Phil’s mind was still processing Kounotori’s words when the door leading to the next room clicked open. He moved close to it, nudging it further along its course with a hand.

  “You’re saying… these assholes were behind all that shit with Mac N’ Cheese?”

  A startling realization if that was true. Phil hadn’t witnessed most of the man’s rampage himself, merely encountering the madman near the end when he had shown up amongst the flames of the Blue Friday nightclub owned by the local yakuza family. But he’d heard about what happened in the parlor afterward. Apparently it was a bloodbath.

  “Indeed.” Kounotori’s beak clacked. “The man-creature’s mind was weak~, a perfect target to consume. And consumed it was, yes yes it was indeed of course of course~.”

  “Oka-“

  The door was fully open. Phil’s words died in his throat. Before him was a solemn stone room with colossal red stained-glass windows that dominated the walls. But that sight, and the sight of a well-dressed gentleman disappearing into the rippling surface of a glass mirror, only partially registered in his brain.

  The rest of his mind was fully occupied by the shape of Jean’s motionless body on the floor.

  “JEAN!” Phil cried out, rushing over to his friend’s side without heed for any traps or other people who might be in the room.

  The closer he came, the worse it looked. His friend’s chest was caved in so deeply that it looked hardly even a full inch thick. The jagged edges of several broken ribs had pierced through his skin to grasp the air like ivory towers coated in a thin layer of dark red liquid. Jean’s mouth was covered in blood and various fleshy chunks, each one small enough to fit on the edge of Phil’s index finger. One of his arms was strewn carelessly to the side, a thin piece of bone sticking out of the broken limb like a stick snapped in half, while his other arm lay on the upper part of his crushed chest, posed as if he had been holding something up in front of his eyes in his last breaths.

  Phil’s feet suddenly slipped across the floor. He didn’t even have a chance to regain his balance before he crashed to a halt on the lukewarm flagstones. His hands felt… slick. Phil raised his hands to his face. It wasn't the flagstones that were lukewarm.

  He had slipped and fallen into a pool of Jean’s blood. His hands were covered in sticky, warm liquid. It was splashed across his shoes, pants, and coat.

  He was covered in his best friend’s blood.

  “Jean!” Phil’s voice cracked. But he was close enough to Jean’s body that he could no longer deny the truth that the cold and rational part of his mind had screamed out as soon as he’d seen him. This was not the first time Phil had witnessed death with his own two eyes. Jean’s eyes were glassy. His expression was lifeless. His chest did not move. The amount of blood on the floor… no one could lose that much and still draw breath.

  Jean was dead. His brother was dead, and his blood was covering Phil’s hands. It felt like the walls were closing in on him, but a swift glance was enough to show that they weren’t moving at all.

  Kounotori’s harsh voice broke through Phil’s pounding thoughts.

  “Only one can leave. That is the truth, is it not, man-creature Phil? Such a shame. Shame! SHAME! Krkrkrk! That was Red Summer, not Pink Winter. Wrong one for me, no no. Not at all. Stupid, stupid human! I~ will keep searching, but what will you~ do, man-creature Phil?"

  The gentleman in the suit.

  Phil’s head whipped around to glare daggers at the mirror. He didn’t answer the deranged stork, nor did he believe Kounotori expected an answer. In the mirror was the gradually retreating form of the man in the suit.

  “I’ll be back.” He muttered to Jean. There was no response from his brother. Phil lunged to his feet, his shoes slipping again in Jean’s blood, but this time Phil was prepared. He kept his balance. He ran full tilt toward the mirror, heedless of how solid its surface appeared. Closer and closer it loomed, but Phil’s momentum did not falter by even a second. The surface of the mirror reflected Lumina keeping pace with him, a look of… not rage, but sorrow on her face.

  “Don’t slow down!” Shouted Lumina.

  Far behind her was the stork. Kounotori was standing near Jean’s body, his head cocked at a slight angle as he observed Phil with an expression of mild curiosity (at least as much of an expression that a bird could manage to have on its face). His wing rose in a human-like wave of goodbye. The stork seemed disinterested in following Phil. Behind Kounotori was the colossal looming figure of D.3.S. Frog. The last thing Phil saw before the mirror’s surface consumed him was D.3.S. lowering its head to Jean’s body, its gaping maw wide open, and a long, pink tongue slithering out to scoop up his brother’s body. It was a gentle action, almost forlorn.

