Chapter 37: Tyrant (Part 1)
Chapter 37: Tyrant (Part 1)
The Incinerating Tyrant's event was something to look forward to, but it was still about a month away.
We had Lee Ha-rin to thank for having the application form in hand the moment the official notice went up, however she'd gotten her information.
'Is there some kind of Constellation otaku community out there?'
The place was a constructed world, but it mirrored my own in so many ways that I figured the internet here probably worked the same way.
Birds of a feather flocking together is just common sense.
Not that I expected a zealot on Ha-rin's level.
'If that sort of mental state were widespread, that'd be a real Nightmare...'
A worry that crossed my mind because I'd entered Ha-rin's Nightmare looking for fragments of Nightmare.
Unlike Han Ye-ji, who had created a game stage that blended horror-game elements with her own trauma,
Ha-rin's Nightmare looked like an ordinary world.
It didn't throw dead ends at you just for walking somewhere,
and the world outside the mansion wasn't a frozen backdrop like a painting.
If anything, the weather was pleasant and the people full of life—a dream that felt more like a lucky omen than a Nightmare.
"Ugh, I went in to work yesterday and the team leader..."
"What happened with those documents? Can't you process them properly?"
"Hey, I think the homeroom teacher caught us skipping night study."
"Already busted, so let's just go game. We'll get whipped tomorrow anyway."
Countless people milled about outside the window.
The backdrop was so vivid I could have mistaken it for reality instead of a dream.
People of every stripe, their faces fully rendered down to individual features, each going about their own business.
Businesswomen in suits dashed around in a hurry, cars blared their horns at them at crosswalks.
Mixed groups of students cutting class in broad daylight in their school uniforms, university kids savoring their youth.
'Why is this a Nightmare?'
Nobody paid me any particular attention.
No—they did glance my way.
The instinctive, heated looks people give a good-looking man.
And that was it.
No frothing-at-the-mouth fanatic NPCs chasing me, no three-meter-tall man-eating lumps of flesh.
I toyed with the smartphone that sat naturally in my pocket and bought a glass of soda milk at a café.
The sweet fizz of the soda sliding over my tongue, the creamy richness of the whipped cream.
Wandering through a vast dream that was perfectly realized from scent to flavor, a realization gradually surfaced.
A tiny dissonance I felt while moving through a world far larger and more elaborate than anything Han Ye-ji's unconscious had produced.
"Yeah, that tracks. Fucking consistent."
The overwhelmingly peaceful everyday life looked a lot like my own world before the apocalypse.
Meaning, there were no Constellations and no Incarnations.
"This is insane, honestly... how am I supposed to find fragments here?"
The internet entertainment news on the smartphone had nothing about Constellations or Incarnations.
Obviously, searching only turned up novels and games.
A world where billboards, the news, people's conversations—none of it mentioned Constellations or Incarnations.
A peaceful world without Constellations or Incarnations.
That was Lee Ha-rin's Nightmare.
I couldn't even begin to guess where the fragments of Nightmare were supposed to be.
Ye-ji's Nightmare was structured like a game stage—clear the stage and get a fragment of Nightmare as a reward.
So in this fully realized world, where and how was I supposed to find one?
After wandering the streets snacking on odds and ends, I quietly gave up and exited the Nightmare.
The dream world was simply too enormous to search on foot for a fragment of Nightmare that could be anywhere.
'Am I supposed to chalk this vast dream up as a talent of Ha-rin's?'
Neither Ye-ji nor Ha-rin made it easy to get fragments of Nightmare.
Ye-ji's Nightmare was stuck in terms of progression, and Ha-rin's was too large to locate the fragment.
Even so, I couldn't just sit around doing nothing but wait for The Incinerating Tyrant's event.
That would be way too boring.
So I paused monitoring my two Incarnations for a bit
and started spending time inside Ha-rin's Nightmare every day.
A Dream Demon is a demon of dreams.
Just as a fish grows by swimming and an earthworm feeds and develops by tunneling through the dirt,
a Dream Demon grows when inside a dream. Simply lazing around and indulging in this dream world would sharpen my qualities as a Dream Demon.
The analogy involving fish and earthworms stung a little,
but I couldn't help it if my abilities were exactly at that level.
Maybe I should turn my attention away from The Incinerating Tyrant, famous across the Northern Continent, for a moment. Constellations on a similar level to The Incinerating Tyrant.
