Chapter 65: The Trial of The Death and the Eldritch Mirror
Location: Inside the Black Spire - The Second Trial: Sofia’s Instance
The suffocating, stagnant mana of the deepest layer of the Abyss pressed against Sofia Vileblood’s skin. The endless obsidian bookshelves of the Tower had dissolved, trapping her in a perfect, nightmarish replica of her own domain: the 100th Floor of the Dungeon. Her Throne Room.
Standing in the shadows near the towering iron pillars, the real Sofia watched as history rewrote itself before her eyes.
At the far end of the blood-red carpet, sitting upon the throne of carved bone and obsidian, was the Other Sofia. But this projection was not the weary, isolated ruler who had waited centuries for an anomaly to save her. This Other Sofia dripped with malice. She lounged on the throne with a theatrical, villainous arrogance, a cruel, cackling smirk plastered across her beautiful face.
Standing before the throne were five humans.
Sofia’s breath hitched. The Previous Summoned Heroes of Frontierra.
She remembered them. Decades before Kyouya Kusanagi fell into the Abyss, the Goddess Kamiya had summoned this party to conquer the dungeon.
Leading the vanguard was a young man named Ren. He had deep, ocean-blue hair, striking white eyebrows, and fierce blue eyes framed by silver-rimmed glasses. In his hands, he gripped a slender longsword that pulsed with blinding holy light, designed for blistering speed.
To his right stood Daichi, the heavy attacker. He had messy brown hair, unmarked brown eyes, and wore thick, blessed steel armor. His massive broadsword hummed with earth-shaking magic.
Behind them hovered Haruki, the mage. He was a lazy-looking boy with messy dark hair and unpredictable, deep blue eyes that usually stared at the world with apathetic boredom.
Flanking the boys were the two support casters. Sakura, a girl with a vibrant, pink vampire-bob haircut and soft blue eyes, held a staff crackling with offensive elemental magic. Next to her was Ayame, a beautiful girl with long flowing dark hair and crimson eyes, her hands glowing with the soft, restorative aura of a high-tier healer.
The five heroes stood in a loose formation, their weapons glowing with borrowed divine light. The oppressive mana of the 100th Floor pressed against them like a physical weight, but they had come too far to turn back.
Ren adjusted his silver-rimmed glasses, scanning the throne with tactical precision. His heart pounded, but his voice remained steady. “Remember, we don’t have to kill her. Just seal her long enough to claim the core. The Goddess promised us a way home.”
“Home,” Daichi repeated, his massive broadsword resting on his shoulder. A wistful smile crossed his scarred face. “My little sister’s birthday is in three weeks. I told her I’d be back for it. She’s turning twelve.” He laughed softly, though it was hollow. “She’s probably still leaving letters under my pillow.”
Haruki, the lazy mage, snorted from the back. “You still have a sister to go back to.” His deep blue eyes were fixed on the floor. “My parents sold my game collection when I disappeared. Said it was ‘clutter.’ I just want to see if they kept my cat.”
“Haruki…” Sakura touched his arm gently. Her pink bob swayed as she shook her head. “We’ll all make it. The Goddess wouldn’t have chosen us if we weren’t strong enough.”
Ayame, the healer, clasped her hands together, a soft golden glow already forming around her fingers. “Strength isn’t what matters,” she said quietly. “Faith is. We just have to believe we’re meant to return.”
Ren nodded, gripping his holy longsword tighter. “Then let’s end this. For our families. For our world. For the future we were stolen from.”
They raised their weapons in unison, a fragile moment of unity before the darkness.
And then the Other Sofia began to laugh.
"We are ending this right here, Demon Lord!" Ren declared, his voice echoing through the vast chamber. He pointed his glowing sword at the throne. "If we manage to beat you, the Goddess promised we can finally go back home. We will reclaim our lives!"
The Other Sofia threw her head back and laughed—a high, grating, terrible sound that made the real Sofia’s stomach churn.
