Chapter 19: Her Nightmare
Chapter 19: Her Nightmare
A message appeared in the corner of my vision asking if I wanted to enter Han Ye-ji's lucid dream, but the situation caught me so off guard that my fingers froze for a second.
I'd been waiting out each month because I didn't even have 3,000pt, and now double that amount had just materialized out of nowhere.
"Why the hell did it multiply by five?"
Points that had only been enough to buy one Sweet Lucid Dream and call it a day.
But the base amount was now five times larger. Saying it out loud really drove the absurdity home.
I had to assume something like 4,000pt had been tacked on top of the base 1,000pt.
What used to be 12,000pt a year was now 60,000pt a year...
The more I phrased it that way, the more staggering it felt.
That still wasn't the important part.
I now had 6,000pt. Should I finally pick up one of the Constellation's basic functions?
I've always had a habit of buying every single basic function first—whether I'm playing a game or managing my spending.
But I couldn't just splurge using that same logic here.
"Whoever built this shop system, I swear to fucking god..."
The upgrade on the computer screen cost a mere 5,000pt.
A price that practically wrung a mutter out of me, even though I'd been muttering less lately.
Sure, the luxury-furniture Constellations can flex a hundred thousand or a million points on impulse buys,
but why the hell does something as basic as a sorting function eat up this many points?
It wasn't even absurdly expensive in absolute terms—what made it sting was the fact that it amounted to six months of my salary.
And something told me this wouldn't be a one-time expense either.
If it had been pricier, I could've accepted it as the kind of thing a Constellation who'd snagged a talent-rich Incarnation might legitimately use. If it had been around three thousand points, I could've chalked it up as a rational choice on par with a Basic Authority.
But burning six months' salary just to upgrade basic functions? That hurt.
And if this jackpot wasn't a permanent increase—just a one-time bonus—then upgrading the computer first meant I'd be waiting over half a year for my next Authority. That would be a disaster.
First, I had to figure out why I'd gotten so many points.
[October Base Points: 1,000pt awarded]
[Special-Management Incarnation Bonus Points: 4,000pt awarded]
Special-Management Incarnation.
I could pretty much guess just from the label.
It wasn't like I had a ton of Incarnations. I had exactly one. There was no way I wouldn't know.
What I was curious about was which kind of special management this was.
Was it special management in the Dream Demon sense—because we'd mixed bodies? Or special management because she'd brought back a Nightmare Fragment and I'd given her mental care?
Personally, I was rooting for the former.
Four times the base points just for mixing bodies in a dream.
It wasn't like I had any reason to treat a man's chastity as sacred.
[Intervene in Incarnation Han Ye-ji's lucid dream?]
[Yes / No]
Everything else could wait.
The points had gone up, but nothing was about to change dramatically this very second. It could all be put off.
※
Maybe it was because I'd entered a beat late, but Han Ye-ji's dream this time was bizarrely unique.
A battlefield where a ruined city model, desert, jungle, and a shooting range and bunker plastered in concrete were all jumbled together in every direction without any rhyme or reason.
She was diligently firing her gun at mannequins in the middle of this warzone.
Her opponents were the same ones I always saw during her training sessions: black mannequins, white mannequins, and black drones.
I hadn't bought the Oneiric Elixir because I'd figured physical training inside a dream was a bit harsh,
but did she actually find shooting practice fun on her own?
She cleanly shot down a black drone making a low pass with an ambiguously shaped gun that went thump-thump,
then hoisted the gun high in celebration and let out a cheer.
At the same moment, the sound of firecrackers filled the battlefield.
"Hell yeah, new record!"
The white mannequins that had been crouched behind cover,
the black mannequins that had been rushing her and toppled over with bullets to the forehead or shoulder,
the drones that had been zipping around and then dropped out of the sky—all of them were tidily cleared away.
The white mannequins sprang to their feet and took up new positions,
while the black mannequins and drones melted away into the shadows.
Then a message appeared in the empty space where Han Ye-ji's gaze had already been fixed.
[94 / 100]
"That's not a perfect score? What gives!"
The instant she saw the message, all her earlier joy vanished and she started throwing a fit.
Not that her tantrum was about to change the score.
Even if this was a dream, consistency wasn't on the table, apparently.
Below the score, a detailed breakdown appeared.
Damaged white mannequins, missed black drones—each mistake was meticulously itemized at 0.2 points, 0.5 points.
Seeing it calculated with that level of detail, it looked less like something Han Ye-ji was imagining and more like she was dreaming a training regimen she actually ran in reality.
Watching her bounce around and fume indignantly over a less-than-perfect score was energetic and genuinely good to see.
She hadn't ever been all that into melee weapons, but here she was, utterly hooked on marksmanship.
At this point, it felt less like she'd chosen a safer career path to support her little brother and more like she'd switched tracks because she simply wanted to shoot guns.
