Blood, both red and sickly purple, made a slick, terrible mix on the cave floor. Lucid's arm was a mess of torn flesh and pain.
"Hold on, Lucid! I will heal you!" Alice's voice was frantic in his mind.
"Stop!" Lucid thought back, gritting his teeth. "This one is mine."
He could feel the beast's hot, rancid breath on his face. With his free hand, he grabbed the dagger still protruding from the creature's left eye. He twisted it, and with a final, desperate yell, he ripped it free and stabbed again, this time deep into the side of its muscular shoulder.
The Unfaithful beast faltered, its grip loosening for a split second. That was enough. Lucid tore his mangled arm from its jaws and scrambled backwards, then turned and ran. He did not run for the tunnel. He ran straight for the pulsing, violet tear in reality.
A guttural, earth shaking growl sounded behind him, reverberating through bone and stone. The sound was cut off the second he passed through the rift's shimmering surface.
The change was instant. The world dissolved into a whirlwind of melting shapes and colors, a blinding chaos that stole his vision and his sense of up and down.
***
Welcome, Enlightened...
The trial shall commence.
Any failure in completing the target in due time will result in one's forfeit of life.
Objective: Unknown.
Participant: Alice The Divine Maiden.
Trial scenario: Unknown.
Required time: One Week.
May your journey lead you towards Enlightenment.
***
He felt a sensation of falling, but there was no ground.
Then, there was.
He hit the ground. Hard.
He groaned, the sound echoing in a new, strange silence. The blinding light was gone. He was lying on something soft and cool. He hastily touched all over his body, his heart hammering. His arm... it was fine. The terrible, tearing pain was gone. He looked at it. The skin was whole, unmarked. Even his torn shirt was mended.
The best part about Omega Rifts, he remembered from his old training, was that whatever damage you sustained in the real world was healed upon entry. It was part of the reason he had charged that beast and almost gotten himself killed. It was a calculated, insane risk. But things could have been much worse.
He got up on his knees, taking in his surroundings.
"Where the hell am I?" he muttered.
"Oh, right. Omega Rift."
"Are you alright, Lucid?" Alice asked him, her voice thick with worry.
"More or less," he replied, standing up and brushing himself off. He was in a hallway. A very fancy, very clean hallway with dark wood panels and paintings of stern looking people.
"Lucid, please do not neglect my help," Alice said. She sounded much sadder now.
"It was not that I didn't want your healing," he thought back, feeling a pang of guilt. "I just couldn't afford to lose focus. That thing was—"
"Young Master!" a voice came from behind him.
Lucid froze. "What the hell?" he said under his breath.
"Are you alright? Do you need any assistance?" The voice was crisp, formal, and familiar in a deeply unsettling way. It came from a butler, a man no older than thirty, with neatly combed hair and a spotless black suit.
The butler hurried closer, his hands fluttering with concern. He wrapped a steadying arm around Lucid's shoulders, helping him to stand. Lucid stood, feeling almost lazy and staggered, but he straightened himself. Something felt wrong. Deeply wrong. Like his body was different. Taller. Lighter.
"No, you have it all wrong. My name is Lucid," he tried to correct the butler, his voice sounding strange to his own ears. It was higher, smoother.
He looked at the butler's visage. He traced a familiar face, a familiar sharpness and condescending look that he had endured back at the mansion in his own time.
"Gerald?" Lucid breathed.
"Yes, sir? What is it, Master Karmen?" the butler, a much younger Gerald, replied.
"Karmen?" Lucid repeated the word, much more carefully, his mind racing to catch up. He remembered where he had heard that name. He remembered why it was so familiar.
Then, it hit him like a physical brick to the stomach.
'No. No, no, no, no!' he yelled urgently, silently, inside his mind.
He pushed past the younger Gerald, ignoring the butler's surprised squawk. He moved through the mansion's hallways. It was the same mansion, but it felt newer, brighter. He burst open a door at random, his heart pounding.
Inside, a young maid was partially undressed, changing into her uniform. She let out a sharp shriek.
"Master Karmen!"
Lucid slammed the door shut, his face burning with a heat that was not his own. He was unfazed by the sight itself, but horrified by the confirmation it brought.
He went through more doors, his movements becoming frantic. Finally, he found a bathroom. He stumbled to the sink and turned on the faucet, splashing cold water on his face. He looked up.
Into the mirror.
Staring back at him was the very person he had come to detest.
The familiar crystal blue eyes. The sharp, clean lines of the face. The neatly styled black hair. And the most intriguing, terrifying part, the complete absence of the deep, bruise like eyebags. There was no sign of the exhausting sickness, no trace of the weary, dying noble. This face was youthful, vibrant, and full of a cruel, untouched potential.
"You have got to be kidding me. No!" Lucid yelled at the reflection. The voice that came out was Karmen's voice, clear and strong.
"I knew that Omega Rifts could be anything, but I did not expect this," he whispered, the sound alien in this throat.
"It is okay, Lucid," Alice's voice came, a steady presence in the storm. "So far, no danger is present."
'Alice. You followed me inside. Like usual,' he thought, a wave of relief washing over him. He was not alone.
"On the other hand, Lucid, this is quite humorous," Alice continued, a gentle, musical lilt in her tone. "I reside with you, and you now happen to control another person. A person within a person that is inside another person..."
"That is not funny," Lucid grumbled, splashing more water on his, or rather, Karmen's, face.
A loud, urgent bang came at the door.
"Young Master! Is everything alright in there?" It was Gerald again, his voice tight with a servant's worry.
Lucid, now apparently Karmen, took a deep, steadying breath. He looked at the reflection. The blue eyes looked back, wide with his own panic, but the face was a mask of calm, aristocratic beauty. With a loud sigh, he turned off the water and opened the door.
