Kenneth, who had been idly fiddling with various utensils on the far table, stopped and met Diana’s gaze, his body frozen stiff like a mouse in the shadow of a feral feline.

  “Th-th-thank you!” he squeaked as he ran up, nearly stumbling over his own feet, to take the basket from Diana. Despite his frantic speed getting to her, he slowly walked back toward Keilani while keeping his body slightly turned toward Diana as if he were afraid of turning his back to her.

  Lucy wondered if, before she had entered this Dream, Diana had done something to Kenneth to make him wary of her. But that assumption didn’t seem right. For one, Diana didn’t look at Kenneth with contempt, nor any hint of guilt at whatever action she had taken. If anything, the slight crease in her brow as she was watching Kenneth come up to her suggested confusion, of all things: perhaps she herself was trying to figure out the source of Kenneth’s apprehension.

  “Oho, look at you,” Ricardo said to Diana with a grin, “taking a page out of the Understanding playbook. You planning to do a Primary shift?”

  Lucy expected Diana to be fuming at him for implying basic compassion was out of character for her, but instead Diana sighed with clear exasperation and said, “Look. I’m just doing my job as a Dream Knight properly. But it’s all right. I wouldn’t expect a sport brawler to understand there’s more to this role than fighting.”

  “Hey, hey,” Ricardo said, a fiery but still lighthearted glint in his eye, “I’ve been doing more talking than fighting ever since I got here.”

  “And yet Kenneth doesn’t have the nerve to speak to you.”

  “Speak for yourself!” said Ricardo, walking up to Diana. “I swear that ‘Thank you’ was the first time he said a complete sentence to you.”

  The two of them continued to argue by the door they had come in from, Diana sounding far more intense about it than Ricardo, but Lucy didn’t sense actual, violent anger brewing. If anything, the fact that they were bickering in a mostly civil fashion spoke to the strength of their teamwork and unified goal of rescuing Kenneth.

  Teamwork…Now that Lucy thought about it, it was surprising that other Dream Knights were here, and that there was the expectation of them working together. The King hadn’t mentioned anything of the sort to her. Was this a regular, expected occurrence within the Lattice of Dreams? Or was this some rare anomaly that the other three Dream Knights had worked out before Lucy showed up?

  “You look like you’re asking a million questions,” said Keilani, going over to Lucy’s side while Diana and Ricardo continued arguing. “I take it you’re new to this Dream Knight business?”

  Lucy nodded, remembering that Keilani was aligned with Ideation rather than Understanding, making her wonder with slight embarrassment if the confusion had been that apparent on her face. “Yeah. This is only my second…no, third Dream.”

  “Gotcha. I’m not all that experienced, but I’ve been through a few more Dreams, seen most of what this Lattice throws at us Knights. Well, I want to believe that’s the case, but you never know what else you’ll be blind-sided with when you step into another Dream.”

  Lucy gave a sheepish smile. “That’s kind of exactly how I feel right now.”

  Keilani laughed, nudging Lucy on the shoulder. “You’re pretty funny, you know that? But I get what you’re saying. My guess is this is the first time you’ve met other Dream Knights?”

  Lucy nodded, happy to finally get answers to the questions that had been on her mind but had gone unspoken, thanks to her arrival leading to an immediate battle and an ensuing search for shelter.

  “So,” Keilani continued, “these multi-Knight Dreams are something that happens sometimes. How often, I don’t know. But from what my Chief told me the first time I came back from one—”

  “Sorry,” said Lucy, “your ‘Chief?’”

  “Yeah, he’s the one who offered me the choice to become a Dream Knight, and he guides me through things whenever I come back to my Final Dream. I think you have someone like that in your own Dream, right? Every Knight I’ve met did, including Ricardo and Diana.”

  “Oh, yeah, I do,” Lucy said with a nod. “But it sounds like it’s different for everyone. Yours is a Chief; mine is a King.”

  “A King, huh?” Keilani eyed Lucy’s Higher Ideal, from the gauntlets and chain mail to the fluttering cape. “Guess it makes sense—you’re a literal knight, after all. Man, what are the odds! If they made a book or a movie about Dream Knights, I bet you’d be on the cover.”

  “Uh, yeah, maybe,” Lucy said with a slight laugh. It had been difficult to see before, but now it was apparent how Keilani was aligned with Ideation, based on how rapidly she connected dots and came up with ideas like that.

  “You’d look great,” Keilani said with an encouraging grin. “But where was I? Ah. Right. So Chief told me that some Dreams will take in the influence of multiple Dream Knights, if the Dreamer subconsciously feels like they need more help. When that happens, all of the Dream Knights summoned need to work together to rescue the Dreamer.”

  If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  “Makes sense,” said Lucy. “Does that mean we all get alignment updates after the rescue?”

  “From what I know, everyone who participated meaningfully in the rescue gets the standard alignment update at the end. Sounds a bit ambiguous, but I think it means everyone who the Dreamer felt helped them during their rescue. It’s all based on influence, so if you leave a positive impact on the Dreamer, that impact gets broadcasted through the Lattice.”

  “I see…” Lucy thought back on how, so far, all she had done was engage in battle with one of those armoured troops and gotten her left arm injured. Sure, she had eventually incapacitated him in the end (albeit temporarily), but not without Ricardo’s help. Not exactly a shining example of helpfulness to young Kenneth.

