Two years had passed, marked by the steady progression of Lucien's fighting skills and his unwavering faith in his undiscovered path. Each day brought him closer to his destiny, and the whole Clan watched with pity as their young dreamer fought for his last string of hope.
One of these days, Sarah, the healing aunt, approached Lucien during one of his visits, with concern visibly etched across her face. Looking at the twelve years old kid, full of bruises, she gently voiced her worries, "Lucien dear, I've been thinking a lot about your dreams and your unique power to have visions. I believe what you are following is not your path” she said while healing him. “Your true calling lies in harnessing the full potential of your visions, rather than pursuing combat skills. Come on, it’s too bad to be on the utility side, look at me! Ain’t I important?"
Lucien listened intently, a stubborn glimmer in his eyes. He smiled politely and replied, "Aunty Sarah, I appreciate your concern and your help, but I can't give up on the combat classes just yet. I believe that I will become a combat dreamer very soon, and I need to be ready for when my combat dream arrives. I'm stubborn, I know, but I have to follow my goals; there is no way around it."
Sarah's expression softened, and she recalled a conversation she had with Dalton, Lucien's father and the leader of the Clan a few months back. At the time, she had expressed her worry about Lucien's participation in the combat classes, questioning the risks he faced and his daily visits to her place.
"I understand your concerns, Sarah," Dalton had responded with a mixture of determination and concern. "But he needs to learn his place. I don’t like it any more than you do, but if he chooses to be stubborn and keeps attending the combat classes for the kids with combat dreams, there's nothing I can do. Life will teach him his place the hard way, and I don't plan to interfere in that. But keep healing him please; otherwise, he might really get some permanent injury, and I don't want the poor kid to walk around the village in that state.”
Sarah nodded, the memory fresh in her mind as she returned to the present conversation with Lucien. She understood Dalton's perspective and the tough love he held for his son, despite not agreeing with his methods.
With a touch of sympathy, she said, "I respect your determination, Lucien. You have your father's stubbornness. Just promise me that you will stay cautious and not let your goals blind you to the dangers, alright?"
Lucien nodded earnestly, gratitude shining in his eyes. "I promise, Aunty. Thank you for your concern and for continuing to support me."
It was like torture for this kind aunt to see the kid getting beaten up over and over and over and still delude himself thinking that things will get better in the future. She could only sigh as the kid went away. Since it was a task from the Clan leader, she didn’t have much option and could only keep healing the poor kid every single day.
By the time he got home, Lucien dove into the food like there was no tomorrow. His body needed to replenish the energy wasted on his healing and there was no way around it. After eating his two-person portion, he said good night to his family and went to bed early. This was a routine everyone in the house was already used to. Lucien didn't talk much to anyone anymore, with a single goal in his mind, he moved with the sole focus of getting his second dream. It had gone way past stubbornness and become an obsession.
At the beginning, his parents tried to talk to him during and after dinner, ask how the day had gone, ask if he got something new from his visions and, in the end, try to stop his mad chase to be a combat class dreamer. At some point, he stopped answering, and then, a few months later, he stopped listening to them. His dad got the message and stopped bothering him too, but Artemis never gave up on him and instead, started supporting the kid without questioning his reasoning any longer.
The funny part was that both sides thought that everything would be solved the moment Lucien got his second dream. His parents believed he would stop this obsession the moment he got a support class second dream, and he believed everything was going to be alright the moment he got his hands on some dream firepower.
Lying on his bed, he checked his notes about his visions again. Combat wasn't the only field he had been training. For years, he had been taking notes about his visions with Artemis, studying the language and all the weird stuff he had seen. The feeling of what his body was trying to do or trying to say grew stronger, and over the last couple years, he had started to make sense of the stuff the people in his visions talked about.
Checking his notes before sleeping was a sacred ritual for him. His goal was to remember all the important topics he had already learned in his visions' world, including some vocabulary and other things he had never seen before.
In his first year, he only got the basics of his situation on his dream adventure, like his name, a bit of how that world worked, and the relations between his body and the people closer to him. And in his second year, the major advance was the key words he learned and took notes on, mostly nouns and verbs. It enabled him to somehow understand what people were saying. It was far from perfect, but it was better to know the basics of the language than knowing nothing at all. From that point on, things started making more sense, and surprisingly, he started to learn subjects from his body’s school.
