Chapter Thirty-Eight

Nope.

Harmony stepped forward to end this. Her versions danced back, laughing as they did. The pieces clinked into place for their transformation to be complete, even their clothes and armor morphed out, extruding from their skin. If this lasted longer, they'd lose track of friend or foe.

"Wild readings of mimic's replacing people were in the Grass Library, but it was considered hopped up chitter more than history," Loap spoke, her face pinched with worry.

"Clearly, it's real. You said you didn't know much this morning." Tyler grunted, annoyed.

"Those legends haven't even gnawed at the roots of the truth," Mimic-Loap yelled loudly, her ears picking up on the conversation easily. "Do you want me to tell them about…"

The blurred rush beside her was all Harmony caught as Loap flashed by her, a two-legged push shooting her out faster than an arrow, the impact left her target in fine chunks that spread out in a mist and coated the beast kin's fur red. A cracking sound came after the impact. The attack was so explosive that it pushed the other mimics away. To regroup, Harmony and Tyler dashed to cover the bloody bunny.

"That skill will be down for days, but I couldn't let her get it," Laop stressed.

Was that why? The mimics were still developing most skills. Stopping mimics from blabbing embarrassing secrets would have been valid enough. Not that Harmony would want to be on the receiving side of such an attack. There were a few skills she didn't want her duplicates to acquire. It was good that [Stride Before the Fall] and [Eternal Fable's Heart] were giving her copies problems as the skills worked hard to be brought to fruition. Was it because they were bonds?

"Let's kill these quick," Harmony ordered with a hint of authority.

"Well, that's not a reaction we thought we'd be having to that scene, Harm? A little blood thirsty under that facade." One of her Mimics laughed.

How rude. Harmony pulled out two of the makeshift explosives. "Hyacinth!"

The toad expanded. [Stride] activated allowing herself to share a glance with her copy for a brief moment. Her familiar kicked, blasting her ahead faster than she could have traveled normally. It broke her back. [Poise and Bearing] and [Style and Grace] could only gracefully handle such an impact to a certain level, even if she knew it was coming. It put her close to where she wanted to be, between two mimics, sadly not both of hers. Here her vital body was needed. Each hand crushed the rigged cluster of elemental crystals in them, with a strength Tyler couldn't match with his massive mitts. Fire, water, and lightning mixed to explosive proportions.

Her death was inevitable, but that close and still incomplete so were the mimics. Out of her many deaths, that was one of the quickest ones, and the shockwave sent her stumbling back.

"Harm!" Tyler cried, his reaction time as slow as the mimic's caught in the blast.

Easy to forget she hadn't shown off that sacrificial part of her to others. "Still here." She told him.

Now they had the monsters outnumbered. Two mimic copies remained, their advantage blown apart. Chasing them down would be a pain if they tried to run. Smart, logical, and able to reason. They wouldn't need that much time to be complete, but clearly, they needed to stay in a certain range to accomplish that.

Tyler-mimic completed first. Soul sight saw when everything synced up to the point where if she ripped her eyes off of him, there would be no telling them apart. The concerning part of that is that the structures that represented Jessica were merged in that copied conglomeration, and yet no sign of the spirit or its projection anywhere. It felt like two spirits in one body; her structures were the last part to form in the mimic. Was it a replica or an actual danger to deal with?

Harmony silently ordered Hyacinth to crush it when it runs through [Familiar Bond]. It didn't run. A heavy and joyful laugh escaped the mimic's lips. "To have such an underutilized form. Are we so afraid of our full potential that we will not unlock the door?"

Blue flames burst from the mimic's skin. That'll make it easier to tell them apart. Rather than running, the flaming copy flashed forward, a naked flaming after image appearing in the middle of the group that he stepped into, bringing his body and blistering heat. Even as Harmony stepped away, she could feel the [Taunt] take hold.

Tyler's maul forced into action crashed downward, and his mimic caught the blow with a single hand. Loap's kick bounced off him like he was a solid block of iron. The fur on her leg singed in the heat.

The forced compulsion to attack didn't knock out of Harmony's senses as she struck out with her palm. This was the first attempt at a soul strike since the seals had thought around it. The synergies were all realigned around what her skills could do without bending them so much with synergies and connections. [Final Silence] - [Renew Spirit] - [Disintergate] - and an extra dose of [Cold Touch] to deal with the copy of Jessica hiding in there.

Her palm struck him, and the fire went out. That was about it. The damage was minimal. Why though? Because of this new form? Maybe because it hit a mimic? Or was it just that this recreation of the soul damaging strike wasn't good enough?

"What did you do? That hurt!" The mimic asked arrogantly while tanking extra blows from Loap and holding Tyler's maul in place as he tried to yank it free and undisturbed, as Hyacinth lunged into the fray after shrinking down enough to aim to ram the monster amid the chaos rather than crush everyone. That meant he was only close to twice Tyler's size.

Harmony winced in pain as Hyacinth landed, and this version of Tyler didn't move an inch.

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The stunned Hyacinth shrunk to avoid a heavy fist, and he hopped backwards.

What would her copy do when it was complete? A quick glance revealed it was working hard on her heart skill, and everything else was nearly complete. At least the mimic didn't get all of the group's memories.

"Just something I picked up in the Garden," Harmony answered the mimics question. Talking would buy time and burn some of the time the copy had left on its defensive skills. Tyler's fate-bonded skill gave him not-quite invulnerability that left him cocky and exposed. "This is one I learned here."

Harmony hopped back, the ice image of her palm print resting on the armor the mimic had copied.

It looked down at the currently inert print. "What's this art and crafts class?"

Tyler let go of his maul, giving control to the copy. Out of his bag came the other two bombs, and he pushed forward while Loap moved to distract the monster.

