Theron dragged himself out of sleep. His scythe wasn't fully summoned, but it hung at the edge of the room's reality like a heavy, unspoken word. He sat up, blinking at Bruce and Kael with the unfocused, bleary stare of someone trying to pull themselves out of very deep water.
"I slept too long."
"You slept exactly enough," Bruce said. "The consolidation needed the time."
Theron rubbed his face. "I was dreaming. Something about... a ledger. The numbers were everything. The ledger was the whole world. And then it wasn't."
Bruce and Kael exchanged a quick look.
"Apparently, D-rank comes with a mandatory surfacing dream," Kael said. "Mine was about the ancient ones. Yours was a ledger. Did you get hit, Bruce?"
Bruce paused, casting his mind back over the dark stretch of the night. He had slept deeply, but there was a residue at the edge of his consciousness. He focused on it, and the shape materialized.
