Chapter 61: Challenge 2
Chapter 61: Challenge 2
My limbs felt strangely drained of strength.
A leaden lethargy cocooned my entire body, leaching out every trace of vitality. Together with the musty basement air, it felt no different from the old days.
I took stock of my condition, muffled my footsteps, and crept through the darkness.
From somewhere ahead came a murmur of voices and the flat slap of hands against stone.
Blind as moles, people were tapping the rock walls with palms and soles, inching forward little by little. At the very least, they weren't wearing Incarnation Suppression Squad uniforms.
"Damn it, what's with this darkness? This isn't what they told us."
"Never mind that. Regrouping takes priority. The operation hasn't changed just because the dream turned out like this."
I drew a slow breath and settled into the well-worn motions.
A lightless alley, idiots chattering out in the open—a jagged shard of metal clutched in my hand, the hot rush of breath against my clamped-shut mouth.
Shk-shk. The metal gouges the nape, the body thrashes, then goes limp.
A sequence of work I knew inside and out.
"...Han Seung-yoon? Hey, where'd you go?"
The scrap metal was blunt, so the blood sprayed a little more than I'd have liked. But luckily, nothing appeared to be drawn by the scent.
A terrified shout swallowed the sound of a still-warm corpse crumpling to the ground.
"Quit messing around and come out, you piece of shit—this isn't funny!"
Why would anyone yell in a situation like this? What possible good could making noise do right now?
I'd never understood the types who scream "kyaah!" when they ambush you from behind, or the ones who holler at the top of their lungs when they've been cut off and left alone. By the time any understanding might've dawned, they were already dead.
The long, winding alley had people scattered in twos and threes, all of them panicking—shouting into the blackness, thrashing around, crashing into things with clumsy thumps and clatters. Of course they were panicking: this was nothing like what they'd been told to expect.
Right now, about half of this dream had bled together with my own nightmare. The opposing Incarnation had to be a Dream Demon too; she'd sucked up every dream in range and spun it into an enormous illusion barrier.
That was probably why, just as I'd seen with Han Ye-ji earlier, I was seething. Boiling over with rage. Was it the influence of another Dream Demon? Both Ye-ji's emotions and mine had been cranked up to an eerie intensity.
I didn't know the exact nature of the barrier, but maybe thirty percent of this nightmare was now woven from my own dreams. The original plan must have been to scatter the suppression squad inside a dream of their own making, level everyone's physical capabilities, and overwhelm them through sheer numbers.
Instead, my dream had bled in—and now their own people had gotten scattered right along with them.
It was absurd. It was infuriating. Humiliating enough to make me cringe at myself: sure, I'd only been a Dream Demon for a year, but was I really this pathetic?
I hadn't even been the target of whatever Authority they'd used, and yet I'd been swept up as helplessly as a child who can't swim caught in a current. The whole thing was too ridiculous for words.
To a Dream Demon, his own dreams are territory—personal domain. The fury simmering inside me didn't belong to the human I once was; it was my fury as a Dream Demon. It felt exactly like waking up to find some thief had broken into my house and made off with every piece of furniture in the master bedroom.
Then, on top of that, like seeing that same stolen furniture recycled and put on display right outside my front door.
The humiliation of being openly mocked by that thieving bastard sent a pounding ache through my skull.
So I'd kill him.
'Strip away the Authorities and turn this into a bare-knuckle brawl, and I've got no complaints.'
Most of the suppression squad's elites had spent their careers sharpening their Incarnation abilities to the absolute limit. This whole setup probably wasn't just about smuggling—it was a trap meant to screw over the city's Incarnation Suppression Unit. I didn't know the specifics, but the fact that the Fallen Constellation had clear countermeasures in place meant there'd been friction here more than once.
A dry exhale tickled my lips.
The body I had now was immeasurably stronger than the one that had once survived three days on nothing but a single can of food. A grip that could sever a man's neck and arteries with a scrap of sharpened metal. Legs that could stride through the dark without a sound. Hands large enough—and strong enough—to smother even a scream.
Even with the physical limits imposed by this dream, this body was in a whole different league from what I'd had back then.
'And these guys aren't carrying any real gear, either.'
I searched the corpses, but nothing helpful turned up in their pockets. All they'd been holding were clubs or metal pipes they'd picked up somewhere—the same way I'd scavenged whatever was lying around in the hallway.
They'd planned to subdue their targets inside the Dream Demon's Authority; they probably meant to grab their equipment once they were in the dream. My presence alone had wrecked the entire operation.
