34: The Mirror Gate

The Mirror's Crescent Moon Slash opened with the small precise mastery-200 cone the launch-week design team had clearly modeled on a hypothetical perfected swordsman, and the cone's outer rim caught my left shoulder pauldron in the small split-second I had taken to register that the cone existed at this width, and the launch-week pass-through carried the impact across my IRL left shoulder with a small clean realistic shock that the Premium pod's cradle-band heart-rate dampening did not, anywhere, soften.

> *Ding!* [Damage taken: 287 HP. Mirror Self has activated Crescent Moon Slash (Mastery 200) at +50% extended cone radius.]

Twenty-six percent of my HP gone in the opening half-second.

I had not been prepared for the extended cone radius. The launch-week design team had, at mastery 200, given Crescent Moon Slash an additional fifty-percent cone radius that the present launch-week public mastery cap of 100 did not unlock. The Mirror Self was operating on a tier of mastery I had not yet reached. The Mirror Self's mastery 200 was, presumably, the launch-week design team's small careful warning to candidates: *if you survive to Lv 80, you will fight someone with this skill at this mastery; learn its width now or learn it then.*

I learned its width now.

I rolled off the right shoulder, came up at three meters' distance, raised the Black Iron Heavy Blade two-handed, and committed to the cool-headed assessment I had taught myself, in old timeline, to perform at exactly this point in any fight that had begun badly: *what does the opponent want me to do, and what does he expect me to do, and which of those should I do.*

The Mirror Self wanted me to do exactly what I had been doing for two weeks of new timeline, which was to operate at the small disciplined edge of my known cap and to use the launch-week dream's foreknowledge to pre-empt the opponent's tells. The Mirror Self knew exactly what I was capable of, because the Mirror Self was me. The Mirror Self had access to my entire skill tree, my entire stat sheet, my Severing Form chains, my Ironbody Stance cooldowns, the small two-finger forward balance on the Black Iron Heavy Blade. The Mirror Self had — additionally — the one tier of mastery I did not.

The Mirror Self expected me to commit to the small disciplined approach because the small disciplined approach was the approach I had taught myself for five years.

The Mirror Self was correct in expectation.

The Mirror Self was therefore winnable only by the approach the Mirror Self could not anticipate.

I did not have the approach the Mirror Self could not anticipate. I was the Mirror Self. The Mirror Self had been built specifically to anticipate everything I could do.

This was, I noted, a small careful design problem.

The Mirror Self closed the three meters at a sprint.

I parried his first basic strike on the longsword's flat. The parry caught. Severing Form chained. I parried his second basic strike — Severing Form chained again. I parried his third — chained. The crit chance bumped to +6. The Mirror Self, on parry four, broke the rhythm with a small unexpected lateral step that took him out of the parry-rotation and put him at my flank. I pivoted on the left heel. He had Crescent Moon Slash off cooldown, half a second early on the launch-week 8-second standard CD because the Mirror Self had a +0.5s cooldown reduction tier I did not have access to. He used it.

The cone caught me at the thigh.

> *Ding!* [Damage taken: 312 HP. Mirror Self has activated Crescent Moon Slash (Mastery 200, +50% extended cone, +0.5s CD reduction).]

Forty-five percent of my HP gone in the first eight seconds.

I disengaged. I rolled back four meters. I activated Ironbody Stance. The launch-week 12% damage-reduction floor came up. The Mirror Self did not pursue. He stood at the chamber's center with the Black Iron Heavy Blade held low and to the side and the small almost-smile at the corner of his mouth, and I realized — at the small clean second-pass of the cool-headed assessment — that the Mirror Self was not trying to kill me as quickly as possible.

The Mirror Self was trying to teach me.

The Mirror Self was a teaching encounter.

