8,331Here we go.
Cover Art: Curbizzle
Chapter 75
The Beast was catching up with them.
That was the only name Jaune could think to give it. The thing was a presence in the back of Salem's mind, always there, always hovering. It didn't matter how much distance he dreamed between them and it. He constructed an elaborate week of travel with the sun and moon flying by overhead, and yet it dogged their every step.
Even Salem was shocked.
"How is it still following us? We've been travelling for over a week!"
It had been minutes in truth, but she'd still been tricked into dreaming up hundreds of miles of travel, so whatever it was should have been left behind. Were it just a nightmare, she should have dreamed something new up – something that made sense given the distance from the tower. It could have been bandits on the road or monsters or even a dragon, not this thing pursuing them.
Pursuing but never quite catching. It always hovered just out of sight, roaring and screaming and filling the air with a sense of dreadful tension. If he had his aura full, and wasn't so aware it had torn a chunk from it before, Jaune might have headed towards it to investigate.
Ozpin pulled him aside. "How close are we to Vale?"
"Not at all."
"What? But you could cross the distance for us."
"And bring this with us," Jaune pointed out, with a nervous look backwards. "I'm not sure if my Semblance could recreate damage it causes to the city, but I'm not sure it couldn't either. Are we willing to take that risk?"
Ozpin cursed, visibly frustrated. Their plan had worked so easily – they were in Salem's dream, they'd tricked her, and it should have been painfully simple to use her to find where she was hiding in or outside the city. Instead, they had this Beast in her head refusing to leave them be.
"We can't ignore this," Ozpin said. "What if we killed the nightmare?"
"You think that's what it is?"
"It must be." Ozpin nodded, certain. "It's a figment of her imagination, perhaps some lingering sense of unease or fear relating to the tower she spent most of her mortal life trapped within. A persistent fear that won't let her go, which follows her even in her dreams."
It sounded plausible. Oobleck would have had more to say, but the idea of Salem subconsciously feeling trapped inside the tower and the dream reflecting that with an unease that refused to let them escape made some amount of sense. Enough for Jaune to agree.
"Fine. But what about Salem?"
"We can leave her at a camp. In this time, she was but a trapped maiden and I – we, here – knights. She would accept being told to stay safe while we deal with the threat."
"This is her dream, though," Jaune pointed out. "And if she gets so much as nervous on her own, she'll start manifesting other things."
"No better than if she sees this monster and imagines it too powerful for us to fight. If she imagines it stronger, it'll become stronger. No?"
"It would." Jaune grimaced. "Fine. You convince her to stay – but do something with your magic. This isn't real, so all you need to do is convince her she's safe and as long as she doesn't let doubt or fear creep in, she will be safe. But if she panics, a dreamed-up monster will find her no matter how well she hides or how well she's protected."
Ozpin nodded. "I'll convince her. Salem is – or was – innocent at this time. Trusting. If I tell her a simple cup is a magical artefact capable of keeping all monsters at bay, she will believe it. Give me something ostentatious."
Jaune concentrated and summoned up a gaudy golden goblet encrusted with gems and which emitted a faint silver light. It glowed, and hummed with... well, it hummed with no power whatsoever, but it certainly looked special. Ozpin chuckled as he took it, thanking him and leaving to convince Salem it was some holy artefact that would keep her safe while the two "knights" went off to slay the beast.
With any luck, Salem's belief that they could – and her unshakable love and faith in Ozpin in this era – would grant them an automatic win. If she dreamed Ozpin unbeatable, then he'd become it for the duration of this dream.
That didn't stop Jaune expanding some aura to summon a fresh suit of armour and bulk himself up, or to sharpen his sword to an unnatural degree. Better safe than sorry, and the more dashing an image he cut the more Salem would subconsciously rate his odds.
Given the presence still hovering out of range despite that they'd stopped moving, Jaune had a feeling they'd need it.
/-/
Once Salem was safely set in a camp surrounded by magical artefacts, Ozpin joined him and they headed off on foot towards the presence. Horses didn't feel like they would be of much use and could even be a hindrance if they fell and pinned them down. Jaune and Ozpin were not normal knights on horseback, but huntsmen with aura – more dangerous on foot.
