DEVANTAKA MIRROR ART: ARBOREAN CLAW.

I utter these words from memory as giant talons of flaming green explode forth from my mirror-covered left hand and arm. It demolishes the debris in its path towards the target – the vulture demon – and grabs the underside of its wing, grasping tight.

With my unconscious directive the flaming green talons rip, shred, tear the feathers with its entire roots, leaving an unceremonious clump of empty, bare flesh underneath like the webbed wings of a bat.

The vulture demon shrieks, and bursts out of the debris in a blast of fury. It lunges at me again, snapping with its beak, but unlike moments before where I could only see its attacks from the reflection of the mirror, my expanded awareness allows me to sense it, witness it in waking reality. I dodge, and growl the command again.

DEVANTAKA MIRROR ART: ARBOREAN CLAW.

I can feel my entire right arm grow back in the fraction of a second, sizzling, mutating, bones coming into being, blood vessels stitching together around it, my musculature wrapping around them both, completing with skin and perfect flesh, living, breathing, absolutely new and youthful. The mirror expands and covers it also to shoot out flaming talons of green and this time digs into the underbelly of the vulture demon, tearing out its feathers, skin, and letting loose its stomach-pouch. Corpses and remains of the devoured spill out upon which the mirror is happy to feast.

I feel a new power growing within me with each consumed bone, flesh, organ, every drop of blood.

The vulture demon rears up on its stout legs and unfurls its wings to deliver a roaring gale that sweeps up everything in its path, overturning the chunks, rocks, fragments of concrete, metal, and glass, shredding any object unfortunate to be caught in its path –

And like words spoken from a dream, I utter the command that rises to my consciousness.

DEVANTAKA MIRROR ART: EARTHCLEAVING MULTISMASH.

Two gorilla-like arms of flaming cyan burst forth into existence from my mirror-laden arms, and smash down upon the earth so hard that it impresses craters upon its strike, lifting me up high into the air from the recoil, producing waves on the earth that radiate outwards like an earthquake. The shockwave from the dual smashes blow back the gale with vibrations of its own, ripping and cleaving the flying rubble, and digs deep into the vulture demon. The shockwave generates enough force to rip and grind the flesh of the demon against its bone, and for the very first time, blood issues forth from the vulture, purple, miasmic, harboring a stench of the utmost evil.

But it's merely the beginning.

The vulture lets loose a shriek of such a deafening volume that it nearly ruptures my eardrums, and, fires beginning to envelop its remaining eye, it sheds its feather coat of umber-brown to reveal obsidians of charred-black, becoming less a creature but more a thing, an eldritch thing. Lowering its head, body, and wings upon the earth, it springs up with the mightiness of a missile, rocketing up towards the sky, shattering the foundations of the building in a tornado of wings and blades.

It splits the air with a screech as like from a fighter jet, and, ascending several hundred meters, folds its wings, becoming something akin to a rod, a bullet, a munition of unquestionable destruction.

Just like last time, I am prepared.

When it finishes its descent, when it is about to make contact with the ground, I will catch it with my punch and hurl it into wherever will damage it the most, or use my arborean claws to bisect it from the head down to its feet.

I wait, wait, wait for the right time to strike.

I feel the heat and gale upon my face as the vulture descends with a velocity so hideous that its head and surfaces of its wings are set alight in a blaze of glory.

It's merely 200 meters away.

Just 100 hundred.

Just 50.

I narrow my eyes, but, as if seconds were stolen from me, the vulture is right on my head, and, without being able to utter any command, I am pulled into its sharpened talons and yanked up towards the sky.

The tops of shops, low-rises, office buildings, and distant skyscrapers fall from below me with alarming speed as the vulture ascends into the stratosphere, crushing me with its talons, preventing me from issuing forth the movement of my hands or my arms that should accompany my ancient commands.

The air quickly grows thin – we ascend past low-hanging clouds, through the remains of moisture-laden cumuluses – until I can see all of Seoul below me, and very far away in the clear daylight, the faint outlines of the coasts. An approaching vertigo envelopes my head, cajoling for rest. But the mirror does not allow it. I can feel it reaching into my bloodstream, pumping it, enlivening the rhythm of my heart, to keep me alive in my defense so I can triumph against this evil. My head feels like it's about to burst; the sky above me slowly darkens from its bright, blue shade to the pitch-navy of the great beyond, punctuated only by loftier cirrus clouds and cumulonimbuses with anvils as their tops.