Then again, who'd plan an operation expecting the mind-form of some greenhorn Dream Demon—less than a year old—to be lurking inside the Protector?
I was running my fingertips over a rapidly cooling corpse in the dark when a faint glow of light bloomed in the distance. Idiots. In absolute darkness, they had no idea how far a light source could carry.
From the moment I took a dagger—blade about as long as a palm—off one of those idiots, it was the same pattern on repeat. With scrap metal, you had to slice the throat. But with a properly edged dagger, you could punch a hole through a lung from behind. And a man with a hole in his lung can't scream.
While the defenseless fools stumbled around by the light of a lighter or a smartphone, dying in silent screams, a sudden shriek—skreeee—ripped through the hallway. I'd heard voices before, but this was the first time a door had opened.
"—So, what, we're dreaming right now?"
"I slapped myself and I'm still asleep..."
"You tried slapping yourself just now? You really think an Authority used by an Incarnation or a Constellation is going to break because you hit your own cheek?"
I followed the sound of the door and caught familiar voices. They weren't even trying to keep it down, as if they still hadn't grasped the situation. That told me roughly what this dream had turned into. All those old doors lining the hallway—suppression squad members isolated behind each one of them.
Han Ye-ji was contracted to me and had just awakened an Authority, so she could probably open at least one door. The original plan must have been to isolate three people at a time and have dozens of criminals gang up on them, whittling down their numbers bit by bit. But now the criminals were scattered too, and because my nightmare had seeped into the mix, anyone who couldn't handle Dream Demon magic wouldn't be able to open those doors at all.
"...There's a body."
"I don't think it's one of ours. Looks like an Incarnation from a smuggling ring, but... why's he dead?"
The three figures—still not fully adjusted to the darkness, or maybe just night-blind—felt their way along the wall toward me and stopped when they discovered the corpse. I'd left it propped near the door figuring the old iron thing wouldn't open; now it'd become a nuisance.
The moment they spotted the body with its nape torn to shreds, their voices dropped. I could see the tension snap into their bodies, muscles coiling tight.
They looked so thoroughly spooked that I deliberately let a footstep sound.
"Something's coming—get ready."
One miscalculation: back in my world, deliberately making your footsteps heard means you're a person without hostile intent. But in this world, there was no reason to assume the same unspoken rule applied.
I saw Namgung Hui crouch and tense her thighs, and I quickly spoke up.
"You're stuck in here too, huh?"
"W-wait!"
As if she'd mistaken my voice for a starting signal, Namgung Hui launched herself at me—like a sprinter jumping the gun. But there was none of the power her textbook body tackle implied. As I'd suspected, the suppression squad's physical strength had been weakened. Some kind of downward leveling, maybe.
I'd already set the knife aside on a metal pipe on my way over, so I met her barehanded charge as I was. I slapped away the hand reaching for my waist, pressed down on the back of her neck, and let her momentum carry her to the side. Her forehead smacked the wall with a solid thump.
I winced. My emotions were running so high that my temperament had gone a little feral.
"C-Constellation?"
"That's right. Your Constellation."
Her flustered face was oddly endearing. Namgung Hui, forehead still smarting from the impact, scrubbed at her face like she was dry-washing it and got to her feet. Han Ye-ji started toward me, her guard dropping, but Jeong Ah-rin blocked her path.
"Can you prove you're really our Constellation?"
"Right you are. You're a sharp one."
Compared to Namgung Hui, who was still trying to figure out why she'd been taken down, and Han Ye-ji, who clearly had no idea why she'd been held back, Jeong Ah-rin was handling herself admirably. Dragged into some strange space, and your first instinct is to confirm whether the figure in front of you is genuine—that's exactly the right call.
I could tell from the aura I'd sensed ever since Han Ye-ji awakened her Authority, but from their perspective, there was no way to know if I was real or some kind of fake.
"Fair point. Which means I'd better prove it through Ye-ji, wouldn't you say?"
"Yes, sir. Can you do that?"
"Hm, well. The reason our Ye-ji looks so down in the dumps is that right before deployment, she had a dream where—"
"Constellation?! It really is you, guh—!"
Whump. The dull impact echoed through the hallway as Jeong Ah-rin's clean elbow strike sank precisely into Han Ye-ji's stomach as she tried to rush forward. A clean hit—just a little harder and it might've cracked a rib.
"First of all, shut up, you idiot. And Constellation... sir, those bodies back there."
"Yes. I dealt with them."
If I'd known this was how things would go, maybe I should've just kept the knife.