The Overseers did not announce the trial this time.
One moment, I was in the dust-choked amphitheater where Elior and I had crushed the last test, and the next, my boots were sinking into a floor that looked like polished black glass. A hall stretched infinitely ahead, narrow as a coffin lid, lined with towering mirrors.
Each one breathed.
Yes—breathed. The mirror faces swelled outward like lungs, their silver surfaces fogging in and out, as though some unseen giant pressed its face close to the other side. My stomach knotted. I hated it immediately.
Elior whispered beside me. His voice trembled, though he tried to cloak it in piety.
"Reflections," he said. "But… they are not our own."
He was right.
The nearest mirror held not me, not even a warped version of me, but a thing that only wore the outline of my body.
Its skin sagged like wet parchment, sloughing off to reveal purple muscle underneath. Its eyes—my eyes—were pits, black with writhing worms. Its mouth sagged too wide, showing teeth cracked and yellow as candle stubs. And yet, I recognized the tilt of its head. The way it hunched.
It was me, if I gave in.
I gagged. My stomach rolled, acid stinging the back of my throat.
The Overseers' laughter skittered across the ceiling like rats. "These are the masks you have worn. These are the masks you will wear. Choose, or be chosen."
The monster in the mirror moved. Its lips peeled back from its broken teeth, and in a voice like mine but dragged over nails, it whispered:
"Let me in."
I flinched back.
Elior grabbed my arm, but he was shaking, too. His mirror-self loomed tall and pristine, a shining saint—but the robes dripped blood, and every step it took left stigmata in the glass. Its halo was barbed wire twisted into a crown. Its lips smiled, but blood trickled steadily from the corners.
It whispered, soft, reverent, "Hypocrite."
Elior made the sign of the cross. His fingers trembled. His lips moved in prayer. But no voice answered him—not his god's, not the Overseers'. Only silence.
I couldn't stop staring. All down the hall, the mirrors writhed. Every single one held us—Seo-jin and Elior—but each version more wrong than the last. One mirror showed me with my guts dragging on the ground, grinning as I fed them into an army of slavering corpses. Another showed me chained and begging, forehead pressed into filth. Another: me standing on a throne made of bones, while my friends—if I even had the right to use that word—lay stiff at my feet.
All me. All possible.
My throat closed. I stumbled, head pounding. The weight of all those eyes—my eyes—burned into me like a brand.
And then, a voice.
Not the Overseers'. Not Elior's.
"That's not you."
A whisper, soft as a fingertip brushing my ear. Warm where everything else was cold.
"They're showing you masks. Lies. Don't look too long. You'll forget yourself."
I froze. My chest lurched. It wasn't the first time I'd heard it—the whisper had haunted the last two trials—but here, in this grotesque hall, it sliced through the horror like a line of sunlight.
I almost laughed. Almost.
"Seo-jin," Elior rasped. His eyes were wide, bloodshot. He stared not at me, but at his bleeding saint-self, which was now kneeling and tearing its own chest open with delicate fingers. "We must pray. We must endure."
"Yeah," I said, voice hoarse. "You pray. I'll… improvise."
Because if I didn't, I was going to scream.
I staggered forward, forcing myself down the hall, mirror after mirror reflecting horrors of me. Some I recognized. Some I didn't. All of them whispered: coward, murderer, survivor, worm. The Overseers wanted me to put one on. To step into the mirror, sink into that version, accept it as truth.
"Not happening," I muttered. My throat was dry. My palms stung with cold sweat. "I don't do costumes. Not unless they're funny."
A brittle laugh tore out of me. Too sharp, too loud. The reflections twitched. Some tilted their heads, imitating me. Others slammed their fists against the glass, splintering cracks that immediately healed.
"Seo-jin—" Elior's voice cracked. He was falling behind. His mirror-saint had begun weeping blood, whispering confessions Elior had never made. The Overseers were peeling him apart.
And me?
I was dangling by a thread, anchored only by that faint, impossible whisper in my ear: "Keep walking. Don't stop. Don't let them choose for you."
The corridor bent inward, narrowing, mirrors crowding closer until their edges scraped my shoulders. Each step smeared my reflection across their surfaces, a hundred, a thousand grotesque Seo-jins leaning in.
Some grinned, maggots twitching in the gaps of their teeth. Some wept pus. One pressed its face so close to the glass that its flesh left streaks like oil paint.
And all of them whispered, like a hive:
"Take me. Wear me. You're nothing without us."
I forced my lips into a smile. It tasted like rust, but I couldn't let them hear the crack in my voice.
"Sorry," I said. "I don't do secondhand outfits. Especially not ones that smell like… whatever that is."
I gagged at the squelching face, then laughed—harsh, brittle. "No offense, but you all look like me on a Monday morning. Which, if you knew anything, is already hell."