Okay, he didn’t start learning all of them, but just math. The symbols used to represent quantity or operations were very simple, and after learning them, he quickly caught up with what the teacher was teaching. Since he and his body in the visions were still young kids, when he learned the numbers, the body’s class had just reached multiplication and division, so with a bit of self-study, he was able to catch up, since he was also learning math in the real world.
Was he on the right path? He asked himself these same questions every night before going to sleep, but the answer never came. Pushing these thoughts to the back of his mind, he quickly relaxed his bruised body to get to sleep because today was math class after all. And his second day started just like that in his vision realm.
###
In these two years, Tomas also grew a lot. His body grew steadily stronger and more resistant, to the point Dalton needed to suffer some collateral effects to push Tomas to his limit, and no fire or heat powers could bother him anymore. His strength also increased considerably as a nice side effect of his dream, making him able to win using brute force against some of the kids with direct physical enhancement dreams.
It was all going way too well for him in the past years, but for one thing.
“AHHHHHHH I’m stuck! It’s so frustrating!” yelled Tomas, surrounded by his group at the end of another training class.
The kids were hanging around in a clearing close to the training grounds. There were a lot of big pine trees around and some short ones, as this place marked the beginning of the forest. The group's favorite place, however, was a small, robust tree with branches very close to the ground where they could sit.
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“It’s so unfair; you all already got your second dreams, and I’m still stuck with my first one! Do I need to jump in a volcano to get my fire resistance even higher?” He kept complaining, pacing from one side to the other. It was already known to the group he had reached a high enough level to get his dream path going, but surprisingly it did not happen. No matter how harsh the conditions he put himself through, it seemed it was not sufficient to break through.
As the rational one in the group, Cindy started recording all the ways he had been using for training in the past two years. "Let's check to see if we are missing something. For your heat/fire resistance, Dalton and my father have been throwing explosions and lasers at your face every morning for the past two years, so I think that there is nothing better we can do in that field.” Jess, Michel, and Marlon agreed. Going beyond that would really require him to jump in a volcano.
Then Cindy continued, “And on the pressure resistance side, there are your father's explosions again and that earth user teacher also helps by compressing earth around you from time to time, and I also think you have everything settled on this side too," said Cindy.
Lying lazily on a different branch from the group, Jess commented as a joke, “Are your insides explosion-resistant? Imagine if you were exploded from inside? That would be gross hehe.” But Tomas took it in another way, “Jess, you are brilliant!!! I need to get tougher inside too! Come on, Cindy, throw a solar beam in my mouth!” Tomas said, opening his mouth like a baby bird waiting for food.
The girls instantly got shocked. “You are insane!” they both screamed together, but Tomas begged with certainty, making puppy eyes, “Pleaaase, just a little bit! It doesn’t need to be powerful, just enough to test if Jess was right!” and Jess quickly denied her merits, “For the record, I never suggested it! I was joking, you dumbass! If you want to burn your tongue, do it by yourself, don’t make it look like I gave this stupid idea.”
After a lot of pleading and the support of the other two boys, Cindy agreed. Even knowing Michel and Marlon were only supporting the idea to see him get burned, Tomas was firm in his conviction, so he fell to his knees and opened his mouth like an obedient dog ready to receive some treats. Meanwhile, Cindy was already gathering a bit of light on the point of her finger, making the surroundings turn slightly darker.
Unwillingly, she pointed inside his mouth and shot a small laser that lasted only a moment, covering all his face in a flash, trying not to concentrate the beam too much to lessen its power. Full of different expectations, the four kids stared deeply at Tomas's face, just waiting to see his reaction. With closed eyes, a large grin took control of his face; ‘it’s only a bit warm!’ he thought.
“Cindy, more power, please! Hahahaha!” Tomas yelled extremely excited. For the boys' disappointment and the girls' relief, it had worked. He really was resistant from the inside too! “I’m a bit tired, Tomas. Let's end it here for today, okay?” She tried to run away, but Tomas shortly cut her hopes, “No no no no. I’m soooo close to breaking through! Will my dear friend deny a request from her desperate friend? Oh poor me…”. In the end, she accepted; it was better to get this over with; otherwise, he would never stop bothering her, so she started preparing another attack.
That bizarre scene repeated for a few hours, where Tomas ate her lasers like a Pac-Man until Cindy was wasted on the floor, completely drained of stamina. “I’m done, you crazy maniac, there is not a single drop of energy in me anymore. And for the record, I’m never doing this again,” she complained, completely exhausted.
