Anyone can look up the definition of a dream.

I don’t need to quote mountains of literature on what they are, what they mean, and why we dream.

Nor do I need to tell you that dreaming isn’t a privilege, curse, or unique ability ascribed only to humans.

Animals dream too. There’s scientific literature on that.

I’ve seen dogs dream. Tobias’s adopted family has a dog, and I’ve watched it experience fitful bouts of slumber. I’ve heard it bark in its sleep too.

But why am I talking about dreams?

It’s because of something odd that I’ve noticed.

Mirai doesn’t dream…unless she’s inside the Sarcophagus.

I don’t know why, and I can’t say whether it bothers me or not. It’s simply something that I’ve become aware of this past week.

I haven’t asked Erina or Pearson about it.

I haven’t mentioned it to Celeste either, but perhaps I should since she is a shrink and all.

So why haven’t I told them?

Well, do you expect me to trust them?

By the way, I haven’t introduced Pearson and Celeste yet, but I will.

All good things in due time.

That said, if it’s a question of trust, have I spoken to Ghost about it?

No, I haven’t mentioned it to him, though I wonder if he’ll discover it on his own. After all, he does reside within the Sarcophagus…and he gets to see me naked while I float in that artificial womb full amniotic fluid or something like it. The Sarcophagus has a way of undressing me by making my clothes dissolve, but then it dresses me up again before tossing me out to the kerb. That’s something I find discretely unnerving, more so than finding myself naked in a translucent sack underneath that mechanical terror that exists inside the giant coffin.

On a side note, I learnt from Ghost that they were originally called Cradles, but somewhere along the timeline they were renamed Sarcophagi.

Not sure which I prefer, though it hardly makes a difference.

However, as I was saying, Mirai doesn’t dream unless she’s inside her coffin.

I wonder if it was the same for Count Dracula.

Did he dream of Mina while sailing across the open waters from Europe to England? Speaking of Mina, see what happened to the unfortunate Count for falling for the wrong woman? Nothing good comes from falling for the wrong girl! And she was married to boot. Trying to steal another man’s woman? Shame on him.

Regardless, I should get back on point.

However, my point has nothing to do with Mirai’s inability to dream outside of the Sarcophagus. Rather, it has to do with the dreams themselves. To be specific, it concerns the first dream I experienced since waking up to my new life as Mirai.

It was a dream of seeing my parents again – of greeting them at the spaceport after being apart for so many years. They looked just like I remembered them when I was a child. I guess that’s to be expected since I have no idea how my parents look these days.

However, since it was a dream, I don’t believe it matters.

Rather, what does matter is that I wasn’t the one greeting my parents and welcoming them home after they abandoned my sister and I on Teloria.

No, sir.

It was Ronin Kassius who met my parents on the concourse after they exited customs.

I must have cut quite the forlorn picture as I watched an older, manlier Ronin hug my mother and shake hands with my father, all while I observed the touching reunion from afar.

My feelings of neglect and sadness were compounded by shock when I caught my reflection in a shop window and saw Isabel looking back at me.

Waking up in a cold sweat inside the womb, I remembered that line from Hamlet.

Dreams are but shadows.

I know that taken out of context it can mean many things, but within the context of the scene, Hamlet is alluding to how dreams are intangible and ephemeral.

As I floated within the womb, I fervently hoped that was all it was.

I certainly wanted to avoid speculating on what the dream meant.

In truth, I was afraid of the dream being a portent of where my future was headed.

And that brings me to the question of who am I?

– # –

Celeste, whom I shall introduce in a later installment of my timeless memoires, refers to me as an amalgam.

In other words, I am an amalgamation of Ronin Kassius and the entity known as Mirai, with a third identity – that of Isabel – thrown into the mix.

Yet Celeste is quite specific in drawing distinctions between all three…at least for now.

In her estimation, Ronin Kassius functions as the self-aware component, while Mirai is the conscious, subconscious, and the physical, with Isabel being the false identity that combines them.

That’s one way of looking at me.

The problem is whether Mirai is also self-aware.

One indication that she may be lies not in the nature of my transformation when my appearance changes from blonde to brunette, my eyes become crimson, and all my senses sharpen tremendously, but in the fact that it takes place at all.

It implies that Mirai is aware of the circumstances she is in, and thus makes an executive decision to assert herself by powering up.

It also implies that the self-aware aspect – the me that’s thinking and speculating right now – is simply riding on Mirai’s shoulders. In other words, I’m pointing the way, making decisions, telling her to turn left, right, or go straight, but I’m not actually in control – at least not yet.

I find this…terrifying.

