If This Is A Dream, Let Me Never Wake

“The tower’s coming down!”

“Everyone, fall back!”

— KRRRRUMBLE!

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

“Grrrrr…”

Only when the damp breath of the horde massed before the veil wet their faces did the soldiers finally grasp what was happening, and shouts closer to screams burst out of them.

“Hold them! Hold them, now!”

Not one of the palisades, traps, or weapons they had prepared came anywhere close to stopping the monsters’ advance. Steel-hard claws and brute strength cut the soldiers down so easily and so gruesomely that the general watching from the rear forgot he was supposed to be commanding his troops.

“Screw this! I—I can’t do it!”

“I didn’t join the army to die like a dog…!”

When terrified soldiers began peeling away from the line one after another, a few old veterans roared in fury.

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

— THWACK.

In that instant, 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 it without a glance. Where its foot lifted away, the corpse lay crushed past all recognition.

Faced with an end so grisly and so futile, the soldiers could not help but lose the will to fight.

“Aaaagh!”

An irresistible force.

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

“Mooove aaaside!”

Just then, a bellow tore out from beyond the monster horde.

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

— KRRZZT!

The sparks spreading from his hand raced up his arm and wrapped his whole body. 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 could stand in his way. A single 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.

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 legend had come here in person, and color began to return to the soldiers’ faces.

Damn it.

Despair gripped Leonard.

The magic barrier, their last bastion, had crumbled, and there was not a knight or a mage to be found anywhere. The men 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?

Peaceful everyday life had fallen apart in a single month.

Dimensional rifts had opened all across the continent, and under the endless hordes pouring through them, the nations humanity had built toppled one after another.

Is this the end? Is this our fate — to be swept away this limply?

— Crrrk.

Tiny beads of blood welled where his fingernails bit into his palm. The soldiers, with no way of knowing what was in his heart, 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—!”

Thunderbolts gripped in both hands, Leonard steeled himself and, with a long roar, hurled himself into the middle of the horde.

How much time had passed since then?

One mage, fighting alone on the battlefield. All around him, the monsters that had died by his hand lay piled in a great mound.

“Blegh.”

He spat out the clot of blood pooled in his mouth, and his smeared, whitish vision sharpened. At the same time, the raw stink of blood flooded 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.

Or he tried to.

“…”

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

Where his right arm should have been was nothing but empty space, and his belly was torn open, his guts a hair from spilling out. On top of that, a monster’s severed head dangled from his other shoulder, its teeth still sunk into the flesh.

“Khuh!”

With the cough, his numbed senses 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 in the light of the flames.

Could they all be dead?

— Fwaaash.

Behind him, as he watched the Empire’s end in a daze, the boundary between dimensions broke down and a huge rift formed. Monsters he had thought he’d wiped out to the last one began pouring through and massing, one after another.

They had only one destination: the capital of the Citra Empire.

“Ha.”

A hollow laugh slipped out of Leonard before he knew it. He had fought with his life on the line, and still the situation was racing toward the worst, unchanged.

Perhaps some corner of his heart had known all along that no matter how hard he struggled on his own, it was far too late to overturn an outcome already decided.

But he could not give up.

As long as breath remained in him, he would survive to the end and keep fighting. Even if he were the last human alive, even if nothing was left of this body but teeth, he would go on fighting. He had sworn that oath to himself before he ever became a mage.

Move!

On muscle alone, standing was about all he could manage now. But Leonard wrung out the last of his mana, pushed it into his limbs, and forced 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 gaze down the line of monsters marching in single file and began calculating his spell, moving with a speed hard to believe from a body that could have dropped dead at any moment.

— KRRZAK!

Sparks snapped in the empty air, and blue lightning coiled around his whole body like a snake, throwing light so fierce in every direction that it could be 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, burning everything that came near to a blackened crisp.

Burning, cutting, stabbing, crushing.

Heedless of the monster blood and ash caking his skin, he burned through every last drop of his mana.

And the moment his body hit its limit, Leonard lurched to a halt like a broken marionette.

— Shunk!

He finally drove a knife-hand through a downed Giant’s skull and smashed it, then collapsed onto his back, staring up at the sky and dragging in ragged breaths.

“…Huh?”

Then he saw it.

Someone was standing beside him.

Leonard was so startled he forgot, for an instant, even to breathe. He had sensed no presence; it had never even crossed his mind that anyone was there. A hood hid its face, but its outward shape was unmistakably human.

— Shhk!

With one light gesture, it severed Leonard’s remaining left arm from his torso.

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

“…”

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

A skin-crawling smile, hidden under the hood.

Who…

As the questions rose in him, a thick darkness settled over Leonard’s consciousness.

What woke him in the still darkness was the smell of greasy, salty food. When he finally forced his heavy eyelids open, sunlight through the window stabbed his eyes.

“…”

Leonard let out a grumbling groan and pulled the blanket over his face. For now, all he wanted was to savor the soft, fluffy bed for every second he could steal.

This is nice…

He was one step from drifting back off to dreamland.

Then it hit him that something was badly wrong. His half-closed eyes snapped wide, and he pushed himself upright. Hold on, why was he even conscious at all?

“Hhgk!”

— Rnnnnng.

A ringing inside his skull, and on its heels a horrific headache. Leonard, halfway out of bed, slumped against the wall.

Every pain he had piled up fighting the monsters seemed to crash in at once. He sank hard to the floor, drenched in sweat, and soon realized that his body bore no wounds. His skin had no wrinkles either, and there was not a trace of his old muscle.

What in the world is this…?!

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

My body’s gotten smaller.

Puzzled by the thought, he looked around. The room was cramped but familiar, with no furniture beyond a bed and a side table.

That can’t be. This place is…

For the briefest moment he thought he might be in the afterlife, but it felt far too real for that.

— Sniff, sniff.

The smell teased his nose again. Nose twitching, Leonard walked slowly to the door and reached for the handle, his hand flinching as it closed around it.

If he was right, what lay beyond this door was…

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

— Creak.

“You slept in, Leonard.”

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

When the door opened, the ones who greeted him were none other than his parents.

An old table set for breakfast, and a plain kitchen that somehow felt warm. Every inch of it matched the childhood memory that still rose up whenever he closed his eyes.

“…Aah.”

Blinking again and again against eyes that had begun to sting on their own, Leonard staggered toward the table where his family sat. A scene he had only ever seen in dreams lay before him.

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.