The past five months had been a blur of repetition and quiet progress. Classes, training and night patrols in the Dream—it all blended together into something that felt less like routine and more like ritual.
Of all those things, schoolwork was ironically the easiest.
Regular high school subjects. Essays, group projects and Beacon's unreasonably long lab reports. After everything he faced in the Dream, trigonometry and literature was tame.
Predictable.
He'd integrated well at Beacon ever since transferring from Ansel, all those months ago. He'd been the awkward new guy who didn't have many friends. Now, he actually knew people. He had companions—Ruby, Nora, Ren, Yang, Weiss, and even Blake in her quiet way. Between classes and cafeteria lunches, life had started to feel… normal again.
His midterms had come and gone without disaster. A solid 78% average, which to Jaune felt like a victory considering how often he was nodding off during morning lectures after nights in the Dream. Then came finals—and he'd pushed through with an 85%.
If they were still around, his family would have been ecstatic and celebrating.
Yang hadn't taken it well.
He could still remember her incredulous expression when the results came out, Ruby grinning beside her with her own perfect-student glow.
"Eighty-five? You beat me?" Yang had said, pointing at him as if he'd committed heresy.
"Hah. Just Barely," Jaune had defended, laughing.
Ruby had only tilted her head innocently. "I got ninety."
Yang's jaw had dropped.
And then Nora, with perfect timing, had announced that hers was eighty-seven.
Jaune had just wished he'd taken a photo of Yang's face at that instant. It was a very memorable one.
Moments like that anchored him. Reminded him that despite the responsibilities that were in his life now, despite the monsters and his father's ultimatum, he was still living a normal life.
But the laughter faded quickly once classes ended. Because there was always another part of his world waiting—the hidden one.
Jaune walked through the corridors of the LUCID base, nodding to the technicians and night-shift analysts. Some recognized him and waved, though most were too busy with their tasks—scanning charts or adjusting simulators. It had all become familiar to him. Ordinary, even.
And that was what scared him a little.
Because the more ordinary this secret world became, the less ordinary he felt.
He thought back to the last few months when he created his new rune for Rank 1.
Sword.
It wasn't conceptual or high-tier, like his Meta rune, Weakness, but it was elegant in its simplicity. With Sword, he could split his blades and control them like extensions of his will—telekinetic steel guided by intent. The first time he'd done it, he'd grinned like an idiot as four training blades floated around him like loyal satellites.
But that excitement faded as his understanding deepened. Sword wasn't what he needed. While it was fun to use, he could tell that... it wasn't the rune meant for him.
So, Jaune imbued it into Crocea Mors, fusing its essence into the blade until it became a single-use weapon rune. In doing so, he'd severed it from his soul.
That moment had been quite interesting. It was like a part of his memory had been severed from his mind, and he couldn't replace it.
He remembered watching the faint glow fade from his hands and thinking: I can't afford to be sentimental about power.
His second experiment had gone better.
The Teleport Rune—his current Rank 1 rune—was raw, but powerful. Straightforward in theory, yet complicated in practice.
He could "blink" short distances, shifting through space with a faint pull of energy. It worked best when he could see where he wanted to go, but the Aura consumption was immense.
One night, he'd nearly collapsed after jumping two dozen times in combat. Every warp had felt like ripping through invisible fabric with his bare hands.
Still, he couldn't deny the thrill. The sheer freedom of it. The ability to move anywhere, instantly—it was intoxicating. And dangerous.
He wasn't sure if he would keep it. Part of him wanted something more refined, something conceptual, a Rune that resonated with him the way Weaknesshad. But for now, Teleport worked. It was progress and most importantly, another step toward Rank 2.
As Jaune walked deeper into the facility, past the training halls and rune archives, he found himself smiling faintly. The hum of machinery surrounded him, a rhythm he'd come to associate with purpose.
His other experiences within the dream had been… strange, to say the least.
If there was one thing Jaune had learned over the past two months, it was that nightmare zones never followed logic. They were like fever dreams stitched together by fear and memory—half-sense and half-chaos. And yet, despite how warped they could get, there was always a pattern to them. Always an Amalgamation hiding somewhere in the distortion, feeding off the fear of the dreamer, growing fatter and stronger with every second it remained unchallenged.
Jaune had seen plenty by now. More than enough to last a lifetime.
He still remembered the first Rank 1 zone they cleared as a full squad—him, Oscar, Ren, and Nora.
Nightmare zones were shaped by emotion which meant that the stronger the trauma, the more erratic the layout. Some were endless hallways that looped back into themselves; others were small, confined places that pressed down on the mind like a vise.
But some… were like nothing he could've imagined.
There were a couple that were quite memorable to him, even after they'd cleared it.
