Insomniac Player

The intruder entered Room Sixteen without bothering to open the door.

Black cracks spread across the wood, and his body passed through them like smoke, reassembling inside the abandoned dormitory a heartbeat later. Damien was already gone.

The stranger followed the thread buried in Damien’s consciousness, tracking it through a washroom, down a service staircase, and into the first-floor corridor. The route should have eaten a full three minutes. The dream burned through it in twenty seconds instead.

I’m learning this faster than he expects, Damien thought.

Every corridor inside this constructed Saint Mary’s had grown out of a real memory. He couldn’t imagine a wall into existence or turn the floor into fire on a whim; the formation rejected anything unsupported by lived experience. What he did have, though, was years of nearly identical nights stacked one on top of another.

One night the service staircase had led him toward the kitchen. Another time he’d turned toward the chapel after hearing glass shatter somewhere off in the dark. During a bad storm, fallen plaster had once forced him through the dormitory instead of his usual route. The building never changed. His remembered path through it did, night to night, and he could switch between those memories at will, right at every intersection.

The intruder kept charging forward. Damien made the corridor repeat itself around him.

Room Seven. The linen closet. The cracked painting of Saint Mary. Turn left.

Room Seven. The linen closet. The cracked painting.

The intruder stopped dead on the third pass. "A loop." He struck the painting hard enough to split it.

The corridor cracked open from floor to ceiling, moonlight pouring through the gap to reveal the Dream Corridor waiting beyond it. The stranger reached for the opening.

Damien shifted memories again on instinct, and the split became a classroom window instead, rain hammering the glass, the corridor stitching itself back together behind the intruder’s shoulder as if nothing had ever broken.

The masked man turned slowly. "You’re awake enough to resist the formation. Not trained enough to actually control it. Every change you make damages your own mind a little more."

He wasn’t wrong. Pressure built hard behind Damien’s eyes with every switch, each one forcing him to hold two full memories at once and make the formation choose between them. Details had already started bleeding together. A child’s drawing had appeared taped to the kitchen wall. Chapel benches now occupied half of a classroom that had never had any.

I can’t keep doing this forever, he realized. Good news, neither can he.

The man’s black form flickered visibly after every wall he broke apart. Whatever stood in front of Damien wasn’t physically present at all, it depended entirely on a thin tether running back through the corridor, into the corrupted moon jade, and from there out to a real body sitting somewhere well beyond the Pavilion’s walls. Every act of force he threw cost something drawn through that same tether.

I need him to spend enough of it to actually weaken.

The stranger raised both hands, and dozens of black needles filled the corridor at once. Damien ducked into the nearest classroom.

The needles chased him in, striking desks, walls, the old chalkboard, and every impact reshaped the room a little further. Desks turned into operating tables. Paper decorations peeled into strips of skin. Words crawled across the chalkboard on their own.

ABANDONED. UNWANTED. FORGOTTEN.

The dream had found pain easier to shape than furniture, apparently, and it reached straight into Damien’s own memories to prove it.

Children’s voices whispered somewhere behind him. Nobody came for you. Nobody chose you.

Then a different voice, older, colder. Even the system tried to erase you.

Damien froze. That last voice didn’t belong to Saint Mary’s at all, and the intruder hadn’t reacted to it either, which meant he hadn’t deliberately dug it up. His attack had stirred whatever the formation was already holding underneath everything else.

Damien forced himself to breathe. One. Two. Three.

The whispers kept going regardless, so he counted them instead of letting himself believe a single word. Seven child voices. One adult voice, repeating every fourth interval on a pattern too clean to be real.

Artificial. Not memory. Something planted.

He grabbed a remembered chalkboard eraser and wiped straight through the word UNWANTED. The whole classroom blurred at once, and he stepped through the blur, emerging in the kitchen a beat before the intruder followed him in.

"You don’t fight like a physician," Damien said.

The wooden mask tilted. "And you don’t dream like a patient."

The man extended one hand, and a black cord snapped tight around Damien’s throat, yanking him clean across the kitchen. He struck a table, lost his footing entirely, and felt the cord tighten despite having no actual airway to crush, the dream translating danger into suffocation because his mind already understood what that felt like.

The stranger closed the distance. "I came for the moon jade. You’re an inconvenience attached to it, nothing more."

No recognition sat behind that voice at all, no old grudge, no hidden familiarity waiting underneath. The man saw only Earthling, some Level 20 outsider who’d noticed the wrong thread at the wrong time. Whatever secrets Damien actually carried, this man clearly knew none of them.

That makes him simpler to read, Damien thought. Not any safer to fight, though.

He reached beneath his shirt out of pure habit. No First Blood Dagger there, obviously, this body carried none of that. His hand closed around a ring of old keys instead, the ones he’d carried through a thousand night patrols at Saint Mary’s without a single thought.

He drove one straight into the black cord. It didn’t cut through, not even close.

But the contact reminded the formation that the cord itself didn’t belong in this particular memory at all. Silver light flashed along the key’s edge, and the cord loosened enough for him to twist free. He kicked the table into the stranger’s path, and it passed harmlessly through the man’s legs, but the half-second delay was exactly enough.

