𝐈𝐧 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐖𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐞𝐬𝐭 𝐃𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬 (English)

Chapter 91

Jaune normally slipped into dreams like a ray of sunlight through a window, flowing into a person's subconscious mind without a conscious thought of his own. The same for them. Few ever noticed, so subtle was his Semblance's intrusion.

This was different.

Jaune tumbled into the abyss screaming in rage, cursing himself for falling for Watts' simple trip and with his thoughts locked solely on the nightmare on the horizon: Salem. Thoughts of what she would do to him, what horrors she might inflict, and also what she'd do with his Semblance if he surrendered to her.

He did not appear in a person's dream.

He slammed into it, shattering the barrier with a sound like breaking glass and smashing down onto a dusty desert-like surface in the middle of a nightmare-blasted landscape. The sky was purple and crackled with lightning, while the sand beneath him was black like ground obsidian. It was warm, as if it were absorbing heat from the lightning itself.

Or as if it were alive.

"Whose dream is this?"

Ruby, Blake and Weiss had been knocked out at roughly the same time as him, and each of them would have had negative enough thoughts about it to cause a nightmare. He doubted Ruby or Weiss had ever seen a desert like this, but there was no telling how many places Blake had been to as a terrorist. It was mostly likely her.

"I have to see if I can wake her up. If I can change someone's DNA then I can surely purge poison from someone's system as well. If I can give her a boost then she might be able to stop Watts taking me away."

Or at least protect her teammates.

The first thing was finding her. He'd never been able to effect people without interacting with their dream self. The scenery was just a figment of her imagination. It was the dream persona that represented a person's identity.

"Blake! Blake, where are you! This is a dream! I need you to find me!"

He picked a location and began running. Samina was make-believe here. The landscape didn't become fuzzy so he assumed he was headed in roughly the right direction, continuing to shout at the top of his voice.

Something rumbled far behind him, beginning as a distant noise, impossibly deep, and then sounding closer. It could have been the rumbling of thunder at first, but the lack of any flashes of light told him it wasn't. While dreams could and did defy reason, the dreamer usually mimicked natural phenomena accurately. They'd lived through enough thunderstorms to know what they looked and sounded like.

That sounded like a growl. A monster, then.

"Of course Blake would be having a nightmare," he groaned. "She's just a raging bundle of guilt and misery."

She was probably blaming herself now for being knocked out by Watts, as if others hadn't fallen for the exact same trick. Jaune turned and made his way toward the noise, knowing that the "monster" in a nightmare was sure to be close to the dreamer. It wouldn't be much of a nightmare otherwise.

Traversing the desert, he soon came upon several ruins sticking up from the black sand. Half-buried, they still retained their architectural style and the white marble shone. Vacuo, then? He'd heard there were interesting ruins there for tourists to see. The number of them picked up to a startling degree, to the point he felt like he was in the middle of a ruined city. There was no way Vacuo had this many ruins so close together, but Blake's dream might just be slapping them down without a care for realism.

"Blake! Blaaaake! Or Weiss or Ruby!" he shouted, since it could still be them. "Anyone!"

The ground beneath him cracked.