The launch-week design team had built the Mirror Gate not as a death-match — though the death was real — but as the small precise tutorial in the failure case of overconfident foreknowledge. The Mirror Self was demonstrating, in the small clean compressed format of a five-minute fight, the exact mode of failure that had killed me in the cockpit at twenty-four: I had relied on the small disciplined edge of my known cap, and I had been beaten by an opponent who had been one tier above me, and I had not survived the small careful exposure of my own ceiling.

The Mirror Self was telling me, by demonstration, that the second time would not end differently if I fought it with the same toolkit.

I had answered the mirror's question with the right answer — *the someone at the cairn* — and the mirror had drawn anyway, because the right answer was a necessary condition and not a sufficient one. The mirror was now showing me, in real damage and real risk of real death, the additional condition.

The additional condition was: *learn something the Mirror Self does not know.*

The Mirror Self was me. Me had a finite known toolkit. The toolkit was being demonstrated against me at one tier above its current cap. To find the additional condition I would have to find a thing in my toolkit that I had not, yet, used; or I would have to compose, on the fly, a new combination of known things that the Mirror Self had not, in the launch-week design team's modeling, anticipated.

The Mirror Self had been modeled on my publicly visible patterns. The launch-week design team had access to my kill-cam history. The kill-cam history had me using, in two weeks of launch, exactly the toolkit I had been using.

The toolkit I had not, yet, used was — the toolkit I had been hiding.

I had three things in the toolkit I had been hiding.

One: the small chip of black iron from the cleft scout's offering plate, which the launch-week design's small interaction physics would let me throw at thirty-eight meters per second as a small projectile that did, by its in-game damage formula, four damage on impact and which would also, by the small careful interaction with any in-game eye-target, blind for one full second on a head-shot.

Two: the Severing Path's cycle 7 reward, which had been an unmarked passive that I had not bothered to test because the launch-week tooltip had been deliberately vague: *small reflexive correction in moments of true peril.* I had assumed it was a placebo. The Severing Path's other cycle rewards had been precise and useful. Cycle 7's vagueness suggested either a placebo or a launch-week design team's very deliberate Easter egg that activated only at specific thresholds.

Three: the Withered Hollow's Hollowsteel Sabre's *Hollow* proc, which I had sold off two weeks ago — but the Sabre's proc had taught me, by demonstration on the bear at half-HP, that the Mirror Self's launch-week design did not include a healing-reduction debuff in its reactive defensive moveset. The Mirror Self's reactive defenses presumed his own healing pool would carry him through long exchanges. If I could apply a healing-reduction effect, the Mirror Self's defense calculus would shift.

I had no healing-reduction effect in my current loadout.

I had — in the shared inventory's second slot — Wanqing's Withered Quiver's small reserve of Wither-procced arrows that she had pre-loaded for me at the cairn this morning as a small precaution, *just in case the trial throws something at you that needs a DoT.*

The Wither was a damage-over-time, not a healing-reduction. But the Wither's tooltip had a small final clause I had not, until this exact second, paid attention to: *Wither also reduces target's HP regeneration by 15% for the duration.*

Fifteen percent HP regeneration reduction was the closest thing to healing reduction I currently had access to.

I exited Ironbody Stance early. I drew the small chip of black iron from the private inventory slot. I drew, with my off hand, a small Wither-procced arrow from the shared inventory's second slot.

The Mirror Self watched me.

The Mirror Self's small almost-smile did not change.

I closed the four meters at a controlled walk this time, not a sprint. The walk was the small unfamiliar thing the Mirror Self had not, in his model of me, anticipated. I had not, in two weeks of launch-week public combat, used the controlled walk into a fight. I had used the sprint, the kite, and the parry-rotation. The walk was a thing I had taught myself in old timeline, in the third year of solo PK, when I had been routinely outnumbered three-to-one in the Sea of Reeds wilderness and had learned that the walk into a multi-target fight produced the small one-half-second of adversary hesitation that the sprint did not.

The Mirror Self hesitated for one-half second.

I threw the chip of black iron into the small open space of his eye-socket.

