Yuki materialized back into Rimelion with a soft shimmer of pixels and chilly night air kissing her cheeks.

  For a moment she stood still, blinking at the quiet world. The others weren’t logged in yet. It was just her, the stars, the river, and the faint hum of nighttime insects.

  Her breath fogged in pale curls as she turned in a slow circle, half expecting their horses to have wandered off or been eaten by an [Ambitious Raccoon].

  But no.

  There they were.

  Tied exactly where she and her friends had left them, by a jagged cluster of rocks overlooking the riverbank. The horses raised their heads lazily when she approached, as if offended she’d even imagined them being irresponsible.

  “Good morning,” Yuki whispered, patting their warm necks. “Or… good night. Or… something.”

  The terrain looked different under starlight, more… colder? She stepped onto the rocky outcrop and crouched, running a hand along the stone. Time had cracked it open, water had smoothed it, wind had eaten away the soft edges. But the scars… those remained.

  Thin radial fractures. Melted surfaces. Strange ripples frozen in stone.

  Then she spotted it.

  A soft glimmer: pale, translucent. Exactly like the illustrations. Yuki inhaled sharply, breath catching in her throat. “Oh!”

  She summoned a small globe of light, letting it hover near her shoulder. The glow washed over the stone surface, revealing more of the material embedded in the cracks.

  Sun-Glass.

  It had an unmistakable texture, smooth like half-melted bottle glass, but cloudy inside, streaked with delicate lines like frozen lightning. The edges shimmered faintly, as if kissed by dawn. Just like Libyan Desert Glass back on Earth.

  She traced a finger along the surface. The almanach’s theory returned instantly:

  Grandmaster-level wind magic blasted small stones, sand, and debris together. The heat fused them. Rainfall and time lithified the mix into a conglomerate. Sun-Glass.

  It wasn’t valuable… not in any economic or enchanting sense.

  Just pretty.

  Just a scar of history.

  Yuki stood there for a long moment, imagining the force. The roar. The collision of wind and dirt and magic so fierce it melted the ground itself.

  She swung her sword once.

  Twice.

  On the third strike, a small shard popped loose, aquamarine-colored, sharp at one end, smooth at the other. The moonlights caught in its body, glowing faintly like a trapped drop of sky.

  “Mine,” she whispered, smiling as she tucked it into her inventory. “Souvenir for Rimebreak museum.”

  With renewed energy, she climbed the rocks, boots scraping lightly, her light flickering across the rough terrain.

  She reached the top and paused.

  And her breath left her in a quiet, stunned exhale.

  Because across the river, just a dozen meters away, the world looked alive. Rolling hills. Lush grasses. Morning mist rising from the fields like soft breath in pre-dawn light. Farms dotted the landscape, with lanterns glowing faintly around them.

  But this side—

  She turned slowly, taking it in. As far as she could see, the land was dead. Not barren like sand. Not abandoned like fallow fields.

  Just…

  Dead.

  The soil was pale gray. Lifeless. Powdered like ash. As if something had drained it of color, drained it of growth, drained it of reality. Yuki tightened her grip on the rock beside her, tiny shivers creeping up her spine.

  “This is where it happened…” she whispered to herself.

  Whatever had killed this land, whatever had turned soil into cold dust, was the same force that left Sun-Glass buried in the stone.

  The same force that once belonged to the Sun Fox. She clenched her fist, imagining herself being so powerful she could change such a vast area.

  She swallowed.

  The others would be here soon.

  Yuki was still staring across the dead-soil wasteland when two soft, familiar voices echoed behind her.

  Her teammates appeared down on the riverbank, first Tramar, who manifested like a disgruntled ghost, eyes half-lidded, and posture screaming why am I alive, followed by Phèdre, who arrived like she had been awake for three hours meditating with scented candles.

  “Hi!” Yuki shouted, waving both arms frantically. “Up here! Up here!”

  Tramar lifted a hand limply. “Not so loud… my soul didn’t spawn in properly.”

  Phèdre climbed the rocks with quiet, fluid ease as she’d never once tripped in her life. Her expression held a faintly entertained curve.

  “You look magnifique,” she told him, tone warm and lightly mocking in equal measure.

