“What the fuck?”

  The Dreamer leapt backwards with explosive force, as if her entire being had been struck and shattered. In stark contrast to how her voice had been efficient and measured all this time, she began breathing raggedly, her pants echoing out through the white abyss, which seemed to quiver in time with her breaths. With bloodshot eyes, she shot her gaze down at her leg. Blood gashed out of the fresh new wound, dyeing her beige pants a clear, unmistakable crimson.

  A scream erupted through pure white nothingness.

  “The hell are you doing?” the Dreamer spat at Lucy, sinking down to clutch at her bleeding leg. “That was a mistake. Tell me it was! Tell me you’re just a horrible klutz!”

  “The cut wasn’t that deep,” said Lucy, consciously making an effort to stand tall in the face of the Dreamer’s glare of pure enmity. “I just wanted you to take your foot off of them.”

  “What?”

  The Dreamer whipped around just in time to see the unconscious woman press up against the edge of the wall Lucy and the Dreamer had come from. She glided through the air in a perfect straight path, carried by the same unseen force from earlier. A mere second later—far too quickly for the Dreamer to react—her unconscious body pressed up against the wall, stopping as it met resistance, but even that was temporary as the woman phased right through the wall, disappearing entirely. When her body was partway through the wall, her arms and legs jerked slightly, and Lucy remembered what the Dreamer had said about these newly-formed, unconscious people being startled awake as soon as they left the white void and entered the darkness of the System’s maze.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” The Dreamer clutched at her hair, grabbing fistfuls of it, as her voice filled the space with a lower and more vehement tone that clashed sharply with her image. “Did you not listen to a word I said? Or are you trying to piss me off? You’re literally feeding the System!”

  “I heard you loud and clear,” said Lucy, biting on her to cheek to maintain a stout frown against the Dreamer’s hellish expression. “But I’m not killing a defenceless, unarmed, unconscious person.”

  “Don’t you dare give me that holier-than-thou attitude!” The Dreamer shot right up to Lucy, drawing in close and bringing her glare just inches from Lucy’s eyes. “Or are you stupidest hypocrite in history? You, the one who stabbed my fucking leg without hesitation!”

  Lucy bit her lip. “Like I said, it was—”

  “I heard you loud and clear, too!” the Dreamer interjected, running her hand up in a wiping motion over Lucy’s face to shut her up. She held it in the air, looking as if she might smack Lucy, but instead brought it back to her side. “Doesn’t mean I believe you. What happened to, you know, moving them out of the way, or pushing me aside, if that was all you wanted to do? Fuck…”

  She bent over, placing both hands on a spot just below her knee where the blood continued to trickle down.

  Lucy’s hands shook. Regardless of how she felt right in doing it in the moment, and regardless of how her distaste toward the Dreamer had been mounting up to a breaking point, Lucy was blindsided by a sudden welling up of guilt in seeing how she had maimed another person enough to make them bleed so profusely.

  But just as she was afraid the shaking would get bad enough to make her drop her Ideal, the Dreamer looked up at Lucy, still bent over and grabbing her leg, shooting a glare that would put even the Queen from Kenneth’s Dream to shame.

  “You’ve wanted to do something like this the whole time, didn’t you?” Her voice was low, her words seeming to cast the white void into a slight darkness.

  “What?” Lucy gave a look a genuine shock. “I did it because I didn’t want to follow your last order. And I still stand by that.”

  The Dreamer stood back up, clicking her tongue dismissively. “Like hell that’s all there is to it. You think I don’t pick up on all the things you don’t say?”

  In a gesture that caught Lucy completely off-guard, the Dreamer reached out and placed her hand on Lucy’s shoulder. Despite how her shoulder was covered in a thick epaulette, she could feel the pressure and firmness of the Dreamer’s grip.

  “Admit it,” the Dreamer said with a wicked smirk. “I’ve been showing you how to end this Dream, how to rescue me, but you’ve had certain thoughts bouncing around in that head of yours, waiting to explode. That little trick with your sword and my leg was like a little spark before the atom bomb, am I right?”

  This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

  Lucy exhaled loudly and audibly, her eyes bulging as she stared down at the girl grinning and mockingly holding her shoulder. She couldn’t take it anymore. Not after everything this Dreamer had said, not after she said all of it with a nonchalance that was both irritating and highly unsettling, and especially not after this Dreamer had the audacity to claim she knew Lucy’s inner workings better than herself. Perhaps she herself lacked self-awareness, and if that were the case, Lucy was more than happy to bluntly help her understand.

  “You aren’t right in the head.”

  Lucy said it in a low voice. The Dreamer’s eyes went wide, her grip weakening slightly; it seemed even she hadn’t expected Lucy to be so direct.