"Leave!" The mimic ordered the beast-kin, and Harmony could see its primal bond flair and break slightly in him at issuing the order. It wasn't the real bond, but it was so close that the other side in Loap twisted in confusion, and she turned and walked away.

What could her copy do to Hyacinth? Harmony couldn't stop herself from sparing a glance in that creature's direction. A manic grin of glee on her face, like a twisted reflection. [Familiar Bond] was copied, [Stride] was copied, everything was ready except for her heart skill, which was being worked on with an intensity that took all that mimic's focus.

That had been a mistake. Eyes off of Mimic-Tyler, his kick shoved her tumbling away. Not as bad as Hyacinth's, but [Style and Grace] strained to turn it into a graceful fall, even as the kick had her side aching.

The handprint blew. The [Disintegrate] charge held in it blasted into the mimic's guts. It only grunted in pain. "Aren't you finished yet? She can't be more complicated than mine!" He yelled at his remaining partner.

Tyler tackled his copy. "That armor's a bit loose at the collar." He shoved the explosives into the imperfectly crafted breastplate at the neck. "Jessica!"

The flaming spirit manifested and shoved her arm through the mimic. It was unsurprisingly unaffected by the fire. The explosives were not. That had been their primary plan when departing on this little gathering trip. Throw the explosives at house-sized mimics and have Jessica light them up.

The real Tyler clicked on his fate-bound skill as Jessica's arm connected. The seal limited its length to much shorter than the mimics. While removed from harm, it didn't prevent the blast from flinging him away. The mimic wasn't so lucky. The blast only ripped him into three pieces, a testament to Tyler's fortitude.

That battle left everyone spread out and beaten up. The only unaffected being was the mimic who'd finally completed forming the last skill to complete the full and unsealed copying of Royal Harmony White. Night shifted into its full pre-sealed armoring. Nails shifted into vicious claws, and a competing [Shadowed Graves] spread out, telling them all they had to stay in place as death was here.

"Why do we let our morals keep us in check? Don't we wonder why all those other kingdoms forbid the selection of the Necromancer class? We know the things we can do if we only had the strength to go through with all these lovely ideas. Who shall we remake first to serve?"

Alien to all current fashion and armor, the glossy skintight coating of black was more disturbing and nightmarish than fabulously unique, at least when the person wearing it had a malicious look in their eye paired with a sadistic smile. Maybe Ambrosia had a point about her concerns around Night's newest form.

Around the mimic, the landscape started to shift as anything living and even small rocks crumbled to dust, and an eerie, cold quiet spread out.

They should have brought more explosives.

Tyler stepped toward the monstrous copy, and his movements slowed like he was pushing against an impossibly strong wind, except all he was running into was icy stillness and silence that caught him. If that was all, he'd be fine, but the spider corpse armor started to flake and peel away as other skills ground away at him.

Harmony saw the skills connecting and synergizing within the mimic with an undisciplined aggression that had prevented her from doing more than theorizing about combinations. Pages from notes on how Maekus controlled the environment. How to break rules with her stats. This wasn't a measured approach to testing and progression; this was diving into the madness, and this was bad. She had to get Tyler out of there. Maybe if she knocked him away? "Jessica, heat him up! I'll…"

Time flickered, and now she was approaching Tyler at a speed she didn't remember kicking into. What she was saying was lost. Not this! [Recall], [Disintegrate], and [Renew Spirit] had a theoretical application if she bent the rules to erase people's memories, but it was highly unethical to even test on a willing subject due to the risks.

Another skip and Tyler gasped while carried over her shoulder as they accelerated away from the mimic. You'd think someone so much larger would be hard to move, but this demonstrated the strength of even a sealed vital body. A makeshift protection constructed out of [Mend] [Renew Spirit], and [Poise and Bearing] got thrown together half-constructed to possibly stop further mental intrusions. The pair tumbled out of the cold to a waiting Loap.

The mimic hadn't even moved. It was playing with them.

"What now?" Loap asked.

Running wouldn't work. The mimic had full use of every skill she had unsealed. To match, she'd need to break her seals and forfeit the Games. Why wasn't it attacking? Was that what it wanted?

"Aren't you going to finish us off?!" Harmony called to it.

The expanding circle of destruction ended, and the mimic stretched and cracked its neck before returning a smile. "In due time. We couldn't move while trying that technique. Not advanced enough. We need our notebooks. Hyacinth refuses our calls. Max's oath is very confused and hurting right now. I don't know how your death will affect those. What we really want to know is what [Eternal Fable's Heart] can do without the seven seals."

Harmony watched the [Heart] in the mimic cycle away feelings for fate and then processed most of what it produced. Those glowing blue eyes of truesight burned like suns. Really burned, blackened cracks formed at the mimic's eye sockets, and smoke started to rise from them. It had sacrificed pain otherwise that had to hurt.

The mimic's chest around its heart crunched inward, pinching the whole torso into an area a little bigger than her head. A copy based on [Stride Before the Fall] burst into existence, but it was too late, as the current status stayed around. The quantum-bonded duplicate was so unstable that it disappeared a moment later. The compression reversed, exploding out.

Even as it was far past living, the mimic stumbled forward, held together by the remains of Night, blind, and clinging to undeath. "Well, that was unexpected." It chuckled as blood flowed out of its mouth.

It tried to put itself back together, skills still flashing, trying to repair and restart the life it had. Enough time, and maybe it could revive.

"Meep."

Harmony picked up Hyacinth and tossed him. At the apex of the throw, her familiar expanded. Blind, but still aware, the mimic flashed one last bloody smile as finality came crashing down. The shadow toad's thud shook the earth.

A truly horrifying death to end the fight.

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