Will I lose myself to Mirai?

Will I go to sleep one night and never wake up as I am absorbed into my Mirai’s self-awareness? Or will I absorb Mirai into me while maintaining the false identity of Isabel val Sanreal?

Ghost is fond of saying, ‘time will tell’, but I’d rather time kept its revelations to itself.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

And yet deep down I know that I can’t continue living like this.

The distinction will get me killed out on the battlefield that is the Gun Princess Royale.

And I’m also afraid that the reason my self-awareness may be distinct from Mirai’s is because I am unable to accept who I am now.

I know that I’m a girl, but this isn’t who I want to be.

I don’t want to be Isabel val Sanreal, or Mirai the Gun Princess.

However, I have no other recourse but to continue calling the shots from the top of Mirai’s head until I find a way to get off, though I know there is no going back to my life as Ronin Kassius. Therefore, I will continue to think of myself as someone separate from Mirai, until she or I absorbs the other, or we end up merging into a new entity that is both Mirai and Ronin Kassius.

That is why the dream I experienced greatly unsettled me while also leaving me with an emptiness in my heart that can be transcribed as loneliness because deep down, I miss my parents. The likelihood that I may never return to them as their son, but reacquaint myself with them as Isabel, mires my heart with grey emotions.

This sense of loss compounds the fear that I’m already losing myself to Mirai.

If so, is that truly such a bad thing?

I wasn’t happy as Ronin Kassius.

Will I be happier as Isabel and Mirai?

Will I live long enough to find out?

– # –

I understand that my unwillingness to accept who and what I am may lead to my downfall.

The disjoint between Mirai and I, and for that matter Isabel and I, introduces a delay between the self-aware and the conscious, physical body.

Even if Mirai can assert herself at critical moments, that could prove deadly to me in the Gun Princess Royale because there is a marked difference between the other competitors and I.

If the other girls take a bullet to the head, it is the mechanical avatar that dies – the Gun Princess and not the Meister.

If I take a bullet to the head, I die – both the Gun Princess and the Meister.

And that’s not the only thing that sets us apart.

It takes more than one bullet to the brainbox to bring down a Gun Princess because they have very hard heads.

In contrast, I don’t have an adamantine skull or adamantium coating over my skeleton.

Thus, with one armor-piercing round to the cranium, it’s Game Over for me.

Farewell Mirai, and better luck to your next incarnation, but for me it would all be over.

It’s true that the Sanreal Family, that is House Elsis Novis, and my cold-hearted bitch of a sister could imprint the most recent archive of my neural map into another copy of Mirai…but that’s only if they can make one.

You may recall from the previous installment of my progressive memoires that Erina called me a miracle. A miracle she said, with a zealous light in her eyes. Therefore, producing another Ultra Grade Mirai doesn’t happen at the snap of her fingers, although it does start with the push of a button. However, should she be successful, and the archive of my neural map can be implanted into the new brain, the next Mirai wouldn’t be me. She wouldn’t be the me that I am now. That me would die, and perhaps fly off to Heaven or Hell, depending on whether I’ve been a good or bad girl because I do believe that Mirai has a soul. At least, I want to believe that she does. She has Angel wings, so why not a soul? Admittedly, her wings are black but let’s not dwell on that. The point is that who I am now would perish in this reality, and the copy would only be a copy.

The real Mirai – the first Mirai – would be no more.

I have asked Erina what would happen to me if I was shot in the head. Would the Angel Fibers repair the damage? If so, then perhaps installing the latest archive of my neural map would compensate for the loss of information in the regenerated portions of my brain. But there would certainly be a lot to repair because Mirai’s skull – as strong as it is – isn’t armor plated.

Erina admitted that she didn’t know.

She and her research team that developed Mirai are continuously collating the data they collect on me, so they have yet to determine the extent to which the Angel Fibers can heal my wounds. But if I died from head trauma and the Angel Fibers subsequently put me back together, would I be the same person I was before? Perhaps, it really does come down to whether Mirai has a soul or not. Yet even if Mirai could survive a bullet to the noggin, I have no intention of finding out, and I don’t want a copy to be made of me because I am the true, one-and-only Mirai.

I am fully aware that this contradicts my earlier assertions of being separate from Mirai. However, I have no desire to die.

I want to survive the Gun Princess Royale, and I want to live.

That’s what I decided for myself as I listened to the bullets whiz by, ripping through the air, not quite indiscriminately tearing up my surroundings.

Maybe I’m jumping way too far ahead by revealing too much, too early, in this the latest volume of my memoires.

Maybe I should let the story run its course, but having said that I’d resolved to live, I would like to explain a little of my circumstances at the time.