"Oh, you pathetic, fragile little weaklings!" the Other Sofia mocked, her crimson eyes flashing with sadistic delight. "You truly believe you earned your way here? You merely survived the upper floors out of sheer, dumb fortune! But this floor? I am going to sever your hopes, your limbs, and your lives!"
From the shadows, the real Sofia gripped her dark traveling coat, her knuckles turning white.
This is fake, she told herself. An illusion created by the Tower. A twisted exaggeration.
She had killed them. That was the unchangeable truth. But she had never been this cackling, monologuing villain. In reality, she had tried to warn them away. The tragedy had only occurred because the heroes, in their final desperate moment, had done the one thing her cursed existence could not tolerate.
Right on cue, the illusionary Ayame fell to her knees. The healer clasped her hands together, a brilliant halo of divine light erupting from her body as she began to chant.
"O Great Goddess Kamiya," Ayame prayed, her voice ringing with desperate faith. "Grant us your divine protection. Cleanse this foul darkness from..."
The prayer was the trigger.
In the past, hearing the Goddess's name had caused Sofia’s System-mandated programming to override her sanity, forcing her into a blind, uncontrollable berserker state.
But the Tower’s illusion did not just make the Other Sofia go berserk. It transformed her into an eldritch nightmare.
The Other Sofia stood up from the throne. A sickening, brittle SNAP echoed through the chamber. Her pristine, pale skin suddenly turned the color of week-old corpses, fracturing like cheap porcelain. A chorus of loud, bone-crunching pops filled the air as her joints violently dislocated.
The real Sofia stepped back, horrified. Even to an Immortal Demon Lord, the sight was profoundly unnatural.
The Other Sofia’s spine snapped backward at an impossible angle. She dropped to the stone floor on all fours, her elongated limbs bending in reverse. She twitched and scuttled forward like a massive, broken spider. When she lifted her head, her jaw unhinged with a wet tearing sound, her mouth ripping open all the way to her ears to reveal endless rows of needle-sharp, shark-like teeth.
Instead of crimson blood, a thick, black, corrosive sludge began to leak from the cracks in her porcelain skin. The sludge dripped onto the obsidian floor, instantly melting the stone with a violent, hissing sizzle.
The atmosphere in the room completely collapsed.
Ayame’s prayer caught in her throat. The glowing halo of healing magic around her hands flickered, sputtered, and died entirely, suffocated by the sheer, crushing density of the monster's dark mana. Ayame fell backward, her crimson eyes wide with pure academic despair. All her research, all her preparations, all her faith meant absolutely nothing.
"This... this isn't a demon," Ayame stammered, her voice cracking in terror. "This is an anomaly that shouldn't exist in our reality..."
Ren, the brave leader, froze. The holy sword in his hand, which had burned with the righteous hope of returning home, suddenly dimmed. It was as if the light itself was terrified of the darkness leaking from the creature. Ren took an involuntary step back, his eyes wide behind his glasses, desperately trying to track her sickeningly erratic, twitching movements.
It was a total crisis of faith. Ren had spent years believing that good always triumphed over evil. But looking at the bone-cracking horror before him, he realized they were not fighting a villain. They were fighting an inevitable, apocalyptic natural disaster.
"Hold your ground!" Ren screamed, though his voice shook with primal panic. "We have to attack!"
Behind him, Daichi and Sakura were already breaking. Daichi’s grip on his massive broadsword loosened. The heavy, blessed steel armor he wore suddenly felt like a freezing iron coffin. His knees trembled violently against his will. The heavy attacker, who had never feared death, felt his courage completely evaporate. As he watched the Other Sofia’s cracked, severed flesh writhe and bubble with black sludge, Dachi gagged, doubling over as he vomited onto the stone floor from pure psychological horror.
Even Haruki, the lazy, apathetic mage, was trembling like a leaf in a hurricane. His deep blue eyes were blown wide. He had assumed the Demon Lord would be just another target, given how easily they had dispatched the weaker demons on the upper floors. He was wrong. They were all so terribly wrong.
From her hiding spot, the real Sofia murmured, "Stop..."