She was having so much fun that it felt wrong to yank the flow away, so I stayed right where I was to see how the dream played out.
Maybe because I hadn't entered the lucid dream alongside her, it felt like her dream and I were separated—like a stage and the seats below it.
"Again! Restart!"
Just like replaying a shooting game at an arcade, she shot the scoreboard and the mannequins began to move.
The white mannequins took up various positions—some running forward, some hiding in the back, some taking up a spot right beside Han Ye-ji—and then, from far off, the black mannequins appeared.
Like most games or simulations, the first one came walking toward her and crumpled with a bullet between the eyes.
Then two, then three.
They kept multiplying, showing ever more varied patterns: coming from front and back at the same time, swarming from all directions with staggered timing.
Then, among the steadily multiplying black mannequins, black drones appeared with a buzzing whine.
The buzzing black drones began dropping one by one toward the white mannequins' heads, and even just watching from here made me feel disoriented and dizzy.
But she acted like it was old hat—picking targets by speed and distance, popping the nearest one first, knocking them right out of the air.
[92.8 / 100]
But the score was a little lower than before.
The training machine apparently didn't log every single deduction—she dropped to the ground and let out a burst of frustration.
I hesitated for a moment, debating whether to intervene in the lucid dream, but then she sprang back to her feet and gripped her gun again, and I decided to just keep watching.
Her anger and irritation didn't really read as genuine, stressed-out, about-to-lose-her-mind frustration.
It looked more like a spirited player gritting her teeth at a tough game and burning with competitive fire—disrupting that felt wrong.
If my Incarnation wants to self-improve, a Constellation has no business getting in the way.
From a little farther back, I could spot drones sneaking in or black mannequins making stealthy approaches, but giving her tips on that felt iffy too.
Nobody likes a backseat driver when they're making the same mistake over and over in a hard game.
And so, exactly like watching someone else play a game, I kept my eyes on Han Ye-ji—until the world collapsed.
She'd been shooting nonstop even before I arrived, so maybe her concentration had finally bottomed out.
A desert sandstorm whirled up and swallowed the dense jungle and the crumbled concrete.
The dreamscape shifted, like a stage curtain rising to reveal a new backdrop.
And there was Han Ye-ji, unmistakably younger.
She was wearing a school uniform—was she in middle school?
A face so young and a frame so small it was hard to tell whether she was an upper-level elementary student or already a middle-schooler.
Even now, in high school, she wasn't exactly tall, but back in middle school she'd been even smaller.
"Hey, if we get caught we're dead!"
"Like anyone can catch us!"
Girls in uniform skirts tore down the hallway at a full sprint, utterly indifferent to their skirts flipping inside out.
Both the boys' and girls' uniforms included ties, and the game was to yank those ties loose and run.
Watching this, the male students had clustered into the corner of a classroom, chattering about last night's drama or variety show—and whenever the rowdy girls came near, the boys tensed into full alert.
In the middle of a scene straight out of a youth drama, the tiny Han Ye-ji was running.
No allies, no enemies—just a melee of middle-schoolers grabbing at anyone's tie within reach and bolting.
They ran around during every break, then dozed diligently through class.
Sometimes boys mixed into the chatter, sometimes girls clustered together, betting game scores on their smartphones.
When the lunch bell rang, the girls bounded down the stairs five steps at a time, racing for the cafeteria.
The boys swarmed around a male student-teacher who appeared from the far end of the hallway and moved as a group, walking slowly toward the cafeteria.
A dream that peaceful—if only it had stayed that way.
But given that I'd been abruptly dumped into a school hallway, this was clearly her Nightmare as well.
I just hoped it wouldn't turn out like last time, when I couldn't obtain a Nightmare Fragment.
Still, had something bad happened to her back in middle school?
Given that Han Ye-ji lived alone with her younger brother, maybe this was the memory of when her parents died.
I walked down the hallway, turning the thought over in my head.
A woman in a tracksuit was rapping a wooden sword against her palm and yelling at the kids running wild—I glanced at her to gauge the situation,
but no one in the school paid me the slightest attention.
Was this just an ordinary dream?
As if mocking the thought, a noise rose from the sports field.
I glanced out the window and spotted a bizarre life-form.
A white-haired gorilla with elongated arms? Or a sloth that could walk on two legs and was unnervingly fast?
A weird bipedal beast scraped its sharp claws across the field as it headed toward the cafeteria—
and then, with a speed so quick it barely registered, it lashed out.
"Ah, fuck..."
Only one person collapsed, covered in blood.
The male student-teacher who had been walking to the cafeteria with the other boys earlier.
And behind him, clutching a soccer ball in both hands, drenched in blood and trembling violently—Han Ye-ji.
The monster's head burst apart, and a beat later, a sound like a clap of thunder rumbled across the sky. In that same instant, the dream world shattered.