Crystalise: The Exaltation System: ASCENDANT F.R. Brooks (the snowy day read aloud .TXT) 📖

A fidgeting, repetitive tap in the fingertips of his left hand.

“You drum your fingers when you’re nervous,” Lo had once pointed out to him. “What are you so nervous about?”

“Nym… you’re only identifying one other presence in the vicinity, right?” Liam asked. “Obscuran innate, for sure?”

“Roger.”

“Huh. Interesting.”

His reflection’s gaze turned to James, who whistled obliviously across the chamber. Liam considered taking that moment to create a metal spear and then run it through the mirror.

A scream ripped through the silence.

Liam turned just in time to glimpse James disappearing through a mirror’s wavering surface.

“James!?” Liam rushed over to the rippling mirror. It was solid by the time his fists pounded upon its surface. Liam called out his brother’s name again and tried to shoulder through. The surface was as solid as every other glass pane.

Through the comms, Liam could hear scrambled, glitched audio. James’s voice, screaming.

“James! Where are you!?”

No response.

“Where is he!? Where the hell is he!?” Liam demanded, bolting back to the mirror with the suspicious reflection.

His reflected replica had retreated, leaving only his actual reflection behind. The crack in the glass was no longer filled with metal liquid. It was gone and the mirror’s surface smooth and unbroken.

What the…?

Cold, heavy weight crashed into his side. His own brother was on top of him in the blink of an eye. James pinned him to the ground and his hands went straight for Liam’s throat. Frigid layers of ice crushed down on his chest and throat as ice encased him.

Liam struggled back against the pressure. He conjured a blunt, metal beam and extended it straight into James’s torso. It was enough force to knock James off him. Liam struggled through the ice and split the metal beam into spidering tendrils to break the ice up.

Before James could lunge back upon him, Liam climbed free of the ice. The ice was nowhere near frigid enough to be from James.

“Liam!” Nym chimed. “Wait, that’s not James!”

“I had a sneaking suspicion,” Liam said, dodging blows from his brother’s replica. “Where is he?”

“Uh… still working on that. Just hang tight and don’t die!”

Liam dodged more blows before he managed to grab the replica by the throat. He slammed the mob against the nearest mirror hard enough to shatter the glass. The replica’s visor cracked and warped.

An obscuran mob could certainly replicate any element—but they were fragile replicas. This mob’s replica of their sentisuits could never withstand what real polymerized lucidium could. Obscura was as much of a wildcard as it was a fragile illusion.

Liam conjured his meteor hammer again and kicked it straight at the replica. The heavy, spiked, metal orb smashed into a mirror behind it. Liam snapped the orb back and took aim again, kicking the orb straight for the mob’s chest. A direct impact left another deep chasm in the mob’s imitation sentisuit.

The replica ducked another shot and glass exploded from the orb’s impact.

It’s goading me into smashing the mirrors. I don’t even know where the hell James is or whether those mirrors are his ticket back.

Liam snapped the orb back on its chain. When it was at his side once more, he transmuted it into his backup weapon—a chain sword with bladed discs along the whip.

Icicle barriers spiked up between them as the mob attempted to distance itself. Liam cut through the ice easily and then snapped the chain sword back to hook the creature’s leg. It howled an inhuman cry as the sharp discs cut through armor and flesh.

Before Liam could go for a killing blow, the creature made a strange wave of its gloved hand. More screaming filled the chamber as the mirror next to Liam ejected James. With the velocity of a great fall, James and Liam went flying across the chamber until they hit the mirrors on the other side.

“Oh, shit… holy shit…” James panted, having finally stopped screaming.

“James, what the fuck!? Where were you!?” Liam growled.

“I don’t know, man, but it wasn’t very disco.”

They looked up, greeted by a replica of a meteor hammer crashing down upon them. The brothers ducked away, and the orb whipped past them, smashing into another mirror.

Disoriented, James barely dodged the orb’s next strike. He took a blow to the chest upon the mob’s second shot. The replica moved fast to descend upon James, aiming for an easy headshot.

With a flick of his wrist, Liam sent a wave of lucidium reinforcement through the chain sword. When it snapped back, each metal disc had merged to form one solid javelin. His next shot would be a gamble.

“James, get down!”

Liam timed his throw and hoped for luck to finally favor him as he pitched the javelin. Its trajectory cut through the spinning rhythm of the rotating chain and pierced the replica just shy of the neck.

The replica crumpled to the floor beside James. In death, its illusion faded, revealing a lithe, humanoid creature with a featureless face and numerous, thin, tendrils twitching from its back.

Liam breathed a sigh of relief at the peace that followed.

James inched away from it in disgust.

“Fuck, these things are ugly,” he said.

Little remained of the disintegrating mob. A tiny, red orb clinked on the floor as the carcass carrying it faded.

“This is the last one, you think?” James picked up the orb.

Liam nodded as he watched the empty space where the carcass had once been.

He picked up the javelin and willed the metal to dissolve and be reabsorbed back into his system as lucidium.

“That was one hell of a lucky shot for a guy with your luck,” James said.

“Yeah… looks like my stars are aligned a little differently today.”

Liam’s gaze drifted to one of the broken glass panes—the one where he’d seen his own reflection acting suspiciously.

That reflection’s actions made little sense to him—if it had been the obscuran mob, it could have just lunged out to attack. Instead, that glance toward James had seemed more like a warning that Liam did not heed.

“Where’d you go? When that thing pulled you in?”

“I don’t know how to describe it,”