The reflections twitched. Some recoiled. Others hammered harder against their glass prisons, desperate to break through.
But joking worked. Joking meant air in my lungs. Joking meant I was still me.
Behind me, Elior wasn't faring as well. His saint-reflection had collapsed fully to its knees, ribs pried open like a cage. The thing pulled its own heart free, dripping blood onto the mirror's floor.
Elior sobbed, lips moving in prayer, but every word came out wrong. Twisted. A litany of sins he'd never confessed. His reflection whispered each one back, sweetly, lovingly, as though it were cradling him in damnation.
I grabbed his shoulder. Hard. "Hey. Look at me."
He flinched, his pupils blown wide. "Seo-jin—"
"Don't listen to it. That isn't you."
"It—" His voice cracked. "It is. My faith has never been pure. My confessions—"
"Shut up." My voice cut sharper than I intended, but it was the only way to pierce through. "It's bait. That's all. They want you crawling inside that bloody puppet suit. You do that, you're done."
His chest heaved. For one heartbeat, I thought he'd snap. Give in. Step into the glass.
And then, again, that voice—the whisper.
"Hold him steady. You're the anchor here."
I squeezed Elior's shoulder until my nails dug in. "I don't care if you're a hypocrite, a liar, or a choirboy with stage fright. You're Elior, you idiot. That's enough. Stay."
The mirrors hissed. I swear they did. Like snakes in a pit, agitated at my defiance.
The floor quivered. The corridor buckled and warped, funhouse angles snapping into impossible geometry. Mirrors folded over mirrors until we were walking inside a kaleidoscope of horrors.
Everywhere I looked, Seo-jins grinned back at me. Hundreds. Thousands. My flesh rotting, my spine bent, my jaw unhinged, my hands dripping blood from crimes I hadn't committed—yet.
"You will." they chorused. "You will. You will. You will."
My knees wobbled. The sound wormed into my skull, scraping thought away, leaving only the words behind.
You will. You will. You will.
I clamped my hands over my ears. It didn't help. The sound was inside my head now, buzzing, drilling. My body lurched toward the nearest mirror without my consent.
And then—her again.
"Seo-jin. Stop."
It wasn't a whisper this time. Not faint. Clear. Firm. Warm as breath on the nape of my neck.
My legs froze.
"This isn't you. You are more than their stage, more than their masks. Don't give them your face. Don't give them your name."
I inhaled sharply, like breaching the surface of water. Air burned down my lungs.
"Right," I croaked. My mouth was dry. My body shook. But I forced a grin at the mirror's corpse-faced Seo-jin. "Guess what? I'm the original. You're knockoffs. Which means you're all cheap imitations."
I spat at the glass.
The reflection snarled, maggots spilling from its eyes. The mirror spiderwebbed, shrieking like an animal.
For a split second, the pressure lifted.
Elior sucked in a breath, eyes clearing. He clutched my arm like a drowning man. "How… how are you—"
"I'm stubborn," I said. "Ask anyone. I refuse to be merchandise."
The Overseers laughed above us, voices overlapping like a choir made of broken bells. "He refuses the masks. Delightful. Dangerous."
The mirrors began to melt. Faces sagged, dripped, pooled into a sludgy sea around our boots. Hands reached up from the glass-ocean, grasping, clutching, pulling at our legs.
Elior screamed. He swung at the hands with his chained wrists, smashing them to shards, but more surged up.
I snarled, kicking, pulling. "Get—off—me—"
And then, without thinking, I reached down. Into the sludge. My hand closed on one of the twisted reflections' wrists.
It jerked, surprised.
I yanked it halfway out of the mirror. Its face was mine—rotted, eyeless, jaw hanging loose. Its mouth worked, gasping.
"Not you," I hissed. "Never you."
And I slammed it back into the sludge.
The whole hall screamed. Mirrors cracked in waves, fractures racing down the corridor like lightning. The sludge boiled, recoiled, evaporated into smoke.
The pressure lifted. My knees buckled. I dropped hard to the glass floor, lungs burning, body trembling.
Elior collapsed beside me. He was pale, shaking, whispering broken prayers, but alive. Still himself.
Above us, the Overseers' laughter rang long and low. "Refuses masks. Refuses truth. How fascinating. How dangerous."
I spat blood. My throat ached raw. But I forced my head up, glaring into the unseen sky.
"Sorry to disappoint," I rasped. "But I don't do costumes. I'm Seo-jin. You don't get to rewrite that."
The Overseers hummed, curious. Displeased. Amused. I didn't care.
The corridor dissolved. Mirrors shattered into shards of silver dust, raining down around us like ash. And then we were standing again in the amphitheater, breath ragged, chains rattling.
The trial was over.
But in my ear, softer than the Overseers, softer even than Elior's panicked breaths, came the whisper:
"You did well."