Mirror, Mirror on the Ranger (Patreon)

For freshness, I’m using the Japanese version of the team on this occasion. Ryouma and his teammates would go against a ferocious knight from hell who likes to trap people in his mirror. But the monster had bigger plans for the team.

Will they be able to defeat Geltgelt and his diabolical scheme?

You already know the answer!

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Let’s go and stay safe!

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Ryouma had been doubting himself. He thought that he deserved to be a hero. The supposed death of his brother, Hyuuga, propelled him into having the confidence to lead the Gingaman team.

But now, Hyuuga’s back. It turned out that BullBlack had kept his brother in secret all along. With the ancient knight’s resignation, the former soldier was released to return to the team.

Ryouma held the Starbeast Sword with both hands. It should have been Hyuuga’s all along. Perhaps, it could still be.

GingaRed glanced back at his brother who crouched to pick some flowers at the park. Ryouma gripped the sacred weapon tighter. It is time. “Hyuuga, I gotta tell you something.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s up?” replied his brother who immediately stood up.

Ryouma hesitated, but it must be done. He started his explanation.

But got cut by the chiming alert from his communicator. He answered it right away, “Saya, what’s going on?”

“Monster attack at the business district. We’re on our way,” answered GingaPink’s face on the round monitor.

Ryouma nodded. This issue must be delayed until later. “Got it, I’ll catch up with you. Be careful!”

“Will do. GingaPink out!”

Ryouma prepared to dash out, but he heard Hyuuga’s voice behind. “I’m coming too!”

“What, no! It’s too dangerous!” denied Ryouma.

“Look, I’ve been with BullBlack for a while now. I know how to handle these monsters. Besides, you’ll need additional manpower to keep civilians out of harm’s way.”

Ryouma sighed. There was a logic to his brother’s persistence. Perhaps he would get the perfect moment to transfer the power of GingaRed to him after the battle. “Let’s go!”

People were screaming. Businessmen and workers of the nearby corporate center trembled in fear as numerous Yartot footsoldiers came to wreak havoc. Security officers fired their pistols, but all bullets simply bounced off the alien minions’ carapace. The deadly claws and stings came for the kill.

The kicks and punches came as the final defense for mankind. The Gingaman team had arrived. Four of them: Blue, Green, Yellow, and Pink. All of them immediately went to battle against the minions while the civilians ran for safety. “There won’t be any massacre today, demon creeps!” exclaimed Saya as she kicked a Yartot right on the head.

GingaBlue’s strength was enough to crush the heads of a couple of foot soldiers while GingaGreen’s speed managed to successfully launch six deadly slashing attacks almost at the same time. The monsters tried to hit GingaPink, but her gymnastics skills were too agile for them. The Yartots instead got destroyed.

“Guys!” called Ryouma as he arrived on the scene with Hyuuga.

“Help these people while we handle the Yartots!” ordered Hikaru.

“Got it!”

But the two heroes’ presence was detected by the other minions. As Ryouma helped some employees escape, Yartots chose to attack Ryouma and Hyuuga instead of the team. Luckily, they could fight them even without using any powers.

But not for long. With the enemy’s number growing, tackling attacks from all sides had proven difficult for Ryouma and Hyuuga. GingaBlue saw this. “Hang on, we’re coming!”

But a monster stepped in between the Gingaman team and Ryouma. It was a knight whose armor was decorated with skulls and skeletons. On one hand, he held a powerful sword. On the other, a heavy shield with a similarly dreaded carving. “You have wasted your powers for too long, Gingaman. I, Geltgelt will see it done.”

“What?!”

But the Gingaman team didn’t have time to give witty comments. The shield split opened and from a round mirror inside, strange beams of energy struck each Gingaman. Gouki, Hayate, Hikaru, and Saya all shrieked in excruciating pain as Geltgelt’s dark magic did something horrible to them. The Gingaman suddenly were powerless to stop evil.

“What have you done to them?!” shouted Ryouma as he desperately tried to fend off the Yartots’ attack.

“Somebody… Help!” cried out Hikaru in paralyzing fear.

Gouki was in the same anguish. “He’s coming!”

“I can’t shake him off!” yelled Hayate. The helmet visor of GingaGreen showed Geltgelt’s reflection although the monster had moved. It was as if he had imprinted himself onto the glass to torment the heroes.

