Prologue: Operation Dawnlight.
Location - Red City - Dead Zone.
Date - dec 4 - 2026.
The rain fell like a thousand whispered secrets against the cracked pavement, each drop exploding into a tiny constellation of despair on streets that had once known the warmth of human footsteps. The city lay broken—skeletal buildings reached toward a starless sky with twisted rebar fingers, their glassless windows gaping like the hollow eye sockets of corpses. Water pooled in bomb craters and flooded abandoned storefronts, carrying with it the smell of rust, decay, and something else. Something that shouldn't exist.
The smell of nightmares made manifest.
Thud.
The sound cut through the rain's monotonous rhythm like a heartbeat from something that had never known life.
Thud.
Louder now. Closer.
Between two collapsed apartment complexes, a shadow moved—but shadows weren't supposed to move like that, weren't supposed to breathe. The creature stood at least twelve feet tall, its humanoid frame wrapped in darkness so absolute it seemed to devour the dim light struggling through the storm clouds. Rain sizzled against its skin, evaporating into black mist. Its mouth hung open, revealing rows of fangs like obsidian daggers, each one dripping with something thicker than saliva.
The Terror stopped.
Its massive head swiveled left, then right, nostrils flaring as it sampled the air. The rain drummed against its shoulders, cascading down its impossible anatomy in rivers of shadow. For three heartbeats, it stood perfectly still—a predator's patience worn into its very existence.
Then it continued east, each footfall shaking loose debris from the wounded buildings around it.
Five floors up in the northern building, pressed against a water-stained wall that still bore the faded remnants of floral wallpaper, a figure waited. The woman's black suit seemed to absorb what little light existed, tactical lines running along her limbs like veins of midnight. Her helmet—smooth, featureless, gleaming faintly with some inner luminescence—tracked the Terror's movement with mechanical precision.
Only when the creature's footfalls faded to a distant tremor did the helmet retract, nanite technology folding back into her collar with a whisper of sound that was almost organic. Silver hair, darkened by rain that had seeped through the building's broken ceiling, clung to pale skin. Red eyes—the color of freshly spilled Blood —stared after the Terror with the calm of someone who had learned to swallow their fear whole.
"May." The voice crackled through her earpiece, distorted slightly by interference that plagued all tech in Terror-heavy zones. "Report."
May pressed two fingers to her ear, her voice barely above a whisper. "Multiple contacts. Three level 3s—one northwest, approximately two hundred meters. Another due south, prowling the metro entrance. Third one east, circling the old shopping district." She paused, her enhanced vision tracking movement through the skeletal cityscape. "And one level 5. The big bastard just passed my position, heading east toward the central plaza."
Static crackled. Someone cursed softly on another channel.
"This one's going to be rough," May continued, her breath misting in the cold air despite the suit's temperature regulation. The words tasted like copper—like blood remembered but not yet spilled. "But Command wasn't wrong. If we can retake this city, if we can establish a lighthouse here..." She swallowed hard, thinking of the maps, the strategic importance, the supply routes that could be reopened. "This changes everything for the eastern territories. This gives thousands of people a chance."
Across the rain-slicked street, in four separate buildings that stood like tombstones marking humanity's grave, sixteen figures stirred. Each wore the same tactical suits, each helmet gleaming with that same eerie bioluminescence. Four per building. Four souls preparing to wage war against the impossible.
In the southernmost structure—an office building that had once housed insurance adjusters and IT consultants—four figures stood in what had been a conference room. Rain poured through a hole in the ceiling, and somewhere below, water dripped in a steady, maddening rhythm.
In the eastern building—a hotel where families had once laughed over breakfast—four more waited in a gutted restaurant, broken tables pushed against walls, menus turned to pulp scattered across warped floorboards.
And in the westernmost building—a residential complex where children had once played in hallways now choked with rubble—a man stood alone at a window on the seventh floor.
Captain Rin Kazumi.
His suit bore the same midnight black as the others, but twin blue lines ran down his sides like captured lightning, marking his rank. His helmet was retracted, revealing a face that was younger than his eyes suggested—sharp features, dark hair pushed back from his forehead, and an expression carved from the same stone as the broken city around him. He stared down at the destruction below, rain streaking the cracked window before him, each drop catching what little light existed and turning it into something almost beautiful.
Almost.
