The sound wasn't from the trees.
It wasn't an Echo.
It was closer.
Mikail's eyes darted to Moona, to lisa, both of them heard it too.
They shifted, subtly, unconsciously.
Readying.
Not relaxing.
lisa raised her weapon again, slow and steady. Moona's wand flickered, then glowed faintly, an ergency glyph coiling at her fingertips.
"...What was that?" Moona asked, whisper-light.
The answer ca with a second crack, louder. A sound layered with grinding stone, warping air, and sothing deeper.
Like a laugh being swallowed.
Mikail stepped forward. Just once.
Then the System flickered.
A screen, not blue and calm, but blood-red and jagged, as though clawed violently into the fabric of reality, erupted before them in a sudden flash.
It pulsed with a sinister glow, flickering erratically like a heartbeat on the edge of panic.
The edges hissed with static as if the very air rebelled against its presence.
[DANGER!!]
The word throbbed across the screen in sharp, crimson strokes, dripping with urgency.
[QUEST INITIATED: RUN FROM THE NIGHTMARE!]
A cold wind swept through the field, unnatural and reeking of sothing ancient and wrong.
Shadows twitched as if sothing massive had just opened its eyes in the dark.
Then...
The ground beneath them shuddered.
Not violently. Not like an earthquake.
But like sothing vast and alive had shifted far below the earth... Stretching.
lisa's knuckles whitened around her weapon.
"It's here," she muttered. "It's already here"
Moona stepped back instinctively, her ergency glyph now burning a pale blue in her hand.
"No... No, that's not a shadow. That's-"
The grass bent.
Not from the wind, but from pressure.
From the weight of an unseen gaze.
Then.
Sothing moved.
From the tree line. Fast. Wrong.
Too many limbs. Not enough rhythm. A blur of disjointed motion that the eye refused to follow.
It didn't run. It skipped. Jolted. Flickered between points in space like it was broken... Or pretending to be.
The System scread again.
[WARNING: THE NIGHTMARE IS AWAKE]
[OBJECTIVE UPDATED: KEEP MOVING. DO NOT LOOK BACK]
Mikail felt sothing in his bones snap to attention. A primal instinct. A mory is written in the blood of hunted things.
He grabbed Moona and shouted. "RUN!"
lisa didn't need telling. She was already moving, boots pounding the ground, eyes forward, jaw clenched.
Behind them, the forest warped.
Branches reached when they shouldn't. And the thing that chased them let out a sound that didn't belong in a world with air and sky.
It was a sound without shape.
A thought of a scream.
An unspoken nightmare.
And it was gaining.
They ran.
Through tall grass and dying light, through the field where even the wind dared not howl. The ground twisted under their feet, the very world skewing like a dream turning sour.
Because it was a dream, soone else's.
Sothing else's.
Sothing native to the dark.
Nightmares.
The true children of the Shadow Realm. Born of fear, not imagined, but rembered.
Ancient mories were etched in the void before stories were told.
They weren't supposed to be here.
The Zero Zone, that strange, fractured place between dinsions was ant to be a buffer.
A neutral ground. Dead, silent. Unclaid.
But sothing had changed.
Sothing had opened a door.
lisa gasped, "Why is a Nightmare here? They're not allowed past the Shroud!"
Behind them, the creature was no longer flickering. It had found a rhythm. Found form.
A mass of limbs and teeth and smoke, stitched together by hatred. No eyes. Just a single vertical slit across where its face should be... Weeping darkness.
The System pulsed again.
[DEVIATION DETECTED]
[NIGHTMARE TYPE: "DREAM-EATER"]
[WARNING: SHADOW REALM BREACH - UNAUTHORIZED ENTITY]
[REWARD INCREASED FOR SURVIVAL]
"Unauthorized?" Mikail growled under his breath. "Then soone brought it here..."
And that made it worse.
Because Nightmares didn't wander.
They didn't get lost.
They hunted with purpose.
This one wasn't wild.
It had been sent.
--------
They ran.
And kept running.
But The Nightmare-
The Nightmare was like a fish in a vast sea.
And they?
They were drowning.
It moved through the world with ease, like gravity bowed in its presence, like distance was optional.
Mikail felt it.
Not just behind them, around them.
Like the thing wasn't following.
It was choosing.
