Panicked and shaken, Elena awakes on a plane surrounded by people she immediately recognized. This flight was the turning point in her life, the day that marked the end of a life as a normal girl. To Elena’s right is her mother, a young woman in her late thirties that escaped from home to spend time with the love of her life. To Elena’s left is her father, a man who had just turned thirty wanting to be more than just some traditional husband. These two, as the rebellious spirits they are, went through countless hardships to live the life they have now.

“Huh? What’s wrong, Elena?”, asks her father sitting by the window. Clearly tired yet concerned, he wonders what could make her violently wake up.

“I think I had a nightmare…”, she replies, shedding a few tears.

While he gently embraces his daughter, his wife is still snoozing absolutely undisturbed by her daughter’s condition. Annoyed, he flicks her throat as she wakes up with a loud gasp disturbing those trying to sleep. Stifling his laughter, he keeps embracing his daughter as his wife adjusts to the situation at hand.

“What’s wrong? Did dad do something?”, she asks. “Or was it a nightmare?”

“I thought this plane crashed and I was the only one that survived!”, she squeaks with her voice muffled by her father’s embrace.

Bewildered, puzzled, and concerned, all they can do for now is comfort her until they land about half an hour from now. Their flight went smoothly without any kind of intervention that could ruin her life. She still has her loving parents that will accompany her every step of her life. And now they can embark on their journey.

Unlike some of her peers, Elena is well off. Despite their hardships, Elena’s parents managed to reach a point where their combined net salary makes up 100k in euros allowing for grand vacations every once in a while despite their needlessly frugal lifestyles. Though they may not spend a lot of money on themself, they do go all out when it comes to Elena treating her like a perfect little princess.

Their first stop along their journey is a hotel with plenty of accommodations for comparably rich folk like them. A terrace suite somewhere in the USA, Ohio… perfect for the little princess that is Elena. Though they’re primarily here for a nearby zoo, their five days here are plenty of time to indulge in other pleasures sightseeing in Ohio may bring. Shortly after unpacking, they order takeout although the hotel probably has plenty of food to be delivered to their suite. Immediately after that, they decide to go browsing. With a taxi to their nearest mall, her father showcases his fashion sense and his love for browsing that she’d eventually inherit.

While there, an upset stomach leads her to a collection of filthy toilets. Luckily, hers only had urine on it meaning that wiping it all away with cheap, shitty, and incredibly useless one-ply toilet paper and then covering that seat with even more inferior low-quality toilet paper. Her little operation goes off without a hitch until she grows aware of the absolute silence suffocating her. She opens the door and finds herself walking into another world.

“Huh?”

Her voyage out of her cramped stall leads her to a foreign land similar to the one she’s in. Stepping out of the restroom leads her into the now-collapsed mall. She’s awestruck by the lack of people but also terrified as she attempts to make her way down. To her left is a collapsed path leading to nowhere while to her right is a clothing store with a caved-in ceiling and a tech store with two floors. The fact that she’s on the second floor means she’ll have to at least get down to the first floor to jump and find her way out of the mall.

Stepping into the tech store she comes across wash machines, air conditioners, and fans. Most of them seemingly have been left untouched for years. They’re overrun by greenery taking over this abandoned mall yet surprisingly intact since there wasn’t too much rain reaching into this building. Further back lies a collection of flatscreen TVs she isn’t used to because her father stubbornly insists on TV causing brain rot in children simply because it’s a new thing he isn’t used to. Not seeing a box TV heavier than a newborn is strange as she and her friends that were allowed to watch TV only had those. They’re also a rather novel invention for now and wonders just how people transformed these blocky behemoths into something she could see herself carrying.

“What’s that light over there?”, she asks herself.

Beyond the tipped-over TVs lies rubble from a hole in the wall created by the elements. Sunlight beams into Elena’s eyes as she attempts to climb over the little mountain of rubble and TVs. Outside lies a world just as ruined as the mall. She has no idea how this happened or why. Everything she knows about her world feels wrong now that she is a part of one completely different from the one she’s used to. The further she looks, the more distraught she gets as logic breaks apart in the distance. Space distorts and buildings take off into the sky. The weirdness seems to reach its peak somewhere far away where a pillar of light stands.

