In contrast to the mostly serene, but extremely dangerous, terrains of the Dream Realm, the areas of Siege Capitals on Earth could be called relatively safe and yet — never quiet.
Human cities never slept and never stopped their endless rush, but that crazy haste, the never-ending noise, the life that kept its constant flow even in this doomed, dying world made it all look almost peaceful.
Almost…
A loud bang rang behind the door of a small office inside the NQSC’s Human Government’s Headquarters that was followed by a quiet grumble and incoherent mutterings.
Soul Reaper Jet hit her head on the surface of the metallic desk she was currently occupying hard enough to make a dent.
She growled tiredly and mumbled something under her breath, still not changing her awkward position.
The warm breeze of late spring blew peacefully through the open window behind her and slowly ruffled her hair as the rays of the dying sun slid over the interior of her office.
The serenity of it all was making her almost succumb to the temptation of Morpheus’s realm.
‘Damn it, I’m so tired…’
She moaned once again and exhaled as she slowly lifted herself up and looked at the amount of paperwork left on her desk and growled slowly once again.
A desire to set this place on fire and go home for the first time in three weeks and indulge herself in the pleasure of sleep was becoming more and more alluring with each passing second.
The said pleasure was actually a basic human right, damn it!
She turned her head towards the disabled screen that was attached to the wall to her left and exhaled tiredly as she saw her reflection.
“Curses, I look like shit…”
And indeed she did.
Under her icy-blue eyes lay deep black circles and bags; her hair was disheveled; and her skin was deadly pale.
Not only was she sleep deprived, but because of the apparent lack of action for the last week, she was running low on essence too.
She was tired, hungry for both human food and monster souls, and also extremely bored.
She chuckled, as she thought of the times when her younger self dreamed of ending up in quite a similar position, doing nothing more dangerous than giving her mad boss some documents to sign and making enough to run all of the outskirts for a month or two.
Well, maybe not that much, but she did get a substantial raise after the latest campaign had finished.
Who could have imagined that she would become a colonel some day?
Definitely not her!
Apparently she made a very good impression on the higher-ups with her achievements in the last defensive campaign of the Northern Quadrant’s Port City.
Even her… scandalous behavior earlier was swept under the rug, thanks to that.
‘Damn that crazy devil…’
The initial predictions of the length of the event in question ended up being very off.
And instead of it lasting slightly more than a month, as the government believed, it had dragged on for almost four and had been much more intense too… At some point she even had to join the House of Night in a few short naval clashes, despite the fact that her Aspect and abilities in general weren’t very suited for that.
So, overall, Jet was very busy these past few months.
And now… now she was stuck with tons of paperwork to do.
She exhaled.
In her stupidity and terrible lack of time in the field, she decided to postpone making reports until the Nightmare Gate activity ceased.
And then the event dragged on more and more, and the amount of paperwork grew with each passing day, and now — a month after everything went back to normal and the Government declared the campaign successful — she was finally pushed into the office…
Actually, she was pushed there more than a week ago, and since then, she barely ever left it.
And it was driving her mad!
She was longing for some action, something tasty to chew, and to sleep like the dead person she was, for at least a day.
And yet, as she threw one long yearning look outside the window, Soul Reaper sighed and went back to work.
Even if she hated the thing with all her cold heart, postponing it even more would definitely make it worse.
Why did she have to be such a responsible person?
Why couldn’t she just be like some dark, irresponsible, and crazy gremlin who writes whatever he wants, mumbles some shit in public places, does some ridiculous things, and ruins other people’s already nonexistent reputation!
Oh, how she wanted to strangle that little devil… Not only did the despicable idiot spam her communicator with absolutely degenerate nonsense, he also couldn’t hold his idiotic mouth shut in public areas and mumbled some easily misunderstood sentences in the presence of his professors and general student populace!
But that wasn’t the worst thing… Someone had seen the moron sneaking out of the Academy to meet with her inside her PTV for their periodic meetings on a few occasions.
Dead of night.
With the vehicle covered in silence by her [Heartfelt Confession] Memory, and those meetings lasting from half an hour to an hour…
“Oh, I can’t wait to see that pale moronic face again… I’m going to whip that smart scrawny ass of his, until the little devil’s crawling like a worm he is!”
The reason for her outrage was quite simple.
