Chapter 21: Dream Demon (Part 1)
Chapter 21: Dream Demon (Part 1)
How do I even begin to describe this sensation? It felt like stepping into a swimming pool for the first time in my life.
A prickling static fizzing against my skin, defying any simple explanation.
This wasn't a human sense, so human language wasn't built for it.
Han Ye-ji had woken from her dream, but I remained, submerged in the architecture of her mind.
The shooting range was gone. A long, narrow corridor stretched out before me, a disjointed gallery of flickering lights—some sputtering in decayed fixtures, others blazing under pristine spotlights.
I picked up a glass marble discarded on the floor. It hadn't merited a display case.
A memory surfaced: elementary school Han Ye-ji, her deskmate tripping while running with a lunch tray. Every scuffed marble underfoot was the same—forgotten debris from insignificant moments.
Walking further, I found a mammoth gilded frame engulfing the canvas with a single image: a convenience store. There was no velvet rope holding me back, not like in a museum, so I stepped closer and let my fingers graze the surface.
It was the moment I'd contracted her.
Less than half a year ago—not an easy memory to shake. Then again, she clearly treasured it, judging by the way that gold frame was bombarded with upward-angled spotlights and plastered in ornamentation so gaudy it practically screamed.
I saw a pure white dog plushie no bigger than a palm, and projected above it, a massive holographic beast. A blurred tableau of a happy family flickered inside a soap bubble.
Exaggerated memories and faded recollections, then.
I wandered through her archives until I reached a massive door.
'A special exhibit?'
This memory was too dense for a single frame, too laden with thought to be a mere fragment. It had commandeered an entire room. Curiosity got the better of me, and I pushed the door open.
Inside stood elementary-school Han Ye-ji. Fifth grade? Sixth? She looked practically the same as she did in middle school, standing on a school field under a sky of hanging frames, a personal panorama. With every brush of my fingertips against them, vivid recollections spiked into my consciousness.
The first thing I saw was an adult woman, face blurred beyond recognition. Her mother, maybe? Or a teacher.
'Men must be protected.'
Men are taller. Women have more muscle mass. An evolutionary split—males gathered, females hunted. Millennia of sudden advancement had done little to erase those physiological foundations.
Therefore, girls shouldn't hit boys, even if the boys were bigger.
Men were to be protected by women. It was the mantra the teachers had drilled into them since elementary school, and young Han Ye-ji had never questioned it. Why would she? She had a little brother. Her late parents had always told her it was her duty as an older sister—as a girl—to protect him. She'd have done it regardless.
Women do not hit men.
Han Ye-ji's short, ten-year life had accepted that as an absolute truth. Until the day it wasn't.
The texture beneath my fingertips turned rough and grainy. The photograph's frame had dissolved into a violent smear of oil paint.
A boy in her class, infamous for his foul temper, had started an argument with Han Ye-ji over the lunch line. It was the kind of petty squabble that could happen in any elementary school in any world.
"You're just an orphan with no parents!"
"What?"
"I'm right, aren't I? You're an orphan!"
He was crowing, so triumphant, like he'd unearthed a damning secret. At that point, right and wrong had already ceased to matter. Young Han Ye-ji swung her fist and slammed it into the boy's face.
Back then, boys hadn't hit their growth spurts yet. The boy, outmatched in size and strength, threw a punch back, but it ended fast—a gush of blood from his nose, and the fight was over.
The aftermath was equally predictable.
Han Ye-ji the orphan had no guardian to call. The bleeding boy, sporting a fresh black eye, had both parents storming the school in record time.
The father jabbed his finger in Han Ye-ji's face, calling her a worthless bitch. The mother sat behind him, mouth prim, making no move to intervene.
But what happened next was a sharp turn from the script.
"Han Ye-ji's parents died in the line of duty. Your language is crossing a line, sir."
A young female teacher stepped between them.
She laid the facts down clean: Han Ye-ji's mother had been an Incarnation. Her father, a male soldier. Both had died in a tragic accident during a city defense operation. The boy's mother, who had been lounging with such detached grace, finally twitched. But it was too late.
"So what?!" the boy's father roared, face crimson. "Being an Incarnation makes it okay?!"
In my world, that would have been the killing blow—the teacher retreating in a cold sweat while the triumphant father kept bellowing. But not here.
A sudden, vacuum-packed silence swallowed the staff room.
The student teacher stopped typing mid-sentence. The old instructor lowered his newspaper. Even the homeroom teacher, who'd been content to spectate between the two kids, quietly rose from her chair. Every set of eyes in the room converged on a single point.
A female student teacher strode over and planted herself squarely between them.
"Excuse me. What did you just say?"