It had started like a normal mansion home—three stories and rich walls but the smell of something burning had lingered in the air. The longer they stayed, the more weird it became. The hallways lengthened and the walls pulsed faintly like veins just beneath the plaster. Then came the sound—wet chewing, from everywhere.
The dreamer, a woman in her late twenties, had been trapped in her own house. Running from room to room, corner to corner, as mouths began to bloom from the floorboards. Human-sized teeth gnashing through the carpet, tongues slithering up from under the bed, voices whispering her name.
Ren and Oscar had found her curled up in the bathroom, shaking. Jaune and Nora went for the source. The Amalgamation was fused with the house itself—a grotesque structure of bone and wood and flesh. When it roared, every wall screamed with it.
Jaune had been the one to cut it down, using Sword and Weakness in tandem. He still remembered how satisfying it felt when the structure splintered and dissolved, leaving behind that soft shimmer of energy as the zone dissolved.
They'd saved her and the dreamer woke peacefully. Or as peacefully as one could after being in a Nightmare. But even after waking, Jaune kept thinking about how easily fear could twist something so ordinary into a nightmare.
That was the thing about these zones—they weren't evil for the sake of being evil. They were reflections. Just… distorted beyond recognition.
Another nightmare zone which Jaune remembered was a scene in a bedroom of a large house. The lights were off and there was no sound except for the steady drip of water somewhere behind the walls. Then ceiling pulsed and they saw it.
The Amalgamation this time wasn't pretending to be a structure—it was watching. A skinless humanoid thing, clinging to the ceiling with inverted limbs, eyes studded across its body like embedded jewels. Each one moved independently, tracking every member of the squad. Its mouth hung open too wide, and from it poured a slow stream of black liquid that hissed when it hit the floor.
The dreamer was paralyzed below it, lying on the bed. Couldn't move, couldn't speak—just staring upward in terror as the thing dripped black fluid on her face again and again.
Jaune didn't even think.
He dashed forward, teleporting just before impact, appearing right above the bed and slamming Crocea Mors down through the creature's chest. It shrieked, eyes rolling in every direction, limbs twisting in panic. Nora blasted it with a lightning burst while Ren severed its spine.
When it was over, the dreamer broke free of her paralysis and sobbed quietly into her hands.
Then the zone cracked apart, dissolving into faint white mist.
He couldn't deny it—there was something… rewarding about what they did. Seeing someone freed from their nightmare. Watching them wake up peacefully again. Every cleared zone meant one less corrupted dreamer, and one less potential collapse of the real world.
But even Rank 1 Amalgamations were unpredictable.
One zone they'd entered had been set on a beach, serene at first—until the ocean started boiling. Black waves rising, shaped into faces that screamed as they crashed down. The Amalgamation had been beneath the water, whispering through every ripple.
They'd handled it, but Jaune remembered how the water smelled. Like oil and decay.
It reminded him too much of the train station in his early days alone.
As for Rank 2 zones… those were another level entirely.
Qrow had taken them—Jaune's squad and Ruby's—on supervised runs through a few Rank 2s, to show them what powerful ones looked like.
He hadn't exaggerated.
The first was a battlefield that stretched infinitely. A place where the air itself seemed heavy with despair. The Amalgamation wasn't one creature—it was every soldier. Thousands of corpses, reanimating and moving as one vast organism, a sea of broken armor and blood-soaked banners. Every time one fell, another rose to take its place, crawling over the bodies of its fallen brothers.
Jaune still remembered the sound of their inhuman voices. A single word repeated endlessly, in a language that he understood.
"Kill."
And when Qrow killed it, the chanting stopped instantly. The silence afterward was deafening.
The next Rank 2 was worse.
A forest. Quiet. Too quiet. Every tree looked identical, and the deeper they went, the thicker the air became. At first, they thought the Amalgamation was hiding in the forest somewhere.
That's when Qrow told them: "It's not in the forest. It's the forest itself."
And he was right.
The trees began to move, branches snapping toward them like limbs. Roots tore through the ground. The whole forest was alive—and it was hungry.
By the end, the clearing burned, Ruby panting beside him, her silver eyes reflecting the orange glow.
Jaune had stared at the ash and realized something: every nightmare had a kind of logic. Fear gave it rules. Break those rules, and you could win.
He was getting good at breaking them.
So that was how it had gone—the past few months, one nightmare after another, one victory at a time. Every fight made him sharper. Every zone cleared gave him insight into the way fear shaped the dream.
He was now a Peak Rank 1. No longer the same boy who'd first stumbled into the Dream Realm, trembling and unsure.
Now, when he looked into the mirror… he didn't just see a weakling.
He saw power.
And the faint, steady path toward Rank 2.
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AN: Advanced chapters (up to 10) are available on patreon