Chapter 54: First Dream Experience

The moment Gima’s eyes snapped open, she was convinced they were broken.

The world had been bled of all color, leaving only a stark, blurry monochrome, like an ink wash painting left out in the rain.

With a yelp, she shot out of bed, her eyes instinctively scanning for George’s solid silhouette. It was a disturbingly new reflex: when in doubt, find the paladin.

Where he should have been, there was only a fuzzy, indistinct shape. Hovering above its head was a bright, cottony orb, like a speech bubble in a comic, glowing with a soft, alluring light that practically begged to be poked.

Gima squashed her curiosity. First things first. She pinched her thigh. Ouch. She yanked her tail. Double ouch. Satisfied, she began a verbal recap to ground herself in reality.

“I, the great and powerful Demon Lord, was nearly consumed by a nightmare during my advancement, only to be saved by the damn virgin, after which I proceeded to get embarrassingly horny for him. Luckily, the idiot’s too dense to have noticed. My body is in the middle of a growth spurt; my previous reaction was purely… physiological.”

She added a special, withering emphasis to “purely physiological.”

Okay, memories are intact. This isn’t a dream within a dream. So, I’m actually in the dreamscape?

A sliver of relief allowed her to approach the glowing cotton ball. As she got closer, it sharpened into a crystal-clear image: a first-person POV from the back of George’s ridiculously virile warhorse.

Dream-George was galloping across a wasteland, the sound of his horse’s hooves completely drowned out by the incessant bragging of another man, clearly Strong’s. Suddenly, the ground gave way, and a little girl in black and white stockings tumbled into the darkness.

Gima felt a phantom jolt of the dream’s panic, watching as George carved a bloody path through the gloom, searching for her.

It’s just a highlight reel of his day. Of course the damn virgin’s dreams are as painfully righteous and boring as he is. 

Still, it was certain that she had arrived in the dreamscape.

With that settled, Gima turned her attention to more pressing matters. As fascinating as this new plane was, power came first. She pulled up her status screen.

“Advancement Requirements: Unknown. Please explore on your own.”

Utterly useless.

Her gaze drifted back to George’s dream, a wicked glint entering her eyes.

A ‘Nightmare’ should, by definition, give people nightmares. To level up, I probably need to spread terror and warp dreams. And this damn virgin is the perfect test subject. Or… I could skip the terror and go straight for a lewd dream. A dream where he ravages me.

Making a paladin have a wet dream about his succubus slave!

The idea was so depraved it was brilliant. She could harvest a five-star meal of lust and give him a crippling guilt complex. It was a win-win.

Eager to get started, she reached out and touched the dream. It felt warm, like bathwater.

The dream was at its climax. George was standing before the succubus girl, muttering some heroic nonsense. Gima felt an intuitive, god-like power to bend this little world to her will. With a single thought, the dream-Gima’s filthy rags flickered and became a pristine white dress.

Amazing! Okay, now for a school swimsuit. Black and white thigh-highs. And let’s make that ass a little… perkier. Alright George, for the love of the abyss, pounce on her already!

A thrill shot through her as she poured more power into the fantasy.

Suddenly, the dream flared with a searing heat, forcing her to snatch her hands back with a yelp. She watched in utter frustration as the dream-Gima’s sexy new outfit dissolved back into grimy rags.

Damn it! He’s completely immune! Harder than a rock and twice as dense.

She sighed, her tail swishing in disappointment. As it moved, she felt her hair stir, as if tickled by a phantom breeze.

Someone’s here?!

She launched herself into the air, spinning to face George’s sleeping form. Nothing.

Frowning, she focused. A thought, and her hair moved again. She reached back, and her fingers met the leathery surface of a wing—a wing that was significantly larger than she remembered.

“Oh, right. I have wings.”

She unfurled them, and they just kept going, expanding until the room felt like a shoebox. She held out an arm; it didn’t even cover half the length of one wing.

She gave a tentative flap. Instead of the hurricane she expected, she simply floated upward toward the ceiling. With a squeak of alarm, she covered her head, an instinctive counter-flap saving her from a nasty bump. Like a fledgling bird taking its first flight, her wings found their rhythm, holding her effortlessly buoyant.

I don’t know if I’ve just grown or if this is a dreamscape perk, but this is as easy as jogging. I can finally fly!

She tucked in her wings, took a running start, and launched herself out the open window.

The monochrome city of waterways spread out below. With a joyful beat of her wings, she leaped from the windowsill, paused for a moment to stare down at the street, a jolt of old trauma making her stomach lurch, then squashed the fear and pushed off. The inn shrank away as she soared into the sky.

The Dreamscape city of Salem remained quiet and peaceful. Outlined in black and white, it was as blurry as if shrouded in mist. Among the buildings were countless faintly glowing dreams, like a field of cotton waiting to be harvested.