  The stone room disappeared, replaced by a kaleidoscope of colors – red, blue, pink, and purple, though the purple was dull and lifeless, while the other colors were vibrant and moved as if they were alive and watching – no, sneering at Phil. The colors were mocking him.

  He felt as if he were moving and motionless at the same time.

  “Some sort of transportation magic!” Lumina’s voice shouted from behind him. Phil gave a curt nod to signal his understanding. It made sense (as much as the soft magic system of this world did). Before entering the mirror, its surface had displayed a picture of sunshine, trees, and birdsong. There were people walking on paved paths. Birds flew through the sky. Some sort of park… or forest, or whatnot. It seemed strangely familiar, but Phil was not sure how exactly.

  He shook his head as the colors increased the speed of their dizzying rotation around him. The man. He needed to fix the appearance of that man in his head. Memorize every detail he’d seen of the well-dressed gentleman as he disappeared through the mirror.

  Phil had seen the man from the back. Tanned skin poking out from under a grey business suit. The suit was at least a two-piece, but Phil couldn’t see if he wore a waistcoat underneath to make it a three-piece suit, which would have only been visible from the front. Nevertheless, a fancy suit. Classic brown Oxford shoes. Close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair. Faint red Egyptian hieroglyphs on his skin. The hieroglyphs almost seemed to be swimming around on the man’s flesh, but Phil hadn’t gotten a close enough glimpse to be certain of that. It could have just been a trick of the light… or a casual display of magic. He’d put the gentleman at around mid… 40s, maybe early 50s? The hair made it hard to say for certain. Salt-and-pepper hair always made a guy look older.

  That description was simultaneously unique and ordinary. Regardless, it was now burned into Phil’s brain with such vigor that he hardly expected to ever forget it, similar to how the sight of Jean’s body refused to leave his mind’s eye no matter how hard he tried, and no matter how sick to the stomach it made him.

  As if she could sense Phil’s thoughts, Lumina piped up with a theory of her own.

  “Do you think that really was Red Summer? Kounotori seemed to believe that.”

  Phil could only agree. Even from the back, Kounotori appeared to recognize the gentleman, immediately labeling him with the specific naming scheme that the stork claimed was reserved for the upper echelons of the Sons of Kul Elna. And if the stork was right… Red Summer was the leader.

  In a flash, the kaleidoscope of colors vanished to be replaced with the same gentle and sunny scene he'd observed before entering the mirror. Phil sharply glanced around. It was a park. The mirror had spat him out in a park. The park, Phil belatedly realized. While it was not covered in snow like it had been the last time he’d seen it, Phil could not fail to recognize this place, the very same place he’d first woken up in this world all those months ago.

  Domino City Park.

  The mirror had transported him all the way from Pegasus’s island to the center of Domino City Park. Behind him was the park’s fountain. Propped against it was a simple hand mirror which lacked any sort of decoration or flair.

  “Mommy, that man’s covered in blood!” A child’s voice rose through the air.

  Phil ignored those words, just as he ignored the mother shouting for the child to run back to her. Where was the gentleman? Where was he? The man had a head start, but it wasn't a huge one. One minute, maybe two? Definitely no greater than five unless time had moved differently inside the mirror. The park was large enough that any man would need at least ten minutes to jog out of it from the center, and it had looked as if the man in the suit was walking, not running, when Phil had seen him through the mirror.

  Good. He didn’t know Phil was in pursuit. Ignoring any extra magic, that was. Not like Phil could do much about it anyway.

  Quickly Phil made up his mind, tearing down the path he knew was the quickest way out of the park with all the speed he could muster. The world was quiet here, filled with a silence that was only occasionally broken by people screaming in shock from Phil’s appearance. The exit of the park came into view. There were more people here, but still no man in a suit. Everyone was dressed as they should be for a day out to the park. All comfortable, breathable clothes that were standard for the Spring air. No one would wear a formal suit to a place like this.

