Akira's POV
I was back on the road.
Not this road, not the one outside the ramen shop or any street on Dune, but that road. The specific one, wet and dark, with the rain coming sideways and my blood running in thin red lines into the cracks of the pavement.
I knew it was a dream the way you sometimes know, that faint meta-awareness running underneath the experience like a subtitle, but knowing didn't stop any of it. The concrete under my cheek was still cold. The rain was still indifferent.
What was different this time was that there was someone else there.
He was standing a few meters away, not looking at me. Looking down the road, toward wherever the road went when it left this particular moment. He was wearing my face, my old face, the one I had died in, and his clothes were dry, which was wrong, because both of us should have been soaked.
I tried to say something but he didn't turn around.
He just walked away, down the road, in the direction the road went and I watched him go from the ground and felt the particular specific helplessness of someone who cannot follow, and then the rain got louder, and then there was nothing.
I jolted awake sitting up.
The room was dark. The ramen shop below was quiet, which meant it was early enough that my mother hadn't started prep yet.
My hands were flat on the mattress and my heart was doing the thing it did after the bad ones, a fast, unsteady rhythm that took longer to settle than it should have.
I sat there and breathed until the rhythm evened out.
The dreams had been getting more frequent. Not always the same, not always the road. Sometimes it was the rooftop, the hands on my collar, the half second of nothing.
Sometimes it was earlier than that, classroom hallways, a torn bag, glasses in two pieces on the floor.
Sometimes it was my mother, the first one, her face turned away from me at an angle that felt final.
The common thread was that they all ended the same way, with something unfinished. With the feeling that I had left without completing something important and the thing I had left was not going to wait indefinitely.
I had filed it. The way I filed most things that didn't have immediate solutions. Present and noted and set aside until I had enough information to do something useful with it.
But the man on the road was new.
I got up before I could think about it any further, which was the strategy I had developed for the four-in-the-morning variety of thoughts that came without useful content and stayed longer than they were worth. I pulled on a shirt and pushed the balcony door open.
The night air hit first, cool and still in the specific way of very early morning before the city had decided to wake up and start generating its own weather.
The ramen shop was on a mid-level floor with a balcony that looked east, which I had decided, in my first week here, was either fortunate or a design choice by a previous tenant who had understood the value of watching the city wake up.
I stood at the railing and looked at the skyline.
The glow registered before my brain fully caught up with what it was seeing.
Red. Not sunrise, not traffic, not any of the ordinary lights that populated the eastern stretch of the city after dark.
A specific, pulsing red that rose from somewhere three or four kilometers out and sat against the dark sky with the sullen insistence of something that was not going to go away on its own.
A gate.
I had seen them from the hospital window. Had read about them in enough detail that the visual was not new.
But reading about something and standing on a balcony at four in the morning watching one pulse against the city skyline were different experiences.
The difference sat in my chest with a particular weight that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with the understanding that the abstract had just become specific.
The system didn't wait for me to finish processing it.
[New Quest Available.]
[Classification: Solo. D Rank.]
[Objective: Clear the active gate at coordinates 4.7E. Locate and eliminate the dungeon head.]
[Gate Status: Active. Current tier: D. Upgrade window: 40 minutes.]
[Note: A D tier gate upgrading to C tier in a residential zone will trigger a mandatory guild evacuation response. Civilian casualty probability increases significantly at C tier and above.]
[Reward: Experience points. System commendation.]
[Accept / Decline]
I read it twice.
Forty minutes. The gate was forty minutes from upgrading to a tier that would pull a full guild response into a residential area and raise the civilian casualty probability from manageable to significant.
The system had delivered this information with its characteristic absence of urgency, the clean impersonal text of something that stated facts and left the weight of them to me.
I looked at the red glow. Then I looked at the quest screen.
I pressed 'Accept'.
The screen folded away. I was already moving back into the room, pulling on the rest of my clothes, reaching for the dagger.
The cloth wrapping was getting worn at the edges, I had rewrapped it twice since discharge, and I made a note to find a proper sheath in the same part of my brain that was already running through everything I knew about D tier dungeons and what I was likely to find inside one.
Blood fiends, probably. Possibly a standard demon of sufficient power to have claimed the dungeon head position without the more sophisticated classifications.
D tier was not the lowest I could handle, technically, but the gap between technically and actually had already put me in a hospital once, and I was trying to be more precise about that distinction going forward.
I was almost to the door when the kitchen light came on.
I stopped. My mother was standing in the kitchen doorway in the specific posture of someone who had not been fully asleep, or had not been asleep long, or had that particular parental antenna that activates when something is wrong even before the conscious mind has caught up.
She looked at me, at the dagger, at the jacket I was pulling on, and her face did something that she did not let become the expression it was trying to be.
"There's a gate," I said, because starting with the truth was always faster.
"I know." She had heard it too, then, or seen it.
"How long."
"Forty minutes before it upgrades. I have to go now."
She was quiet for a moment. Not the silence of someone who didn't have anything to say, but the silence of someone choosing carefully between the things they could say and the ones they should.
I had learned the difference in the first week. My mother was not a woman who said everything she thought.
She was a woman who thought everything and said the part that mattered.
"Come back," she said.
Two words. She said them the way you say something that is too important to be decorated.
I looked at her across the kitchen in the dark and the weight of the dreams was still somewhere behind my sternum and the red glow was outside the balcony door and the system's forty-minute window was already running.
"I will" I reassured her once more..
She held my gaze for a moment longer. Then she nodded, once.
In the way she had that communicated both belief and the full awareness that belief was not the same as certainty and that she had made peace with that gap because the alternative was not letting me go.
I turned and went down the stairs and out into the street.
The red glow was brighter from the ground. More present. The city was still mostly asleep around it, a few early pedestrians who had stopped to look the way people stop to look at things they know are dangerous and haven't decided yet whether the danger is their problem.
It wasn't their problem. It was mine.
I checked my grip on the dagger through the cloth and then started moving toward the gate.