Lucy whipped her head around just in time to see the white space behind her pulsate and distort. It was a lot like how the darkness would shift whenever the System lumbered through it. It calmed, then settled back into its lifeless uniformity—just before everything came streaming in from all directions.

  It was like watching the pages of thousands of encyclopedia torn out of the spines and flying toward the centre of cyclone, as all those images that had assailed Lucy’s vision earlier came flying out. In the middle of it all was the most cacophonous noise that could ever have been emitted, so blaringly loud and dense that it flooded over the auditory realm like a tide of white noise, but uneven enough that one was forced to hear the millions of different individual sounds all at once. Lucy clamped her hands on her ears, but this did little to alleviate the sound of an entire universe being compressed.

  It was unbearable to the point Lucy closed her eyes again, but she quickly opened them back up after remembering what had happened the last time she did so. When she refocused her sights, she found that the cyclone of everything had stopped, and now there was a vaguely human silhouette floating there in the white void. Slowly, the silhouette began gaining discernible features, including a face and clothing, such that it was clear this newly-constructed being was a woman a little older than Lucy and the Dreamer. Her expression was one of clear shock, but contrasted against its utter stillness and the lack of focus in her eyes, this woman did not yet seem to be conscious.

  The woman came closer, and closer, and Lucy quickly realized she was moving toward her, in the direction of the edge of the wall from which Lucy and the Dreamer had entered. Reflexively, Lucy moved to the side to avoid a collision, and the unconscious woman continued floating ahead, pulled along by an unseen force.

  “What are you doing?”

  The sudden yell sent Lucy’s eardrums ringing. It was the angriest she had heard the Dreamer until now, and when Lucy looked over at her, she was fuming.

  “I just told you that they’re the robots!” The Dreamer glared at Lucy with a disdain that was raw but not all together new, like it was prepared, waiting for the moment Lucy would trigger the need to reveal it. “Do you want the System to get even bigger?”

  “This…” Lucy brought her hand up to her forehead, shaking her head as she felt a migraine coming on. “This doesn’t make any sense. No matter how you look at it, that woman is clearly human.”

  “Are you seriously talking in such blatant bad faith? How dumb do you take me for?” The Dreamer clicked her tongue at Lucy, then floated over in front of the woman before she could reach the edge of the wall. The Dreamer gave a look of disgust, then grabbed the woman’s shoulders and pushed against her to keep the woman in place. Almost all of the woman’s details had filled in at this point; the only missing spot Lucy could see was a small patch on her cheek that didn’t have skin or anything underneath it, just pure white nothingness. But Lucy guessed that as soon as that woman crossed through the wall, that patch would fill up and then she would awaken into consciousness, utterly confused by the dark, unfamiliar place she would find herself in.

  “You saw them transform!” The Dreamer yelled while continuing to hold the woman at bay. “They were going straight for the System. And two of them attacked you. Are you really going to kiss up and make friends with that?”

  “I—”

  “Heh. I should’ve known that an Understanding knight would be so stupidly naive.”

  “That’s not what I’m saying!” Lucy yelled back. Her voice echoed all throughout the abyss, but she didn’t care, as she’d had enough. “Yes, those four I met turned into machines. But how do you know everyone who comes from here turns into that? If they aren’t machines, then this is murder!”

  The Dreamer sighed, hanging her head. Despite her body going limp in disappointment, she was still holding the woman back without any apparent struggle, which surprised Lucy given the Dreamer’s small stature. “Look, let me tell how this all works. These people come from the wall, enter that gross dark maze, then get lost for a while until they inevitably turn into what they were all along: a robot.”

  Lucy could only look back at the Dreamer with wide eyes and her mouth agape. So those that emerged from this white void were plopped into the darkness and were doomed to become a part of the System despite all their searching for a way out. Lucy had thought this whole Dream was hellish, but this revelation was total and complete madness, like a vision of an ideal world as held by a twisted god of eternal torture and damnation.

  “That’s why,” said the Dreamer, “it’s best if we kill ‘em off before they leave and it becomes a pain in the ass to find them in the maze. And thankfully for us, we have that big sharp sword of yours to help. So, pretty please, could you come over and hack off their head already? My dainty little self can’t hold back their heavy body forever, you know.”

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “What…”

  Lucy breathed in and out, loudly, deeply, using her self-made sounds to prove that she was real, that she was really existing in this moment. The Dreamer didn’t sound like she was making up any of the information she’d just said, but…This couldn’t be true. A Dream where Lucy had to kill off an unconscious person due to some wicked purpose they weren’t even aware of? And, from the sounds of it, this would be far from the last time she would have to do so.

  “Come on!” The Dreamer yelled, shaking the woman’s shoulders vigorously to make her whole body shake. She handled her like she was less than human, a piece of wood or paper for Lucy to practice her sword technique on. “I told you everything, didn’t I? This is what I need help with. Or are you going to be like every other useless knight before you and let me down?”

