The next morning, we were awoken by a sound none of us were quite prepared for.

It wasn't birdsong, or wind through leaves, or even the faint hum of neon buzzing back to life in the ruins. No—what dragged us all into the waking world was Wallace's snoring.

To call it snoring was charitable. It was a wailing cacophony, a trumpet blast that rattled the fountain's cracked stone and made the traps V had laid shiver in protest. If I didn't know better, I'd have sworn a herd of elephants had migrated into the dream just to mock us.

"Well," I muttered, glaring daggers at the offending mountain of a man, "good morning… mostly everyone."

"Morning…" Sven groaned, rubbing at his eyes, hair sticking up in errant spikes. He looked like he'd been through a battle and lost, courtesy of Wallace's "night serenade."

Cordelia stretched, her flowers dimly glowing in the early haze. "Okay," she began, voice steady despite the rough awakening. "I think I know how we progress through this web of dreams."

I held up a hand, cutting her off before she could build her argument. "I believe I do too, but you probably won't like what I say."

That got everyone's attention. Fractal tilted her head, Ten crossed her arms impatiently, and V caught his returning sand-ball with a lazy flick.

"For those who haven't noticed," I continued, "we're not surrounded by my astral forest. Normally, if I sit in place for too long—meditation, sleep, anything that settles me—my forest bleeds into the environment. But here? Nothing. Not a sprig, not a branch." I tapped the cracked fountain beside me. "Conclusion?"

Cordelia exhaled through her nose, resigned. "We're in a dream ourselves."

Fractal perked up, nodding quickly. "I thought so! I've felt Dream-mana weaving through the air ever since we arrived. Like threads pulling taut. It's not subtle."

"That begs the question then," V muttered, tossing his sand sphere again and catching it without looking. His tone was flippant, but his eyes sharp. "How exactly do we escape a dream… when the dream belongs to a Dominus?"

"I don't think this is Morres's dream," I said, voice low. "Let's rewind what he told us: find the tower, slay the Viraloid, secure the ground. Pretty straightforward. Except it isn't." I looked at Cordelia. "Open your Gloss. Search Viraloid."

Her Gloss flickered to life, lines of text shifting like a living tome. She blinked, her lips tightening.

"Now," I continued, "rearrange the letters."

Her eyes widened. "Raldoiv…"

Sven froze, the color draining from his face. "No. No, that's—"

"Exactly." I nodded. "Raldoiv. A known Other. And what's Raldoiv's Arte?"

"Virus Manipulation," Cordelia whispered.

The group went quiet. The weight of the word hung in the air heavier than Wallace's snore ever could.

I drew in a slow breath. "We aren't in Morres's dream at all. We're in Raldoiv's. Which means Morres didn't send us here to purify infection—he sent us to cut Raldoiv out of the Tower of Dream entirely. Hired us as… mental hitmen."

Ten's chains rattled as she stomped her foot, sending a tremor through the ground. Her glare could have burned steel. "You know…" she hissed, "I am really starting to hate every single one of the people who trained you."

The shockwave was apparently enough to rattle Wallace awake. He bolted upright with a roar, throwing his shield up instinctively. A dome of solid barrier magic snapped into place around us. "WHO—WHAT! AMBUSH! UNDER ATTACK!" His mace was already in hand, eyes wild.

We all sat there, blinking at him.

"Enemies?" he demanded, chest heaving. "Where are the enemies?!"

Ten dragged a hand down her face. "Unbelievable…"

"Thank you for joining us, Mammoth," I said dryly, gesturing at his dome. "As your charge, I order you: when we get back to Demeterra's domain—or find a healer here—you're getting your respiratory tract checked."

Cordelia gave me an apologetic shrug. "I'd volunteer, but I only have so many diagnostic cubes. And frankly, body scanning isn't on the priority list when we're already inside an Other's dream."

Wallace looked from her to me, still bleary. "…So no enemies?"

"Only the ones in your nose," V muttered, flicking his sand-ball at Wallace's shoulder.

The barrier dome popped away with a shimmer, leaving the silence to return. But now, that silence was heavier. Because the truth sat with us like a boulder: we weren't hunting infection. We were trespassing in the mind of something far, far worse.

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Fractal tugged her hood tighter, biting her lip. "He doesn't look like something that goes down easy. Even with weaknesses. Are we sure Morres didn't just shove us in here to… I don't know… die quietly?"

"Possible," V admitted. "But Morres is too much of a perfectionist to gamble all his cards on disposal. If he wanted them dead, he'd have made it clean. This is… targeted."

"Targeted or not," Ten snapped, her voice sharp as her chains clinked together, "we're here. So we train. We refine. We make every edge sharp enough to cut infection when we meet it."

That seemed to seal the matter. No more debate. The Glosses winked closed, leaving us with the sick image of Raldoiv still etched in the back of our minds.

***

The courtyard where we had camped became a training ground. With no enemies rushing us, it felt like the first real reprieve since entering this fractured dreamscape. The city around us was silent—too silent—but the silence gave us space.

Wallace was the first to rise, rolling his shoulders. "Warm-up. If we're to face something that doesn't die, we must endure longer than it does." He dropped into push-ups, each repetition shaking the cracked stone beneath him. His sheer bulk made the exercise look like the earth was submitting beneath his will.

Sven, grumbling about wasted breath, still followed suit, but modified into lighter drills. He worked his arms, rotating wrists and fingers before drawing his firearm, spinning it, then re-holstering. Over and over, smooth as ritual. "Muscle memory. No time to think when claws are two inches from your throat."

Ten's version of training was less subtle. She stomped into squats, chains rattling, the ground splintering slightly beneath each motion. Every few repetitions she'd kick or swing her weighted ankles, carving gouges in the fountain edge. "If it gets close, I'll crush it. Don't care what it looks like. Everything breaks if you hit it hard enough."

Fallias had chosen finesse. She worked on manipulating her Gloss—swiping, distorting, layering words into sharper forms. Fragments of glowing text hung in the air before dissolving. "If Raldoiv is infection embodied, then precision is our edge. Cut through the noise, pierce the rot, before it spreads." Her voice was softer than Ten's but edged with determination.

Fractal, surprisingly, had joined her. She danced small arcs with her hands, weaving Dream-mana into temporary illusions: flickers of butterflies, faint replicas of our group, shimmers of moonlight. They lasted seconds before unraveling, but each left her panting. "I can distract. Split attention. Dreams are fragile if you know how to pull the seams."

Cordelia worked with patience. Flowers bloomed in her hands, silver-tinged petals glowing faintly before wilting into dust. Again and again, she coaxed the process, refining it to a finer glimmer each time. "This will be the only thing stopping his regeneration. If I falter, he doesn't stay down."

V, of course, leaned against the broken railing at first, tossing a sand sphere lazily. But then he scattered it across the courtyard, layering hidden traps in places we weren't watching. He moved with casual precision, eyes sharp. "You'll thank me when he steps where he shouldn't."

And me? I sat cross-legged at first, palms pressed to my knees, coaxing the astral paper to manifest. Sheets rose around me, folding, layering, shifting until they gleamed with mirrored brightness. Then, with a snap of my fingers, they flared with light. Weak, sputtering at first, but growing steadier the longer I focused. It wasn't sunlight. But it was enough to sting the eyes.

Hours passed. Sweat slicked brows. Muscles ached. The city remained deathly still, the only sound our breathing and the slap of effort against stone. Yet within that silence, we found rhythm.

Wallace lifted his shield, standing firmer. Sven's shots grew tighter, cleaner. Ten's strikes cracked the ground deeper, more precise. Fallias's glyphs sharpened into crystalline edges. Fractal's illusions lasted longer, their shimmer steadier. Cordelia's silver flowers gleamed brighter, more metallic. V's traps were invisible even to us now, only he knowing where they lay.

And my light—my paper sun—burned longer than before, a steady glare that cast shadows across their training.

When we finally collapsed back around the fountain, lungs heaving, the silence of the dreamscape felt less suffocating. Less mocking.

"We're readying ourselves for a monster that might not even bleed," Fractal said, wiping her forehead.

"No." Wallace shook his head, his deep voice steady, resolute. "We're readying ourselves for survival. Bleed or not, it falls."

"Okay." I let the breath out slow, forcing calm into my voice. "Lumivis. How am I doing?"

The silence that followed was deliberate, heavy with the weight of everyone else's eyes on me. Then, smoothly—like a teacher amused that the pupil had finally raised the right hand—Lumivis answered.

"I was beginning to wonder when you'd include me in the conversation, sire."

The temperature seemed to drop. Every pair of eyes locked on me in startled unison. Wallace froze mid-stretch, Cordelia blinked sharply as if shaking free from a spell, and even Ten's chains stilled against the stone.

"You… can bring Lumivis in here?" Fallias's voice was a thin ribbon of concern, stretched taut as a bowstring.

"Yeah?" I said it like it was obvious, though I knew it wasn't. My Arte let me pull threads from books, from words, from places that weren't supposed to be touched. If I could draw strength from texts written by the dead, why not from my own companion? Still, their reactions told me this was something more than unexpected—it was unnerving.

Fallias swallowed once, her eyes flicking upward toward the dream-sky as though expecting to see cracks appear. Then, very carefully, she asked, "Lumivis… what is the time dilation here?"

There was no hesitation. Lumivis's voice cut through the air, sharp and sure. "None."

The word carried weight—certainty rooted in a logic far deeper than any of us could access. It landed like a verdict.

"None?" Cordelia repeated, disbelief softening into worry. "So one night here is… one night out there?"

"Yes." Lumivis replied simply. "What you experience here runs parallel to the waking world. There is no lost time. No advantage. When you wake, the clock will not have cheated you."

Fractal frowned, her head tilting. "But that's not how dreams usually work. Dreams skip. They bend. You blink and hours vanish, or an eternity fits inside minutes."

"Precisely," Lumivis said, her tone tightening. "This is no ordinary dream. You are not sheltered within the mind of a Dominus, but trespassing in the contagion of another. The rules here have been bound and rewritten. Cause and consequence march in lockstep. Every second spent wandering Raldoiv's infestation is a second given to him."

That silenced the group more thoroughly than Wallace's snoring ever could. The implications were suffocating. There was no safety in thinking, it's just a dream. No illusion of waking to find this nightmare undone.

Ten broke the stillness first, her foot grinding against the cracked flagstone. "So if we bleed here…"

"We bleed there," Lumivis confirmed.

"And if we die here?" Sven asked quietly, his hand brushing the grip of his pistol.

Lumivis didn't soften the truth. "Then you die in truth. No waking. No return."

I straightened my back despite the knot tightening in my chest. "So we fight like it's real, just as we would have before." I said, steadying my voice. "Because it is."

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