When Aimee was shuffling through a bunch of files and collected evidence on the shelf on which Mr. Night Owl was standing, she heard a cracking sound coming from Jason, who was sitting behind her on the ground in a meditative pose. When she turned around and checked on him she found that Jason’s right eye seemed to be injured by something - a crack appeared across his right eye socket, through which blood was slowly seeping and flowing, even though nothing had touched him.

“Shit! Jason!” Aimee tried to wipe away the blood dripping from Jason’s face, but the blood just wouldn’t stop flowing from the crack. So after a short moment of hesitation, she decided to try her very simple healing spell on him.

“Hiss!” Mr. Night Owl hissed at Aimee once again when she was preparing her healing spell, as if he was rushing her.

“Just give me a minute! I want to help him!” Aimee said with both her hands raised and palms facing Jason, after a short chant, a ball of gentle blue light appeared in the air and slowly floated towards the crack on Jason’s right eye.

The spell did not do much, for the crack on Jason’s right eye still remained and did not close even one bit. Aimee grunted and was about to try again, but a box was thrown over by Mr. Night Owl and hit her on the head.

“Important things first, goddammit!” Mr. Night Owl opened his mouth and spoke in an agitated female voice: “He’s fighting on the other side! Now do your part!”

“What the ... You can talk?”

“Yeah, yeah, Nekomatas can talk, yeah, breaking news.” Mr. Night Owl hissed again and said: “Maybe you can gossip about it on your phone things later. Now we need to find the things that are providing fuel for the nightmares!”

“What kind of things?” Aimee took one more look at Jason, it seemed to her that the bleeding on his eyes had stopped: “Do you know what we should be looking for?”

Didn’t your mentor teach you about Living Nightmares?” Mr. Night Owl looked around and said: “What is it that you mages call it? Right, limbos?”

“Not about the things that are fueling them. What kind of things are we talking about!?”

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“Anything, anything that could be used to collect and channel the fears, despair and nightmares.” Mr. Night Owl started looking at some other things from the shelf: “This Living Nightmare is something different, so anything suspicious could be ...”

“Wait wait wait!” Aimee found a very worn and dirty notebook from one of the boxes placed inside of a ziploc bag, and as she opened it and flipped through the pages, she found that the notebook had a lot of drawings of different symbols on its pages, the styles of which seemed quite familiar to her. She was uncertain at first, so she put the notebook in front of Mr. Night Owl: “Could this be? These are just symbols … I think I saw this kind of symbols somewhere else...”

Mr. Night Owl sniffed the notebook, then said: “Someone in an unstable state drew the symbols on this notebook, destroy it!”

Aimee tried to rip the notebook apart, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not tear even one page from the notebook.

“Use your magic, dammit!”

Aimee put the notebook down on the desk behind her and raised her ice scimitar on held by her right hand.

-------------------------------------------------

“Mr. Lin!” “Are you okay?!” the two officers raised their silver guns at the humanoid monster wielding a large sword and a whip made of spine and called out to Jason: “Your … your eye!”

“Shut up and stand back!” Jason wiped the blood off from his face, then ripped the shard out from his right eye - maybe it was because he was in the limbo, the pain was sharp and grueling and there was no adrenaline pumping through his body to numb it, which made him sweat all over his body, something he did not think was possible until now.

Jason cast an Internal Fortification spell on himself, which would not stop the bleeding right away, but should help him heal fast, even in a limbo. Then, he held the shard covered in his blood in his right hand, and another pen-spear appeared in his hand.

“Similar power … similar power ...” the humanoid monster tilted its head left and right while waving its giant sword and spine whip in the air while mumbling in a voice that was at times low-pitched and at times high, then started slowly walking towards Jason: “Smells different … smells different … stronger … but weaker? No matter, no matter … ”

“Stand back and go back. I’ll hold him here.” Jason conjured another silver pen-spear on his left hand, only this pen-spear had a curved tip and edge.

The two officers held their guns at the monster and started slowly backing away, but before Jason could make sure that they went back up the stairs, the monster launched another attack at Jason with its giant sword.

The five metal rings at the back of the sword rang a tormenting and disturbing sound once again, and this time, countless pale and bloodied faces flashed right behind Jason’s eyes: his parents’, his younger brother Mack’s, Laura Jensen’s, Caroline’s, and even Jianmen’s. These faces were crying, moaning and howling, accusing him, blaming him and cursing at him.

“Boom!” Jason raised both of his silver pen-spears in a cross to block the monster’s sword, the spears got shattered once more and he was sent flying back and rolled on the ground. But before the monster could attack him again, he rolled back and launched himself at the monster with two newly conjured silver pen spears.

“Ting!” the tip of the spear in his left hand was blocked and entangled by the monster’s spine whip as Jason was swinging it from above aiming at the monster’s head. But the tip just fell right off and towards the ground. Jason’s right leg curled back as the spear tip fell, and his right kick landed on the stump of the spear tip.

Like an arrow fired upwards at point blank range, the spear tip shot right at the monster’s waist.