Chapter 156: The Mirror Colossus

The Mirror Colossus opened its eyes, and the sky of Floor 2 turned into a face.

It was not a giant standing in a hall. The hall was its body. The canyon was a wound it had grown on purpose. The mirrored ceiling was its brow, and the glass horizon bent around it in a slow curve, because the thing was the size of a small planet and the party was standing on its chest.

[FLOOR 2 FINAL FORM: THE MIRROR COLOSSUS]

[SIZE: PLANETARY]

[GUARDIANS MERGED: 9]

[LEVEL: 999]

[ALL SKILLS ACTIVE]

[SIX SEALED COMBAT SKILLS: REMAIN SEALED]

[HEALTH: 252/520. CHARGE: 90/220. CORRUPTION: 90%]

"Please tell me it is not looking at us," the glass-bird woman whispered.

The eye turned. It was the size of a lake, and in the middle of the pupil Jace saw himself, calm and smiling, holding a crown.

"It is looking at us," Caleb said. "Everyone stand on a line I draw. Do not argue."

He painted a boundary across the glass with one flick of his marking kit, and the party stepped behind it.

The Colossus lifted one hand. A continent of mirror rose with it, thousands of miles of silver plain peeling off its palm like a sheet of ice. Then it brought the hand down.

"Ninefold Wall!" the shield man roared. "Tenth Plate!"

Ten shields of white metal unfolded in the air, each one the size of a house, locked edge to edge, and the continent slammed into them. The sound was not a sound. It was a pressure that stopped everyone's hearts for one beat. The plates bent. The shield man's knees hit the glass and cracked it in a star, and blood ran from both his ears.

"I can hold it for ten seconds," he said through his teeth.

"Use five," said Scarlett.

She went up the wall of plates like a flame climbing a curtain. Alexander went with her, and behind them the lightning girl spun her chain until the air itself began to scream.

"Skybreaker Chain," she said. "Storm Crown."

Blue lightning wrapped the Colossus's wrist in a spiral a mile wide. She yanked, and the arm stopped mid-fall. The continent of glass hung over the party for the length of a held breath.

"Now," said Alexander.

"Falling Verdict," he said, and his gold aura roared up through the crown on his head. "Ninth Edict. Ten Thousand Cuts."

He did not swing once. He swung until the swings had no gaps between them. A storm of golden crescents spread across the hanging continent in a lattice, and a heartbeat later the whole thing fell apart into dust and slid off the Colossus's palm like sand through fingers.

[ALEXANDER ROOK: TEN THOUSAND CUTS]

[COLOSSUS ARM: SEVERED AT THE PALM]

The Colossus screamed. It was Jace's voice, and it was a voice that had never been in pain until now.

Then the severed hand grew back. Silver poured out of the stump, flowed into the shape of fingers, and became a fist again before the dust had settled.

"It heals," said Selene. "Of course it heals."

"It heals from the heart," said Penelope. She had her ledger open and her spear tucked under one arm, writing fast. "Every reflection came from the same place. If there is a heart, it is where they were all copied from."

"Where is that?"

Penelope looked up at the face. Her pen stopped.

"Behind the eye," she said. "Where Jace's reflection is holding the crown."

The Colossus drew its fist back, and the air over the party went black.

"Everybody down," Caleb said. "Down, down, down!"

The fist came. The twin-hammer woman did not go down. She stood at the front of the line, raised both hammers over her head, and the two heads began to glow like furnaces.

"Hammer Twins," she said. "Meteor Hymn."

The hammers came down together on the glass at her feet. A shockwave went out in a ring, then another, then a third, each one taller than the last, until the rings stood up from the floor as walls of white fire and met the incoming fist in midair. The fist stopped. The fire kept pushing. For a moment the two forces hung against each other like two mountains leaning on a single point.

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[PARTY COMBINED POWER: 340% OF BASELINE]

Then the fist cracked from the knuckles to the wrist, and the Colossus roared and jerked back its arm, and the light of the broken glass rained across the whole hall.

[HEALTH: 252 -> 238]

A tremor of the Colossus's own recoil had thrown Jace into a wall of mirror. He pushed up from the floor and saw the ice-wolf tamer leaping off the shield man's plates with her beast half a mile ahead of her.

"Frost King," she cried, and the wolf, which had been the size of a horse, grew until its shoulders were taller than towers. It bit the Colossus's wrist. The frost raced up the arm in a white wave, freezing silver into snow, and the burning knight rode the wave up the arm and drove his blade into the chest.

"Sunfall Lance," the knight said.

A column of flame went into the Colossus's ribs, and the ribs lit from within like a lantern, and the whole giant shook.

"It's working!" the glass-bird woman shouted.

"No," said Penelope. "Look at it."

The Colossus smiled with every mirror at once. The frost on its arm melted into silver. The wound in its chest closed from the inside. And in the center of the pupil, Jace's reflection lowered the crown slowly onto its own head.

[COLOSSUS: SECOND PHASE]

[THE CROWN OF THE BEST VERSION]

[ATTACK POWER: DOUBLED]

The sky went white.

The Colossus opened its mouth, and a beam of pure reflected light poured out of it. It was not aimed at the party. It was aimed at the floor beneath them, and through it, and past it, down toward the tower's lower levels, where every person who had ever been rescued was waiting.

