Kaen’s voice cut sharply through the comms.

  “Signal triangulated. Malcolm’s core node—subterranean chamber, fifty miles west. Coordinates locked.”

  Dynamo didn’t wait. She slammed the remote on the table, thumb hovering over the activation stud.

  “This is it.”

  Bernadette’s eyes gleamed in the flicker of holo-light. “Straight into the lion’s mouth.”

  Hiroto chambered a round and nodded. “Open it.”

  The portal tore wide, light folding in on itself until the farm’s mildew air was replaced with the copper sting of ozone and damp stone. They stepped through into the belly of Malcolm’s fortress—an industrial warren of steel corridors lined with humming machines and the stench of antiseptic.

  Alarms blared instantly. Shadows broke from the walls—Malcolm’s men, armored with every manner of weapon.

  Hiroto fired first, a burst that cut down the nearest two. Dynamo surged forward, fists crackling into mallet shapes, bones and steel snapping under each blow. Bernadette moved with surgical precision, every shot a punctured throat, a shattered visor.

  “Keep moving!” Hiroto barked.

  They cut through the corridor, boots pounding against grated floors, gunfire echoing like thunder.

  The ruptured panels exploded in a cascade of Sparks and flame. Dynamo slammed her hammers into a guard whose body flew into a junction box, electrocuting him. One of the walls gave way, revealing a spiral staircase.

  Beyond the breach, the passage widened into a crude spiraling staircase leading into the darkness. The low rumble of machinery pulsed throughout the chamber.

  “Two levels down. Chamber core. Aiko is there,” Kaen’s said.

  Hiroto led his team into the uneasy hum of the obsidian cravase. They cut through another squad at the landing. Hiroto’s knife flashed under the strobe of muzzle fire; Dynamo’s roar echoed throughout the space, drowning out the dying screams. Bernadette vaulted the last step, boots splashing into a pool of coolant, her pistol at the ready.

  The chamber door loomed ahead—massive, reinforced, and surrounded by cables. A low humming rose from the floor. A sound that was more biological than mechanical.

  Hiroto planted his hand against the door. Heat radiated and pulsed beneath the metal. Aiko’s voice leaked through—thin, echoing, not entirely in this world:

  “Help me…”

  Dynamo’s jaw tightened.

  “No more waiting.”

  Together they forced the door wide, weapons ready.

  The experimentation chamber sprawled before them, a cathedral of mirrors and glass. Malcolm stood at the center, lit in fractured light, one arm wrapped in a tether of radiant energy that dragged Aiko from a mirror’s liquid surface. Half her body was free, thrashing, eyes wide in terror; the other half was still caught in the shifting dream-world beyond.

  Malcolm turned, calm, and his smile was like that of a madman.

  “You’re just in time to witness a miracle,” he said as he strapped the Mindjivity device on Aiko’s head.

  As Hiroto moved deeper into the cavernous space, the vastness of it all took his breath away. Mirrors jutted from the walls at impossible angles, their surfaces rippling like disturbed water. Some reflected the room, others showed alien landscapes: crimson skies, oceans suspended upside down, faces peering out before vanishing like smoke.

  Hiroto held up a fist. They fanned out—Dynamo to the left, Bernadette to the right, their rifles and mallets ready.

  At the center, Malcolm stood. Rooted to the floor like a statue. His usually impeccable suit is in tatters. The last vestiges of his shirt clung to his sweaty body.

  One hand clutched a tether of liquid light, a strand that writhed and pulsed like a living artery. It connected him to the mirror like an umbilical cord.

  Hiroto gasped as a half-formed Aiko emerged from the mirror. An arm, a leg, then the rest of her body spilled to the floor. Her face was pale, and her lips trembled as if she were freezing. Her hand clawed at the frame, nails clawing at the wood.

  Malcolm pulled on the tether, drawing her closer inch by inch. Each pull sent ripples cascading through the other mirrors; the reflections shivered into distorted versions of Hiroto’s team. He saw himself with blackened eyes, Dynamo dripped blood from her fists, and Bernadette laughed with a mouth too large and wide to be real.

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  They froze, the surreal spectacle holding them in its gravity.

  “You feel it, don’t you?” Malcolm said, his voice echoing through the chamber, calm, almost reverent. “The boundary between worlds isn’t fixed. It bends, it yields… if you have the will.”

  Aiko let out a ragged sob, pulling away. For a moment, her eyes met Hiroto’s. They widened with desperate recognition.

  “Uncle—!”

  Her cry ricocheted throughout the chamber. Crackling sounds came from every direction, and several mirrors shattered and sprayed glass across the floor. Each shard still shimmered and played impossible scenes of parallel worlds before fading to dull silver.

  Malcolm didn’t look back; he tightened his grip on the tether, voice lowering.

  “She’s the key. You can kill me if you like—but you’ll lose her to the dream forever.”

  Bernadette raised her pistol. Dynamo clenched her hardening fists. Hiroto remained calm, not making any sudden moves. The room thrummed like a held musical note, stretched thin, waiting to snap. The mirrors pulsed as if they had heartbeats, their surfaces swelled and contracted in time with Malcolm’s pull. The tether of light pulsed in his hands. Hiroto could hear its hum. It was like a thread was connecting multiple worlds.

  Aiko screamed again—not just with her voice but with every surface in the room. The sound bled from the mirrors, from the cracks in the floor, from the air itself. Hiroto’s vision wavered; for a moment, he saw multiple variations of his niece—some younger, some older, some with hollow-eyed and broken faces, and all struggled as if held by unseen hands.

