Your breath is hot and heavy as you run down the streets. A number of buildings on both sides of you crumble to pieces as they are torn apart by massive crystals piercing through the concrete. Kaja is running at your side, or rather just slightly ahead of you. She’s holding your hand and tugging you lightly to ensure that you don’t stop running.
And when you glance behind you, you see the shadow creature chasing after you with its translucent purple blade hovering right beside it.
Its menacing determination to chase after you still fills you with fright even after all this time.
It’s everything you’ve seen in your dreams for far too long now. Although admittedly things are a bit different now… Now you’re not quite so absorbed in your loss, and a little more focused on that which you have. This dream itself is a massive boon, now that you think about it.
Simply being here allows you to take a better look at everything that’s happening around you. Since the dream is more than a dream - it’s basically a copy of what’s happened in reality, that must mean that everything in it must also be real, right? Since hardly anything changes from what’s happened in the past, then anything you observe ought to still be accurate, right?
You turn your eyes back towards the Sweeper, as the Sheriff calls it, and you find that it’s a rather accurate name.
You’ve certainly given these things plenty of thought throughout the past three years, but none more so than since that broadcast of his. Particularly that they were able to kill one, assuming that he was telling the truth.
This implies that the Sweeper has limits. But even if it could kill you in one fell swoop easily, why didn’t it? One of the few questions that’s been running through your mind all this time is simply - why didn’t it cut you down while you were running away? It certainly had more than a few chances to do so.
It’s during this dream that you realize why.
The Sweeper was corralling you. Just as it had been corralling that stampede of alien animals at first, then those thousands of crags after. They act as one does with dirt: they gather everything into a pile before sweeping it all aside into some cosmic bin somewhere.
You focus a deep Scan on the Sweeper chasing after you, and immediately sense a depth you simply cannot fathom. It’s a bit like staring down into the ocean and seeing the murky depths far below your sight. Not even close.
Although its vast psionic energies flicker around it in waves, the thing itself is like a dark void. You can’t sense any thoughts or emotions from it, nothing you can understand anyway. Before you thought it was something like a monotone, but now you realize it’s the absence of it.
Though you can’t tell what it is, you can certainly see how much energy it’s capable of using. While it is a great amount - more than you and Kaja combined - simply the ability to see it is more than enough. It means that perhaps you’ve got a fighting chance against it.
“Let’s try to stop it,” you tell Kaja. “I think we can do it.”
“Are you nuts?” she tells you, her voice elevated with worry. “We can’t fight that thing! We don’t even have a gun. All those people who shot at it with their guns - they’re dead. Not even dead, just gone, straight up gone! I don’t even remember what they looked like, or what they told me! I… I can’t let that happen to you…”
“It won’t. And we don’t need guns. You and me - we’re way more dangerous than some dudes with guns.”
You pull your hand away from Kaja as you stop, then spin around to face off against the Shadow Sweeper. It slows over two dozen meters in front of you, though it continues to advance. You sense its energies flare outward with overwhelming amounts of Telekinetic power. But it’s far from the only power it uses. You can sense it shaping some of its remaining energies into numerous other powers, such as Temperance, ESP, and Telepathy.
However, none are varied, and all use the exact same amount of power as the others. The only one that uses a great amount of energy is its Telekinesis. As it does so, it swings its massive blade horizontally above him, then flings it downward in an attempt to bisect you.
Instead of shutting your eyes, this time you keep them wide open.
The blade stops inches away from you suddenly, as Kaja catches it with her burgeoning Telekinesis. You glance over at her to see her struggling against it, and sense her straining psionically. But she’s holding her own. The massive blade shakes and shudders in the air as she fights a slowly losing battle against the Sweeper.
“I don’t think I can hold this!” she tells you through gritted teeth.
“Yes you can,” you reply. “I know you can.”
