[THE VOID - MEMORY PRISON]
Kai opened his empty arms. He didn't care about the heavy, suffocating filth of the cell.
He didn't care about the stench of rusted iron and ancient decay. He stepped blindly into the darkness and embraced the trembling woman.
He pulled Nyra's cold, scarred body into his warmth, holding her as tightly as he could.
"It's okay," Kai whispered, his voice cracking.
"I'm here. I've got you."
But the exact millisecond their skin touched, Kai's eyes violently rolled back into his skull.
It wasn't a hug. It was a Data Transfer.
The fragile logic of the dream shattered into a million jagged pieces. Kai was no longer standing in the cold stone cell.
He was violently sucked into the raging current of her memories, his consciousness hijacked and forced to witness every agonizing second of the hell she had endured.
[FLASHBACK: YEAR 1 ]
He saw Nyra waking up in the dark. She wasn't tied to the wall by ordinary iron chains.
She was bound by a grotesque, pulsing fleshy rope that emerged directly from the center of her own chest, tethering her heart to the absolute darkness of the Void.
She screamed. It was a raw, vocal-cord-tearing sound. She pulled at the fleshy tether, her fingernails breaking and bleeding against the floor. She called for help until her throat bled.
But only the darkness whispered back.
[FLASHBACK: YEAR 3 ]
She realized she couldn't feel physical pain anymore. The agonizing cramps of starvation had died weeks ago.
Her belly was a silent, hollow tomb—a vacuum where her own body had begun to cannibalize itself, her system grazing upon the very marrow of her spine just to keep her brain functioning.
Desperate for release, desperate for the quiet peace of death, Kai watched through her eyes as Nyra forcefully bit completely through her own tongue.
She collapsed. She waited for the blood loss to take her. She waited for the final silence.
Instead, a jarring, mechanical correction took hold of reality.
[System Notice: Host Termination Attempt Detected]
[Action Denied]
[Reconstruction Initiated]
A cold, blue digital light washed over her broken body. Her severed tongue forcibly knitted back together, the muscle fibers stitching themselves shut.
The spilled blood reversed its flow, forcing its way back into her veins.
It wasn't a divine miracle; it was a forceful, algorithmic reassembly. It was a life sentence.
It was the System confirming that her agency over her own life had been irrevocably severed.
She wasn't allowed to live, and she was strictly forbidden to die.
[FLASHBACK: YEAR 7 ]
The crying had stopped. The desperate screaming had stopped.
Now, there was only laughter.
Kai watched in absolute, paralyzing horror as a skeletal, emaciated Nyra sat on the floor of the cell.
She was using her own regenerated blood to draw a complex, frantic geometric pattern on the stone tiles.
It was a Transmutation Circle from an old anime they used to talk about.
"If I draw it..." Nyra giggled, her hollow eyes wide and manic in the dark.
"I can summon a Hero. I can summon him. I can summon Kai."
She slammed her bloody palms onto the circle.
Nothing happened. The stone remained cold.
The realization that it was useless washed over her, and the manic laughter instantly mutated into a guttural, soul-crushing wail.
Then, she heard it. A voice echoing through the heavy stone. His voice.
"Nyra..."
Her dead eyes suddenly sparked with light. She scrambled to the door, screaming his name, her bloody hands beating against the stone. She begged him to come in.
She begged him to open the door.
But two entire years passed. The voice just kept ringing on a loop—a cruel glitch in the dream, feeding her a false hope that never, ever arrived.
[PRESENT TIME]
"BLAARGH!"
Kai violently shoved himself away from Nyra, doubling over as he crashed to his hands and knees.
He vomited acidic bile onto the stone floor, his entire body convulsing with shock.
The sheer horror of it. The unfathomable weight of the time. Kai's hands couldn't stop shaking. His mouth felt like dry sand, longing for any kind of anchor to reality.
The psychological torture was too massive, too dense for a human mind to process in a single second.
He gasped for air, wiping his mouth with the back of his trembling hand. He looked up at Nyra with absolute terror.
She went through that? For nine years?
But Nyra didn't seem to notice his horror.
She didn't seem to care about her own trauma or the blood on the floor.
She crawled toward him, her heavy chains rattling against the stone. Her dull eyes were wide with sudden, innocent worry.
"Kai? Are you okay?"
She reached out with a trembling, skeletal hand, gently wiping a speck of vomit from his chin with her dirty, ragged sleeve.
"Did you get hurt anywhere? Are you hungry? I don't have any food, but..."
Kai's breath hitched. She was fussing over him. After nine straight years of unimaginable, mind-breaking torture, her very first instinct was to ask if he was hungry.
A volatile mixture of sympathy, grief, and pure rage exploded inside Kai's chest.
He opened his mouth to speak, to tell her how deeply sorry he was, to swear to her that he would burn the entire System to the ground to fix this.
"Kai?"
Nyra's voice trembled.
But beneath it—
Another voice overlapped.
Perfectly synchronized. Almost identical to his own.
Don't be naïve.
Kai's vision flickered, static blurring the edges of his sight.
For a split second, Nyra's shadow moving slightly wrong while she hugs Kai. The shadow was taller.
Darker.
You saw her memories. But whose memories were they really?
Kai's heartbeat skipped, freezing in his chest.
The Goddess of Lucid Dreams does not show you the truth.
She shows you what you can survive.
On the wall, the dark shadow smiled.
Ask yourself, Glitch—
Who is dreaming right now?