  Bernadette steadied her weapon, but her reflection leaned forward, whispering, Pull the trigger, darling, free her with blood.

  Dynamo snarled and swung a mallet-hand at the glass, but the reflection she intercepted—her double burst through the surface, weaponized and misshapen, a silhouette made of static and shadow. Dynamo’s blow landed, shattering it, but the echo of impact rattled her bones as if she’d struck herself.

  The air thickened, every breath like inhaling water. Kaen’s voice buzzed faintly in Hiroto’s ear, distorted:

  “Warning. Dimensional overlap at ninety-three percent. The chamber is becoming… both.”

  Malcolm’s eyes burned with something beyond madness—conviction. He reeled Aiko closer, her body half free now, her skin flickering between flesh and glass. “Do you see it?” he said, his tone exalting. “The threshold bends for her. She is the seam. She is the door.”

  Hiroto stepped forward despite the weight crushing his chest. The mirrors tilted toward him, thousands of versions of his own face watching—some proud, some broken, some grinning like predators.

  Aiko’s arm shot out, trembling, fingers stretched toward him. Her skin shivered between states—child, corpse, warrior, stranger. Each reflection showed a different fate.

  The tether writhed, like an untamed serpent tearing her apart. Malcolm hunkered down, bracing his legs. His veins bulged and teeth clenched at the strain.

  “She belongs with me!” he said.

  Malcolm pulled the tether taut; ripples of light washed over him.

  “She doesn’t belong in your tiny, broken world. She will become a goddess in mine.”

  The chamber responded. The mirrors bent inward, and tiny crackling noises emanated from the walls. Reflections bled shot into the air, creating a mad kaleidoscope of ambient light. Shards hovered then circled the room, reflecting images from other realities—cities burned, oceans boiled, and steam stripped the flesh off bones. The skies split, and alien stars invaded.

  For a moment, Hiroto, Dynamo, and Bernadette stood on a ridge overlooking countless worlds bleeding into another, and Aiko was at the center, caught between them and the distant worlds.

  “No! It hurts, make it stop!”

  Aiko cried in agony as tears flowed down her face. The mirrors groaned, making a sound like a demonic whale song, which sounded like a thousand tormented screams. The reflections took a life of their own.

  A second Hiroto stepped from the glass, obscured by shadows, a katana glinting with dark, blackened hues of light. His eyes were pits, but his smile was predatory. Dynamo’s twin followed. Her mallet-hands steamed and dripped molten iron. Bernadette’s double slipped into the room without a sound, pistol spinning on one of her fingers. Hushed whispers coming from her reflection, I already know where you’ll miss.

  The real Dynamo cursed.

  “This is some nightmare bullshit!”

  Her shadow lunged, the ground shook with the impact of its fists.

  Steel clashed as Hiroto met his doppelg?nger’s blade, sparks flew and froze midair, hanging like stars. Each strike carried more weight than the last, as if the mirror version leeched strength from their doubles.

  Bernadette ducked as her twin fired—bullets that curved like serpents. She countered with a roll and shot back, their gunfire weaving a pattern across the chamber like an executioner’s tapestry.

  Kaen’s voice broke through the madness, flickering and warped. “They are constructs of possibility—versions of what you might have become. Defeat them, and the mirror loses hold.”

  Dynamo bellowed, mallet-fist smashing into her reflection’s chest. It staggered, then split into two more copies, both snarling, both swinging.

  Hiroto felt his blade catch on the phantom’s weapon—but the impact cut into his own shoulder, blood running hot. His double laughed, voice low and venomous: “Every wound you give me, you give yourself.”

  Aiko writhed at the center, her body bending between realities, her screams tearing across dimensions. With every surge of the tether, more doubles spilled out—some malformed, some perfected, all hungry.

  Bernadette snarled, snapping the neck of one copy, only for another to step from the shards with her same smirk.

  “It’s Endless,” she hissed.

  The chamber was no longer a room but an arena of infinite facsimiles of themselves, a battle royale between who they were and what they might have been. The mirrors pulsed like a beating heart, spraying fragments that became weapons in the hands of shadows.

  Malcolm stood untouched in the chaos, dragging Aiko closer, his face lit by the storm of violence. “You see now,” he shouted, almost gleeful. “She is the fulcrum. Every choice, every path—they converge on her!”

  Hiroto’s double raised its blade, mirroring him perfectly. For a moment, Hiroto saw all his failures lined up, taunting him. He tightened his grip and then struck only air, but the motion shook the mirrors.

  The battle raged on. Reflections of themselves, revealing collapsing realities into a maelstrom of melee. Aiko’s outstretched hands trembled, caught between Malcolm’s pull and her uncle’s desperate reach.

  The chamber convulsed, mirrors buckled inward as the doubles pressed their assault. Dynamo wrestled three versions of herself, her mallet-hands sent thunderous shockwaves throughout the chamber. Bernadette evaded as a wave of reflected bullets came from her twin, who laughed manically. Hiroto bled from multiple cuts, his doppelg?nger enjoying every strike.

  Malcolm yanked the tether hard, dragging Aiko nearly free—her chest heaving, half her body still submerged in the shimmering glass. Her eyes rolled white, her lips parting with a sound that wasn’t human.

  And then, it happened.

  The mirrors answered her.