Emails. Meetings. Deadlines that felt recycled.
Everyone spoke like background noise, and I played my part — nodding, replying, typing.
Except sometimes, my fingers typed words I didn’t remember thinking.
Once, instead of Report ready, I wrote Phantasm neutralized.
I deleted it before anyone saw. I hoped.
The days blurred — gray melting into gray.
But nights? Nights were alive.
[SYSTEM LOGIN // DREAMER AMAYA]
Sync Progress: 18%
Directive: Combat Calibration — Session 1 of 5
The white plain unfolded, faint circuits glowing beneath my feet like veins under skin.
Air: cool. Hum: steady. Pulse: not wholly mine.
Something moved.
Not a person.
An insect — enormous, translucent, wings vibrating like glass wire.
Fear Index = 78%
The system knew.
I lifted the light-katana — lighter now, obedient.
The first strike missed. The second didn’t.
The body broke into rain-scented motes that drifted up like sighs.
[Session 1 Complete — Reward: +50 Coins | Sync +4%]
The next calibration arrived without countdown.
A cluster of voices descended — hundreds, overlapping, too many mouths for one sky.
I swung at noise and carved only silence.
“Useless.”
“Too late.”
“You wanted this.”
The blade flickered — not from damage, from me.
I stopped swinging. I listened until the words ran out of oxygen.
They folded inward and vanished.
[Session 2 Complete — Reward: +70 Coins | Sync +6%]
By morning, my reflection looked corrected.
No shadows under my eyes.
Heart slow as a metronome.
“You’ve been killing your tasks lately,” my manager said, smiling.
I smiled back. I couldn’t name a single task.
That night: Session 3.
A figure of light mirrored me with a one-second delay.
My swing, its swing.
My breath, its breath.
To win, I had to move before I believed I could.
The copy overshot, cracked, fell away in tinkling shards.
For a heartbeat, it felt divine — the clean geometry of a perfect strike.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
And then a voice surfaced in my memory:
You always loved slicing others, didn’t you? Murderer.
The whisper had no source. The euphoria iced over.
I didn’t have time to sink into the thought.
I was still here — performing, feeling alive for once.
[Session 3 Complete — Reward: +60 Coins | Sync +5%]
The sky tore.
Static bled through like snow in a dead channel.
........................................................................................................................................................................................................................
A ping buzzed again in the Lattice system:
FEAR SOURCE NOT FOUND
FALLBACK PROTOCOL: OBSERVE SUBJECT RESPONSE
........................................................................................................................................................................................................................
The ground lost its edges.
For a second, I wasn’t sure where my body ended.
Then the hum resumed — like a hand smoothing a wrinkle from a sheet.
The world snapped back into place.
And I was still standing.
Session 4 loaded wrong.
The walls collapsed inward, shrinking as if the world could consume me any second.
My katana was useless.
I thought hard for survival — the only thing that came to mind:
Use your dreams.
And so I did.
I imagined the walls shattering, the pixels fragmenting —
and they did.
And so I won.
And so I felt the adrenaline again.
[Session 4 Complete — Reward: +20 Coins | Sync +2%]
Days turned into calibrations.
Reality thinned.
Sometimes I blinked and saw the interface faintly overlay the office —
numbers hovering over faces,
progress bars sliding across screens that weren’t there.
I wasn’t allowed into the world by sleeping anymore.
The calibrations came at random times, spread across days.
The final one arrived as a 3 a.m. text: Ready?
When the dream opened, it wasn’t a void.
There was a sky. A horizon. A heartbeat hiding in the clouds.
At the center, a sphere of radiance — trembling like a living thing.
[Ascension Trial — Begin]
I walked.
The light answered with memory — kindergarten shame, teenage cruelty, the color of blood on winter asphalt.
Each flash hit like gravity. It hurt more than just a nerve.
It felt familiar — and disgust bloomed.
A feeling I didn’t fight. I endured.
Step by step, I crossed the scenes.
I passed the routes until it was all white again —
the walls now holding more meaning than my reality.
“Synchronization achieved,” a voice said — not loud, just true.
The world didn’t fade this time.
It folded — like a hand closing over a coin.
[Training Sequence Complete]
[Dreamer Amaya — Ascension Level 2 Achieved]
[Reward: +200 Coins]
[Balance Updated]
I woke before sunrise.
The city looked washed clean — like someone had pressed refresh on the air.
On the windowsill lay a crushed moth — pale, dusting the sill with ash.
I hadn’t opened that window in months.
My phone lit on its own.
A draft message sat open, unsent, the cursor patiently blinking:
Keep climbing.
I didn’t remember typing it.
But the text felt warm — as if my hands had just left.
Outside, the first train moved through the morning like a seam being sewn.
Above the buildings, I saw them for the first time —
threads of light running sky to sky, crossing and recrossing like luminous veins.
Not stars.
Not planes.
Something building a lattice out of the air.
I think the dream is corroding into the spaces I see.
I watched until the lines dimmed with the sun.
Maybe my reality now feels more like a dream
than the dream I live in.