The younger Gerald stood there, wringing his hands. "Young Master, is everything alright? If anything, we can cancel your departure for the Academy tomorrow if you are not in good health."
Lucid drew himself up, trying to mimic the formal posture he had seen Karmen use. He made his voice firm, trying to bury the shaky terror beneath. "Yes, it is I. Karmen."
Gerald took a step back in slight shock. The response, the tone, it was off.
"Do not worry," Lucid continued, forcing a bright, confident smile onto Karmen's face. "I have never felt better than ever!"
Gerald looked at him like he did not act like he normally would. His brow was furrowed in confusion.
"Lucid, I think you overdid it," Alice said reluctantly.
The butler Gerald finally nodded, a slight, uncertain smile touching his lips. "Very well, Young Master. You have no guests for today and no urgent matters that require your attention. I suggest that you rest and come down for dinner at seven."
Gerald told him this with a deep, formal bow, one that Lucid had not been met with in the future mansion. Then the butler continued down the hallway, walking with practiced grace. Meanwhile, Karmen, or rather the person wearing him, stood there awkwardly, as if he had just received the worst news of his life.
"Uhm, Lucid," Alice's voice chimed in, gentle and puzzled. "I fear that I am confused."
"I know," Lucid thought back, slumping against the doorframe. "Same here."
He, or rather they, made their way to the study. It was the same study where he had first met the older, dying Karmen. Books lined the walls. A tall window stood in the middle of the room, right behind the large, polished desk where they had their discussion. It was mesmerizing, seeing it so new and clean.
He took a seat in the large leather chair. It felt wrong to sit in it. He looked at the ornate clock on the mantel. It was made of gleaming gold. Karmen really was a noble through and through, even in his youth. The time was currently four in the afternoon. Nearly half a day had passed since arriving here and inhibiting the Young Master's body.
He pulled a fresh sheet of paper from a drawer under the desk and picked up a quill. He started scribbling something. He drew a rough circle. Then he drew two stick figures next to it.
"What is that you are drawing, Lucid?" Alice asked carefully.
He drew a shaky oval shape that was supposed to resemble the rift. Then he tried to draw the Unfaithful beast, which ended up as a lopsided circle with stick legs and a scribble for a head.
"I am guessing the stick figure with the scribble on its head is you, Lucid," Alice mused.
"Yes," Lucid thought, adding more frantic lines. "The circle is the rift. And the stick figures are, well, you and me. And that scumbag."
"We were attacked by what seemed like a Fallen beast. A tiger or a leopard. But what is weird is that this was an Omega Rift." He drew an awkward shape next to the stick figures, a circular body with a smaller circle attached on top and elongated lines for legs. It hardly resembled any animal.
"Fallen, or the Unfaithful, usually come out of rifts that are open. Beta rifts, or Alpha rifts in the worst case. Not Omega Rifts," he explained, writing the words 'Beta,' 'Alpha,' and 'Omega' on the paper with messy letters.
"Omega Rifts are essentially stabilized Sentrum Rifts. They have materialized and become permanent fixtures. They require intense attention and resources to clear and dissipate," he continued, drawing arrows from the 'Omega' label to the lopsided circle.
"I see. Are they of any danger, like that Sentrum Rift that pulled us in before?" Alice asked.
He went on to circle the shaky oval that was the rift on the paper. "No. That is the neat part. They are not immediately dangerous to the environment. They are classed as non invasive rifts, which is why my old cohort would leave them be while we focused on the other, more dangerous ones."
"I see. So what steps do we have to take to leave?" Alice's voice was logical, calm.
Lucid crossed Karmen's arms, swaying his head back over the chair while thinking. "The things we have to do to 'solve' an Omega Rift vary. It could be a trial set in the past, a conflict to solve, a specific being to slay, or we might just have to roam openly in a landscape until we find another rift to exit through. The possibilities are endless with Omegas. They are puzzles."
He drew a large question mark over the drawing of the creature and the rift.
"That is why knowing what to do is so difficult in these rifts. However, inhabiting another being's body, like this, is usually a sign. It points to a trial where we have to solve a past action, a regret, or a key moment in this person's life."
"Like that Sentrum Rift we cleared, the confrontation between the rebels and the empire," Alice spoke, understanding dawning.
"Exactly. Now we have to solve a personal issue related to Karmen. Which, by the guess of everything we have witnessed so far, is set in his past."
"However," Lucid added, tapping the quill on the paper, "being that an Omega Rift can only be accessed by more than one individual, I wonder where Jake disappeared to. He should be in here somewhere, too."
"Okay. I understand it much better now," Alice said aloud, her tone one of confirmation.
"Why ask? You could have just read my mind," Lucid thought, a faint smile touching Karmen's lips.
"I have decided to stop doing that," Alice replied, her voice soft but firm. "I value your privacy and your inner life, Lucid. I will not repeat that same mistake."
"Value what?" Lucid thought, a laugh bubbling up that felt strange in this new chest. "I mean, I have gone to the bathroom plenty of times since we met. What privacy is there? You must have probably caught a glimpse of... everything!"
There was a pause. Then Alice asked, ever so gently and with a hint of genuine, innocent curiosity, "May I ask, is it that figure you drew on that sheet, Lucid?"
He looked down at the paper he had been scribbling on. There was chaos everywhere. Hastily written words, two stick figures, and beneath them, the lopsided beast that now, in his frantic drawing, looked less like a leopard and more like a strange horse bear hybrid. And in his distracted state, he had drawn two large, circular shape right in the middle of the creature's lower body and a line protruding from in between both circles, in a place that suggested something very, very odd.
He stared at the drawing. Karmen's face flushed a deep, embarrassing red.
"..." Lucid preferred to stay very, very quiet. He slowly crumpled the paper into a ball and tossed it into the cold fireplace.