The final corridor led to a space filled with mirrors.
As Cyr stepped into the area, the corridor behind him vanished, leaving only a single path ahead.
At the end of that path? More mirrors, forming its sides and endpoint.
"That guy definitely took advantage of his role as the game master to sneak out," Cyr muttered, rubbing the back of his neck as he stood in place.
The mirrors in this space were all damaged—some shattered to mere shards, clinging stubbornly to their frames.
Each broken mirror had its own unique "style."
The floor was covered with fragments, some reduced to glittering dust.
Countless reflections of himself stared back from the jagged surfaces, mimicking his every move.
"Is this a puzzle?" Cyr wondered aloud, crouching to pick up a shard from the floor. He ran his fingers along its sharp edges, then looked thoughtfully at the surrounding broken mirrors.
The space was roughly 150 square meters, and the fragments on the floor likely numbered in the tens of thousands.
Each piece was irregularly shaped, with no apparent pattern. Even if they were marked like puzzle pieces, putting together so many fragments would take far too long.
"Am I going to bleed out here?" Cyr sighed, glancing at the shattered mirrors and shards around him. He preemptively stuffed some paper into his nose to stem the inevitable nosebleed.
Carefully, he began sorting the fragments by size, arranging them neatly on the floor. Even the tiniest, nearly invisible pieces were meticulously collected and set aside.
The process consumed a significant amount of time.
What followed was a grueling and monotonous puzzle-solving session.
Without a marker to label the fragments, Cyr had to rely entirely on memory to recall the size and shape of each piece when needed.
It was a taxing task for the brain, akin to solving a highly complex mental puzzle.
Unnoticed, the paper in his nose turned from white to deep red, but Cyr remained unfazed, his gaze fixed on the fragments as he pressed them into place.
When a shard touched the wall, it adhered as though by invisible glue, holding firmly without risk of falling.
He needed to work faster—there was no telling how many more trials awaited him. To reach the port of Banato by January 1st, accounting for travel time and potential delays, he couldn't afford to linger here for long.
The faster his mind worked, the steadier his hands became.
Soon, one of the mirrors was nearly complete under his skillful reconstruction. Yet, Cyr halted his progress.
"There's no fragment for this spot…" he murmured, staring at the single gap left in the mirror. He glanced at the pieces still laid out on the floor.
He was certain—every piece was accounted for, and none fit the missing space.
Expression calm, he swapped out the blood-soaked paper in his nose for fresh sheets and began assembling another mirror.
Once again, the same problem arose: a missing piece.
It wasn't that the mirrors were impossible to complete. They were incomplete by design.
Hundreds of mirrors were pieced together under his hands, but each one had a conspicuous gap.
Meanwhile, a small mountain of bloodied paper grew in the corner.
"Ugh—" Cyr suddenly stopped, dropping the fragment in his hand as he collapsed onto the floor. His breathing grew rapid and labored, interrupted by dry heaving.
His body felt numb, cold.
The combined effects of blood loss, mental overexertion, and low blood sugar hit him like a truck, overwhelming his senses.
After a bout of heavy panting, he lay flat on the cold ground, chest heaving, face pale. His nose continued to bleed, staining his lower face and the collar of his shirt with both dried and fresh blood.
He looked utterly defeated, as though he'd been mercilessly beaten into the dirt.
Yet, despite it all, a laugh bubbled up from his chest.
"Hahaha… hahahahaha…"
"Hahahahahahaha…"
Cyr's laughter was filled with hysteria and a hint of extremity, so much so that tears glistened in his azure blue eyes.
Not bad, not bad at all—this game.
64,892 pieces.
It could have been harder. Why not bump it up to hundreds of thousands?
As if exhausted from laughing, he sat up weakly, rummaged through his backpack, and pulled out bread and an apple, quickly eating to regain some strength.
"From the time I started piecing it together until now, 162,891 seconds have passed..."
"Less than two days. It should be the 27th now."
"That means I still have time." After finishing his meal, he closed his eyes briefly to regulate his breathing. Standing up again, he burned the blood-soaked paper in a small fire to get rid of it.
