Not long after that, Sophia saw Dav coming and stopped short to avoid running into him. He appeared in the mirrors and reflections. “Is that really you?”

  It wasn’t until she heard Dav’s mental voice ask “Is who really me?” overlap with his physical voice as he said “Sorry, the mirrors are really confusing,” that she realized she’d asked the question telepathically instead of out loud.

  The mirrors didn’t seem to have noticed. Sophia blinked and muttered, “You’re not real.”

  The fake version of Dav smiled at her and faded away, taking the reflections of himself with him. It was honestly pretty disturbing to see her boyfriend disappear, even if she knew that was only a fake reflection of him.

  Sophia stared at the spot where the Dav-reflection stood for a long moment before she realized that they could all do exactly what she’d just done and completely trivialize the mirror maze. Even if by some chance the maze had two people encounter fakes of each other at the same time, so they thought they were real when they weren’t, that was no different from assuming everyone was real.

  It was easy enough to let everyone else know, too. The mirror maze clearly wasn’t set up to deal with telepathy.

  After she explained the trick, Dav and Taika separately admitted that that wasn’t the only thing it wasn’t able to deal with. Taika could see something about the light of the reflections that let him know what they were, while Dav could tell Sophia and Amy apart from their reflections because he could tell they were reversed images of themselves. He couldn’t detect Taika, because Taika’s fur patterns changed all the time normally, even as a fox.

  Sophia and Amy had no such advantages, but with the telepathy trick it didn’t matter. Sophia was pretty sure they’d have been fine without it, but it was definitely showing its value.

  Once they didn’t have to worry about the fights, they breezed through the maze. Sophia found it a lot of fun to race her mirror images through the corridors at a brisk walk. She tried actually running, but that was too fast to keep checking for turns in the mirrors. It wasn’t a real race, but that didn’t matter; it was fun.

  The Challenge had three intermediate spots where you could stop, take a rest, and meet up with your team. You could skip them, too, but the pamphlet called them a good place to rest and heal. Not stopping didn’t change anything; unlike most Challenges, there were no known time limits on Reflections. They probably existed, but if so, no one had ever hit them and reported it.

  Given that the longest completion time listed in the pamphlet was over two days, Sophia wasn’t worried about it. The shortest was two hours, but that was a team that simply blasted their way through everything and didn’t all die. They didn’t even try to learn an Ability; they simply walked out when they were done. It was probably the best evidence Sophia had that maybe their encounter difficulties were what others saw. It was also evidence as far as she was concerned that people did stupid things with their life on the line in every world, just to set records. She guessed the person who wrote the pamphlet agreed, because that was the only team where none of the people were identified.

  The shortest “real” completion time was a little over four hours, with another hour spent trying to gain an Ability. It wasn’t a particularly long time to try for an Ability. Sophia’s guess was that none of the people who were trying really thought they’d get one so they didn’t try very hard.

  They were a little behind the pace of the fastest team when they reached the first rest point. That should have been a sign that they weren’t going to come anywhere near breaking the records, because the fights would only get harder. Without the fights, they began to catch up.

  By the third area, Sophia was certain that her team wasn’t the only one with a way to bypass combat in the Reflection Challenge. The recommendation might be to always guess “real,” but it was obvious that not everyone did.

  They were almost exactly three hours into the Challenge; if they kept up the pace for the last section, they’d beat the previous record for “proper” completion by about fifteen minutes. That was close enough that it would come down to how long they spent trying to gain Abilities, and Sophia fully expected that they’d take longer than an hour. She really expected several of them to get something, maybe all of them, which made leaving early foolish.

  At least, they would if her idea worked out. If it didn’t, Dav and Taika would probably still get Abilities. The place was certainly weird enough to be compatible with Dav’s Species and Sphere and it was illusion-based, which was still Taika’s bread and butter.

  When Sophia finally finished the last step of the maze, she stepped out into an open plaza. The floor was reflective black glass, but small bits of stone that hadn’t been polished poked up above the floor level in places. Ahead of her loomed a glowing pair of open arches separated by a pillar and enclosed in a larger, standalone structure that somehow reminded Sophia of a massive gate, even though it clearly wasn’t.

  Runes covered the entire structure, even if only the arches glowed. Light rose from the posts on either side of the false gateway, illuminating the elaborate traceries that didn’t glow with their own light. Beyond the structure, Sophia could see the foothills of mountains illuminated by the aurora and a wide spread of stars that did not form any constellations she recognized.

  In the open space made by the pair of arches, a pair of mirrored glyphs floated unsupported. Sophia frowned at them as she realized that they were not quite true reflections of each other. They were close, but the details were different. It was when she glanced at the ground and realized that even the reflections in the black glass weren’t true that she really began to realize just how difficult her task was going to be.

  Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

  Sophia glanced around and grinned to herself. She’d hurried, and this time, she was the first one through the maze. She opened her pack and started dumping feathers out. This might be more difficult than expected, but she was still going to try her plan.