The Geltgelt reflection swung his sword and attacked. The four Gingaman got struck even though the real monster was far away. The reflection became their real enemy.

The Geltgelt reflection then choked the Gingaman from behind. Their necks visibly showed pressure although no one had touched them. To them, the monster used his massive and armored bicep for suffocation. It didn’t take long before the heroes began to lose their power.

“Simple, I have made them my human sacrifices,” answered the skull knight with triumphant laughter. With the other Gingaman could only contort and writhe in agony where they stood, the demonic monster turned to the last two remaining opponents.

“Watch out!” shouted Hyuuga just as Geltgelt’s shield split open again. He pushed his brother away. Unfortunately, it put him right on the spot to be the monster’s latest sacrifice. The evil beam of energy snaked its way out of the mirror and struck Hyuuga. He screamed as the power assaulted his face and went directly into his brain. But that wasn’t all.

When Ryouma looked back, his brother was gone. The laughing Geltgelt showed a struggling figure inside the mirror at the heart of his shield. The skull knight had captured Hyuuga. “Hyuuga!”

His call was of no use. The shield closed again, blocking Hyuuga from the outside world. “Let’s make this interesting, GingaRed. If you can cure your friends of my spell, I will free all of you including your pathetic brother. If not, the souls of the Ginga team will be sacrificed to resurrect Daitanix. You have time until sundown!”

Ryouma heard another shriek. Those were his teammates. All of them turned into multicolored beams of teleportations that shot out to the sky and spread in different directions. He must find them and cure them.

Geltgelt left him with a disembodied booming har-de-har. Ryouma gulped. He needed time to digest the situation. How could this battle go so wrong? A creeping thought began to sting his mind. Perhaps he didn’t deserve to be the team leader. He should be the one trapped in that mirror, not Hyuuga!

Ryouma clenched his fists. It’s too late for regrets now. “Ginga Tensei!” shouted Ryouma and he was transformed into the GingaRed. He didn’t waste time tracking down the first signal of his teammate. Hayate should be the nearest. The hero teleported out like a crimson comet.

“Hayate! Hayate!” called out GingaRed among the thick bushes and overgrown trees. GingaGreen should be here, but there was no sign of him. Ryouma explored the creepy forest further.

Out of nowhere, he found an abandoned warehouse. The doors were locked, but the Gingaman easily broke the padlock with a single punch. He went inside.

His helmet gave off a bright spotlight to shine his way. The interior was haunting. It was empty save for some broken container boxes. The windows were dirty, but Ryouma didn’t realize that the smudges on the glass were actually ancient sigils of magic. As he went deeper into the warehouse, the windows behind him glowed.

“Hayate!” called out GingaRed to a figure who sat at the heart of this deserted place. GingaGreen sat in a W position with both of his legs extended to the sides. The pretty boy didn’t respond.

The closer he approached his teammate, the concerned Ryouma became. Especially when he found that Hayate was sitting facing a small shrine of skulls. His helmet was on the ground with a sliver of blue light being drained from it. “What the…”

“I am nothing but a cattle of Geltgelt. I surrender my soul to be led to the slaughterhouse of Daitanix…”

“Don’t worry, Hayate. I’ll save your Gingaman soul!” A spark of golden light was summoned by Ryouma. It spread across his Gingaman suit to form additional golden armor. One part of the light manifested into a formidable sword, the Starbeast Sword.

Ryouma grabbed it from the air in front of him. He then swung the weapon to destroy the demonic shrine. The cursed miniature shattered into thousands of ceramic shards.

The destruction seemed to snap GingaGreen back to the real world. “Wha- huh?”

“Hayate, are you okay?” asked the worried Ryouma who pat his teammate’s shoulder.

Hayate wasn’t sure himself. “Yeah, uuh, the last thing I remember is I’m fighting this skull monster.”

“That’s Geltgelt. He put you and the others in some kind of a trance. We need to find them before that monster turns them into human sacrifice.”

GingaGreen shivered. “I can’t remember being a sacrificial lamb on my bucket list. What should we do?”

Ryouma shook his head. “Honestly, I’m running low on manpower. But we can’t risk splitting so that Geltgelt can take us down again.”

The helmetless GingaGreen. “Why don’t we make them come to us?”

“Huh?”

The excited Hayate elaborated. “We can make a signal that lures our teammates in. It can be based on Geltgelt’s pattern.”