Cyr stepped into the only remaining corridor. His hand brushed along the mirrored walls until he heard a click. One section of the mirror retracted, revealing a hidden chamber behind it.
Inside, there was a table, chair, and even a skeleton slumped in the corner. In the skeleton's hands lay a small, intricate box—made of a material that was not quite metal but felt extraordinarily sturdy. It was locked with a combination code.
Of course, one blast of Blue could easily force it open. But the contents would likely end up as shards alongside the box.
Recalling the missing fragments from the mirrors outside, Cyr's instincts told him the box couldn't be forced open.
He ran his fingers along the surface of the box until he found a set of raised, uneven letters etched at the bottom:
"How many mirrors are here?"
How many mirrors? Did individual shards count? If not, how many intact mirrors were there?
"The code is five digits, so the answer should be…" Cyr whispered, twisting the lock mechanism.
66,666 pieces in total— including those scattered on the ground and those still intact.
The lock clicked open with a satisfying sound.
Inside was a single mirror fragment.
Cyr immediately matched the shard to one of the gaps in the mirrors outside.
"So, there must be similar fragments waiting in the other rooms…" He pocketed the piece, exited, and moved into another chamber.
---
In the second room, the box's bottom bore no words but instead four sets of letters from the Hunter world's alphabet.
The code was another four digits.
"Simple," Cyr muttered. Using the alphabet's standard sequence, he cross-referenced the letters and connected the dots to reveal the code: 2733.
The second box opened without trouble.
---
The third box had an unknown set of shapes on its bottom. After several attempts to overlap and cancel the shapes, he failed. Trying again with segmentation and rearrangement, he succeeded.
---
The fourth box featured twelve different symbols, with the code still requiring four digits.
"All I need to do is group the symbols by type and sequence," Cyr said, quickly inputting the numbers derived from the arrangement.
One by one, he cleared every room and solved every puzzle.
---
Eventually, Cyr returned to the main chamber, armed with all the missing fragments. He inserted them one by one into the gaps in the mirrors.
Once the last mirror was complete, the walls began to shift.
They rotated and reassembled, erasing the previous corridors entirely. All the completed mirrors vanished, replaced by a massive, towering door.
The door was enormous and heavy, but its keyhole was absurdly small—and no key was in sight.
"So, after finishing the puzzle, it's time to find a key?" Cyr smirked lightly, his tone dripping with sarcasm.
"This pointless waste of time just never ends, does it?"
"Well then," he muttered, cracking his knuckles, "let's see if my old skills have gotten rusty…"
From his fingertips, a thin thread of nen extended, sliding delicately into the keyhole. Pressing his ear against the door, Cyr enhanced his hearing with nen to listen for the slightest movements inside the mechanism.
Using nen threads as makeshift tools, Cyr deftly picked the lock.
Years ago, he had learned this skill for a cosplay of Dazai Osamu. Back then, he'd mastered using anything from hairpins and wires to cards and stiff paper to open locks.
With a click, the door creaked open.
"Got it," he said, casually pushing the heavy door aside and stepping through.
---
Beyond the door, there was no anticipated exit.
Instead, it led to an empty hall, vast and barren.
"…Enough already." Cyr's voice was flat, his patience clearly frayed. Looking at the room, he wasted no time. He swapped his bloodstained clothes for a fresh, clean set right on the spot.
"If you're telling me to carve my own path…" He smirked maliciously, raising both hands.
"Blue—"
Black and blue energy surged outward, flooding the entire hall in an instant. The underground space shook violently as walls crumbled and shattered under the relentless bombardment.
Fine sand began seeping in through the cracks, accompanied by the sound of structures breaking apart.
With a rumbling crash, the walls completely collapsed. A torrent of golden desert sand poured in, threatening to bury the maze entirely.
"Whoa." Cyr remained expressionless, immediately teleporting upwards using Blue.
He emerged above the chaos, shaking the sand off his hair and clothes while glancing down at the swirling vortex of the collapsing maze below.
"Yare yare," he sighed, adopting a carefree tone laced with mock irritation. "Almost ended up buried alive… self-burial, at that."
