“What a truly beautiful scene.”
A ticklish voice flowed out, as if admiring the picturesque view unfolding before her eyes.
Nameless Legion Commander, Lucid Rem of Lust.
If one were to summarize the dream she created in a single word, it would be peaceful.
It wasn’t a particularly large house.
The rather aged wooden structure was just the right size for a family of four.
The kitchen on the first floor.
A woman who appeared to be the mother was preparing ingredients with a soft hum.
Next to her, a pot simmered over a hot flame, filling the small home with warmth and a cozy aroma that drew the family together.
The father, seated in a chair, seemed to be reading the newspaper with a stern expression, but the tips of his feet tapped in rhythm with his wife’s humming.
As if enchanted by the smell of food, the children came down from upstairs.
An older sister and a younger brother, both looking to be of a decent age.
The two appeared to have had a light argument just moments earlier, as they bickered quietly even while coming down and sitting at the table.
But only for a moment.
As the father folded his newspaper and picked up his spoon, the rest of the family followed suit and began eating.
It was the very picture of peace.
A family without a single hint of worry or trouble.
“It is a lovely sight indeed… but something still feels off.”
However, the expression on Rem’s face, the very creator of the dream, was tinged with puzzlement.
Nowhere in this place…
Could she see the presence she had been seeking.
Could it be that man is the father?
Or perhaps the youngest son?
But as Rem looked at their faces, her expression only grew more perplexed.
It was no wonder, really—
The faces of the happy family, basking in this harmonious atmosphere, looked just like mannequins displayed in a shop window on the street.
Featureless.
Just like mannequins without eyes, nose, or mouth.
It was clear from the surroundings that the mood was one of warmth and familial joy, yet strangely, their faces couldn’t be seen.
And as realization dawned, Lucid Rem’s expression gradually hardened.
Several reasons came to mind that could explain this.
This scene was one crafted by Lucid Rem after entering Shane’s mental world. It was an illusion projected from his consciousness.
In other words, this was a scene Shane desired. Something he wanted to see.
However, the reason the family members’ faces weren’t visible lay in Shane’s psychological defenses.
In short, while he had allowed this scenery to be shown, he had not granted permission for their facial features to be revealed.
Which meant—
“A dream is still a dream, after all.”
The target was fully aware of the situation.
***
“……”
The scene changed in an instant.
Where warm sunlight had been pouring in through the window, now cold moonlight streamed in, spattered with fresh blood.
The cozy home, once filled with the delicious smell of food, now reeked with the stench of rotting corpses.
The humming mother’s lips no longer made a sound.
The father who had hidden contentment behind a stoic expression now wore a grotesquely twisted face.
The siblings who had been bickering just moments ago were now huddled in the corner of the kitchen, watching their parents be devoured by the dead.
Lucid Rem furrowed her brows at the dream she had crafted herself going wildly off course.
The beautiful scene she had just admired was now completely ruined.
It felt as though someone had thrown mud onto a work of art.
With a gleam in her seductive purple eyes, Lucid turned to one side.
There stood Shane, now wearing a blank, pure-white mask.
“This is unexpected. I thought you were just someone pulling the strings behind the Myo Tribe’s chieftain. I didn’t think you were that masked man everyone’s been talking about.”
“The feeling’s mutual. I didn’t expect you to show up in person.”
“I was curious, you see. Just how that prickly Myo Tribe chieftain ended up falling under your sway.”
As she spoke, Lucid soon shifted the topic.
“But this scene is rather unpleasant.”
“Why is that?”
“Because it’s not lovely, is it? I love peace, you see.”
“For someone who says that, Nameless doesn’t seem like such a peaceful organization.”
“Well, to protect peace, blood must be shed. Even so, their deaths won’t be as tragic as the scene you created here. Each death will hold meaning, rooted in personal convictions.”
Lucid spoke as if she genuinely believed that, but Shane gave a faint chuckle.
As the former First Legion Commander of Nameless in his previous life, no one understood the reality behind this very scene better than he did.
“Death is just death. Though the consequences of a death may differ, to the dead themselves, it’s ultimately meaningless.”
Having faced countless deaths firsthand in his past life, Shane knew.
Their deaths were always wrapped in meaning and justification, but in the end, those narratives were nothing more than stories crafted by the living for the sake of the living.
And that legion commander of lust….she was the kind of woman who could wrap death in the most beautiful guise.
Like oil and water, the two were fundamentally incompatible in their beliefs.
“Still, wasn’t that earlier scene far more beautiful?”
Lucid wasn’t entirely wrong.
After all, beautiful things were always preferable to cruel ones.
“That’s just the wish of the living. When someone else takes it upon themselves to dress it up, that’s not compassion….it’s deception and arrogance. Meaning should lie in death itself. You shouldn’t smear it with lies.”
The dream that Lucid had just created was a recreation of a family Shane had personally annihilated in the past.
A brother and sister who had fled their undead-turned parents, only to die nameless in a mountain cave.
To Shane who remembered all of it vividly, that peaceful scene was nothing more than mockery of the dead.
