Betrayal

Amid these passages that shared a common apex, Angel felt herself being drawn toward it, as though she were an iron nail facing a magnet. One moment of carelessness, and its magnetic pull would catch her, sending her flying helplessly toward it.

If her mind had not remained clear and her spirituality reasonably abundant, she suspected she would have drifted involuntarily in that direction, following the passages deep into the magnificent city.

And I have a feeling that reaching the interior of that city, the center of the "corruption," would be disastrous for me... Angel swept her gaze around and abandoned the idea of using the Mirror World to flee quickly from the Calamity Giant. She floated only a few meters through the darkness before returning to the Physical World.

Because the two worlds operated under different rules, she now appeared dozens of meters from where she had entered the Mirror World. Yet her distance from the slowly approaching Calamity Giant had shrunk rather than grown. The dark clouds continually appearing in the sky seemed to press down upon her head, and the giant's silhouette amid the thick smoke and flames grew clearer. She could almost make out his charred skeleton and the purple flames filling the places where flesh and blood should have been.

Looking directly at a mythical creature like this made Angel feel as though steel needles had pierced her eyes. Pain, aching pressure, and other sensations flooded her brain, and her spirituality, which Anne's power of "order" had just calmed, began surging again.

Whoosh—

As she turned aside and averted her gaze, a flash of light streaked through the corner of her vision. Sirio Sauron seemed to have found a way to keep flying with flames after his Flame Transformation had been stolen. Wrapped in white-hot