The Second Imperial Gate was not a wall of iron, but a fortress of light. Known across the surface world as the Mirror-Bastion, this fortification was a miles-long semi-circle of crystalline quartz and enchanted silver-glass built to span the inner ridge of the Capital Valley.
It did not rely on physical thickness to repel invaders. Instead, the Bastion was a massive, macro-scale amplification of the very magic Jeather had harvested in the deep. Any spell, any kinetic projectile, and any beast that charged the wall would see its exact replica materialize from the glass, matching it blow for blow with absolute, terrifying symmetry.
Standing atop the crystalline ramparts was Arch-Marshal Vane, a Rank 18 tactical savant dressed in pristine silver robes. Beside him stood a dozen high-tier light-weavers, their hands glowing as they maintained the pristine, flawless surface of the Bastion.
"Let him come," Vane said, his voice flat and devoid of emotion as he looked through his spyglass at the dust cloud rising from the ruined First Gate. "Commander Brandon relied too heavily on material density. He forgot that the true strength of the empire lies in our ability to reflect and adapt. Whoever this 'anomaly' is, he will have to fight himself to cross this ridge."
Down on the royal highway, Jeather stopped. The grass had vanished here, replaced by white marble tiles that led directly to the shimmering, reflective wall of the Bastion. As he stood there, his image was perfectly mirrored in the glass—a tall, lean figure in tattered clothes, surrounded by a faint, violet-silver gravitational distortion.
"A macro-reflection field," Jeather analyzed aloud, his voice carried to his soul-realm via the Hive-Link. "It's identical to the Mirror-King's default aura, but stabilized by a continuous external power grid."
"Jett, this one looks dangerous," Saxum rumbled from the Aether-Forge, his massive titanium hands resting on a newly forged anvil. "If we hit that wall with the Gorilla or the Centipede, it's going to spawn a duplicate that hits us back just as hard. We'll be breaking our own teeth."
"Then we don't hit it," Jeather said, a cold, calculative smile playing across his lips. "A reflection requires an image to copy. If there's nothing for the glass to see, the system collapses."
Inside the pressurized space of his soul, Jeather initiated a high-speed variable shift. The Sovereign Deck hovered in front of him in the physical world, but inside his mind, the cards were spinning like a deck of razor blades.
"Synthesis: The Perfect Vacuum."
He didn't pull out a single vanguard beast.
Instead, he chose three cards that occupied the stealth and sensory-distortion slots of his collection: the Obsidian Wraith-Lord, the Void-Sovereign Hound, and the newly acquired Aegis-Drakes.
"Saxum, don't fuse their bodies. Fuse their outputs," Jeather commanded. "I want an inversion field. I want to turn my physical presence into a negative value."
"Live-Forge locked!" Saxum shouted, pulling a glowing lever.
The Obsidian Wraith-Lord's intangible mist expanded, blending with the Void-Sovereign Hound's light-eating shadow-skin. The golden defensive traits of the Aegis-Drakes acted as a hard outer shell, locking the inversion inward.
Jeather took a step forward on the white marble highway.
"Manifest: Inversion Aura."
In the eyes of Arch-Marshal Vane and the light-weavers atop the wall, the world suddenly glitched. The young man approaching the gate didn't disappear into thin air like a standard stealth-user; instead, the space he occupied turned a flat, absolute black. It was as if someone had cut a silhouette out of the fabric of reality itself.
As the "black hole" of Jeather's presence approached the Mirror-Bastion, the enchanted silver-glass began to panic.
The ley-lines built into the quartz pulsed erratically. The reflection field tried to create a duplicate of the attacker, but the glass could not read a negative value. The mirror showed nothing but an empty highway, even though Jeather's heavy footsteps were physically vibrating through the marble beneath the wall.
"What is happening to the array?!" Vane demanded, his calm facade instantly shattering as the light-weavers began to scream in agony. The feedback from the network was burning through their mana-veins. "Target the black space! Fire the Prism-Cannons manually!"
Three massive crystal turrets atop the wall swiveled, unleashed beams of concentrated, white-hot solar energy directly at the moving silhouette.
Jeather didn't use his phase-shift. He didn't need to.
"Reflective Aegis: Hijack."
He held up the Mirror-King's card. Because he possessed the soul of the very entity the Bastion's magic was modeled after, Jeather didn't just absorb the incoming solar beams—he seized control of the network's frequency.
The three solar beams hit his prismatic barrier, but instead of storing the energy in a buffer, Jeather funneled it directly into the Bastion's own silver-glass walls via the Silver-Thread Spider's conductive filaments.
"You built a mirror," Jeather whispered, his voice a low, terrifying vibration. "But you forgot that if you shine too much light into glass, it blind-charges the user."
The Mirror-Bastion didn't just reflect the energy; it trapped it in an infinite loop between its internal layers. The silver-glass began to glow with a blinding, erratic white fire.
"Shut it down! Sever the grid!" Vane screamed, but it was already too late.
The miles-long fortress of light reached its saturation point. The molecular frequency Jeather had forced into the loop clashed with the wall's structural quartz.
With a sound that resembled a continent-sized mirror being struck by a boulder, the Mirror-Bastion shattered.
Millions of multi-faceted glass shards, each the size of a carriage, rained down into the valley, exploding into harmless dust as they hit the marble highway. The light-weavers were thrown from the ramparts, their magic networks permanently burnt out by the feedback loop.
Arch-Marshal Vane fell to his knees amidst the glittering debris, his silver robes torn, his spyglass crushed to powder. He looked up through the shimmering dust to see the absolute black silhouette recede, revealing Jeather standing before him.
The Sovereign Deck returned to its slow, peaceful orbit around Jeather's hand.
"The empire spent twenty years building this ridge," Vane whispered, his voice trembling with a mixture of awe and horror. "And you broke it in three minutes without even summoning a beast."
Jeather looked down at the old marshal, his prismatic irises reflecting the dying light of the broken fortress.
"Your empire builds walls because it fears the dark," Jeather said, pulling a blank Void-Steel Card from his coat. "But I lived in it. And down there, we don't use mirrors. We use teeth."
He flicked his wrist. The card didn't target Vane, but the shattered core-stones of the Bastion's light-engine, siphoning the raw, high-platinum crystal energy directly into his deck to fuel the next evolution of his vanguard.
[Siphon Successful: Bastion Light-Core Absorbed]
[Aether-Forge Upgrade: Prismatic Heat Unlocked]
Jeather stepped over the ruins of the Second Gate, his gaze locked onto the inner ring of the Capital. Only one gate remained before the central palace. The harvest was nearly complete.