Two hours later.
The world had quieted.
Gone were the screams, the stink of smoke and the sharp rattle of claws tearing against steel. Even the iron taste of blood in his mouth was replaced with antiseptic air and the low hum of medical machinery.
Jaune sat propped up on the edge of a bed in LUCID's medical wing, under beacon. His hospital gown was loose around his shoulders and his back and chest were wrapped in bandages where talons had raked across him. Both arms were secured in thick white wrappings, the skin underneath freshly scarred and ugly.
The LUCID medical staff had saved them.
It still amazed him.
The Amalgamation had bitten through to the bone, mangling and severing both of his arms . Yet here he was, fingers twitching weakly as though almost nothing had happened.
His nerves however, told a different story. They hurt when he moved, and ugly red scars ran like jagged lightning bolts up from his elbows, but his arms were still his. He flexed them, trembling at how sluggish they felt. He hadn't bled out because Weiss—half-dead herself—had frozen the wounds before he collapsed. Then the medics had finished the job.
The standard healing rune, once activated, flared with runic energy and could knit together flesh that would otherwise be beyond repair. But the healing runes weren't absolute miracle workers. The Amalgamation's bite had been too brutal; too much tissue had been mangled. His arms could be reattached and, stabilized, but the deep gouges and the trauma embedded in the muscle would take more than one rune healing cycle to erase.
It left him with scars—raw, angry grooves that pulsed like living reminders of how close he'd come to dying. The medics told him that with enough healing runes and maybe a day or two of steady application, he'd look relatively normal again. Until then, he'd carry the proof.
The scars would remain, however. A reminder of how close he'd come to dying. And most importantly, a reminder of his weakness.
Jaune exhaled shakily and leaned back. The ceiling light buzzed faintly overhead.
To his right, Weiss Schnee lay on her own bed. Propped on pillows, her face was pale but calm, her silver hair fanned across the sheets. Weiss wasn't asleep—her eyes were open, fixed on the ceiling with a strange blankness, as though she was somewhere far away.
They hadn't spoken since they were wheeled in.
And they weren't alone.
Rows of other beds lined the medical wing. Most were filled. Students he recognized—operatives from higher ranks, older years—sat or slept with injuries of their own. Bandaged ribs, arms in casts, heads wrapped in gauze. The smell of antiseptic was thick, but beneath it lingered something else: smoke, scorched cloth, the faint tang of blood.
Jaune swallowed hard. This wasn't just about their fight in the restaurant. Something bigger had happened.
He glanced at the clock. Two hours since the Amalgamation dissolved. Two hours since Weiss collapsed vomiting blood, and Jaune collapsed with half his body screaming in agony. Two hours since LUCID personnel stormed the building.
He remembered it clearly.
The cleanup.
The restaurant had been sealed within minutes. Armed personnel poured in—LUCID Response Unit, clad in matte-black combat gear. Their visors flickered faint blue, lenses scanning for any grimm left.
The flesh walls posed no threat to them. Since the flesh walls were connected to the Amalgamation mutant, they had disintegrated when the creature died.
It made it easier for LUCID personnel, at least.
They performed under standard procedure, Jaune recalled from his readings.
First, containment. A perimeter was thrown up around the block, disguised as a police cordon. Civilian witnesses and victims were immediately herded into holding areas, stunned and confused.
Second, erasure. Then, the memory-alteration runes came out. A rank 2 operative was charged with using small obsidian slates which were imbued with the rune. They made memories of fangs and shadow, of shrieking monsters and collapsing walls, a distant dream. In their place: fire, gunshots, confusion. A terrorist attack. That was the story LUCID always fed the public.
Third, extraction. Survivors were shuttled out under armed escort. Any bodies—those who hadn't made it—were tagged, bagged, and quietly disappeared. No coroner would ever see them and no news report would ever admit their deaths came at the claws of creatures that weren't supposed to exist.
The LUCID operatives worked fast, practiced, like they'd done this dozens of times. By dawn, not a trace of the Amalgamation would remain.
And in the middle of it all, Weiss had been the one who called it in.
She'd triggered her communicator that had been installed on her phone the moment things spiraled. HQ had heard her panic, her clipped report of a possible Rank 1 breach, and they'd moved. Without that, Jaune realized, the restaurant might've been swallowed entirely before anyone came.
Now, the results filled the medical wing.
However, it wasn't just their battle.
Word was trickling in from hushed conversations between medics and operatives: a series of Amalgamation appearances had erupted across Vale. Not just one infected civilian. Not just a single Nightmare Zone spilling over.
Multiple.
Jaune ran his tongue against the back of his teeth. That wasn't normal.
He'd seen enough in the archives to know that Amalgamations breaking into the physical world were rare. Dangerous and catastrophic, sure, but rare. For several to appear on the same day, scattered across the city? That meant something deeper. Something wrong with the dream.
The media would've gone insane if they'd known. Images of monsters in restaurants, streets torn apart, blood and fire—it would've ripped through every channel. Panic would've spread like wildfire.
But LUCID had been faster. Every scrap of footage deleted, every civilian account altered. Already the news was looping a different narrative: coordinated terrorist bombings across Vale. Dozens injured, several dead. Security measures heightened. The word "Nightmare" never once spoken.
Jaune rubbed at his scarred arm, wincing as fire lanced through his nerves.
Terrorist attack. Sure. That would explain the collapsed buildings, the missing people, the sudden evacuations. The public would swallow it. They always did.
But he knew the truth.
Everyone in this wing did.
He glanced back to Weiss. Her lips pressed together faintly, the smallest tremor of her hand gripping the blanket. She knew it too.
Jaune's throat went dry. He opened his mouth to say something, anything, but no words came.
