The lizard, despite his cold-blooded nature and demeanor, took his associate's advice seriously. He hadn't been visibly spooked in the slightest by the mumbling light show—not at all. But there was something about the noises coming from the room, and that look the mouse gave him, that made him take pause and take him seriously. After all, he trusted the man implicitly, or at least seemed to.

Li's darting glance went between Dian and the mouse, then he motioned abruptly to follow. Both he and Dian bolted at a pace that would match; Dian in particular kept a watchful eye over his shoulder, gun held tight, finger literally scratching at the trigger.

As the mouse had so smartly slammed the door shut behind him, aside from the myriad of scraping and panting noises, there was little to no indication of just what was happening behind them... Until another set of claws, black-tipped and dripping with what looked like some kind of venom impaled that door with a vengeance. For a moment, the fingers paused in relative silence, curling and twitching and flexing, as if savoring the taste of new meat in the air. But before any hopes of it staying that way could rise, the door was literally ripped apart and cast aside in a violent flash.

Unlike the previous creature they'd encountered, this one stood straight and tall, at least from the shoulders down. It carried a feminine form, but was hardly anything beautiful: Pale and reptilian, with a long, writhing tail that nearly matched Li Fang's own. The scales-- and what might have once been copper skin, were charred, blackened and burnt-- bubbling in some places, scarred in others, and on the verge of simply peeling off on the rest. Medical bandages loosely wrapped itself around the figure in haphazard fashion from literal head to toe, but hardly seemed to cover it, let alone heal it. Draped across it hung what was either a little black dress, or a stylized butcher's apron, matched with what was unmistakably... a withered, old-fashioned fedora. Like the rest of it, they too were blackened and scorched.

Rather than chasing after though, it simply stood there, staring at the ground in a way that hid the face, taking deep, but frequent breaths that rose and sunk it shoulders. The corridor itself however, began to change.

Apparently stemming from the closet she'd spawned from, a wave of bright, saturated red sprawled rapidly across the hallway, decaying and eroding everything it touched as it went along. The floor broke up into pieces of uneven rock, gaps and holes and even full-on pits revealing themselves, one of which conveniently swallowed the ashes of the last monster they'd encountered. The walls cracked and caved in in some places, revealing crooked rods of iron that should've been their foundation, with smoke, and eventually small embers pouring out into the enclosed room. And the ceiling itself... it didn't even seem to be there anymore. Just a blinding white glow that made them sweat, like they were under a sunlight.

If the last creature they confronted was any representation of Ace's demons, this was undoubtedly the grand daddy of the bunch.

As the trio rounded the first corner available to them, Dian hung back an moment. He leveled his shotgun and immediately let fly three rapid-fire rounds of buckshot; before he could get a fourth off, however, a hand snared the cloth of his shoulder and yanked him along.

"Don't shoot it," Li Fang chided as he pulled Dian back into motion, shouting over the ruckus as he continued running. "It's useful to us. We have to find Crawford in here."

Though steely as ever, Dian was considerably wider-eyed and more on pins-and-needles about the whole situation than his boss was. Nonetheless, he followed orders.

If the figure... even registered the firey spew of buckshot, it didn't show it in the least. There were sounds of the metal puncturing flesh, and a few stray pellets even pilfered her hat, but there wasn't a single twitch in its movement that didn't seem to be there already. The shoulders rose, and the moment they hit their peak, sunk, and repeated infinitely. The sounds of heavy panting-- a loud and frantic hyperventilation-- stormed through the corridor, and soon there didn't even seem to be a pause between breaths. It looked up; the piercing green eyes jittered madly through the bloody gauze, but seemed to hold just enough focus to recognize this newfound trio. Whatever plans it had to greet them was unlikely to be a hearty handshake and a pat on the back.

At first, it seemed content to simply pace forward in a slow, steady gait, eying them like food. But as her hysterical breaths rose, so did her pace. Before long, that gait turned into a trot, that turned into a full on sprint. Any opportunities it had were met with its claws becoming intimate with their backsides, or fronts, should they be foolish enough to face it head on.

At the same time, the hallway and all the cracks and pits within it didn't just seem to lengthen-- the giant, castle-like wooden door at the opposite end suddenly slid out of view. The hallway had just made itself turn not far in front of them, and it was safe to assume that there would be more than one sudden curve beyond that. Probably for the better, though. The monster hurling itself after them was very fast, but it probably wasn't agile enough for that many sharp turns.

Right?

And so they ran. And kept running.

"His conscious mind will find us," Li Fang reassured his associate as he took it up to a full-fledged sprint, darting around the corners effortlessly. He had already used the mirror before, even if it wasn't on Ace, and he seemed to have some idea of how it functioned. The nightmarish circumstances just didn't seem to... register with him. Perhaps that's just the way it is when you're the one who's actively causing others' minds to be in such a state.

"When it does, the avatar of his subconscious mind won't be far away, and that is what we want to find."

Dian raced along behind the two, huffing and puffing, and putting tremendous effort into his sprint, but keeping up nonetheless. He didn't seem built for speed, but he had the endurance to deal with it.

'No...! Stop!'

No doubt it felt like a longer trek than it actually was. Around every turn was a new peril, namely, packs of the Morbid Atlas from before. Sometimes there was only one, and sometimes there were upwards of five. Many of them stood as barricades in their path, and several actively tried to attack them with their weighty orbs, but each was cut down horrifically by the hands of the big bad snake in the hat. The caustic goo was spilled on her, and even burned away patches of her gauze, but did nothing to slow her down. It seemed like she spawned from a different pack of monstrosities, or was in her very own faction altogether. At the very least, she was in her own league.

'Stop it... Just shut UP!'

