The mere thought of allowing herself to perish made Lucy’s skin burn with imagined shame and anger. She could already hear the Dreamer’s high-pitched giggles while watching the light leave Lucy’s eyes, ready to add Lucy’s face to her ever-growing repertoire of Dream Knight failures.

  Even besides the rage it inspired in Lucy in to imagine herself falling before the Dreamer’s eyes, the very thought of taking her own life was…upsetting, to say the least. She’d had many a day and night where she was sunken into the deepest listlessness and depression of a trapped and hopeless existence, but still she had clung to the desire to continue living. Perhaps it was stubbornness, or perhaps it was due to the weight of obligation to others, to those she would hurt by deliberately taking her life away from them, to those in the future she could have helped but wouldn’t. The latter reason resounded more strongly than ever, now, due to both her present circumstances in the waking world and her having taken up the mantle of a Dream Knight.

  Lucy the Dream Knight was not someone who would even attempt such a thing.

  “Contemplating the easy way out of this miserable existence, huh?”

  The Dreamer spoke with such a lighthearted and joking tone it made Lucy’s stomach churn. She scowled as she looked back up at the Dreamer. “What makes you say that like you can read my mind?”

  “You’re way easier to read than you think,” said the Dreamer, the white of her grin matching the maddening white all around. “And come on. Staring down at your sword, making big pouty lips, and letting your eyes go all puppy-dog like you’re taking pity on your own reflection? Seen this dozens of times now.”

  Lucy remembered all those images that had flitted by just moments ago—images of Dream Knights, more than likely. “You’ve seen other Dream Knights…actually…?”

  “Uh-huh.” The Dreamer put her hand on her hip, her tone one of divulging a casual anecdote. “Always kinda messy—at least until the sweet nothingness in here erases it away—but they all figured it was the best option before doing it. Something about dying to return to their own Dream and never having to come back to this one.” Her grin widened. “They always emphasized that last part. And to this day, I still wonder why. Like, isn’t it so rude of them to never want to see me again?”

  “Certainly sounds like they had a lot on their minds,” Lucy said as deliberate conversation filler while she was still frantically rummaging her brain for another way out. There had to be. Should she have put more points into Ideation after all?

  “Right?” said the Dreamer in a pleased tone, seeming to have bitten right into Lucy’s verbal detritus. “They get all overthinking and talking to themselves and it sure sounds to them like they have too much to think about. But how about sparing a thought for little old me, who’s been stuck in here for ages with just my thoughts? Well, just my thoughts and the System and its cronies out there, but they haven’t mattered in a long time. I’m just here chilling in this whitespace, like I’m trapped in an Apple commercial forever. Isn’t that sad? Don’t you feel bad for me? I want to get out of here, too, you know?”

  Lucy’s head was spinning, both from her continued manic searching for other approaches to her situation, as well as from how the Dreamer was jumping between topics and tones that did not match her face or situation at all. The complete, pure, unchanging white backdrop did little to ease the fever dream feeling of it all; Lucy wondered if this was what spiralling into insanity felt like—and then she caught herself, because she did not want to admit she was allowing her mind to deteriorate like that.

  “Say,” the Dreamer said, having apparently taken a break from her rambling. “If you actually end up rescuing me, what happens? I heard it’ll stop this Dream from happening to me again, but is that really true?”

  After all the inane yapping the Dreamer had just spieled, this question reached Lucy’s ears with resounding clarity that was almost too sharp, like a brass bell being rung inches from her face. The question made her skin crawl with a sense of unease she couldn’t quite place, but she saw no reason to lie, especially as other Dream Knights seemed to have already given her most of the answer some time ago. “Yes. If I rescue you, this Dream will end and you’ll wake up.”

  “That settles it, then!” The Dreamer clapped. “You sure took a roundabout way of getting to this point—and I could’ve done without you making my leg bleed, but I’ll let that slide because I’m a forgiving girl. But now all you have to do is listen to me, then you’ll rescue me, and we’ll both get out of this snoozefest. Win-win, am I right?”

  Lucy stared unblinkingly at the Dreamer’s face, her mind racing again. Compared to her other options for leaving this Dream, using the return point or dying, rescuing the Dreamer was the odd one out because it was the only one that allow the Dreamer to return to the waking world. And that…

  “I’m not rescuing you.”

  Lucy said the words definitively, her figure standing up perfectly straight to let her voice project out through the far reaches of the white void.

  Silence set back in. The Dreamer froze, her expression unmoving, her eyes never leaving Lucy’s. Some interminable amount of time later, the shadow of a scowl darkened her expression.

  “What?” She laughed awkwardly, her brow furrowed and lowered so she was glaring at Lucy over the bridge of her nose. “You’re…you’re kidding, right? Unless you actually want to stay with me here, forever. You know I was only kidding with all the flirtatious banter, right?”

  “Well, unlike you, I’m not kidding.” Lucy placed one hand on her hip and the other on her Ideal’s handle. “You…you shouldn’t be allowed to return to the waking world. Not after everything I know about you now.”

  “Oh.” The Dreamer spoke with such a flat tone that the world itself seemed to yawn and lose all energy. In contrast, her face was lowered in such a precise way that, even with the blinding white light all around them, her face was spider-webbed with shadow as she pierced into Lucy’s eyes with her own. “So you think you know everything you need to know about me? Is that it?”

  She grimaced, looking every bit like she was about to bellow a roar of rage, but at the same time, her eyes clouded over and tears ran down her cheeks. Spittle flew from her mouth as she yelled: “What could you possibly know? Let me guess. You think I’m an axe-crazy maniac in real life?”

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  She thrust her arms out and latched onto Lucy’s arm with a vice grip. Lucy flinched and tried to shake her off, but she would not let go, her hands locked onto the Dreamer’s arm and her eyes locked onto Lucy’s panicked and confused gaze.

  “You don’t know jack shit!” the Dreamer screamed, her voice sublimating between a sob and a snarl. “None of you shitty Dream Knights ever do! You all spout pretty words, then give up as soon as I don’t live up to whatever expectations you have in your heads! You should die! All of you should just die and leave us fucked-up Dreamers alone!”

  “Let…go…!” Lucy wrestled with the Dreamer, but the girl’s strength was monstrously immense. Was she tapping into some manic energy from her sudden hysteria? Or was her subconscious distorting the physical properties of her Dream, including her own strength? There was no way for Lucy to know, but just as she was trying to find a way to get the Dreamer off of herself—preferably, without making her bleed again and anger her further—something caught Lucy’s attention from the corner of her eye.

  Another unconscious person, a boy only a few years younger than Lucy, had just come into being a few feet away.

  Lucy couldn’t help staring at him wide-eyed, but she quickly regretted it upon seeing the Dreamer follow her gaze. Her expression changed in an instant, lighting up as if a terrible fire had been ignited within her, and in a single second shaken and distorted by flailing limbs, a moving mass of flesh and hair, and vocalizations that almost sounded inhuman, the Dreamer had flung herself off of Lucy and onto the unconscious boy’s back.

  “Look!” The Dreamer’s voice tore through the empty air like a command from a higher power, deeply and vehemently upset. In another jerky but blazingly-fast motion, she wrapped her arm around the boy’s neck and tightened her hold with enough force that one could almost see the boy’s trachea caving in. “See how easy it is? Even I can do it? This is all I’m asking you to do! And you don’t even have to do that many! Just enough until the System weakens!”

  Lucy was only half-processing her words because she could not think of another moment in the Dreams she’d visited so far that had her as taken aback as right now. The Dreamer really, truly continued to choke an unconscious but fully living person all without batting an eyelid. The way she talked so casually about eliminating the boy made it sound like he was merely a dummy or an NPC in a video game—and that only made Lucy want to vomit as she saw the boy’s face starting to turn a shade of blue.

  “Let go of him!”

  Lucy was furious, but this time she wouldn’t risk accidental maiming with her Ideal. Gritting her teeth, she quickly slid her Ideal back into its sheath, then flew with all the force her body could propel her with and tackled the Dreamer with the full strength and momentum of her entire body.

  Thanks to the weight of Lucy’s Higher Reflection, she knocked the Dreamer away from the boy with quick and immediate ease, and the two of them lay sprawled out but still floating in mid-air below and to the side of the boy who had almost asphyxiated without ever being conscious of it.

