How could this have happened? How could they have missed and not heard that someone was sneaking up on them? One moment of inattention had been enough. Harry ducked backwards as fast as he could and staggered. The approaching bolt missed him by a hair, whizzing past his chest and then towards the surface of the mirror. When it hit the shimmering glass, however, the mirror did not shatter as one might have expected. The surface bent backwards like an elastic membrane from the force of the impact and then stretched again. The bolt did not come out the other side either, but had disappeared, swallowed by the mirror. All this happened in the blink of an eye. Harry regained his balance and drew his sword from his belt. He saw Yuri already rushing forward, pulling his axe from his back in preparation for battle. The giant charged a group of men. They were five sinister figures in adventurous-looking armor. Their individual pieces didn't seem to fit together and had probably been acquired in raids. One of the men was putting a new bolt on his crossbow. He was the one who had just tried to kill Harry. Next to him stood a warrior with a helmet on his head, leaving only his eyes uncovered. He had also drawn his sword and was gesturing to the three others to pounce on Yuri. These three others looked more like a cross between apes and humans, with hair all over their bodies and even their faces, and a hunched posture. In their hands they carried knotty hardwood clubs covered in crusted blood. When they saw the sign of their commander, they began to grunt and stormed forward without a second thought.

"Run away! Quickly!" Harry shouted to Abigail, who stared at the attackers with wide eyes. The TRAP agents were outnumbered and he probably wouldn't be able to protect her. She had to get to safety before the crossbowman was ready to fire again. Then he ran after Yuri. The first of those grotesque ape-men had already reached him and was charging him, club in hand. Yuri had the presence of mind to turn his long axe and drive the handle straight into the attacker's stomach. As he doubled over in pain and the club fell from his hands, Yuri pulled the handle back and swung, slamming the axe into his back with great force. The ape-man screamed at the top of his lungs as he was slaughtered. But the other two were already flying towards Yuri. He tried to quickly pull the axe from his first opponent, but to no avail, as the lower hook of the blade had become lodged in the ape's spine.

"Oh shit," he gasped as he lifted the axe with the hairy, still writhing body hanging from the end. At that moment, the others tackled him to the ground at full speed. Yuri immediately tried to get to his feet, but then he saw one of the apes above him bring his club down on him. Then something metallic flashed and passed through his opponent. Blood sprayed down on Yuri, and a moment later the ape's head fell from its neck, resting on Yuri's chest. It had been Harry who had decapitated the creature with his sword.

"Disgusting," Yuri grunted, grabbing the bloody head by the hair and jumping back to his feet. Then he threw the shaggy head at the remaining ape-man, who now lunged at him, completely unimpressed and death-defying, and hit him in the face. Still, the butcher ran on as if possessed. Meanwhile, the Commander had reached Harry and crossed swords with him. It was immediately clear that he was an opponent of a different caliber than his primitive minions. Moreover, his armor gave him a distinct advantage, while Harry was still clad only in pants and boots. A quick series of attacks and parries ensued between the two. The street samurai realized after the first few seconds that he would not be able to bring this fight to an early end. For the time being, the commander did not offer him any openings into which to push. Now he just had to try to buy Abigail and Yuri enough time to act and turn the situation in their favor.

"No," Abigail gasped, who instead of running away as Harry had wanted, had just taken cover behind the next larger tree. She watched in horror as the crossbowman raised his now reloaded weapon and aimed at Yuri from behind. He was fighting the last ape with his bare hands, dodging the blows of the club. She had to do something! If she didn't act now, Yuri was doomed. But what, what could she do?

