Chapter 33: Into the Dream (Part 1)
Chapter 33: Into the Dream (Part 1)
Watching Lee Ha-rin drop like mosquitoes hit with bug spray, a thought crossed my mind.
Wouldn't it be faster for me to train as a Dream Demon than for her to get used to me?
Her limit appeared to be simply holding hands—she just couldn't progress any further. The thought came naturally, watching her stall out.
At least when someone inches closer, you can actually see the distance shrinking.
But when she faints in three minutes on a bad day and six on a good one depending on her mental state,
calling that growth is a stretch.
Am I supposed to call it progress because her record before fainting went from four minutes fifty-eight seconds to six minutes twelve seconds over an entire month?
If that qualifies as growth, then a sloth shuffling along counts as sprinting.
At this rate, it'll take a decade just to get to penetration.
The reason I kept entering my two Incarnations' lucid dreams was simple.
I could enter theirs, but they couldn't enter mine.
Crossing the boundary between dreams and invading another person's—that was a trait unique to the Dream Demon.
No matter how talented, my two human Incarnations simply couldn't do it.
Same principle as the greatest swimming prodigy in human history still being unable to breathe through gills.
Even if Han Ye-ji and Lee Ha-rin mastered lucid dreaming
and bloomed their talents into becoming exceptional Incarnations, they still couldn't enter another person's dreams.
Impossible unless I used my Authority to change their species outright.
Even if Han Ye-ji and Lee Ha-rin had souls overflowing with talent and abilities far surpassing my own, that was just reality.
A human with an IQ of 150 can't flap their palms and fly faster than a bird with an IQ of 30.
"Cadet Lee Ha-rin, pass!"
"Thank you for your hard work."
On the screen, Lee Ha-rin was passing her basic physical conditioning exam.
She'd already exceeded the passing standards back in military school, so as long as she hadn't regressed at the Academy, passing was a given.
She cleared it a month faster than Han Ye-ji, which meant weapon techniques were on the schedule starting next month.
[Constellation, Lethargic Nightmare requests that you pass the theory subjects first.]
"Theory exam—understood!"
I told her to clear the theory classes first, since we wouldn't know how her trait would manifest yet.
That wouldn't take long, either. Lee Ha-rin's style since military school had been to compensate for her lacking stamina with theory.
Even if she took every single theory course, she'd pass them all in a few months at most.
※
They say "no way" is how people get caught.
And caught she is.
Two months passed.
Han Ye-ji now had a junior three months behind her,
I had grown completely accustomed to the life of a Dream Demon,
and Lee Ha-rin was no longer fainting outright—just having brief blackouts.
I really was faster at learning this.
Around the time I succeeded in summoning Han Ye-ji into my own lucid dream,
Lee Ha-rin had reached the point where she'd faint but her lucid dream wouldn't shatter.
All that remained now was shock therapy.
Time was the answer—I knew that—so why not invest that time lavishly?
When Lee Ha-rin entered a lucid dream, I entered my own and summoned her.
What I pictured: a master bedroom in an ordinary family home.
One bed, a closet flush against the wall, and nothing else—a small, cozy space.
"Hrk—!"
She looked around, I took her hand, and she trembled violently before passing out. I looked down at exactly the same scene as always.
But since this was my own lucid dream, her dream wasn't fraying.
Freddy Krueger's ability in the horror movies I'd drawn inspiration from worked that way.
Someone dragged into the dream couldn't leave without my permission.
in the movies, that leads to traumatic, gruesome murders—
but the difference here was that what I'd be doing was lewd.
A small body sprawled flat on the bed.
Neatly cropped short hair from military school, a slender figure, and a chest relatively lacking compared to Han Ye-ji's.
So delicate she was almost tiny—I enclosed her in my arms.
The height difference alone was over twenty centimeters. I could completely cage her with one arm.
I lay on my side as if drifting off to sleep and draped an arm over her stomach, which rose and fell in sharp, shallow movements.
"Ah—uh—u-uhhh?"
"There you are. Awake, I see."
Before I even finished speaking, her eyes shut again.
She squeezed them tight, opened them, rubbed her face dry, scrubbed at her eyes—nothing changed, no matter how many times she did it.
Normally, the lucid dream would end and she'd startle awake in her bed.
But now, opening her eyes and finding herself still wrapped in my arms had to be a shock.
We weren't just touching hands—we were embracing, lying in the same bed.
"Uh—is this—no—I—what...?"
I'd modeled the dream room after a military academy dorm,
so she couldn't even parse the situation, blinking up at me in utter bewilderment.
I felt the frantic pounding of her heart through my arms.
Her eyes shook as if an earthquake were rattling them,
and her mouth trembled so badly she couldn't string words together.
I might know jack shit about psychology, but at the very least I could tell
the psychological impact hitting Lee Ha-rin right now was on a completely different scale from anything before.
