Chapter 147: The Final Copy Gate Opens
The Executive Guest Gate didn’t just open. It dissolved the world behind it.
The banquet hall’s cold grandeur shattered into a million shards of blue-white light that swirled like a violent snowglobe. The ground beneath them liquefied, then solidified into a new, terrifying geography. The air itself seemed to scream as it reformed.
Skellir’s knees buckled as the floor snapped into existence under his boots—a vast, impossible atrium that made the previous stages feel like closets. It stretched into a haze of refracted light, a cathedral of hostile hospitality. Blue-white crystal floors, polished to a blinding sheen, reflected a ceiling lost in gloom. Mirror-paneled escalators ran at wrong angles, some ascending into nothing, others descending into the mechanical darkness that churned below. Bridges of solid light flickered in and out of existence, connecting floating service platforms that trembled. Xenon elevators shot up and down their transparent shafts at random, silent and deadly. Every surface held a ghost of their own reflection, watching them back.
At the atrium’s heart, maybe three hundred meters away, a colossal archway pulsed—the Final Copy Gate. Sealed. Before it, on a slender spire of crystal, glowed the third and final Xenon Guest Seal.
Antoinette’s voice echoed, not from above, but from the walls themselves, the floor, the air. “Stage Three. The Final Guest Atrium. Recover the third seal and reach the Final Copy Gate. The dimension has now reached its ultimate function.”
The hum changed. It wasn’t a pulse anymore. It was a constant, vibrating scan, a feeling of being physically read down to the tremor in a fingertip.
“To better serve your individual journey,” the host-voices chorused, sickly sweet, “the system will now manifest temporary physical copies based on your strongest recent physiological and psychological signatures. Please, enjoy a truly personalized experience.”
Antonella’s breath hitched. She understood before the others. Her body went preternaturally still. She lowered her breathing, drawing air in slow, silent draws through her nose. She straightened her spine, softened her gaze into something neutral and observant. She became a statue of pure intent, refusing to give the scanning dimension a single spike of fear, anger, or hesitation to copy.
Lusiana did the opposite. The announcement was still ringing in the air when she lunged for the nearest bridge—a narrow span of solid light connecting their platform to the next. It was retracting. “No you don’t,” she snarled, and threw her weight against the shimmering edge, muscles corded in her neck, trying to force it back into place.
The omnipresent scan peaked with a sharp zing.
The air to her left and right shimmered. Two figures coalesced from blue-white light, resolving into perfect copies of Lusiana Veitayaki. Their faces were set in identical snarls of effort. They didn’t look at her. They simply mimicked the strongest action in the system: violent opposition.
Both duplicate Lusianas slammed bodily into the same bridge from opposite sides.
There was a sound like cracking glass. The bridge, subjected to three simultaneous forces of aggression, shattered into dissolving fragments, leaving a gaping void where her path had been.
“Are you kidding me?!” Lusiana shouted, stumbling back from the edge. One of the copies, its task complete, faded. The other turned toward her, its expression blank, and lunged. Lusiana met the charge, shoving it back. It was solid, real. The impact sent a shock up her arms. As she fought her own copied aggression, the scanner zinged again, reading her violent correction.
A new copy of her shove manifested ten meters ahead, slamming into a service platform and knocking it off its axis, blocking another potential route.
Iva froze, not from strategy, but from shock. A soft cry escaped her. Twenty paces ahead, a copy of herself was kneeling on the crystal floor. This Iva was cradling the head of a fallen artificial host, tears streaming down its face, begging, “Please, someone, help me, I don’t know what to do!” The anguish in the copy’s voice was a perfect, gut-wrenching mirror.
Her feet were moving toward it before her mind could catch up. The need to soothe, to fix, was a physical pull in her chest.
“Iva, don’t!” Antonella’s voice was a whip-crack, but she didn’t move from her controlled stance. “It’s a photonic trap! It’s using your own empathy as a landmark!”
“I know!” Iva cried out, her voice breaking. She stopped, fists clenched at her sides, staring at her own weeping double. “Knowing it’s a copy doesn’t make it hurt less. It feels like watching myself drown.”