Gima executed three and a half perfect aerial turns and a flawless Cobra maneuver for good measure. Her acrophobia was a distant memory.

Ha! Take that, gravity! You suck!

She circled, pretending she was a F-22 fighter jet patrolling her airspace. Any who dared defy her would face her wrath—

“Pew pew! KABOOM!”

She made finger guns at an imaginary rebel stronghold, complete with sound effects. The enemy was vaporized. The survivors surrendered unconditionally.

If it weren’t for the encroaching fatigue and the nagging duty to figure out this whole “leveling up” thing, she could have played Top Gun all night. She landed on the city’s clock tower, perching on a windowsill and letting her legs dangle.

As her breathing returned to normal, the exhilaration faded, replaced by the cringey realization that she, a being of three lifetimes, had just been acting like a hyperactive child.

“It’s this body,” she rationalized. “It’s young, probably junior-high-aged. A little bit of chuuni is perfectly normal.”

Having successfully blamed her immaturity on puberty, she surveyed the field of dreams below. Analysis paralysis kicked in. She decided to start with someone she knew; it would be easier to get feedback.

A certain bald alchemist came to mind. The urge to further “enlighten” the man she’d already set on his path to sagehood was strong. But, alas, she had no idea where he lived.

The celestial warhorse? Payback for being a snitch. But no, he was just a stud. His dreams would be a boring, one-track loop of fornication, and getting useful feedback from a horse was a long shot.

Which meant, the inn’s servant had just won the human-experimentation lottery.

Last time, George had defended her from that lecherous guard, and the servants had been salty about it. After she snapped back at them, they'd probably been plotting some petty revenge behind their backs, like adding a ‘special ingredient’ to their food. Also, she just got up in the middle of the night to get something to eat. Even though George most likely overpaid, it wouldn’t stop them from retaliating.

Fear, she believed, was a far better management tool than kindness. The best way to keep people in line wasn’t to bribe them, but to find the biggest loudmouth and make a terrifying example of him.

She flew back to the inn and phased through the door of the ground-floor dormitory. Inside, four sleeping figures, four floating dream-orbs.

A pale green orb immediately caught her eye. Wrath. This dream was practically simmering with it.

Gima leaned closer. The dream sharpened into focus.

She saw a grotesque caricature of George, his face fleshy and brutish, yelling, “You put something disgusting in this soup!”

A flashback: the dreamer spitting a thick glob of phlegm into a soup bowl. Just a little spit, what’s the big deal? He thought.

“No, I didn’t!”

“Liar!” Dream-George roared, his voice comically distorted, obviously by the dreamer.

The dream concluded with George giving the servant a silver coin, telling him to get a new soup, paying for the meal again, and warning him not to do it again. This, apparently, was the ultimate insult. The pale green of the dream intensified with righteous indignation.

So that’s why my food took forever. I was starving.

Gima touched the dream. To warp it, she had to become part of it. She plunged in.

It felt like diving into a thick fog, which then parted by a clear wind to reveal the inn’s common room. The setting was familiar, but the scene was… not. A pathetic, sniveling George was kneeling before the servant, banging his head on the floor and screaming like a clown in a play, “I was wrong! Please spare me!”

The servant was kicking him. With each kick, George would roll across the floor like a sad, armored log.

Clinging to the servant’s leg was a girl with a hat who looked exactly like Gima, an angel dressed in a white gown. “Big brother,” she cooed, “let’s go to bed and play.”

A wave of pure, unadulterated revulsion washed over Gima. Dreams were weird, affected by subjective will, she got it, but this was just foul.

Time to test her new toys. It seemed like she had more control than she had expected. With a thought, she willed the dream to reveal the servant’s greatest fear.

The inn dissolved. They were in a damp, dark temple. A child-version of the servant was staring up at a massive statue of a trident-wielding sea goddess, Umberlee. As a priest chanted, the statue came to life, showing a great tsunami destroying a village, the goddess herself riding the crest of the wave, her trident crackling with lightning. The boy was on the floor, trembling.

Gima smiled. With a wave, the dream was the inn again. With another thought, a trident of pure lightning materialized in her hand. She then reached into her memories of disaster movies and conjured a truly epic, city-destroying tsunami outside the window.

The sky turned black. The servant finally noticed her. “Who… who are you?”

“I am the messenger of the Sea Goddess,” Gima boomed, having swapped her form for that of a bald, ridiculously muscular man. “And I have come for you.”

The servant’s legs turned to jelly. He collapsed, unable to speak.

“What were you planning to do to the guest named George?”

“Revenge!” he blurted out, all bravado gone. “I was going to put laxatives in his horse’s feed! And spread rumors that his little attendant is a whore!” In a dream, secrets were hard to keep.

“I have come with a warning.” Gima raised the trident, and a bolt of lightning split the sky. “You will obey me.”

“I will! I swear I will!”

“Good…”