"You're the expert here," Ozpin said. "Tell me how this all works."
"Nightmares are usually keyed towards causing emotional distress to the dreamer from what I've seen. They're not invincible, especially not against me, but sometimes even when I beat them, they find a way to twist – like the creature suddenly becoming the dreamer at the last second and being killed by me."
"That could happen here," Ozpin noted. "Switch places between it and Salem at the last second and force her to dream of me – the man she loves – murdering her." He grunted and sheathed his sword. "We'll have to be careful to incapacitate rather than strike a killing blow and fall for such an obvious ruse."
"Don't take it too easily," Jaune warned him, keeping his own sword out. "Salem would be just as distressed by you being tortured to the point of breaking and then ripped apart in front of her. Pain is pain; it doesn't matter how the nightmare achieves it, only that it does. And the nightmares can't force real-world changes on the dreamer. My Semblance can, and it can also let the nightmare do it to us. If Salem dies, she'll wake up in a sweat. If we die, we may not wake up at all."
"Then it may be best to let you do the fighting. Unless you disagree? I'm happy to help but I fear I may become a burden to you if Salem's worst fears here revolve around me."
He wasn't wrong. Ozpin was such an obvious bait for nightmare fuel that the man might as well have been a walking target. The man's armour would conveniently break, his weapon would shatter, and the beast – whatever it was – would undoubtedly prioritise him as if Jaune didn't exist. The two obvious ways for Salem to experience her nightmare was for it to go after her, or to go after Ozpin.
Jaune – or Sir Graveth – simply didn't matter.
"That might be a good idea," Jaune admitted. "But here." He dreamed up a sniper rifle replete with explosive dust ammunition. "Help with this."
"Ah, typical medieval weaponry."
Jaune scoffed. "We're not constrained by that here. Unless you'd rather a bow and arrow?"
"This will do, Mr Arc. This will do nicely."
Jaune and Ozpin continued marching for another few minutes. It kept feeling like they were drawing close – the overwhelming presence so thick and cloying in the air that breathing became difficult – and yet they never caught sight of it. Like a monster in some cheap horror flick, it was always just out of sight, playing its ominous music and threatening to not show itself until the final ten seconds of the movie, during which it'd only be caught on a dropped camera as the victim's feet were dragged off-screen.
Was Salem a fan of the old classics? Somehow, he couldn't imagine she would be. There probably weren't many theatres open out in the middle of the Grimmlands for her to pop into, nor rental shops to borrow from. Or, well, televisions, electricity, or working internet connection.
"It's avoiding us," Ozpin remarked. "What does that mean?"
"We'd need Oobleck here if you wanted a psychiatrist's answer." Jaune gave it a go anyway. "It might mean this is a subconscious fear that Salem can't face, something she can't deal with, or which she feels is forever out her reach. Lingering but unapproachable."
"Hm. Not a bad answer. Perhaps you'll make a fine therapist yourself if the huntsman business ever gets too much for you."
"Maybe I'll retire once Salem is bested and the Grimm are gone."
Ozpin shook his head. "I'm afraid Grimm existed before she did and will exist after her – and my – demise. They'll simply be wild creatures once more, with no one backing them. Huntsmen will still have their place, and the academies I helped build will outlive me."
"Grimm were always a thing, then?"
"Fragments of the God of Destruction's power. I assume, anyway. It's hard to know when dealing with creatures like that. They could be shards of his power, creations of his to serve his destructive will, or just baby gods for all I know. I may be ancient by the standards of humanity, but I am an ant in the grand scale of things. What we called Gods may not even be gods. They could simply be stellar travellers with power that, while to us seems divine, is downright commonplace in the vast infinite distance of the cosmos."
"You realise we're in a nightmare, right?" Jaune snarked. "Let's not give Salem any ideas! I don't want to have to fight a Great Old One because you waxed lyrical."
Ozpin chuckled. "My apologies. But we're not finding this thing. I see two choices. We either ignore it and push on towards Vale and continue as planned, or you use your control over the dream to force a confrontation."
He'd been thinking the same thing. "Your choice, sir. You're the teacher here."
"I am but a student in the ways of the dream, but... I suppose what you are saying is that I should hold responsibility for the consequences of our actions if we head to Vale and cause damage to the city. And you're right. There's no point taking any unnecessary risks." Ozpin sighed. "Let us see this beast. Bring it to us – or bring us to it. We can always flee if needs must."
Given his last attempt to interact with the beast had savaged his aura, Jaune very much decided on the latter. He took the space beneath his and Ozpin's feet, not the ground but the location, and twisted it. Twisted them until he imagined them standing before some cowardly creature. The world turned white as the dream bucked and twisted but, this time, he was fighting Salem's imagination of a location, and not this lingering fear or deep seated trauma. It didn't push back nearly as much as the beast had, burning a fraction – less than a twentieth – of his aura reserves. Jaune and Ozpin did not move; the world moved around them.
And then they were there.
So was it.
Not a dragon, not a monster, not a Grimm, nor even a twisted nightmarish amalgamation of all three combined with slasher-killers wielding chainsaws for arms. No, it was nothing so obvious, nor so aggressive.
It was three oddly shaped pools filled with a black tat-like substance.
Ozpin sucked in a breath. "BACK!" he roared, lunging and catching Jaune's collar, the raised bit of armour, and hauling him away. He hadn't been close and yet Ozpin dragged him further. "GET BACK!"
"What—"
"Back!" Ozpin hissed and kept dragging. They'd been a good fifteen feet away when they arrived, but Ozpin dragged Jaune across the rocky ground until they were at least thirty feet away, and then kept going until forty-five. "Make us a platform!" he snapped. "Put us in the air! Stilts, hover-technology. I don't care which!"
The ground under them trembled and broke off, beginning to float.
"Good enough," Ozpin breathed, slumping to his knees. "By the Brother Gods," he whispered, a quote Jaune had never heard from him or anyone. "By the brothers," he whispered again, clenching his eyes shut. "Of course it would be this. Of course it would be. I'm such a fool."
"What is this?" asked Jaune.
"Something we cannot and should not touch, even in a nightmare. There's no telling what this will do to us. If we're lucky, it will just kill us. If not... I dread to even imagine what your Semblance might do in the hands of the Grimm. Take us away from here. Take us—"
The black tar in the central pool bubbled and boiled. It began to surge up over the edge, growing and expanding as something rose from within it. Something big. Though its body was covered in the substance and couldn't be made out, it was obviously not humanoid in shape. It was an amorphous blob, and Jaune suspected it simply was the substance of those pools given shape and form.
Thousands – no, millions – of red eyes opened at once, all facing in different directions, all peering through the muck.
Then, suddenly, they all swivelled to face the two of them.
"End the dream!" Ozpin hissed. "End it now!"
"I can't!" Jaune replied. "I'm not the one dreaming it. We'd... We'd have to wake Salem up. Make her end it."
"I won't bring her here, not here of all places. Take us back. Take us to her."
Jaune grabbed the bottom of their floating platform and imagined it whisking away, but it did not. Something had a hold of it. Looking down, the ground cracked and both he and Ozpin leapt apart as a black, sticky spike struck up and latched onto the rock platform from below. The Beast had them.
Imagining a circle cut around it, Jaune tried to let it have a small chunk of their platform while the rest escaped. It should have worked but the moment he tried, the tendril expanded out with hundreds of little lines like the roots of a plant, infecting the rest of the rock. Stubbornly, Jaune caused another rock to appear at their side, a short jump away from their own.
Instantly, a fresh tendril shot up and stabbed into that one as well.
"It's stopping me!" Jaune cried, eyes going wide. "That doesn't happen! I'm normally just another figment in someone's dream. They react to me, but they never focus on me, and they never know I can control things. This knows! Ozpin, it's sentient!"
The man whirled on him. "What!?"