About what must have been 4,000 meters above sea level, the vulture drops me, hurling me back towards the earth.

I fall towards it, witnessing the tips of the heavens above, when I hear the familiar approaching screech of a diving bomb, and I see the vulture coming at me again, intending to slash me mid-air with its force, slash me until I am but a jumble of bones that tumble from the sky.

DEVANTAKA ART: LION'S ROAR!

I utter, as the thin air of the atmosphere at this height is compressed into a spike of a roaring gust, and manage to deflect by centimeters the coming slash of the vulture demon's obsidian wings.

The vulture twirls its wings, unfolds it, rises again, diving once more, this time intending to divide me in two with its beak.

I am ready.

It's almost upon me, almost – just mere meters away –

DEVANTAKA MIRROR ART: ARBOREAN CLAW!

Flaming green talons shoot forth from my right arm and hand as it latches onto the beak of the vulture demon, closes it shut, and swings me around and upon its back like I am on a rope-gun.

Its feathered and obsidian-laden body reflects upon the entirety of my being as I begin to hack the joint holding its left wing away, slashing, slashing, drawing my nails and fingers across the reflections of its wings across my mirror-enveloped body. Speckles and clumps and fragments of feather and wine-black stone rip and tear from the vulture in the midst of its wild dive, its erratic movements made in efforts to throw me off its back.

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But I am relentless and persistent. My head and hair swings this way and that, going through a lifetime's motion of rollercoasters in the span of those few, precious seconds as we descend upon the earth; the vulture shrieks, and it slaps my body hard, driving nails of obsidian and charcoal-feather like porcupine quills upon my face, scalp, and anywhere exposed; I yelp in pain and agony, but I drive my nails harder into my mirrored body, cutting, slicing, cleaving away the bloodied sinews that holds the wings to the vulture's breast.

The vulture manages to reach back with its beak and then crushes me tight, holds me up between, intending to swallow –

In that desperate moment, before I am torn asunder, I make the final cut to the last bit of sinew that holds the wings, reflecting all of Seoul in the mirror, all of the Earth below and the heavens above on my body.

And with a crack, a shatter, and bang, the mirror that covers my body breaks into a hundred pieces. An inexpressible horror ripples through my body – it is something that I instinctively know must never happen, yet I cannot undo it.

At once, red, indigo flames cover my entire body from head-to-toe, and blast the beaks of the vulture demon apart, prompting it to drop me; a blazing red orb emerges at the center of the broken mirror shards above me, falling with me. It shrinks in size, vibrating, sparking arcs of what seems to be red electricity through the surrounding air and discharging upon distant clouds; until at last, the orb is squeezed to a singular point, a singularity, and, like the blast of a nuclear weapon or a supernova in textbooks, the singularity explodes, rocketing the broken mirror shards to orbit, towards the earth, towards the clouds, towards the horizon far far away, scattering the shards and careening them in hundred directions to no one knows where. The scattering shards sever the thin sinew of the vulture's wing at last, robbing it of its ability to sustain flight.

Only a small, bracelet-sized patch of my mirror remains latched upon my arm. I pull myself towards the back of the vulture demon; it makes no effort to respond, the intelligence and consciousness from its flaming eye robbed, if only for a moment, as we descend freefall towards the city below.

We come to a destructive landing, smashing through eleven-storeys of a high-rise building just a few tens of meters north of the Han-river. The vulture demon takes the brunt of the impact; I rest upon its feathers, though sharp, and leave with only a few deep gashes on my thighs, chest, arms, hands, and bare feet.

For a moment, all is dark. Fragments and specks of concrete and pulverized metal pepper and shower upon our figures. We are both demons to the inhabitants of this building.

Sirens and crackling water sound in the distance as I return to consciousness little by little, having survived the impact of a fall from heaven like an angel of old.

I groggily rise to my feet, stumbling a few times; but as I try to climb off the back of the vulture demon, it comes to life once again. It twists its head with the dexterity and flexibility of swan, snapping its beak, tearing the ends of my hair off like giant scissors – but without warning, a multitude of radiant, white rays crisscross and emerge out of thin air, caging the head of the vulture demon. In a fraction of a second, the lines pull taut, and shred the head of the demon in a detonation of purple miasma.