Behind him, footsteps—lighter, cautious. A woman's silhouette approached, her suit conforming to curves that spoke of both strength and grace. Her helmet retracted with a soft hiss, revealing dark eyes and hair tied back in a practical bun.
"Captain Rin," she said, her voice carrying a note of something between curiosity and concern. "You always do this. Every mission, every city. You stand at a window and stare at the ruins like you're looking for something." She moved to stand beside him, following his gaze to the wasteland below. "It's all the same, isn't it? Destroyed buildings, empty streets, nothing but Terrors and ghosts. Where's the beauty in that?"
Rin was silent for a moment, his breath fogging the glass. When he spoke, his voice was softer than she expected—almost tender, as if he were sharing a secret with the ruins themselves.
"I dream about it sometimes, Saya." He lifted one hand, tracing a pattern on the window as if painting an invisible picture. "I see flowers growing through the cracks in the pavement. Cherry blossoms, maybe. Or those wild ones—the kind that don't need anyone to take care of them. They just... grow." His finger moved lower. "And children. I see children playing in the streets again. Laughing. Chasing each other around lamp posts that actually work. Parents calling them home for dinner."
Saya watched him, something tightening in her chest. "Captain..."
"That day isn't far off, Saya." He turned to face her, and the softness in his eyes hardened into something else—something forged in fire and tempered by loss. Determination. Raw and absolute. "Not if we keep fighting. Not if we take back these cities one by one, light by light, dream by dream."
He took a deep breath, the kind that comes before a plunge into deep water, and his entire demeanor shifted. The dreamer vanished. The soldier remained.
"Right." His voice cut through the rain's whisper like a blade. "Let's get to it."
Rin pressed his hand to his ear, activating the squad-wide channel. Static crackled, then cleared. Eleven sets of eyes turned toward their comms, eleven bodies tensed, ready.
"All teams, this is Captain Kazumi. Final positions." His voice was steel wrapped in cold certainty. "Team Soujiro, take the western approach. That level 3 near the metro is yours—hit it hard and fast before it can alert the others. Team Mitabi, you have the northwest sector. Standard suppression tactics on that level 3. Keep it contained, keep it quiet."
He paused, looking at Saya, who had already reactivated her helmet. Around them, through the broken walls and shattered floors, he could feel his team preparing—weapons checked, dreams manifesting, hearts beating that particular rhythm of pre-combat focus.
"Team Himura, southern district is yours. That level 3 is a prowler—it'll try to run if it senses us coming. Don't let it. Pin it down and eliminate."
Another pause. Rin's own helmet began to form, nanites crawling up from his collar, but he stopped them at his jawline. Not yet. He wanted to see the city clearly one more time.
"Team Kazumi..." His eyes found the eastern horizon, where the massive level 5 Terror stalked through the rain like a god of extinction. "We take the big one. Central plaza, twelve minutes. Saya, Hiro, Jun—you know the drill."
Across the comms, voices responded with crisp acknowledgments. Professional. Practiced. But underneath, Rin could hear it—the thing they all carried but never spoke about. Fear, yes. But also something brighter.
Hope.
"Remember," Rin said, his voice softening just slightly, just enough. "Every city we take back is another lighthouse we can build. Another thousand people who get to sleep without nightmares. Another piece of humanity's dream restored." His helmet began to form now, the nanites sliding over his features like liquid midnight. "Move out. And—"
His voice came through their comms now, slightly distorted by the helmet's processors but no less clear.
"—stay alive. That's an order."
Rin turned from the window. Behind him, three figures materialized from the shadows of the gutted apartment—Saya, and two others whose suits bore different colored accent lines. Hiro's were red. Jun's were green. They moved with the fluid grace of people who had fought together so many times they could read each other's intentions in the shift of a shoulder, the tilt of a head.
"Team Kazumi," Rin said, and despite everything—the rain, the ruins, the monsters waiting in the dark—there was something almost like a smile in his voice. "Move out."
Four figures dropped from the seventh-floor window, their suits absorbing the impact with barely a sound as they hit the flooded street below. Around them, in perfect synchronization, eight other figures emerged from their respective buildings.
Sixteen dreamers.
One broken city.
And in the distance, through the rain and the darkness, something massive turned its head—as if it had heard them coming.
As if it had been waiting.
