If This Is A Dream, Let Me Never Wake

“The tower’s coming down!”

“Everyone, fall back!”

— KRRRRUMBLE!

The colossal rampart tower that fed the barrier its mana came down, and in that instant the azure veil stretched along the horizon melted away like snow.

“Grrrrr…”

A monster horde had massed before the veil, and only when its damp breath wet their faces did the soldiers truly grasp what was happening. The shouts that burst out of them were closer to screams.

“Hold them! Hold them, now!”

But the palisades, the traps and the weapons they’d prepared came nowhere close to stopping the advance. Steel-like claws and monstrous strength cut the soldiers down so pointlessly, so horrifically, that the general watching from the rear forgot he was supposed to be commanding anyone at all.

“Screw this! I—I can’t do it!”

“I didn’t sign up for the army to die like a dog…!”

One terrified soldier after another began peeling away from the line, and a few old veterans roared at them in fury.

“No! Hold your posts, you idiots! Whatever it takes, we—”

— THWACK.

A Giant’s toe swung into the back of the veteran’s skull and took his head clean off.

The headless body toppled, and the Giant trampled over it without a glance. When its foot lifted, what was left of the corpse was crushed past all recognition.

An end that grisly and that futile was more than the soldiers could bear, and their will to fight drained away.

“Aaaagh!”

There was no resisting it.

Once the front line started to give, it collapsed in the blink of an eye, and the monsters rode the momentum, pressing their advance faster still.

“Mooove aaaside!”

Just then a bellow tore out from somewhere beyond the horde.

A man was running toward them with a long plume of dust trailing behind him, and flickering arcs of lightning leaked out between the fingers of his clenched fist.

— KRRZZT!

The sparks raced from his hand up his arm until they wrapped his whole body, and then the man, now a single bolt of lightning, punched straight through the dead center of the horde.

— SQUELCH! CRUNCH!

Neither hard hide nor muscle meant anything to him. One charge burst hundreds of monsters into lumps of meat, and the sight was so overwhelming that even the fleeing soldiers stopped in their tracks.

“L-Lord Felix?!”

Leonard Felix.

He was the mage who stood for the Citra Empire itself, and a member of the Rounds of Archmage, the circle said to admit only the greatest on the continent. A living, breathing legend had come here in person, and color began to return to the soldiers’ faces.

Damn it.

Leonard, though, was in despair.

The magic barrier, their last bastion, had crumbled, and there wasn’t a knight or a mage to be found anywhere. The soldiers standing here were ordinary people with next to no training, let alone any experience fighting monsters.

How in the world did it come to this?

It had taken all of one month for peaceful, ordinary life to fall apart.

Dimensional rifts had opened all across the continent, and endless monster hordes poured out from beyond them. Under that assault, the nations humanity had built toppled one after another.

Is this the end? Is this our fate — to be swept away this limply, and nothing more?

— Crrrk.

His fingernails bit into his palm until tiny beads of blood welled up. But the soldiers had no way of knowing what was in his heart, so they broke into cheers.

“The Archmage is here!”

“We’re saved!”

Leonard shook his head irritably and shouted.

“Enough chatter — get back! I’m taking it from here!”

The soldiers fell back, thanking him over and over. A moment later a horde far larger than the first came on, kicking up clouds of dust.

“Haaaah—!”

Leonard steeled himself, gripped a thunderbolt in each hand, and hurled himself into the middle of the horde with a long roar.

How much time had passed since then?

A single mage was fighting alone on the battlefield, and all around him the monsters that had died by his hand were piled into a great mound.

“Blegh.”

He spat out the clot of blood that had pooled in his mouth. His smeared, whitish vision sharpened, and at the same moment the raw stink of blood pushed deep into his nostrils.

At some point Leonard had ended up standing atop a mound of blood and shredded flesh. A sticky scrap of viscera slid down his face, and without thinking he raised a hand to wipe it away.

No. He tried to raise it.

“…”

Only then did Leonard look down at his own body, and his breath started coming in gasps.

Where his right arm should have been there was only empty space. His belly was torn open, his guts a hair from spilling out, and on top of that a monster’s severed head hung from his other shoulder, its teeth still buried in him.

“Khuh!”

As he coughed, the senses that had gone numb slowly came back to life.

The Empire…? The soldiers of the Citra Empire, the people…

Swaying, Leonard turned his eyes and found a faint light far off. Beneath smoke that reached the clouds lay the imperial capital, glittering red with the light of the flames.

Could they all be dead?

— Fwaaash.

As he stood watching the Empire’s end in a daze, the boundary between dimensions broke down behind him and a huge rift formed. The monsters he’d thought he had wiped out to the last began crossing it, gathering one after another.

They had only one destination, and that was the capital of the Citra Empire.

“Ha.”

A hollow laugh slipped out of him before he knew it. He had fought with his life on the line, and still the situation was racing toward the worst, as if nothing he’d done had changed it.

