Chapter 63: Challenge 4
Chapter 63: Challenge 4
Do a thing often enough, and you start to sense the outcome before it happens.
The pulse slowing under your fingertips,
the strangled voice drowned out by bloody froth gurgling up into the lungs,
the limbs going slack as the body sags, and that last labored, hacking gasp for air.
'This bastard—he's not dead.'
He hadn't even managed a dying curse. After that final breath, the heartbeat had stopped, the eyelids I'd swept shut had closed—but he wasn't dead.
I ripped the knife from his back and drove it in again.
This time I wasn't aiming for a lung. I was going for the spine at the small of his back.
A familiar grating resistance hummed through my palm as metal caught on bone.
With a sickening crack the knife sank in properly—and still my instincts screamed the same thing.
Still not dead.
—You goddamn son of a bitch!
Had the hole in his lung forced him to use telepathy instead of his voice?
The ugly shriek rang inside my skull.
Then again, if a Constellation could descend to the mortal plane, take a knife to the vitals, and just die—what kind of Constellation would that be? A defective one. If they were that fragile, humanity probably wouldn't be worshiping Constellations. They'd be breeding them in pens.
I shoved the corpse away, but the black-and-violet mist of magic power was already bursting from it, a beat ahead of me.
The world spun with a sensation that was starting to feel a little too familiar.
"You—you insolent whelp! I was endeavoring to find a peaceful resolution between kin!"
The violet-haired pretty boy stood before me, whole again, grinding his teeth.
My hand went to my waist on reflex, but neither of us was carrying a weapon—just light clothing.
So Dream Demons can't be killed by physical means?
That's pertinent information, actually.
"Khk—unhand—unhand me, you—you lunatic...!"
He was trying to say something, so I reached out with both hands and throttled him.
If your base strength is lacking, you're supposed to use a rope or a brace to snap the neck clean, but my grip strength was good enough to do it barehanded.
With a crunch, his face went blue, his tongue lolled out, and he sprawled across the floor.
—You crazy bastard!
"What the fuck—he's alive?"
The corpse with the broken neck sent me another telepathic message.
Whether the break had severed the nerves or not, the body that had been twitching on the ground dissolved into black mist once again.
Were Dream Demons only huntable through magic-based techniques?
"You clueless oaf! You've arrogance to spare, I'll grant you that! Did you truly believe a contest between Dream Demons could be settled with such paltry physical brawling?"
Our eyes met, and I couldn't look away.
I tried to turn my head, but my face wouldn't move—as if someone were behind me, clamping my neck in place.
Staring into a man's eyes like this isn't exactly a hobby of mine. Pretty women, sure. Not this.
Our faces were close enough now that I could feel the heat of his breath, and it turned my stomach.
I considered jabbing both thumbs into his eyeballs, but my arms wouldn't move either.
As his face inched closer, a bizarre sense of pressure settled over me.
I have absolutely zero interest in rubbing faces with another man, none whatsoever!
"Heh-heh—cower before me!"
"Oh for fuck's sake, are you gay? Get your goddamn face out of mine!"
"Such vulgarity!"
The way he kept advancing, with that archaic aristocrat's diction, was terrifying.
Locked eye-to-eye, close enough that if I stretched out my arm our wrists would brush.
Not the life-threatening kind of terrifying. The other kind.
"We Dream Demons are beings of dream... If you wish to kill me, you must contest the Origin itself!"
[Constellation, 'Unforgotten Sin,' opens the Origin of the Dream Demon race.]
[Constellation, 'Lethargic Nightmare's' Dream Demon race Origin is forcibly opened.]
A system window popped up out of nowhere, interposing itself between us.
Good. Better than a staring contest with some guy.
As the thought crossed my mind, the world around me began to warp and churn again.
A plain unfurled behind him.
A blood-soaked plain littered with broken, rusted weapons.
Unmistakably a battlefield. At the far edge of it, a black tide advanced.
Creatures that walked on two legs—oxen, lizards—and savages with the heads of dogs or boars.
A whole bestiary of the sort of monsters you'd see in a fantasy RPG came thudding closer in lockstep.
"You thieving piece of shit, that's plagiarism!"
The moment I saw the giant with a catapult strapped to its back, the words flew out of me on their own.
Probably the agitation from earlier getting the better of me.
Other fantasy races show up in every mass-market novel under the sun, sure—
but a catapult mounted on a giant's back, with a tiny pygmy race clinging to the rigging? That dragged up a beloved movie from my past life, the one with the ring.
The realization that the gay Dream Demon in front of me had plagiarized my all-time favorite movie from the far side of memory made the simmering fury boil up all over again.
"Heh-heh, you young fool. Whatever your Origin may be, it is clearly a pitiful thing!"
"What's an Origin?"