Rin's boots hit the flooded pavement with a splash that sent ripples racing outward like liquid silver under the dying light. He didn't stop—couldn't stop. His body was already moving, muscles remembering the dance they'd performed a hundred times before. Behind him, three shadows peeled away from the building's face, hitting the ground in perfect succession. The sound of their landing was swallowed by the rain, by the thunder rumbling somewhere beyond the city's corpse.
"May," Rin's voice cut through the comms as he sprinted east, water spraying from each footfall. "Should I—"
"Stay on overwatch," Rin interrupted, his breath controlled despite the pace. His enhanced vision picked out the route ahead—collapsed cars creating obstacles, a crater that would need to be jumped, the skeletal remains of a bus lying on its side like a beached whale. "Report any changes. I trust the teams to execute. When the time comes—" He vaulted over a pile of rubble without breaking stride. "—I'll put an end to this bastard."
Through the comms, he could hear it—the sharp exhales, the footfalls of his team matching his rhythm. They moved like parts of a single organism, spread across the ruins but connected by something deeper than technology. Trust. The kind earned through blood and survival.
The central plaza opened before them like a coliseum built by catastrophe. Once, this had been where people gathered—a fountain at its center, benches where lovers sat, street performers drawing crowds. Now the fountain was a crater filled with black water, the benches were twisted metal, and the only performance was the one about to unfold.
The level 5 Terror stood in the plaza's heart.
Up close, it was worse than May's description suggested. Twelve feet of concentrated nightmare, its form flickering at the edges as if reality itself rejected its existence. The darkness coating its body writhed like living smoke, occasionally revealing glimpses of pale flesh beneath—hints of the human shape it had corrupted. Its fangs gleamed even in the low light, each one the length of a forearm, and when it breathed, black mist poured from its nostrils like exhaust from some infernal engine.
It turned toward them.
And Rin saw its eyes—hollow pits filled with an intelligence that was all wrong. Not animal cunning. Something that remembered being human and hated what it had become.
"Saya," Rin said quietly. "Now."
She was already moving.
Saya's form blurred, her suit's enhancements combining with her dream manifestation to push her speed beyond human limits. The air around her hands shimmered, frost crystalizing in the rain, and twin daggers materialized in her grip—beautiful, lethal things carved from ice so clear they looked like captured starlight. She didn't slow. Didn't hesitate.
Her arm whipped forward.
The daggers flew, spinning through the rain, leaving trails of frozen air in their wake. The Terror shifted—fast, impossibly fast for something its size—and the blades missed its feet by inches, embedding in the pavement on either side.
For a heartbeat, nothing happened.
Then the daggers detonated.
The explosion wasn't fire or force—it was cold. Pure, absolute cold that spread like a living thing, ice racing across the wet ground in crystalline fractals, climbing the Terror's legs, encasing its feet in a prison of frozen water that fused with the pavement beneath. The creature roared, a sound like metal tearing, and tried to move. Its feet didn't budge.
"Movement restrained!" Saya's voice crackled through the comms, sharp with satisfaction. She'd already conjured new daggers, circling left, forcing the Terror to divide its attention.
The creature's response was immediate and vicious. Its massive head snapped toward her, mouth opening impossibly wide, and darkness poured out—not like breath, but like liquid night given velocity. The blast tore through the rain, evaporating drops before they could fall, leaving a trail of heat-shimmer in air that had been cold seconds before.
Saya twisted, throwing herself into a slide that sent water spraying. The darkness blast passed overhead close enough that Rin saw her suit's surface ripple, the nanites struggling against the corruption trying to seep into them.
But the Terror's focus on Saya was exactly what they needed.
"Go!" Rin commanded.
Hiro came from the right—a blur of red accents and focused intent. His hands moved in patterns that looked almost like prayer, and the air around him began to sing. Not literally, but that's what it felt like—the wind responding to his dream, bending to his will, becoming something sharp enough to cut reality itself.
"Wind Blade!" His voice was a battle cry and an invocation.
The air condensed, compressed, sharpened into a crescent of pure force that screamed as it flew. It caught the Terror's right knee with a sound like thunder meeting lightning, and the creature's leg buckled. Darkness sprayed from the wound—not blood, but the essence of nightmare made liquid. It sizzled where it hit the ground, eating through concrete.
