Lucy lost all her bearings as the light from her Ideal flickered off into oblivion. As soon as darkness swamped her vision, the pressure of the hands holding her face became almost painfully apparent, and she shook herself free of the Dreamer’s grasp.

  “Oh, sorry, does your light go out when you get excited?” The girl’s sweet laugh was far more ominous without a visible face to attach it to. “By excited, I mean scared or startled. You weren’t thinking of something else, were you?”

  “Wait,” Lucy said with a biting undertone. She didn’t want to play into this Dreamer’s twisted games, especially not with the darkness—her darkness—engulfing her. She took a moment to regain her senses, then held her Ideal out in front of her and concentrated with a single, pointed thought of wanting to banish this lack of vision and allow herself to see this person who had just lost every ounce of her trust.

  The light roared back to life across her blade, shining forward onto the Dreamer’s from a slight downward angle. Her face beamed with her picture perfect smile, but the absolute darkness that covered her from the neck down made her look like a head floating over an endless abyss, a spirit of the night haunting Lucy.

  “But either way,” the Dreamer said, “that means I hit a nerve for you, huh?”

  Her smile widened, her teeth gleaming with a harsh, sharp kind of brightness like the metal nuts and bolts of the machines that reflected Lucy’s light back at her.

  “Because I know why you were smiling.”

  The light went out again, and there was a clatter as Lucy’s Ideal fell to the floor. She felt as though she were being stretched out in every direction while, at the same time, her body was caving in on itself. Never before had she felt so naked, so vulnerable, the kind of existential chill one gets when someone else has managed to reach beyond the tough outer shell of the self and find a small but damning piece of the beast underneath, a piece that Lucy herself could never have seen.

  But almost as soon as this new level of fear had descended upon Lucy, a red-hot anger burned quickly and profusely within her, telling her that she was being both violated on a personal level and manipulated into believing a claim that was wholly untrue. There was no way that what the Dreamer was insinuating could be true. And Lucy could prove it with a simple but decisive explanation, so easy to grasp that the Dreamer had to be in the wrong for even suggesting there could be any other reason.

  “Yes, I smiled because I won.” Lucy deftly picked her sword back up, aimed it right at where she was sure the Dreamer was still standing, and in a moment she had lit up the Dreamer’s snide face again. “I barely managed to save my own life. The fact I came this close to losing it all was just crazy to think about. Who wouldn’t smile after beating the odds like that?”

  “Hmmm…” The girl put her finger to her lip, tilting her head while her gaze drifted off into the distance with a pensive look. “That does make sense. Like from a logical standpoint. But what you’re saying isn’t what I saw. You wanna know what I saw?”

  “That’s—”

  “I’ll tell you what I saw,” the girl interjected without skipping a beat, shifting her posture so that she leaned in closer and made half her face fall under shadows. “It was like a toddler finding out how to climb stairs for the first time. Or a little loner boy in his backyard after crushing an ant for the first time. That was the smile I saw. The shameless, kinda crazy and nutso smile you have after realizing you just did something you never even thought you could do.”

  She smirked, raising her head a little, the tides of darkness lapping at the shores of her face as she added: “All from the joy of doing something you always, truly, secretly wanted to do.”

  “That’s not true!”

  Lucy didn’t intend for those words to be shouted. She hadn’t intended for those words to be spoken at all, yet now there had sunk into the Dreamer’s expression of amused surprise, reflecting off the plain metallic floor, sinking into the darkness that devoured it for some unknown far-off purpose, like a dark karmic force that would return like the resounding echo filling Lucy’s ears.

  The girl stood perfectly still, her posture remaining perfect and calm as she smiled with pursed lips that challenged Lucy to pick up after her own outburst.