  “Hey now, don’t worry,” Keilani said with a gentle smile. “You don’t have to rush to do something big for Kenneth. He’s a good kid, and good kids are usually grateful to any adult who stands by them. So you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

  “Right,” said Lucy. “I sure hope so.” Thomas certainly hadn’t been that way with her, most of the time. But maybe it was because of the nature of being siblings, or because of Thomas experiencing the growing pains of being a young teenager.

  As Lucy went down this line of thought, she caught herself. If Thomas were the Dreamer she was rescuing right now, would she be able to set aside all their baggage and help him from the bottom of her heart? It was easy for her to say that she would, when she thought about Thomas at his lowest and focused on the purest and most noble of her own intentions. But there had been another side to this Dreamer and Dream Knight relationship, one predicated on the Dreamer’s gratefulness and trust toward their Knight. Would Thomas let her in, after all those after-school evenings where he would come home and wilfully avert his eyes away from hers before holing himself up in his room? Lucy looked across the room at Kenneth, sitting on a stool finishing off one of the pieces of bread Diana had given him, his wide eyes so much more open and less jaded than the last memories she had of her own brother.

  The sound of a doorknob turning rung out, followed by the squeak of the door they had come through swinging wide open. Everyone looked at the doorway as the two bakers stepped inside, their movements stiff and their hands shaking. Despite that, the husband quickly shut the door behind him, then the two of them looked at the party with hard frowns.

  “Little boy,” said the wife, looking at Kenneth, “come with us. Now.”

  “No!” Keilani said immediately, and Lucy realized she had already pieced together that the armoured troops were at the bakery’s front door. Did they have some way of tracking Kenneth? That would be absolute hell, but it was also possible they had spread out and were interrogating buildings along this street. Lucy hoped that was the case.

  “Um…” Kenneth stared at the bakers, his mouth agape and quivering while his hands shook violently.

  “Kenneth, stay where you are!” Keilani shouted. She glared at the bakers. “We’re not letting you turn him in.”

  “This isn’t a joke!” said the husband, stomping forward with a conviction in his anger that hadn’t been there before. “That’s the royal guard out there. The royal guard!”

  “We should’ve known you were a band of brigands,” the wife said with unchecked scorn, “brigands hiding away a heretic! We’re not going to be complicit in your treason!”

  “Hold on!”

  Lucy’s voice pierced through the air, followed by sudden and complete silence. Lucy herself was taken aback; one moment she had been glancing at Kenneth shaking and on the verge of tears, and the next moment her body and voice had already stepped forward.

  “What?” The husband’s chest rose and fell heavily as he glared at Lucy, his face red. “You have the nerve to tell us to wait?”

  “I mean, I mean…” Lucy scrambled to calm herself, to steady both her posture and her voice so that her own knightly image shined through. She was aware of Kenneth’s and the other Dream Knights’ gazes on her, particularly Diana’s sharp and judging eyes.

  Forcing herself to focus on the bakers, Lucy said: “Please, hear us out. We’re not brigands, and we’re not hiding a heretic. All we’re doing is protecting a young child who can’t defend himself. You have children yourselves, don’t you? Or know someone who does? Would you really be all right turning in someone like that?”

  “Lucy…” Ricardo said in a low voice strained with anxiety.

  “Yes, we would!” the wife said without skipping a beat. “What are you implying? That it’s fair we get tried and executed in his place?”

  The husband pointed at Lucy, his forefinger shaking with anger. “A sophist and a charlatan, this one! Trying to get us to walk the gallows ourselves in place of that heretic!”

  Lucy’s mind both went blank and raced a million miles a second—this was not how she had wanted the conversation to turn out. At all.

  “No!” Lucy shouted. “Please! Wait! You’ve got this all wrong. What I’m trying to say to you is—”

  “Urk…!”

  The male baker’s eyes went wide, then he opened his mouth and coughed out blood. The world seemed to go still, as if reality were breaking down before Lucy’s eyes, before she looked down at his chest and saw the tip of a spear piercing through.

  Diana stood behind him, holding the other end of that spear.

  The flow of time crashed back into consciousness as Diana withdrew her spear from the male baker’s flesh. He coughed and retched some more blood before falling to the floor with a heavy thud.

  His wife snapped her terrified gaze to his motionless body, but before she could scream, Diana grabbed her by the mouth and muffled her voice, then in one swift motion thrust the spear through her chest as well. Diana kept the spear plunged for a moment, her expression hard and devoid of any empathy, before pulling her weapon out and allowing the baker woman’s body to join her late husband on the floor of their own bakery.

  “What…”

  Lucy had gone stock still despite her heart thundering in her chest. After what felt like an eternity, she glanced back at the others. Ricardo held his head low with his hand on his forehead. And Keilani…

  Keilani held Kenneth with one arm, using her other hand to cover Kenneth’s eyes. It made perfect sense for her to do so, or so Lucy initially thought. But judging from how Kenneth seemed completely unperturbed, it looked very likely that Keilani had covered his eyes before Diana had even gone up to do the deed.

  Almost as if Keilani knew beforehand that Diana was going to go up to the people Lucy was speaking with and murder them in cold blood.