Instead he leaned back, staring at the ceiling, listening to the low murmur of medics moving between beds. His body still ached. His arms burned with phantom pain. His head throbbed with exhaustion.
But it wasn't just his body that hurt.
Something had shifted tonight.
The world outside didn't know it yet, but Vale had been attacked by something far worse than terrorists. And if multiple Amalgamations could slip through at once…
This wasn't the end of anything.
It was the beginning.
He sighed with frustration.
He was still too weak.
The pain in his arms and body was distant now, dulled. What lingered sharper than the needles of agony, was memory.
The blood.
It kept looping in his mind when he closed his eyes—splashes on concrete, red footprints streaking across the restaurant, the way it mingled with shards of glass and broken steel. The bodies. People his age and older, civilians—people who had been there one second, alive, shouting, fighting, and then torn apart the next. The beowolves had ripped through them like meat.
He could still smell it. That copper tang that no disinfectant could erase.
Jaune carefully analyzed his own thoughts and the way his emotions were reacting.
By all logic, he should've broken down already. Normal people did. Even hardened soldiers sometimes cracked when confronted with the sheer horror of that kind of slaughter. Shouldn't he be trembling? Shouldn't he screaming? Shouldn't he be unable to breathe without remembering that crushing terror?
But… he wasn't.
It puzzled him. The memories played, yes, but they didn't own him. He wasn't spiraling, wasn't losing himself in panic attacks. The more he thought about it, the stranger it felt. He remembered everything in excruciating detail, but it was like the part of his brain that was supposed to fall apart had just… stayed silent.
'Why am I not breaking?'
The thought made him uneasy. Was something wrong with him? Or was this just the result of the training in the Dream? The stat increases, the endless fighting against abominations—had they rewired him? Or maybe he had just gone numb, his body's way of coping with too much at once.
He drew in a shaky breath, forcing his shoulders to relax.
At least Jade was safe.
That truth was the only lifeline in this sea of blood and memory. Jade hadn't seen the worst of it. She stood in front of those monstrous tendrils. She had heard the last screams before the walls swallowed them. When he'd overheard the LUCID operatives mention her, his heart had nearly collapsed out of relief.
"Memory alteration," the man had said casually, as if it were nothing more than cleaning up paperwork. Jade had been returned to her dorm, her memories adjusted, her world reset to something normal.
Jaune wasn't sure how to feel about that. On one hand, he hated it. The idea that someone could just reach in and edit his sister's mind left him cold. What right did they have? Who decided what people should and shouldn't remember?
But on the other hand… wasn't it kinder this way? Would he really prefer Jade waking up with nightmares of tendrils and blood, knowing full well she couldn't defend herself against such monsters? Would he rather she carried scars like his?
No.
Jaune let his eyes fall shut for a second. He didn't want her to suffer. He didn't want her to know. If forgetting was the price, then maybe—just maybe—it really was for the greater good.
And, if he was being brutally honest, he didn't want to be the one to explain it. He didn't want to sit his sister down and tell her that the world was far darker than she ever imagined, that he was caught in it, and that she was helpless against it. He wanted her safe, in her bubble, with her books and her classes.
That thought brought him back to himself.
He hadn't passed out. Through all of this, through torn flesh and broken skin, through watching people die in front of him, he hadn't lost consciousness. Most people would have welcomed it—let oblivion claim them for a while, if only to escape the reality. But Jaune had stayed awake.
Why?
Maybe it was the adrenaline still buzzing faintly in his blood. Maybe it was the pain refusing to let go. Or maybe it was stubbornness, that same stubbornness that had kept him fighting when everything screamed at him to run. Training in the Dream had changed him, but even before that he'd had something in him that refused to just lay down.
Either way, he was still here, still awake, still alive.
He shifted, grimacing as the scars in his arm tugged. He looked towards his right, where Weiss was still staring despondently.
She was propped up against her own bed, her posture too rigid or perhaps too relaxed, her eyes unfocused. She wasn't moving much, wasn't even blinking as often as she should. Her gaze was fixed somewhere that wasn't here, wasn't now.
Jaune frowned. He recognized that look, even if he couldn't name it properly. Detached. Hollow. Shock bleeding into silence.
For a moment, he debated. Should he say something? Should he just let her be?
He wrestled with himself, then finally pushed up off his bed, legs weak beneath him. Hobbling, more than walking, he made his way across the short distance. His bare feet were soundless on the polished floor.
When he reached her bed, he hesitated again. Words felt clumsy on his tongue, like tools he wasn't qualified to use. What did you even say to someone after all of this?
"…Hey." His voice cracked slightly. "Uh. How are you… holding up?"
It sounded stupid the moment it left his mouth. Of course she wasn't fine. No one was fine. But he couldn't think of anything else.
Weiss turned her head slowly. Her eyes met his, sharp and icy even when dulled by exhaustion. She didn't say anything. Just… stared.
And then, without a sound, tears welled in her eyes. They slipped down her pale cheeks, unacknowledged, as if even she hadn't given them permission. She didn't sob, didn't break, didn't move—just sat there, staring at him, silent tears carving tracks down her face.
Jaune's chest tightened. He wanted to say something, do something, reach out—anything. But no words came. No gesture felt right.
He exhaled, long and heavy. "…Right."
Reaching up, he pulled at the curtain hanging from the rail that circled her bed. The thin fabric hissed as it slid closed, shutting her away from the rest of the world, granting her the privacy she hadn't asked for but clearly needed.
Then, without another word, he turned and hobbled back to his own bed. He lowered himself down with a wince, lying back, staring up at the ceiling again.
Sometimes the best thing you could do was leave someone to their grief.
And Jaune… Jaune understood that all too well.
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AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon.