It was a falling sensation similar to when Lucy returned to her Final Dream: her body laying back as it went full dive through the air. Unlike during that liminal experiencing of crossing through the threshold to an entirely new Dream, Lucy still had her consciousness and all her senses about her, so she could see both Ricardo and Kenneth falling with her through the cloud of vibrant coloured glass that swirled all around them.

  Lucy’s first instinct was to try to fight against gravity to move her body and avoid getting cut by the glass shards. But soon, she realized that the shards themselves appeared to be conscious, or perhaps orchestrated by some higher force, for they fluttered away whenever they were in danger of coming into contact with any of the three people falling through the air, like birds flying away ever so shyly. Kenneth appeared to be entirely unfettered, as he gazed at the glittering shards and reached his hand out with wonder.

  Looking at him, Lucy felt a twinge in her heart. Just like when Kenneth had laughed after seeing the queen’s hair fall off, this moment was also a first: the first time Kenneth had appeared so free. With the shards that used to make up his aunt’s kitchen shattered and now floating up and away into oblivion, there was a halcyon beauty to seeing Kenneth having broken away and finding joy in it.

  Then, all too suddenly, the last of those glass shards disappeared, and Lucy gasped as she landed on her back. The impact wasn’t too drastic or painful, but the abruptness of it added to the disorientation of finding herself staring up at the enormous grey-and-brown walls of the church. As Lucy got up with a groan, she glanced around the floor, realizing that they had landed on the altar at the very end of the church hall. Kenneth lay calmly on the floor, thankfully without any sign of being in pain, though Lucy could see in his eyes that he was disappointed that that joyous, wondrous fall from his mind’s prison was over so soon.

  “Ugh…”

  Ricardo lay not far from Kenneth, his haphazard posture and his eyes squeezed shut showing that his landing had felt far less comfortable.

  Lucy rushed to his side and bent down. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah…just…getting hit on my back again so soon wasn’t so great.” He reached out his hand and Lucy helped him back up to his feet. He stooped over slightly, grasping at his lower back.

  “Take it easy for now,” Lucy cautioned. “I don’t think you should push yourself, or it might get worse.”

  “Oh, because we have all the time in the world, don’t we?”

  The sharp tongue and sardonic voice: Diana’s presence announced itself with the urgency of a hurricane. She stood several rows of pews away from the altar, her stature, always tall, always defiantly straight, bent forward as she rested her weight on her spear. Even from a distance, it was apparent that she was breathing raggedly, and her crimson cape was riddled with tears and holes.

  Further down the church hall in front of Diana, the floor was strewn with piles upon piles of helmets and pieces of armour: a sight Lucy recalled from her first skirmish together with her fellow Dream Knights against the royal guard.

  “They’ll be back up any second,” said Diana through her panting, “and more of them just keep coming. I don’t know what you did to Ricardo, but he’s gonna need to suck it up so we can get the hell out of here.”

  Lucy gave a quiet grunt of frustration. She didn’t disagree with Diana, especially since the sheer amount of royal guard equipment on the floor terrified her when she imagined them all being reassembled into a veritable legion of soldiers trapping them in. But the biting tone to Diana’s words had made it sound like she was thoroughly displeased to have them back, as if they were no more than dead weight.

  “Why didn’t you go after the first wave?” Lucy kept her tone neutral, but hoped that it would sound vindictive enough to put Diana in her place.

  “Because leaving you behind would be a bad idea?” came Diana’s retort. “If you went into those windows, it would make sense you’d come back here, and clearly my guess was right. And it’s not like I can leave the Dreamer behind.”

  Diana answered honestly, without as much sarcasm as would have been expected, and everything she said made sense. Lucy knew she should let it rest there, but she couldn’t help herself from flaring up when she looked at Diana’s face, much like when she had been face-to-face with Kenneth’s aunt.

  So, in the silence that should have given way calm to discussion of their next move, Lucy added: “You sure care a lot about the Dreamer you would’ve stabbed, if Ricardo hadn’t stopped you.”

  The effect was immediate. The church felt as if it rose a degree or two in temperature as Diana’s hard gaze turned into a vehement glare. “Have to get the last word in, huh? You—”

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  “All right, all right, that’s enough,” said Ricardo as he stepped up into the space between the altar and the pews, turning his head to lock eyes with Diana then Lucy. “Now really ain’t the time to bring this up. Let’s settle this after we’ve escaped this place.”

  Lucy kept her eyes locked on Ricardo’s, seeing that in his unwavering and pleading gaze, there was a sharpness directed specifically at her telling her to drop the topic she had just brought up. Lucy hung her head down slightly, though she kept her brow furrowed. “Sorry. You’re right. Let’s focus on getting out of here.”

  Ricardo nodded to her, then to Diana, then motioned for Lucy and Kenneth to follow him as they walked through the church hall to meet up with Diana. Once the three remaining Dream Knights were within proper speaking distance, discussion of their strategy quickly unfolded.

