The Hotel of Mirrors and the Two of Them (1)
We entered the Hotel of Mirrors.
A pristine white hotel, lavish to the point of excess. The corridors inside looked just as spacious and refined — until you walked them for more than a moment. Then you understood. This was no ordinary space. It was even more absurd than the dungeon-warped campus we'd just left. Every surface was lined with mirrors.
I stayed calm.
So far, this is exactly like the original.
An A-rank villain's appearance had put the party in danger, but the Ark System — triggered by An Yumin — had pulled us into this hotel. Fatal Blood, the villain, wouldn't have been able to follow. Only legitimate Theia cadets could enter this place.
Not every plot thread had been resolved yet, but this was clearly a location tied to the protagonist, An Yumin. That was why her party members — Jo Arin and I — had been allowed in with her.
I looked around. There wasn't much to look at. A long, white corridor. Mirrors covering every wall. No lobby. No elevators. Nothing else. An ordinary cadet would have been lost to confusion in seconds.
The Hotel of Mirrors had another name: Leticein's Mansion. According to the original story, this was the home of the legendary Archmage himself.
His taste is something else. You could develop claustrophobia just standing here.
I, on the other hand, was intrigued. I tested the corridor with a few steps, and my reflection multiplied across every surface. There was nothing in this place but those mirrors — and the mirrors were the heart of both the space and the quest. They were mirrors of truth.
That's why, in the original, An Yumin's weakness gets reflected in them.
You can hide things from others, but deep in the heart the truth remains. Distrust of her own ability. The anxiety of watching cadets like Song Sia and Choi Hana pull ahead of her. This quest forced her to face those fragile feelings head-on and overcome them.
I checked the room numbers along the corridor. Four digits. The first two were 10 — tenth floor. That confirmed it.
The one invited into the Hotel of Mirrors is An Yumin, just as I thought.
Ten was her favorite number. In the special Awakener sports tournaments staged for hero publicity, the ace always wore number 10. And the ten strongest heroes who stood at the absolute peak were collectively called the Master Heroes. An Yumin's mother had been one of them. The number itself was practically synonymous with her dream.
Leticein and An Yumin really are connected.
We would enter the Hotel of Mirrors again in the future. But this tenth floor — the truth mirrors here held no information about Leticein. To reach other floors, An Yumin herself would have to move. Only when she faced her inner weakness and overcame it would the path to other floors open. In this particular quest, that would be the extent of it — other floors unlocking, nothing more.
This was Leticein's hotel. Somewhere in here, one of his Three Sacred Treasures might still be waiting.
As a villain, just thinking about those items — the highest-grade artifacts in the original setting — made my pulse quicken. Especially since one of the Three Sacred Treasures was a mirror.
And of course this place is called the Hotel of Mirrors.
Maybe the authority I possessed wasn't pure coincidence either. I was still just an extra, but my interference with An Yumin might already have set off some butterfly effect I couldn't predict.
I searched the floor for her.
Jo Arin won't be on this floor.
She had already overcome her own weakness. She would be resting safely somewhere else — not on the tenth floor, where the mirrors of truth waited.
Then a thought struck me.
If these are mirrors of truth… do they reflect mine as well?
Before I'd gained my hidden authority, I would have been a mess of contradictions and frailty far worse than An Yumin's. Even after all the injustice I'd suffered in Aegis, I'd endured everything for her sake.
I should check.
If there was any hidden fragility inside me — any unconscious weakness I didn't know about — I needed to know it all.
I turned and faced a mirror head-on. A young man who had fully shed the blonde-tanned punk look stared back with an easy, open expression. Nothing changed.
No special event for me, then?
My mental fortitude was at 90. Maybe I was fine the same way Student Council President Jo Arin had been fine in the original — nothing happened to her in the Hotel of Mirrors either.
But right then, the me inside the mirror transformed.
The cadet uniform became an assassin's cloak. I checked my own clothes — only the reflection had changed. Then the figure in the mirror drew something from that cloak.
That is…
A familiar mask. I had never actually worn it, but the world knew it as Unknown's mask — stained with blood-red blotches. The me in the mirror held it and smiled.
