Lucid Dream: I Am a Veteran Player
Lucid dreaming. I am a veteran player—a hard-boiled veteran. The fact that I couldn't let go of this trash game until I collected every single ending was proof enough of the sheer depth of my love-hate relationship with it. I was confident that I knew more about Endless than anyone else.
But that didn't mean I knew absolutely everything about this world. There were many things never mentioned in the game, and plenty of elements that could only be guessed at. That was why, occasionally, things happened that defied all understanding.
When the Princess woke, she was in a dream.
Is this... a dream? It wasn't the Imperial Palace bedroom she was familiar with. Garnet opened her eyes in an unfamiliar place, lying on a makeshift cot that looked as though it had been set up just for a quick nap. Even within the dream, she knew instantly that it was one. A lucid dream. This was a lucid dream. Garnet, forcing her heavy eyelids open... No. The protagonist of the dream, having just awoken, slowly spoke.
"Cana."
"Ah. Your Grace. Are you awake?"
"Yeah. How is the Princess?"
A man. The owner of the voice was a man. Though he must have been exhausted from just waking up, the man took the damp towel handed to him by the maid, lightly wiped his face, and got straight to the point. Because this was a dream, Garnet could intuitively grasp the situation. Isn't that how dreams usually went? You just 'naturally knew' things you had no business knowing. The man was Duke Nosferatu, and the woman before him was a maid named Canaria.
"The Princess is still asleep."
"Really? I'll connect to her myself now, so go get some rest."
"Understood."
The man seemed to activate some kind of ability, and his mind was instantly linked with the 'Princess.' The protagonist, quietly observing her, nodded. "It'll take some time before she wakes up."
Moving to the bathroom, the man washed up quickly and grabbed a sandwich from the dining hall. He continued to monitor the Princess via telepathy. She, too, seemed on the verge of waking.
A moment later, the Princess in the dream opened her eyes. And what followed was exactly what Garnet had somewhat anticipated. The man used his telepathy to project the dream-companion to her. Rubbing her sleepy eyes as she sat up, the Princess tilted her head and stared blankly at Gigachad.
"Good morning... Dreamy..."
"A MIRACULOUS MORNING INDEED, GAR-PEEP!"
And then, a normal daily routine followed. A maid of the imperial court came to the Princess to inform her of an 'assignment.' A massive cursed plague had broken out in the Empire's granary region, and all the crops were set to wither and die within a few hours. The nature of the nightmare was disease and famine.
To remember this dream, the Princess stuffed herself with food until her stomach twisted, then threw it all up until her insides turned inside out. Bingeing and purging. Constantly swallowing and vomiting, the dream-Princess suddenly realized:
Ah, I was dreaming.
And then, just as the dream world seemed to collapse... she was still in a dream.
"Ugh... What a horrible dream..."
"SHAKE OFF THAT DROWSINESS AND RISE WITH VIGOR, MY DAUGHTER!"
Neither the man, who was the protagonist of the dream, nor the dream-Princess, whose thoughts he was reading, realized that time had wound back. Only Garnet, who was observing the dream, could perceive this truth. It was bizarre. She had never had this kind of dream before. Yet, Garnet intuitively understood the cause of this phenomenon. She recalled information she shouldn't have known as if it were the most natural thing in the world. This phenomenon... was a kind of bug. A save point bug. A glitch that occurred because the baseline for the saved data had shifted to the moment the protagonist woke up.
Garnet's dream-within-a-dream was not an ability to overwrite time. It was an ability to reconstruct 'lost time' in the form of a dream within a dream. It was inherently multi-layered and vertical—dreaming inside a dream. But now, she could witness all the changes in time without ever waking up.
The dream Garnet was having was still just one dream. She was simply having an incredibly long dream. While Garnet pondered what this implied, the Princess woke up from her dream over and over, repeating her 'assignment' countless times.
"Huh... I feel like I had a nightmare..."
The dream-Princess was strangely slow to realize she was having a nightmare. Garnet had thought she herself became aware of the dream after a dozen or so nightmares... but the Princess had gone through dozens, no, hundreds of dreams-within-dreams, gradually piecing the nightmare together.
It was just so faint that she hadn't even recognized she was experiencing a dream-within-a-dream. And so, finally, the Princess became aware of her own nightmare.
"Ugh, I definitely had a nasty dream. What was it again?"
"BREATHE SLOWLY, AND RECALL IT CALMLY."