"Please, please, please!" she croaked and closed her eyes. This had to work, this was her only chance. She thought about the interface, tried to picture it in her mind's eye and was startled when she suddenly saw it in full detail in front of her. What was different now? Why did it work right away without her ever having practiced it? Never mind, don't waste a thought on doubts or explanations, every second counts! She saw a screen in front of her, with program lines scrolling from bottom to top. It was too fast, she couldn't read what was there, couldn't understand the text! Even as she thought this, wishing the code would slow down, it did, and time seemed to slow down altogether. It was as if she was in control, just by the power of her mind. Now she could understand the code. It was the complete representation in programming language of everything that was happening around her right now, with three inputting entities - Harry, Yuri, and herself - and a fourth entity, the world, responding to those inputs like a sophisticated neural network. She stopped time completely and changed the material of the shooter's crossbow from wood to liquid steel. As she confirmed her input and allowed time to return to normal, she heard his horrified screams. She opened her eyes. With stunned horror and a face contorted in pain, the archer watched as his crossbow, transformed into red-hot metal, flowed over his hands and arms, turning them into smoking lumps of flesh. He collapsed, unconscious from the pain.

"Oh, um, whoops..." Abigail gasped as she saw what she had just done. She hadn't thought about the consequences of her actions, she had just done the first thing that came to her mind to save Yuri. And it had worked, even if the solution had an extremely drastic effect. But what worked once might work a second time! She closed her eyes again, searched the code for the remaining ape-man's club in the same way, and wrote a motion-sensitive, explosive core into it. There must be some creativity and variation, she thought to herself. Then she ran the lines again. Yuri's opponent was about to swing wide for another blow when the weapon suddenly exploded in his hand, tearing off his entire forearm up to the elbow. Before he realized what had just happened, Yuri's powerful left hook caught him in the face, knocking him to the ground and mercifully knocking him unconscious.

"Wow, what's going on here?" exclaimed the giant, who was of course completely surprised himself. Then he caught sight of Abigail in the background, standing there with a focused expression on her face, seemingly watching the fight, but at the same time mentally absent. The amulet around her neck shone brighter than ever. Had that been her work? Had she really managed to penetrate the very foundations of this world to change it, as Harry had suspected? Only now did he notice the crossbowman, still lying on the ground and smouldering. Yes, there was no other explanation, it had to be Abigail.

"Demons, this is the work of demons!" cried the commander, retreating as he realized what was happening around him. His group was incapacitated or dead, he was the last one left. Yuri, meanwhile, ran to the corpse of his opponent with his axe in it, placed one foot on the lifeless body, grabbed the handle of the weapon and pulled it out with a terrible crack.

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"Demon on the way!" he yelled at the Commander, swinging the bloody axe and running like a steamroller in Harry's direction to help him. When his opponent saw what was coming, he turned and fled in panic. Harry started to follow, but then jumped aside as a precaution to make way for Yuri, who had picked up some speed.

"Gods help me!" the commander screamed desperately, and in the next moment the axe handle, which Yuri held horizontally in front of him with both hands, struck him in the back. The fleeing man was knocked off his feet, flew three steps forward, and landed face down on the thick root of an old tree. He barely had time to look back. The last thing he saw was Yuri driving the axe straight into his chest. The blow had been delivered with such force that it pierced his chain mail, chest, and even went through his back to the forest floor below.

"Not bad," he heard Harry's voice behind him and turned around. The other two had caught up with him and he looked at their exhausted faces.

"Yeah, isn't it?" the giant nodded, grinning and pointing at the still twitching body. "I call it *robber on a stick*."

"Now I want to see who's hiding under that helmet," Harry said, bending down to the defeated man. "He fought damn well, I've never seen a fighting technique like that before." He then grabbed the helmet and pulled it off the Commander's head. When they saw his face, they were taken aback.

"I know him from somewhere," Yuri mused, rubbing his hands together.

"Yeah, me too," Harry confirmed. "I just don't know where to put him now."

"I know!" Abigail gasped and bent over the dead man. For a brief moment, her excitement overcame her disgust at the corpse. "Don't you remember? He's one of the scientists from the lab we rescued Yanny from. One of the bastards who cut off her hand with the laser."

"You're right!" Yuri nodded and Harry remembered too.

"But what's he doing here? These guys couldn't fight, we just tied them up in handy packages with some cut wires," he remembered.

"I think there's a deep psychological reason for this," Abigail mused. "Yanny may not have consciously witnessed the procedure, but she certainly saw this man in the lab. Considering that he was one of the people responsible for the experiments on her, it's almost logical that we would meet him here in her mind in such a role," the programmer continued.