Initially, she believed that her situation was caused by a set of unfortunate incidents, but when she started to get news of her and Sunny’s nonexistent relationship becoming public knowledge, she decided to dig a bit deeper.
And now she knew for sure — that bastard had planned all of it!
Or at the very least he was aware of what his actions might cause.
There was no way in hell that paranoid little devil with an additional sense would let anyone spy on him, unless it was his intention altogether.
It was a good thing, though, that the bullshit story she gave to the Wake of Ruin somewhat negated the consequences that shitshow could have left on her career and reputation.
Didn’t Sunny himself say that she should improve it and rise in ranks as soon as possible?
And then the next moment she pulled the stunt like that!
She exhaled as she remembered the pitiful looks people gave her now… Maybe it wasn’t such a good thing after all…
When Saint Cor confronted her the second time, her embarrassed mind somehow came up with the idea to put all the blame for her misfortunes — rightfully so — on a crazy time-traveler.
So she took the story of their original meeting in a police station — from both timelines that is; some… events the idiot told her about from his previous life; a few ideas she got from those cheap sinful romantic stories she definitely had never read; combined it all together; and — in her sleep-deprived state — came up with the most ridiculous story of her being seduced by a poor, yet enigmatic, slightly crazy, fun-to-be-around, and actually competent Sleeper with a common background.
The story Wake of Ruin swallowed, after asking for some details…
And somehow, at some point that story slipped out, got spread to the masses, and grew arms and legs in the process, becoming even more ridiculous than it had already been.
And now she was an overworked, very romantic twenty-eight-year-old cat-lady — that didn’t even have a cat!
— that by chance met the love of her life — her soulmate!
— an unfortunate young Sleeper that just came back from his First Nightmare and fell in love with her at first sight.
And now she was waiting for her one true love, not knowing whether he would return at all, sighing languidly and looking from the window like a princess from a fairy tale yearning for her prince!
Jet wanted to puke, crack her skull open, pull out the memories of the things she heard, and destroy the cells responsible for her decision to proceed with this spectacle at all!
“Spell stupid me! The prank got out of control and backfired…”
Why did she even think that making a degenerate prince charming out of Sunny was a good idea for payback?
The sharp-tongued devil either wouldn’t bat an eye at it, or pull out some stunt to make it even funnier for him and more embarrassing for her.
Was this whole situation a payback for her alternative self doing that inappropriate… joke she made in front of their cohort in Antarctica?
Was he that petty to avenge a transgression she didn’t even commit… yet?
Or was it because she kicked his ass in the dojo of her house after everything he had dumped on her?
Damn that crazy devil.
Damn her stupid younger self that got her into this situation.
The one that would apparently turn into a desperate pervert in the next few years…
“Cheers!” she mumbled non-enthusiastically as she raised her cup of instant coffee.
“The future looks even bleaker…”
She took a small sip and then pulled back in her seat with a chuckle.
Well, maybe everything wasn’t that bad.
Even this whole situation was kind of fun — in an absolutely embarrassing way, but it was.
And as the rumor mill spread far and wide, her reputation also… improved drastically.
It was humiliating, but — she guessed — it was better to be seen as a love-struck girl rather than a murderous lunatic.
Especially considering everything that they would have to do when Sunny returns to the Waking World.
“Hmm… maybe that was his idea to begin with? No way, nah… I don’t believe that that madman predicted everything so perfectly!” she mumbled under her breath.
But couldn’t he really?
He knew her far better than she knew him after all, so he might have predicted her reaction and her desire to have revenge.
But there were too many ‘ifs’ anyways: her being investigated; Saint Cor taking her side twice; the story of their romance slipping out… Could that lunatic manipulate that too somehow?
Jet wasn’t sure of anything these days!
Who could have thought that she would one day end up being friends with a slightly mad time-traveller and, more than that, the public would also somehow come to believe that her naive self got seduced into a relationship with him — a minor!
‘Fuck, this world is crazy.
Sunny is crazy.
Am I crazy too?’
And the world was literally going to shit too.
Not only according to Sunny’s retelling of future events, but by her own observations too.
And somehow… she believed that it might happen much sooner than was described by Sunny.
The whole miniature Chain of Nightmares thing that she lived through was proof enough of that.