“Whyyy!!! I’m so close that I can feel it!” Tomas lamented but didn’t complain to Cindy. After all, she had helped a lot in the last hours.
Saying goodbye to his friends, Tomas went home, already expecting an earful from his parents for being late, and he wasn’t disappointed.
“What were you doing out so late? Do you think I am your maid to wait until this hour to prepare your dinner? Do you think I don’t have anything better to do? Don’t you care…” Artemis kept scolding Tomas while he listened in silence with his head down.
When she finally ended, Tomas instantly changed topics and explained why he was late, “Sorry, Mom, but I just found out what I was lacking to master my dream and was too excited to test my theory with my friends!” Then he looked at Dalton, “I’m too close, Dad! I only need to get stronger on the inside too! With your help, I can do it; I can feel it, Dad!”
With a worried look on his face, Dalton asked just to confirm what his son was asking, “So basically you want me to explode your mouth, did I understand correctly? I will only do it if your mother agrees; otherwise, the blame will be on me if something goes wrong…” With the decision shifted to Artemis, Tomas instantly changed his focus, “Mom, pleaaaase!!!”, using the best puppy eyes he could put on.
After a lot of convincing and negotiation during his dinner, Tomas finally got what he wanted. Artemis only agreed with this because her baby was pretty sure he could get his second dream from this experience.
With his finger pointed at Tomas’s open mouth, Dalton warned, “This may hurt, kiddo, but if what you told me about your tests with Cindy is true, it’ll be okay.” Without warning, a small blast was instantly released inside Tomas’s mouth.
BOOM!!!
Despite the worried look on his mother’s face, Tomas was happier than ever. “Come on, Dad, give me mooore!” Tomas yelled, while laughing. “Ok, kiddo, don’t blame me later…” Dalton answered, already putting a hand behind Tomas’s head, so the blasts wouldn’t push him back. “Do you remember the beginning of our training when a small blast was enough to reach your limits? It’s time to power grind again hehe,” That said, he put his finger again inside Tomas’s mouth and started.
boom boom boom boom…
A series of small explosions began popping inside his mouth at a very high frequency. Amidst the tens of explosions per second, Dalton asked very loud, so his son could hear it, “I WILL INCREASE THE POWER SLOWLY, SO WHEN IT’S ENOUGH JUST LET ME KNOW, OK?” And Tomas answered with a thumbs up, because he wasn’t capable of closing his mouth.
It was late at night when they started, but their little grinding noise began waking up everyone living around their house. After a few minutes of disturbance, their neighbors started going outside their houses to see what was going on and why all those explosions. By the time one hour had passed, Artemis had to go outside herself to explain the situation to the annoyed people because they started cursing Dalton in front of their door, as he was the main suspect for this trouble.
The only one that was not affected by the loud noise in all this was Lucien since he was, in a way, already ‘awake’ in his visions, living his undesired second life.
Time passed and after one and a half hours, Tomas signed with his hands, telling Dalton to stop. Everything was shaking, his eyes were blurring, and his head was spinning, but nothing could take his sincere smile from his face. A bit disoriented, he attempted to stand up just to find himself laying on the floor before he could take his second knee from the ground.
“Easy there, boy,” Dalton said to his son. Not even an armored leopard would be able to stand up after a shock treatment like that, much less a kid.
Leaving Tomas laying on the floor, Dalton went outside to call Artemis back and got a bit surprised by the amount of people complaining in front of his house. “Sorry about the noise, folks, goodnight and… sleep well,” Dalton quickly apologized, clearly not sorry for waking up everybody.
“Come inside love, let’s check if our son got any brain damage,” Dalton said to Artemis, who answered, as expected, with a front kick in the center of his chest.
“Brain damage?! I remember you saying it was safe, you bastard!” She yelled.
Dalton flew through the front door(which was closed) stopping only when he, and the door, hit a wall on the other side of the living room. “I was kidding babe, the boy was only a bit dizzy…” He explained himself while already gathering the splinters of his front door.
After the couple calmed themselves, the still stunned Tomas was delivered by Artemis to his bed. Tomorrow was promising and he was full of hopes for his desired second dream and all the possibilities that would come with it, because he could feel it, he would get it tonight.