Disease and famine. A nightmare designed solely to convey a single piece of information: a crop plague. The scene that followed was exactly as Garnet remembered. The man in the dream, the protagonist, read the 'suffering of hunger' through the Princess's mental imagery. The man muttered to himself. "Ah, was the crop plague at this time?
I guess because her sleep time decreased due to Gigachad, she went straight into work mode." Thinking this, the man gave the Princess a hint. Since 'Dreamy' was supposed to be her 'inner self' anyway, he figured it wouldn't be too strange to help her recall the dream together. Besides, it was something he had read from her mental imagery in the first place.
"IT SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN A NIGHTMARE ABOUT A PLAGUE."
"Dreamy. Who were you just talking to?"
But that was a misjudgment. To be precise, the content was wrong. Because it wasn't a nightmare about a plague breaking out. The nightmare the Princess had was 'a nightmare of repeatedly eating and throwing up.' It was a dream of terrible hunger, a dream of horrific gluttony.
A dream of the Princess's own suffering. Although she chose a nightmare closely related to her 'assignment' to make the information easier to associate, the content of the assignment was not the theme of the nightmare.
"Aha. I see."
If she had normally repeated the dreams-within-dreams to carry out her assignments, the Princess's diary would have probably read like this:
Binge eating. Vomiting. Hunger. Food. Pain twisting my stomach. A dream of repeatedly eating and throwing up. Famine? Disease. Maid. Food. Harvestable crops. Crop failure. Hungry. Plague. Crop plague? Granary...
A relentless chain of association. Free association, clinging to the very edge of the nightmare until the necessary information was disgorged. Only after completing dozens of such associations would a few trivial words finally be written in the diary:
Western Granary. Chiron Village. Crop plague mixed with curses and sorcery.
"I wasn't the one dreaming..."
In other words, Dreamy was not the Princess herself. The Princess had never once had a 'nightmare about a crop plague breaking out.' The deaths of tens of thousands of people didn't even register as a nightmare to her. The Princess was no philanthropist.
A dream where tens of thousands died could never be a terrible nightmare for her. It wasn't her nightmare. That was why she had to construct nightmares in a way that 'abused herself.'
"It wasn't my dream...!"
Dreamy was someone far more altruistic and kind than her. Someone who considered the deaths of others to be a nightmare. Someone who blamed himself if he couldn't save people. Someone who viewed the very destruction of this Empire as a nightmare. An ordinary person. This world was the dream of an ordinary person.
"Excuse me, by any chance..."
The Princess looked at the protagonist of the dream. She looked at Garnet.
"Aren't you dreaming right now?"
And with that, the man—no, Garnet woke from the dream.
"Phew..."
It was a dream too long to forget entirely. Because it was so long, the Princess could remember a great many things. Waking from her dream, she looked at Dreamy standing right beside her.
"A young duke who has just inherited his title... Duke Nosferatu, perhaps?"
"Ha."
"Pfft, hehe."
"Damn it."
Dreamy—the hallucination Duke Nosferatu called Gigachad—vanished. And in Gigachad's place, a handsome young boy stood before the Princess. It was the true form of Duke Nosferatu.
"I don't have the slightest clue how you figured it out. Did you have some ability I didn't know about?"
"I must have seen it in a dream."
"I'm pretty sure your ability doesn't work like that."
"I don't remember the details either. It's just that kind of ability."
Though she couldn't remember clearly... Garnet had understood so much within that dream. Looking at this world through the Duke's eyes, observing the hundreds of loops over and over... she had felt the Duke's emotions and thoughts as he worried for the Princess. She had immersed herself in those feelings. She had fallen deep into them.
Devotion. To prevent the destruction of the world, to save a single girl. For the sake of others. A profound devotion that consumed his entire soul and effort, denying himself even proper sleep. It was a truly noble and sublime emotion. To truly love an entire world was not something an ordinary man could do.
Yet he had done exactly that. Despite being an utterly ordinary person, he loved this world. He loved the girl who was destined to destroy it. Not with some abstract agape, not with some grandiose ideal, nor with some lofty conviction.
But in a truly ordinary way. Just as an adult loves a child, he loved the world and the girl. He was made of pure, unadulterated love.
"Ah. Now I finally know. Why this world feels so much like a dream..."
"..."
"You. You were in love with me. Pfft, haha."
"I think there's been some misunderstanding."
"I feel like I had a dream of being loved last night."
A dream of love. This was a dream of being loved.