Chapter 67: Mad Man
An induced, lucid dream was not freedom but intrusion. It was when sleep no longer belonged to them, when the walls of their mind were prised open and a foreign hand painted across them.
They might believe they were in control — aware and awake within the dream — but every route they walked and everything they met had been placed there deliberately, like pieces on a board.
They could taste fire, recall wounds that had never happened, even hear confessions they had never given, all while convinced those memories had risen from their own minds.
The danger lay in the thin line between awareness and manipulation.
To wake from such a dream was to wonder which thoughts were truly theirs and which had been planted to take root long after.
So, to sum it all up, the island was not a shifting mass. Their minds were being tampered with, and while they thought themselves ahead of the zealots, they had been under their thumb the whole time.
Kyle only realised this after a long while, and it had all begun with the red flare, which was meant explicitly for them. For the two boys who were already asleep, it was easier to trap them in that sleep and give them a fabricated reality.
Inducing the two girls into the lucid dream had been harder. It would have been far more difficult if the ritual had also robbed them of the memory of falling asleep.
It was remarkable that Adela had actually fallen asleep within a dream; it had felt uncannily real.
Once they recognised the dream world, the dark fog over their minds shattered. Everything in the constructed world collapsed into blackness, and their dream avatars fell into a vast, empty space.
***
"No, no. Hahaha. Wait, imagine this: you’re a flying fish that can only swim in the snow. Isn’t that funny?" A male voice rambled at a beast sitting patiently with a flat stare, while he scratched nonsense into the wall with the sharp end of a stick.
The pitiful creature had been tamed by the worst possible master.
Through the beast’s eyes, though it could neither speak nor feel as a human would, there was still that weary, resigned look, as if it had given up entirely.
"Bah. You’re so boring. Even a stone would do a better job than you."
It was a Pallid Caraphract, Stage Two, Dire-ranked, standing six feet tall. Its body was sheathed in a bone-white carapace that caught the light pouring from a wide hole in the cave’s ceiling, gleaming like ivory plate. Two furred tails trailed behind it, each tipped with a sharp spike. Tufts of pale fur showed at the joints where the armour gave way.
Its head was smooth, encased in the same pale shell, with two cat-like eyes set within.
The creature could easily have been a boss in a Green Zone, for it was the same rank as the one Kyle had slain.
The four of them opened their eyes at the same time, a dull haze clouding their vision. The first sensation was the chill of the ground beneath them. The next was the sound of a man muttering in madness, followed by the scrape of something sharp against stone.
’Huh? Is this the zealots’ dungeon...’
That was Kyle’s first clear thought as he tilted his head towards the sound without rising. When his eyes shifted to what sat beside the madman, he froze, not from fear but in calculation.
’...Do they want to feed us to the creature?’
The beast looked tamed, bound to the stranger clad in rags. The man resembled a cave-dweller, distinguished only by his hairless body and his lank frame.
Perhaps he ought to have devoured the mutated creature rather than tame it, for he looked like a man in desperate need of sustenance. Undeniably so.
The only thing preserving his skin, Kyle thought, might have been his life as a hunter; malnutrition did not manifest quite so starkly on him.
That was markedly different in Kyle’s own case, for his condition was far past remedy, and not even the ascension to a higher rank could conceal the toll.
...In truth, it was little short of narrative contrivance that he remained alive at all.
Aware of this, Kyle dismissed the man’s frailty, concluding his own was worse.
But that was not the pressing concern. The question was where they had been brought.
Na-Ri was the first to lift her upper body, sweeping her hair aside before casting a glance at the man, who only then appeared to register that they had awoken.
"Who the fuck is the second walking corpse?" the beautiful stranger muttered flatly as the unknown figure instantly broke into a smile and began walking towards them.
Hearing her words, Kyle could only grimace, well aware she was referring to him as the first walking corpse she had encountered.
It was a peculiar situation for him... because this walking corpse had saved her life.
And, in one sense, she had cleaned herself up before that moment whilst he had not, having quite literally just crawled out of a hole, bloodied and ragged.
In short, she had been rescued by a filthy corpse.
How was that fair, exactly?
"Look, Scabby, our guests... no, perhaps victims... wait, the former? We did bring them here, after all, so perhaps ’guests’ is the appropriate word, yes?" the unknown man muttered to himself with visible frustration before abruptly shaking the nonsense from his head.
He then extended one hand towards Adela and another towards Na-Ri, leaving the two boys momentarily frozen in disbelief.
’Definitely not,’ Kyle thought, dismissing the word ’guests’ at once.
This bastard, who might very well be a zealot and was clearly acting unhinged, had dragged them here — hardly the work of a host.
His hands searched the ground discreetly while he kept an eye on the Pallid Caraphract, and Orion fixed his own on the crazed man with a hard glare.
The creature’s tails suddenly lifted in a motion to strike, and Kyle’s fingers closed unconsciously around a small stone.
’What? You want to be the first to see where beasts go after death, pussy cat?’
Before any of them could think twice, the instinct to strike was already in the air.
They were prey in the eyes of others, and when hunted, every stranger became an enemy; the need to be ready for battle could never be set aside.
Na-Ri’s blade appeared out of thin air, and she stretched it towards the madman’s throat while still seated on the ground. Her eyes carried a sharp killing intent.
"And who might you be?" she asked coldly.
The man raised a hand to still the creature, then turned his gaze to Adela, who glared back with interrogative fury.
His grin widened further, and he lifted a finger to point at Kyle.
"His long-lost elder brother!"
"Wait, what!?"