The Third looked on the verge of fainting. "Removing the worst of it?! You just demolished half the world!"
Azuna finally turned her head toward him, expression serene. "And if you scream one more ti, insect, I will remove you as well."
The Third squeaked like a terrified mouse and backed away.
Damon didn’t react. He watched the process with cold focus while the mirror dinsion groaned in agony around them. Spatial threads anchored themselves deeper while Azuna carved away instability with the casual elegance of soone trimming her nails.
Then, she frowned.
"Master," she said calmly, "there is a problem."
The Third’s soul almost evacuated his body. "A... A problem? That wasn’t the problem?! What was all that cutting then?! A warm-up?!"
Azuna flicked her wrist, and a collapsing mirror ridge vanished. "Yes."
Then her eyes glimred with warning. "Master, sothing in this fragnt is rejecting my control. Sothing old. Sothing buried. It is resisting assimilation."
Damon’s gaze hardened. "What is it?"
Azuna shook her head. "I suggest we better not tamper with it right now. I can still stabilize the whole thing, but I am going to have to cut more than I anticipated."
"It’s fine. Do whatever you have to do."
Azuna got to work again, and this ti, her speed was a lot faster and furious. The Third’s face paled watching her work. She was chopping everything left and right.
Golden arcs flashed faster than lightning. Mirror-pillars fell away like wheat. Whole corridors of the fragnt vanished in clean, rciless slices. Azuna’s expression didn’t change even once. She moved with a terrifying, almost chanical precision.
The Third’s lips trembled. "S-stop. STOP. Please stop. That’s... that’s my favorite corner! No. Not the south wall- that’s where the-"
Azuna sliced it cleanly in half.
He fell to his knees. "You monster... you absolute butcher... do you even understand how long it took to earn this fragnt? How many tis I almost died? How many trials-"
Azuna snapped her fingers, and the shattered remains of a mirror corridor imploded into harmless sparks. "Irrelevant."
The Third stared at her as if she had just skinned his pet. "Irrelevant?! That was the HEART of my sanctuary!"
Azuna casually cut the "heart" in half as well. "It was unstable," she said.
"You killed it twice!" he scread. "You’re a devil!"
Azuna paused, looked at him, then at the collapsing structure, then at Damon. "Master. The insect is distracting ."
The Third flinched and clamped both hands over his mouth.
Damon didn’t spare him a glance. "How much more do you need to cut?"
Azuna’s golden threads danced wildly now. The fragnt trembled under her control. "Thirty percent," she said. A huge portion sank into the void the next mont. "...sixty percent," she corrected calmly.
The Third made a dying-frog noise.
Azuna lifted her sword, spun once, and unleashed a crescent of gold that carved away an entire quadrant of the world. It peeled off and dissolved instantly, taking dozens of cracked reflections with it.
Now the Mirror World had shrunk into a warped do the size of a mansion.
Azuna exhaled. "Ninety percent."
And then it all boiled down to a small floating platform. A small floating platform in the middle of the nothingness.
The Third choked on air. "WHAT DID YOU DO?!"
Azuna gave him a serene smile. "Saving your life and your dinsional fragnt’s life."
"What dinsional fragnt?!" He scread into the collapsing dinsion. "What part of this looks saved to you?!"
Azuna’s eyes shifted to Damon again. "Master. It’s done. I have stabilized the laws and the remaining core of this fragnt. The growing void was severed. Now this should be stable. That insect is still bound to it, and he should be able to open the exit portal for the dinsional fragnt."
The Third stared blankly at her. Then at Damon. Then, at the tiny floating platform beneath their feet, barely twenty ters across, suspended in endless space, in so remote corner of the cosmos.
His voice cracked. "You... you call this stabilized?"
Azuna nodded politely. "Yes. Before, it was dying. Now, it is stable."
Damon did not care. "Open the portal."
Under Azuna’s glare, the Third gulped nervously and stepped back. "Ummm... about that."
"Open," Damon repeated.
"Fine! Fine! I will do it." The Third no longer bothered to play any gas and imdiately opened up the portal. A swirling mass of energy showed up in front of them, similar to a dungeon portal.
However, Damon did not enter it right this second.
He calmly sat back down, blood tendrils unexpectedly shooting up and tying down the Third without any warning.
"Dude! Dude! Calm down! Why are you doing this now? I opened up the fucking portal for you, didn’t I? What more do you want from ? Can’t you just leave? I will also leave, and we can both pretend that this whole thing never happened. What do you say? Shall we shake on it?"
Damon did not answer him. He calmly sat down, legs folding beneath him as if he were settling in for a quiet ditation session rather than sitting on the last surviving scrap of a dying dinsion.
Blood tendrils tightened around the Third, binding him like a grotesque cocoon. Without his realm tricks, the assassin was nothing more than a panicked, wriggling rabbit caught in a snare.
Now that there wasn’t much dinsional space left, the little floating platform actually had a surprisingly dense concentration of ambient mana, thick, rich, and swirling like mist caught in a sealed jar.
Damon inhaled once, and the mana surged toward him like starving beasts responding to a king.
"You’re... you’re stabilizing? Here? Now? In my fragnt, while it’s floating around in the space like a piece of tard?!" The Third writhed. "Have you absolutely lost your fucking mind?!"
The blood tendrils squeezed harder, silencing him with a strangled yelp, and for the first ti, Damon addressed him.
"Tell sothing. You are a trapper, aren’t you? For your little assassin club, you are the person who traps and holds problematic targets, hmmm?"
***
Mass Release sponsored by Sgtcwby
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