  The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Tramar groaned, cracked open that glowing blue vial he’d bragged about all yesterday, something Scamantha had called [Mana Fizz v0.3.1], and chugged half like a desperate alchemist and climb up with Phèdre.

  “I need thirty of these,” he lamented. “And an emotional support animal.”

  Phèdre flicked his forehead with a perfectly manicured nail. “You have Yuki.”

  “I said animal,” Tramar muttered.

  Yuki ignored him and practically bounced in place.

  “Guys—look, look, look—sun’s coming!”

  They all turned.

  And the sunrise unfurled across the horizon.

  The first edge of gold crested the far hills, soft, peach-pink light spilling over the grasslands on the other side of the river, catching the dew, lighting every blade of grass like glass threads.

  Then the color shifted as it crossed the river, reaching the dead soil.

  Where the hills looked alive, hopeful… this side looked like a graveyard of daylight. The sun painted the pale gray earth in shades of ash and honey, creating a haunting contrast; beauty laid over ruin, light refusing to give up on land that no longer remembered.

  Yuki held her breath.

  Her fingers curled around her package and she unfurled the [Sun Fox’s Twilight Paw].

  It glowed faintly, like a sleeping ember stirred awake. The air warmed around her, not in temperature, but in presence. A hush fell over the world, the kind that made even Tramar stop complaining.

  They gathered close as the first full ray of sunlight touched the Paw.

  It was like watching a flame ignite without heat.

  Golden strands, thin as hair, bright as magic, shot out from the Paw in sudden, fierce whips of light.

  Yuki gasped.

  Because the strands didn’t just shine, they reached.

  Toward her.

  Through her.

  She felt a gentle tug deep in her chest. A feeling like warm fingers brushing her magic, flipping pages in her soul as if her essence were a book being read.

  For a momentshe wasn’t Yuki… she was seen?

  Understood.

  And then, as if satisfied with what it found, the rays pulled away and burst outward.

  Threads of golden dawn spooled into the dead field, stitching the air like seamstress-light trying to weave the world back together. Each thread left a fading shimmer behind, like an embroidered promise.

  Yuki swallowed and quickly stuffed the Paw back into her inventory, heart fluttering in her throat.

  Before any of them could speak, the air in front of them cracked.

  A crystalline sound, like glass bending under pressure. A line formed in the empty space. Then another. Then fractures spiderwebbed outward, each glowing with soft dawnlight.

  A tear.

  A translucent seam in reality.

  The tear widened, peeling open slowly until a vertical curtain of pure dawnlight billowed between the cracks: glowing, shifting, almost behaving like a liquid.

  Not a portal, or a door, but more like a veil, a sheet of sunrise hung upright in the world.

  Through it, Yuki saw a forest.

  Not the dead wasteland around them, or the gray ruin. But the forest as it once was, lush, golden, trembling with morning mist and foxfire sparks.

  “OH SAEVERIN—” Tramar shouted, suddenly wide-awake. He darted forward. “GUYS! LOOK AT THIS! BEHIND THE GATE IT LOOKS NORMAL!”

  Phèdre caught his sleeve. “Tramar, attends, do not—”

  He yanked free, already halfway immersed in the glow.

  “NO, IT’S FINE, LOOK—IT’S—” He stopped. His face twisted. He blinked rapidly, as if trying to clear static from his vision. “—uh—actually—hang on—if you look through it, it’s—”

  He froze again.

  “OH GODS IT’S—MY BRAIN—NO—NOPE—NOPENOPENOPE—”

  He backed up fast, hand on his forehead, nearly tripping over a rock.

  “Too much thinking in the morning…” he muttered, collapsing against a boulder.

  Phèdre let out a slow, suffering exhale; half sigh, half I warned you. She patted his back as though soothing an overheated dog.

  “Mon pauvre imbécile,” she murmured, voice full of amusement. “You ran into it like a toddler chasing glitter. Truly… what outcome were you imagining?”

  Yuki didn’t react, her focus locked onto the veil of dawnlight as if a string had pulled taut from her chest straight into the shining tear. The golden threads along its edges fluttered like faint fox tails, beckoning her forward.

  She stepped closer.

