It was as though running was all Lucy knew how to do and all that she had ever done.

  How long had she already been puncturing the lifeless grey floor with her footsteps? Her legs gave no ache of fatigue, nor did her arms, all thanks to her Primary Axis, but because of this there was no way to tell how much energy she had expended. Even if she worked up the courage to look over her shoulder, past the machine and its saw blades, and try to gauge the distance to her return point, what good would that do? Was it even possible, with everything here looking so uniform?

  She did, occasionally, give the briefest look over her shoulder, just long enough to tell whether her pursuer—no, potential executioner was still on her tail, as well as to gauge roughly how far she was from the machine of her demise. Every time she did the latter, she found the machine was far enough to keep herself from being stricken frozen with shock and terror, or led to believe that she should just give up and accept her fate because the machine was ruthlessly gaining on her. But at the same time, the machine was near enough that Lucy couldn’t pause for even a second or slow down. Everything was perfectly in place to keep Lucy in perpetual motion.

  Lucy let out a sharp, ragged breath, as if her soul was climbing and clawing its way out of her body as a well of terror began taking hold.

  She couldn’t keep on doing this. The machine didn’t seem to have a battery or attached cables, so it had to be running on some magical force. And if that force never ran out, Lucy would surely collapse from exhaustion or destroy her knee joints long before the machine ever reached a point of wear and tear that would even slightly slow it down.

  Lucy wheezed, her ears popping from the sheer force of her rapid breathing. When her hearing went back to normal, she was drowned again in the high-pitched whirring of the saw blades mere metres from her back.

  Lucy’s entire body braced as she breathed in—and was too shaken to breathe out, even as she continued pumping her feet forward. Was this how she was going to die in this Dream? Even if she was just going to return to her own Dream, that wouldn’t let her escape from the experience of being torn to shreds.

  Return…

  Lucy gulped and cursed under her breath. She had been running away from her return point for minutes on end, possibly even hours. And even if she were to reverse direction now, how would that be possible without running straight into her pursuer? Even if the machine wasn’t fast enough to turn and get her with the saw blades immediately, the walls on either side were close enough that Lucy would have to skirt around mere feet from the machine, and at that point the hulking mechanism could simply veer to the side and tackle her down.

  Was there really no escape? Was Lucy being railroaded down the path to an eventual but gruesome demise? As these thoughts shrieked out in Lucy’s mind over and over, her eyes stung with flickering movement—no, flickering light.

  Her Ideal’s illumination flickered off and on, off and on, until finally, it went out entirely.

  “What?”

  It took all of Lucy’s willpower not to let her legs and arms go still from shock and force them to keep going. As she continued hearing the sound of her own footsteps barely audible over the engine roar and the drone of rotating razor-sharp metal, she wanted to slap herself silly.

  She had lost focus. That was why Concentrated Illumination had gone out.

  This frustration abated quickly, however, and was replaced with a chill of terror the likes of which Lucy had never known before. Running away from a thousand-kilogram death machine was terrifying, but running away from one in absolute pitch-black darkness was utter insanity. With no visual stimulus, Lucy was further assaulted by the unbearable sounds of machination thrashing through the air, which further fed her visualizations of being caught up to and becoming fresh blood painting the saw blades’ razor sharp spokes.

  Light up light up light up light up light up!

  She gripped her Ideal out in front of her with such force it hurt, her arm shaking both from the force of her sprinting strides and from the tremors of her desperation. She needed this to light to come back on, right now because if it didn’t, she was probably going to lose control of herself, stumble forward, topple onto her face, and then the machine would catch up and—

  No. She she shook her head. Visualizing those gory details was precisely why the light wasn’t coming on right now. All three times she had activated it thus far, her mind had been picturing that brilliance and that brilliance only. So even though every single one of her mental fibres latched onto the adrenaline and consternation of the present situation, she forced herself to relinquish it and allow her mind to fill with pure, brilliant white as she closed her eyes and concentrated.

  When she opened them again, that white from her mind did not disappear, instead shifting off to the space in front of her, emanating from her Ideal and lighting the grey path ahead of her.

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  She did it.

  Even with a gargantuan mechanized reaper of souls at her back, intending to bring her to an end in its unfeeling rampage, Lucy had found the inner fortitude to concentrate and find her light again. If that wasn’t the purest display of Understanding Lucy had seen thus far, she didn’t know what was.

  Thinking this, Lucy’s muscles relaxed, her footsteps becoming lighter and more effortless. She stared at her Ideal, marvelling at the perfect sheen of metal she could see through the white light, at the fine, sharp edges that, at one point, had seemed to her as if it could cleave the sky in two.

  She didn’t have Diana’s Feat that allowed her to decimate those armoued guards in a single swing of her sword—but so what? She was a Dream Knight with physical capabilities enhanced beyond human limitations; her unyielding endurance in the chase thus far was a testament to that. Even if Rebellion wasn’t Primary Axis, the alignment points she had put in this far should still grant her sword swing more destructive power than one would expect. If she could at least cut through the fixture holding up the saw blades and detach them from the machine, that would be enough to defang much of the danger she was feeling.