Your sudden faith in her causes Kaja’s heart to skip - it’s so visceral that you feel it as well. Her energy surges slightly, allowing her to take better hold of the incoming blade and very nearly halting it to a standstill.
As she wrestles against the Sweeper, you shape your energies into a powerful Surge. You narrow down its cone greatly, practically turning it into a beam large enough to just about engulf the Sweeper whole. You pour heaping amounts of hesitance, doubt, and questioning into the Surge, more than enough to stop dozens of people at a time.
Though its vast void soaks up all your emotions like a sponge, it stops less than a dozen meters away from you. You feel a sudden jolt pulse outward from it, some kind of defensive power. It’s powerful enough to shatter your Surge and stop your attack short.
And unfortunately, it keeps its hold on the blade.
You sense it pour a bit more energy into its Telekinesis, causing Kaja to strain significantly more as a result. It scrapes through the air slowly towards you, and you can almost hear it slicing through the wind, like a low, somber hum.
Not that you’re worried. Instead, a grin forms on your face as you initiate your Network and join Kaja to it.
Both your energies fill a shared pool, and combined in this way you’re almost a match against the Sweeper’s. Especially now that you’ve grown as much as you have. Back then, you had almost nothing to draw from. Then again, it isn’t so much about the size of the pool… it’s also about how well you can swim in its waters.
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You also lend some of your own energies directly to Kaja through the Network, empowering her Telekinesis in the process. Her hold on the blade steadies once again, and halts its slow advance. Firmly.
“What the hell is going on?!” Kaja says close to frantically.
“I know you’re just now figuring things out, but trust me when I say we’ve got psionic powers, okay? And they’re awesome.” You reply.
“What, you can see the future now or something?”
“Something like that… Just like you can move things with a thought.”
“You make it sound so easy!”
“Yeah? Well you’re the one who’s actually doing it. Now focus!”
You Surge outwards a second time, but this time in a shallow cone directed at Kaja. She finds herself bathed in determination and excitement, exactly as how you’re feeling it. Of course, she can’t help but be swept up by it.
More than that, she seems somewhat mesmerized by who you suddenly are, who you’ve become, who you’re going to be. There are equal parts pride and happiness and You sense her energies swell again, allowing her to channel just that much more energy through her Telekinesis.
The blade begins to shudder again shortly after, as the two wrestle for control of it.
Kaja now seems ready to actually challenge the Shadow Sweeper now, invigorated by this “future you”. Of course, you’re far from done yourself. As far as you’re concerned, all you’ve done so far is hit it with a warning shot. It’s the next one that’s going to actually finish it off.
At least, you hope it does.
You concentrate half of your current energies and form it into a long and fine needle-like spear. Then you shift the energies slightly and focus them into a truly devastating Interrupt. This much power is more than enough to put a complete halt to any person you’ve met thus far. In fact, you’re certain this much would be lethal to absolutely any creature currently living on the planet.
You could perhaps spear through a dozen people and Interrupt them all in one go.
Though it’s designed to stop their physical organs from functioning, and thus killing them, you’re not sure if it will do the same to the Sweeper. You hope the power translates well to whatever biology the Sweeper has. If anything, you hope to inflict a terrible wound on it - one grievous enough to give Kaja the edge she needs.
You fling your Interrupt straight at the center of that void, stabbing deep within with absolute certainty. Then you push the entire length of it further and further in, despite the Sweeper’s attempts to repulse it and push it away.
As you do so, you sense its energies flicker and flutter, as though each power is shutting down and then reactivating over and over. Its energy pool also fluctuates, as though it’s switching between settings. It’s shallower one moment, then deeper the next, and then everything else in between.
You’re horrified to learn that its actual depth is far more than what you’ve sensed previously, but at least you know you can hurt it. At least, while it’s at this ‘depth’. You hope that it remains there and doesn’t escalate things…
You push in the rest of your Interrupt without hesitation, causing an all-systems blackout from the void itself. It completely vanishes for a moment, but reappears almost immediately after.
