Dream
A clicking sound echoed through the dark hideout.
Then came a sharp tick as something popped open, and the smell of cooked meat drifted through the cramped little space.
"Hah. Ham again today."
A girl's voice muttered the words, clicking her tongue like she'd had more than enough.
Once the voice registered and the inside of the hideout came into focus, a firearm leaning against the wall swam into view, giving off a faint glow of its own. By that dim light, a girl sat scooping food from a can and packing it into her mouth.
Ash-gray hair. Chestnut-brown eyes. She cleared her throat with a little huff and kept shoving the canned meat in, bite after bite.
For all her talk of being sick of it, she must have been starving. She scraped the inside of the can clean and finished off every last scrap of ham.
"Tch."
The empty can set aside, the girl sighed and swept her gaze around the darkened shelter. One wall was stacked high with water and canned goods. She muttered to herself, the words laced with a dry, self-mocking edge.
"How long am I supposed to hold out like this?"
She crumpled the finished can and tossed it into a corner. That corner, too, was heaped with every kind of trash she'd gone through. One look at the place was enough to tell she'd been living in here for quite some time.
A rustle.
The darkness inside the hideout rippled, swaying as if a breeze had pushed it aside.
"Ah, crap."
The girl caught the change at once. Her brow furrowed, and she snatched the firearm off the wall. She slung the sniper rifle — a weapon that towered over her own height — across her shoulder with practiced ease and slipped out of her hideout in a hurry, grunting as she squeezed through the narrow passage and broke out into the open.
Darkness. Darkness. Darkness.
The outside was just as drowned in pitch black. This wasn't the ordinary dark of night. In the sky of this world steeped in blackness, there was not a sliver of moon, not a single twinkle of starlight. Nothing but a nauseating, absolute dark.
Even with the heavy sniper rifle on her shoulder, the girl tore away from her hideout at a terrifying clip. Once she'd put enough distance behind her, she stopped and looked back.
A squirm.
In her gaze, the rippling of the darkness swelled larger. Then, in a single instant, something burst from the dark — a shape the eye could register as a form, yet could not begin to identify.
"God. I'm so sick of this too."
The girl's brown eyes stared into the darkness with the calm of someone long past being shocked by the grotesque sight. She pulled the sniper rifle from her shoulder and, without even bringing the scope to her eye, swept her arm and squeezed the trigger.
A heavy gunshot cracked through the air. The bullet punched into the shape in the darkness, and the thing let out a thin shriek as its swollen form instantly shrank back down.
Watching the writhing mass in the dark, the girl muttered without thinking.
"Should I just die."
She'd repeated those words more times than she could count. Even that mutter had become too familiar now. At first it had surged up as something raw and choking. These days she just said it out of habit.
She cleared her throat, raised the sniper rifle toward the empty sky, and fired a single shot.
"It'd be nice if someone saw this and came to save me."
Watching the bullet climb into the black, she spoke the words with not a shred of hope in them.
A squirm.
The thing that had shrunk under her bullet rippled once more in the darkness. And the girl, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, slung the sniper rifle back over her shoulder and took off running again.
A flash.
My vision wrenched sideways without warning, and a flood of bright light poured into my eyes.
"Urgh."
What the hell?
Questions slammed into my head all at once. I shoved myself upright in a hurry. The world had changed so abruptly that I found myself waving my arms around like an idiot, squinting at my surroundings.
"Player? Are you all right?!"
A pair of crimson eyes under a head of golden hair filled my vision. An angel.
"Huh?"
Only then did my head settle, and the world I'd just been watching peeled away from reality. What I'd seen a moment ago was a dream. A dream so vivid it had scrambled every sense in my body.
"Ugh... what even was that?"
I clutched my head, and the scene I'd just witnessed rose up again. A world drowned in darkness. A demon squirming inside that dark. It was a sight I knew far too well. That was what waited once you stepped into this game's final chapter — a world of darkness where the sun and moon had vanished, and a demon called an Eoduksini, a thing whose form swelled the longer you looked at it. And inside that world, a girl sitting there eating canned food.
What the hell was that insanely vivid dream?
I clenched my fist, then opened it again, just to remind myself this was real. The tight pull of muscle was enough. I was here. This was reality.
"Player?! Are you okay?"
Angel had planted herself right next to me, peering at my face with genuine worry.
"Yeah. I'm fine now."
I sat up, working the stiffness out of a body that felt like it had been wrung out overnight, and started folding up my bedding. Even as I did, the contents of that dream kept circling through my head.
"What even was that..."
I wanted to write it off as some random nightmare, but it had been far too vivid for that. A nasty, lingering kind of dream. And strangely enough, that ash-gray-haired girl refused to leave my mind. She just kept flickering there, over and over.
"All right, kids. You got that?"
The teacher rapped the chalkboard for emphasis.
"Yeees~."
The class droned back at him, and the teacher cracked one of those rare smiles of his, a smug little grin, before going on.
"That's right. Once this dungeon evaluation is over, the first semester is finally done. And then comes that sweet, sweet vacation."
He let out a cheer and chewed on his ballpoint pen with obvious relish.
