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The Hunter in the Garden
The knowledge was a cold stone in my gut. This was no natural disaster, no random mutation of the subconscious. This was a deliberate act. A poison being injected into my garden, and the poison had a source. The nightmare had a master.
My peaceful existence was over. The quiet pride of the healer was shelved, replaced by the grim focus of a sentinel. My realm was under attack, and I was its first and only line of defence. The fear remained, a constant, icy companion, but it was now a fuel for vigilance, not a trigger for paralysis.
My days in the waking world became a façade of normalcy, a carefully maintained performance for my parents. I built taller block towers. I learned new words—"why" became a particular favourite, a useful tool for mimicking childish curiosity. I played in the park, but my eyes were no longer on the children with their budding Quirks. I watched the adults, searching their faces for any sign of the cold intelligence I'd felt in the Dreaming. Was it the man reading the newspaper? The woman arguing on her phone? The enemy could be anyone.
At night, I no longer drifted peacefully to my throne. I arrived alert, my senses stretched taut. The first order of business was fortification. I walked the borders of my realm, the edges where the structured Dreaming gave way to the formless potential of the void. I reinforced them not with walls, but with concepts. I wove threads of gentle dreams and quiet contentment into the fabric of those borders, creating a subtle early-warning system. Any touch of malice would feel like a splinter in silk.
Then, I began my patrols.
I was a ghost in the machine of the city's sleep. I drifted through the swirling nebulae of dreams, a silent guardian. I soothed the natural nightmares—the test anxieties, the social embarrassments, the grief—with a gentle touch, but my primary focus was the hunt. I was searching for that specific, oily resonance, the psychic signature of the invader.
I found it again, a week later. It was fainter, more cautious. It was attached to the dream of an old woman, feeding on her loneliness. This time, I was ready. I did not engage. I did not even brush against the dream. I hovered at the very periphery, a silent observer.
I studied the connection. The nightmare was a leech, but every leech has a tail. This one was no different. A thin, almost invisible thread of malicious intent led away from the dream, not back into the dreamer's own mind, but out, away, into the vast network of sleeping consciousness. The nightmare was a remote-controlled drone.
My consciousness followed the thread.
It was like tracking a single, poisoned river back to its source. The thread wound through the dreamscape, bypassing thousands of sleeping minds, a line of ugly purpose in the beautiful chaos. The further I followed, the stronger the residue of hatred and despair became. The air around the thread grew cold.
And then, I found it.
The thread terminated not in a dream, but in a fortress.
It was a pocket of the Dreaming, but it had been horrifically altered. It was a cramped, windowless room, its walls not made of stone, but of shifting, screaming faces—echoes of every victim he'd ever fed upon. The air was thick with the smell of stale fear and cheap incense, a futile attempt to mask the stench of suffering. A single, bare light bulb swung from a wire, casting jerky, manic shadows. This was not a dream born of a sleeping mind. This was a lair. A stronghold consciously built from stolen nightmare stuff.
At its center sat a figure.
It was a man, or the dream-shape of one. He was hunched over in a rickety chair, his posture a permanent cringe. He was painfully thin, draped in a stained bathrobe. His hair was lank and unwashed. But his hands… his hands were moving with a surgeon's precision. In them, he held dozens of those psychic threads. He wasn't just holding them; he was *weaving* them, his fingers flying, tying intricate knots of despair. He would pluck one, and a nightmare somewhere in the city would intensify, the despair flowing back down the thread to him, a visible pulse of dark energy that he absorbed with a faint, shuddering sigh of relief. It was less like feeding and more like a man gulping water after days in a desert.
This was the source. The puppeteer.
His name, pulled from the very fabric of his self-constructed hell, was Kageyama. "Shadow-room." A fittingly pathetic and grandiose name for a pathetic and grandiose man. And his Quirk was 'Phobophage'—the fear-eater.