"By the way, you did very good job with magic earlier," Yuri interjected, giving Abigail a thumbs up. She beamed proudly.

"Yeah, it just worked, oddly enough it wasn't as complicated as I thought it would be," she explained. "Imagining the controls and the interface was actually enough. Did you notice time slowing down?"

"Not at all," the other two replied in unison.

"Okay, that's weird, I can't explain it. I really need to talk to Yanny about this when we get back. Maybe she'll have an idea..." the programmer thought.

"But we still haven't deactivated the barrier," Yuri interjected, wiping the sweat from his brow. "Any idea what to do now?" Harry nodded slowly.

"Yes, I think so. Did you actually see what happened to the bullet that hit the mirror before?" he asked the group. "I saw the bullet go into the mirror, but it didn't come out the other side. It just went into the mirror. This thing is still the only clue we have in the whole mission. Also, that group of robbers seemed to be looking for the mirror. They really wanted it for something."

"Yes, *Evil* wanted the mirror," Abigail confirmed, glancing over at the strange construction with the spikes holding it to the three bars.

"We need magic again," Yuri smiled.

"I'll try," Abigail whispered, closing her eyes again and returning to the running lines of code in her mind. She searched the environment for the mirror and found it. It was true: it was different from all the other objects, from the trees and bushes, the stones, the burned house and the bodies lying around. In one of them, she could even read that the heart had stopped beating at that very moment. It was the ape-man Yuri had knocked unconscious to the ground earlier. The mirror, however, inexplicably seemed to exist on another plane. Although it was with them in three-dimensional space, it should not be visible. She tried to instruct the interface to begin decoding the object and succeeded, but despite the enormous computing power now running in the background, the result was not positive. There must be another solution, something else. She thought about it, trying to look objectively at all the information she now had. Then she had an idea. Harry was right, the mirror was the solution to the riddle. However, the *magic* she had learned in the meantime would not help. They were still on the same level in Yanny's subconscious, and trying to decipher them here would be just as ineffective as a mere attempt outside of cyberspace would have been. She wouldn't succeed from here, she had to go one level deeper.

"Yuri, would you do me a favor, please?" she asked her comrade when she had opened her eyes again.

"Of course!" the giant said in surprise.

"Would you pick me up and put me upside down in the mirror? That would be really sweet of you," she smiled and winked at him.

"Harry, we've been here too long, Shirt lost her mind," Yuri grumbled, his chest muscles twitching. The man he was talking to just grinned, thinking he understood what she was up to.

"Well, we can try. And you're sure it won't burn your head off? We don't know what happened with the crossbow bolt earlier. Isn't it too dangerous?" Harry asked Abigail.

"I'm just guessing and hoping," she nodded, taking off the large shirt that would have gotten in the way and dropping it on the floor.

"All right, I'm convinced," Yuri said, walking over to her and effortlessly lifting her by the hips with his strong hands and carrying her to the mirror.

"Hey! I could have walked!" she laughed, waving her arms.

"Don't struggle, you need to conserve energy," he muttered. When they reached the mirror, he held her with the utmost care and slowly and gently placed her upside down in the mirror. At first the glass membrane bent backwards, but then her head disappeared into the surface. The entrance to the mirror tingled and small electrical discharges flashed across her face. She opened her eyes. Her head was sticking out of a black hole, into an empty void of white light interspersed with a red band of numbers, letters and special characters. She had arrived at her destination. It was the barrier that she now gazed at with fascination.

"I have to understand it, just understand it..." she murmured and the amulet around her neck began to glow again. The connection of the interface to the deeper layer of the subconscious was now established. While Abigail was still thinking, the computing power from outside came to her aid, supporting her with a powerful energy. She began to understand, and the characters and letters of the red ribbon began to arrange themselves in a logical sequence until the encryption was clearly legible. In the end, only one digit was missing, and Abigail had to add it herself. The moment she wrote a seven in the right place, the red ribbon disintegrated and disappeared. The barrier no longer existed.

The series continues with the title:

Time of the Wolf