  Lucy’s cheeks flared from both embarrassment and intense frustration, and she was inclined to call the girl out for getting on her nerves to the point that she—no. No, Lucy couldn’t let herself get worked up, for she knew was in the right here. In her regular speaking voice, Lucy quickly added: “You…you said earlier that I was being presumptuous. Well, now you’re doing the same thing, talking as if you can read my mind. What you saw is as I said, and that’s the truth.”

  “…Gotcha,” the girl said in a low drawl, her hand on her chin as she inspected Lucy with a dreamy but intense gaze. It bothered Lucy to no end that it was impossible to tell whether or not this Dreamer was actually convinced, or was only saying that and taking on a pensive look to feign the appearance of taking Lucy’s words seriously. After some time, she sighed and said, “It really is a shame, though. I was hoping I met someone who would finally help me do what I need to do properly.”

  “And what would that be? Tearing those machines apart in the most violent ways possible?” Lucy said with only a slight attempt to soften the distaste in her voice.

  “Most violent way? Pfft, no, not even close, that’s just a huge waste of energy.” Again, the Dreamer’s dismissive gesture was overly informal and lighthearted, disconnected from the fact that she was talking about engaging in brutal fights to the death. “I need someone who’ll help me pulverize these bots down to their cores. Like, not just busting them up and shutting them down. I mean breaking them down to the point where they’re practically vaporized. Not a piece, not a crumb, not an atom of them left after we’re through with them.”

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Lucy placed her hand on her hip, mostly perplexed, but also slightly disturbed by the biting ruthlessness with which the Dreamer relished her words. “Wouldn’t that be a waste of energy, too? It should be enough to shut them down and make them stop.”

  “Pretty ironic of you to say that, considering…” The Dreamer only gave a wry smile upon seeing Lucy’s brow furrow. “But you’re right, it would be a huge waste—if there wasn’t a good reason for it.”

  Inexplicably, like in the way one’s body jerks and panics due to a subconscious fear of slipping and falling, Lucy looked back over her shoulder in the direction of the boy-turned-machine’s remains. She couldn’t see anything, for her Ideal’s light shone in the opposite direction, and though she felt the urge to divert her light there, she had a strong, cloying intuition that taking her eyes off the Dreamer would be very bad at this point. Partly because Lucy felt it would be rude to turn her back and her light away from someone she was speaking with, but also partly because there was a voice in her mind saying that leaving herself vulnerable to this girl would put herself in grave danger. She had no basis for this besides her own mistrust, and something else, something festering at the rim of her mind that she couldn’t quite grasp, but it was strong enough to dominate the purely rational part of herself.

  So instead, Lucy kept her gaze and her light trained on the Dreamer, her grip suddenly shaking for a split second, and asked: “What is this important reason?”

  The lines of the Dreamer’s smile bled into the shadows at the edges of her face. “It’s simple, really. Every piece of those bots gets fed into The System to make it bigger and stronger.”

  “The System?” said Lucy, her mind already arriving at a conclusion that made her shudder.

  “You’ve met it, haven’t you? Huge hideous machine with all these blades and murder tools, you can’t miss it. And the worst part is, it doesn’t even need to find new parts itself. All these bots have, like, an instinct that makes them want to go to the System and offer themselves up. Kinda cult-y, isn’t it?”

  “Y-yes, very.” Lucy was struck by a bolt of lightning as the strange exchanges between the machines finally made sense. All that talk about knowing where they needed to go, the woman-turned-machine collecting the fallen pieces of the girl-turned-machine and running off so she could make it while the parts were “still good…”

  Lucy had let them escape and go to the death machine, to the System.

  This realization gutted her like a sucker punch to the ribs, and a cold sweat ran down her back at the visualization of all those mechanical parts being added to that hulking machine, making it even more deadly. She had the urge, again, to look over her shoulder at where the boy-turned-machine’s busted heap lay, this time to make sure that they were still there.

  “What’s wrong?” said the Dreamer, her eyes fluttering with a confusion that fell between genuine and exaggerated. “Oh. I think we both have the same idea, now that I mentioned that little detail. Go ahead, you can finish what you started.”

