Her boot had transformed into mechanical parts.

  No matter how much Lucy stared at the ground, completely frozen despite her rapid breathing, she couldn’t deny what had just happened before her eyes after the boy-turned-machine had sunk his claws into the boot. Her lungs heaved, surging up and down at the same break-neck pace that flashes of inference entered her mind.

  These machines weren’t just aiming for her armour.

  They wanted to harm her directly.

  They wanted to harm her, get under her armour, sink into her flesh, and transform her into a living heap of scrap parts just like them.

  And Lucy had seen what happened during that transformation. She had seen the four poor, lost human beings she’d been speaking with on good terms, all battered down and writhing in agony, until their skin quite literally burst apart to reveal how their innards had transfigured from flesh into metal. If Lucy were to let her guard down for even a split second, and let these machines give her even just one clean scratch, then she would be doomed to go through the same agonizing fate. And, since she technically wouldn’t be dead, she would remain in this Dream forever as a killer drone doing the death machine’s bidding.

  She absolutely could not, would not, let that happen to her.

  “Aaaaaaagh!”

  Lucy’s body lurched forward before she could form any conscious thought, before she could register the guttural scream that erupted from deep within. In a flash of conjured lightning, she was upon the boy-turned-machine, who was still on the ground readjusting its “arms” after attacking the boots. It looked up just a split second before Lucy thrust her blade straight down into its torso-like area, sending gears and circuitry flying to form a crude hole.

  The boy-turned-robot immediately fell backward onto the floor, sprawled out, its body rising and falling as Lucy continued to drive her sword downward over and over with inhuman force. She impaled the surface of iron skin over and over, thrusting right down through until her sword tinked from hard contact with the ground, leaving the little mechanized body riddled with crude, jagged holes.

  “Cool lady,” the boy-turned-machine cried out, “stop! Stop! Please stop! You’re hurting me! You’re hurting me!”

  Lucy’s heart seized with dread upon hearing a familiar voice begging her to stop—but this was quickly cast aside as she continued her flurry of strikes with one thing on her mind and one thing only: to utterly crush this foe and ensure her own survival, ensure that she came out of this altercation alive at all costs.

  “It’s still me!” the boy-turned-machine shouted. “You remember me! Please! Please stop hurting me! It hurts!”

  Lucy did not heed a single word, for all she heard was the distortion, the clipping, all the little details that told her this only an artificial approximation of a human voice. And this drove her into even more of a frenzy, stabbing downward with such force and speed that one would almost expect this bloodless machine to bleed a bright red river. When she had exhausted her upper body and had to leave her sword in the ground, resting on top of it while panting desperately, she began kicking and stamping at the pile of junk beneath her that was quickly losing all recognizability as the anthropomorphic machine it once was.

  The tremors that shook Lucy’s body stopped, then all she could hear was a final strangled yelp, followed by her own frantic breathing that swept over every centimetre of the open air as if it had replaced the silence of the darkness forever for the rest of her existence. Nothing moved, nothing stirred, and it took Lucy a brief eternity before she realized her body had finally stopped moving.

  At the same time as this realization, her Ideal’s light went out. Darkness enveloped her sight once more, but she did not feel panic nor even a hint of fear. Instead, there was indifference, a complete disregard for this non-entity that reduced all to obscurity. Lucy existed in this moment, her racing heart, ragged breath, and reverberating veins all spoke to that indisputable fact, and so she stood stalwartly in the shadow of her own existence that no darkness, no matter how absolute, could take away.

  How comfortable, how placid, how mollifying it was to simply stand in this darkness after asserting one’s own existence. Lucy had exerted herself to her utmost, protecting the very continuation of her own life, and for that she deserved to be rewarded with the dulling of all her haywire senses, most of all the piercing light that had forced her to comprehend those mechanical monstrosities. This darkness was not an obstacle, but an ally, the embodiment of complete disengagement from her surroundings, her problems, and herself. It was an endless black sea that stretched out out everywhere above her and below her, a lukewarm sea that did not roar or growl, and so it would be easy, oh so easy, to simply lay back and sink down and never allow light to disturb this world ever again.

  Like letting disembodied arms carry you down into the raging waters.

  Like letting your own two feet lead you downstairs to the Chamber of Atonement and its fires of absolution.

  Lucy’s eyes cracked open. She hadn’t even registered herself closing them. She was leaning forward, weakly grasping the handle of her Ideal while bent over it, the blade stuck into the floor. Had she fallen asleep? She did not remember losing consciousness, but with darkness as the only thing she could see, it was impossible to tell. On the surface, she couldn’t believe it possible for her to ever feel comfortable enough in this dank, dark industrial space to ever fall asleep, but then she remembered the soothing feelings she experienced just before “waking up”—as well as the reflections of those feelings she had seen in Cole and Kenneth—and shuddered.

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  Was she being pulled deeper and deeper into this Dream’s darkness the more she interacted with it?

  It was a deeply unsettling thought, and her immediate desire was to dispel this darkness right away. Like the forced transformation induced by those living machines, this darkness had to have a transformative effect on all those caught within it. Slower, much slower, and more insidious, but Lucy was sure that this was true.

  Fighting to keep her breathing from going shaky again, she grasped her Ideal with both hands and imagined the pure white light emanating from it once more. In moments, visualization became reality and Lucy could see her golden armour, the locks of blonde hair that had fallen over her face in the scuffle, and her own reflection in the blade: wide-eyed and damp with sweat, but still there, still intact, still the young woman she knew herself to be.

  Then she angled her beam down at her feet.

