Chapter 15: Choice
Chapter 15: Choice
The penalty for failing to collect the Nightmare fragment turned out to be time.
Normally, when I shared a lucid dream with Han Ye-ji, I'd wake right along with her at her 6 a.m. alarm.
But when I opened my eyes today, she was already well past her morning workout, had long since been fed lunch, and was currently trapped at the shooting range.
"You muscle-for-brains idiots. Where exactly do you think you're sending a trait this precious?"
"Wh—what do you mean by that!"
A middle-aged woman who looked far older than the instructors.
The deep furrows carved into her brow and the streaks of white peppering her hair marked her as well past fifty.
Most of the instructors looked to be in their twenties or thirties, so she was conspicuously out of place.
She had the presence of a vice-principal, or maybe some guild bigwig—definitely not a line instructor.
"You can't teach kids with heads that full of rocks! A trait like this, you should've contacted us first. You're telling me I had to hear about it through another channel and come down here myself?"
A real bigwig, it seemed. Both the weapons instructor and the shooting instructor had their heads hanging low, completely at a loss under the scolding.
And Han Ye-ji's face had darkened too, as if she thought she was the reason for the storm.
[Lethargic Nightmare requests an explanation for the current situation.]
Feeling sluggish, I rubbed my bleary eyes and typed a short question mark as a single character.
Was there a physical fatigue penalty mixed in with the late start?
Letting that exhaustion stack up because I'd missed a Nightmare fragment would be a real pain.
"Ah, there we go. The Constellation's arrived. I wanted to bring a proposal to you, Constellation."
The woman didn't even blink at the message that materialized in midair; she just kept the conversation rolling smoothly.
Were people in this world simply not fazed by talking to open space?
It made me feel like some yokel gawping at a wireless earbud for the first time.
She stopped lecturing the instructors and strode over to the aides she'd brought with her, rattling off orders.
"Now then, Cadet Han Ye-ji. Apologies, but would you mind helping us for a moment?"
"Yes, what should I do?"
The request came out in a soft voice, but judging by the chaos she'd stirred up before I'd opened my eyes, Han Ye-ji had gone rigid.
She hadn't been half this tense even under the instructors before.
"Good. Kang Su-jin, head over that way and ready the shield. Hee-ah, grab the trunk—bring out the equipment we prepped."
"Yes, understood."
The two aides ducked their heads and dashed off.
The woman called Kang Su-jin took up position roughly ten meters away and ducked down behind what looked like a riot-control plastic shield, which she deployed on the spot.
The one called Hee-ah, wind already coiled around her soles, practically flew over and came back lugging a large case.
From the black case—a gun case, to be precise—emerged a sleek, plastic tranquilizer rifle.
The giveaway that it wasn't a lethal firearm was the row of darts alongside it, each filled with a vivid blue liquid.
The disassembled black components gleamed, glossy and spotless.
"You said you can shoot, right? Let's see you put one into that shield."
With practiced hands, the woman pulled the components from the case and assembled the rifle in seconds.
Tranquilizer rifle or not, the elongated barrel and foregrip made it look more like a plastic toy than a real gun, but Han Ye-ji took hold of it without hesitation and slid a dart in behind the barrel.
"Alright... should I fire now?"
"Yes, into the shield."
A faint, deflated fwoosh—the unimpressive sound sent the blue dart sailing through the air, and it bounced right off the shield.
A needle as fine as a strand of hair wasn't about to punch through reinforced plastic.
If it could punch through, it wouldn't be a suppression tool; it would be a lethal weapon.
"Kang Su-jin, status report!"
"Huh? Nothing seems to be wr-wr-wrong?"
The woman startled at the sudden shout, straightened up from behind the shield—then sagged straight back to the ground.
She tried to stand, but the drug was already kicking in hard; the hand that had held the shield flopped and scrabbled uselessly against the dirt before giving up entirely, her body going limp. Less than a minute from upright to completely sprawled.
"What in the...?"
"Bonus strike. You told me even a sword clash drops an extra hit at a random spot, didn't you? Spells manifest twice. High-explosive shells detonate twice. Stopper-round shockwaves knock a target back twice. You think a tranquilizer dart would be any different? Go stick her with a stimulant already."
Behind me, someone was plunging an awakening-agent injector deep into Kang Su-jin's thigh.
The woman—whose name I still didn't know—turned back around and spoke again to Han Ye-ji.
A business card was pressed into her hand while the girl stood frozen, still not grasping any of what had just happened.
"Even if you get deployed, wouldn't you be more comfortable heading back toward your home continent? And on top of that, rear-line public-stability operations carry a lower fatality rate than the front lines, at minimum. She's your first Incarnation, and still young—I'd think protecting civilians suits her far better than being shipped off to a war."
I couldn't read the entire card, since her fingers kept it half-folded, but the bits I glimpsed said Eastern Continent Incarnation Special Task Force, Counter-Terrorism—.