  Lucy ground her teeth at the Dreamer’s entitled words. But she had to stop, she had to prevent herself from being goaded on, or else she would be giving into the same kind of provocation that Diana lived for. Understanding…Understanding…Lucy needed to do what she did best and analyze the situation, then use Ideation to come up with a different solution. There had to be a way out of needing to murder an unconscious person who couldn’t even fight back.

  “What if I just destroy the System itself?” said Lucy. “You saw how I cut off those saw blades. I can damage the System, so if I just kept going—”

  “Do you have selective memory loss or something?”

  In addition to the Dreamer’s guiltless interruption, she took the unconscious woman and pushed her down so that she lay flat on her back. Even in this position, the woman continued to float toward the wall via the unseen force. So to stop this, the Dreamer put her foot down on the woman’s abdomen, hard enough to stop her but also with enough force to make it look like her spine could snap.

  “You—!”

  Lucy lurched forward, floating over as fast as she could, but the Dreamer held her hand up just as Lucy was at arm’s length away.

  “I wasn’t finished!” she roared, stamping down on the woman’s body twice. “You’re saying you cut down the System’s saw blades, right? Well, did you conveniently forget how an even bigger weapon grew out of that? That didn’t just come out of nowhere. You probably didn’t see because you were too busy gloating, but some of those robots ran up and fused with the System to cause that to happen.”

  Lucy blinked blankly, her brow furrows. Had she really been that blinded by her pride that she hadn’t seen these robots’ self-sacrifice take place right in front of her?

  “And they’re gonna keep doing that,” the Dreamer said, “unless you nip the problem in the bud. So hurry up, take out your big pretty sword, and get rid of this thing!”

  Lucy’s entire body shook. She wanted to reach for her Ideal and grasp it as a way to steady her right hand like usual, but she consciously kept it at her side. Hearing the Dreamer so readily refer to the woman she was holding as a “thing” did little to assuage Lucy’s suspicions that this Dreamer was not all right up there. But more than that, there seemed to be real animosity in how the Dreamer referred to the origins of these robots. And, though it made Lucy shudder to think about, the rules of this Dream weren’t just decided arbitrarily. All this nonsense about the System and the robots and the people they came from—all of it had to come from some aspect of the Dreamer herself.

  With all of this weighing down on Lucy’s mind, she let loose the question that had been hanging over the two of them like a dagger.

  “Do you…wish everyone would just die?”

  Lucy hadn’t said it with any particular force. She’d spoken it from a place of genuine curiosity and understanding, keeping her voice low so as to keep the tone conversational and encourage an honest answer. Despite this, her question reverberated loudly through the white abyss, as if the far reaches of nothingness had absorbed her words like an Eldritch sponge and were using their hideous vocal chords to repeat back what Lucy had just said, ad infinitum.

  The Dreamer’s gaze pierced into Lucy’s eyes. She had lost her enraged expression, her features going neutral and awfully still so as to be inscrutable. She seemed to have become detached from her present reality for a moment, as her foot slid down the unconscious woman’s body, which began floating away again until the Dreamer snapped back to her senses and pressed down hard on her victim once again.

  Then the Dreamer laughed.

  It was different from her many other laughs up until this point. It was deep, throaty, as if her voice was being eked out of her lungs and she was enjoying this the same way one enjoys a hearty feast. But there was something else mixed into her playful and mocking tones. A warble of choked anguish at the end of each utterance, a subtle deepness behind her higher-pitched cackling that sounded suffocating, like the self-admittance of one who was too far down a twisted path.

  “It’s the only way,” the Dreamer said. “They all keep perpetuating the System. It’s in them. You saw how their machine bits were right under their skin!”

  Lucy couldn’t say anything to that, for she had indeed seen the horrifying moment their skin tore away to reveal everything underneath.

  “No one can be trusted,” said the Dreamer, her eyes vacant, staring at Lucy but far, far beyond her. “I was stupid for trusting them. And the System. For so, so long. So everyone should die. Everyone has to die!”

  Reaching forward while keeping her foot on the unconscious woman, the Dreamer grabbed Lucy’s wrist and pulled her close so that she was practically breathing down Lucy’s neck.

  “I was afraid, you know. Hesitant. Weak. But talking about this with you made me decide. As soon as I wake up…I’m doing the same thing in the real world. It’ll be so fun and satisfying!”

  Lucy couldn’t tear her eyes away from the Dreamer’s. It was like she had cast a spell similar to the queen from Kenneth’s Dream, but rather than sorcery, it was the depths of madness that held Lucy captive, the way the irregular light in the Dreamer’s eyes revealed the hopeless depths below as they spiralled into chaos. And, worst of all, Lucy felt that she was being sucked into it.

  Lucy unsheathed her Ideal.

  “Oh, finally!” The Dreamer clasped her hands in front of her chest as if being given a love letter. “Here, should be an easy—ugh?”

  She gazed down, searching for the source of the sudden pinprick and the ensuing warmth, and found her leg stabbed clean through with Lucy’s sword.