“That…sounds…bad…?”

Unimpressed stare. “What is the symbol on your chest?”

Lucy looks down.

Where the pain had been centered, there’s a purple mark on her chest—concentric partial-circles connected by squiggly lines with points coming off of them like a thornbush had a baby with a serif font.

It looks familiar, but—

“I don’t know.” If it has some specific meaning, the dream hasn’t seen fit to share that context with her conscious mind.

“Hmph.” He sounds deeply skeptical. 

“Prelate, I believe the one thing we may be certain of is that this young woman was gravely injured by the demons.”

He raises an eyebrow. And? Leaving aside the question of whether they can in fact be sure of that—Terendelev certainly got a better look at that wound than he did; if she’s certain it’s demonic in origin then he has no grounds to gain say her—“injured by demons” isn’t exactly a set that excludes the demons themselves, let alone their patsies.

Yes, well. Prelate Hulrun certainly does important work for the city; nobody whose word holds water would deny that. Also, when left unrestrained, he burns children at the stake. “I believe that focusing too much of your attention on her may prove unduly straining.” To whatever other security measures you could be overseeing. If she is a demonic plot—which she probably isn’t—it could well be a distraction.

He scowls harder, but nods. “If you’ll excuse me.” And then he stalks off.

“…I apologize for him.”

“I am missing…so much context.”

“Whatever else may be said of your situation, it seems truly disorienting. Today is a festival; I’m afraid I don’t have time to answer all your questions, but I hope you find someone who can.”

“We’ll see how that goes, I guess. If I don’t, can I ask you questions at the temple tomorrow?”

“I imagine so.”

Okay. Okay.

This is still almost certainly a dream, but there are a lot of traits her dreams usually have that this one…doesn’t. Qualitative things; events blurring into one another, her eyes focusing weirdly, being able to make things happen by thinking about them…nothing that happens in every single dream, or anything, but if they were present she could feel more viscerally confident that this was a dream.

As it is, it feels like this is actually happening to her. Which doesn’t mean it is, but it makes it less appealing to find somewhere to sit down with her head beneath her knees and wait to wake up from the anesthesia, and more appealing to explore the dream world around her.

The festival does look appealing, but somehow she finds herself studying the mineral patterns of the stonework of a nearby building instead. It’s just…

The thing is, she actually cannot recall ever seeing such consistent detail in a dream before. The arrangement of tiny crystals in the stone isn’t interesting enough to have come from her imagination, but it is exactly the same every time she looks at it. It doesn’t have any emotional significance, but it remains itself, no matter how intently she examines it. She doesn’t find herself wandering off to look at other detailed bits of stonework, or having an epiphany that the chunk of rock in front of her is important in some way, or making it rearrange itself by glaring at it hard enough.

She doesn’t think heavy duty painkillers are supposed to give you more coherent dreams.

It’s, it’s just…

It’s not that she’s unwilling to entertain the idea that this is real. She’s read too many books with characters that either insisted that what they were experiencing wasn’t real right up until something happened that finally snapped them out of it, or refused to believe it at all and categorically failed to accomplish anything except making everyone around them look better by comparison. She doesn’t have the total failure of genre-savvy it would take to not even consider that this might be real.

It’s just.

Out of all the possible things that could be real, why Truck-kun? Why not Santa, or the Tooth Fairy, or Jesus, or an honest politician?

She has nothing against the fantasy world she seems to have landed in—it appears to have some kind of demon problem, but Earth has malarial mosquitoes and neo-nazis, so let he who is without sin cast the first stone—but she got here by getting hit by a truck, not walking into a wardrobe, and that’s frankly offensive.

She’s glaring hard enough at this random stone wall that it takes her a couple of moments to realize that there are a whole lot more bugs in the area than there had been previously. That’s sort of good in the sense that sudden bug increases are the kind of thing that happens in dreams more than in real life, and sort of bad in the sense that they are not especially something she wants to dream about.

She idly swats one.

+1 XP

Wait, what? She can get XP from random bugs?

"BEHOLD, CRUSADER GODS. BEHOLD, IOMEDAE, YOU POOR IMPOSTER.“

Ah. Non-random bugs. Okay, not great. 

The woman who healed Lucy earlier turns into a gigantic dragon and yells at Bug Guy to fuck off. Bug Guy promptly decapitates her.

Hey! No! Lucy had a mild personal attachment to her! Foul!

This is officially not a good dream. The best thing Lucy can do now is wake up. Wake up. Wake up. Be an obedient dream and either wake up or—

—or unhappen it.

“Load save.”

Are you sure you want to load your previous saved game? This action is irreversible.

“Yes!” People are dying, and not just the dragon healer lady!

And she’s back in the weird void, and ow her chest hurts again.

Okay, first things first, apparently saved games are one use only because hers disappeared, so she needs to create a new one. She can do that.

And then…

Hoo boy this is gonna suck…

“Screen close.”

Ow! Yep! Hurts as much as she remembered!

But this time she’s braced for it. She hurls herself off the stretcher as soon as she’s out of the Screen Void—ow, okay, that might have been a mistake—rolling a few feet—ow ow ow, pressure on chest wound, bad—and attempts to spring to her feet but only managed to sort of shakily stagger upwards.

She remembers what the Prelate said about her stretcher-bearers being suspicious, and turns—too fast, ough, she staggers and almost falls over—to look at them before they can run off.

It hadn’t struck her as especially noteworthy, before, that she saw names and levels floating above people’s heads, because that seemed like a reasonable thing to happen in a dream, especially one with a litrpg conceit.

But if she’s going to treat this as being maybe real, then they probably matter. She’s level one, right now, and Hulrun Shappok was level thirty-three, and Terendelev was level forty-nine.

The two guys holding the stretcher she just clumsily rolled off if are Foulrot and Tripegarter, both level fifteen, and the halfling—or “halfling”—who had been yelling that she needed help was Suture, level five.

Hm. Looks like Mr. Shappok was correct about those guys being sketchy. But not much of a challenge, probably, for cranky guy and the literal dragon?

Which would be more reassuring if it weren’t for the horrible bug guy who oneshotted Terendelev.

“Hey, are you sure you should be standing?” Suture asks. “You’re hurt pretty badly—”