Semua Bab Bloodscript: Survival Game of the Reborn: Bab 51 - Bab 60

Vinyl met my back. For a second I thought I was still hitting water—the impact knocked the breath out of me either way—but when I dragged in air it tasted like stale coffee, metal, and too many people in too small a space. The bus. We were back on the bus. I lay there for a heartbeat, sprawled half across my seat and half in the aisle, lungs burning, ears ringing with phantom calliope notes that weren’t there anymore. Someone groaned nearby. Another voice cursed softly. The hiss of the doors closing cut off the last trailing echo of the carnival’s static. Cold sank into my bones as the adrenaline bled out. I was soaked. My clothes clung to me in heavy, clammy folds. My hair dripped onto the already‑stained seat fabric, adding new wet patches to the old. My fingers still curled like they were gripping rope, ached. I forced them to unclench. Corvin was in the seat next to mine. Of course he was. He was perched on the very edge, elbows braced on his knees, head tippe

The mirrors didn’t wait for me to pick a version.They multiplied.The older author and the Game‑master faded to the periphery as the corridor ahead of me lit up, pane after pane flaring with scenes like someone had flipped through every “what if” file I’d ever half‑imagined and pinned them to the walls.On my immediate left, a reflection coalesced into a woman I almost didn’t recognize at first.Me.But softer.She wore a nondescript cardigan and jeans, hair pulled back in a messy knot that had never been a style so much as an afterthought. The circles under her eyes were deeper, but not from late‑night drafting—more from long commutes, overtime, fluorescent lights.She sat at a cubicle lit by bad LEDs, typing something into a spreadsheet. A mug sat next to her keyboard, chipped at the rim. A Post‑it with the words “Remember: buy printer ink” fluttered on her monitor.There are no notebooks on the desk.No files open with fiction titles.Just a screensaver of a beach she’d never visi

The corridor narrowed, then narrowed again.Mirrors closed in so tight on either side that if I’d had to take a deep breath, my shoulders might’ve brushed the glass. Every pane still hummed with some possible version of me—author‑me, office‑me, Ethan‑forever me—but as I walked, their images began to smear, colors bleeding, faces blurringLike the maze was losing interest in my little personal melodrama.Or aiming for me at something else.The floor under my boots pulsed once.A low, rolling shudder ran through the walls, like distant thunder trapped in crystal. For a second, all my reflections flickered—not into alternate Willas, but into fuzzy afterimages, like a bad signal.The feeling that someone had just yanked on an invisible cord tied to my chest hit so hard I had to grab the nearest frame to steady myself.“Corvin,” I breathed.I didn’t know how I knew it was him.I just did.The maze adjusted.The next step forward landed me not in another narrow hall but in an opening.A cha

His grip burned.Not with heat—his fingers were cold as the mirror surface—but with pressure, with insistence, with the beginning of that awful, stretching sensation trying to pull me through.The not‑world behind him bulged hungrily, the cottage and the hills and the too‑blue sky all bending toward us like they were on elastic bands.“Stop fighting,” Mirror‑Corvin snarled. “You don’t *have* to hurt anymore.”“I don’t trust anyone who says that,” I grated, yanking my wrist back.He was stronger.Of course he was. The Game had built him out of all the things I found irresistible about the real Corvin—his power, his certainty, his capacity to hold a line under pressure—and then shaved off the friction.I stumbled forward another half‑step, the mirror’s liquid surface kissing my knuckles. Cold lanced up my arm, making my teeth clack.Images flashed on that surface.Me in the cottage, laughing. Me at the desk. I woke up in a bed that didn’t smell like bus vinyl and blood and fear, but lik

The air got heavy.Not just metaphorically.It felt like someone had dropped a lead blanket over my shoulders.Every eye on me. Every breath on this glass floor calibrated around the idea that if I walked those ten steps to the central mirror, everyone else’s odds would improve.Key Author.Battery.Sacrifice.My heart pounded so hard it made my vision pulse.If I did it—if I stepped forward, merged, became whatever sleek, white‑lit operator the Game wanted—I’d stop running. Stop dying. Stop dragging people over rotten planks while the world tried to eat us.I’d also become the engine for the next hundred rounds.Fix everything.For them.Break myself.For it.My knees wobbled.I didn’t move.Not because I’d decided.Because my body didn’t know which direction to fall.Before I could lean anywhere, a shape cut into my line of sight.Corvin.He stepped in front of me, between me and the dais, shoulders squared, stance wide. The reflection in the heart mirror echoed the move, his image