  Sophia had a very clear idea what Ability she wanted. She had no idea if she’d be able to get it, but she was beginning to get the feeling that the entire Challenge-Ability system was more flexible than people thought. If she approached gaining an Ability differently, could she shape what she got? Specifically, could she do what Dav did by accident in the previous dungeon and change one of her Abilities into something else, something specific?

  It definitely seemed worth trying. It would obviously have to fit the general theme of the Ability granted by the Challenge, but that was easy enough. One of her basic Abilities needed some help, pretty much exactly the same help the Shardstorm got from the Reflections Challenge. Sophia had a few changes to make to the Ability, obviously. She wasn’t about to break a soulblade; she didn’t even have one and if she did, that was about the dumbest thing to do with it.

  At the same time, she wanted the Ability to be as cheap as possible. That meant that tying it to blades (or the shards of metal a broken blade would become) only made sense if she wanted to hit people with them. She didn’t. She wanted easily moved floating spellcasting and maybe sensory platforms; she could easily see the Ability she was envisioning becoming the basis for her future upgrades.

  Therefore, feathers. They even connected to her Species; her father’s wings were feathered, so she was certain hers would be if she ever managed to shapeshift and have them. Featherstorm mage sounded a little funny, certainly not as imposing as bladestorm or shardstorm, but Sophia didn’t care. The feathers felt right in a way that blades didn’t.

  It might not be what they said here, but she’d always been taught to pursue what she wanted to do rather than what other people already knew made people powerful. You might not succeed, but at least you weren’t limiting yourself to being someone you weren’t.

  Sophia grinned at the memory of all the qualifiers her mother added; she was always the practical parent, where her father was the visionary. Sophia was pretty sure that even if this didn’t work out the way she expected, she’d either be fine or be able to recover it later, so why not try for what felt right?

  The others arrived before Sophia even finished pulling out the piles of assorted feathers from half a dozen different birds. She watched them gasp at the sight, then settle down into their own methods of working on Abilities while Sophia sketched the glyphs, the doors, the floor, and even the aurora in places. With the way the floor made an obviously imperfect reflection, she wasn’t certain where to bound the Ability image, but the aurora did seem to change colors depending on whether she looked through the arches or not. It might be part of it.

  When Sophia finished the spell to gain this Ability, she didn’t just flash the image she held in her head with mana. Instead, she manifested her wings and knelt on a pile of feathers while holding more feathers in her hands and tried to keep her Imbue Blade, Animate Blade, and Animate Spell Blade Abilities in mind. It was hard to hold all of it, and she was pretty sure it wasn’t going to work. The only real hope was the feathers she’d set out, as if treating the process like it was almost a ritual would help.

  An errant thought passed through her mind as she pushed the mana out and for a moment, the aurora in her image was replaced with thousands of floating glowing feathers.

  Sophia sighed as she opened her eyes. She’d put enough of her mana into the spell that she was going to have to recover mana before she could try again and that would take longer than…

  There was something floating in front of her. Sophia blinked at it dumbly for a moment.

  It looked like a multicolored feather floating in the air surrounded by flecks of magic. Did that mean it actually worked?

  Naturally, that was when the Guide decided to tell Sophia what she’d achieved. It wasn’t something she’d expected or even thought was possible.

  Grand Feat Completed!

  For your Grand Feat of activating an unknown Ability related to the Refraction Ability of the Reflection Challenge, you have been granted a reward!

  Activating an unknown Ability is dangerous but can open new Spheres to explore.

  Reward: Plumed Enchantress has been added to your possible Sphere upgrades!

  Reward: Your Linked Collection has been granted the Variation Plumed!

  Reward: Feathers and Plumes are treated as Blades for your Abilities. This reward will last until you choose a new Sphere or upgrade or split your current Sphere.

  Sophia’s first thought was that Cliff must be thrilled; he’d love having a new variation.

  A murmur of agreement in the back of her head told Sophia that Cliff was, if anything, even happier than she expected. There was something about making everything able to fly or swim, but she was pretty sure she was hearing him talk to himself, not to her.

  Sophia’s second thought was the realization that the feather was floating because it was Imbued with Imbue Blade. It seemed that Imbuing a feather didn’t just make it float like the blades; it also made it shimmer with the magic invested in it.

  Or maybe that was the “plume” part?

  Well, whatever the reason for the name, it was clear that she’d partially succeeded and mostly failed. She hadn’t managed to get an Ability that would let her use multiple feathers instead of one blade. Still, she should try to Imbue a few feathers to get a feel for it while Amy and Taika worked.

  They were easy to Imbue, quite a bit easier than a knife, but the real difference came when she tried to move them with Animate Blade. Instead of lifting one feather the way she’d have lifted one blade before, the entire group of feathers floated off the black glass floor. They all moved together and she couldn’t separate them, but maybe she hadn’t done quite as poorly as she’d initially thought. It wasn’t quite there, but it wasn’t hard to imagine figuring out a way to get it to do what she wanted in the future.

  The explanation for why Sophia hasn’t heard this is possible is pretty clearly laid out in the Guide’s description of what she did: it’s dangerous. I don’t think I need to say more than that; it should be very obvious by now how the Vocational Registry treats danger.