Jun attacked from the left in perfect synchronization—green accents glowing as water rose from the flooded plaza like a cobra responding to a charmer. But this water was different. Jun's dream had always been about control, about making the soft and yielding become hard and absolute. The water elongated, molecules aligning, edge sharpening until it was less liquid and more living blade.
"Water Edge!" Jun's voice was calmer than Hiro's, but no less intense.
The water-blade struck the Terror's left knee with surgical precision. Another spray of darkness. Another roar of pain and rage. The creature's leg gave out, and it began to topple—twelve feet of nightmare crashing toward the ground with enough force to crack the pavement.
But it didn't fall.
The Terror's massive hands slammed down, catching itself, arms flexing with strength that could crush cars. Its head swiveled, tracking all three attackers at once, and its mouth opened again. Another blast building, this one wider, meant to catch them all—
Jun saw it coming too late. The darkness blast erupted, and he tried to dodge, tried to bring up a water shield, but the angle was wrong, the timing off by a fraction of a second—
The blast caught his shoulder, spinning him like a rag doll. He hit the ground hard, suit smoking where the corruption had touched it, and didn't get up immediately. Through the comms, Rin heard him gasp—pain and shock mixed with the desperate need to breathe.
"Jun!" Hiro's voice, tight with concern.
"I'm—" Jun coughed, forcing himself to his knees. "I'm good. Suit took most of it. Dammit, that was close..."
Inside his helmet, Rin smiled. Not at Jun's injury—never that. But at the confirmation of what he already knew. Every Terror, once restrained, followed the same pattern. Fear made them predictable. Desperation made them stupid.
"Just like always," Rin murmured.
The blue lines running down his suit began to glow—not with reflected light, but with something from within. Something that pulsed in time with his heartbeat. His dream manifesting, responding to his will, eager to be used.
The ground beneath the Terror trembled.
Then erupted.
Vines burst from the cracked pavement like breaching whales—thick as a man's torso, covered in thorns that gleamed like obsidian, moving with serpentine grace. They wrapped around the Terror's arms, constricting, pulling, anchoring. More vines erupted, and more, until the creature's arms were encased in a prison of living wood that burrowed deep into the earth beneath.
The Terror thrashed, darkness pouring from its mouth in a continuous scream, but the vines held. They always held. Rin's dream had always been about growth, about life persisting even in death's shadow.
And right now, that dream was a cage.
Rin moved.
His legs coiled, suit's enhancements activating, and he launched himself upward. Rain streaked past his helmet, each drop catching the green glow emanating from his hands. In his grip, a spear materialized—not metal, but condensed life energy wrapped around a core of pure dream manifestation. It hummed with potential, with the promise of growth twisted into the service of ending.
The Terror saw him coming. Tried to track his arc. But it was trapped, restrained, helpless.
Exactly where Rin needed it.
"For the light," Rin whispered, and drove the spear down.
He landed on the Terror's back with both feet, using his momentum and the full weight of his dream to drive the spear through the creature's spine, through its ribcage, straight into where its heart should be.
The spear punched through with a sound like ripping silk.
For a moment, everything went silent. Even the rain seemed to pause.
Then the Terror screamed.
Not with its mouth—the sound came from everywhere and nowhere, a psychic wail that Rin felt in his teeth, in his bones. The creature's body convulsed once, twice, darkness pouring from the wound like smoke from a snuffed candle. Rin pushed off, launching himself backward as the vines released, as the ice around its feet shattered, as the Terror's massive form began to collapse.
He hit the ground in a crouch twenty feet away, spear dissolving back into motes of green light.
The Terror fell forward with a crash that echoed across the dead city.
And then... it changed.
The darkness coating its body began to recede, peeling away like old paint, revealing what lay beneath. Not a monster. Not anymore. The massive form shrank, compacted, reformed into something heartbreakingly human.
A man. Middle-aged, with the kind of build that spoke of hard work and honest labor. His face was slack in death, peaceful even, with crow's feet at his eyes that suggested he'd smiled often.
Rin's helmet retracted, letting the rain touch his face. He stared at the corpse, at this father who had become a child's nightmare.
"Someone dreamed you strong," Rin said softly, though the man couldn't hear. "Dreamed you brave and big and unbeatable. The way children see their fathers." He closed his eyes briefly. "And the nightmare took that dream and twisted it. Made you into the thing they feared losing. What a waste."
