Just a little reminder! If you enjoy what I create, you can support me at https://ko-fi.com/godtiersage
also extra chapters on here
The Cost of Vigilance
The war was a silent, draining siege. My nights were no longer my own. They were a meticulous, exhausting circuit of strengthening dreamers, reinforcing mental fortresses, and monitoring the ever-shifting patterns of Kageyama's hunger. I was a doctor performing endless, delicate surgeries in the dark.
The toll it took was not just on my dream-self. My physical body, that of a three-and-a-half-year-old boy, was bearing the brunt of a stress it was never designed to handle. The constant, low-grade expenditure of power, the psychic strain of vigilance—it all leaked through the connection. I was always tired. A deep, bone-weary fatigue that naps couldn't cure and sleep only intensified. My appetite, once robust, became finicky. I pushed food around my plate, my stomach often too knotted with unseen anxiety to accept much.
My parents watched this transformation with a helpless, heart-breaking confusion. The doctor found nothing. "He's just a little run down," was the repeated, useless diagnosis. Their worry became a constant, gentle pressure in our home, a third presence in every room. They tried everything. Longer bedtime stories. New, exciting foods. Trips to the zoo. I would try to rally, to give them a convincing performance of a happy child, but my smiles were thin and my energy reserves were empty.
One afternoon, I was sitting on the living room floor, attempting to engage in the critically important work of pushing a toy car back and forth. My mother was on the couch, pretending to read a magazine but really watching me. I could feel her gaze, feel the weight of her concern like a physical thing.
The toy car rolled under the sofa. With a sigh that felt far too old for my body, I lay down on my stomach to reach for it. The dust beneath the sofa was thick. As my fingers closed around the plastic wheels, a sudden, sharp *crack* echoed from the kitchen.
My father had dropped a plate.
It was a simple, mundane accident. But in my hyper-vigilant state, my nerves stretched taut from a night of battling psychic parasites, the sound wasn't just a noise. It was a gunshot. It was the sound of Kageyama's nightmare realm fracturing.
My body reacted before my mind could. I flinched so violently I hit my head on the underside of the sofa. A jolt of pure, undiluted panic—the kind I felt when confronting the Phobophage—flooded my system. My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. I scrambled backward, away from the sound, my breath coming in short, sharp gasps. I couldn't get enough air. The room seemed to tilt and swim. Tears of sheer, adrenal overload sprang to my eyes.
"Arata!" My mother was on the floor in an instant, her arms around me. "Honey, it's okay! It's just a plate! Daddy dropped a plate, that's all!"
But it wasn't all. To me, in that moment, it was everything. It was the sound of my fragile control shattering. It was the terror of the hunt bleeding into the daylight. I was so tired, so stretched thin, that the barrier between my two worlds had worn down to a tissue. A dropped plate had torn right through it.
I buried my face in her shoulder, sobbing—real, ragged, helpless sobs that shook my entire small frame. I wasn't crying about the plate. I was crying from the exhaustion. I was crying for the peace I'd lost. I was crying because I was a child carrying a burden no child should ever have to bear, and I was so, so tired.
My father stood in the kitchen doorway, his face a mask of guilt and confusion, holding the pieces of the plate. "I'm so sorry, buddy," he said, his voice soft and pained. "I didn't mean to scare you."
They held me for a long time, until the storm of panic passed, leaving me hollow and shivering. The incident, small as it was, changed something. The unspoken question in my parents' eyes shifted from "What is wrong with him?" to "What happened to him?"
They began to watch me differently. Not with frantic fear, but with a deeper, more thoughtful concern. I saw them exchanging quiet looks, having hushed conversations after they thought I was asleep. The theory of a late-blooming, stress-induced Quirk was back on the table, but it was now tinged with a new worry. What kind of Quirk would manifest as chronic fatigue and panic attacks? What did that mean for my future?
Their dreams that night were steeped in this new, complex anxiety. My father dreamed of being unable to protect me from a threat he couldn't see. My mother dreamed of me fading away, becoming translucent, no matter how tightly she held on.
I wanted to soothe them, to tell them it would be alright. But I couldn't. The energy wasn't there. That night, I barely had the strength to maintain my own realm, let alone tend to theirs. The cracks Kageyama had left were still there, and my power was focused on the front lines, not on home defence.
The siege was costing me everything. I was losing ground in both worlds.
A break in the pattern came a few nights later. I was shoring up the dreams of a young chef plagued by nightmares of burning her restaurant down—a particularly potent feeding ground for Kageyama. As I reinforced her confidence, her memory of the perfect dish she'd cooked that day, I felt it.
A thread snapped.
Not just any thread. One of Kageyama's primary feeding lines. It didn't retract. It didn't wither. It was severed, cleanly and completely. The echo of its dissolution was a small, silent shockwave in the dreamscape.
Then another snapped. And another.
Something was happening. Something I wasn't doing.
I withdrew from the chef's dream and cast my awareness toward Kageyama's lair. The usual, frantic energy was gone. Instead, there was chaos. The screaming faces on his walls were contorted in silent agony. The threads in his hands weren't being woven; they were thrashing, whipping around like severed power lines, spraying arcs of raw fear-energy wildly.
