Apocalypse Trade Monopoly
Chapter 156: : Glass Knives

Chapter 156: : Glass Knives

The second mirror vanished in a whisper of static, scattering like sand in zero gravity.

One right. One wrong.

Two chances left.

And no margin for hesitation.

The chamber trembled slightly—not enough to throw anyone off balance, but enough to let them know: the room was watching now.

Lucas stepped back, scanning the arc of remaining mirrors. Eleven left. Each reflection waited in eerie stillness, but that stillness was a lie—he could feel it, crawling under his skin.

These weren’t just coded ghosts.

They were designed to provoke.

Tala glanced at him, eyes flicking sharp. "If we guess wrong again—who dies?"

The system didn’t answer.

The silence did.

Lucas’s jaw tightened. "We won’t guess."

"Great," Juno muttered from behind, still shaken from the X that had marked her mirror. "No pressure."

Ava approached the sixth mirror. Her own reflection tilted its head, but only a fraction late—like someone who’d almost caught the timing and fumbled the last note.

"Lucas," she said, low and fast. "I think they’re syncing to our memories."

He stepped closer, brows drawn. "Meaning?"

"Meaning this isn’t just code. These things are trying to pull personality fragments. Echoes from us. Maybe even emotional bias."

"They’re baiting us with familiarity."

Tala snorted. "So pick the one that feels wrong?"

"No," Lucas said. "Pick the one that isn’t even trying."

Ellis, quiet until now, pointed toward the far left mirror—the ninth in line.

"I’ve been watching that one," he said. "It doesn’t mirror anything. It just... stands there."

They all turned.

The figure behind the glass wasn’t even facing forward. Its back was turned, shoulders slightly hunched. No movement. No tricks. Just quiet defiance.

Keisha frowned. "It’s not showing anything."

"Exactly," Lucas murmured. "It’s not performing."

Ava nodded. "Vote it."

Lucas stepped forward, gaze steady. "Nine. Final decision."

The floor glowed green beneath his feet.

[TWO CORRECT.]

The mirror disintegrated.

Ravi exhaled sharply, like he’d been holding his breath for minutes.

Then the room dimmed.

Something changed.

Not visibly.

Atmospherically.

Like a scent you couldn’t name filling your lungs.

[FINAL ROUND.]

[SURPRISE CONDITION: DUAL ENTRY.]

The lights snapped overhead—white-hot.

Two mirrors remained side by side.

The voice spoke again.

[You must enter together. If you choose wrong, only one returns.]

[Decide.]

Tala cursed under her breath. "They’re not even pretending this is fair."

Ava’s jaw set. "Which ones?"

The last two mirrors were identical—perfect, obedient reflections. No lag. No flaws. No quirks.

Too perfect.

Ravi shook his head. "There’s no way to tell."

"Yes there is," Lucas said.

And then, to everyone’s shock, he stepped toward the mirror on the left—the one that still mirrored him in perfect unison—and punched it.

His fist collided with glass.

But it didn’t crack.

It didn’t ripple.

It didn’t even resist like a solid surface.

It absorbed.

Like pushing into warm jelly.

Ava moved instantly, grabbing his shoulder. "What the hell was that?"

Lucas turned slowly, fingers flexing as he pulled back.

"It’s synthetic sync. The perfect mirror. That’s the trap."

He turned to the second.

The reflection in that one blinked just a half-second behind him.

"And this," he said, nodding at the final one, "is real."

"Then let’s go," Ava said, already walking toward it.

Lucas grabbed her wrist—not hard, but firm.

"I go first."

"Why?"

He looked at her, and something flickered behind his eyes.

"Because if I’m wrong, I’d rather it be me."

A beat passed between them.

Then Ava pulled her arm free.

"No."

She stepped forward.

Lucas followed.

They stepped together.

The mirror accepted them.

The room went black.

The silence that followed was pure, suffocating.

Then the system spoke.

[CORRECT.]

[DUAL ENTRY – STABLE.]

[THREE REFLECTIONS PASSED. NEXT SEQUENCE: TRUTH CHAMBER.]

The floor dropped.

Not fell.

Dropped.

Not a fall. Not motion.

Absence.

Like the floor had never existed, like the world remembered gravity and forgot physics.

Ava’s stomach twisted—not from fear, but from dislocation. One moment she stood beside Lucas. The next, her body was suspended in a void where space meant nothing, where falling had no wind, no pull.

Just descent.

Then—

Impact.

But not hard.

More like arrival.

Ava’s boots hit solid surface. Her balance staggered. She blinked against a flash of light—

—and found herself standing in a vast chamber of glass and echo.

A circular arena.

No walls. No ceiling. Just translucent platforms hanging in infinite black, each one a perfect disk, with thin seams of code running like veins across the floor.

Lucas landed beside her, knees bent, catching himself with practiced calm. His eyes lifted, scanning.

No mirrors now.

No door.

