“Look! These are very rare magic mirrors!” the Pixie excimed in her bell-like voice. “They don’t just reflect the face you have today. They can show you fragments of the past, the desires of the present, or even your soulmate—the person you love most in the world!”The "Us" drew closer, lured by the promise of that dark gss. But the moment they met the polished surface, the stability of their fusion wavered.Etan focused on the reflection, trying to recognize himself. In an instant, the image shifted: Tsuki’s part vanished, and only Etan remained in the mirror. He was alone, shrouded in simple clothes, his gaze fixed and shoulders slumped, immersed in a solitude that seemed to have no end. It was the Etan from before—the one who hid behind thoughts to avoid feeling the world.“Am I... still alone?” the dual voice murmured, Etan’s low note trembling.Then, Tsuki’s impulse snapped. The girl longed to see herself, reciming her space. Etan’s image dissolved like smoke, and in its pce, Tsuki appeared. She was a tiny girl, sitting on the ground with scraped knees, surrounded by darkness, her blue eyes filled with a desperate hunger for attention. She was the Tsuki who had never had a body, the one who existed only as a whisper in the gloom.They were not together in the reflection. The mirror showed them independent, yet both terribly lonely. Each time one emerged, the other was erased, as if they could not exist simultaneously in the truth of the heart.Suddenly, the delirium exploded. In their minds, the projections of who they were before began to scream—a mute cry that tore through their thoughts.“LET ME OUT! LET ME OUT!”In reality, the physical body gave a violent jolt. There were no magical transformations in the gss, no silhouettes stepping out of the obsidian; there was only a boy who had begun to convulsively beat the mirror with clenched fists, screaming at his own reflection. The two voices—Etan’s deep one and Tsuki’s sharp one—were no longer synchronized; they overpped in a harrowing cacophony, while froth appeared at the corners of the mouth and the eyes rolled frantically.The "Us" was imploding. For Etan and Tsuki, it was a struggle for the survival of the soul, but for those watching, it was only a pitiful and terrifying spectacle.“Etan! Tsuki! Stop it! It’s just a mirror!” Fyty cried, her light flickering desperately. The Pixie tried to get between them and the gss, but the body brushed her aside with a blunt, blind gesture, continuing to scream at itself: “I want out! Let me go!”The psychic stress was so violent that the matter around them began to suffer:The right hand (Etan) gripped a stone pilr, and under the pressure of his terror, small blue crystals began to crack the rock like shards of ice.The left hand (Tsuki) cwed the ground, and the pavement crumbled into a fine sand that blew away with the market wind.The merchants backed away, knocking over stalls. Someone cried out in fright, others whispered words of disdain: “It’s a being from another world... it’s a monster!”From above, the Shadow-Hunter waited no longer. What was supposed to be a quiet stroll had turned into a public danger. Ashnuith’s spy detached from the ceiling like a drop of bck ink, his flint bde aimed with surgical precision at the base of the skull, ready to extinguish that delirium before the "Us" destroyed themselves—or everyone else.The final cry was an inhuman sound, an acoustic ceration where the two voices fused into a single shriek of pure mental agony before abruptly cutting out. The body of the "Us" lost all strength, colpsing forward with a dull thud that made the pavement shudder.