She was an Immortal. She was the ruler of the Abyss. But beneath the titles, she had once been a normal girl. Seeing her own face twisted into this spider-like abomination, watching the terror on the faces of the children she had been forced to slaughter, stripped away her regal composure.
"Attack it! Now!" Ren roared, charging forward, raising his dimmed sword for a desperate strike.
He didn't even see her move.
With a speed that defied physics, the Other Sofia vanished from the floor. A wet, tearing sound echoed through the room. Ren stopped dead in his tracks.
The Other Sofia was suddenly behind him. One of her elongated, backward-jointed arms had punched straight through his back, the jagged, pale fingers erupting from his chest, coated in blood and black sludge. Ren gasped, a torrent of blood spilling from his mouth, his glasses slipping down his nose as his life instantly extinguished.
"REN!" Daichi screamed, wiping the vomit from his mouth.
The Other Sofia flicked her wrist, tossing Ren’s corpse aside like a broken doll. She scuttled toward the remaining four.
"Run!" Daichi bellowed, stepping in front of the girls. He slammed his broadsword into the ground, activating his ultimate defense skill. A massive, glowing barrier of holy earth and light erupted, forming a towering shield. "Find a way to escape! I'll buy some time!"
But the Other Sofia didn't attack the shield. She opened her ripped, ear-to-ear mouth and expelled a torrential stream of the black, corrosive sludge in a wide arc over the barrier.
The sludge rained down directly onto Ayame.
The healer didn't even have time to scream. The moment the living, acidic liquid touched her skin, she began to vaporize. Her flesh, her bones, her clothes—everything melted into a bubbling puddle of hissing black tar in less than a second.
Sakura collapsed to her knees, dropping her staff. Tears streamed down her face, matting her pink hair. Her mind completely shattered. "Mom... Dad..." she sobbed helplessly, curling into a ball.
The Other Sofia’s cracked, jointed hand didn't break Daichi’s shield—it simply elongated, stretching like pale rubber, flying over the top of the magical barrier. The jagged fingers slammed downward like a guillotine blade, piercing cleanly through Sakura’s skull. The pink-haired girl fell silent, pinned to the floor.
Daichi looked back, his eyes vacant with shock. Ayame was a puddle. Sakura was dead. The only one left was Haruki.
But Haruki was not casting a spell. Stripped of all his pride, the lazy mage was scrambling backward on all fours like a frightened crab, his boots scraping uselessly against the blood-slicked stone, weeping hysterically.
Daichi let out a broken, hopeless cry and swung his heavy sword at the creature. The Other Sofia didn't dodge. She simply punched straight through the holy steel of the blade, shattering it, and drove her hand through Daichi’s armored chest, tearing his heart out from his spine.
"No... please, stop..." the real Sofia whispered, tears finally breaking past her crimson eyes. She took a step forward, her hand reaching out weakly, a human girl drowning in an ocean of manufactured guilt.
The shadow of the Other Sofia loomed over the final hero. Haruki backed into an iron pillar, nowhere left to run. In a blind panic, he thrust his hands forward, screaming as he unleashed a torrent of absolute dark fire magic at point-blank range.
The flames engulfed the eldritch abomination. For a second, the room was bathed in blinding heat.
But the Other Sofia simply walked through the inferno. The fire didn't even singe her porcelain, cracked skin. She grabbed Haruki by the face with her massive, jagged hand, lifting him off the ground. With a sickening crunch, she crushed his skull, dropping his lifeless body onto the pile of his comrades.
The slaughter was over. It had taken less than thirty seconds.
The Throne Room fell deathly silent, save for the hissing of the acidic sludge melting the floor.
Slowly, the Other Sofia stood up. Her spine cracked and popped as she adjusted her posture, though her limbs remained unnaturally elongated and her jaw hung slack, revealing those rows of bloody needle teeth.
The creature didn't return to the throne.
Instead, its neck snapped sideways, rotating a full one hundred and eighty degrees. The pale, cracked face locked its dead, crimson eyes directly onto the shadows where the real Sofia was hiding.
The creature smiled—a horrific, ear-to-ear grin.
It knew she was there. And the Trial of The Death had only just begun.
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