No others.

Just the two of them—

And the voice.

[Welcome to the Truth Chamber.]

[There is no exit command. There is no system override. There is only honesty.]

Ava’s lips parted, slow. "Truth?"

The floor beneath them lit up—pulsing red under Lucas’s feet.

[Player: Zhang, Lucas.SUBJECT: HIDDEN INTENTION.]

A low chime rang out like a cracked bell.

Then a projection snapped to life above the arena.

A memory.

But not just a glimpse.

This one built itself piece by piece—layer by layer—as if the system had to reconstruct the forbidden from beneath scrapped files and encrypted vaults.

The projection formed above them, flickering with deep-code architecture. Not surveillance. Not from her system. This was internal. Pulled straight from Lucas’s own memory chain.

Ava’s eyes narrowed.

The scene loaded.

A black sky. A massive storm front over a broken city—Bunker 09, confirmed by the auto-tag flashing briefly in the top corner. Military insignias still half-intact. The structure had been officially listed as collapsed during a quake surge.

Except this feed told a different story.

The footage zoomed in.

Lucas stood at the edge of the blast zone. Alone. Cloaked in a scrambler mesh that fuzzed his figure in waves. He knelt beside a series of relay beacons—custom made. Not military. Not even Black Market.

Bai-engineered.

The sync-code flooding from the relay was old-world encryption—but Ava recognized the Blueprint-style hooks.

Her hooks.

They’d been lifted from an early prototype she’d discarded.

Lucas had salvaged them. Adapted them.

Weaponized them.

The beacon pulsed once—and detonated.

Not a fireball. Not chaos.

A controlled system wipe. A silent collapse of the bunker’s sync-grid, like watching a city flatline from the inside out. No alarms. No defense.

The bunker’s entire infrastructure died in eight seconds.

No chance to evacuate.

The projection warped—and snapped to a second scene.

Different location.

Bunker 12.

Same operation.

Lucas again.

Same beacons.

Same expression: calm, surgical, necessary.

He didn’t flinch as the lights blinked out behind him. He didn’t run. He walked.

[SUBJECT: BA—Zhang, Lucas][CLASSIFIED ACTION LOG: DESTRUCTIVE OVERRIDE OF TWO MILITARY BUNKERS][INTENT: STRATEGIC SYSTEM RESET][FATALITY ESTIMATE: 4,100+][COLLATERAL ACCEPTED]

Ava’s blood went still.

The system didn’t embellish. It didn’t dramatize.

It stated.

Lucas’s voice beside her was low. Tired, but firm. "You weren’t supposed to see that."

Her head turned sharply. "That’s how you ’disappeared’ for a week? You wiped out two bunkers?"

"They were compromised," he said. "Locked by Rewrite and rerouting system cores to central military command. They weren’t shelters anymore. They were weapons farms."

"You made that call alone?"

"No," Lucas said. "I made it first."

The memory projection hovered in the air, flickering with warning glyphs as it destabilized.

Ava stared at him. "You used my code."

"I used a ghost of it. The scraps. The ones you were going to delete."

"You built bombs out of my drafts."

Lucas didn’t blink. "Because your drafts are better than most people’s masterpieces."

She took one step closer, voice colder now.

"How many knew?"

"Just me," he said. Then paused. "Now you."

The system flared beneath their feet again.

[LUCAS ZHANG – ACTION VERIFIED.][HIDDEN OPERATIVE STATUS: ACTIVE – FORMER]

[PLAYER AVA ZHANG – ALIGNMENT SHIFT DETECTED][INTEGRITY DEVIATION: 6.7%][NOTE: SYSTEM ATTENTION ELEVATED]

Ava’s heart kicked in her chest.

That was new.

Lucas frowned. "They’re watching your reaction metrics."

The chamber shifted—subtle. Like a breath caught in the walls.

The kind of shift that precedes a storm—not because of sound, but because of air. The space itself inhaled.

Ava felt it first. Her system would’ve pinged the change—if it were still hers.

Instead, her instincts responded.

Then came the voice.

But this time, it was not the neutral, synthesized tone of the system.

This one was personal.

Familiar.

Infuriating.

[OVERRIDE ACCEPTED.][NODE AUTHORITY: GRANTED TO USER – "ANGLE"][MODE: DIRECT INTERFACE – GHOST THREAD]

Lucas stepped forward instantly, jaw tight. "Of course."

Ava’s mouth flattened into a line. "She’s watching us."

The chamber reassembled itself—walls folding upward like petals in reverse bloom, transforming the arena into something new: a cathedral of code and false light. The floor became transparent beneath their feet, exposing an illusion of infinite data spirals below.

And at the far end—a figure.

She materialized like a memory trying to take shape.

Long coat. Blade-cut features. Eyes that burned not with power, but certainty.

Angle.

Not a video feed.

Not a puppet.

She had somehow manage to embedded herself inside the system. This complicated things.

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