  They y there, sprawled at the feet of the indifferent mirror, their face pressed into the market dust.In that moment, something unusual happened: the mutations that had begun to corrupt the environment—the blue crystals on the pilr and the fine sand on the ground—started to vibrate, emitting a faint glow before rapidly shifting back to their original form. Stone became stone again; the pavement returned to pavement. It was as if the world around them had caught its breath once the psychic short-circuit of the two guests was broken.The Shadow-Hunter, caught off guard by this sudden colpse and the restoration of matter, checked his momentum mid-air. He nded nimbly a few paces from the lifeless body, sheathing his bde with a sharp click. His golden eyes spun frantically, baffled by an anomaly that fell outside all his training.Fyty descended slowly toward the body, her wings beating wearily. She looked up at the Shadow-Hunter, who no longer even tried to hide, and let out a long sigh heavy with bitter disappointment. She wasn't disappointed in Etan or Tsuki, but in the cruelty of a situation that no one seemed able to control.Around them, the circle closed in quickly. The ctter of armor and rhythmic footsteps drowned out the murmurs of the crowd. A contingent of Asha guards—a heterogeneous mix of races: a powerful reptilian, a tall, pale human, and an armored being whose eyes were all that could be seen—surrounded the area with weapons drawn.“Take them,” ordered one of the guards, a bluish-skinned woman bearing the marks of command. Her voice was firm, devoid of emotion. “Bring them immediately before the Sages. Ashnuith awaits them, and this time, there will be no medical rooms to host them.”As the guards lifted the inert body of the "Us," Fyty remained suspended in mid-air, small and alone, watching her friends being dragged away like dangerous cargo toward the political heart of the city.The awakening was not abrupt, but accompanied by the tolling of melodic bells that vibrated deep within their bones, soothing the acidic tumult they had left in the market. When Etan and Tsuki opened their eyes, they did not find themselves in a cold cell, but in a circur hall dominated by natural light streaming from above.They were seated upon a throne of living wood, its roots still seemingly sunk into the cavern floor; the pnt had not been carved, but had grown spontaneously into that shape to receive them, enveloping them with a strange, firm kindness.Before them, Asha’s power structure dispyed itself in all its diversity. Two rows of stalls held the Thirty permanent residents—fifteen on each side, arranged in two overpping tiers. They were creatures of every imaginable species: aquatic beings in gss spheres, gentle giants, reptilians in colorful cloaks, and noble-featured humanoids. Above them, even higher, sat the Three Sages, figures radiating a silent and ancient authority.The silence of the hall was solemn, until one of the Thirty—an elderly man with skin like parchment—broke the stillness.“What is your name?” he asked, in a voice that smelled of earth and patience.“Etan,” the deep, resonant note replied.“Tsuki,” the sharp, vibrant tone echoed.The two voices rang out separately, yet they were strangely harmonic within that acoustic chamber.Another resident, a metallic-skinned being seated on the upper tier, leaned forward with less courtesy. “And who are you? What is your nature?”The "Us" hesitated. The brown eye sought the blue one in the invisible reflection of their mind. “We are not certain,” they replied in unison, and the sincerity of that answer made the leaves of the wooden throne quiver.At that point, a slender figure stood up among the Thirty, eyes glowing with an intense light. “Do you perhaps hail from another dimension? Are you travelers of the pnes?”The response came blunt, honest, and haunting: “One of us is.”A tremor ran through the entire assembly. The Sages exchanged rapid, meaningful gnces, while a sharp whispering broke out among the thirty residents. The idea of a bi-dimensional being—a local soul fused with a stranger—was an anomaly that surpassed even Asha’s vast case history.The Hall of the Thirty suddenly grew cold, not from the temperature, but from the surgical precision of the questioning. The man who had stood first, a being with three eyes that seemed to analyze every yer of their skin, crossed his arms.“What do you mean by ‘one of you’?” his voice rang out like a curious condemnation. “I see a single body. Yet you introduced yourselves with two names, you speak with two voices, and my colleague beside me has confirmed what our soul-sensors indicate: there are two distinct souls in there. So why does my sight show me a single individual? And above all…” he paused dramatically, “I am told that you made a spectacle of yourselves at the East Market. You were screaming ‘let me out.’ Which of you wants to escape? Etan or Tsuki? Or is it your flesh trying to expel one of the two?”Before the "Us" could articute a response, another resident—a creature with long, thin fingers dressed in technological vestments—stood up abruptly, interrupting the first.