"This thing isn't a figment of Salem's imagination. It isn't some past trauma she can't forget." Jaune swallowed as he looked back to the body of the beast. "This is something else. Either it's a creature that has the exact same ability to infiltrate dreams as me, and which has coincidentally done it to her at the exact moment we have—"
Which was so unbelievable and so ridiculous a chance as to be impossible.
"—or this creature exists as a separate entity in Salem's mind, knows she is dreaming, knows we are intruders, and is specifically hunting us down."
Ozpin let out a shuddering breath. "Essence... The Grimm essence itself, the taint from the pools. I knew Salem had come out different, changed, but I thought it an evolution of her grief and anger. I did not consider... but I should have. Too much change, and too soon."
"Ozpin?"
"When Salem killed me and our children in a fit of rage, she was overcome with grief. In her madness, she sought to end her immortal life once and for all and threw herself into the Grimm pools. Pools filled with the essence of the God of Destruction, from which Grimm would infinitely spawn. They are anathema to life – to the very forces by which we are created – and anyone who touches them dies."
"But Salem could not die," he continued, with clenched fists. "Salem was unable to die because of the curse of those blasted gods, so instead of death she was consumed by the pools and changed physically. I did not consider that she might have been changed mentally. I assumed the ordeal had twisted her mind, yes, but in a human way. As someone who had been effectively tortured and driven to a madness that led her to want to eradicate all life. I thought her insane, but understandably so."
Jaune swallowed. "Instead...?"
"Instead, she may have been corrupted. The essence, unable to kill her, may instead have contaminated her and lived on within her, like a parasitic fungus coopting and controlling an insect's body unto its death, but one unable to die."
An extra presence inside Salem, an extra consciousness, living unknown within her subconscious, but with a consciousness of its own. It was hidden but aware, and capable of thought and reasoning on its own. Normally, in everyday life, it would just be a mute passenger unable to do anything.
But here, in a dream, it might as well have been a passenger like Jaune, someone – or something – capable of independent thought and action, and of influencing the world around it. A rare moment where it could hunt.
And it was hunting them.
"Jump!"
Jaune dove off and onto the rocky ground as their platform was destroyed. It was a small mercy that the beast was as mindless as any Grimm before them, since all it would have needed to do to kill them was shake its gunk everywhere or transform the whole area into a version of those pools.
It did not, thankfully. It didn't understand things like strategy and just roared its fury and lurched after them, intending to rip them apart and smash their bodies to paste. It was as wild and pointlessly aggressive as any Beowolf, and it was that which saved their lives. It gave Ozpin and he chances to dodge and run, to put distance between them as the beast roared and dragged itself from the pools to give chase.
The thing didn't have legs, which made sense given it had basically just been sludge in the first place. He'd been right before to call it a creature of ooze, like a slime out some videogame, because that was how it acted. It blobbed and oozed after them, not jumping or rolling but sort of squishing down and expanding across the ground, and then rising back to its full height almost a hundred feet from where it had been, oozing ever closer as the two of them sprinted.
"You don't feel fatigue!" Jaune shouted at Ozpin as the man tired. "It's all make-believe. You don't have to breathe either. Any pain you feel is in your head!"
Ozpin grunted and kept running, quickly recovering – or at least accepting he could ignore his burning muscles – and running at full speed. Jaune was more used to it, willing himself to accept there was no real feeling here, and soon feeling light and floaty, just forever running without loss of stamina.
Sadly, it was the same, and it had lived in Salem's dreams long enough to know that. The creature oozed down and then vanished, crossing an impossible distance to appear before them. Jaune skidded to a stop and willed up a huge wall of rock between them, just to buy them time. The rock wall was shattered seconds later, but it was time enough for the two of them to turn around and run the other way.
"It controls the dream just as easily as you do!" Ozpin hissed.
"It doesn't need aura to do it either," Jaune said. "It's in Salem's head, it lives here, which means her dream is its world."
"How did you not face this the last time you were there?"
"Because it lingers. It never came close. We were the ones who sought it out, remember? This thing is a Grimm at the end of the day. It'll attack anything it sees, but it didn't know we were there before."