  Phil rushed up to the closest person, a woman in jogging attire with headphones on, who hadn't yet noticed his appearance. He grabbed her shoulders, eliciting a scream of shock and fear from her lips.

  “A man in a suit!” Phil gasped out. The woman stared at him with eyes as wide as dinner plates. She looked like a deer in the middle of a highway, mere seconds away from being run over by a car. "Did you see a man in a formal business suit pass through here! Tan skin, tattoos, older guy! Salt-and-pepper hair!”

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  “N-no! I haven’t! Pluh-please!” She gasped out, her face as white as a sheet. Phil pulled away from her, hardly noticing that his grip had left her shoulders decorated with a pair of bloody handprints. The woman screamed and ran out of the park as fast as her feet could carry her.

  “Fuck!” Phil screamed and spun around. “FUCK!”

  Lumina didn’t wait around. She darted over to the side, coming to a screeching halt near the closest lamppost, one that was perhaps fifteen or twenty feet in height. She scaled the black-iron post in a flash, perching on top of it with her hands cupped around her eyes like a pair of makeshift binoculars. Her head swung left and right, allowing her to scan every direction in turn.

  “Nothing! He must still be in the park!”

  What next? Which part of the park should he search next? There was so much ground to cover. Screams came from behind him, causing Phil to look back with a hopeful expression before he realized it was all nothing – the people were screaming and running away from him. He ran a hand through his beard, heedless of how Jean’s blood on his hands slicked his beard together. What now what now what now what now? Lumina effortlessly hopped down from her perch, dusting off her dress with a quick brush of her hands.

  He couldn’t let his thoughts keep spinning away. A snap decision was made. He’d cover the park in a zig-zag pattern. Maybe the son of a bitch had chosen a slower path, or he hadn’t known the path Phil had taken was the fastest one out of the park. The man had been walking earlier. Phil was sure of that. Lumina couldn’t see him on any of the streets heading away. He still had to be in the park.

  The trees in the park were not thick enough to obscure his vision or wide enough to hide a grown man behind them. Still, Phil ran to as many as he could see, dashing around them as if the suited gentleman could be crouching behind any one of them.

  But it was Lumina who spotted the gentleman first.

  “Phil!” Lumina shook his shoulder to get his attention and pointed toward a building in the distance. The building was concrete, single-story, and like an ugly blemish amidst the natural beauty of the city park. It had one steel door on the front. Next to the door at about head height was a sign with the words ‘Men’s Restroom’ written on it in large white letters. The door was wide open.

  And Phil could see a pair of elegant brown Oxford shoes disappearing into the building. No one in their right mind would wear fancy dress shoes like that to a park.

  "Got you," Phil muttered malevolently. He sprinted toward the men’s restroom with murder in his eyes. The door closed with what almost sounded to Phil like an ear-splitting ‘thud’, but in all reality it was just a light ‘click’.

  Phil burst through the door. The inside of the restroom was depilated. The space likely hadn’t been cleaned in years. A single bare bulb overhead struggled to illuminate the room with sickly, flickering yellow light. Scraps of sodden toilet paper littered the sticky, grimy floor. The air reeked of stale urine. Three sinks with a mirror each decorated one side of the room, while the other side of the room was evenly split between a row of urinals and a handful of toilet stalls. The doors to the stalls were closed shut. Phil ran over to the mirrors, checking them one by one. He poked their surfaces several times for good measure. Each mirror showed nothing but a reflection of the room behind him, along with one very grimy bearded man with large splashes of fresh blood liberally spread across his clothes and skin.

  Phil let out a coarse string of swears of such force, violence, and creativity that even a sailor would blush in shame upon hearing his tirade. The man in the mirror copied his actions, silently speaking through a face twisted with rage. He put his hand against the mirror, even though he’d poked its surface a moment prior. Nothing. His palms did not sink through their surface like they had in the upside-down room on the island. He repeated the process on the other two mirrors.

  Still nothing. Either the mirrors weren’t magic, or the magic had already faded.

  “They feel… normal.” Lumina’s voice echoed his assumption.

