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  Orion liked the mountains.

  They were large. Imposing. They seemed eternal. To him, that meant safety. Nothing small could ever bring something so vast down.

  His father used to say those mountains hid rare mineral veins. Special iron, mana crystals, things only experienced adventurers dared to search for. Orion did not fully understand what that meant. He only knew it was important, and that he had been brought along.

  He was five years old.

  The boots were too heavy, but he did not complain. The coat was thick and itchy around his neck, but he did not complain. The backpack swayed with every step and sometimes felt like it was pulling him backward, but he did not complain.

  His father always walked at the front of the group, carving a path through the snow. He spoke little, but when he did, everyone listened. The other men laughed, talked, joked about who would get rich first once they found the right vein.

  “When this is over, I’m buying a bigger house,” one of them said.

  “A house? You’re dreaming too big. I just want a better bed,” another replied.

  “Stop being lazy. Build your own bed. It’s not that hard.”

  Orion walked right behind his father.

  From time to time, the man glanced back and smiled.

  “You’re doing well,” he said. “Hang in there.”

  That was enough.

  Since his mother disappeared, his father was all he had left. There was no one else to leave him with.

  This was his second expedition, so everyone felt a little more confident. The belief that Orion had great potential was what reassured them.

  For his age, his mana reserves were above average for a child, and so they all expected him to become someone important someday. These expeditions were meant to give him experience.

  The air grew thinner as they climbed. The trees became smaller, more scattered. Snow covered everything in an almost perfect white, broken only by dark rocks jutting out like exposed bones.

  They stopped near a stone cliff.

  The group leader said it was a good place to set up camp. Mineral veins often appeared close to formations like that.

  While the adults worked, Orion sat on a rock, swinging his legs. He watched everything closely. He liked how the men always seemed to know exactly what to do. How every movement had a purpose.

  His father approached and handed him a canteen.

  “Drink slowly.”

  The water was icy, but good.

  “We’ll start digging tomorrow. If we find what we’re looking for, this expedition will be remembered.”

  Orion did not know what being remembered meant to his father. But he liked the idea.

  Night fell early.

  The fire crackled. The smell of warm food spread through the camp. The wind blew hard, but the mountains protected that small space like natural walls.

  With heavy eyes, Orion yawned.

  “Go to sleep. Tomorrow will be a long day.” His father placed a blanket over his shoulders.

  Orion closed his eyes, and then something changed.

  A bad feeling ran through his body when he opened them again a few minutes later.

  The campfire was still there. So were the mountains. But the sound was gone.

  It was as if the world had been wrapped in a thick cloth.

  Some of the men’s bodies lay scattered on the ground, their parts separated by impossible distances.

  At the center stood a girl who looked young. Or rather, something.

  Small. Thin. With turquoise hair that clashed violently against the white snow. She wore old, frayed clothes.

  One surviving man tried to strike her with a massive hammer. His arm stopped. When the hammer touched her head, a metallic sound echoed, but the girl did not react.

  The weight of his own body pulled him forward, and his neck snapped with a dry crack.

  The girl watched everything in silence.

  Her face was far too young for what was happening. She wore a relaxed expression, a faint smile on her lips, but her eyes were empty, as if she were copying an expression she had seen before.

  Orion’s father advanced.

  His sword was wrapped in mana. A blade that had cut down monsters larger than anything there.

  The sword struck.

  And failed.

  The sound was wrong. Sharp. As if the blade were being punished for trying.

  What followed was not a conventional attack. In a swift motion, she grabbed his face and pulled. His head separated with a precision too clean to be called an attack.

  When his body fell and Orion saw his father’s head in her hands, eyes still open, he tried to scream, but nothing came out.

  The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  The girl finally looked at him. She approached slowly, then dropped his father’s head at his feet.

  As if offering a gift, she stood there, staring at him.

  Orion could not move or speak. His breathing barely came out. The mana radiating from that thing was terrifying. He had never felt anything like it before.

  She crouched in front of him.

  Her pink eyes examined him as if he were an object. A detail.

  “How old are you?”

  Her voice was flat and direct, without any real emotion.

  With trembling hands, Orion opened his palm toward her, showing his age. She looked for a second and mirrored the gesture.

  “Five, then. Half of mine,” she murmured. “I learned how to communicate with humans not long ago. But it seems you cannot even do that.”

  She extended her hand, as if she were about to touch him.

  Orion closed his eyes.

  What he received was not a death sentence, but a small pat on his head.

  “You are so fragile that you are not even worth my killing intent.” She turned away and began to walk off. “Good luck on your way back.”

  The forest’s sounds returned. When she vanished and that terrifying mana disappeared, Orion vomited.

  He knelt on the ground, gasping. The word fragile echoed in his mind. When he realized it, he could no longer stand.

  Alone and surrounded by corpses, Orion understood that the world can end without warning.

  °??──────??°

  The shadow moved first.

  It slid along the ground like something spilled, clinging to snow and stone, then rose with Orion’s exact body. The same posture. The same murderous intent. Both daggers cut through the air at once.

  I moved. I barely dodged, felt a blade graze my side and tear my clothes. Before I could react, the second strike came, along with the real Orion.

  They moved in perfect synchrony, aiming for every opening.

  Retreat was not an option. I twisted my body and drove all my strength into the chest of one of them. The impact was real. Bones gave way. The body was thrown back and buried in the snow.

  There was no scream, no uneven breath. I concluded I had struck the shadow. It was strange. It felt like hitting a real human.

  ‘So that thing can imitate even that. It fools my senses perfectly.’

  I fired a burst of flame at the fallen body.

  The next instant, Orion appeared at my side.

  There was no warning. No time. The daggers cut into me before I could react.