The man's body began to glow—not with darkness, but with pure white light. His form dissolved, breaking apart into hundreds of luminous orbs that floated upward despite the rain. Dream cores. The purified essence of what he'd once been.
Saya appeared at Rin's side, her helmet retracting to reveal sweat-dampened hair and eyes bright with adrenaline. From her suit's hidden compartment, she produced a cube—no larger than a Rubik's Cube, its surface a lattice of crystalline energy that pulsed with soft blue light. Intricate circuitry ran through its transparent walls, and at its heart, a small void waited, hungry for what they'd earned.
She held it up, and the dream cores responded, drawn like moths to flame. They streamed into the cube, filling it with light, with power, with the currency that kept humanity fighting. When the last core entered, the cube sealed with a soft click, its surface dimming to a steady glow.
Saya tucked it away. "Clean kill, Captain. Textbook."
Rin pressed his hand to his ear, activating the general channel. "All teams, report."
Static crackled. Then voices, each one a small miracle of survival.
"Team Soujiro reporting," came the first voice, slightly breathless. Through the comms, Rin could hear the sound of something large hitting the ground. "Level 3 eliminated. Metro entrance secure. Zero casualties."
"Team Mitabi checking in." Another voice, this one calmer. "Northwest sector clear. Target down. Himura took a glancing hit, but suit held. We're mobile."
"Team Himura here." A woman's voice, steady despite obvious pain. "Southern district is ours. That prowler was fast, but not fast enough. Lost a lot of dream energy keeping up with it, but we got the bastard. No serious injuries."
Around the city, in three different locations, Rin could picture it: Teams standing over dissolving Terror corpses, collecting dream cores, checking each other for wounds that might not show through the suits. Breathing. Living. Winning.
"Good work, all of you," Rin said, and meant it with every fiber of his being. "Regroup at rally point Beta. We'll—"
"Captain." May's voice cut through, sharp with confusion. "I'm... I'm getting something weird on my sensors."
Rin's eyes narrowed. Around him, his team tensed, hands moving toward weapons that were never truly gone. "Define weird."
"Energy spike. A huge one. But it's not—" Her voice shifted from confusion to something worse. Something cold. "They're not registering as Terrors. The signature is different. It's almost like—"
"May." Rin's voice cut through her analysis like a blade. "Report. Now."
Back on the fifth floor of her building, May's eyes were locked on her helmet's HUD. The tactical display that normally showed a clean map of the area had gone haywire. An Energy signatures so massive , being born.
May's fingers trembled against the side of her helmet, her breath coming in short, sharp gasps that fogged the interior display. The HUD before her eyes had become a nightmare of its own—numbers climbing, warnings flashing in urgent red, the tactical map that had been clean and controlled seconds ago now looked like someone had thrown paint at a canvas.
An Energy signature bloomed across her screen like a malignant flower.
The threat level indicator—a simple bar that rarely moved past 3 in standard operations—began to climb. The number flickered, updating in real-time as her suit's sensors struggled to process what they were detecting.
Level 1.
May's heart hammered against her ribs. That was normal. Expected, even.
Level 2.
Still manageable. They'd cleared dozens of those today alone.
Level 3.
Her mouth went dry. Multiple level 3s in one location meant calling for backup, meant careful planning.
Level 4.
"No," she whispered, the word barely audible even to herself. Her silver hair clung to her face, damp with sweat that had nothing to do with exertion and everything to do with the ice forming in her gut.
Level 5.
They'd just killed one of those. It had taken perfect coordination, a trained team, every advantage they could muster.
Level 6.
"Oh god." Her voice cracked. The readings didn't make sense. Couldn't make sense. A level 6 hadn't been seen in over two years. The last one had required three full squads and air support. Fifteen dreamers had gone in. Eight had come back.
Level 7.
The number locked in place, glowing an angry crimson that seemed to pulse in time with her racing heartbeat. But the energy readings kept climbing—the bar filling, filling, threatening to overflow into territory that shouldn't exist. Territory that couldn't exist.
Not here. Not now. Not with just sixteen of them.
"C-Captain," May's voice came through the comms, and she hated how it shook, hated the terror that colored every syllable, but she couldn't stop it. Couldn't contain it. "Captain Rin, I—"
She swallowed hard, trying to force moisture back into her mouth, trying to remember her training, her protocols. But all of that seemed distant now, meaningless in the face of what her sensors were screaming at her.