"Did I say something wrong?! You think being an Incarnation's kid gives her the right to smash my son's face in?!"
The red-faced man was still roaring, but now his wife looked genuinely horrified. She shot up from her chair and grabbed his shoulder, trying to shut him up.
"Didn't your son insult a deceased Incarnation first?"
"That doesn't mean she can hit him—!"
The homeroom teacher gave Han Ye-ji a light tap on the shoulder and casually steered her out of the staff room.
"It's okay. Just go home for now. Next time, don't hit him—come tell me first."
A few soft flicks to the forehead, more playful than painful. A bewildered Han Ye-ji shuffled off toward home, her mind already on picking up her little brother on the way. She'd been treated like a criminal in that office, so she couldn't understand why she'd been set free without so much as a scolding.
If she saw this now, she'd understand.
Why she'd walked away without punishment.
Why the boy who'd been hit had become a sudden outcast.
What happened to his father at the next parent-teacher meeting.
And how a post from one of the student teachers had spread rumors all the way to the mother's company, forcing them to move within six months.
But young Han Ye-ji knew none of it.
She was too young to parse the meaning of the shouting behind her—the crash of breaking objects, the scrape of overturned desks. Too young to comprehend the sight of teachers wailing on a man, or the boy's mother going berserk seeing her husband get hit. She couldn't grasp a student teacher and that woman locked in a brawl over it all.
The only thing she took from leaving that staff room was a deeper reverence for her late parents and a profound, crystallized respect for Incarnations.
The image of Incarnations and Constellations lodged itself in the deepest crevice of her unconscious. It was probably why she fawned over me so desperately, clinging with that almost needy affection. To Han Ye-ji, a Constellation wasn't just a social institution—it was something far higher. Her entire childhood, teachers and parents had beaten into her that she had to protect boys, but when it came to Constellations and their Incarnations, those petty rules suddenly meant nothing. Being the child of an Incarnation and a soldier who'd sacrificed themselves for the nation carried a staggering gravity in this society.
Just as an Academy instructor would blindly cheer her on for simply running hard. From her late elementary years through middle school, right up to the high school days before she met me—every corner of her life had been touched by people regarding her with a fanatical reverence for Constellations. They'd shaped her subconscious brick by brick.
※
I surfaced from the dream.
It felt like being dragged backward by the scruff of my neck through a current, yanked clean out of a viscous pool. By the time I oriented myself, Han Ye-ji had already left the dream behind—time had passed, and she was eating lunch.
'...So what do I actually do with this?'
Great, I'd grasped the fundamentals of being a Dream Demon. I understood why Han Ye-ji hung on my every word, why she felt so desperate and burdened. From a young age, she'd been hardwired to believe Constellations were greater than parents and teachers combined. Hardly her fault.
So what?
In the end, I'd just confirmed she'd cling to me and devote herself to making me happy. That didn't really move the needle. I had no choice but to wait for tonight's lucid dream session and slip back into the Nightmare.
You can't expect to be full after one spoonful. This isn't some busted pay-to-win mobile game—you don't skyrocket in power off a single skill.
"Cadet Han Ye-ji, positions."
"Positions!"
Lunch over, Han Ye-ji now stood before the shooting range I'd seen endlessly in her dreams. The place was swarming with self-walking mannequins straight out of her subconscious—no idea if they were built from cutting-edge tech or some Authority.
"Training commence!"
"Commence!"
The firearms instructor was probably from a military background. She shouted order confirmations like a drill sergeant while hoisting her weapon. Then, with a soldier's rigid posture, she drilled a black mannequin that had popped up in the distance square in the head.
'Way better shot than me.'
The mannequin was at least three hundred meters out, weaving side to side as it charged—no hesitation. The instructor's hand moved in a blur, bullets cracking through skulls with a steady, almost musical rhythm. The black mannequins crumpled without a single missed shot.
"Your shooting condition is good. Maintain it. Widen your field of view!"
Time dragged on, and soon the drones began to appear. My viewpoint was locked with Han Ye-ji's, but I switched to the mannequins' perspective. A few drones were slinking out of the mock sewer drains.
"Eyes wide open! Don't just stare blankly!"
I braced for another point deduction, ready to scoot my chair closer to the computer screen—but the instructor's yell must have triggered something. Han Ye-ji snapped her muzzle downward. Skimming low, a black drone was creeping up on a white mannequin huddled behind cover.
Pop. A single shot skimmed past the white mannequin's ribs and clipped the drone's wings, blowing it out of the air. A massive hologram flared to life at the same instant.
[97.8 / 100]
Not quite a perfect score—but a number that blew her previous record clean out of the water.