There was no way that the event of such scale missed Sunless — a known history buff — in his previous life.
So — she believed — his regression shook something…
deeper from its slumber.
The Forgotten God — she gulped and nervously looked around.
Was she becoming paranoid of her own thoughts?
Good!
Better be paranoid than dead!
Well, she was already dead, of course, but anything deader than that would be unpleasant.
But she digressed.
Sunny’s initial prediction that Antarctica might go to shit was coming true.
The Port City’s previous situation was proof that the Dream Realm was looking for a way to start consuming the Earth faster, but for some reason it decided to abandon its plans for the Northern Quadrant for now.
But she also knew — Antarctica would probably become worse, and even quicker, than before.
Good thing that the fiasco that was the first month of the latest campaign was a good wake-up call to everyone, so this time the Government decided to start preparing for the Southern Campaign effectively immediately and had already started the evacuation slowly.
First to be relocated were Government officials, engineers — such as those working in LO49 — and mundane families of the Awakened too, so as not to cause panic.
And the main campaign would start in about a year’s time.
But would that be enough?
Knowing their luck and Fate’s particular dislike of their world — it wouldn’t.
Unless… they proceed with that crazy plan of Sunny’s in Antarctica.
That whole idea of his was beyond crazy, to be honest.
Jet wasn’t even sure if that would be possible at all.
Sunny wasn’t sure either.
And it also required him to speedrun through ranks very, very quickly.
Probably even faster than they predicted… But there was no other choice, it seemed.
Either that or death.
Or maybe something even worse — becoming a Nightmare Creature for all eternity.
Nah, she didn’t want such a fate.
Sunny was a bit crazy, but he wasn’t an idiot, that’s for sure.
And if he said that there was a chance for that gamble to pay off, then all there was left for them to do was to make it come true, or die trying.
Actually, maybe he wasn’t even that crazy…
Jet thought about his behavior very carefully since meeting him.
The small slips; that sense of humor of his; the moments of him lowering his guard; the sharpness of his mind; the way he could calculate the whole field and predict its flow in mere minutes — that was beyond impressive.
He might be chaotic, yes.
But… Maybe he actually wasn’t?
Jet actually believed that he — this version of Sunny at least — wasn’t crazy at all.
And that persona of a mad clown he was trying to show was a play.
In fact, she was almost absolutely certain of that.
Soul Reaper wasn’t an expert in psychology, but she could recognize a defense mechanism when she saw one.
The guy was broken so badly that when he accidentally let those cracks show, her cold heart would crack in pain too.
That boy — that man in a teenager’s body — lived through so much that no normal person could stay sane.
She knew of some of his experiences from his tales, but the event that broke him completely must have been the one right before his death.
His last trip to the Tomb of Ariel.
She knew almost nothing about what transpired there — it was a painful subject that he usually avoided — but from the little slips she heard… It was very, very bad.
She wasn’t sure how he even kept moving after that, if the events transpired even remotely the way she believed they did… And yet he somehow managed to pull himself back together enough to function like a normal human being.
Well, somewhat.
So that clownish persona of his, his sense of humor, diving into his impulses, creating those impulses and all the other things he did too — everything was a play.
To distract himself.
To make it a bit less painful.
Never to forget nor to let it disappear, but numb it down just enough, so he could proceed with his plans.
It was truly admirable.
She herself was a very responsible and even selfless — though she would never admit it probably — person, but he was beyond devoted in his quest.
Even though his end goal had a selfish background, wasn’t that the point anyways?
To make a world where even a lost and broken Shadow could find solace and peace in the end?
Jet chuckled melancholically.
Yeah, she could respect that.
She shook her head, chasing away ridiculous thoughts that started to fill her mind.
She had a lot of work to do, after all!
Not only did she have to finish countless reports tonight, but she also needed to rest, if only a bit, and proceed with her ‘Saint Jet’ project that she had to put aside somewhat for a few days.
It was much harder than Sunny explained, as expected, but not as hard as she initially believed it would be.
She was getting close — she could tell.
She could already feel her body growing stronger, her essence becoming more potent, her connection to the world forming bit by bit.
The most problematic part wasn’t figuring her element — she had managed to pinpoint the thing pretty accurately even before the solstice — but the fact that she couldn’t find a place where she could effectively pull her elemental essence from.
