The loss of all sense.

  Lucy was far too used to it now, this being her fourth time surrendering all physical attachments when crossing a Dream Threshold. In all the previous instances, she had found it soothing and comforting—and who wouldn’t, she asked herself, given the inherent turmoil of conscious thought and feeling? It was a warm absence despite the lack of warmth, like curling oneself up under the covers on a stormy night and letting all time and responsibility fall away into oblivion. It was a complete negation of existential inertia, becoming without, becoming nothing, falling through one’s image and self-consciousness until it was so far away it could never be reached.

  It had been a blessing and a mercy, but this time, Lucy’s mind went into a state of apprehension that lingered even when her body then mind went numb. This mode of nothingness was close to how she imagined death would be like, and she was in abject fear of her own self knowing that she had found her previous experiences comforting. Perhaps she did have a subconscious desire to pass on and be done with everything back when she was still green to being a Dream Knight, or perhaps it had always lingered in some untold recess of her soul back in the waking world. But regardless of the origin, she could no longer let that existential resignation continue to be a part of her. She wanted—no, needed to live. Otherwise, what would be the point of the image she wanted to uphold, of the whole legacy she wanted to imprint in the minds of her loved ones, perhaps even humanity as a whole, when she took on the mantle of a Dream Knight?

  And so it was that Lucy reawakened to the physical sensations of her armour weighing on her and her chest rising and falling in breath with a fiery and defiant motivation. Her eyes had closed, so she forced them open with wrathful purpose—only to find that there was nothing to see.

  Just as she had predicted in her prior conversation with the King, her Concentrated Illumination Feat had disabled itself as soon as her mind had gone blank and broken her focus. To re-activate it was simple enough, and once she did so, she could finally start exploring this Dream properly, and find the Dreamer she still hadn’t met yet.

  As Lucy raised the Ideal she was still holding with both hands up so that the blade was level with her face and pointing forward, she bargained mentally with herself. Since the light from her Ideal would be the only light for as far as the ey could see, she would immediately alert anything and everything within the vicinity and cast a massive target on her person. Knowing that, it was clear she shouldn’t rush, and instead take time to think of a more covert way to traverse the Dream, or at least prepare herself better for the possible dangers.

  But the more she stood in this absolute darkness, the more her hands shook and legs trembled, an uneasy tremor vibrating from deep within her chest and radiating out so that her entire body was a pond disturbed by endless rippling waves. The utter lack of sight, her dominant sensory function, did not help in the slightest in curbing the earlier unease she felt about losing all sensation when crossing the Dream Threshold. Her innards were churning, as if trying to emerge from her skin and let out a deep, bellowing scream, the kind one barely remembers before whiting out from heart-stopping terror.

  If she didn’t do something about this darkness right now, she was going to lose her mind.

  With that, Lucy tightened her grip on her Ideal—and froze. When the King had told her about travelling to and from her Final Dream, he had clarified that time within the outgoing Dream would pause, and then resume when she returned at the exact point from which she left. And the last time she was here, before returning, a pursuer was right on her tail.

  Lucy’s left hand flew up to her mouth, covering it just in time before her breathing went choppy and would have come out in audible gasps. She tensed her entire body with excruciating intensity, keeping herself as absolutely still as possible to minimize the risk of making any sort of noise.

  A second passed. And another second. And another.

  Lucy felt herself becoming light-headed, forcing herself to remain in such an uncomfortable position, but she didn’t dare risk being ambushed. Even though she had Cognizance (I) that would allow her to phase through a surprise attack from the enemy, it was useless if she couldn’t see where the attack was coming from and what it even was. Plus, if the enemy really was as close by as she was imagining, they could launch another attack just as quickly. No matter what she did, she was at a disadvantage, so all she could do was stall and protect herself and bide time until she could think of a way out. Or was she only delaying the inevitable?

  She couldn’t think like that. If she panicked, acted too hastily, or otherwise screwed up and perished here, she would never be able to return to this Dream. If that were to happen, would the Encroachment stop? She cursed herself silently for not having asked that of the King, but no matter what the answer was, Lucy had no mind to willingly allow herself to die in a Dream. She grit her teeth, feeling frustration again at once again considering the easy way out of surrendering her life.

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  Think. She had to focus on solving this situation as a problem, one with an actual, feasible solution. This was another facet of the Axis of Understanding, after all: the ability to calmly and reasonably analyze a situation. And if Lucy were to focus purely on logic here, there was one burning question that soon became clear.

  Why could she not sense her pursuer at all?

