The Extra's Rise - Chapter 976
976: Next Floor 976: Next Floor The next chamber tried a new kind of joke: a mirror that wasn’t a mirror.
It was a tall, foggy sheet of glass stretched across the far wall of a perfectly square room.
When I took a step inside, a pale outline of myself appeared in that fog-not my reflection, but just my bones and joints, like a chalk drawing made by someone who knew all my bad habits.
As I breathed in, the drawing was still.
As I breathed out, little red dots of light blinked on wherever my body was leaking the secret that I was about to move.
“That’s rude,” I told the wall.
Valeria hummed, a bright, dangerous sound along my forearm.
“It’s honest.
Honesty is the knife you carry inside your pride.” Erebus tapped once on the pact-line.
‘Proceed.’ Sword Unity means the blade, body, and intent are one thing.
It also means every part of that one thing can betray the other two if you get lazy.
Posture tells.
Eyes tell.
The ankles write love letters to the floor a half-beat before the rest of the body has even been introduced.
This tower was here to make sure I unlearned all of that lazy poetry.
I settled my stance-soft knees, hips stacked over ankles, my spine refusing to be a flagpole.
My right hand found the hilt like it was born there; my left rested on the mouth of the scabbard.
I made myself boring.
If this got any less dramatic, the room might fail me out of sheer politeness.
“Baseline,” I said.
I looked at the fog.
The chalk-skeleton looked back.
Red dots pulsed over my right shoulder, my left eyebrow, and the ball of my front foot.
My own body had just called the police on me.
“Your eyebrow just confessed to the crime in three languages,” Valeria noted, entirely too helpful.
“Thank you,” I told my eyebrow.
It twitched in response, adding another red dot for spite.
I drew and cut.
The cut was small, clean, and short enough to live in a broom closet.
The mirror kept its notes.
Red dots had flared a breath before the blade moved: a tiny shoulder hitch, a fractional loading of the thigh, a whisper of weight onto my heel.
I could get away with that in the outside world.
Not here.
The tower taxes tells.
“Unity is good,” I told the room.
“Now we make it quiet.” This wasn’t about speed.
It was about pre-motor silence-that tiny space before a move starts where your body gives a little speech about what it plans to do.
No more speeches.
Just the thing itself.
I reset.
Four in, six out.
On the next draw, I tried to start with relaxation, not contraction.
No shoulder prep.
No heel stamp.
The blade wanted to move; the body let it.
The red dots still blinked, but fewer this time.
The eyebrow was trying to behave.
The heel was still a menace.
“Better,” Valeria purred.
“Your elbow didn’t try to found a small nation.” A line of fresh text wrote itself on the wall to my left: PLEASE COMMIT.
“That’s what the last door said when it tried to sell me a handle,” I answered.
The floor clicked.
A thin, delicate frame rose around me like a birdcage made of fishing line.
The clear strands crossed and intersected at my nose, shoulders, hips, knees, and ankles.
At each crossing hung a tiny, silver chime bell.
They rang with the slightest twitch.
“Excellent,” Valeria said.
“An instrument.
You are the bad music.” ‘Time,’ Erebus added, his voice like a stamped form.
I cut again.
A gentle, mean little cut, all bite, no tail.
Three bells rang.
Not many.
Too many.
I slowed down.
I remembered Tiamat, prodding a line down my back with a training staff, telling me to stop trying to impress the air.
‘No pre-load.
No ‘ready.’ The ready is the cut.’ I planted the big toe of my front foot into the stone like a thumbtack.
I let my heel imagine a floor that was very far away.
I let my neck be boring.
I told my eyes not to pick a spot like a hungry cat; they understood and went soft, seeing everything and picking nothing.
“Draw,” Valeria whispered.
I drew.
The blade moved.
I did not.
No bells.
In the fog, the chalk-skeleton did exactly the thing without hosting a press conference first.
Two red dots blinked, but they were late-blinking after the cut was already over.
That was the shape I wanted.
The tell arrives and finds the action has already gone home.
“Again,” I said, because victory is a trap.
“Again,” Valeria sang, because repetition is how knives learn.
The tower, of course, changed the rules as soon as it thought I was comfortable.
The mirror shifted.
The chalk-man was gone, replaced by a faint ghost of me at half-opacity.
It copied my timing, but it cheated.
It started its move on the twitch I hadn’t even twitched yet.