  Taking a deep breath in and out, Lucy sprinted forward a few more paces, lengthening the distance between her and the enemy, then spun around on her heel and faced the machine, gripping her Ideal with both hands as she shone the light right onto the relentlessly chugging mechanism. It was still as brutal and grotesque looking as she remembered, and the sharp gleam of the spinning saw blades certainly didn’t help in that regard. But still, she could now look at the machine not as an insurmountable force of nature, but as an opponent to stand up to, a denizen of the darkness to be slain by the light of Lucy and her Ideal.

  I can do this.

  But the moment Lucy said this to herself, the loud infernal rumbling stopped, and the incessant whirring ceased. There was a loud clang, like metal dropping from a high point onto another block of metal. And after that, silence.

  The machine had stopped.

  Lucy blinked a few times, making sure she wasn’t seeing things, that she hadn’t become completely mentally disconnected from reality after being warped by fear. She forced herself to look at her Ideal to prevent it from deactivating like the last time she had lost herself in shock. She shone the light all around the machine’s enormous figure, scanning for any signs of movement. Gears had stopped turning, belts along the wheels and other rotating parts were no longer conveying, and the crude facsimile of a “head” at the top seemed to have lost all sense of sentience, or whatever artifice of sentience it was meant to produce.

  Lucy exhaled loudly, letting her shoulder slump down even as she kept her Ideal and light pointed up. Somehow, some way, the chase was over. But, she told herself bluntly, she couldn’t let her guard down just yet. If she really wanted to be sure of her safety, she would have to dismantle the machine, at least its most crucial and most dangerous parts.

  And for the latter, there were two shining examples that she immediately set her sights on.

  Keeping her illumination pointed at the saw blades, which had gone completely stationary and thus lost their relentless vibe of wanton and unfeeling destruction, Lucy approached the two front-facing weapons and the rectangular enclosure supporting them. The enclosure’s metal looked well-built and sturdy, but she was sure that with enough force, she could break the enclosure off the machine or at least cut it off from the rest of the machine’s circuitry.

  Lucy gripped her Ideal with both hands again, mere steps away from her target, which she was confident about taking down—when the air was filled with a deafening clamor like the earth itself groaning in unbearable pain.

  Lucy struggled to maintain her footing as the floor shook with violent intensity. She shone her Ideal’s light all around the machine in quick, jerky movements, trying desperately to find out just what was going on. Through the clamour, the panic, and the incomplete fragments of the whole picture she could see from her light, Lucy gasped as she had to accept what was happening before her eyes.

  The machine was growing.

  It rose higher and higher above the ground, appearing to sport a second chassis and engine. Its “head” became larger to match, and extra layers of mechanical scaffolding made it both resemble a human head even more while also emphasizing its inhumanity. But worst of all was the saw blades: not only did the enclosure become attached to a new mehcanical arm that was raised high up into the air and well out of the reach of Lucy’s sword, but there were now three such arms, each sporting a pair of saw blades whirring even more ravenously than before.

  A thud and clank, both barely audible over the upgraded machine’s hideous but purposeful cacophony, rang out as Lucy sunk to her knees. There was no way for her to fight back before those blades ripped her to shreds. And if she wanted to go back on her initial decision, it was far too late now, as she was now so close to the machine she could count the individual spikes of the saw blades looming over her.

  Out of all the sudden occurrences and discoveries thrust upon Lucy since coming to this Dream, this next one did not surprise her:

  Her Ideal’s light went out.

  Another clang struggled to be heard as Lucy’s hand went limp and let her Ideal drop to the floor. She didn’t know if she wanted to scream, laugh, or cry—and what did it matter? No matter what she did, she wouldn’t even be able to hear herself over the endless roaring and whirring and rumbling that completely filled an otherwise perfectly quiet world. To the death contraption before her, Lucy was barely an insect to be squashed.

  Frustration welled in her grit teeth and burning cheeks, only to be eclipsed by a pounding, throbbing pain that reverberated through every vein and artery, as if pure ice had been poured into her bloodstream. Never, not even against the massive whirlpool in Cole’s Dream, nor the queen’s inhumanly cruel scowl in Kenneth’s Dream, had Lucy been so clearly forced to examine herself for what she was: small, vulnerable, and entirely ineffective to those who overpowered her. In this moment, collapsed on her knees in absolute darkness mere feet away from a killing machine she couldn’t see but knew was there—in this moment, her entire being knew fear and nothing else.

  Lucy’s tears gushed ceaselessly, her mouth hanging open as she let out incoherent sounds she could neither hear nor make conscious recognition of, but then, she brought her hands to her face reflexively as she was momentarily blinded.

  When her eyes readjusted, she found a dim yellow light coming from the “head” of the machine. Two circular lights, like eyes, and they illuminated a curved piece of metal underneath that looked like a smiling mouth.

  “Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.”