The swirling vortex of colors finally settled, and Kael found himself standing before a door, its wood the color of dried blood. The red door. He reached out, the wood cool and strangely familiar under his fingertips.
It was no longer an abstract concept in his mind but instead was a tangible gateway. Taking a deep, steadying breath, he pushed it open and then stumbled through, the transition seamless, as if he had just walked out from his room.
As he pushed the door, the familiar, comforting corridor of his subconscious – usually adorned with bookshelves of memory and vibrant dreamscapes – melted away, revealing a space disturbingly alien. It resembled nothing so much as a moving armored truck.
The walls were a dull, oppressive gray, lined with advanced steel plates. The floor was sticky with a substance that smelled faintly of copper and fear, a metallic tang that clawed at the back of Kael's throat. The air was thick, stagnant, as if it had been breathed in and out a hundred times over by the damned.
Binding sigils flared to life around his wrists and ankles, chains materializing and biting into his flesh. His body felt heavy, leaden, as if gravity had turned against him, and the reassuring hum of his dream walking powers became absent, replaced by a terrifying silence that caused him to panic in fear.
The sound of labored breathing and quiet whimpers filled the cramped space, inforning Kael that he wasn't alone. As his eyes, straining in the dim light filtering from unseen sources, adjusted, he made out the shapes of other figures, bound like him. They looked like beings, sprunged from a fevered nightmare.
They consisted of men and women with chrome limbs that whirred and clicked, others encased in bulky exoskeletons that made them seem like walking tanks. They all wore expressions of cruel indifference, their eyes fixed on a single purpose. Kael, bound in rough chains, realized with a sickening lurch that he was one of them, a slave.
Their eyes, though, held a common thread were the same stark fear and abject confusion that mirrored his own.
Above the din of labored breaths and the whirring of cybernetic implants, Kael could faintly make out snippets of conversation. His captors, whoever they were, spoke in hushed, guttural tones, their language laced with harsh consonants.
"Hey l heard that this year's batch is very strong and properly trained", said one of the men, who Kael assumed were his captors.
"Ofcourse they are. After all, they are survivors of the outer layers ", replied another man.
"What! They are survivors, tha..ts-wa..it, how did the team even capture them? l mean from what I am told, these survivors are pretty strong." said the first man.
"l don't know the full details myself but from what l'm told , an anarch was involved"
The conversation went on and on, with Kael being confused more, by each passing moment.
"What's a survivor? And what's this about this anarch, it sounds like a pretty important figure "
As Kael was busy with his thoughts, the truck suddenly jolted violently, jerking him back to the present. The metal groaned around him causing an echoing of rattling chains. His heart pounded in his chest, as he analyzed his situation.
He wasn't in his own mind, his own carefully cultivated inner sanctum, but trapped within the subconscious of another.
Which was an impossible phenomenon and a violation against the most fundamental laws of his reality. Single-star dream walkers could never venture into the subconscious of others. Only the monsters of the six-star realm, the apex predators of the dreamscape, possessed such power. And even for them, it was not easy.
While Kael was pondering on this matter, he suddenly recalled the weird system he had just obtained not so long ago.
The mysterious interface, had performed feats that were out of the realm of possibility so it wouldn't be a surprise if it was behind this.
With a final, sickening lurch, the truck came to a grinding halt, its metal frame protesting against the abrupt stop.
*Hisss!*
A hydraulic hiss announced the opening of a massive door, revealing a cavernous space that reeked of blood and despair.
The armored guards who had been transporting them suddenly began to move and rough hands dragged him and the other slaves from the truck, uncaring of the chains biting into his flesh.
He was then thrown into a dim lit corridor.
The shackles that were restraining him and the others, were removed by the guards, giving the slaves a chance to move again.
Kael suddenly felt the heavy gravity on him suddenly lift off, and his strength returning.
While he was fully embracing his freedom, he suddenly heard a lot of noise echoing through the corridor.
The corridor led to a ramp, and the scene below unfolded like a grotesque spectacle of an arena, bathed in harsh, flickering lights.
The arena was a stark contrast to the sterile, oppressive confines of the truck. Walls of raw, jagged stone rose high above, disappearing into the shadows. The floor was nothing more than churned dirt, stained with a disturbing crimson red that stemmed from the remnants of past battles and past lives extinguished in this godforsaken place.
The roar of the crowd reached him even from this distance, a primal symphony of bloodlust.
The roar of the crowd washed over him like a tidal wave, sounding loudly even from the distance he was at.
While he was stumped by the enthused crowd, the guards suddenly grabbed him and the other slaves, suddenly throwing him into the arena.
As he was thrown into the arena, his chains clanked against the ground as he landed in a heap, the impact jarring his already disoriented senses. The world spun around him, a dizzying vortex of stone and shadow. He had to blink several times to clear his vision.
He could feel the eyes of his captors on him, cold, calculating, predatory. They were watching him, assessing him, waiting for the entertainment to begin. Kael looked around desperately, his gaze darting from the towering walls to the blood-soaked dirt, trying to find a way out of this hellish place. Every escape route seemed just out of reach, a mirage shimmering in the oppressive atmosphere. He was a bug in a jar, pinned beneath their gaze, and the jar was the arena floor.
The crowd grew louder, their chants more insistent, more demanding. The roar was a physical force, pressing down on him, suffocating him.
His eyes searched the stands, scanning the sea of barbaric faces, looking for anything that might give him a clue as to what he was supposed to do.
And then he saw it. Somewhere high above the fray, in a private box overlooking the arena, a single man- no a boy clad in a white face mask made from polished bone, was staring down at him.
The boy's mask was very similar to the same mask that he had seen on the burning wreckage of King's Cross Station, the one that the high ranked walker wore.
The figure sat cloaked in shadows, but Kael could feel the weight of his gaze, those ember eyes burning into him, stripping away his defenses, seeing into his soul.
While staring at the man, a sudden and shocking thought suddenly dawned on Kael.
"Could it be- could l be exploring one of that person's unsolved traumas?"
The HUD in Kael's vision flickered to life, disrupting his senses with a cascade of data. Messages scrolled across his vision, impossible equations and glyphs that shifted and rearranged themselves in a dizzying dance. Then, a single message, stark and unambiguous, solidified on the screen, sending a shiver down his spine.
[Task Assigned: Survive the Arena of Purgation. Gain power or perish. The choice is yours.]
Kael's body was not his own, his dream walking powers were suppressed, and he was trapped in the subconscious of another. But the will to live, that primal spark of defiance, burned strong within his chest. He had no idea how he was going to get out of this, but he knew one thing for sure: he wasn't going to go down without a fight. Even though he was weak he would survive, and he would make them regret the day they crossed Kael, the dream walker. The arena of purgation would become their purgatory, the place where they would pay for their sins.