Junior lurched upright in bed. His breath came fast, and a chill sweat clung to his skin. He wanted to take a few minutes to steady himself, but recording what happened was too important.
"Athena," he rasped. His throat was dry, the word little more than a croak. He forced down a swallow, then another, until he could manage the rest. "Begin dream log."
"Recording," the AI stated simply.
Junior took a deep, shaky breath.
"It was the beach again," he said as he exhaled slowly. "Same as before. I really need to come up with a name for it. Crimson Sands, maybe ... no, that sounds lame. Focus. Name's not important now. Just -"
His voice broke on the last word. He startled, sudden panic pressing against his ribs. "Achilles!"
A soft whine answered him. Then claws scuffed against the floorboards, and the warm weight of a muzzle pressed against his hand. Junior let out a shaky laugh, rubbing the dog's ears while Achilles licked the sweat from his palm.
"You're here ... you're really here. You were incredible..." His words tumbled out in fragments. Then he started to laugh.
"Do you wish to continue recording the log?" Athena asked, her voice cool and precise.
Junior reigned in his relieved, slightly hysterical laughter. He drew in a long breath, trying to gather himself.
"Erase that," he said. "Start over."
A pause, then the chime of confirmation.
"It started on the Crimson Sands," he said, his tone steadier. "Once again, I was alone against a tide of formless monsters…"
\ - / - \ - /
Junior's nightmare, The Crimson Sands
In the way of dreams, the nightmare starts not at the beginning, but in the middle. As if what should be impossible is normal, and has always been so.
Dream-Junior's stands on the blood-red sand, facing the ocean. The beach feels familiar; more so than can be explained, even though he has dreamed it only a handful of times. It's the familiarity of a place known well — like coming home.
He can see, another impossibility his dream self simply accepts. He's wielding a medium-length spear with a leaf-shaped blade. The spear is more … stable than the weapons of his first dreams. It still shifts occasionally into other forms, but usually shifts back to the spear soon enough.
Waking-Junior has started learning about different kinds of historical weaponry, a subject he's never been interested in before. Dream-Junior doesn't remember this, though. He holds the archaic spear (called a doru according to his studies) with unearned confidence and stares unblinkingly forward, like a sentinel on watch. Dream-Junior knows he must defend this beach with his life, though he doesn't know why; the knowledge of what lies behind him is only a vague feeling of 'something important'.
The monsters appear soon. Some walk up out of the ocean and step onto the beach. Others rise through the sand - not like the burrowing of an earthworm, but as if they were walking up through the ground itself. Still others simply appear from nowhere.
A part of Waking-Junior's awareness stirs, noting the anomalies. He begins to ask himself if this is truly real.
Meanwhile, the monsters charge recklessly forward, and Junior rushes to meet them. Their clash is like a thunderclap - literally. An actual thunderclap of sound booms through the air, which, while impressively dramatic, is another anomaly noted by an increasingly lucid Junior.
Junior fights, but now that he's more aware he tries to pay attention to what he is doing. He still doesn't know much about fighting. If anything, his performance is worse than when he was mindlessly dreaming. But he now remembers enough to know that Millie suggested the more real the dream - or rather, the more grounded in reality - the better the potential gains.
He continues to thrust and slash with more enthusiasm than skill. He doesn't know advanced moves like blocking or parrying, though he does occasionally try to dodge. The monsters land blows, strikes that should fill him with fear and pain … but don't. Glancing down, he notices a suit of crimson armour covering his body. He doesn't remember if he had it on at the start of the nightmare, but it feels right, as if it had always been there. Like his weapon, the armour shifts — sometimes leather, sometimes metal, sometimes something in between. Yet whatever its form, it never seems to lose its effectiveness. Junior notes its presence, but continues the battle.
At some point, he remembers enough to try something else new.
"Achilles!" he calls out as he fights. He looks around, but doesn't see anything other than the tide of monsters. "Achilles! Can you hear me? Come, boy!"
Junior continues to call, but nothing happens. He's not sure what he expects, but at least the effort helps him stay focused and lucid.