  Phil spun around. The stalls then? He approached the first one, lashing out against its door with his foot. The door flew open with a bang.

  Nothing.

  His foot kicked in the second door. It fell to the floor, but like the first, there was no suited gentleman behind it. Lumina ripped the third door off its hinges. It crumpled within her grasp like it was a sheet of flimsy tinfoil.

  Nothing.

  Other than Lumina, Phil was alone in this room. So, utterly alone. He raced back to the mirrors, staring at their surfaces with such force that it felt like his eyes were burning – or was that the feeling of his tears gathering? A froggy croak filtered through the air, but it hardly registered in Phil’s ears.

  He stared at his reflection in the mirror. The men’s restroom was empty. There was no suited gentleman to be found. In his mind’s eye, Phil replayed the scene of the Oxford shoes disappearing into the men’s restroom. Those had to be the man’s shoes. They were too unique in this specific location for Phil to be mistaken. He replayed the scene over, and over, and over again. He didn’t know how, but that man had managed to escape. Was it the mirror? He stared at his reflection. A beard slicked tight with dark liquid. Ragged hair. Wild eyes. A torn coat. Splashes of blood that wasn’t his. He stared at himself. The man in the mirror looked at Phil and Phil looked at the man in the mirror.

  Jean Dubois was dead.

  Jean was dead and Phil wasn’t even good enough to catch the man who killed his brother. He’d failed. He hadn’t been fast or smart enough. The culprit had slipped right from his fingertips. Whether it was through one of the mirrors or not, at this moment all three of them were solid to his touch. There was no kaleidoscope of colors to greet his eyes, nor a well-dressed gentleman to tear to shreds with his bare hands. Neither could Lumina sense any magic about them. Phil had lost whatever minuscule lead he had begun with. For what? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  The wild-eyed man in the mirror stared at Phil, but all Phil could feel was a sense of rising disgust from the sight, moving like rancid bile up his esophagus. Lumina’s voice, thick with concern, crawled into his ears, but it was faint, far too faint for him to notice. D.3.S.'s croaks were the same.

  “You have one new voice message.” The frog croaked out.

  But that went unheard to Phil’s ears. Their voices buzzed like the rest of the flies drifting through the air, drowned out by a sense of overpowering sorrow and rage. Even though it was still Spring, the inside of the restroom felt as hot as a desert. The feverish warmth beat down on his shoulders as the man in the mirror continued to endlessly stare at him. The uncomfortable warmth tore away at his skin in waves. Faintly, he could hear cicadas whirring outside. His hands gripped the sink, clenching and unclenching around the porcelain surface.

  The heat felt worse by the second. Was it now a physical force weighing down on his limbs like some great pressure? It was almost too much to bear. Phil could feel his bones trembling. Were they creaking, or was that just his imagination? The heat sharpened. It felt magnified by the stench of stale urine that pervaded the air. The buzzing of flies filled his ears with such great force that few other sounds could compete, other than the cicadas, the light overhead, and the sound of police sirens in the distance. The air moved sluggishly throughout the restroom. It struggled to enter Phil’s lungs. His brother was dead.

  A hairline crack formed on the edge of the sink from his grip.

  He breathed in. Out. In. Out. The buzzing was still there. The flies. The cicadas. The burgeoning police sirens in the distance. The heat. Buzzing and buzzing and buzzing to drown out the rest of the world in a maelstrom of noise.

  Jean was dead and Phil was too damned worthless to even find his killer. A fly settled on his cheek.

  Something inside Phil snapped. He lunged forward, battering at the man in the mirror with his fists like a wild animal. The man in the mirror silently copied his actions. The glass groaned, and then cracked and finally splintered under his blows, but Phil did not stop his assault. Hammering blows fell on the reflective surface over and over again. Glass shards tore into his knuckles and slid under his skin, but the man in the mirror was still there. Still there, still staring at him with that disgustingly helpless, grieving gaze that was mixed with an undercurrent of simmering rage.

  “FUCK!” Phil roared, his fists coming to a halt. A volley of spittle flew from his mouth to land on the surface of the broken mirror. A warm hand settled on Phil’s shoulder. He could see Lumina in the mirror. Her eyes were wide. She looked worried. The sight barely even registered in Phil’s mind before it was drowned out again by the stare of the man in the mirror.