Unknown…
The truth the mirror had made of me was Unknown. For a moment the figure seemed to have something to say. Its lips moved — but no voice reached me.
Leticein?
The shape of Unknown's mouth looked like it was forming that word. Then a presence stirred further down the corridor. Unknown put on the mask and vanished from the glass.
An Yumin, then.
I still wanted to know what Unknown had been trying to say — but right now I needed to rejoin her. I had to check her condition. This tenth floor was her space; she held the primary authority here.
I called out toward the presence beyond.
"An Yumin? Are you okay?"
She responded. Our eyes met. She was smiling — brightly, openly.
"Lee Junwoo… no, Junwoo!"
She cried it out with pure joy and ran straight into me, throwing her arms around me. For a moment I couldn't speak.
The two of us stood there holding each other for a while. Something about An Yumin was off. More than off.
"Just the two of us like this… it feels so good. Like before we ever started Aegis."
At first I'd assumed she was frightened — trapped in a bizarre space, clinging out of fear. That wasn't it. Her eyes were different from usual.
This doesn't feel like An Yumin.
Normally her gaze was stubborn but clear. Now it was hazy. She looked up at me as if she adored me — and at the same time, something ominous lived in those eyes. Like looking into a villain's. An unease I couldn't name.
Chaos?
I could feel it from her — that peculiar attribute of power that truly dangerous villains leaked without meaning to. But An Yumin was the protagonist. Calling her a villain at this point in the story was as far from the truth as you could get. And if she really were a villain, my hidden trait — Unknown — should have activated.
No. Even if the trait doesn't trigger, this feeling is unmistakably a villain's.
For a second I wondered if a villain was wearing her face. But the woman in my arms was An Yumin, without question. Still holding her, I turned my head. We were standing on the tenth floor of the Hotel of Mirrors. Every mirror lining the corridor was a mirror of truth — and dominion over this floor belonged to her. The reflection showed An Yumin, clearly and completely. The only difference was that she looked like a woman utterly in love.
Or maybe that is her true self.
I was briefly thrown. In the original, the mirrors of truth revealed the weakness An Yumin kept buried. What she was showing now was something else entirely — honest, unguarded affection for me. So I didn't push her out of my arms. I held her more gently instead.
"Junwoo…"
In a shy voice I'd never heard from her before, she buried her face against my chest. Her warmth pressed into me. We'd been fighting all evening, but the scent of her still carried — the same scent that had once made me fall for her. If the Unknown title hadn't been active, I might have fallen for her all over again. She was that lovely right now.
Is this the tenth floor's influence?
In the original, the way off the tenth floor was to confront the truth hidden in An Yumin's heart. In other words, to clear this quest, she had to fully face and release the feelings she'd been suppressing toward me — the longing to go back to how things used to be.
She'd confessed her feelings during Hell Week, but what I felt from her now was far more honest, far more intense.
In that moment, the scenery in the mirrors began to change.
That is…
The glass showed the two of us — not as we were now, locked in an embrace, but as we had been at Theia High School. I understood at once.
This space is under An Yumin's complete control.
It was no different from dreaming. But according to the original, whatever happened here would leave a lasting mark on her. And the dream she wanted right now was a very sweet one.
"I'm going to go back to that time. Back to before those other girls got in the way of us."
She said it, then kissed me. A brief kiss — barely a moment. She pulled back, her face flushed, then slipped free of my arms and laced her fingers through mine.
"So tell me your heart, too."
The moment I heard that, a very good idea came to me.
The way she is right now… she might be able to take us somewhere beyond the tenth-floor corridor.
In the original, all you ever saw here were the corridor mirrors. No further clues about Leticein. And I still couldn't stop thinking about what Unknown had mouthed in the glass.
Playing along with this sweet dream of hers wouldn't hurt.
I leaned close to her ear.
"The hallway's a little much. Want to go somewhere else?"
Her face went red again — but she nodded.
"Then let's go there."
She pointed past us. We moved together and stopped in front of a guest room door.