  The pain came late, but when it did, it was overwhelming. My body was durable. I knew that. But those strikes pierced through that durability as if they knew exactly where to hit. It was not just metal. Something was wrong.

  Something alive.

  I recoiled on instinct, feeling one wound heal as another opened across my shoulder. The blades seemed to tear beyond flesh.

  My mind wandered, even in the chaos.

  Pumpkin. Sentil.

  During the expedition, while we fought monsters, they did something similar. They did not simply wield their weapons. They merged with them. Mana was not an external reinforcement, but an extension of the body.

  That was it.

  Orion was doing the same.

  With the sword still in its sheath, I managed to block some strikes, the metal vibrating under impact, while others grazed me.

  Then I felt it.

  A presence behind me.

  The other Orion attacked from my blind spot.

  I ducked on instinct, feeling the blade cut through the air above my head, and countered low, striking his leg. Before he could react, I fired another burst of flame straight into his face.

  The impact sent him flying back.

  I twisted and slammed the sword’s sheath into Orion’s torso. The blow was solid. Thanks to my body, I could keep up with his movements, react, attack.

  But something was wrong.

  They retreated.

  Both of them.

  Not like wounded prey, but like hunters repositioning.

  In the long run, this exchange was not working in my favor. Orion also seemed to have some form of regeneration.

  ‘He still hasn’t used any different skill.’

  My thoughts raced.

  ‘That shadow clone… is it his unique skill? What’s the trick? Can he only summon one?’

  I held the sword in front of me and drew it from the sheath. The metallic sound echoed weakly against the strong wind. I did not know how to use it properly, but I thought that if I struck hard enough, it had to work.

  If mana could reinforce the body, as Pumpkin said, then the concept should not be so different from compression. Focusing mana into a single point.

  I concentrated.

  The blade was wrapped in my mana, but the result was dry. Crude. Unstable.

  Sentil could activate his [Ice Manipulation] on his weapon with precision. I could not. I was just dumping mana into it.

  I advanced.

  I chose one of them.

  I raised the sword and brought it down in a vertical slash.

  The impact made the ground explode.

  Snow, stone, and earth were hurled into the air. The shadow was crushed, Orion’s body shattering under the blow.

  But then…

  It vanished. Dissolved into the snow.

  The other Orion was already moving.

  The attack came fast, but I managed to block in time. The blades clashed. I seized the opening and swung horizontally with such force that a nearby tree was cut in half.

  Orion dodged, leaping away with impossible lightness.

  That was when I realized it.

  ‘No… this is wrong.’

  My breathing was heavy.

  ‘I’m using too much mana.’

  Every strike was destructive, excessive, inefficient.

  Many waste mana because they do not know how to control it. I was doing exactly that.

  ‘I can’t keep fighting like this. This isn’t about quantity. It’s about how much you can do with the least amount of mana. Efficiency.’

  I closed my eyes for an instant, far too long to be safe. The world around me faded. I did not think of explosions or raw power. I thought of the blade.

  The mana that had been flowing through my entire body was pulled back, forced into obedience. It left my arms, my legs, my skin, and gathered only where I wanted it.

  In the sword.

  The sensation was wrong. Like trying to force water through the eye of a needle. It resisted, vibrated, tried to spread again. My teeth clenched as I compressed it, layer by layer, binding it to the blade as if it were a metallic extension of my will.

  The air around the sword warped slightly.

  There was no excessive glow. No heat. Just a dense, nearly silent pressure that made the nearby snow sink a few centimeters.

  Orion advanced.

  Not both of them. Just one.

  He came fast, daggers crossing in a lethal arc. I did not dodge. I twisted at the last second and advanced into him.

  When the blade met Orion’s torso, there was no explosion.

  There was resistance.

  For a brief instant, I felt something solid. Something real.

  The sword cut.

  He was split from shoulder to hip, like cloth torn open by force. He did not vanish immediately. Orion staggered, the dark division pulsing as if trying to mend itself.

  Then he leapt back.

  A broken thought crossed my mind, almost childish.

  ‘I hit him!’

  Orion placed a hand over his chest.

  Shadows crawled across his flesh, writhing and sealing the wound by force, like black fingers stitching a living body shut.

  He took a deep breath.

  Smiled.

  “So your adaptation finally showed you how to hurt me. Your species really is impressive. I’ll admit that.”

  The shadow advanced, vanishing right in front of me.

  ‘So the one who just healed himself is the real Orion. That means I can attack this one without concern.’

  I still wanted to resolve this without killing him. Orion’s punishment should come from the people, not from me. Even if they decided to execute him.

  The shadow appeared behind me.

  I had made a mistake in my last strike. I put all my mana into the sword, but that alone was not enough. I needed to distribute some into my legs, arms, and back as well. That way…

  In a swift motion, the sword cut through the shadow’s neck, sending its head flying.

  And then…

  “Activate, [Black Coffin]!” Orion shouted.

  My vision went dark.

  It was not like closing my eyes. It was like being buried. Sound vanished. Air disappeared. For a moment, I no longer knew if I still had a body.

  Then a light tore through the darkness.

  Snow.

  The sky.

  My body, kneeling, headless.

  ‘What…?’

  My head struck the snow as the rest of me fell forward. The sensation came late, confused, too distant to be called pain.

  Orion approached slowly.

  “Every time my shadow takes the fifth hit…”

  He stopped beside me.

  “…the action against it is transferred to the aggressor.”

  The shadow dispersed like smoke.

  “You hit me a total of two times and missed once. When you made that cut with your mana, I managed to hide within my shadow. I had to deceive you to save the fifth hit.”

  Orion picked up the sword that had fallen from my hand and pointed it at my face.

  “I had to take the risk of being cut as well, so you wouldn’t hold back against the shadow. In the end, it worked.”

  He smiled.

  “Goodbye.”

  Then everything went dark again.

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