"This is exactly why I became a public employee. Kids, I do this teaching gig for the on-time clock-outs and the vacation."
The class gave him a complicated look, suddenly in possession of an adult's private reasoning, but the teacher was in too good a mood to care. He just kept grinning and talking.
"So, to recap — you form your own teams, and the school assigns you a dungeon that matches your level. Got it?"
"Yeees~."
Satisfied with the answer, the teacher nodded, declared himself finished, and wrapped up the briefing he'd called us in for before afternoon classes started.
"Jojun, what are you doing about the team?"
Alice's chair scraped as she stood and turned to me.
"Hmm."
I let the sound trail off while I sorted through my thoughts. This fourth scenario was the Dungeon Assault scenario. A kind of final exam held by the Great Demon Subjugation Academy — a fairly straightforward one, where the player cleared a dungeon alongside three teammates of their choosing.
"Well, you and Violet, Alice. And we can just throw in whoever for the last slot, right?"
I'd have loved to bring Cheonghwa along too, but she was in another class, so there was no running this scenario with her. Typical.
Up ahead, Violet — who'd just been getting to her feet — gave a cute little jolt. So she'd been listening in the whole time, pretending not to care while her ears stayed wide open.
"You're coming with us, right, Violet?"
I grinned, needling her just enough as I tossed the question her way.
"Wh-what?!"
Violet turned toward me with a valiant attempt at looking clueless, but the stiffness in her cheeks and the twitch at the corner of her mouth gave her away completely. Anyone could see she already knew.
"Alice and I are running the Dungeon Assault together. You're coming too, aren't you?"
"W-well. If you want me to come along, I suppose I could."
She twisted a lock of purple hair around her finger, talking in circles, but the wanting was written all over her.
"Yeah. Let's do it, Violet."
This is the kind of moment where a guy's gotta step up and make the call.
The three core members were set. Anyone would do for the last slot.
"Jojun, I'm heading to afternoon class then."
"Sure. See you on the way home."
I waved as Alice headed out of the building toward the auditorium, then turned my own steps toward the Virtual Combat Training Wing in Building B.
Same as always, I walked into the training room off the stairwell — and a guest who'd arrived ahead of me was already waiting in the empty white chamber.
"Jojun!"
Short black hair, a fierce face, and the boyish good looks of a knockout. Cheonghwa greeted me with a bright smile.
After the inter-class match, the seven black horn-shaped tattoos on Cheonghwa's wrist had dwindled down to one, and her ability had changed dramatically. The black lightning that used to pour out of her whether she wanted it or not now answered only when she called for it. With her power fully under control, she could have gone back to the auditorium and taken advice from the hunters the guilds had dispatched — but she insisted on keeping one day a week for training with me.
"You're here early."
I flicked open the buttons at the front of my uniform shirt as I spoke. Cheonghwa swallowed, her eyes on me. I felt the stare and looked back, and she turned her face away, cheeks flushed.
Ever since we'd stopped by the masquerade ball a few days ago, Cheonghwa had been like this. Sneaking glances. Going red. Looking anywhere but at me. It had to be whatever she'd overheard during that late-night talk between the vice president and Alice. What exactly had Cheonghwa heard in there? The vice president — the same one who'd been secretly practicing fellatio with the former student council president, and who'd taught Alice all sorts of useful techniques — hadn't gone and put ideas in her head, had she?
The thought made me weirdly self-conscious under Cheonghwa's gaze. A faint, complicated current wound itself between the two of us, and I shook it off by dropping down where I stood and starting training.
These days, unlike before, my practice always began with meditation. I turned my attention inward and refined the essence of Speed, replaying Tialfi's slash from that day over and over, asking myself again what Speed truly was.
"Hoo."
Only after fifty minutes of meditation did I rise to my feet.
A crackle of heat filled the air the instant I finished — I'd been so locked onto myself that I hadn't even heard it building.
A bolt of blue lightning split the empty air and slammed into a scarecrow dummy across the chamber. And Cheonghwa wasn't done. She swept her arm as if dragging something out of herself and sent a single stream of black lightning screaming into the dummy.
A much bigger blast followed. The black current blew the scarecrow apart.
I clapped, walking toward her.
"Damn. That's just about perfect now."
Watching Cheonghwa move with that kind of fine-grained mana control — nothing like the old days — I felt a lump rise in my throat, the pride of a former teacher who couldn't help himself.
"Aww, come on~. That's all 'cause you taught me so well."
Cheonghwa beamed at me, puffing me up without a hint of shame. A smile packed full of accomplishment, and a single bead of sweat sliding down between her cheeks — the whole picture of her hit me all at once.
"Uh...?"
I took a step toward her before I knew I was doing it. Cheonghwa flinched back, startled — then stopped, planted her feet, and looked up at me.
"J-Jojun?"
Up close, the sweet scent of her body rushed straight through me. She fidgeted, staring up, her flushed cheeks twitching, her eyes flickering wildly — and still, something in them wanted this. Wanted it clearly.
And then I did it.
I cupped Cheonghwa's face in my hands, gentle, and pressed my lips to hers.