“Wait, pattern? You mean his magic?”

Hayate chuckled. “There’s no such thing as magic. What he did to us was just some kind of a mind-jamming pattern which we can duplicate.”

Ryouma was hesitant at first, but he trusted his friend. “You got it. What do we need?”

“That’s where we need you.”

“What do you mean?”

GingaRed was standing on a strange-looking circle of sigils and other complex writings on the floor. “I can’t believe that you’re making bait!”

“The pattern should be superimposed with Gingaman energy. That’s how we can lure our friends. Do you want Saya and others back or not?”

Ryouma sighed. “Fine, let’s get on with it.”

“Good, good. Now, you have returned to your normal mode. Try to summon the Light of Ginga again.”

GingaRed nodded. His arm extended skyward. “Power-up Mode. The Light of Ginga!”

Ryouma’s costume glowed on the arm, the palms, the waist. The golden armor would give a boost to his power.

But the glow dissipated. It even drained down to the magic circle below. The reddish paint became golden with the newly imbued force. “What the-”

“Excellent,” said the GingaGreen with a smirk.

“Hayate, what-”

Out of nowhere, GingaRed was grabbed from behind. Two gloved hands pinched him between the armpits. It bore the color green. “Gou… Gouki!”

“I surrender my soul to Daitanix,” mumbled the GingaBlue.

“Snap out of it!” But Ryouma was in a bad place. GingaGreen approached him and immediately gave Ryouma a barrage of punches to his toned abs. Sparks flew every time the fist hit the suit.

“We are nothing. Just another food to be consumed by the void,” muttered Hayate monotonously.

“Guys!”

“How naive that you came here to save your friends,” said a voice that Ryouma never wanted to hear. From the shadows, the yellow and pink Gingaman came. Their mouths moved to speak, but the escaping voices were the mix-up between their normal one and Geltgelt’s.

“No!”

“Why can’t you just accept the fact that your team is now nothing more than a collection of my meat puppets,” said the corrupted Saya. “Even your precious Light of Ginga is now part of my magic thanks to your stupidity.”

“This moron truly trusted his friends. He even listened to me to surrender his power,” snickered the evil GingaGreen. Hayate grabbed Ryouma’s crotch and made the team leader moan. Without Ginga’s power and at the center of a dark magic circle, GingaRed was hopeless at fighting evil.

From the cement floor, rose five skull statues. On four of them, there were jewels of green, blue, pink, and yellow. Ryouma could guess that the only thing missing was his own. “Once all of our Gingaman souls are collected, Geltgelt’s mirror tower could be completed and we all will be one as Daitanix’s slave,” explained Gouki who still held his own team leader firmly.

“Perhaps our lovely GingaRed needed a demonstration,” said Saya with an enticing tone.

Each of the small skull statues opened its mouth and ghostly energy shot out to wrap around the Gingaman. They shrieked and moaned and wailed as if the boundary between pain and torment is blurred with pleasure and arousal. Then, the Gingaman changed.

“No, this can’t be....”

The four Gingaman got their own additional armor. But instead infused with the pure power of space and time, they were cursed with dark magic. Forms of skulls and skeletons adorned their costume. It was as if Geltgelt had donated some of his forms to embolden his slaves. A big skull was on their chests, connected with a ring of smaller bones to form a loose choke collar. For the girls, skulls were also on the tip of their budding breasts. Another one decorated the jockstrap around their groin.

Gouki and Hayate enjoyed their own cup that grew with the perversion. Ryouma could feel Gouki’s shape pushing to the crack of his butt from behind. He gulped and sweat profusely. Something was wrong.

“Looks like the little GingaRed was not worthy enough to be a hero,” mocked Hayate as he felt Ryouma’s groin also grow. He fleshly caress the apparent shaft as GingaRed’s fighting spirit dwindled. “Perhaps Hyuuga should lead us instead of a pathetic rookie like you.”

“An idiot who keeps on letting his friends down,” ridiculed Gouki.

The remaining Gingaman approached them. Saya and Hikaru licked their own tongues before kissing each other in the fiercest way. They could feel Ryouma’s mind begin to roam into the wild as the witness. Giggling, the Pink and Yellow Gingaman then stabbed GingaRed’s armpit with their fingers.