“Mama! Papa! Where are you?”, she yells out distressed. A looming sense of dread fills her heart yet she holds on and attempts to be strong. Determined and full of conviction, she believes it’s time to travel toward the pillar. Her extraordinary athleticism gets her off the first floor filled with PCs and games.

Stepping out of the mall by climbing over the broken remains of a revolving door, she makes her journey to the pillar of light. Suddenly, rumbling terrible enough to make her tremble demolish the mall as if nature itself is telling her to venture out into a world far more terrifying than hers. With haste, she runs and takes off trying to avoid getting crushed by rubble, cut up by glass, or suffocated by a mist of dust. Just barely, does she evade a deadly predicament.

The first thing she sets her eyes on is parked cars hoping to find out anything that could help her get back home. Just like the mall, the parking lot is worn down by nature and completely devoid of human life. She only comes across moldy car seats, pictures of families, and phones that stopped working a long time ago. The closest she ever got to deciphering the mysteries of this world are the IDs that were left behind. Several of them were issued after Elena came here. Somehow some IDs speak of ten years in the future meaning that she somehow missed years and some kind of apocalypse that rid the world of human lives.

“2015? That’s seven years from now…”, she thinks. Something seems to be nagging at her… Something buried in her subconscious mind is telling her that everything she’s experiencing right now is wrong. Elena can’t help but cry at a loss she cannot remember.

Something crashes behind her forming a dust cloud she has to run away from. With haste and tears and snot running down her face, she runs for her life believing to be targeted by a threat. Before she could make it very far, she looks back spotting a person walking out of that cloud with some kind of animal following her. Upon closer inspection, she’s facing a young woman as old as she is in 2015 and a jackal hiding behind that stranger.

“Hey! You can’t use magic, right?”, boldly asks the young woman. “Even if you could, you’re probably pathetic, right?”

Arrogant and powerful, the last kind of person Elena can deal with… But she can’t choose her heroes and decides that it’s probably best to stick with the superhuman that came crashing down out of nowhere. She probably knows what is going on, where she is, and how to handle this situation.

“Who are you?”, she asks.

“I’m Marcela, the greatest Ohian… Ohian? Ohioan? The greatest Dream Catcher of Ohio? The greatest Dream Catcher of the Midwest? The greatest Dream Catcher of the Midwest! Prostrate yourself for I am now your lord and savior!”, she says with grandeur. “Follow me if you want to survive!”

“To survive?”, she asks herself.

While in a daze questioning her survival, Marcela shatters like a vase that fell off its stand. Frozen and confused, a plane crashes into her bursting into flames as she is sucked into purple sludge and a demon towering over her. The Domain she’s in is just a small space encompassed by a dome of glowing purple sludge.

The demon that ruined her life is humanoid in nature yet also so animalistic it reminds Elena of an anteater. Its scalp is bleeding with no hair that could drape over its head. One eye is hollow while the other one has turned gooey and is close to drooping out. Its nose mostly lacks skin and most of its flesh allowing one to gaze inside its nostrils. Most peculiar is its snout shaped like the bullet of a rifle with an opening at the tip where its tongue would shoot out. Aside from arms missing most of the meat with massive claws as hands, there’s not much else to be horrified of. It has no lower body, no stomach to absorb all the passengers it just devoured, and only a ribcage attached to a spine that slithers like a snake.

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Because of its lack of mobility, it can only turn its head to assault another passenger with its tongue. Back then… When her plane crashed, she was sitting next to her disfigured parents while surrounded by 168 corpses of strangers. Both of her parents had passed before she woke up and some of the sludge had already melted most of the skin on her legs. While shouldering the pain and fear, she swam to the edge of this Domain leaving everything behind.

However, here, all she can do is tremble in fear as her seat sinks into the sludge. Terrified and frozen in fear, its tongue extends.

