The sky was torn. Crimson and silver ribbons danced across the night like a diseased aurora, casting an unnatural glow over the shattered cityscape. Cassian crouched behind the rusted shell of an overturned car, his gloved fingers tight around his rifle. The fog rolled thick between the broken skyscrapers, obscuring everything beyond twenty meters.
"Reality stability at eighteen percent," his visor HUD flashed in warning red. The display flickered, numbers dancing erratically as another distortion wave passed through the area. The world itself seemed to shiver.
"Martinez, on my six. Chen, take point," Cassian whispered into his comms. The remaining five members of his tactical squad moved silently through the ruins, their dream-thread enhanced armor plates glinting with faint blue energy—protection against psychic attacks that conventional kevlar couldn't stop.
Cassian wiped condensation from his cracked visor. Weeks of fighting had left him bone-weary. His muscles ached with fatigue that went beyond physical exhaustion—it was as if reality itself was draining him.
None of this was supposed to happen. We thought we could control dreams.
The thought came unbidden as he watched a nearby streetlight flicker and bend, its metal pole briefly twisting into an impossible spiral before snapping back to normal. Another reality fracture.
"Movement, eleven o'clock," Chen's voice crackled through the comms.
Cassian signaled the squad to freeze. In the fog ahead, shadows moved with a fluidity that defied natural motion—too quick, too angular. The footprints appeared in the rubble-strewn street before the creatures' paws landed.
Dreambeasts. Nightmare hounds.
They came in a blur of twisted limbs and impossible geometries—wolf-like creatures with bodies that phased in and out of existence. Their eyes glowed with malevolent silver light, jaws opening far wider than any natural predator's could.
"Suppressive fire!" Cassian barked, his rifle already spitting bullets. "Martinez, Chen—flank left. Layla, with me!"
The squad responded with practiced precision, but Cassian could see the fear in their eyes. The bullets tore through the first wave of nightmare hounds, but the creatures barely slowed. Where flesh should have torn, their forms simply rippled like disturbed water.
"Physical rounds ineffective!" Sergeant Layla shouted, her back pressed against his. "Switch to dream-gel!"
Cassian reached for the specialized grenades at his belt. "Cover me!"
As his squad laid down covering fire, he primed the dream-gel grenade—a technology they'd developed only months ago when conventional weapons proved useless against the dream incursions. The canister hummed with unnatural energy as he hurled it into the center of the approaching horde.
The explosion released no fire or shrapnel—instead, a pulse of blue-white energy expanded outward in concentric rings. The nearest dreambeasts froze mid-lunge, their forms crystallizing into glass-like statues.
"Move up! Target the frozen ones!" Cassian ordered.
For a moment, it seemed to work. The specialized rounds from their rifles shattered the frozen dreambeasts into fragments that dissolved into mist. But for every creature they destroyed, three more phased into existence behind them.
A nightmare hound leaped twenty feet through the air, its trajectory impossible, defying gravity. Martinez screamed as it phased partially through his chest armor before solidifying inside him. Blood erupted from his mouth as he collapsed.
"Fall back to position Delta!" Cassian shouted, firing three perfect shots into an approaching beast. The specialized rounds tore through its semi-corporeal form, but it barely slowed.
"Cassian!" Layla's voice cut through the chaos. She stood ten meters away, reloading her weapon. "They're coming from below too!"
The ground beneath her feet rippled like water. Cassian lunged forward, reaching for her—
"Layla, move!"
Her eyes widened in recognition of the danger, but too late. The concrete beneath her feet dissolved, and nightmare hounds erupted from the darkness below. Their jaws closed around her legs, her torso, her throat. Cassian watched in horror as his childhood friend, his second-in-command, was torn apart before his eyes. Her scream cut short as her body separated into a red mist.
Something primal snapped inside him. Rage and desperation fueled his movements as he emptied his magazine into the swarm that had taken Layla. The specialized rounds tore through dream-flesh, but more beasts kept coming.
Adjust. Survive. Later.
The beasts moved with increasing distortion—some appearing to run sideways on air, others leaving afterimages that solidified into new attackers. A hound lunged at Chen, its jaws clamping around his arm. The beast's teeth seemed to pass through his armor like it wasn't there, but the blood that sprayed was horrifyingly real.