Skellir’s own nightmare appeared right in front of him. One moment the path was clear, the next a duplicate Skellir stood there, panting, eyes wide with unfocused panic. It was coughing, a dry, ragged sound, and its hands were outstretched, fingers grasping at the air, reaching for help from everyone and no one at once. It was a perfect snapshot of his most common state: scattered, desperate, and trying to connect to everything at once.
His own breath seized in his throat. The urge to apologize, to make a joke, to fall apart—it was a tidal wave. He looked at this frantic, pathetic copy of himself and saw every missed diagnosis, every late realization, every time he’d tried to be everything for everyone and ended up nothing for himself.
The scanner hummed, hungry for his reaction.
He closed his eyes. Just for a second. He heard Varek’s voice in his head: Your panic won’t just hurt you once. It will repeat.
He opened his eyes. He stopped apologizing. He stopped trying to be charming. He looked past the panicked copy, to a copy-bridge that was flickering into solidity a few meters to his left. It was a narrow window. He didn’t think. He just moved.
One clean action. A controlled sprint, two measured steps, and a leap. Not a flailing jump, but a committed, athletic arc. He landed on the bridge just as it fully solidified, rolling to absorb the impact.
The scanner zinged.
The panicked copy of him dissolved. Instead, the air around him shimmered, and a second, identical bridge of solid light materialized ahead, extending his path forward by another fifteen meters. A perfect copy of his controlled leap’s consequence.
“Oh,” he breathed, a laugh of pure, shocked relief huffing out of him. “Oh, that’s it. That’s the move.”
Antonella was already in motion, a study in minimalism. She approached a locked service hatch blocking a short-cut. She didn’t kick it. She examined the mechanism for two seconds, then delivered a single, precise knife-hand strike to a weak point in the crystal seam. The hatch popped open. The scanner copied the strike. Two other locked panels along her route popped open in sync.
She moved through the openings, a ghost leaving only useful doors in her wake. Her copies were tools, not obstacles.
“Iva, now!” Antonella called, not looking back as she navigated a series of shifting platforms. “Tell it you’re not playing!”
Iva was still rooted, tears cutting clean lines through the dust on her face. The copy of her was still sobbing over the host. Another copy appeared further down, this one simply standing and wringing its hands in helpless anxiety. The path was getting crowded with her own inaction.
She swallowed a sob. She looked at her copies, at their manufactured pain, and she forced the words out, sharp and clear. “I can’t save you,” she said, her voice trembling but audible. “You were made to slow me down. I can’t save what only exists to stop me.”
She said it to them. She said it to herself.
She stepped forward, and walked right through the kneeling copy. It dissolved into cold light at her touch. She didn’t look back. She started to run, a clumsy, grieving sprint, but it was forward motion. It was enough.
Lusiana was battling a hall of mirrors filled with her own fury. Every time she shoved a copy aside, another copy of that shove would manifest somewhere else, knocking a platform askew or collapsing a handhold. She was literally fighting her way through a maze built from her own aggression. “Get out of my way!” she screamed at a duplicate that blocked a narrow pass, elbowing it in the ribs. The scanner hummed.
Ahead of her, a copied elbow-jab slammed into the support of an escalator. The moving staircase jerked and ground to a halt.
“No!” Lusiana sprinted for the now-frozen escalator, the most direct route to the central spire. She was mere meters from the bottom step when another copied impact—this one from her earlier kick—blasted into the side of a floating service platform. The platform swung like a pendulum and smashed into the escalator’s undercarriage.
With a groan of shearing crystal, the entire escalator tilted sideways, becoming a useless, sloping wall.
The longest route now lay before her, a winding, precarious path across failing copy-bridges. She screamed, a raw, furious sound that the atrium swallowed whole.
Antonella reached the base of the central spire. The seal was above, on a small ledge. The route up was a series of handholds that appeared and disappeared in a pattern. She watched one cycle. Then she moved. One exact hand placement. One precise foot lift. One controlled pull. Each movement was singular, deliberate, a masterclass in economy. The scanner copied each one, creating duplicate handholds and footholds that stabilized her path. She climbed a ladder of her own perfect repetitions.