Too awkward to keep spinning my viewpoint around while Han Ye-ji stood locked in place, and this bigwig just kept talking.
Bigwig—that label was sticking, wasn't it?
I mean, she'd abruptly fired a tranquilizer into someone and jammed a stimulant into them right after?
And when she'd called the instructors brain-dead rock-heads, they hadn't dared to make a sound.
Working for someone like that had to be draining.
※
The instructors, too, withdrew without a word when the card-giver dismissed them, so Han Ye-ji found herself at liberty barely two days into training.
Even the shooting instructor, after one glance at the card, had nothing further to say and vanished.
That left Han Ye-ji with the rest of the day to sit and research the card on her newly issued laptop.
Some Incarnations did join guilds and fight the monsters that surged in from the front lines.
Others worked inland, suppressing creatures that appeared sporadically or subduing Fallen Incarnations.
She could go the civil-service route, something akin to a SWAT unit, or join a private guild under a mutual-cooperation agreement.
Personally, I thought this was the better path.
[The Constellation Lethargic Nightmare prays for your safety.]
There was only one reason for that: it was safer.
Han Ye-ji wasn't the hero of some novel.
People die easily.
A man could joke with you yesterday and be dead by morning because he swallowed a glass of water wrong.
A guy who looked healthier than anyone could start rotting from the guts outward until his whole body gave out—I'd seen that more than once.
Even if I shared Dream Demon essence with her and granted her Authorities, at bottom Han Ye-ji was still a female high school student.
Could I really throw a kid like that—barely prepared, raw as she was—into a warzone just to chase points?
Besides, the reason I'd contracted her in the first place was that she reminded me of someone I knew back in my old life.
[Moments before a passenger ferry to the Academy was due to dock, indiscriminate violence erupted at the harbor.]
[The clash is said to have begun as a pride-fight between Incarnations that escalated into inter-guild friction.]
[Thanks to a private security firm that immediately dispatched personnel to the scene, both parties were subdued without casualties.]
A short news segment played across the screen.
Not a major incident like a terrorist attack—just two idiots drunk on their Authorities, talking trash about each other's Constellations until the fight went physical.
In the brief clip, a concrete floor and a metal footbridge sheathed over in ice.
A man and a woman leaped atop it, swinging steel rods.
A rod slammed into the ground, spraying ice shards in every direction, and the person filming let out a startled shriek of Ah!
Then, right on the heels of that, three figures cut through the crowd.
Incarnations from the private security firm, all armed with non-lethal gear—just like the tranquilizer rifle Han Ye-ji had fired a moment ago, plus net launchers—swiftly and methodically put the two brawlers down.
A bolas snared the ankle of one trying to spring clear; a steel net was flung over him on top of it.
When they thrashed and tried to resist, a soft thwip and a blue tranquilizer dart later, they were subdued in an instant.
So that was the idea: you slot into a team as a ranged-specialist to put down rampagers exactly like those two.
Sure, I saw the bolas home in and lash tight around an Incarnation's ankle with precision, and I saw the steel net arc skyward as if it weighed nothing, but the tranquilizer rifle had been exactly that—a plain, unglamorous tranquilizer rifle.
Some overconfident idiot swats away the dart and then drops right to sleep—pacification would get a whole lot easier that way.
After the clip, I kept my viewpoint behind Han Ye-ji and skimmed the search results alongside her.
How should I put it... if front-line Incarnations looked like medieval fantasy cosplay,
then the people handling inland public security appeared to have evolved toward something closer to sci-fi or cyberpunk.
Probably because they fought mostly in urban environments and wore armor made from reinforced plastic infused with their Incarnation's blessing.
She shifted from studying the laptop at her desk to lying on her bunk, phone in hand, and drifted off without warning.
The speed of it meant she'd triggered the lucid dream on purpose. So did all that video-watching mean she'd already tilted toward a decision?
I couldn't tell. The choice was hers, regardless.
[Do you wish to intervene in Incarnation Han Ye-ji's lucid dream?]
[Yes / No]
I tapped the familiar prompt, and the world shifted.
Now that I thought about it, whenever I entered a lucid dream, I found myself seated at a desk in front of a computer, but I always woke from one lying flat on a bed.
Was I not merely dreaming, but actually traveling somewhere?
Han Ye-ji's dream today was an improvement over yesterday's.
A tidy living room met me as a welcome.
I was on the sofa when the front door opened and Han Ye-ji stepped in.
She must have dreamed of coming home from school again, like that first day, because she tossed her backpack aside without ceremony.
"Oh—Constellation?"
"What is it?"
And now, seemingly fully aware, she stood there dithering in front of me, uncertain.
She was getting used to the lucid dreaming too, apparently.
Before, she'd moved entirely on instinct—
eating if there was food, drinking if there was drink,
lying down if there was a bed, sitting and flicking on the TV if there was a sofa,
and during those first weeks, whenever she'd notice me beside her, she'd loop her arm through mine or lean against my shoulder without a second thought.
But now, for the first time, she gave me a different reaction.