But Lucid’s next words pierced right into Shane’s heart.
“But in the end, you allowed me to create that scene. Doesn’t that mean you do desire it too?”
“That’s right. I wanted to see it, just once. What kind of life they might have drawn had I not interfered. But… a dream is still just a dream.”
Unless the organization called Nameless was erased completely, the peaceful vision Shane longed for would never return.
Lucid, realizing she could not sway Shane, looked at him with a trace of pity.
“Your world is even bleaker and more lifeless than this desert.”
“Who knows…”
Shane waved his hand as he looked out over the death-filled dreamscape.
Manipulating his own mental world was easier for Shane than flipping his hand.
The scenery shifted accordingly, now filled with a darkness that showed nothing at all.
“Even a judgment like that is too much luxury for me.”
Something began to rise from the black floor where nothing had existed before.
The stench of blood.
Blood started to fill the ground entirely, and from within that thick, sticky pool, a withered hand emerged.
A hand with torn flesh, no part of it left intact.
More hands like it rose from every direction.
“Even a bleak, lifeless landscape has a certain charm. But what about this?”
“…….”
At Shane’s words, Rem’s brow twitched.
She understood dreams better than anyone.
The scene unfolding before her wasn’t just a world the man in front of her had imagined into existence.
What was being revealed was something he had seen and experienced in real life.
Countless hands pulled their bodies up from the sea of blood.
Just like the family of four she had seen earlier.
All were corpses with unrecognizable faces, creaking as they turned their gazes toward Rem.
Sensing a foreboding presence, Rem quickly unleashed her power.
Though it was someone else’s mental world, here, she could become or create anything.
Above the empty sky, a sun began to rise.
It was well known that the undead were vulnerable to sunlight.
Not only that, but the intense heat evaporated the blood rising from the ground.
Red steam filled the air, and the undead that began to reveal themselves appeared to melt in the scorching heat.
Rem didn’t stop there.
Rain began to fall from the sky.
But it was no ordinary rain. It carried the energy of silver.
That holy rain stripped the undead of their unholy power.
However—
Even with the sunlight scorching their flesh and the holy rain pouring from above, the undead continued to march toward Rem.
“How…?”
“You shouldn’t compare them to those pathetic necromancers’ undead.”
If Rem had made a mistake, it was in thinking that these undead were created by ordinary dark magic.
But these were masterpieces crafted by the Shane of a former life and his corrupted self.
Even under the sunlight, they did not lose their power, and no matter how much they were exposed to divine energy, they did not weaken.
It wasn’t that they had been forcibly raised through mere dark magic—it was something far more fundamental: an overwhelming emotion of envy toward the living.
In other words, their origin itself was their driving force.
Just as Rem bit her lip and was about to change her approach, Shane’s voice rang out once more.
“Let’s put an end to this little farce, shall we?”
With that, Shane knelt on one knee and thrust his hand into the blood-soaked earth.
What emerged was—
“Y-Your Majesty…”
“……!!”
A woman, half-naked and gripped by the neck. More precisely, she was of the succubus race.
“Unable to appear yourself, and instead coming through the power of a subordinate. Still the same as ever.”
“…….”
“Look closely, succubus lost in a dream. There is no meaning to be found in death.”
Crunch.
With just a small application of force—
Rem’s subordinate, the succubus, had her neck snapped before she could even scream, her body going limp like a puppet with its strings cut.
And with that, change came swiftly.
The mental world sustained by the succubus’s power began to shatter piece by piece.
“……I won’t forget this.”
“Oh dear. A mere intruder, and yet you leave with such a cliché parting line.”
“…….”
Through the succubus who had just died, Rem had manifested herself….and now she watched her body fragment as it began to crumble apart.
The death of her subordinate was a humiliating defeat.
More than anything, it was Shane’s entire way of thinking that Rem couldn’t stand.
Because it felt as though he were denying her very existence.
And yet, what made her angrier was that she couldn’t refute a single word of what he had said.
“Soon, the time will come for you to wake from this dream, Queen of the succubi.”
“Well. Whether it’s reality or a dream world….in the end, it all ends the same. You just haven’t realized it yet. What about you?”
With those cryptic words, Rem vanished.
***
The dream world began to collapse.
Shane watched as the world, filled with blood and corpses, crumbled and soon returned to a void where nothing existed.
A space where only darkness remained.
Just being in this place made Shane feel sick to his stomach, but he held it back and looked down at his feet.
A tiny speck of light, barely visible even when he focused his eyes.
Precisely because only darkness existed here, that small light felt all the more precious. It was his inner self. Something Shane had tried hard to keep hidden all this time while facing Lucid Rem.
As he stepped back, moving his foot away, the light began to blink and slowly grow in size.
And just as it was about to fully unfold—
Shane summoned darkness once more, shrinking the light back down.
It was a light he longed to see, more than anything, but one he still didn’t deserve. So Shane suppressed his desire.
If the day ever came when he could gaze upon that light…
It would be the moment he atoned for a past too heavy to bear on his own shoulders.
Whether that day would ever come….no one could say.
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