Kaja takes this moment to completely envelop her Telekinetic grasp on the blade and wrench it from the Sweeper’s grasp. With her arms gesticulating wildly, she swings the massive weapon over your heads, then flings it point-first towards its owner.
“Go for the head!” you cry out.
Kaja raises the blade’s trajectory slightly upwards, aiming towards the Sweeper’s head rather than its chest. The blade itself whips through the air with extreme speed, but stops mere inches from the creature’s head.
The blade wobbles slightly as the Sweeper’s Telekinetic energies wrap around it, stopping it in midair just as Kaja had done against it only moments ago.
Looks like it recovered way faster than I thought, you transmit to Kaja through the Network.
Aw hell, she replies.
She says it again the moment the both of you sense the Sweeper slowly pushing the blade back. More than that, its own Telekinesis seems to be taking more and more control of it as the seconds pass. It won’t be long until it retakes control, and you realize that it’s now or never.
But how? You’ve used up two thirds of your energy so far, and most of that was from both your attacks!
You can’t attack it, not directly anyway. Not unless you wanna wipe yourself out again. No, you’ve gotta come at it from a completely different way altogether if you’re trying to come out of this alive.
Sure it’s all just a dream and nothing you do here actually matters. Besides whatever new skills you learn or wisdom you glean, reality will still be the same and nothing will change. Mistakes won’t be undone and your past is still the past. Right?
May as well go all-out in here since there’s no consequences. If anything, you can practice powers you don’t normally get to use. Or, even better, you can craft new powers altogether. Combination powers like Orchestra and Living Nexus and Temporal Acceleration.
You weave your energies into your Foresight, and peer into the numerous shards of the future that lay ahead of you. Most show exactly what you fear - the Sweeper regaining control of the blade. Very few reveal a future where the blade rams straight into its head, causing both entities to dissolve on contact.
You quickly step halfway into one of the rare futures, but instead of funneling the energies of Temperance into yourself, you pass it through to your Telepathy. Then, you transmit it straight to the Sweeper itself, then add that shard to its own.
Since it isn’t an aggressive move, it slips in neatly with the other shards the Sweeper is sensing, but vanishes after a moment. It’s overwhelmed by the Sweeper’s actual fate. But you don’t simply drop one shard - you drop another. Or rather, the same, merely a copy. But another nonetheless. And you drop more and more copies into it, allowing your lethal shard to appear and reappear over and over.
The Omen then catches like a fire in the Sweeper’s future, widening and spreading across its vast but immediate future. You see all its shards flip over to yours, slowly at first. But it results in an overwhelming cascade by the end.
When all the Sweeper can see are shards of its own dead future, it stops altogether and stands still almost as though it has given up the fight. All its energies recede at the same time, which allows Kaja to ram the blade straight into its head without resistance. As foretold.
The weapon drives in like molasses, however. And where blade meets void, both things seem to melt and bubble and dissipate into smoke. It takes many seconds for Kaja to burn through it all, to completely erase the Sweeper’s head.
It also takes the majority of the blade to do, and is basically little more than a large nub at the end. Kaja embeds it into the asphalt with force, even as the Sweeper’s body flickers in and out of existence. And then suddenly, it’s gone altogether.
Both of you are filled with absolute joy and excitement, and can’t help but yell and scream in victory. The two of you immediately hug each other tightly, thankful that neither of you had gotten hurt. Or worse.
Your faces are filled with the widest smiles as your glance turns into gazes. Her eyes catch yours at the same time that yours catch hers, making your heart stop still.
You see her eyes flick down to your mouth, as though begging for a taste. Of course, you share that feeling deeply, especially considering you’re intertwined within the Network. You can’t help but need her even more now than you ever have. And the same with her.
The both of you lean in towards each other to fulfill that mutual need, your heart now beating a million times a minute.
And then, you wake.