Perhaps some corner of his heart had known all along. However hard he flew or crawled on his own, it was far too late to overturn a result that had already been decided.

But he couldn’t give up.

As long as there was breath in him, he would survive to the end and keep fighting. Even if he was the last human alive, even if nothing was left of this body but teeth, he would go on fighting.

It was an oath he’d sworn to himself before he ever became a mage.

Move!

On muscle alone, standing was about all he could manage now. So Leonard wrung out the last of his mana and pushed it into his limbs, forcing both legs and his left arm to move.

“Grrk.”

Bloody foam rose between his clenched teeth. He plugged the hole in his belly with what mana he had left, then turned a gaze boiling with rage on the enemy.

Throw out the useless noise in your head. Focus on how to kill the enemy.

— Tap!

Leonard kicked off the ground and leapt high into the air.

He swept his eyes down the line of monsters moving in single file and began the calculations to cast. The speed was so formidable it was hard to believe it came from a body that could have dropped dead at any moment.

— KRRZAK!

Sparks snapped in the empty air, and then blue lightning coiled around his whole body like a snake. The light it threw in every direction was so fierce it could have been seen from kilometers away.

“KRAAAAGH!”

Leonard came down on the monsters’ heads with a beastlike shriek. The electricity wrapped around him discharged in all directions and burned everything that came near to a blackened crisp.

Burning, cutting, stabbing, crushing.

Heedless of the monster blood and ash caking his skin, Leonard burned every last drop of his mana to the very end.

Then his body reached its limit, and he lurched to a stop where he stood, like a broken marionette.

— Shunk!

With a final knife-hand, Leonard smashed the skull of a downed Giant. Then he lay back staring up at the sky, dragging in ragged breaths.

“…Huh?”

That was when he saw it.

Someone was standing beside him.

Leonard was so startled that for an instant he forgot even to breathe. He hadn’t sensed a presence, and it hadn’t even crossed his mind that anyone was there. Its face was hidden under a hood, yet its shape was unmistakably human.

— Shhk!

It made a light gesture, and in the same instant Leonard’s remaining left arm came away from his torso.

But he no longer had the strength even to react to the pain. Sprawled on the ground, Leonard shuddered faintly, and then he stopped moving altogether.

“…”

‘It’ bent over the dying Leonard’s head, and its expression twisted.

A skin-crawling smile, hidden under the hood.

Who…

Questions rose in him, and along with them a thick darkness settled over his consciousness.

What woke him in the still darkness was the smell of greasy, salty food. When he finally managed to lift eyelids that weighed a ton, the sunlight coming through the window stabbed at his eyes.

“…”

Leonard let out a grumbling groan and pulled the blanket over his face. For now, all he wanted was to enjoy the soft, fluffy feel of this bed a minute longer, even a second longer.

This is nice…

He was one step from sinking back into dreamland.

Then he caught that something was badly wrong. His half-closed eyes snapped wide open and he pushed himself upright. Why was his consciousness still running, unbroken, in the first place?

“Hhgk!”

— Rnnnnng.

A ringing started inside his skull, and a horrific headache rolled in right behind it. Leonard had been about to get out of bed, but instead he slowly leaned back against the wall.

It felt as if every pain he’d piled up fighting the monsters was crashing in at once. He sat down hard on the floor, drenched in sweat, and soon realized that his body had no wounds on it. It had no wrinkles either, and not one slab of muscle.

What in the world is this…?!

Both his arms had been torn off and his innards reduced to pulp. Yet somehow his body was perfectly whole now, without so much as a scratch.

My body’s gotten smaller.

Confused by his own diagnosis, he looked around. It was a cramped room, but a familiar-looking one, with no furniture except a bed and a side table.

That can’t be. This place is…

For the briefest moment he wondered if this was the afterlife, but it felt oddly too real for that.

— Sniff, sniff.

The smell teased his nose again. Leonard twitched the tip of his nose, walked slowly to the door, and took hold of the handle with a hand that flinched.

If he was right, then beyond this door was…

In that moment, Leonard was afraid for the first time in nearly forty years. What if all of this was only a daydream seen in the last instant before death? He took a breath, and in the end, he turned the knob.

— Creak.

“You slept in, Leonard.”

“Eat up quick. We have to be out in the fields early today.”

What greeted Leonard as the door opened was none other than his parents.

An old table set with breakfast, and a plain kitchen that somehow felt warm. It was the same scene, down to the inch, as the childhood memory that still rose up whenever he closed his eyes.

“…Aah.”

His eyes stung without his meaning them to, and he blinked and blinked as he staggered toward the table where his family sat. A scene he had only ever drawn in dreams was spread out in front of him now.

If this was a dream, let him never wake.

Leonard Felix. Died in the year 1255, aged fifty-seven.

Regressed into the body of a nine-year-old.