"Don't. Move."

Damien's command was a whisper, but it cut through the silence like a whip.

Isabelle stood frozen, her chest heaving. The statue behind her, the Angel that had dropped from the cliff was inches from her nose.

Its stone claws were hooked, ready to tear out her throat. Its mouth was a frozen scream of hunger.

"Master..." Isabelle breathed, her eyes watering. "I can't... I can't keep staring."

"Formation," Damien snapped. "Back to back. Now."

They stepped together, their spines pressing against each other.

Damien faced the path ahead, where twelve Angels blocked the way. Isabelle faced the rear, staring down the one that had almost killed her.

"We'll walk slowly," Damien ordered. "Shuffle step. Do not lift your feet off the ground."

They began to move. It was a torture of physiology.

The grey ash in the air was relentless. It dried out their corneas, stinging like acid. Every instinct in the human body screamed to blink, to wash away the grit.

"Blinking in three," Damien counted down, his voice steady despite the sweat dripping down his mask.

"Two. One. Blink."

CLICK.

They blinked in unison.

GRRR-CLACK.

The sound was instantaneous, he sound of heavy marble grinding against bedrock.

When their eyes snapped open a fraction of a second later, the world had shifted.

The Angels in front of Damien were closer. The Angel in front of Isabelle was now reaching for her waist.

"They are fast," Isabelle whimpered. "Too fast."

"Keep moving," Damien said. "Ignore the distance. Just watch them."

They shuffled deeper into the grey fog. The silence was gone, replaced by the terrifying, rhythmic grinding of stone every time they refreshed their eyes.

It sounded like the canyon itself was chewing on them.

Time soon passed, and ten minutes felt like ten years.

As they navigated a bend in the canyon, the fog thinned slightly, revealing the ground.

Isabelle gasped, almost breaking her stare.

The path was littered with bodies.

They were mummified husks, their skin turned to grey leather by the Abyss air. They were frozen in positions of absolute, primal terror.

Damien stepped over a body clad in heavy, enchanted plate armor, a high-level Vanguard.

The man had died crouching, his hands covering his face, his sword lying uselessly in the dirt.

Nearby lay a mage in silk robes. His wand still glowed with a faint, dying light. His head was twisted backward a full hundred and eighty degrees.

"These people..." Isabelle whispered.

"They were strong. I can feel the remnant mana in their bones. Some were 5th Order. Maybe 6th or 7th."

She looked at her own hands, trembling with Hellfire.

"Why?" she asked, her voice cracking.

"My fire doesn't burn them. My gravity doesn't crush them. Master, what are these things? I am a Half-Demon! Why am I so helpless?"

"Because you are trying to fight a Law with a Sword," Damien answered grimly.

He kept his eyes glued to the statues flanking them.

"I read about them in the Voss Family Archives," Damien lied smoothly, drawing from the deep lore of the original novel. "The Forbidden Texts."

"In this world, power is divided into Orders," Damien explained, stepping over a desiccated abyss elf. "Rank 1 to 9. That is the hierarchy of Biology and Mana."

He pointed his chin at the Weeping Angels.

"But these things? They are not biological. They are Abandoned Creations of an Ancient God from an era before magic and aura. They do not run on Mana. They run on pure Laws."

"Laws?"

"Laws," Damien clarified. "The very foundation of the world. Just like how you cannot stab gravity and you cannot burn time."

It's the same way you cannot break a Weeping Angel because, in a Quantum State, they are a fixed point in the world. They are an absolute fact."

Isabelle swallowed hard. "So we can't win."

"No," Damien said. "We can only survive."

He looked ahead, into the swirling mist.

"We have to find the Sovereign. We'll take the blind fold for the commission and get out of here!"

As he said that, a change soon occurred

The canyon narrowed.

The path ahead was blocked by a cluster of fallen pillars, remnants of some ancient temple that had collapsed into the Abyss aeons ago.

"We have to climb over," Damien noted.

But as they approached the debris, the trap sprang.

From the shadows of the pillars, more statues emerged. And from the ridges above, more dropped down.

THUD. THUD. THUD.

Dust billowed.

Damien and Isabelle froze.

They were in a bowl. To the North, twelve Angels. To the South, the ones following them. To the East and West, statues perched on the debris.

"Circle formation," Damien hissed.

They spun slowly, trying to keep their eyes on everything.

But it was impossible.

There were too many angles. If Damien looked at the group on the left, the group on the right moved. If Isabelle checked the rear, the ones on the ridges leaned closer.

The circle was closing.

Five meters. Three meters. Two meters.

They were being herded like cattle into a slaughterhouse.

"Master," Isabelle said, her voice eerily calm.

"I can't cover them all. There are too many blind spots."

Damien's mind raced. He analysed the situation with the cold, detached logic of a gamer facing a puzzle boss.

'Brute force fails. Magic fails. Speed fails.'

'The Rule: They freeze when observed.'

'The Flaw: Observation is line of sight.'

He looked around the debris. He scanned the corpses of the fallen Drifters.

His eyes landed on a body slumped against a fallen pillar. It was a Dwarf, likely an ancestor of the Ironblood Clan, who had ventured down here centuries ago.

Strapped to the Dwarf's arm was a massive Tower Shield.

It was made of Polished Mythril. Despite the dust, the surface shone like a mirror.

Damien's eyes widened.

He remembered a specific mechanic from Blue Star fiction. A logic puzzle regarding Medusa. Regarding Weeping Angels.

'What happens if a statue sees itself?'

"Isabelle," Damien said, his voice dropping an octave.

"Cover my back. I'm going to grab that shield."

"The shield?" Isabelle asked, blasting a fireball to illuminate the area. "It won't stop them!"

"I'm not going to block with it," Damien grinned beneath his mask.

"I'm going to make them look in the mirror."

With that, Damien lunged.

He kept his eyes fixed on the Angels to his left, strafing sideways until he reached the Dwarf's corpse.

Without any hesitation, he grabbed the handle of the Tower Shield. It was heavy, made of solid mythril, but his reinforced body could handle it.

"Cover me!" Damien shouted.

He ripped the shield from the corpse's grip. He spun around.

The Angels were mid-lunge. Their stone fingers were inches from his face. Their mouths were wide, hungry abysses.

Yet Damien didn't strike.

He slammed the bottom of the shield into the dirt, angling the polished, mirror-like surface directly at the swarm of Angels.

"Look at me!" Damien roared.

In the polished surface of the shield, the Angels saw themselves. They saw the other Angels behind them.

CRACK.

The sound was different this time. It was a sharp, final lock.

The Angels in the front row froze. But this time, Damien felt the pressure change.

"They stopped," Isabelle gasped.

"Master, you aren't looking at them!"

Damien turned his head away.

The Angels didn't move.

"They are looking at themselves," Damien whispered, wiping sweat from his eyes.

"And they can never blink."

He looked at the path ahead, guarded by another wave of monsters.

"To defeat a creature of Law," Damien said, lifting the heavy mirror-shield,

"You don't use force. You use the Rules against them."

He signalled to Isabelle.

"Let's turn this canyon into a Hall of Mirrors."

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