  Lucy swallowed hard. She needed to push through, right here, right now. “You Dream of people turning into violent machines, so they can build up into an even deadlier machine. All so you have a reason to kill them. And you…you’re perfectly happy about that? How…what…what kind of person could say everything you said with a smile?” Lucy brought her hand up to where the Dreamer was grasping her shoulder and forced her hand off. “There’s something deeply, deeply wrong with you.”

  The Dreamer stood frozen, her hand still in the air from where Lucy had shaken it off. She remained like this, staring at Lucy with wide eyes and an unreadable expression.

  And then the white void shook with laughter.

  She crossed her arms over her stomach, bending over herself, looking as if she was about to lose strength in her legs from her own uncontrollable giggling. Lucy watched in shock, but kept her Ideal firmly grasped and pointed forward.

  “I have something wrong with myself?” She looked back up, taking a moment to catch her breath. “You say that as if I’m the only person who could ever be this messed up. Ever try looking in the mirror, Missus Pot?”

  Lucy wanted to ignore her words. She knew they were reactive, defensive, like the snarling of a retreating wolf after losing a scrap. But a chill crept under Lucy’s skin, and she instinctively wanted to yell for this girl to stop talking.

  But the Dreamer kept speaking. “Like I said earlier, I saw what you did to those robots. I saw that smile you had after. And I don’t know who you’re trying to fool: me, or yourself. But that was no smile of victory or whatever BS you want to call it. It was a shit-eating grin. The kind I bet Jack the Ripper had after slicing and dicing his victims.”

  “You…” Lucy’s voice came out lower and harsher than she would have ever wanted it to. It felt like a separate storm, a separate force of nature, thrashing out of Lucy’s body, and she wanted to stop it. And yet, in that exact same tone, she continued: “You’re the one making shit up! Quit lying! I know you love messing with people!”

  “Oh? What do we have here?” The Dreamer giggled, covering her mouth like a schoolgirl watching a nerd being bullied, but when she brought her hand back down, her sneer would have put the Joker to shame. “Is this what a cornered Dream Knight sounds like? I guess if you spend all your time in Dreams, it’s hard for you to face up to reality. Maybe you should dream up a mirror sometime!”

  “You…”

  “Yes, my darling?”

  Lucy held her Ideal up, pointing the tip of her blade right at the Dreamer’s heart. She was barely thinking, barely registering anything from her senses through the veneer of hatred that enveloped her mind. The only thing intense enough to break through was an awful grinding sound, so droning and high-pitched it made her mouth ache. It took some moments for Lucy to realize that both sensations came from herself—from grinding her own teeth.

  This realization made Lucy’s consciousness zoom out, away from this claustrophobic mental space and into the wide nexus of Lucy’s memories and intuitions, where she quickly located a similar expression and vibe associated with it. It was Diana, during their first encounter with the queen in Kenneth’s Dream, when Kenneth had been crying and apologizing and feeding into the queen’s power. Diana had wound up her spear arm for a direct attack on Kenneth—which had thankfully been interrupted by Ricardo’s dive tackle. But in those few seconds, Lucy had seen it: the same teeth-grinding grimace, and the same unchecked hatred that had blinded the red-plumed Dream Knight from the clear moral ruin of her intended actions.

  Lucy couldn’t be like Diana. She absolutely couldn’t be.

  And with that, Lucy brought her Ideal back down to her side, forcing her grimace to loosen and settle into a calmer but still unpleasant frown.

  “Oh?” The Dreamer raised her eyebrow. “Finally decided you got enough blood out of this poor defenceless girl? That’s so inspiring! Even a violence addict like you can quit your drug!”

  Lucy bit her lip, for the girl’s words were far too effective at drawing her ire. But ultimately, Lucy ignored her mocking and turned away, facing the wall the two of them had entered from.

  “Say whatever you want,” said Lucy, purposely averting her gaze. “I’m through with this. Maybe another Dream Knight will finally give you what you want. But it won’t be me.”

  “And where would you go?” the Dreamer said without skipping a beat. “In case you already forgot, it’s a maze back there. And the odds of you finding where you came from in a maze are…slim to none, probably.”

  Lucy turned back around with her eyes and mouth wide. “You know about return points?”

  The Dreamer shrugged, and as she did, the white void momentarily flickered with dozens of images flitting by before settling back down into nothingness just as quickly. “Like I said, I’ve talked with many, many Dream Knights. And since I’m so bored in here, I tend to ask lots of questions.”

  Lucy didn’t respond, not even with a nod. But she was gritting her teeth again, because the Dreamer was absolutely correct. Finding her way back the first time she had visited this Dream was a fluke, only possible due to her having walked only a short distance in a straight line. Now, she wasn’t even sure how she could retrace her steps given that she had been swallowed by the System and dropped onto a conveyor belt in the middle of who-knows-where. Realistically, it was impossible for Lucy to find her return point. So that left only two options to leave this Dream:

  Rescue the Dreamer.

  Or allow herself to perish.