Damien broke for the hallway. The bell rang somewhere in the distance. His waking anchor.

He’d avoided it deliberately until now. Ringing it would end the session outright and drag his consciousness back into his real body, but the intruder’s projection was still hooked into him through that probe. If Damien woke up now, the man might just withdraw straight into the Dream Corridor and try Mei Lian’s guide domain a second time.

He needed to isolate the projection completely first.

He looked down at the pulsing thread. Every seventh heartbeat, energy traveled through it, headed outward. That connection was the man’s whole source of strength in here. The formation’s emergency expulsion would only treat him as foreign if his path back no longer crossed through the shared corridor at all.

Can’t cut the tether. Can stretch it, though, until the corridor seal closes between us.

He ran, deliberately, away from the chapel.

The intruder emerged from the kitchen behind him. "Your exit’s behind me."

Damien let genuine fear show on his face, no acting required for that part, and bolted toward the dormitories instead. The stranger followed exactly as expected.

Damien led him through the first loop again. Room Seven. Linen closet. Cracked painting.

At the final corner he swapped in the memory of a winter patrol and sent the path downward instead. Second loop. Guard office. Dining hall. Service stairs.

The black tether stretched thin across every single transition, its pulses weakening with each pass. The intruder started smashing walls just to shorten the route, spending more power with every strike.

Third loop. Fourth. On the fifth, the man finally stopped playing along entirely.

He slammed both hands against the corridor and released a full wave of darkness. Saint Mary’s broke apart around them both. The ceiling peeled away in sheets. Doors shattered outright. Moonlight fell through an empty sky, and the chapel rose at the far end of the wreckage, its bell rope hanging clear and untouched.

The intruder had found the anchor. "Did you actually think I’d get lost in a child’s hallway?"

Damien stood among the fragments of his own memories, his head throbbing hard enough that the whole dream had stopped holding a consistent shape. One more forced change might collapse the entire domain around both of them.

The intruder walked toward the chapel, unhurried. "When you wake, I’ll return through the corridor. Your physician will open her door eventually."

Damien looked down. The black tether crossed the ground between them, passing straight through the chapel doors and vanishing upward, following the shortest path back to the external moon jade. The stranger had torn down the entire maze to reach this point, and in doing it, laid his own tether directly across Damien’s waking anchor without meaning to.

Damien ran for the chapel.

The intruder threw a black needle that caught his shoulder, filling his arm with a cold, hollow emptiness. He kept moving anyway. A second needle hit his back. The chapel doors got closer.

Then the stranger appeared in front of him without crossing any distance at all, palm slamming into Damien’s chest.

Damien fell against the bell rope, black cords already wrapping around his wrists and throat.

"Stay unconscious," the man said.

"That," Damien managed, "has always been the difficult part for me."

He closed his hand around the tether instead of the rope.

The intruder realized what that meant a half-second too late. Damien pulled the black thread across the bell rope and wrapped them tight together, and the foreign connection cinched down hard around the exact object the formation recognized as his emergency exit. Every pulse traveling back toward the intruder’s real body now had to pass straight through it.

Damien threw his weight backward. The bell rang.

Sound tore through the dream like actual daylight. The chapel windows burst into silver, and Saint Mary’s corridors flooded back all at once, layered on top of each other across hundreds of remembered nights simultaneously. The formation traced Damien’s consciousness, found the foreign presence still attached to it, and followed the tether straight back out.

Panels bloomed across the shattered sky.

➤[Waking anchor activated.]

➤[Patient consciousness identified.]

➤[Additional consciousness detected.]

The intruder clawed at the cord around Damien’s throat. "Stop!"

Damien pulled the bell rope again.

➤[Access authorization: None.]

➤[Foreign consciousness expulsion initiated.]

The wooden mask cracked down the middle.

For one instant Damien caught a narrow human face underneath it, older than the voice had ever suggested, shock breaking apart into raw fury. "You have no idea who I am."

The third bell erased him mid-sentence. Black thread ripped free from Damien’s temple, recoiling through the collapsing dream and carrying the intruder’s whole projection out of Saint Mary’s, across the sealed corridor, and back through the parasite mark buried inside the moon jade.

The final notices opened in front of him.

➤[Foreign consciousness expelled.]

➤[Dream synchronization unsuccessful.]

➤[Reason: User consciousness remained active.]

Damien opened his eyes above the silver lake.

All six moon-jade mirrors had gone completely black. Physicians shouted across the pavilions in every direction. Formation lines snapped one after another. Mei Lian knelt beside the control platform, blood running freely from her nose, one hand pressed flat against the jade door marker that had almost been breached.

Elder Ren appeared at his bedside almost instantly. "What happened in there?"

Damien’s skull pounded. His body hadn’t managed a single second of actual sleep.

The treatment failed exactly the way I expected it to. He looked toward the cracked black thread still hanging off the central moon jade. "A guest let himself in without knocking."

Healer Orr caught the thread carefully between two fingers, blue light traveling down its length and revealing a small inverted crescent burned into the surface.

Elder Ren saw the mark, and his silver eyes went wide. "Mo Xian."

The name meant nothing to Damien.

The fear it put into every face across the Pavilion meant considerably more.