Hunting with intelligence. With mory.
With every step they took, the terrain twisted a little more. The trees bled shadow. The wind started whispering nas they didn't recognize, but their bones did.
Moona stumbled. Mikail caught her, barely.
lisa shouted, "The Zero Zone will close when the Sun rises, Hang on unti-"
lisa couldn't finish her sentence because the Nightmare-
The Nightmare had caught up with them.
A blur. A pulse. A shudder through the world.
Then silence.
Not the peaceful kind.
The kind that follows the snap of a trap closing.
Mikail turned, he didn't an to. His instincts scread not to look, but sothing deeper, sothing older inside him, had to know.
His eyes locked with the impossible.
The Dream-Eater stood still now, no longer flickering, no longer broken. It watched with that single, yawning slit of darkness where a face should be. Not looking at him but into him. Through him. It peeled back thoughts, mories, and fear, devouring them with a presence more intimate than touch.
A na rose unbidden in Mikail's mind. A word he'd never learned, but like he had always known.
"G#ar'v###th"
The air cracked like frozen glass.
lisa's scream tore through the silence. Not of pain, but fury. Defiance.
She turned, weapon raised, its surface now etched with burning runes that flared to life. As the glow dimd, the weapon in her hand was no longer a gun, but a blade, sleek and deadly, humming with residual heat.
lisa didn't hesitate. Her transford blade thrumd with fury as she leaped forward.
She didn't scream again.
This ti, her defiance was silent. Pure.
She struck.
Steel t nightmare.
The air shattered.
The Nightmare's form twisted in ways that defied comprehension as lisa's blade collided with it. The sound of tal eting darkness was like a thousand whispers screaming at once, blending into a symphony of dissonance.
Her strike didn't sever anything. Instead, the blade passed through the mass of limbs and teeth, leaving no mark, no sign of damage, as if the Nightmare was no more substantial than the smoke that clung to its form.
lisa's weapon, however, wasn't done. It pulsed with an intensity that had nothing to do with the weapon itself.
Her arms trembled with the force of it, as though she was channeling sothing much greater than just her own strength.
And then, the Nightmare recoiled, its body contorting unnaturally, as though it was feeling the pain of sothing unseen, sothing beyond the physical.
It let out a sound, sothing incomprehensible, a gurgle from the void, and suddenly, it was upon her. No longer flickering, no longer uncertain in its movents. Its claws, long and jagged, shot out like tendrils of darkness.
Mikail's heart pounded as he leaped forward, dragging Moona with him. "Move!" he shouted, pushing her toward a cluster of trees, but the Nightmare was everywhere. It was in the air. It was on the ground.
The world was no longer just around them, it had beco an extension of the nightmare. Every step they took was like dragging their feet through a field of nightmares, each movent pulling them deeper into the maw of what they couldn't see and what they couldn't fight.
But lisa, she fought.
Her blade, which had once glead with the promise of power, now shimred with desperation. She spun and danced, narrowly avoiding the nightmare's grasp, her body moving like a blur. Every strike, every swing, seed futile, but the sheer force of her spirit, her defiance made the creature hesitate.
But that wasn't enough to stop The Nightmare and lisa couldn't avoid it forever.
Then that happens.
lisa got hit.
Not slashed. Not torn.
The Nightmare's tendrils moved like inevitability, not fast, not slow, just true. One of them struck her square in the chest, and the sound it made wasn't flesh being broken.
It was reality.
A crunch, a ripple, like sothing had bent in the wrong direction.
lisa's body arced backward mid-air, her blade slipped from her fingers, still glowing, still screaming silently.
She hit the ground hard, skidding through dirt and shadow-warped grass.
"lisa!" Mikail's voice cracked, raw with fear he didn't have ti to process.
lisa fell.
The earth shuddered under her weight, not from the impact of her body, but from the rupture in reality her fall signified.
Her mana was gone, drained, burned out, The glow in her weapon had died mid-air, clattering lifelessly to the ground.
The Nightmare turned.
Its focus slid like a beam of dread across the field, and for a mont, ti slowed, not in a heroic way, but in the way nightmares stretch monts of terror to last forever.
It looked at Moona.
Not with eyes. Not with understanding.
But with hunger.
And Mikail...
He stood between them.
....
...
..
.
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