She hauled herself onto the ledge and grabbed the third Xenon Guest Seal. It flared in her hand. Below, the Final Copy Gate hissed and began to iris open.
Skellir, using his copied bridge, landed on the main platform just as the gate unlocked. He didn’t stop. He ran for the glowing threshold, his lungs burning, his eyes fixed on the opening. Second place. He just needed second.
He crossed the threshold a half-step behind the invisible marker of first, slamming into the interior wall of the gate with a gasp of desperate relief.
Iva reached the platform third, her face pale, her body trembling with spent adrenaline and emotional whiplash. She stumbled across the line and sank to her knees, hugging herself.
Lusiana arrived fourth. She didn’t stumble. She walked, stiff-legged and shaking with contained rage, past the threshold. Her eyes were fixed on some middle distance, seeing only the cascading failures of her own copied fury. She said nothing. The silence coming from her was more violent than any scream.
The Xenial Xenon Xerox Dimension held for one final, silent second.
Then it shattered.
The blue-white world fragmented into a storm of light. There was no transition, only a violent, soundless expulsion. The cold crystal, the humming void, the copies—all of it vanished into a blinding flash.
Then gravity returned, hard and familiar.
Skellir’s knees slammed onto the unforgiving stone of the Central Arena. The sudden roar of the crowd was a physical assault after the dimension’s eerie silence. The air was warm, smelling of ozone and sweat and tension. He blinked, disoriented, the afterimage of the atrium burned onto his retinas.
They were back. All four of them, sprawled or kneeling on the trial floor in the harsh xenon light. The monolithic scoreboard loomed above, the numbers from the previous stages still glowing: Lusiana 13, Iva 12, Antonella 11, Skellir 7, Taitusi 8.
Antoinette stood before them, her expression unreadable. The crowd’s roar died into a buzzing, anticipatory hush.
“The final challenge of Trial 20 is complete,” she announced, her voice clean and sharp in the quiet. “Rankings for the Xenial Xenon Xerox are as follows. First place, with four points: Antonella Fuentes.”
A section of the crowd erupted. Antonella pushed herself to her feet. She didn’t smile. She stood perfectly straight, the third seal still clutched in her hand, her mind already working, adding four to her seven. Eleven.
“Second place, with three points: Skellir Anthonysson.”
Skellir let out a shaky breath that was almost a laugh. He stayed on his knees for a second longer, head bowed. Three points. Added to his five. Eight. He was at eight.
“Third place, with two points: Iva Stigsdottir.”
Iva slowly got up, wiping her face with her sleeve. Two points. Added to her eleven. Thirteen. She looked toward the scoreboard, her expression hollow.
“Fourth place, with one point: Lusiana Veitayaki.”
Lusiana didn’t move. She stood rigid, staring at the floor. One point. Added to her ten. Eleven. Her jaw was a tight, hard line.
Antoinette said nothing more. She offered no commentary, no updated totals. She simply stepped back, leaving the four of them standing in the spotlight with their new, unspoken numbers hanging in the air between them.
The silence stretched. The scoreboard still showed the old totals. The math was now a live wire in everyone’s mind.
Skellir was at eight. Taitusi was at eight.
Antonella was at eleven. Lusiana was at eleven.
Iva was at thirteen.
Two were tied at the bottom. One was alone at the top. One was in the middle, but her lead was gone, consumed by the single point she’d just earned.
Somewhere beneath that glowing board, Taitusi’s frozen eight points waited to be judged against Skellir’s identical eight. The arena held its breath, waiting for the final, terrible arithmetic to be made official.
Antonella stood still, victorious in the challenge but trapped in a brutal tie. Her eyes were already scanning the others, calculating survival, calculating votes, calculating every possible angle.
Skellir looked at the concept of second place like it was a rope thrown from a cliff he was still clinging to. It was rough and it cut his hands, but he was no longer falling.
Iva breathed in, then out, a slow shuddering cycle. Disappointment at losing her lead warred with a fierce, guilty relief that she was, for this second, safe. The conflict twisted her features.