  The mess was immediately and shockingly apparent. Not only were cables and registers and circuits and cables scattered all about, their connections either severed or pulled apart, but much of the components littered over the floor had been pulverized into dented remains or wire so flattened it could be mistaken for paper. Glass shards dotted the chaotic heap of broken parts like sinister stars in an odious night sky, reflecting Lucy’s light back at her as tiny spears impaling her eyes. Lucy shook her head, fighting against the momentary blindness, moving her light away from the glass shards to take in the whole picture of what was in front of her.

  Junk. No matter how anyone looked at it, this was a pile of mechanical junk that deserved no more than a passing glance. As if to prove her case, Lucy’s leg moved on its own, kicking over a small metal box covered in circuitry and wiring. It rotated and fell onto another one of its metal faces, filling the air with the sounds of clanging and scraping.

  The sounds of an inanimate, unintelligible machine.

  Not the sounds of a human child.

  It was exactly as it looked: the remains of a machine that had broken apart. There was no body that had been maimed and injured, only an assembly that had lost its structural integrity. There was no soul that had been snuffed out, just electricity likely powered by a battery that could no longer funnel its electrodes through wires that could not bleed. And there was no head, for—

  The dome.

  Lucy’s light glared back at her again, this time from the dome’s smooth shiny surface. She had seen it earlier after dismantling the man-turned-machine, but she had quickly looked away from it to brace herself for the other assailant.

  But now. Now that she was alone in the dark and left to stew in the aftermath of her actions, Lucy couldn’t tear her eyes off the dome and its familiar shape, its uncanny resemblance to a certain bodily feature that every human being was hardwired to recognize immediately on a subconscious, instinctual level. As her gaze bore into it. she saw her eyes reflected back at her in the exact place where eye sockets would have been situated if the dome were a real human head.

  It had been a human head.

  Lucy felt all the wind suddenly expelled from her chest as if she had been punched there. She bit her lip so hard it bled, the light from her Ideal flickering to match the same manic and irregular rhythm of her pounding heart.

  The dome was no longer just a dome. It sprouted skin, the same unblemished pale skin that she had seen pulled taut into a wide grin no more than ten minutes prior. Wide eyes with blue irises sparkling with wonder despite the clear exhaustion behind them. Sandy brown hair that had grown long and messy despite the lack of nutrients to consume anywhere in the vicinity, growing out longer and longer as if in defiance of being stifled, as if recklessly proclaiming the fruits of living and continuing to live.

  For that hair had been attached to a real, flesh-and-blood young boy who just wanted to find a way out of the darkness.

  And Lucy had…

  A smack and metallic thud echoed through the dark as Lucy balled her gloved hand into a fist and smacked it down onto her upper leg. She grit her teeth, fighting back tears.

  It wasn’t a little boy. She had seen exactly what her opponent had looked like before striking them down. There was no trace of humanity left in there, and the conspicuous heap of inorganic junk lying at her feat corroborated that fact.

  But that didn’t erase the human life the heap of metal had emerged from.

  Lucy stabbed her Ideal into the floor, taking a white knuckled grip on its handle while she used her other hand to grasp her temple as she felt a head-ache coming on from a voice in her mind that refused to shut up.

  It wasn’t as if the boy had wanted this to happen.

  What if there was a way to change him back? And then rescue him?

  Now there was no way to know. Now that fate had been completely ripped away from him.

  No, no, no, Lucy muttered under her breath. She shouldn’t focus on any of that. She couldn’t. Regardless of the form it had taken when she first met it, the fact was this machine had ultimately attacked her and almost consigned her to a fate worse than death. Lucy was right to protect herself. She was right to attack, to ensure it could strike at her no longer.

  A thrum rushed over Lucy’s body, different from the unease and anxiety that had seized her until now. In this state, her mind raced toward another realization. This machine was nothing more than a figment of the Dream she was in. It was staunchly realistic in its appearance and mannerisms in its human form, but that didn’t wash away the fact that its very existence was an obstacle. An opponent. Something to get in the way of Lucy’s only goal: to rescue the Dreamer.

  Lucy brought her hand back down from her temple, bringing it to her Ideal’s handle so she gripped it proudly with both hands. So then, it would make sense for Lucy to treat these entities for what they really were—machines set out to impede her—and dispatch them with her sword indiscriminately. They were foes out to get her, just like everything else in this world, so she needed to adopt to tendency to strike, to demolish, to destroy, to tear everything down in her path, and at that thought she smiled.

  She smiled?

  Gasping, she brought her hand to her chest, feeling her heart racing again. But it wasn’t out of fear this time. It was the same excitement, the same giddiness she was consistently finding herself in whenever her thoughts drifted toward a certain Axis and her planned course of action resembled a certain Dream Knight’s.

  “I see you’re finally having fun.”

  A new voice, completely unlike any of the four Lucy had heard earlier. And, more importantly, it didn’t have any of the artificial distortion from the last few voices she had heard. It was a female voice, older than the little girl’s but smoother and less worn with age than the woman’s voice.

  Lucy spun all around, holding her sword out in front of her with both hands with her legs bent and body braced in preparation for a protective strike. She shone her light all around, but saw nothing but the floor and the remains of the little—of the machine that had almost turned her.

  “Who’s there?” she called out.

  Silence, then haughty laughter. Lucy sensed it coming from behind her, but when she wheeled around there was no one there. Despite that, the voice rung out from the same direction again, clearing their throat before saying three words that made Lucy’s mind light up like an array of explosions.

  “I’m the Dreamer.”