"They're adapting to the dream-gel!" shouted Rodriguez, the squad's tech specialist. "It's like they're learning our—" His words ended in a gurgle as a nightmare hound phased through the concrete beneath him, emerging with its jaws locked around his throat.
Cassian fired his last dream-gel round, creating a momentary barrier between his dwindling squad and the encroaching horrors. The gray world around them pulsed with unnatural colors where reality fractured further. Through a tear in the air itself, he glimpsed something beyond—a landscape of impossible architecture and swirling energies.
Every plan fails. You fail better.
"All units fall back to extraction point!" Command's voice crackled through his comms. "Immediate evac ordered. Containment protocol initiated."
Relief flooded through Cassian's veins. They were being pulled out. This nightmare would end.
"You heard them," he shouted to his three remaining squad members. "Extraction point! Move!"
They fought their way through the ruins, dream-gel grenades creating momentary paths through the hordes. The extraction point was just two blocks ahead—an open plaza where the choppers would land.
Cassian's relief turned to confusion as he reached the edge of the plaza. The evac choppers were already there—and already lifting off.
"Command, we have visual on extraction. Request immediate pickup!" he shouted into his comms.
Static answered him.
"Command! We are at the extraction point! Three survivors plus squad leader! Respond!"
The helicopters rose higher into the torn sky, rotors cutting through the crimson aurora. Chen fired a flare, its green light pathetically small against the fracturing reality around them.
Then he saw it—a small blinking light in the center of the plaza. His enhanced visor zoomed in automatically, identifying the signature: Dream Bomb. Armed. Countdown active.
Betrayal hit him like a physical blow. The realization was cold and clear—they weren't being extracted. They were being erased.
"Bomb!" he shouted to his remaining squad. "Clear the area! Move!"
But there was nowhere to go. Dreambeasts closed in from all sides, the helicopters disappeared into the night sky, and the bomb's timer ticked down relentlessly.
In the end, it wasn't the monsters that killed us. It was the dream of control.
Cassian's mind raced, tactical training kicking in even as hope died. The command structure had deemed them expendable—sacrificial pawns in a war they barely understood. The dream rifts were spreading too fast, the containment protocols failing. His squad was just collateral damage in a desperate attempt to seal the breach.
"Orders mean nothing if you're already dead," he muttered, grabbing Chen's shoulder. "Run. Now."
They made it twenty meters before the timer reached zero. There was no conventional explosion—instead, a brilliant blue-silver spiral surged upward from the device, tearing a hole in reality itself. The energy expanded in a perfect sphere, consuming everything it touched.
The wave moved with deliberate slowness, as if time itself stretched thin around its edges. Cassian watched as Chen was caught first, his body dissolving not into ash but into motes of light that spiraled upward into the tear in the sky. His face showed no pain—only surprise, and then a strange peace.
The wave reached Cassian a heartbeat later. He felt no pain either, only a sensation of unraveling, as if the very threads of his existence were being gently pulled apart and rewoven into something else. His last conscious thought was bitter clarity: they had always been expendable pawns in a game they weren't meant to understand. The experiment had failed, and they were simply part of the cleanup.
The wave hit him with impossible force. His body vaporized instantly, but somehow his consciousness remained—clinging to the spiraling dream energy as it tore a bridge between worlds.
Memories flashed before him:
His younger sister's laugh on her tenth birthday. The day he received his first command. Layla's face the night before their first deployment. The faces of his dead comrades, one by one.
Then blackness.
He was falling without end, through a void that felt both infinite and suffocating. Distant whispers brushed against his fading consciousness—words in languages he couldn't understand but somehow recognized. The sensation wasn't physical—there was no wind against his skin, no acceleration in his stomach—just the knowledge that he was descending into something vast and unknowable.
Fragments of thought clung to him like burrs: Had the bomb sealed the breach? Was Earth safe? Did his sacrifice mean anything at all? The questions dissolved into the void, unanswered.
The darkness grew less absolute. Pinpricks of light—not stars, but something else—began to appear around him. They pulsed with colors he had no names for, bleeding into one another in patterns that seemed almost meaningful.
In his last moment of awareness, he saw a shadowed figure standing at the threshold of a torn dreamgate. The figure reached out, lips moving in silent invitation or warning. Something about its silhouette struck Cassian as familiar, though he couldn't place why. A sense of dread and recognition washed over him simultaneously.
Then nothing.
When I opened my eyes again, the sky was bleeding, and the world was no longer my own.