I recoil a little from the sudden reality as the strength and liveliness of the demon extinguishes at last. Its muscles are no longer alive, nor want of movement; its flesh and feathers and bones fade, burn, turn to ash, and are carried off into the wind in a cloud of gathering dust.

I shake my head and rub my eyes.

A figure stands amidst the parting smoke and dust, dressed rather oddly; but then again, so am I.

He wears what seems to be a dark-navy military trenchcoat, with lapels that are buttoned round so as to totally cover his neck, as well as conceal his face and head below the tops of his lips; his hair is done in a military-style crew cut with a few spiky sections that jut out in neat, uniformed patterns, his enigmatic presence heightened by the addition of a single pair of sunglasses with small and perfectly spherical lenses, resting solely upon his high-arched nose without earpieces.

Both of us look at each other for what seems like an eternity.

Finally, he speaks.

"You – are under arrest."

I frown. "What for?"

"Endangerment of lives and destruction of public property with an unregistered mirror."

I retort back. "I just saved hundreds, maybe thousands from being eaten by this – this thing. It's gone now but it was there. Who should you be?"

"True. But you also killed the few hundred in this building, and in the Seoh-go district. You are coming with me."

"Oh yeah?" I snap back. "I ain't going until you tell me who you are."

"That will make things harder for you."

"Try me," I mutter, returning to a shaky stance to sight the man's reflection in my mirror, now only the size of a large, wide bracelet upon my left forearm. He had the look of an elite agent about him; from what I knew, he could be using this as an excuse to capture me and send me to the North, and I was going to have absolutely none of that after everything I went through.

Oh, I'll show him like I did to all those Jopok.

The man seems to sigh. He steps forward.

I deliver a forceful punch directly onto his reflection, pushing my knuckles into his image, intending to crush him.

But he dodges. Effortlessly.

He slides to the side as if in the middle of a waltz, as the invisible fist that I conjured rushes past him and blows the wall behind with the force of a cannonshot.

His words reach my ears.

Dao Mirror Art:

Zhuangzi Dreams of a Butterfly.

A hundred mirrors materialize around me and my entire body, and before I can even remove my right hand from my mirror to react, I am enveloped in a blinding light. It's so bright that my mirror cannot reflect anything but white light; I cannot see anything ahead of me.

The overwhelming light floods my senses and the entirety of my head, until I find myself in a pleasant, grassy clearing of rich viridian green. Tall trees reach into the heavens with their canopies; beyond the tree-tops, I make out a range of snow-capped mountains on the horizon. Birds chirp and squirrels skirt the branches and leaves, rustling the calm clearing in a pleasant andante.

I find my feet upon the petals of a hibiscus flower, swaying minutely in the wind, stretching wide like a dancer's platform; other hibiscuses below me dance with the wind like a flower-sea.

A sweet, comforting breeze wafts through my wings and flutters it. The breeze draws forth a fresh fragrance of nectar from the base of the flower, into which I reach with my long tongue to drink.

A rivulet of sweetness splashes upon my tongue. The nectar is delicious, joyous, rich with life and scent of floral wood; I reach also to the dew upon the petals of cherry-white, cool with the scent of early morning, as the Sun begins its ascent towards the middle of the day.

Wait. 'Middle of the day?' Was that a concept I knew?

'Morning?' What's morning?

All I knew was that the Sun came after darkness, and darkness followed the Sun.

As the water invigorates and refreshes my being, the meaning of the words I hold for granted slowly begin to fall away. Memories, distant memories that aren't mine, surface and scatter across my consciousness, fading into obscurity. Blood, blades, humans. Alien concepts; blood isn't supposed to be red, no blades exist where I live, and I know of only little, friendly monkeys, not beings wrapped in unfamiliar cloth.

The world around me is at rest, and I too am at peace. There is nothing for me to worry about, or nothing towards which I should climb and seek with effort. The prospect of a meal with nectars, a refreshing drink of dew, flight across the rich woods teeming with forest friends, and slumber amidst beautiful petals are blessings vast enough.

I stretch my wings across the flower towards sweet slumber, and lay myself down. I dream whether all of my hazy imaginations were nightmares; whether I had been anything at all but what I presently am: a butterfly.

And as I rest, the cloud parts, navy hands descend upon me, and clap me shut.