  The air changed as she approached, not colder or warmer but alert, humming in a way her mana recognized. The dawnlight shimmer rippled, bending slightly toward her touch, as if it were tasting her intent.

  She didn’t wait.

  “Yuki—!” Tramar tried.

  But she walked through in one clean, sure breath, light kissing her skin, her hair, the tips of her fingers. For a moment she felt folded into sunlight. Warm, weightless, as if drifting through the pause between blinking and waking.

  Then she was standing on moss.

  Phèdre followed a second later, graceful even when passing through literal magic. Tramar stumbled through the veil, half bracing for another headache. “Okay—okay, this is fine—my brain is not exploding—good start—”

  The moment he stepped in, the veil behind them snapped shut.

  A soft hiss, a ripple of gold and then… nothing.

  They spun around in surprise, but the tear was gone; no shine, no crackling glass, no seam in the world to mark how they’d arrived.

  Just forest, endless forest, no visible beginning or end. No horizon, no thinning treeline, no familiar road. Just trees… towering, pale-barked, their leaves shimmering faintly like scales catching light.

  Yuki’s breath caught.

  Everything looked real… but not quite right.

  The leaves rustled when wind passed through, but their shimmer remained even afterward, a soft afterglow.

  Shadows bent at uneven angles, as if the sun illuminating them was nudging everything one inch in the wrong direction.

  And every tree trunk held knot patterns, spirals, loops, whorls, that repeated in unsettling precision, like someone copy-pasted the forest through a magical editing tool.

  “It’s so pretty,” Yuki whispered, reaching out.

  She touched a nearby trunk. The bark felt rough, warm, undeniably solid, but when her palm pressed deeper, a faint ripple of light shivered across the surface before vanishing.

  Tramar groaned behind her. “My head hurts again. There are too many visual illusions. I swear the shadows are trying to do math on me.”

  “Math cannot hurt you, chéri,” Phèdre said lightly.

  “It can and it has,” Tramar snapped, rubbing his temples.

  Phèdre, with a suspiciously playful little hum, lifted her staff and tapped one tree with a crisp crack.

  The tree shuddered. A pulse of gold raced up its bark like startled veins, then faded… leaving the trunk perfectly unharmed.

  “Hm,” Phèdre murmured, tilting her head. “Très solid. Even illusions possess more stability than your confidence.”

  Yuki’s curiosity flared. She pressed her shoulder gently against another trunk, testing resistance. It didn’t bend, didn’t glitch, didn’t flicker. It felt like any other normal tree. A beautiful, slightly phosphorescent tree.

  Tramar, however, had to test things his own way.

  He formed a small firebolt in his hand, no bigger than a candle flame, and flicked it at a cluster of roots.

  The bolt sizzled as it hit.

  For a second it burnt normally: embers spreading, smoke curling, bark charring black.

  Then the fire ran back up the flame, zipping into the air like rewound footage. The burn marks folded inward, disappearing as though the tree inhaled them, leaving the bark smooth and unchanged.

  Tramar stared. “I did not like that.”

  “Then stop provoking it,” Phèdre murmured, tone gentle but edged. “Do not burn the sacred labyrinth, mon chéri.”

  “I wasn’t—I was—It was science,” Tramar muttered.

  Phèdre snorted quietly. “Yes, and you wonder why it dislikes you.”

  Yuki couldn’t help it; she was blinking from one tree to another, a full-spectrum giddy glow in her chest. Her fingers danced over bark and leaves and shimmering shadows, her mind firing off theories faster than she could voice them.

  “This is incredible,” she breathed. “The illusions are layered with environmental magic, maybe sunrise-tied, and the regrowth function is—”

  A branch rustled, and all three froze. They spotted a deliberate movement in the canopy above.

  Yuki tipped her head back slowly.

  Something shifted between the leaves, something light-footed, quick, weight balanced with predatory grace. A flick of pale fur. A shimmer of light.

  Then silence.

  Yuki’s heart hammered as Tramar whispered, “Please tell me that was not that fox.”

  Phèdre leaned in. “Please tell me it was, chéri. I would adore meeting a divine fox that dramatic.”

  Yuki swallowed, eyes wide, smile half forming.

  Whatever it was… they weren’t alone in the Sun Fox’s Labyrinth.