Lusiana said nothing. Her fury was a cold, silent furnace inside her. The copy dimension hadn’t just beaten her. It had held up a mirror and made her watch her own aggression build the walls that boxed her in. The humiliation was a taste more bitter than failure.
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The Central Arena, The Meridian Confluence, Elarion — the main trial floor beneath the final Trial 20 scoreboard, as the blue-white fragments of The Xenial Xenon Xerox fade into silence.
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The last shimmering mote of blue-white light from the Xerox dimension winked out overhead, leaving only the harsh, stadium-grade illumination of the Confluence. The air, thick with ozone and collective breath, seemed to solidify. The four contestants stood like statues on the trial floor, dust and sweat painting their skin, their chests still heaving from efforts that now felt like ancient history.
Above them, the massive scoreboard flickered. The old numbers dissolved into pixelated static. A deep, resonant hum filled the arena, the sound of a system performing its final, irreversible calculation. No one in the tiers of spectators moved. No one whispered. Even Taitusi, waiting in the competitors’ pen, found his throat too dry to make a sound.
Antoinette stepped forward. Her boots echoed on the stone. She looked up at the board, then back at the arena, her face a mask of formal neutrality that did nothing to hide the gravity in her eyes.
The first number locked in with a solid thud that reverberated in the silence.
IVA STIGSDOTTIR: 13.
A gasp rippled through the crowd, then swelled into applause. Iva, still kneeling, jerked her head up. She stared at the glowing ‘13’ beside her name as if it were a physical object that had struck her. Her hands flew to her mouth, pressing hard against her lips to stifle a sob that was equal parts relief and shock. She hadn’t won the last challenge, but she’d survived the trial at the top. The sound that finally escaped was a choked, disbelieaved whimper.
The board flickered again.
LUSIANA VEITAYAKI: 11.
ANTONELLA FUENTES: 11.
The applause turned to a murmur of confusion. Lusiana’s head snapped from her own name to Antonella’s. Her nostrils flared. The one point from the last challenge. The single, miserable point that had cost her the lead and placed her level with the woman who had beaten her. Her fear for Taitusi curdled into a sharp, personal frustration that tightened every muscle in her back and shoulders.
Antonella didn’t react to the tie. Her gaze dropped instantly from her own score, slicing downward like a blade to the bottom of the board. Her mind worked with cold, brutal efficiency. She was safe. The danger was below.
The final two numbers materialized together.
TAITUSI RAYAWA: 8.
SKELLIR ANTHONYSSON: 8.
The arena erupted. It was a wave of pure sound—shouts, cheers, groans of disbelief—that crashed over the trial floor before the reality of the tie could fully land. Two of them. The board had not chosen.
Iva’s hands fell from her mouth, her moment of personal triumph forgotten as her wide, damp eyes found Skellir. He was still on one knee, staring upward, his face blank. The blood seemed to drain from her cheeks, leaving them pale and stark.
Lusiana’s gaze, burning with a complex fire, shot past Antonella to the competitors’ pen where Taitusi stood. The competitive mask she’d worn since the breakup shattered, revealing the raw, unhealed wound beneath. It was a flash of pure, unguarded terror.
Taitusi and Skellir stared at their matching scores. The identical numbers hung in the air, a verdict of shared failure. Taitusi’s easy charm evaporated. His lips parted slightly, his brow furrowed in a genuine, uncalculated moment of shock. Skellir simply looked hollow, the frantic energy of the challenge gone, leaving behind a numb dread he recognized. The public vote. Again.
Antoinette raised a hand, and the crowd’s noise subsided into a buzzing, anxious hush. “By the rules of Trial 20, the contestant with the fewest total points faces elimination,” she announced, her voice carrying cleanly to every tier. “We have a tie at the bottom. Arithmetic has failed to provide a result. Therefore, the tiebreaker will be decided by public referendum.”
She let the words hang, her eyes sweeping over Skellir and Taitusi. “The audience will now vote to decide who remains in TDC Season 4, and who is eliminated, between Taitusi Rayawa and Skellir Anthonysson. The voting interface will activate shortly. The candidates will remain on the trial floor.”