Her element was quite tricky, but not as tricky as Sunny’s turned out to be in this life, she chuckled.
If she were to name the thing, she would call it ‘Stillness’.
To put the meaning behind it into words, it was the state of calmness and cold right before death takes possession of the being’s soul and shadow.
It was very problematic, indeed.
Initially, she thought that it was something to do with death that already happened, so she became a constant visitor to graveyards.
In both worlds at that.
Good thing that it all happened before the solstice, so her newfound achievements crossed out her apparent quirks in the eyes of society.
Her real element was no less problematic, though, but the constant fury of battles in the Port City helped her quite a bit in understanding how to work with it.
The moment when she slew her enemy — as in the being was registered as dead and before it actually died — there was a small amount of Spirit Essence let out in the world that she should try her hardest to consume.
It took a lot of trial and error, amid some meditating and cursing, to get a feeling of how to do this.
But she wasn’t quite there yet, though she believed she was close.
There were two problems that were separating her from Sainthood at that moment.
First — lack of control of the Spirit essence.
Something that she was planning to fix soon.
And second — the amount of essence was too minuscule from slaying a single enemy, not nearly enough to reshape her Core.
But there were upsides too — the stronger Nightmare Creatures left a lot more essence after their death, so there were two ways to proceed after she knew she was ready.
Either to slay at least a dozen Fallen Beasts in a single strike, or… to kill a Corrupted Abomination.
A Devil at least, preferably a Tyrant.
Both were going to be troublesome, but personally Jet would rather pick the second option, even though she knew it was a much more dangerous one too.
It was something akin to a test for her.
To check if she was worthy of becoming a Saint, she chuckled.
It was stupid, but she still believed it was the right choice.
It’s not like it would be the first Corrupted she would have slain, anyways.
So she’d rather do something worth remembering.
But first…
‘I still have a lot of paperwork to do’, she thought dejectedly.
And there were a lot of things to do before attempting Transcendence.
If her calculations were right, it would still take her a month or two before she got a feeling of her essence, and Corrupted Tyrants also do not grow on trees.
So there is that too.
And so Soul Reaper Jet went back to work, wholeheartedly deciding that this would be the last night she had to torment herself with this.
Her mind, though, wandered off for just a moment towards one crazy shadow, surviving in a Death Zone at this very moment — if he even ended up in the same one to begin with.
“I can’t help but wonder how that idiot is doing now…” she chuckled and shook her head.
He was okay!
There was no way that anything could get hold of that madman anyways.
***
Wind was blowing past the black haired boy’s ears with terrible whistling.
His head hurt and kept pulsing; his chest burned and his body ached; his eyes were bloodshot and crying bloody tears too.
He could barely even manage enough strength to hold himself tight enough, so as not to fall from Nightmare’s back.
Sunny wasn’t okay at all.
It was probably a mistake coming here alone in this short scouting operation.
But it was a mistake that had to be made.
Otherwise they would have grown even more stale with a false sense of security, without knowing what was waiting for them just around the corner.
If he survived this… He still wouldn’t know what to do with the situation they’ve found themselves in.
Everything went from bad to worse.
Sunny coughed as he pulled himself a bit tighter as Nightmare increased his speed even more and dove into shadows immediately as they moved past the reach of the force that was quickly killing them both.
He sighed in relief.
His faithful stallion was under the effects too, but not nearly as bad as Sunny was.
Just a few more seconds and he would have been dead.
He coughed up bloody spit as he summoned the Golden Rope and commanded his shadows to bind him to Nightmare with it as his consciousness started to slip away.
And right before it did, a few barely audible words finally managed to escape his lips.
“We are so, totally… fucked…”
Hi everyone.
Here I am with another POV chap – Jet’s this time, as I had promised a few times to make her POV in the comments and thought that it was generally a good idea to show some of her thoughts and what is going on in the Waking World as the story progresses.
Next one should be out by Sunday at the very latest, but might be out earlier, I’m not sure yet, as I’m planning to get some rest from writing for a few days, as it had started to take a toll on me, ngl.
Anyways, would be waiting for your thoughts and I appreciate every single one of your comments, even if I’m not responding to all of them these days.
Thank you all for reading, have a nice day (or maybe night, like me xD) and see you all soon.
Bye!