Eventually, the three of them caught up to their final destination, or so it seemed. But not because they so quickly found their way to the exit they so desired, but because they inexplicably found themselves trapped in a dead end. The grand castle entrance from before was gone, abruptly replaced with a simple, crimson rectangle that might have been supposed to represent a door. But a simple turn of the knob would yield no results, and there was no keyhole to speak of. A light and a cold breeze came from the crevice beneath it, but it was clear that whatever gateway was supposed to be was not meant to be opened. And yet, it was the best chance they had. Should they care to look behind them, they would see that the green-eyed demon was just turning the corner to face them, and already slowing down to a simple, menacing stroll. As if it already realized just how cornered they were. The way her jittering eyes latched onto them from just below her only served to highlight her sinister demeanor. Her claws twitched nervously at her side.

'GET OOUUT!'

At the same time, a voice, unspoken but still heard, made its way through the labyrinth. Was this the conscious mind they were talking about? It seemed to provoke some kind of response from the monster...

"Hhaahhhh-hssfff, hhaahhhh--hssfff...! Hhaahhhh hahahahah! HAHAHAH! HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!"

But it hardly seemed like a positive one.

The pale lizard stopped and watched the mouse tried to open the door, and was convinced enough that it could not be done that he did not try it himself. Instead, he just drew a deep breath, turned around, and faced down the approaching monstrosity. He reached into one of his pockets and produced in his left hand what, frankly, looked like a lady's cosmetics compact. In his right, he grasped the grip of his revolver.

"It is," Li Fang answered quietly. "It's the part of him that can normally ignore its monsters," he further explained, "but not today."

Dian was much more militant about preparing, however, standing in front of the two he was supposed to be escorting, and loading several more frag rounds in to replace the buckshot he'd already fired. He seemed to have caught on, though, and refrained from firing.

It must've said something for just how prepared Li Fang was coming into this little corner of the alleycat's world. Peering back with bloodshot eyes was the image of Ace himself, still bound to the same chair in the same room, with the same expression of horror locked on his face. Being the strong and silent type he was, not a word of it was spoken; but that little compact mirror was likely the emergency exit for a Hellhole that wasn't prepared for them-- or they weren't prepared for themselves.

All the while, the reptilian bogeyman approached ever closer, taking its time while it scraped her claws along the broken wall, as eager for a response. From behind its carelessly wrapped gauze, a mouthful of long, jagged teeth were exposed in its bout of hyena-like cackling. Far too many to even realistically fit into a mouth. And for a moment, it seemed like the group's options were severely limited, until a voice previously unheard shook the very walls with but a single, simple statement.

"The boy told you to leave."

The monster stopped in its tracks, its gaze frozen on the white light of the ceiling. Suddenly, a row of what looked like smooth, iron bars erupted from the ground in front of her with a heavy "chounk." Immediately after came another just in front of that, and the pattern followed in succession by at least a dozen more stood fast between the monster and Li Fang himself. With the last set, came a heavy rattling that quaked the ground they stood on-- and put a sizable crack in the big red door behind them.

In an instant, their bogeyman visibly tensed up and sprung into action, prying apart the bars like they were made of fresh clay. And though she did so with relative ease, the immediate haste she displayed said that she felt her time with her would-be victims was suddenly quite limited.

One might have wondered just how Li Fang remained so perpetually nonplused by the torrid, exaggeratedly hellish circumstances. The simple truth was that, while the thing approaching him could do him serious harm, it would never get a chance to.

All mirrors in that world indeed led back to their dimension of origin, and back to the real Aceas aforementioned in Greens' last post, for any readers who may have missed it. The one Li Fang held was far too small to fit a person through, but quite spacious for the barrel of a gun. In a visible defiance of conventional physics, he aimed the revolver straight through the mirror in his hand as if it was an open window, with the barrel plunging through in such a way that it spatially should have been coming out the back of his hand, but wasn't. Back in "reality," the gun barrel poked out of the Norden Circle, aimed squarely at Ace's face.

"It may be a lost cause," he uttered plainly as he cocked back the hammer. If the monster drew any nearer, it would be the end of their journey in Ace's mind, and, well, quite literally the end of Ace's mind, period.

Without questioning orders for even a hair of a second, Dian turned to the door he previously thought to be a false passage—more a texture on the wall than an entryway—and treated it as a real door, unloading the last couple rounds of buckshot he counted in the shotgun's tube straight into the knob, before piston-firing a mighty, wall-jarring, soldierly stomp straight into it.

Sure enough, the door crumbled like old bread under the mighty boot. But before he could do his military style breaching, something from the other side breached out to them. A blinding cyan light, not dissimilar to the one pouring in from the ceiling, spewed out from the doorway like a geyser almost instantaneously. It pushed the trio back into the bars with a gentle, but meaty shove, but didn't seem to have any adverse effects on them beyond that. After all, they were from the outside world.

The same couldn't be said of the jittery-eyed demon, who now clearly expressed panic in her made haste to tear away the bars... for the few seconds left that she remained visible. Contrary to the otherworldly invaders caught up in this sick mess, this light tore away through her-- and seemingly, the rest of the world around them-- like a heavy rain through sheets of paper. With a final, witch-like cackle/shriek, the snake faded away along with everything else, until it was all enveloped in white.

...

As the light faded, the three of them found themselves in very different surroundings. The long hall behind them still existed in a way, but as the creaky wooden docks at the edge of a city. In place of the door was a simple, but stunning scenery: the view of Westside Island and its coast. Bits of snow filtered through the air, reflecting off the distant city lights. At the edge sat a fuzzy image of what looked like Ace, jeans old up with his bare feet dipped gingerly into the water. But for some reason, he looked... smaller, somehow. And while it made sense that he might have a fishing rod lying next to him, why was there an extra?

It was all up to them to find out.