It was a predictive algorithm made of fog.
If I got lazy, it would beat my blade to the line every single time.
“That’s just showing off,” I told it.
“Beat the ghost,” Valeria said.
“Haunt back.” I exhaled to the count of six and let the last of the air be perfectly quiet.
In that space of nothing, something started.
Not in the muscle, not in the shoulder, not in the foot.
The start was in the cut itself.
The blade was moving, and only then did I find myself attached to it.
The ghost in the mirror arrived late.
One bell rang, a tiny, accidental note.
Two stayed bored.
The red dots blinked after the fact.
I didn’t grin.
Grinning is a tell, and the mirror would have enjoyed that far too much.
We did this until the bells were mostly bored and the red dots brightened more out of habit than conviction.
Even my ambitious eyebrow lost interest.
“Next,” I said, because comfort is for beds, not for towers.
The hall answered by tilting the floor three degrees to the right.
It was just enough to make every ankle on Earth want to confess its sins.
I accepted the tilt and cut on the slope.
If the room wanted to help me understand where I leak my weight, I would graciously accept the tutoring I hadn’t asked for.
A zero-tell step on a slope is harder.
The body loves to load the downhill foot a blink early.
The bells were eager to tell on me.
I cheated by being honest: I put the intent in the cut, then moved the part of me that couldn’t help but follow.
It looked like magic.
It was just physics that wasn’t opinionated.
“Grip, Arthur,” Valeria reminded me.
“Neutral.
Let the forearm talk.
The shoulder does not get a microphone.” I listened.
The handle sat where it always sits.
The thumb wasn’t a hero.
The index finger wasn’t in charge.
The blade tracked true because nothing else needed to.
The bells stayed quiet unless I did something foolish.
I used the bottom of my out-breath as a small, silent door.
The start of my step slipped through that door, and no one saw it go.
The tower watched.
It didn’t clap.
Fine.
We were even.
The wall added a new toy: a string of faint lights that hung at chest height, drifting from left to right at random speeds.
If my head tracked them, the bells tattled.
If my eyes locked on one, the floor would hump itself into a ridge where my next step was supposed to be.
“Look soft,” Valeria said.
“See everything, pick nothing.” I let the lights be lights and blanketed the whole room with an attention that didn’t have a favorite.
The next set of cuts landed inside that blanket of soft focus.
The bells acted bored.
The lights drifted past, discovered I was no longer fun, and went elsewhere to annoy someone more deserving.
“Enough,” I said, when my forearms started to whisper about being made of meat.
The mirror faded.
The birdcage of threads melted back into the floor.
In their place, the tower offered me a little line of text at knee height: NOW, WITHOUT THE MIRROR.
“Ah,” Valeria said.
“The trust fall.” ‘Proceed,’ Erebus confirmed.
I did the same work without the help: soft eyes, neutral grip, forearm chain, no heel stamp, pre-motor silence.
Cut on the bottom of the breath.
The floor didn’t roll me.
The walls didn’t recoil.
The ceiling had stopped trying to be a number and had settled for being above me.
I didn’t need the mirror anymore to know when I was lying.
The feeling of a dishonest cut was now as obvious as a rock in my shoe.
After an hour that might have been ten minutes-time here is opinionated-the room accepted that I was boring.
The tower gave me a door.
It wasn’t made of praise this time.
It was a rectangle of plain wall that simply decided to stop existing.
I looked at it, waited, and when it stayed boring for ten consecutive seconds, I allowed myself to go through it.
Before I did, I took stock.
“State?” ‘Recording,’ Erebus answered.
“Draws and cuts are zero-tell, most of the time.
The heel no longer writes a letter first.
The shoulder has agreed to a lifetime of silence.
Eyes can be soft even when the room is annoying.
Breath is the only drum I can afford, and it keeps time.
Sword Unity is intact.
The new trick is less, not more.” Valeria warmed against my skin.
“You are beautifully uninteresting.
I’m proud.” “That sounds like an insult,” I said, pleased.
“It’s the best kind,” she replied.
“The kind that saves your life.” I took one more cut, because I don’t trust doors that don’t have to wait their turn.
The blade moved like the thought of a blade.
The body was a rumor that turned out to be true.
Nothing in me left a note for the future.
The room did not react, which here, was the same as approval.
We stepped into the next hall.