He wasn't a ruler. He was an addict. His power allowed him to craft nightmares in the minds of others and feed on the fear they produced. But the sustenance was fleeting. It never lasted. It only staved off a hunger that was a part of him. He was a man trying to fill a bottomless pit inside himself with the suffering of others. He was growing stronger, yes, but it was the strength of a junkie—twitchy, unstable, and desperate.
Pity, cold and shocking, momentarily eclipsed my rage. This was a wretched, broken thing. But a broken thing in a position of immense power is still incredibly dangerous.
I must have made a sound, a ripple of my revulsion in the dream-stuff. His head snapped up. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, darting around his cramped nightmare room. He couldn't see me. I was the stage, not an actor on it. But he could feel me. A new presence. A change in the atmosphere of his self-made prison.
"Who's there?" His mental voice was a reedy, paranoid whisper, scratchy from disuse. It was the voice of a man who spent too much time talking only to himself. "Show yourself!"
He yanked on a handful of threads. In his panic, he wasn't surgical. He was brutal. Across the city, a dozen nightmares exploded into full-blown terrors. I felt the psychic screams, a wave of amplified suffering that made me recoil.
This was my fault. My carelessness had caused this.
I withdrew instantly, pulling my consciousness back along the thread, severing the connection before he could get a fix on my location. I retreated to my throne room, my heart pounding—a sensation that felt alien in my dream-form.
I sat on my throne, the silence of my realm suddenly feeling fragile. The enemy had a name. Kageyama. He was not a mighty overlord. He was a desperate, fear-starved addict living in a psychological hell of his own making. That made him more unpredictable, more dangerous. He wasn't seeking conquest; he was seeking his next fix, and he would lash out at anything that threatened his supply.
I couldn't confront him directly. A direct fight would be a battle of wills in a realm he had spent years dedicated to his purpose. I would be fighting on his toxic ground. And the collateral damage—the nightmares he would unleash on innocent dreamers in his panic—was unthinkable.
I had to be smarter. I had to be a physician fighting a disease. I couldn't attack the virus head-on; I had to strengthen the host. I had to make his victims resistant.
My strategy shifted. The hunt was over. Now began the long, careful work of inoculation.
Every night, I patrolled. But now, when I found one of Kageyama's threads attached to a dreamer, I did not attack the thread. I did not even touch it. Instead, I focused all my power on the dreamer themselves. I couldn't stop the nightmare from happening, but I could fortify the dreamer's mind against its worst effects.
For a businessman trapped in a nightmare of financial ruin, I didn't give him money. I nurtured the memory of his family's love, building a mental fortress around it that the nightmare of worthlessness could not penetrate.For a student suffering an exam nightmare, I reinforced the memory of hours spent studying, the feeling of pen on paper, building a shield of competence against the fear of failure.I couldn't stop the fear. But I could ensure it didn't devour them whole. I could make sure they woke up shaken, perhaps, but not broken. I was giving them psychic antibodies.
It was subtle, exhausting work. Kageyama was still feeding, but his harvests were becoming less potent. The fear was there, but it was… diluted. Lacking the rich, full-bodied despair he craved.
I began to sense his frustration in the Dreaming. His nightmare room became more chaotic. The screaming faces on the walls contorted in fresh agony as he lashed out, trying to squeeze more terror from his victims. He was a rat chewing its own leg in a trap, his hunger growing as his supply diminished in quality.
I was starving him out.
It was a cold, patient war of attrition. There were no glorious battles, only a thousand tiny acts of silent defence. My realm became a command center for a resistance nobody knew was happening. I was tired, the constant vigilance and delicate work draining me even in my waking hours. I was quieter, more withdrawn. My parents' concern returned, but it was different now—softer, more confused. Their son was healthy, but he was always so tired, his big eyes often staring at nothing, as if listening to a distant sound.
I was listening. I was listening to the dreams of a city, guarding them against a predator only I could see. I was the shepherd in the shadows, and the wolf was growing ever hungrier, ever more desperate.
I knew it was only a matter of time before the wolf decided to leave its cave and hunt for the shepherd.