> *Ding!* [Status Effect Applied: Mirror Self — Blinded (1.0s).]

I drove the Wither-procced arrow into the Black Iron Heavy Blade's quillon as a small auxiliary blade by the simple expedient of holding it at the haft and using its in-game arrow-tip to score the Mirror Self's chest as I closed. The arrow's Wither proc rolled — the launch-week 12% Wither rate caught — and the Mirror Self took the small DoT and the small HP regeneration reduction.

> *Ding!* [Status Effect Applied: Mirror Self — Wither (5.0s, -15% HP regen).]

The Mirror Self's blinded second was the second I needed.

I activated Crescent Moon Slash.

The cone — at my mastery 100, with the +5% ignore-DEF on crit and the +6% Severing Form chain bonus — bit through his blinded center mass at full damage with the Black Iron proc rolling clean on the second attack roll. The Mirror Self's DEF dropped twenty-five percent for eight seconds.

His HP dropped to twenty percent.

The Mirror Self came out of the blind. His mastery-200 cone was off cooldown again — but the Wither's HP regeneration debuff meant his small reactive heal-tick at the half-HP mark, which I had been counting on him to use, would not regenerate him out of the twenty-percent floor in time.

I did not give him the second to use the cone.

I committed to the basic two-handed downstroke at his neck.

The downstroke was 384 base damage. The +6% Severing Form chain crit pulled clean on the third attack roll. The Mirror Self's DEF was reduced. The damage landed for 768 with the crit multiplier.

The Mirror Self's HP hit zero.

> *Ding!* [Trial Phase 3 Combat Resolved: Mirror Self (Lv 20) defeated. Damage taken total: 599 HP (49% of total). Damage dealt total: 1,247 HP. Combat duration: 38 seconds.]

> *Ding!* [Hidden Achievement Unlocked — *The Hidden Hand.* You have defeated the Mirror Self by employing tactics not present in your publicly visible combat history. Reward: +10% to damage from items not visible on character sheet (chips, off-hand projectiles, secondary inventory consumables) for the duration of the launch-week period.]

The Mirror Self's body dissolved into a small shower of pre-rendered black sparks.

The candle in the chamber flickered, twice, and steadied.

I stood at the chamber's center for one long beat with the Black Iron Heavy Blade still in my two-handed grip and the small clean understanding settling in my chest of what the launch-week design team had been telling me.

The launch-week design team had told me: *foreknowledge is a head start. Foreknowledge is not enough. To survive the second time you must learn things the first time did not teach you. You will be tested for those things in private. The tests will be brutal. You have just passed the first one.*

The Severing Path's cycle 7 reward — the small reflexive correction in moments of true peril — had not, in the fight, activated. It was, then, calibrated to a higher threshold than this fight had reached. It would activate, perhaps, only when the cumulative damage taken in a single combat exceeded sixty percent. I had stopped at forty-nine. The cycle 7 reward was a deeper-end safety net I had not, in this fight, needed.

But the cycle 7 reward was — I now knew — real. The small reflexive correction was a real launch-week mechanic. I would, at some point in the next nineteen days, push past sixty percent in a fight. When I did, the launch-week design team would, with the small careful generosity of designers who had built the Severing Path as a fair slow-burn chain, give me back a portion of what they had taken.

I sheathed the Black Iron Heavy Blade.

The mirror frame at the chamber's center was empty obsidian.

I bowed to the empty frame.

> *Ding!* [Trial Phase 3 Complete. Trial Phase 4 Initiated: The Choice — Berserker or Knight.]

The chamber's far wall — beyond the mirror frame, beyond the small launch-week candle — opened into a long corridor that split, twelve meters in, into two paths. The left path was lit with a soft red. The right path was lit with a soft blue.

Berserker. Knight.

I had answered the mirror's question.

I would now answer the next.

I crossed the chamber, walked past the mirror frame, walked into the corridor, and turned, without hesitation, left.