A laugh burst from Taitusi—a single, soft, strained sound with no humor in it. He ran a hand through his hair, his smile returning, tight and waxy. “Well,” he called out, his voice pitched to carry just enough. “I always wanted to be popular. Just imagined it under slightly better circumstances.”
All eyes turned to Skellir. He tried to summon a joke, to shrug, to do anything. His mouth moved but no sound came. The memory of the first public vote, the terrifying mercy that had spared him, wrapped around his throat like a cold hand. Being saved once did not make the second time feel like a rescue. It felt like a debt called due.
“Skellir,” Iva whispered, her voice barely audible but carrying the weight of a plea.
Lusiana took a step toward the pen, her gaze locked on Taitusi. The fear in her eyes had hardened into something sharper, more accusing. He met her look and the forced smile vanished.
“Don’t,” he said, his voice low, meant only for her but carrying in the quiet. “Don’t look at me like I’m already gone.”
“I’m looking at you,” Lusiana said, her words crisp and clear, “like someone who keeps surviving by making people want him to. How’s that working out now?”
The barb landed. Taitusi flinched almost imperceptibly.
From his knees, Skellir let out a weak, shuddering breath that was almost a laugh. “Ouch. Sounds familiar enough to hurt.”
Antonella cut through the personal tension like a blade through gauze. “Stop,” she said, her voice cold and precise. She looked from Skellir to Taitusi. “This isn’t a trial anymore. It’s not about skill or points. You’re not facing a challenge. You’re facing the story. The one the public has decided to believe about each of you. You need to decide which story is more compelling to keep watching.”
In the Leaders’ gallery, Varek leaned forward, his hands steepled before his mouth. He watched Skellir, not with pity, but with a deep, knowing concern. “Mercy from a crowd is a contract,” he murmured, more to himself than to Aelyth beside him. “They save you, and in return, they own a piece of your narrative forever. It can be a tighter trap than any rule.”
Prince Kelmen shifted in his seat, his bioluminescent veins pulsing with a subtle, irritated light. His gaze was fixed on Taitusi. “A useful tool, that one. Connective tissue for the team. Losing him would be… inconvenient.” His displeasure was a quiet, cold thing, the annoyance of a strategist seeing a valuable piece threatened.
On the opposite side, Leara reclined, a slow, catlike smile spreading across her features. Her eyes danced between the two men on the floor. “A tie,” she mused aloud to Borrok, who stood rigid beside her. “How deliciously messy. A clean elimination is just arithmetic. This? This is theater. This is people picking their favorite hurt.”
Elora, perched on the edge of her seat next to the General, said nothing. Her luminous eyes were wide, drinking in the raw emotion on the floor with the fascination of someone watching a storm break.
Arkan Veyl, seated at the central dais, remained utterly still. He did not speak. He did not gesture. He simply watched, his mercurial eyes taking in the eruption of noise, the panic, the strategy, the fear. He let the silence after Antoinette’s announcement stretch, let the weight of the impending public vote press down on the arena, on the two men below. The cruelty of numbers had been surpassed by the far more volatile cruelty of collective opinion. He was a man who understood both, and he waited to see which would prove more decisive.
Antoinette’s voice broke the silence once more, formal and final. “The final standings for Trial 20 are confirmed. Iva Stigsdottir: thirteen. Lusiana Veitayaki and Antonella Fuentes: eleven. Taitusi Rayawa and Skellir Anthonysson: eight.” She turned her head slightly, addressing the two men directly. “Taitusi. Skellir. Remain on the trial floor. The vote will commence shortly.”
She took a measured step back, folding her hands in front of her. The action was a period at the end of a sentence. The decision was out of her hands.
Around the arena, on countless personal devices and floating public screens, the voting interfaces shimmered to life. Two faces. Two names. A simple choice.
The vote had not yet begun.
But in the roar that swelled anew from the crowd—a cacophony of shouted names, debates, and raw partisan noise—the public had already started choosing.
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The Central Arena, The Meridian Confluence, Elarion — the main trial floor beneath the final Trial 20 scoreboard, with public voting sigils still dormant above Taitusi and Skellir. Immediately after Antoinette announces that the tie between Taitusi and Skellir will be broken by public vote, before the vote begins.