They were the ones who provoked it, though Jaune had undoubtedly done as much himself when he tried to erase it before. And no wonder that tore a chunk from his aura; he'd as good as tried to remove a consciousness from its own mind. That would be like trying to use his Semblance on Cinder to erase her mind and make her braindead in her own dream. Sure, he could change things about people – big things – but he couldn't snuff out someone's mind while he was in said mind. That'd be like turning off the world itself.
His Semblance might actually be capable of it, but it'd taken a million times the aura he had.
A shame too, as erasing this Grimm presence might have gone some way to actually fixing Salem, depending on how much influence this thing had in real life. Its influence might only be limited to her dreams, but that still made him think what it could do.
If a person was tortured in their own dreams every single night, for effective eternity, wouldn't that drive them mad? He'd want to destroy the world as well if living was pain and sleeping was even worse pain. Just an unending symphony of physical and mental pain. Ridding her of one might not save the world, but it might have calmed her down a little. Made her less "destroy the world" and more "destroy Ozpin" instead.
Not that it mattered now.
"We have to take it back to Salem," Jaune said.
"No. No, not that." Ozpin denied. "She threw herself into those pools, Mr Arc. Because of me!"
"From what I've heard, she killed your children—"
"I am not blameless. I could have done differently, could have talked to her, could have left the children with her, could have stayed and raised them. Families break up all the time but I'm the one who arrogantly chose to steal our children away from under her, thinking it the right choice. It was her grief in killing myself with them that drove her to the pools. I am responsible. To do so again, consciously this time—"
"It's a dream. It isn't real. Salem will survive it."
"And yet she'll remember this when she wakes!" he snapped back. "Salem will know we were there, and what she will know is that I did it again! I cast her into the pools, to this beast, all so I could escape." Ozpin shook his head angrily. "I cannot. I will not. We can run this thing around until she wakes naturally. We have unlimited stamina here, you said it yourself."
"Yes, and this thing could catch us if we make a single mistake. Ozpin, sir, you're the one who told me we shouldn't take any risks. This is a big freaking risk you want us to take! What's done is done. Salem hates you. Salem did fall to the pools. Making her relive it is cruel, I agree, but who knows what'll happen if this infects us in a dream. We might die, but we also might just gain a copy o this consciousness within our own. It might drive us as mad as it has her, or even take control of us. We don't have the protection she does as part of her curse."
Ozpin snarled, still very much against it. Jaune suspected it was seeing Salem like this again, innocent and kind, that was reminding him of why he first fell in love with her. It would be like travelling back in time to kill her and save the world, only to find her a sweet and innocent young person not unlike Ruby, and hesitating.
Jaune took the choice away from him.
Salem appeared in a flash, with far less of Jaune's aura expended than it would have taken for him to move the beast instead. She appeared halfway between them and it, and Ozpin roared his fury, looking not to strike Jaune but to charge the monster down and protect his wife. Jaune tackled him, pinning Ozpin down as the beast charged Salem. The man had gone native, falling into the dream and wanting to give his life for Salem.
Jaune couldn't let him – not when Ozpin was also immortal. Remnant didn't need two immortals driven to madness by the Grimm pools.
He would take whatever anger Ozpin had for him in the waking world, but here and now he pinned the man down, holding him as he fought and begged and cried for Jaune to get off. That there was still time, that they could fight this thing, that they could kill it.
Ozpin hadn't felt the power in it – and Jaune's aura was at less than a quarter now. He didn't want to know what happened if he woke back up due to low aura, and left Ozpin stranded in Salem's mind with this monster. The man might fall into a coma from which he would never wake up.
And Salem. Oh, Salem. The woman – an innocent woman – raised her "holy chalice" in quiet protection, trusting implicitly in the lies her love had told her. She closed her eyes, trusting that Ozpin would be her knight in shining armour, and that everything would be okay.
Her screams as the ooze devoured and tore into her were haunting.
And chased them both out the dream as she woke.
Next Chapter: 7th November
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