  “Get the hell off me!” The Dreamer thrashed about, arms and legs bolting and sweeping through the white space like endless flashes of lightning. Lucy was heavy enough that no amount of her manic energy would get the Dream Knight to budge, but that didn’t stop the Dreamer from trying again and again.

  “Do you really think I’d let you go after that?” Lucy let all restraint shatter from her voice, her indignation cutting through the Dreamer’s hysterics and freezing her restless arms and legs in shock. “You…you…agh, why do I even need to explain?”

  “Explain what?” Behind the Dreamer’s angry tone was the inflection of a genuine question, and this made Lucy’s blood boil further. The Dreamer had no reaction Lucy’s darkening expression as she added: “Seriously, tell me already, goddammit! Or are you trying to kill me from an aneurysm before your heavy-ass armour suffocates me?”

  “You…!” A white hot flash of unbridled energy lit up Lucy’s vision and coursed through her veins, lighting every cell in her being on fire. She raised herself up into a kneeling position, grabbed the Dreamer by the shoulders without any regard for the force of her grip, and flipped the un-armoured girl onto her back. The Dreamer only had time to give a wide-eyed look of astonishment before Lucy clamped her knees down on the girl’s legs and used her hands to pin the girl’s hands down.

  It was strange, far too strange that this was possible in a white void where there was nothing close to resembling a solid surface. And yet Lucy had acted on pure instinct, and what she wanted to happen became reality. Did that mean she had exerted enough influence, through her own blind rage,to bend the physical realities of this Dream to her will? But if that were the case, it seemed there was a hard limit to it, because if she really had full control over this moment right now, this extremely dangerous and deranged individual would be cuffed and chained, or trapped within a cage without a lock.

  When Lucy gazed down at the Dreamer’s face, seeing her surprised quickly morph back into seething hatred, Lucy found the words that had been boiling with steam in her throat, and at last she shouted them so harshly her voice went hoarse. “You’re a murderer! Your Dream, your whole entire Dream, is an excuse to murder people! Do you really not see what’s messed up about that?”

  “You’re just like everyone else!” the Dreamer shouted back, struggling against Lucy’s restraints in vain. “Just like all these other unconscious twats who are useless, and ignorant, and have no reason to live except feeding the goddamn System! You’re all so short-sighted. Why can’t you see past the obvious?”

  Lucy shook her head, internally groaning at how the Dreamer rattled off all those words with pure conviction in her eyes. “You’re not making any sense. You lashed out about no one understanding you, but have you listened to what you’re saying? Have you thought for even one second about what you do, what you just tried to do right in front of me?”

  “Fuck you! Forget it!” The Dreamer stopped struggling and turned her head away dismissively. “Some heroes you lot are. I try to get you to understand where I’m coming from and you don’t even try. So—what? Are you gonna keep me pinned here forever? Be my guest. Not like this is that different from what it was like for me before.”

  Lucy continued to glare down at her with her eyes ablaze. But the Dreamer wasn’t exaggerating; she went limp in Lucy’s grasp, keeping her head turned away with a look of pointed indifference.

  As Lucy breathed in deep, heavy gasps, the fire of her wrath still raging within her, the Dreamer’s last words resounded in her mind over and over.

  Lucy didn’t understand her?

  It was like a knife slowly working its way under all her armour, paring through the first few layers of Lucy’s weak, vulnerable flesh. But Lucy halted it with a shield of reasoning: why would she want to understand someone who was clearly deranged and outright homicidal? She couldn’t shake the memory of the Dreamer’s hands squeezing hard enough on the unconscious boy’s neck that she left deep red marks and made his face rapidly turn blue. And the entirely unbothered look on her face while doing it was chilling enough to make one question whether this perpetrator was even human.

  But then Lucy remembered another one of the Dreamer’s expressions from only moments ago: her mouth and nose scrunched up in visceral anger, but her eyes misty with genuine, unprompted tears running down her cheeks. It would be so, so easy to believe that this young woman was inherently malevolent to her core, like the psychopaths who had taken joy in killing small, harmless animals since they were little. But that one small moment of vulnerability, contrasting everything else the Dreamer had ever said and done, made the faint dewdrops of a voice at the back of Lucy’s mind swell into a loud stream whose waters murmured with a crystal-clear question:

  What if a past experience had sent the Dreamer down this path?