"Zoey!" Jace shouted. "It's shooting at the Shelter!"

"I can feel it," said Zoey's voice, small and far away. "I can hold it. Jace, I can hold it, but I can't hold it and anything else."

"Then hold it."

He did not wait for an answer. He pulled the Gravity Chain out of his own shadow, wound it around his arm, and flung it at the beam.

[GRAVITY CHAIN: ACTIVATED]

[CHARGE: 90 -> 85]

The chain caught the beam. It should not have been possible. Light is not a thing a chain can hold. But the Gravity Chain did not hold the light. It held the space the light was crossing, and when Jace pulled, the beam bent. The whole column of white swung away from the floor in a long arc, up and sideways, and burned through the ceiling of the hall into the dark where the moon sat waiting.

The Colossus stared at him.

"You can do that?" it said, in his voice.

"I did not know I could do that," Jace said.

"That's fine," said Caleb, appearing at his shoulder. "Do it again."

The second beam came. Jace did not have the Charge to chain it again, so he took it on the one shield he could still trust, which was Caleb's boundary. Caleb stepped in front of him with his marking kit raised and painted a single black line across the sky.

"Boundary," Caleb said. "Nobody crosses it."

The beam died against the line like a wave against a sea wall. Caleb's arm shook. His panel flickered once, [IDENTITY CONTINUITY: UNVERIFIED], and he grinned at it anyway.

"Still me," he said. "Probably."

The Colossus's face went from amused to furious.

"Overwrite Pulse," Jace said.

[OVERWRITE PULSE: STANDARD]

[TARGET: THE CROWN]

[CHARGE: 85 -> 80]

"Remember your name."

The pulse crossed the sky like a falling star and struck the crown above the Colossus's eye. The crown flickered. For one second the reflected Jace inside the pupil stopped smiling and looked, for the first time, uncertain.

Then the whole giant rose to its feet.

The ground tilted. The party tumbled backward as the platform they were standing on lifted into the air, higher and higher, until they were looking down on an entire world of mirrors falling away below. The Colossus was standing up. It was standing up, and it was bigger than the hall had ever been.

"Is that the whole floor?" the shield man said.

"The floor is its body," said Selene, softly. "The whole floor. It is going to throw it at us."

The Colossus took hold of the glass horizon with both hands and began to lift.

[COLOSSUS: LIFTING THE FLOOR]

[DAMAGE IF DROPPED: PLANETARY]

[HEALTH: 238 -> 225]

A wave of heat hit Jace, and the pain ran through him in a single piece. The crown on the Colossus's head was reaching into his own chest now, tying into the brand of gold code that still glowed there. The reflection link was pulling. It wanted its heart back.

"It's not going to throw it," Jace said. "It's going to take me inside."

"Then we are not letting that happen," said Scarlett, landing beside him with her blade on fire.

"I'm open to ideas."

"You always are." She pointed her sword at the Colossus's chest. "Everybody. All at once. On three."

"We do not have a three," said Alexander.

"Then one."

The whole party lifted their weapons at once, bleeding and cracked and still standing. Light came off them in streams: gold from Alexander, white from Scarlett, blue from the lightning girl, fire from the knight, frost from the tamer, silver from the shield man, crimson from Selene's noon-sun sword. Penelope's spear shone like a lantern. Mateo slammed a fist into his palm and the glass under his boots turned to stone. Liam threw a rope of woven light around the shield man's waist and pulled him back to his feet. Caleb's boundary line flared. Theodore Voss lifted a rod of bone from somewhere inside his coat. Emma Chen's whispered song cut across the hall like a blade.

[MUTUAL SHELTER: 14 PARTICIPANTS]

[SHARED POWER: LINKED TO USER]

"Take it," said Hazel's voice from below. "All of it. Jace, take it."

He took it.

Every light in the hall flowed into his chest at once. It was not Charge. It was something bigger, something that did not fit on the panel. He opened his mouth to scream and nothing came out but gold.

Selene Hart stepped out of the line. She had been Hour Twelve once, and she had spent a long time not being proud of it. She lifted her noon-sun sword in both hands, and the blade swelled until it was a second sun hanging above the party's heads.

"Noon does not set," she said. "Noon Without Evening."

The sun fell upward. It struck the Colossus under the chin, and the giant's head snapped back. The floor it was holding sagged in its grip. For one long moment it was holding up a world with a broken neck, and every mirror on its body went white.

"Now, Jace," she said. "Whatever you are going to do, do it now."

The Colossus's heart, a small, bright thing floating in the center of its chest, turned to look at him.

And the floor, held up in its hands, began to fall.

[HEALTH: 225 -> 213]

[CORRUPTION: 90%]

[SEED OF RESTORATION: DETECTED IN COLOSSUS HEART]

The heart pulsed. A tiny green seed split out of it and drifted toward Jace like a firefly. It touched his chest, sank in, and bloomed.

[UNLOCK: RESTORATION SEED]

[SEED GRAFTED. CHARGE RESTORED: +56]

[CHARGE: 80 -> 136]

Jace opened his eyes. The world was ending above him.

Health: 213/520.

Charge: 136/220.