  Phil’s hands burned. It felt like he’d submerged them deep inside a pool of lava. The mirror was broken. A thousand tiny Phils stared back at him from shards of glass scattered across the room, some still hanging stubbornly to the wall while others carelessly littered the floor. Several of the pieces were splashed in a thin layer of his own blood. The light overhead flickered. It lost its strength, going dark for the briefest of seconds before filling the room once more with a harsh yellow glow.

  He stared at the man in the mirror, but the heart-wrenching sense of grief and loss was still there. Phil ran his hands through his scraggly, untamed hair. It was so damned hot. It felt like the heat was making the air itself buzz. Not just buzz, but thicken to almost unbearable levels. Each breath felt like a monumental effort. Phil shifted in place. His shoes crunched against the glass shards littering the ground. Tears ran down his face, thick and unending. The salty liquid felt like it was scalding his skin even worse than the stifling air was.

  And then a woman’s voice spoke. It was one Phil never thought he’d hear again, a voice both strange and familiar. It effortlessly pierced right through the cicadas and the flies and the sirens and the heat and the grief.

  “Good morning, Knight Phil,”

  Phil’s head darted over to look in the direction of the voice. It was pouring like liquid sound from the mouth of a giant, green-skinned frog with a tan underbelly, long white whiskers, and a pair of bulbous pink eyes. Fresh blood flecked the frog’s mouth. Its presence felt… whole. Like how it had before D.3.S. Frog saved Phil's life at the climax of the Society of Light’s invasion of Duel Academy. Several smaller tan frogs with pure white angel wings floated gracefully in the air around the frog’s head.

  The voice was definitely coming from D.3.S. Frog’s mouth, but it was not the duel spirit’s own voice. Gone was that croaking boom, that feeling of terrifying otherworldliness. The woman’s familiar voice felt… real. Mortal. There was no one else in the suffocating confines of the men’s restroom in the Domino City Park. The frog was sitting nonchalantly behind Lumina. Its formidable bulk completely obscured the steel door leading out into the park.

  "I dearly hope this message reaches you someday, as Sir Bastion believes it will. There is much this queen wishes to say and hear from you, but I think it would please us both to wait until we meet in person once more.”

  “Rose?” Phil hoarsely muttered. He spoke like a man who’d spent the last few months crawling through a desert without a single drop of water.

  Rose’s voice felt like it was reverberating through Phil’s very being. She sounded like she was smiling, ever so gently. It… how was this possible? While he believed his current world was in the same timeline as the events he had experienced in GX, it was undeniable that his present was taking place long before those events. Rose shouldn’t know him yet. And… her voice sounded older than it had before. She’d referred to herself as ‘queen’ instead of the ‘princess’ title she’d used during his time knowing her at the academy. Queen Rose. A future version? So… how? How was this… possible?

  Rose’s voice continued to play through the mouth of D.3.S. Frog without heed for Phil’s internal turmoil.

  “When that time comes, could you please answer this queen’s question?”

  Her words were like ripples in the storming sea of Phil’s mind. Even his grief was pushed aside for the briefest of moments.

  “Hi, how are you today?”

  Rose’s voice faded away. D.3.S.’s familiar rumble replaced it.

  “Message complete. To replay this message, press ‘One’. To delete this message, press ‘Seven’.”

  Lumina’s arm settled around Phil’s shoulder as Rose’s question rang through his mind like some great bell. Lumina’s eyes stared into Phil’s with such a measure of deep care and concern that he had never seen before. She pulled him into her grasp. Her arms wrapped around Phil, holding him tightly in a deep, warm hug without heed for how his tears dampened the shoulder of her dress.

  Her hug was like a solid mountain effortlessly supporting his weight, taking a little bit of the ragged grief off his shoulders, if for even a moment. One of her hands patted reassuringly at Phil’s back, while the other gently ruffled his hair. Try as he might, Phil couldn’t answer the question in Rose’s message. A series of choking sobs fell from his lips.

  Jean was dead.

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