"Energy spike. Massive. Threat level..." Her voice dropped to barely above a whisper, as if saying it too loud might make it more real. "Threat level seven. Reading is still climbing. Signature is—it's not like anything in the database. It's—"
The sky split open.
Not metaphorically. Not figuratively. May watched through her helmet's enhanced vision as the storm clouds above the city parted, pushed aside by something descending from above. Lightning arced across the gap, drawn to whatever was coming like iron filings to a magnet, illuminating the rupture in reality with strobing flashes of white-blue light.
And through that gap, something fell.
No—not fell. Descended.
Wings unfurled against the roiling clouds, each one easily thirty feet across, constructed from darkness so absolute it made the night sky look pale by comparison. They moved with terrible grace, each beat sending ripples through the air that May could feel even from her position—pressure waves that made her bones ache, that made her suit's sensors flicker and distort.
The being's form was humanoid—cruelly, mockingly so. Arms, legs, a torso that spoke of strength condensed into human proportions. But there was nothing human about it. The darkness that coated its body wasn't a covering; it was part of its essence, writhing and alive, occasionally revealing glimpses of something beneath that might have been flesh or might have been pure nightmare given form.
It descended slowly, wings spread wide like a fallen angel returning to the world it had been cast from. Rain that had been frozen in mid-air began to fall again, but when the drops touched those wings, they evaporated with a hiss, turning to steam that rose in ghostly tendrils.
May's breath caught in her throat. Her hands gripped the windowsill so hard she felt the concrete crack beneath her enhanced strength.
"Captain," she managed, her voice barely a thread of sound. "It's here."
---
In the plaza, Rin's HUD flared to life with the same warnings May was seeing. The threat level indicator climbed with sickening speed, the numbers updating so fast they blurred. Around him, his team's reactions were instantaneous—weapons manifesting, stances shifting, dreams flaring to life in preparation for combat.
But Rin stood frozen, his eyes locked on the eastern sky where the clouds had parted.
Where it was descending.
"Shit," the word escaped his lips like a prayer to a god who'd stopped listening. His hand fell from his ear, the comms channel still open, still broadcasting the sound of his team's controlled panic, May's terrified breathing, the distant rumble of thunder that wasn't thunder at all.
Because he could see it now.
They all could.
Every dreamer in the city, every HUD in every helmet—all of them displaying the same impossible, horrifying truth.
THREAT LEVEL: 7
The winged figure touched down in the distance, somewhere in sector seven, and even from two miles away, Rin felt the impact. The ground shook. Buildings that had survived years of neglect chose that moment to collapse, unable to withstand the presence of something that shouldn't exist.
Around him, Rin's team had gone silent. Even Saya, always ready with a quip or observation, stood frozen, her ice daggers manifesting and dissolving repeatedly—a nervous tic, her dream responding to fear her conscious mind was trying to suppress.
Hiro's wind swirled around him in agitated patterns, debris lifting and falling in rhythm with his ragged breathing.
Jun's hands were submerged in water he'd drawn from the flooded plaza, but the liquid trembled, responding to the shaking in his limbs.
Through the comms, voices crackled—other teams, other dreamers, all of them seeing the same readouts, all of them understanding what it meant.
A level 7.
Something that hadn't been seen since the Massacre of '03. Something that wipe out an entire platoon of dreamer's , leaving only ten survivors, leaving scars on humanity's collective psyche that still hadn't healed.
And there were only sixteen of them here.
Sixteen dreamers.
One impossible monster.
Rin's hand slowly rose back to his ear, his fingers steady despite everything, because that's what commanders did. That's what he did. You stayed calm when everyone else was breaking. You found the solution when there wasn't one. You stood when standing seemed suicidal.
"All teams," his voice cut through the panicked chatter with blade-like clarity. "Sound off. I need confirmation that everyone's still mobile."
One by one, they reported in. Voices tight with fear, but still there. Still fighting.
Still alive.
For now.
In the distance, the winged figure spread its arms wide, and even from two miles away, Rin could feel it—the weight of its presence, the wrongness of its existence, the hunger that radiated from it like heat from a furnace.
It turned its head slowly, scanning the ruins of the city around it.
Searching.
And Rin knew, with the terrible cer
tainty of someone who'd stared into the abyss too many times, that it was searching for them.
For the dreamers.
For the light.
The hunt had begun.