He was under attack.
But not by me.
I saw them then. Three new presences in the nightmare room. They weren't dreamers. They were… sharp. Defined. Their forms were constructs of pure will, but a will that was trained, focused, and working in tandem. Heroes.
One presence was a bastion of unwavering calm, projecting a sphere of silent peace that nullified the swirling fear around them. Another was a scalpel, surgically slicing through Kageyama's psychic threads with precise, mental strikes. The third was a net, weaving a barrier that contained the backlash of disintegrating nightmares, preventing the energy from flooding out and harming innocent sleepers.
They were a Quirked response team. Psychic heroes. They had found him.
Kageyama was shrieking, a sound of rage and terror that was almost pathetic. He lashed out, trying to forge new nightmares, but his attacks were disorganized, panicked. The heroes were methodical, professional. They weren't there to fight his nightmares. They were there to cut his lines and contain him.
I watched, utterly transfixed. This was how this world dealt with its monsters. Not with a lone dream-king, but with a system. With trained professionals.
The "battle" was swift and clinical. With his connections severed, Kageyama was just a man—a wretched, powerless man trapped in his own mind. The hero who was the net wrapped him in bands of solid light, and his nightmare realm began to dissolve around him, the screaming faces fading into whispers, then into silence.
As his consciousness was subdued, pulled into a deep, dreamless sleep he would not wake from without assistance, I felt a massive, psychic pressure lift from the Dreaming. The constant, cold draft vanished. The air itself felt cleaner, lighter.
It was over.
The heroes began to withdraw, their job done. But as they left, one of them—the scalpel—paused. Her presence turned, and I felt a sharp, intelligent focus sweep over the area. She was looking at the *aftermath*. At the clean cuts on the severed threads. At the way Kageyama's realm had been contained rather than allowed to explosively decompress.
She was looking at 'my' work.
'Hm.' The thought was a flicker, professional and curious. 'The substrate is… stabilized. Unusually so. Damage is minimal. Did we have support we weren't briefed on?'
Her focus swept the area again, a searchlight passing over me. I held perfectly still, making myself part of the stage, part of the background. I was the Dreaming. I was the silence after the storm.
After a long moment, her presence withdrew, a faint sense of puzzlement lingering in her wake.
I was alone. The Dreaming was quiet. Truly quiet, for the first time in months.
The relief was so profound it was dizzying. The constant tension that had been thrumming through every part of my being simply… evaporated. I felt light. The fatigue that had been my constant companion was still there, but it was now a clean tiredness, the tiredness after hard work is done, not the sickly exhaustion of a prolonged siege.
I returned to my throne and simply sat, breathing in the peace of my realm. The cracks were already beginning to heal on their own. The silver light overhead seemed brighter, warmer.
I had done it. I hadn't defeated him myself, but I had held the line. I had weakened him, contained the damage, and made it possible for the heroes to take him down with minimal collateral damage. I was not a soldier. I was a field medic. And the field was secure.
The next morning, I woke up in my bed feeling… different. The crushing weight was gone. Sunlight streamed through the window, and it felt warm, not threatening. The smell of breakfast from the kitchen—eggs and toast—actually made my stomach rumble with hunger.
I padded out to the kitchen. My mother was at the stove. She turned to smile at me, and then the smile froze on her face. Her eyes widened.
"Arata?" she said, her voice soft with wonder. "Honey, you look… you look so rested."
I hadn't done anything. I had just slept. Truly slept. For the first time in months, my sleep had been a blank, dreamless void of restoration. I had not visited the Dreaming. I had simply been a boy, in a bed, sleeping.
I climbed into my chair at the table. When my mother put a plate of eggs in front of me, I ate them. All of them. I didn't push them around. I ate them.
My father came in, tying his tie. He stopped and stared at me. "Well, good morning," he said, a genuine smile spreading across his face. "Somebody's hungry."
They watched me all through breakfast, their relief a tangible thing in the room. The shadow was still there—the mystery of my months of struggle wasn't solved—but the crisis had passed. Their son was back.
I was back.
That day, I played. Really played. I wasn't performing. I wasn't hiding. I built a fortress out of blocks and then knocked it over with a triumphant shout. I laughed at a cartoon on TV. The sound of my own laughter surprised me. It had been so long.
The war was over. I had learned a brutal lesson about my limits, about the cost of vigilance. But I had also learned that I was not alone. This world had its own defences. There were others who could fight the monsters in the dark.
That night, as I drifted off to sleep, I felt the gentle pull of the Dreaming. I answered it, not with the grim determination of a soldier, but with the warm anticipation of going home.
I appeared in my throne room. It was whole. The cracks were healed. The air was sweet and still. And sitting in the middle of the floor, twitching its nose, was the moon-white rabbit I had dreamed into being. It looked at me with its deep, intelligent eyes, then hopped once and vanished.
Everything was as I had left it. But I was not the same.
I was the Dreamer. But I was also Arata. And for the first time, I felt like those two things could exist in the same world without tearing each other apart. The balance was not a burden. It was a choice. And for now, I chose to simply sit on my throne, in the quiet of my kingdom, and just breathe.
----End----
Give me stones pls