“Stay away!”, she yells as she jolts awake. She’s drenched in sweat, snot, and tears with her heart beating as if she had just finished a marathon and her breaths short. Right before she could be hit by that demon haunting her in her nightmares for the past seven years, she woke up.

“That dream again?”, she thinks as she gets out of bed. These nightmares, though they’re less frequent now, tend to appear on the birthdays of her parents and her own, on their anniversary day, and throughout the first two weeks of August. They always appear on the day her life as a normal girl came to an end.

“There’s probably stuff that I can work on… a report or something like that, maybe? I’ll do a quick patrol and work on that,” she tells herself as she’s been neglecting some of her duties lately thanks to her heavy schedule. “I think I’m supposed to check in with Sylvia for some urgent matter on top of that.”

She heads out of bed and walks up the stairs. Though her nightmares are a minor inconvenience at best, she still would rather sleep in the basement on the off-chance that someone actually wants to stay over or needs a few days of hospitality to sort out their thoughts. She heads to the nearest bathroom and washes her face. While doing so, she reminds herself that her parents died in that crash and that no amount of dreaming can bring them back. On top of that, she thinks back to the day that her first mentor, Marcela, perished fighting a Calamity and managed to keep casualties to just one victim.

Elena checks up on Prometheia by turning the nerves behind her eyes into threads. Her eyes fall out as the threads expand carrying her eyes up the stairs. She then turns her eyes into threads that fit through keyholes so she can take a peek. Prometheia is sleeping in a dog bed on top of a nightstand. Now that she knows Prometheia is safe and sound having her beauty rest, she decides to make a day's worth of meals in one huge pan through the use of eggs and canned meat. Though it is far from healthy or refreshing, it is the quickest meal she can make with rice.

“Now, now… If I leave at 3 I can have a nice little patrol till 6 and meet with Hellfire at 7. There’s also that report I need to submit to Raven and the one for Christa that I somehow missed last month. Should take about two… maybe three for both?” Meticulous planning and a nightmarish lack of time for herself… “Wait, no… I’m also responsible for Olivia, Franky, and Florence. Olivia is still breaking out of her shell so her total kills have been in the lower double digits. Florence has yet to beat one demon. Franky just reached the 100 mark a few days ago… I guess his first encounter did make him a monster when it comes to killing.”

Shortly before it could turn 3 am, she finally creates a list that looks like a solid plan for the day. She’ll start with a patrol all over the city. Most cities have several Dream Catchers with their territories they strictly adhere to. Even within these territories, larger cities can host up to a dozen Dream Catchers. Villages and the like are protected by just one Dream Catcher. Right now, she has two rogue Dream Catchers one of which has been causing issues with her rookies, a retired veteran that only deals with major threats Elena cannot handle, and three rookies only one of which is capable enough to be independent.

Though she could just rely on her senior for the administrative side of Dream Catchers, on a fairly reliable rogue that wouldn’t mind working under her wing and has caused no problems thus far, and on her most capable rookie, she refuses to do so out of respect for her senior, the uncertainty the rogue may bring, and the sanctity of childish freedom that remains within her rookies. Not far from today will there be days where she can make use of any helping hand no matter how devious and mischievous they may be.

“An increase in demons with there being talks that someone is guiding them… some kind of Coordinator…”, she thinks. The recent increase in demons has been rather worrying. Just two years ago, she couldn’t imagine having to deal with a demon a day. Usually, Dream Catchers would encounter them once a week yet the number of active demons is rising every year.

Just two days ago, she faced five Ravagers within a short proximity. This little cluster, if it had been left unattended, could have become a Fusion and wreaked havoc on her turf. When she started doing reports and keeping track of the number of demons, she would only consider the weekly average of 1.3 which would fluctuate around big holidays. Now she’s facing an average of 2.1 demons per day, a number that is still rising exponentially.

“There’s one not far from here… To my right?” After seven years of honing her skills, Elena can create a nearly invisible and intricate but also a delicate network of thin threads. Her patrols only consist of accounting for patches of land that lack coverage and replacing old or severed threads. These threads are then used to detect fluctuations in the level of magic in the air. The only problem is the increase of dark magic thanks to demons making things harder to read meaning her skillset needs to be even more precise than ever before.