Ryouma yelped. There wasn’t much pain. It was humiliation. This kind of thing shouldn’t affect his heroic spirit in any way. But they did. He moaned as the girls twisted their fingers on his armpits. The two’s continuing fondling of his erect raisins gave the most apparent sense of despair. “What…. What is happening to me?”

“What’s happening is you will be the final jewel, GingaRed. Just like the rest of your miserable team.”

Ryouma shook his head. There must be a way out of this. “Gingaman forever…” he said weakly as the uncontrolled drooling began.

“You’re correct, Ryouma. Gingaman forever.” Saya moved in to kiss Ryouma’s helmet. After being kinda satisfied, she turned around just like her corrupted comrades. Their master was there.

“Finally, the spell can be completed. The seal can be broken. The sacrifices can be given,” grunted Geltgelt. “Hurry up, Slaves. Put on your masks.”

The Gingaman obeyed save for Ryouma. But he got no chance. As Gouki released him, GingaRed just fell slouching on the magic circle.

The monster opened his shield and the round mirror freed its prisoner. Hyuuga was there, or so Ryouma first thought. His heart sunk when he realized that his brother had been turned into a lifesized glass statue. Inside, Hyuuga’s spirit called for help although no sounds could escape.

That was before Geltgelt swung his sword and shattered the statue. Ryouma wanted to scream, but only choked and gagging noises came out. His tears poured down his cheeks.

Hyuuga’s remnants moved on their own to decorate the magic circle. The skeleton statues were now shiny with an extra layer of glass. Furthermore, his connection with BullBlack gave unbeatable power to Geltgelt’s twisted spell.

The four Gingaman reached for their helmets that magically appeared before their individual skeleton statues. They put the helmets on. The visors showed the real situation. As their bodies were taken over, their souls were trapped. Some like Gouki and Saya were fighting an unwinnable battle against Geltgelt’s reflection while Hikaru and Hayate became sluts of their new masters.

What’s left was Ryouma. “What’re you waiting for, Slave? Look at my shield!”

Geltgelt’s order made the broken GingaRed flinch. He slowly looked up at the monster mirror shield. Ryouma screamed as the serpentine evil energy struck his helmet. His brain was about the explode. His soul was about to be torn asunder. His eyes were about to pop out.

GingaRed jolted, then his helmet slumped. He stood debilitated at the center of the magic circle while his corrupted friends approached their skeleton statues. The miniatures grew in size. The innards opened to reveal a form-fitting coffin.

The four Gingaman entered the coffins to surrender themselves. With only their helmets peaking out, Gouki, Hayate, Hikaru, and Saya were turned into a part of the statues.

The dark magic structures began to raise around Ryouma. GingaRed was being encased in similar skeleton-themed carvings. He was being turned into a living statue like those found in ancient temples.

GingaRed put himself into a spread eagle position. The visor reflection showed his feeble attempt to escape the inescapable Geltgelt reflection. Like his friends, he was trapped for eternity.

In an instant, the magic circle collapsed. The four statues collided and merged with the central GingaRed tower akin to giant pieces of a puzzle that came together. The Gingaman screamed signaled the final step of Geltgelt’s resurrection spell. Ryouma screamed too.

Bolts of interdimensional lighting struck the mirror tower. Evil energy converged to harness and drain the heroes’ power. Hyuuga’s BullBlack and the Gingaman’ Light of Ginga energy were nothing but fuel for the dark magic.

The tower evolved with its eternal prisoners forever wailing inside. Its form contorted into a monstrous face of a reptilian demon. Twin curving horns sprout out like new towers. The front side of the structure opened to reveal rows of sharp teeth. Two crimson eyes opened. “Come forth, Daitanix. I summon thee!” declared Geltgelt as the monster head came to life.

The interdimensional gate was opened. The giant demon beast escaped its prison and tear the abandoned warehouse apart. Its roar could be heard across the forest and plains.

As the giant began to lay waste to the city, the jewels that adorned its diabolical body continued to glimmer under the sunlight. Those were the only thing left of the assimilated Gingaman. Their bodies were not trapped on the skin. They became the skin. Limbs, torso, everything had merged with the monster that they tried to fight. Only the helmets still remained bulging visibly for everyone to see. It was the ultimate humiliation.

Not that Ryouma and his friends wailed for help out of pure human emotions. It was their master’s command to demoralize all the remaining heroes out there as well the panicking population. Whatever Daitanix told them to do, the soulless Gingaman team obeyed like another set of useful organs.