Just a sneak peak, a teaser, of what is to come some distance down the road.

– # –

I’d heard the term once before, spoken in conversation during a rather stressful period of my life.

It was something I’d forgotten about until it was blared out by the Game Master circling on high inside the Battle Commission’s observation airship – a giant oblate zeppelin the size of a cruise ship covered in lights that lit up the evening sky with the power of a million Christmas trees. It was a garish, extravagant exhibition of avarice demonstrated by the Battle Commission, yet it was also a testament of the Gun Princess Royale’s nature as bread and circus for the masses.

All pomp and spectacle as they say.

Regardless, I certainly knew what the term meant in my reality, but I should have realized that it could mean something else in the Empress’s universe.

Nonetheless, knowing what I knew, a fear caressed my spine as I watched the giant gunmetal grey egg fall from the airship, and crater the middle of the plaza when it landed with a deafening boom that smashed permaglass shopfronts, buckled the nearby maglev station supports, and caused the ground to undulate and ripple, tossing the Gun Princesses and I like plastic dolls into the air.

Some of them crashed through shop windows and deep into the stores.

Others rolled along the ground like helpless tenpins.

A few collided with walls, benches, tables, and signs.

And I slammed my back into an interactive information board, snapping its supports, and knocking it to the ground.

In a heartbeat, the center of the plaza was ruined, and the girls and I were scattered about.

Lying on the wrecked board, I looked up to see fireworks launch from the Game Master’s airship.

They exploded brilliantly in the evening sky, signaling a start to the festivities.

Then the gunmetal grey egg broke apart…and it emerged.

Of course, I couldn’t see it because the middle of the plaza was shrouded in a dense cloud of powdered rubble.

But I could hear it and I could feel it due to the deep thrumming that spread through the air and resonated with my bones.

I could smell it too – the scent of ozone that follows a lightning strike.

One by one the mechanical girls either picked themselves off the ground or hurried out from the shops they’d crashed into.

In quick succession, they checked their weapons and readied themselves for whatever would come bursting out of the cloud filling the center of the plaza.

I too prepared myself, first rising from the wrecked information board to check my customized heavy rifle – the Kaiser from Specter & Koh – before seeking cover behind the remains of a permacrete fountain partly demolished by the egg’s explosive landing.

Maybe those Meisters thought they’d be ready for what was to emerge.

Maybe I thought so as well.

After all, there were fifteen Gun Princesses in the plaza…and only one opponent.

However, I didn’t know how wrong we would be.

I didn’t know we’d be facing something that wasn’t from my reality, but from a harsher realm.

A realm where a war had been fought and it razed the face of an entire planet.

Then a century later, the survivors fought another war.

A war that began with Simulacra.

A war that ended with machine versus machine.

Not long ago, Ghost told me that a Gun Princess has no natural enemies because her enemies are all unnatural.

They are all machines, metal predators, and among their ranks is one that even a Gun Princess has reason to fear.

The Gun Slinger.

As a Gun Princess, I too learnt to fear the Gun Slinger.

But a Gun Slinger has never met a Gun Princess like Mirai, and I was determined to cut my name into the metal demon that emerged from the cloud of rubble to the tune of six Gatling guns and a swarm of missiles.

Before the night was out, I promised to make this Gun Slinger tremble at the mere whisper of the name, Mirai.

And then I would blow the metal mother frekker up and send it straight into the machine afterlife!

- # -

However, that’s not what happened.

Rather, let me say that things opened up a little differently.

And it was all my fault.

That’s because I succumbed to Mirai’s ingrained reaction to shoot at anything she sees as a threat.

Then again, I too have the bad habit of shooting first and asking questions later.

Had I not given into her impulsive nature and mine, maybe the situation would have turned out better.

Instead of waiting for the egg to crash into the plaza, I opened fire on its drogue chutes as it fell from the sky.

This sent the giant egg spinning off course, and it crashed with a boom and rumble a few city blocks away.

Thus, in one fell swoop I tore out the first page of the Battle Commission’s carefully prepared script and turned the night into a free fall battle to stay alive.

- # -

I’m sure you’re eager to read about how the events of that night unfolded.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to wait because that’s not what this volume is about.

Before I recount in detail the longest night of my life thus far, I need to tell you of the week leading up to it, and of the dire events that took place upon my return to Ar Telica.

By now you’re well acquainted with the circumstances that landed me in a Mirai’s body.

With the introduction done and dusted, it’s time to turn the first page on the first chapter of my newly minted existence as both Isabel val Sanreal, and the Gun Princess, Mirai.