The Lady Dream Devourer

The air was filled with a sharp, rusty irony and the thick, copper scent of blood. Clotted gore was smeared across the pavement in front of the pottery studio. At first glance from a distance, the street appeared quiet and deserted, but the silence was a lie.

The tension was suffocating. The high school girl lay paralyzed nearby, her mind shattered by terror. Beside her, the boy remained coiled in the wire, which was as sharp as a razor blade and lined with cruel spikes. His head was bleeding intensely. His nose, smothered in blood, was barely hanging onto the flesh of his face by a few threads of skin. His lips were sliced at the corners, revealing his teeth, and the wire had even snagged through his front gums. He was unable to cry even if he wanted to; he was just gasping to breathe. It was a sight of pure horror. The boy was staring into the sky, hanging on by the final thread of his life.

Zed maintained his Takeover spell, his voice booming with authority. “First command: release the boy!”

The woman in the Gothic Lolita outfit obeyed. She let the kid out of her clutch and threw the wire from her hands, dropping the boy back onto the pavement like a piece of unwanted trash.

“Ara, you look at me with such hatred. Isn’t that disrespectful?” the woman said. She was physically bound by Zed’s spell, unable to step forward, but her voice remained calm. “You don’t even know me, and I don’t know you. Be more respectful and introduce yourself first.”

She tilted her head, fighting the celestial chains of the Cassiopeia spell. “Well, let me do the honor. My name is Vixen Emilia. People from the nether realm also call me the Lady Dream Devourer. Respectfully, obviously.”

Despite the takeover spell, she managed to twitch her left hand. With a sharp, sudden movement, she stabbed the long nail of her pinky finger into her palm just below the finger. “Look, you dirtied my dress.” Blood began to well up and drip onto her red fabric. “The elegant lady, Vixen Emilia, offers her pure, elegant blood,” she whispered. “Respectfully... Pisces: Psyche Separation!”

The moment she whispered those words, a shimmering, pinkish crown materialized on her head. The spell she had just invoked was an ancient magic, one that allowed the caster to separate their consciousness for a brief window of time. It was a legendary and incredibly difficult technique to master. If the caster’s body was not strong enough to handle dual thinking, processing two streams of thought while the original consciousness slept and a duplicate awakened, the sorcerer would die instantly as their brain nerves fried from the overwhelming mana surge.

This high-risk gambit worked perfectly for Emilia. The spell isolated her controlled psyche, essentially putting it into a locked state, and birthed a fresh, duplicate consciousness. This new mind, armed with all her memories and abilities, took over her motor functions. Zed’s shackles remained on her physical frame, but the mind he was controlling was no longer the one pulling the strings.

She dashed toward Zed with furious speed. Her eyes were a haunting, pretty grey, and her red dress fluttered violently as she closed the distance. She appeared on Zed’s right side in an instant.

“Such an intelligent pest. You need some discipline on how to treat others, because trying to shackle someone is plain rude. How disrespectful!”

She was already wielding a razor-sharp wire in her hand. With a sudden flick, she lashed it toward Zed’s right arm. The wire wrapped around his wrist instantly, coiling with mechanical precision and beginning to saw through his outfit before delving deep into his skin.

“Aw shoot! You b*tch, how the hell did you—”

Before Zed could finish his sentence, she gave the wire a violent, practiced tug. The metal sawed through skin, muscle, and bone with a sickening, wet crunch. Within a second, his hand was completely severed, falling to the blood-stained pavement below.

***

Enishi, Raine, and Kris were running together along the sidewalk, heading toward the source of the screams. A pickup truck and a car sped past them on the road, but the further they ran, the quieter the street became. The houses began to thin out, replaced by high walls and hedges.

“Can I ask where you came from? You don’t look like a local, obviously,” Kris asked, his breathing steady despite the pace.

“Well, it’s a long story. To keep it short and normal, we arrived here on a flight. Today. Aha... ha... ha...” Enishi’s voice was dry and clearly lying.

“Bro, your voice says you aren’t spilling the beans,” Raine said. “Tell us exactly what's going on or it’ll get even more difficult to deal with this. You can trust us.”

Enishi glanced at the two of them keeping pace with him. “Well, we got in some real trouble with a magical, menacing space samurai. A Time Walker showed up and dropshipped us here to be precise. To K.U.S. We are not from this world at all. I hope that makes sense. Don’t ask me to explain anything more, I can’t!”

His breathing became faster, partly from the run and partly from the stress of the memory. Raine looked at him with a puzzled expression. “Okay, I get the samurai and parallel world stuff, but what’s K.U.S.?”

“Keep Us Safe. Basically, Koushi, a Time Walker, became my knight in popping, shining armor, but he turned out to be a moron later on. He left me and the other guy hanging here,” Enishi replied.

They rounded the corner and skidded to a halt. The air was thick with the scent of copper. They saw Zed, beaten and broken, with blood spilled across the pavement in a gruesome radius. Vixen Emilia stood over him. Her wine-red dress had a little blood spilled on it as she kicked Zed squarely in the face, grinding her heels into him with a slow, sadistic twist.

The group stood there, their lungs burning, but the air they inhaled was thick with the suffocating stench of a butcher shop. Just past the pottery studio, they saw it: the shredded remains of a man, his body reduced to a heap of symmetrical, crimson ribbons that barely resembled a human being. Nearby, a young girl lay curled on the pavement. She had finally succumbed to the horror, fainting into her own vomit, her eyes rolled back into her head.

But the most gut-wrenching sight was the high school boy. He was still coiled in the spiked wire, his body twitching in rhythmic intervals. He was barely hanging onto his last line of life, his breathing coming in shallow, wet rasps that sounded like a death rattle.

Enishi’s knees nearly buckled. He had seen Zed fight before, but he had never thought that he’d see Zed in such a condition. Raine and Kris stood frozen beside him. Vixen Emilia didn't even look up from Zed's face. She simply increased the pressure of her heel, her eyes glowing with a dull, grey satisfaction. The peaceful afternoon on Via Nino Bixio was gone for them, replaced by a nightmare they couldn't run away from.