  She gestured at Lucy’s back, and Lucy as a bundle of nerves almost followed this command turned around. But she couldn’t do it. She still couldn’t bring herself to turn her back to this girl, especially now that Lucy was about to do something that would require her full attention and leave her unaware of what was happening behind her.

  “I’ll do it,” said Lucy, “but only if you help out.” When the girl raised her eyebrow in perplexity, Lucy deftly added: “Like you said, it’s tiring work. And we can get it done a lot faster.”

  The girl laughed mirthfully, a deeper, throatier sound. “Sure, why not. We can officially call ourselves a team after that.”

  Lucy felt an immediate revulsion at the thought of being considered this maniacal girl’s ally, let alone her teammate, but she brushed it aside in the face of her growing anxiety of what she would find—or rather, wouldn’t find upon shining her light in the opposite direction.

  But when Lucy finally wheeled around and did just that, she breathed a sigh of relief. That scrap heap was still lying on the floor just as she had left it, seemingly with no piece unaccounted for.

  Wait.

  She had turned around quickly without thinking, letting the Dreamer out of her sight. In a panic, she turned back around, but the girl’s cherubic smile had been replaced with dark nothingness.

  “Hey, couldja shine it over here, please? Kinda hard to break something you can’t even see.”

  Lucy’s entire body froze, but then in the next instant she wheeled back around, and sure enough, the Dreamer was standing there in front of the mechanical junk.

  “H-here,” Lucy said, pointing her light slowly and carefully away from the Dreamer and back onto the heap pile. She angled it so that most of the Dreamer’s silhouette was still visible at the edges of the light’s brilliance.

  “Perfect,” said the girl. Perhaps it was Lucy’s imagination, but her voice sounded different, heavier, deeper, from a distance. “Let’s get this party started.”

  Lucy walked up in front of the heap as well. In unison, she and the Dreamer began stamping down at the remains of glass fuses and fragile metal breakers. For iron cogs, copper nuts, and other parts that were too sturdy to be broken down just by trampling, Lucy took quick, decisive swipes with her Ideal, its blade able to cut through anything and everything in the heap without any more resistance than slicing a sheet of paper.

  When at last all the parts had been sufficiently damaged, such that none of them were salvageable as usable parts in a machine, Lucy panted and caught her breath as she set her Ideal down and let it pierce down into the floor, hers and the Dreamer’s faces softly illuminated by the outer rays of her Ideal’s light.

  It was a lot of energy expended just to properly demolish one of these machines, but Lucy didn’t feel discouraged. If anything, she was overwhelmed with a newfound confidence and conviction. The thought of having to do this for every such machine (and how many even were there?) was exhausting. And yet, Lucy could feel a familiar flame welling within her, the one that told her to rise to the challenge. Perhaps it was because she had been lost in this Dream for so long, lost and confused and afraid, so now that she had a clear purpose it abated all of her uncertainties and fears. She could do this; she could rescue the Dreamer by standing up to these machines and eradicating them. They, and even their “master” known as the System, were no longer an unknown boogeyman in Lucy’s mind, but tangible foes, an obstacle to overcome.

  But the moment Lucy gripped her Ideal with renewed confidence, a loud rumbling and clattering sounded from deep in the darkness, from the direction of the conveyor belt Lucy had arrived from. Lucy’s hairs stood on end, for the approaching cacophony was immediately familiar, and it was soon joined by the sound of whirring.

  Whirring saw blades that Lucy couldn’t see, but knew were there, there and closing distance rapidly with each passing second.

  “Wh-what’s happening?” Lucy looked to the Dreamer with her mask of composure completely dissolved. “Is that…?”

  “Oh, sorry, forgot to mention one little thing,” said the Dreamer with all the care of someone who had forgotten to buy groceries on her way home. “You shouldn’t get too comfortable. Here. Ever. Because as soon as you stop being afraid, The System will come after you.”