"You don't even know that? No foundation whatsoever. We Dream Demons are beings of dream. Just as life requires both sperm and egg to conceive, so too does a Dream Demon require a foundational dream to be born."
As he prattled on, utterly at ease, the booming footfalls drew nearer behind him, and the sound of hide drums and horn-pipes scrambled my ears.
Was that fantasy army the Nightmare that had destroyed his world? Hell of a lot of them.
"A legion of monsters that trampled the kingdom's knight orders, the elf armies, the dwarven golems alike! This is my Nightmare, you insignificant wretch!"
From the left edge of my vision to the right, a horde of monsters now stretched without end. Now that I was free to turn my head again, I could take in the full sweep of it.
An army so vast I couldn't begin to count them, still advancing.
Granted, that was a force that could absolutely annihilate a medieval-fantasy world.
"It cannot even be compared to your miserable little Nightmare. Ha! What do you expect to accomplish with those paltry lumps of metal?"
Lumps of metal?
At those words, ignoring the sensation that my neck bones were about to snap, I wrenched my head around.
Just as an army had appeared at his back, my own Nightmare had taken form behind me.
Looking at it, a dozen tangled thoughts collided in my skull.
First: this asshole was completely divorced from modern civilization.
Some fantasy-kingdom native, by the look of it, with little grasp of human science.
Did this continent not have them? And was he one of those who didn't...? And did he seriously not know 'The Incinerating Tyrant'?
And second: that wasn't going to affect me, right?
My own dream couldn't possibly harm me.
Please—getting killed by my own dream would really suck—
Between the ponderous, oppressive footfalls, a shrill shriek of wind rose—sheeeaaak—
A slender, silver-gray aircraft.
To intercept it, something that might have been a wyvern or a dragon soared up from the enemy army and spewed fire.
The aircraft's shriek continued, utterly indifferent.
I almost found myself hoping, just for an instant, that my own Nightmare would lose.
'Fuck—I'm really safe from this, right? Please, please, please, please, please—go, wyvern, whatever you are, shoot it down!'
"Hahaha—afraid of my Dragoons?!"
I squeezed my eyes shut and heard the smug bastard's voice ring out.
What made it even worse was that shutting my eyes only made my hearing sharper.
The pounding footfalls, the thrumming war drums, the savage roars of the dragons tearing through the sky—
and cutting clean through the cacophony of uncountable monstrous shrieks, the shriek of air parting.
I heard the high, fast whistle—sheeeaaak—and the deep, heavy drone of aircraft engines lifting ponderously into the air.
All of it churned together in my ears. I couldn't begin to guess how many of them were behind me.
My stomach lurched from the tension.
One thing was certain: even with my eyes squeezed shut and my hands over my face, a searing flash punched through and flooded my vision white.
Thank god—it's not hot.
※
The reason I survived was one single fact: the subway station in my neighborhood ran so deep it doubled as a nuclear fallout shelter.
I'd gone to meet a friend who worked at the convenience store inside the station, and after that... everything was chaos. Hard to describe it coherently.
The ceiling collapsed without warning. People scattered, fleeing every which way.
Fire erupted partway up the long escalator, and suddenly there was no way back up.
If the fire hadn't started, I probably would've gone up and died anyway.
Anyway. Our world ended like that, and none of us knew why.
Did North Korea lose its mind and launch a preemptive strike? Did someone misinterpret a radar glitch and fire a retaliatory nuke?
I'd read somewhere online that automated retaliatory nuclear-launch programs existed—
the kind where you push one button and the missiles keep launching even after every human in the chain of command is dead. Maybe that was it.
Either way, no one who might have known the truth survived.
Office workers on their way home, college kids heading out for drinks, students ducking into the subway because they couldn't be bothered to wait at the crosswalk.
What would people like that know about a retaliatory nuclear war?
After that, well, reality became something out of a Metro game, just like the ones I'd played.
People wearing fire-evacuation gas masks from the subway supplies, wrapped in burlap and rags, heading outside to scavenge for necessities.
People digging through the collapsed underground tunnels, and people with a knack for craft cobbling together furniture and tools from scrap.
The subway station became a village. The rails got torn up and recycled.
If it hadn't been for the radiation-mutated monster spawn, there really was enough hope there to rebuild humanity.
Hearing that I was the last survivor, though—doesn't that basically mean everyone else is dead?
Did the ventilation system fail? Did the people holed up at Seoul Station leak our location somehow?
I don't know what the hell was happening in other countries that made Korea the last holdout. Don't know any of it. Everyone dead. Unbelievable.
[Constellation, 'Lethargic Nightmare,' awakens a portion of his Origin.]
[Constellation, 'Unforgotten Sin's' Origin is destroyed.]
[Nightmare Fragment acquired: 14EA]
No idea why the hell he thought dragging out someone else's Nightmare was a good plan.