Time passes until another idea occurs to him. He doesn't know why exactly — maybe it's the influence of the dream, maybe it's simply a random impulse.
Junior purses his lips and lets loose with a loud, piercing whistle.
For a moment, nothing happens. Until suddenly … something does.
Junior shouldn't be able to hear the low, rumbling growl, but he does. It's only then that he realizes the monsters aren't making any noise themselves. Or perhaps they were before and have now fallen silent. Details and memories within the dream are still fleeting. While the monsters continue to attack, the growl grows in intensity without gaining in volume. The crimson sands, the air, even the ocean and clouds above seem to resonate to the same impossible frequency.
The all-encompassing sound then collapses into a single point nearby. A kaleidoscope of rainbow colours, in stark contrast to the pervasive redness, bursts into being. Before Junior can react, the colours coalesce into a large dog with golden fur so bright the individual hairs appear to shine with inner radiance.
The golden dog looks around in a brief moment of canine confusion. When his eyes land on Junior, he releases a familiar bark that Junior would know anywhere.
"...Achilles?" Junior asks. He's become lucid enough to realize that he's witnessing something far beyond even the usual oddness of a normal dream.
The radiant dog barks again, then launches into the horde and begins to lay waste to it.
If Junior ever thought his wild flailings were remotely effective at destroying the monsters, he is quickly enlightened to the error of his ways. Achilles fearlessly plows into the swarm like a canine wrecking ball. The dog attacks with the ferocity of sheer predatory instinct.
But it's more than that, Junior slowly realizes as he momentarily hangs back.
Where Junior only has a vague, inexperienced sense of how he should move and how opponents should react, Achilles isn't hindered by that limitation. The dog attacks the dream monsters as if they are real, and the monsters begin to change in response.
Until now, the monsters were ever-shifting and vaguely formless. But Junior now notes they've started to look alike. Since he never laid eyes on it in real life, he doesn't realize they now look more like the small, wrinkled humanoid that Achilles and Millie fought after it attacked him on Integration Day.
When Achilles lunges and tackles a monster, they both fall to the sand instead of passing through each other harmlessly. When Achilles bites and claws, Junior is shocked by the alarming fountains of blood which practically erupt from the monster's wounds.
Before Junior knows it, Achilles has killed every monster in view. Another oddity: before Achilles arrived, the monsters had simply kept appearing.
Surrounded by a mound of carcasses, the golden — and curiously not blood-drenched — Achilles barks loudly, as if to proclaim his victory.
"Good boy," Junior belatedly says after a long pause. The radiant dog's tail begins to wag happily.
But then the tail halts mid-sway. It freezes behind the dog like a horizontal flagpole while Achilles' head jerks towards the ocean. The dog growls as the waters begin to churn. Huge ripples spread across the waves as Junior moves to stand at Achilles' side.
They make for a valiant-looking pair: Junior in shifting crimson armour, doru grounded and ready; Achilles radiant in golden fur, haloed with shining light. A small part of Junior's mind notices that the mounds of corpses have vanished, leaving only the two of them posed on the crimson sands like conquering heroes.
The churning waves break as a massive form lurches up from the sea. More manlike than the smaller monsters, but still covered in wrinkled skin, the giant opens its mouth to speak as it towers above them.
"YOU ARE NOT MY -" the giant roars before being cut off.
As soon as the monster rose, Achilles leapt forward. Somehow, Junior isn't surprised to see that as Achilles soars impossibly far through the air, he also grows larger. By the time the mystical golden retriever reaches the monster, their difference in size is closer to that of a normal man to a regular dog.
The now-gigantic Achilles tackles the huge creature with a roaring growl. They tumble into the water, but do not sink. Instead, they splash around as if the ocean has become a shallow pond.
Junior watches helplessly, unsure of what to do. He glances at his doru, his leaf-bladed spear, and considers throwing it.
"What happens if I hit Achilles?" he wonders. "But wait — this is a dream. It's just a dream. I can just … not miss, right?"
Determined, Junior hefts the doru over his shoulder, pulls his arm back, then hurls it forward. He doesn't know that the doru isn't a weapon balanced for throwing. In the waking world, the man-length spear would be too heavy and ungainly to throw accurately. But in the dream, the normal rules are only suggestions.
The doru flies further and straighter than it has any right to. It somehow avoids Achilles' rolling form entirely — a more self-aware Junior might have noticed that this probably shouldn't have happened. Still, the doru flies true, and the blade sinks into the monster's throat.
A gurgling roar erupts from the monster as Achilles claws at it with renewed fury. A few more desperate moments of struggle, and the creature finally collapses.
Achilles stands above the defeated giant and lets out a triumphant howl. Dream-Junior doesn't think it strange at all when he tilts his own head back and joins in.
/ - \ - / - \
"After that, I think the nightmare became a normal dream," Junior said.
While he recounted the story for Athena to record, he'd moved out to the kitchen. He'd prepared a quick breakfast and set a bowl of canned food into Achilles' dish. The dog eagerly wolfed it down; Junior had given Achilles his favourite as a small reward.
"I'm still not exactly sure if the dream Achilles was really the real Achilles," Junior continued his narration. He paused, thought about the awkwardness of the last sentence, then shrugged and moved on when he couldn't think of a better one. "I felt him over, and physically, he's fine. I don't know if he took any wounds in the nightmare. Even if he did, I've been hit and clawed plenty in the dream, and I never take the injuries into waking life."
Another pause. Junior remembers the very first day of the System's Integration. He touches his shoulder where the thankfully shallow bite wound has been healing without issue.
"Well, except for once. But I'm not sure if that counts as a dream injury, since that monster was apparently real. I still have no idea how that happened, and neither does anyone else I've heard. Point is, I can't ask Achilles if he remembers entering my dream. But my gut tells me it was him. Or some part of him, at least. With all the craziness going on, I guess that's good enough for me."
Junior paused again, long enough to take the last bite of his cereal. When he finished, he said, "Athena, end dream log."
"Recording ended and saved," the AI assistant replied.
Junior cleaned up after himself and Achilles. He was still excited about the dream and couldn't stop thinking about it, so he called Millie.
"Hey Millie," he greeted her when the call connected. "Are you busy? Can I come by?"
"Hey Junior," her voice answered. "Sorry my dude, I'm not home right now. Something came up for work, but I'll be back later this evening. What's up? Any exciting dreams?"
Junior felt a flicker of disappointment, sharper than it should have been. He caught himself at once and scolded the thought away. Millie has her own life, he reminded himself.
"You could say that," he said, trying to keep the flash of irrational negativity out of his voice. He glanced at the blue screen he really shouldn't be able to see, the one he'd already gotten used to far too quickly. That in itself felt suspicious — like the System wanted him to accept it without question. He read what it showed him out loud. "Apeirosis 5.03%."
"What?!" Millie shouted into the phone. Junior grinned; that was exactly the reaction he'd wanted. "After one night? What in all that's holy happened?!"
"Do you want the short version or the long one?" Junior smirked teasingly.
"Long!" she replied immediately. "But I don't have time. Dammit. Give me the gist for now — I'll wring the rest out of you when I get back."
Junior laughed and dutifully explained how he had fought monsters and somehow called Achilles into the dream.
"Soulbonded!" Millie declared when he was done.
Junior sighed with mock petulance. "Fine, fine. You might be onto something."
"You've gotta post something on the bulletin board," Millie said, ignoring his antics. "Maybe Voidharrow will have some ideas?"
The username made Junior scowl; he hadn't communicated with voidharrow84 since his uncle revealed that handle was his. He almost said no, but realized he was being short-sighted. There were other Reclaimed on the bulletin board that he and Millie were still friendly with, and he hadn't told Millie about his uncle, anyway.
"Okay, I'll do that. Thanks," he said.
"No problem. I'll sneak some peeks when I can, then we can dig into it tonight. I can't wait!"
Junior chuckled again at Millie's reaction.
They didn't talk long — Millie really did have to go.
After the call ended, Achilles whimpered, and Junior heard him paw at the front door.
"Ready to go for a walk, boy?" Junior asked. The dog barked once. "Alright, let's get ready. I'll dictate the post to Athena after we come back."