Fon tried to follow but her glitch-zones distorted depth and sound, floor bent the ground like a folding screen.
The clones fought in the distance, movements broken and insect-like. The next death among them would trigger corruption and then everything would collapse.
Fon raised her flute one last time, a single trembling note vibrated through the fog. It made the fake portals shimmer and one portal, in the far back, did not.
Tom saw.... the real sun.
Fon's eyes widened. "Do not—"
He smiled faintly. "There's no other way."
He sprinted forward, the clones dissolved behind him. His shadow stretched long, reaching even before him. The moment his foot crossed the event horizon of that one true portal. A pure and absolute light erupted.
For a fraction of a second, the fog cleared.
The fake suns dimmed.
Fon's flute cracked in half from the vibration.
Somewhere, the system voice whispered,
[Result: Undefined.]
[Player Albert Newton—Condition: Paradox.]
[Match outcome: Pending.]
The match hadn't ended yet.