With a shrug, he brushed off the near-disaster and casually moved forward, as if nothing had happened.
"What the hell did you do down there—?!"
Not far below, a voice filled with disbelief and confusion rang out.
The leader, who had always maintained the image of a wealthy and laid-back middle-aged man, finally lost his usual composed demeanor.
What on earth had this white-haired kid done in the desert maze? How had it collapsed?!
And how did he come out so fast?!
Even though the leader had high expectations for the boy's abilities, this speed was completely beyond his predictions.
After all, the desert test site was notoriously difficult—so difficult that since its creation, no examinee had ever successfully passed it.
But here he was, walking out in under three days.
As the leader ran toward the commotion, his mind raced with questions.
"Ah, that?" The white-haired boy suddenly vanished from midair and reappeared beside the leader, casually running alongside him with his hands behind his head.
The leader glanced over while still sprinting, giving the boy a moment of his attention.
"Well, I got bored with the puzzles, so I just blew a path straight through."
"By the way, I'm not responsible for paying to fix the test site, right?"
The boy's snow-white hair and azure eyes gleamed under the desert sun. His smile was dazzling—arrogant and laced with a devilish malice that overshadowed his angelic appearance.
It was a smile that screamed mischief, a smile that could only belong to a complete troublemaker.
The rumbling behind them finally subsided, and the two stopped running.
The leader turned to look back at the desert. It was just sand, endless yellow sand as far as the eye could see.
"An unconventional approach, huh…" The leader scratched his head in frustration.
Oh well, unconventional hunters weren't exactly rare.
"Don't worry about compensation. Any damages during the exam are covered by the Hunter Association." He sighed, finally answering the boy's question.
At least he didn't have to worry about the money.
"No problem then. By the way, do you know how to get to Banato Port?" The boy's tone was casual but assertive, as if asking for directions was his natural right.
Though the map he'd seen earlier told him Gordeau Desert was east of Banato Port, he had no idea where he currently was within the desert.
"…Banato Port is that way." The leader pointed in a random direction.
As the navigator, giving directions to an examinee was no issue.
"Got it. Thanks." The boy glanced in the indicated direction, nodded slightly, and vanished once more.
"I'm a little curious to see what this kid will accomplish as a hunter…" The leader chuckled, shaking his head. He hadn't even caught sight of the boy's retreating figure, yet his voice was filled with expectation.
---
With Blue, the boy traversed Gordeau Desert in record time, arriving at the nearest city.
"Today is… December 28th."
"Three days left until January 1st."
"There should be some transportation to Banato Port…" He muttered to himself as he walked into a jewelry store. Without hesitation, he dumped the contents of his bag onto the counter.
Golden ornaments and sparkling gemstones spilled out, dazzling under the bright lights of the shop.
"Sir, you mean to…?" The clerk behind the counter blinked in surprise but quickly regained her professional demeanor.
"Selling. You buying?" The boy's impatience was practically tangible as he raised an eyebrow.
"One moment, please…" The clerk made a quick phone call, and shortly after, a man in a suit appeared.
Three minutes later, the boy left the store with a thick wad of cash. Without pausing, he headed for a luxurious-looking hotel nearby.
He booked a deluxe suite, cleaned himself up, and stood before the full-length mirror, admiring his reflection.
White hair, blue eyes, pale skin, and dark facial markings.
Apart from his facial features, which still retained a hint of his former self, every other detail had changed. He was practically unrecognizable.
"Still handsome." He nodded in satisfaction, brushing his teeth as he stared into the mirror.
No wonder he had over a million followers as a cosplayer.
Though cosplay wasn't strictly about looks, a striking appearance certainly helped. If he weren't good-looking, he wouldn't have gained such a large following.
Not that it stopped others from relying on heavy photo editing and filters—he had seen profiles where the photos barely resembled the real person.
Shaking his head at the thought, he sat on the bed and picked up the bedside phone, dialing the front desk.
"I'd like breakfast sent to my room tomorrow morning. Also, please book me a ticket—any form of transport—to Banato Port." He gave his instructions while turning on the room's TV.
Hanging up, he immediately collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep.
°°°
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