“Let’s get to the point! We are also informed that you possess an instantaneous molecur transmutation capability. You can alter the nature of matter upon contact with your hands. And yet…” he pointed a long finger toward their Sauron-leather gloves, “the gloves you wear do not suffer this power. Why? They do not appear to be made of a material different from the litter you turned to copper or the floor that became cy. Do they perhaps possess a function of Inertial Isotion or Passive Molecur Stability?”The Council waited in anticipation. The technical question was a trap: they wanted to understand if the power was conscious or a simple, uncontrolled biological anomaly.The silence of the hall was cracked by the "Us’s" reaction—a cross-defense that left the Thirty stunned.Tsuki, with an unprecedented protective fire, answered the technical question about the gloves. “The gloves don’t change because Etan is a genius!” the sharp voice excimed, vibrating with pride. “He figured out how to stop the power before it destroys everything. It’s Inertial Isotion! It’s his willpower holding the matter of the gloves together; it's not the material's fault!”Immediately after, Etan’s deep note intervened to protect the girl. “And as for the market… it wasn't madness. It was a conflict of adaptation. Tsuki doesn't want to ‘get out’ out of selfishness; she was just trying to give me space, and I her. It was an excess of empathy that short-circuited. We are not a danger; we are in a phase of adjustment.”The Council murmured, struck by the loyalty of the two souls. But just as a Sage was about to respond, the very air of the hall seemed to contract.BOOM.The great doors of living wood were flung open by an immense magical pressure. The guards stationed for defense, both outside and in, were hoisted by an invisible force and deposited on the ground with a "peaceful" yet brutal precision: they were not wounded, but they had been neutralized like toys put to bed.In that terrifying silence, three figures entered in grand state.Llyr-Vahn led the group, his ethereal presence making the air shimmer with silvery energy.Zeryth followed with a rhythmic stride, his gaze already fixed on the room's weak points.And then there was Moko.The strange chimera—that mix of a Furby and a Gremlin—advanced with an air of intellectual superiority that cshed with her bizarre appearance. Her mouth, with its complex structure that prevented her from articuting words, was cmped in a severe expression. In that moment, her face did not bear the usual two eyes of standby mode: three luminous eyes were wide open, aimed straight at the Sages. Moko was reading the mind of every single person in that room, filtering their intentions and their secrets.Liyr-Vahn came to a halt exactly in the center of the hall, ignoring the weapons pointed at him, and fixed his gaze on Etan and Tsuki upon their throne of roots.“The time for gentle questions is over,” Liyr-Vahn decred, as Moko emitted a low metallic squeak—a vibration that seemed to underscore his companion's authority. “Asha is a splendid city, but its walls are not thick enough to contain what these two are destined to become.”Moko tilted her head, her third eye pulsing with a bluish light as she stared at the central Sage. She had no need for words: her gaze was already stripping bare the Council’s fears.The atmosphere in the Hall of the Thirty, charged with metaphysical tension and implicit threats, came to a sudden and bizarre halt thanks to the group's silent communication.In the middle of the hall, Moko tilted her head to the side, letting out a sound like a metallic beep mixed with the squeal of a squeezed plush toy. Her third eye, the central one on her forehead, pulsed rhythmically, shifting from blue to emerald green. The chimera blinked her three eyes in rapid sequence: she was signaling that the Council’s intentions were purely inquisitive.Etan and Tsuki, seated on the living wood throne, exchanged a mental gnce. Strangely, they understood the little genius’s message: there was no imminent danger, only a bureaucratic and bewildered curiosity.Liyr-Vahn and Zeryth froze, sensing the shift in their companion’s frequency.Zeryth imperceptibly lowered his shoulders. He turned silently toward Liyr-Vahn, his expression a mix of relief and terminal boredom. “Thank gods...” he whispered. “There isn’t a shred of technology in this pce. All wood, light, and good intentions. What use am I here? There's nothing for my mercury, not even a single gear to trip.”Reassured by Moko’s “all-clear,” Zeryth decided to take a step toward the throne to address Tsuki, but he stopped mid-gesture.His eyes went wide as they scanned the face of the "Us." It was no longer the one he remembered. The fusion had settled into new features—androgynous and proud—with those heterochromatic eyes staring back at him with haunting depth. Zeryth took a step back and pointed a trembling finger at the throne, looking at Liyr-Vahn. “Liyr... check this out. Look closely.”Liyr-Vahn turned with regal poise, but when his gaze nded on the new face of the "Us," his thousand-year composure shattered. His mouth fell open, and his voice derailed into a loud, incredulous shout:“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOU?!”His words echoed through the hall like stray comets, bouncing off the living wood walls and amplifying in the solemn silence. Happened... hell... happened... The reverb continued for several seconds, leaving the Thirty residents paralyzed in shock.