373 Mathew's reflection
Mathew brought his hand up and clutched at his heart. Seeing the terror, pain, fear, and desperation painted all over the girl’s cute, cat-like face…
It was too much for him. Too much for a man who saw the apocalypse eradicate nearly all of humanity with his very own two eyes… twice. This moment of simple violence in what looked like a fantasy world, however, felt way more personal than the deaths of millions and billions of people Mathew never even heard about.
Briar reached out… but the movement of his hand slowed down as it came closer and closer to the girl’s short pants. And right as he was about to grab it, the time flow of the vision stopped completely.
‘What the hell is going on?’ Mathew thought.
Formerly worried about the poor girl’s fate, he was now starting to freak out.
It was one thing to watch some sort of vision. Given the circumstance, Mathew even put the analysis of what he was actually seeing for a later date.
But the time-flow shenanigans went above and beyond what he could or was willing to accept. The moment something started to fuck around with time, the stakes of the situation rose through the roof.
Then, the same darkness that preceded the birth of this forest-based vision, appeared right at the edge of Mathew’s peripheral vision.
“WHO?!” the young man turned around on the spot, ready to unleash all the power that he could still somehow wield in this strange, suspended state of being nothing more but a mere observer of the events.
“First off, calm down. This is not an attack.”
The voice reached Mathew’s ears right as the clump of darkness started to condense, quickly turning into a human-like shape.
‘Wait a second,’ Mathew thought, squinting his eyes.
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“What you are about to see is a mere message, one that I spent quite a long time trying to perfect. But even if I know what sort of traps and pitfalls to avoid with it…”
The darkness finally took its final form, clearly designed to resemble the shape of Mathew’s body.
“No matter what I say, I know myself well enough to know you won’t ever believe it.”
‘Is that… the being that’s behind the apocalypse?’ Mathew put forward an educated guess.
Assuming this entire apocalypse was caused by a singular entity or even a single group with a shared goal was stupid. There was absolutely nothing to prove or even hint at there not being more than one force behind this entire mess.
And yet… for how messy all the elements of Mathew’s system were, they always ended up somehow fitting the greater picture, making it hard to believe that, for example, the zombies were the doing of one faction while merchants were the creation of another one.
With that in mind, when this darkness-borne being finally started to take shape, Mathew could barely hold his excitement back.
‘Even if I can’t as much as spit at them, maybe I will at least get some answers?’ the young man thought.
He wasn’t delusional enough to believe he could stand against a being that could cause all the mind-boggling events that opposed every physical or biological law that Mathew ever heard about.
In the face of the beings that were behind the apocalypse, merchants, their subspaces, and even Mathew’s system, the young man was nothing more but a mere ant. But just like in the world before their interference ants would end up snatching some of the crumbs of what humans would miss, Mathew hoped to find some hints that could potentially clue him in about the true nature of everything that was going on!
And then, two things happened at the same time.
The darkness that formed the human-like shape suddenly vanished, replaced by a perfectly colored and natural-looking reflection of Mathew’s very own self. And while the visuals reached Mathew’s eyes, he also realized just where he heard the voice of this visitor before.
He heard it in his headphones while listening to the awful attempt at singing one of the songs he was quite fond of.
It was his own voice, distorted by the lack of the beautification that one’s brain would usually perform.
‘What kind of trick is that?’ Mathew thought, his suspicions raising through the roof.
“I know that you won’t trust a single word that will come out of my mouth. After all, you won’t be able to recall ever recording this message. But for reasons I cannot divulge, it happened. And yes, I am you. And in a sense, you can consider this message to come from the future.”
Mathew’s eyes widened a little bit.
Every last detail of his reflection was in place. The tiny, barely a millimeter-long scar located an inch below his left eye from when he fell down and nearly impaled himself with a fork through the eye as a mere kid. The small mannerisms of the facial expression, the manner at which the messenger stood in place…
Everything was exactly as Mathew would expect it to be from his own reflection.
‘No,’ Mathew thought, gritting his teeth in hopes that the pain of doing so would help him free himself from whatever mental force the being behind this illusion was trying to use on him. ‘For beings capable of turning an entire planet into a hell of a zombie apocalypse, creating an illusion of this level shouldn’t be a problem, right?’
Mathew gulped his saliva down.
‘But even if it’s all just a trick…’ he held his breath for a second, ‘is there actually any downside to listening to what it has to say?’
“I took a pause here because I expected you would need some time to digest the news,” Mathew’s copy spoke, only for the original to clench his jaws even further.
‘Right on the spot, god damn it!’ he thought.
“But the time that I can use is limited, so let me get down to the business. Here is what’s going to happen to you, the girls, and how your situation is going to change when you come out from this vision.”