Was the shock so great she couldn't even feel it as real?
She wasn't fainting anymore—she just stared at me blankly.
Gazing up at me with vacant eyes and a slack, dazed smile... The sight was unnerving in a mentally-destroyed sort of way, a chill creeping down my spine...
But at the same time, it stirred something in me—just a little.
It wasn't ragged, torn clothing or a filthy, haggard appearance.
She wasn't huddled in some dank corner of an old underground shelter—she was curled up on a bed thick with the scent of fabric softener.
The sensation of that small, fragile body, felt across my entire frame, was getting me hard.
A reaction completely opposite to Han Ye-ji, who lay still yet burned with fierce want for me.
I kept stroking—her hair, the nape of her neck, her collarbone—like handling a new toy. No real response came.
Just unfocused eyes blankly fixed on me, squeezed shut, then fixed on me again a long moment later.
The thought she's like a doll with its batteries pulled crossed my mind, along with guilt creeping from some corner of my chest. I shoved both aside.
The priority was transferring the Dream Demon's essence.
Whether she stayed conscious or passed out was a trivial detail.
I'd already wasted enough time on pointless stalling.
"Such... such an irreverent dream..."
Maybe she'd regained a scrap of awareness. She muttered it faintly.
The negative emotions seeping from every inch of skin touching mine tasted syrupy-sweet.
A languid, honeyed sensation—like getting a massage under warm sunlight.
"How dare someone... like me..."
At the same time, Lee Ha-rin squirmed, trying to pull away from me. I felt a prickle of irritation.
Not genuine anger—more like the annoyance of someone poking you during an afternoon nap.
Watching her use her lower back in a belly-crawl to squirm out of my arms, I thought, yep, she's definitely done her mandatory service.
"Where do you think you're running off to? Stay still."
But fast as it might've been, belly-crawling on your back and hips doesn't get you far.
I just pulled myself up and mounted her.
I let my weight settle with a touch of petty spite, and a strained grunt—kkeueng—rose from below my chest.
Maybe it was all the long-term exercise, but her body felt surprisingly solid for such a small frame.
This ought to keep her from squirming away.
I wrapped both arms around her and bore down with my weight. The flood of emotion bubbling up inside her surged violently.
Fainting in a dream, waking up back inside a dream—the sheer strangeness of it,
the sight of herself cradled in her Constellation's arms against a familiar dormitory backdrop,
even the military-school gym clothes we were both wearing—
shame and a sense of moral corruption swirled up like mist and soaked into me.
... Even so, it feels a little weird when being cuddled up against me gets flagged as a Nightmare.
"Constellation, this is—I didn't mean to—you're using your precious Authority for a dream like this..."
A tremor-ravaged voice, and sadistic amusement slithered over me.
A voice damp with a desperate need to hide her own fault.
She couldn't bring herself to lie, but the pressure of needing to say something must've been clawing at her—
she kept squeaking and struggling to string a sentence together.
So I decided I'd play along a little.
I'd spent months struggling—not with her lucid dream, but learning to control my own. I'd put in the work.
The nothing-special effort of letting a few dogs loose in a studio apartment while gritting my teeth through the headaches.
So I'd torment her with nothing-special, petty mischief too.
"Oh, my... was this what you wanted?"
"Heek—no... yes—yes?"
I peeled off her gym clothes and slid my hand beneath the loose shirt underneath.
If she said she didn't want it, that painted a picture of a woman making the first move on a man—
and worse, an Incarnation brazenly and disrespectfully rejecting her Constellation.
If she said she wanted it, then she became an insolent Incarnation who harbored lewd desires for her Constellation and dreamed such irreverent dreams.
Inside that dizzying trap, Lee Ha-rin babbled like a broken machine—trying to say something, stopping, steadying her breath, over and over.
Under my fingertips, a lean, muscle-free body.
She was two years older than Han Ye-ji, but looking at her face alone, Lee Ha-rin seemed far younger.
Maybe because she was short, and her chest was a little smaller. And while her skin felt firmer from the exercise, there wasn't any harsh, bulky muscle.
Her stamina ought to be high, but her arms and underarms were soft-soft, and her belly and sides sank right in when pressed.
No spare flesh, but I was flattening out a tender, supple body.
Skin so elastic, thighs so firm—yet the whole body was pillowy and soft.
What kind of contradictory body was this?
Were all women who exercised like this?
The only women I'd ever met were people wasted by malnutrition, thanks to the apocalypse.
A woman who exercised, a woman with any meat on her—impossible for them to have existed.
Hyuk—a whimper, and her eyes squeezed shut.
I seized the opening and stripped off the uncomfortable gym top.
Every time she blinked through a brief blackout, one more article of clothing—hers or mine—disappeared.
Eventually, bare skin met bare skin.
And the negative sensations bleeding from her burst out like a shaken-up soda can.