“Two kilometers… No one’s up so I can just fly over,” she mumbles.

Air blasts carry her toward a bridge. Atop that bridge is a lone man standing atop the railing just about to jump. Elena reaches him just as he jumps off and slowly descends with the man that was just about to end his life or get crippled for life.

“Are you-”

She discovers a mark on his forehead.

“Is that… a Sigil of Temptation?”, she asks herself.

A "Sigil of Temptation", also known as "Devil’s Temptation", are marks that have only been a recent development within demons. The first mark to be discovered was five years ago from a demon that grew stronger by leading people to their deaths or into their domains. demons seem to be evolving through unknown means even though they have no common ancestor and originate from objects all the way to animals and people.

“The report can wait… I have to talk to Raven!” With haste, she submerges the victim, while trapped within an air bubble of her creation, into the river below and ties him down with her threads. She jumps into Graffiti underneath that bridge expecting a powerful foe.

However, she’s met with a monochrome world with checkered hills and pillars connecting to some kind of ceiling in this massive cavern. The demon she’s facing is just a multitude of arms capable of bending and stretching to their heart’s content. A dozen of these hands cover what likely is its heart. The fact that it has a heart, an external core, means that it’s likely rather weak.

Elena only has one massive problem she’s facing right now… Sigils have only been found in powerful demons that can even be observed to hold the power of complex thought and strategy. This one is mindless and weak challenging the beliefs she’s had so far. To test its strength, she lets herself be punched and remains unmoving as it is too weak to ever harm her.

“Maybe those dark magic pills may help?” Some Dream Catchers face the horrible condition of creating a surplus of light magic giving them cancer and forcing them to isolate themselves so as not to radiate that magic onto others. Pills and other kinds of medicine can prolong their lives and allow them to live normal lives in exchange for their strength.

She takes off like a leaf being swept away by an air current and throws the entire bottle of pills. Within its palms sprout eyeballs with black and white rings making up the sclera, the white of the eye. Its black pupils contract to absorb the pills.

Elena creates a ball of yarn half a meter in diameter as another test subject testing the limits of this strange demon. It too is absorbed but only after that creature’s pupil dilates enough to swallow it.

“So… How will it react to gaining more dark magic? Lesser demons usually are too weak to take that amount of dark magic. It should either expel some dark magic or explode as it struggles to live with that quantity,” she thinks. However, it simply lunges at Elena.

“It has become stronger and faster but that isn’t worth reporting.” She backs away into a pillar comfortably walking up and down on it as if she’s never heard of gravity.

Suddenly, she starts sinking into the pillar unable to move or escape as two of the arms extend into the pillar reaching out for her. As soon as they have a grasp of her they retract pulling them closer to the demon. The hands holding onto her merge together to strengthen their hold on Elena as they slowly descend onto a dilating pupil. Slowly but surely both of her feet are submerged before she sets herself free with sheer might.

“It instantly took out my feet without letting me feel a thing,” she says to herself. “The fact that it takes no time to absorb objects and seems to have no limit to the amount it can absorb is horrifying. I should get rid of it before anyone can stumble onto this thing.”

She recreates her feet and rises into the air as she prepares her finishing blow. Threads wrap all around her target and raise it into the air as she creates one lone riband growing longer and longer while being rearranged to create the shape of a cone. Flattening it while it grows even longer creates some kind of helical coil pressed together just waiting for the pressure to let off. Pointing at her target, she finally lets it run wild as it extends at speeds even her own eyes cannot witness. Howling like the sound of massive artillery breaching the sound barrier, it drills a hole into that demon completely eviscerating it of its core.

As the domain dissipates, she retrieves its Devil Seed and frees the person she trapped just a few moments ago. The sigil has vanished meaning that there’s nothing else she has to worry about. She lays him down atop the bridge and continues her patrol. While patrolling, she picks up her phone and decides to phone Sylvia.

“Hey, Sylvia. I know you told me not to call at this hour but we need to discuss something.”