  Lucy almost gasped from the sheer perplexity of this realization, but she could hardly blame herself. Surely, if time had resumed from exactly where she’d left off, her pursuer would still know where she was and still had their attack readied. Come to think of it, Lucy couldn’t hear that loud whirring that had pierced her eardrums while she was running away, nor was there the hissing from before that. It was all far too silent, and if it weren’t for the throbbing pulse of her heartbeat in her ears, Lucy would have believed she’d been robbed of her hearing all together.

  The safest option was to wait. Just stand by, allowing more time to pass, enough time that the complete absence of action proved the absence of an enemy before her. But how long was long enough? Without anything to stimulate her primary senses and give any sort of indication of her surrounding environment, Lucy found that even her sense of time was murky.

  But this was just like the dark miasma she had confronted only moments ago. She couldn’t let it override her senses, let it make her lose sight of herself and her path. In the midst of the chaos of the incomprehensible, this was where she had to engage her Understanding and apply a measured, confident solution to the problem at hand.

  One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

  There was no way for Lucy to tell if her mental approximation of a second was accurate, but she went for deliberately long gaps between the numbers, knowing that in this situation more patience paid off. At least ten seconds had passed now, and if that was added onto the two or three minutes she had stood in fear beforehand, then the corollary was conclusive: if someone or something were out to et her, they would have already done so by now.

  Lucy let her body relax, but she still couldn’t bring herself to breathe a sigh of relief. And as she began raising her sword up to her eye level again, she did so in a slow and hesitant manner where she was prepared to wince if her armour made a sound. No one was there. It was safe to summon her light. But still this was far easier said than done.

  But once she had finished the motion and saw her blade in front of her pointing into the distance, her fear slowly dissolved and was replaced with a warm fervour emanating from her sword arm and spreading through her body. With just a simple thought, she could cut through the darkness that had enveloped this entire world in its oppressive veil. The idea of having so much power at her fingertips lit up a flame of giddiness within her, not dissimilar from how she had felt when cutting down the royal guards in the church using Diana’s Feat.

  Lucy shook her head. She couldn’t let memories of Diana discourage her from exercising her own power. What she was about to do was far different from the brutal violence of Diana’s weapon-enhancing Feat. The light she was about to cast would be the first step toward understanding her entire situation, so that she could solve the Dream’s trials and rescue the perilous Dreamer trapped within. All according to her own way of doing things.

  Now, with her conviction renewed, Lucy took a vice grip on her Ideal’s handle and held her arm perfectly steady so that the blade she envisioned running down her line of sight was an unbroken and definite line piercing into the distance ahead. Then she culled her mind of all doubts and second-guesses so that all that remained was a single thought:

  Concentrated Illumination

  She nearly went blind. After several minutes standing by in the total absence of light, the pure white luminosity that engulfed her blade was like an arrow shot straight into her eyes. But she grit her teeth and held fast on her grip, for she had to see past the effects of her own power in order to discover the truth.

  And that truth was a heaping mess of machinery.

  It lay before her strewn all over the floor, which was a perfectly uniform and nondescript grey surface that revealed nothing about the surrounding space except that it was most likely artificial. The machinery would have blended into that uniformity if not for how it had come apart and clashed with the endless grey with conflicting edges and angles as well as cords, connectors, and chassis that were never meant to be exposed now sticking out in every possible direction. The assembled orderliness of this machine—whatever it was—had been stripped away so that its picture of completeness was broken down into fragments of incompleteness, directionlessness, and purposelessness. And at this sight of wanton chaos, Lucy felt her blood run cold.

  Who or what had done this? Was it her pursuer? The broken machine parts certainly looked sturdy and high-grade, and Lucy imagined their durability was even greater when they were all put together, like links in a chain mail tunic. Whoever had taken it all apart must possess horrific levels of strength.

  But then Lucy spotted something among the heap, partially covered by large oblong chunks of scrap metal and cables so bunched up and tangled they may as well be mechanical intestines. There, underneath them, were large circular discs with serrated edges that looked razor sharp, their teeth glinting in her Ideal’s light.

  Saw blades?

  No matter which angle Lucy shone her light or shifted her gaze, there was no doubt that that was what they were. There were scratch marks on the floor around them, with piles and lines and fine dust nearby; clearly, these saw blades had been running not long ago, likely right before the machine had been disassembled. The more Lucy stared at them, the more she recalled the loud whirring sound that had started up mere seconds before her escape from this Dream, and that brought with it a glaring question.

  Was this machine Lucy’s pursuer?