The most famous Constellations on each continent were notorious for firing off Authorities costing hundreds of millions of points once or twice a year.
Here I was, agonizing over a hundred-thousand-point purchase, while they casually spammed hundred-million-point Authorities. Crazy.
Feeling exactly the way a newbie gamer feels watching a veteran, I found a decent café and sat down.
Ha-rin's Nightmare was a peaceful world—no Incarnations or Constellations, but also no monsters or alien invasions.
I still wasn't sure why she considered it a Nightmare, but it was a damn nice place to laze around.
Using someone else's Nightmare as a vacation spot... I'd really become a full-blown Dream Demon.
I ordered coffee at the café, then hit a sandwich shop for an unctuous, sweet sandwich made with condensed milk.
Since I couldn't find the fragment of Nightmare because the place was too big, not because I couldn't interfere with the dream, I could at least conjure money.
I did have a working theory about the fragment of Nightmare after poking around.
Ha-rin believed her life was safe thanks to Constellations, and that without them she would have died long ago.
Her Nightmare probably wasn't merely a world without Constellations.
To be precise, it was likely a world where, without Constellations, Lee Ha-rin died.
Which only made the problem bigger.
I didn't know the full scale of the dream world, but it was definitely bigger than a single city.
Even if she hadn't rendered the entire world she had never experienced,
she'd still reproduced what looked like a chunk of the Eastern Continent... and how the hell was I supposed to find Ha-rin's parents in all that?
It wasn't like finding a Mr. Kim in Seoul—more like searching for a random couple somewhere in the entire countryside.
And I wasn't even driving a car; I'd have to search several cities entirely on foot.
The reward was just fragments of Nightmare, which I still didn't even know how to use. Even if I found one, it might not be the right answer.
At that rate, I was better off hopping into Ye-ji's dream and practicing bare-handedly snapping old iron pipes.
Well, the biggest reason was that the fragments weren't urgent, so the whole thing felt like a pain in the ass.
And so I roamed Ha-rin's Nightmare, growing as a Dream Demon,
while Ye-ji lived the life of a professional soldier—teaching rookies and getting chewed out by her superiors—
and Ha-rin spent her days happily fangirling at the Incarnation Academy.
Until the day of The Incinerating Tyrant's open observation arrived.
※
Given the sheer scale of things, Ha-rin and Ye-ji never ran into each other.
Ye-ji had been recommended by the Suppression Team, and Ha-rin had been recommended as an Academy honors student.
That was only natural considering the dozens of airships on my screen and the hundreds of invited Incarnations.
I had no particular reason to introduce them,
and since they only casually asked in passing what my other Incarnation was like, I hadn't arranged a meeting.
So I flicked between the two of them, both from the Eastern Continent but boarding different flights bound for the Northern Continent.
"This way, please!"
"Any Incarnations not receive their supplies?"
"Cadets, keep your heads on straight and follow."
"This is the path you'll walk from now on. Eyes front!"
Ye-ji's airship had soldiers deployed for support; Ha-rin's was an instructor-led cadet vessel.
There was something faintly surreal about an airship bristling with what looked like Gatling guns sailing peacefully over a city.
The airships, having departed from the Eastern Continent and the others, gradually converged on the north.
The people milling about mostly had blonde or brown hair, and the buildings had subtly different architecture.
Below, crowds swarmed, waving cameras in a frenzy;
above, dozens of fully armed airships hovered.
With no speeches or rhetorical flourishes, the airships launched the moment the appointed hour arrived.
Maybe it was because this was closer to a support initiative for rookie Incarnations?
The Incarnations clustered together in their murmuring groups looked like a neighborhood reserve militia.
Except for the fact that a fair number of them were young and gorgeous.
'Still looks impressive.'
I didn't mean the chattering rookie Incarnations were impressive.
But the airships, decked out entirely in black and red—true to The Incinerating Tyrant's style—
and the mechanical soldiers standing at attention without a glance for the rookies, those were impressive.
A single one of those dozens of mechanical soldiers could probably subdue both Ha-rin and Ye-ji without breaking a sweat.
[Incarnations, look—]
Just then, a booming voice rang through the speakers.
[Below, gaze upon the foul and hideous monsters that threaten humanity.]
The Incinerating Tyrant was spending points to broadcast his voice to everyone assembled.
The moment I heard it, a sense of connection clicked into place
and my consciousness was yanked somewhere by force.