  The plan was to prepare for what would inevitably happen next. The royal guards who had already been defeated were overdue to be resurrected. Meanwhile, there were no sounds of reinforcements approaching; Diana had become accustomed to hearing the footsteps and clanking of armour outside that heralded their arrival, and from what she had experienced, their timing was irregular. So, it would be best to prepare for the existing guards to come back and then take them out again in one fell swoop, rather than make a run for it and risk becoming caught in a pincer attack when reinforcements arrived and the defeated guards came back. If they were defeated again now, the Dream Knights would have considerably more time to distance themselves.

  To that end, Ricardo positioned himself a few feet from where lay the royal guard armour that had gotten closest to the altar. Diana had fended them all off while standing between them and the altar, so when they resurrected, their attention would immediately be focused on the lone Dream Knight Ricardo standing where their previous adversary had been.

  Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the church hall, toward the entrance and behind the furthest row of royal guards, Lucy and Diana stood poised to strike the guards from behind with the element of surprise, catching them in a pincer attack between the two of them and Ricardo.

  “But what about your back?” Lucy had said.

  “Still not great, to be honest. But don’t worry. My Steel Skin Feat is available again, and it’ll alleviate the pain while it’s active. It’ll also help me tank their attacks so you and Diana can focus on clobbering ‘em from behind.”

  “How long does it last?” Diana had said curtly and dryly. “The moment it’s over, you’re in for a world of pain.”

  “Five minutes. But…” Here, Ricardo had given a smile and said: “In five minutes, we’ll be long gone from here. I know it sure as rain.”

  Now, his words echoed in Lucy’s mind as she stood near the church hall’s entrance, behind a row of pews furthest from the altar. Diana loomed, statuesque as usual, over another section of pews about a dozen steps to Lucy’s side. Above them, carved into the stone that formed the entrance’s arch, was a large relief of an angel wielding a flaming sword. Lucy recalled the story of Adam and Eve’s banishment from Eden, in which an angel guarded the entrance to Eden and drove away intruders with a sword of fire. Lucy looked down at her Ideal in her right hand, noting how the flickering and faint blue aura was both similar and dissimilar to the burning weapon wielded by the larger, sacred warrior hanging over her.

  “Just for the record, Standie.”

  In all of Lucy’s pondering, she had failed to register Diana drawing closer to her. Her eyes were sharp to match the didactic tone of her words, but her eyes did not glow with the animosity she normally had toward Lucy.

  Once Diana was close enough to be within range of Lucy’s sword, her non-chalance speaking to the unnecessariness—or perhaps futility on Lucy’s side—of engaging in violent argument, Diana continued: “I wasn’t going to throw my spear at the kid because I was having a hissy fit. Since you’re new—and because you’re stubborn—you probably don’t know that knocking out a Dreamer is a good strategy.”

  Lucy’s mind rushed from astonishment to disdain, her hand twitching on her Ideal’s handle. “You’re saying it’s justified?”

  “You saw what that kid did to that annoying queen. Dreamers don’t know how to rescue themselves—and they sure as hell don’t know how to stop when they’re making their Dreams worse. If we’re here to rescue them from themselves, better to stop them immediately when they cause shit like that.”

  “But…” Lucy gripped her Ideal’s handle tight in her hand, exhaling a warm breath in Diana’s direction as she locked eyes with her. “…you were about to go way past stopping him. Your spear would’ve killed him.”

  Diana stared at her silently for a moment, then her lips curled into a smile and she let out a small, staccato chuckle. “Your newness and stubbornness are a real fun combination, you know that? Dreamers control everything in their Dreams, even if ninety-nine percent of it’s unconscious. They won’t die unless they let themselves die. If my throw hadn’t been so rudely interrupted, that kid probably would’ve woken back up with a little scratch on his chest and nothing more.”

  Lucy grit her teeth at how openly Diana described impaling Kenneth with her spear. And yet, her mind was fixated on this new information Diana had provided. She recalled how Cole had said that whenever the arms or the whirlpool in his Dream had drowned him, he would always find himself back on the boat. So perhaps this idea of a Dreamer’s unconscious immortality held some truth to it. But even if it were true, Lucy fervently believed there was a major problem with taking advantage of it.

  “Rescuing a Dreamer means helping them,” Lucy said. “Can you really put them through the pain and trauma of being killed, and say that you’re helping them?”

  Diana clicked her tongue and shook her head, her gaze drifting away from Lucy with a look of disinterest. “When you’ve gone through enough Dreams like I have, princess, dealt with enough Dreamers and their bullshit, you’ll understand why your words are hollow.”

  “That’s…” Lucy huffed, grasping at a retort but failing to find one. Her heart was sinking, a sudden sensation that caught her off-guard, and it took a moment for her to come to terms with why this was happening:

  She was horribly, deathly worried that Diana’s prescription would end up being true for her future self.

  But before the gravity of this fear could fully manifest in Lucy’s mind, the clamour of a thousand metal pieces rattling drowned the air of the church hall, and the entire space suddenly dropped several degrees in temperature.