Mad Hatter's Guide to Clearing The Game
Chapter 163: Ch161. [World Quest] (21) - The real story (2)

Chapter 163: Ch161. [World Quest] (21) - The real story (2)

Floor 62

The ground pulsed.

Once, twice, and then it kept pulsing, like a heartbeat just beneath the surface, erratic and too large to belong to anything human.

Sarissa and Mara stood still. They were past walking now, time had become like breath in fog, visible and vanishing. The corridor they had entered twisted behind them like it didn’t want to be remembered, and the dungeon floor was gone.

There was only the feeling of it.

Sarissa pressed a hand to the wall, and it sighed beneath her touch.

"We’re deeper than we’ve ever been." She whispered. "And we didn’t move."

Mara nodded once, her fingers clenched tightly around [Trifle].

Another pulse ran through the stone. This time it wasn’t subtle, with a line of cracks slithering along the floor, splitting into tendrils that pulsed with a dull black glow. Something was moving underneath it.

"I think we’re walking on it." Mara said.

"No..." Sarissa inhaled deeply. "I think we’re inside it."

And then the stone opened like an eye.

An impossible slit peeled down the middle of the floor, revealing a shifting, twitching void beneath. Inside it were shapes, too many limbs, too many angles, and a sound that shouldn’t exist. A reverse echo, like someone breathing in a scream.

And then it was gone, the floor sealed like it never opened.

Mara was already raising her rifle.

Sarissa didn’t move, though. She was staring ahead.

Something had changed.

The corridor ended in a precipice, the ground dropped off abruptly, revealing a space too large to fit inside the dungeon. A hollow, underground sky of jagged teeth and distant screams.

Shapes floated across the chasm, echoes of memories, living shadows repeating long-forgotten traumas on loop.

But standing at the edge was someone.

No, not someone.

Something wearing the shape of a person.

He turned, and he wore Miles’ face.

Sarissa’s breath caught in her throat.

It was him, but not him. His frame was taller, slightly broader, the lines of his face harder, colder. His eyes weren’t honey-brown anymore, only the obsidian rings remained, consuming the iris, burning faintly red from within.

He looked like a god.

Or something worse.

"... Miles?" Sarissa asked.

The figure tilted its head, then smiled.

Not Miles’ smile.

Something older.

***

Floor 99

Miles lowered himself in an offensive stance and got ready to lunge.

Shinji was gone, disappeared the moment the words had been spoken.

Miles didn’t hesitate. He closed his eyes and listened.

The dungeon was breathing, in stillness, in tension, in the space between thoughts.

It exhaled pressure, like the moment before thunder. The floor was less a battlefield and more a stage carved out by something ancient, waiting for its last act to play out.

Something like a whisper came from behind, and Miles turned, but one fraction of a second too late.

Shinji’s blade traced a line across his shoulder. But the wound didn’t bleed right, it sizzled, like the air had been sliced open too.

Miles spun into the attack instead of away, his scythe scraping along Shinji’s mask, sparking against its bone-like surface.

"You’ve gotten stronger." Shinji said calmly, appearing again, five steps away now. "But not strong enough."

"I’m not the same person." Miles answered, his voice a blanket of calm and coldness, with a tinge of rage underneath.

"No. That one would’ve died already."

Then, the real fight began.

No more words. Just movement, brutal, exact, and strange.

Miles’ body moved faster than before. His heart – [Ender’s Heart] – pulsed at his core, threading power into his limbs. Not just speed, it was intent. Every strike was more than an action. It was will, a memory of death, piercing forward, sharpened.

He dodged low, slid across the ground, and came up with a vertical slash aimed straight at Shinji’s chest.

Shinji didn’t block, disappearing out of Miles’ reach.

It was not a teleportation skill, or at least none that Miles had seen before.

It was like a fold in space.

However, Miles anticipated it, the rings in his eyes glowing faintly, the new strength and power in his body feeling like pulling him towards the next breaking point, and reversed the scythe mid-swing, meeting Shinji as he reappeared behind him. Sparks exploded as metal met stone.

For a second, they locked, scythe to katana, eyes to eyes.

"You’re copying me?" Shinji whispered, and then, he tilted his head. "No... You’re echoing me."

"Is that what I am to you? A shadow?" Miles shoved off, flipping backwards and landing in a crouch.

"No." Shinji smiled. "You’re a version of me that never killed enough."

Then the storm came.

Shinji moved like unraveling threads, every step rewriting the battlefield.

One moment he was there, then above, then beneath, and Miles was parrying strikes that hadn’t happened yet. A phantom edge scraped his ribs, a knee collided against his spine, a reverse slash to his thigh.

Blood flew, but Miles didn’t falter.

He just let the damage sink in.

And used the pain.

His new heart pulsed again, stronger. With each injury, something inside him shifted.

He remembered dying, again, again, and again, those past lives of Sarissa’s now engraved in his very being. The sensation of dying and being reborn burning like wildfire inside him.

He’d bled like this before. He had died like this before.

But never with a purpose other than achieving [Regression].

Miles vanished, but not in the same way as Shinji.

Everything stopped around him for the briefest of moments as the golden gem at the heart of his scythe gleamed.

Time stopped, but Miles moved.

Shinji twisted, but one second too late.

Miles drove his scythe down, and Shinji caught the blade by its edge, his palm bleeding profusely.

Silence, then Shinji got up, twisting his body to a spin and elbowing Miles in the throat.

Miles staggered back, gasping.

"I don’t remember you being able to twist time like this..." Shinji growled, blood dripping from his hand. "Was it Wonderland where you got it from?"

"Why are you so eager to know about it?" Miles rasped, and something inside him snapped.

No, it did not snap. It triggered.

Something, and right before Shinji struck again, the visions started playing in the background of Miles’ mind.

He hadn’t activated it, and yet, as if Shinji’s words had triggered it, one of the [Echoes] he had not visited began playing.

[Torture]

The visions of Shinji and Diego filled Miles’ mind like a flood, while he swung his scythe and dodged blows, his and Shinji’s shadows stretching and entangling long on the ground.

Shinji’s blade piercing Dee’s shoulder, and the bleeding freezing inside his veins.

Miles crouched low on the ground, escaping a beheading strike by a hairsbreadth.

Dee screamed in his mind, pain, agony, relent.

Miles felt a tear forming in his eye, blurring his vision ever so slightly as he charged towards Shinji with a hatred that was not there before.

And then, after what felt like a lifetime of slashing, dodging, countering, and evading, the [Echo] ended, leaving only the silent echoes of Dee’s screaming in his mind.

But it didn’t last a lifetime, because Shinji had yet to answer his question.

Although Miles already knew his words.

And they were nothing of an answer.

"The boy didn’t break too, you know?" Shinji flared his nostrils. "Even when he was screaming, begging for the pain to stop... He didn’t break."

Miles jumped backwards, avoiding a piercing strike, and sighed through his nose.

It was not relief, not defeat, not exasperation.

It was merely air leaving his body.

Why did he ask that, though?

If Shinji was so hellbent on finding out, that he would not even crack a simple answer, then be it.

Miles said nothing in return, only looking at Shinji, deep in his eyes.

And then, it was like the world itself exploded with movement.