Images of the carnage from the Heartchamber massacre crashed around inside my head. My stomach turned.
“I know.” I swallowed hard. “It was my fault. I almost got Warcry killed, I got your Spirit sea broken, and you’re the one who has to deal with the fallout while I got away without a scratch. It’s completely unfair. I’m sorry.”
There was the thump of a body hitting the dirt, and when I looked around my hands, Rali was on his knees, tonfa blades stabbed through corpses into the ground, hands clutching the wooden handles like they were the only things holding him upright. Tears streaked the blood on his face. His big shoulders and stomach shook silently.
I let Death Metal drop. I didn’t know what to do. Rali was the most happy-go-lucky person I’d ever met. I’d seen him show like two emotions the whole time I’d known him, and nothing but contentment had lasted more than a few seconds. How long had he been pretending like we were cool when in reality he hated my guts? Just since he’d lost his Spirit sea in the massacre, or before that, when he had to sign his life away to the Dragons because of me? Or had it started even earlier, when I’d gotten his sister’s arm torn off? Heck, why not the night when I turned the OSS against them and they had to flee their hometown forever?
So much of the bad stuff that had happened to my friends had happened because of me. It should’ve been an army of Hakes dead on the ground.
A purple shimmer caught my eye from down the hill. Sushi was still holding the kitchen window portal open, her fins pressed to its metal sash, but her whole little fish body was shaking with the strain.
“Come on, man,” I said, standing up. “There’s a group of beggars in the real world trying to steal you. I think that’s what this whole dream attack thing is about. Kest and Warcry were holding them off when I left, but those guys were really skilled. We have to get back and help.”
Rali squinted at me, the lace in his eyes shifting. The tears had stopped.
“Beggars?”
I nodded, holding out a hand to help him up. “Old ones, ones who couldn’t see, ones missing limbs and no prosthetics...”
He frowned and grabbed my hand. I hauled him to his feet. We picked our way back across the bodies to the window and climbed through.
This time, I gasped awake on the sticky floor of the ship’s kitchen, with Sushi slumped across my arm like she was exhausted.
Out in the canteen, an elderly voice yelled, “I lost the chosen one!”
The sound of fighting stopped, except for one last smack of metal on meat.
“Ouch, please stop!” a beggar pleaded. “We give up!”
I picked Sushi up and grabbed the counter, pulling myself to my feet.
Out in the canteen, Kest and Warcry were facing down the beggars, who all stood with their hands clasped in front of them to show they were finished using their weapons. Rali still floated beside them, levitated by the arthritic old man.
“We were only fighting for our chosen one,” the old man said. “Without him, there is no reason to fight.”
Rali sat up in midair and put his feet on the floor like he was sitting on a bed.
“You guys are from the Beggar Clan,” he said.
It hadn’t sounded like a question, but the blind man with the matted dreadlocks nodded. It seemed like he was their leader.
“We came to find the chosen one. You.”
Rali stood up, shaking his head. “I can’t be the chosen one.” He put a fist to his stomach, just above his navel. “My Spirit sea was destroyed. See for yourself.”
“This is how we know you are the chosen one,” the blind beggar insisted. “Only one who has known the power of Spirit but thrown off the shackles of its distraction can reach the final, purest state of enlightenment: hakkeyoi.”
“Why try to kidnap him, then?” Kest took an aggressive step toward them. “And why these dream attacks? If you weren’t going to hurt him, why not just talk to him face-to-face, like normal people?”
“We had to test whether he could truly handle the power that comes with hakkeyoi.” The beggars’ blind leader smiled at Rali even though he shouldn’t have been able to tell where the big guy was. “Your fear and past notions about right and wrong tried to gain control over you, chosen one, but you threw both off. You are truly prepared for enlightenment.”
Rali tipped back his head like he’d just figured something out, something he should’ve known all along.
“Sushi?”
The little fish swam out of my hands and over to him.
“This is my dream, isn’t it?” he said.
She nodded with her whole body.
“Me achin’ leg,” Warcry muttered, dragging a hand down his face. “A dream inside a dream?”
“Like ten of them,” I said.
“How do we get out of it?”
“Can’t,” Sushi told him. “Dream Spirit still attacks.”
“I’m not technically attacking, little fish,” a smooth, cool female voice said. “Though you did an excellent job of countering it. Someday I’d love to hear how a creature managed to cultivate a Ten-level specialization, but I suppose we should get acquainted first.”
The beggars vanished without a trace, and a thin blonde in a charcoal business suit appeared where their leader had been standing. She was flat as a board all over—literally flat, in the sense that, from head to toe, her body was the regular width from shoulder to shoulder, but only about three inches deep, like a piece of wood planking. She looked as if someone had taken a regular lady and rolled her out flat. Her nose barely stood out as a bump on the front of her face, and a surgical mask covered it and her mouth.
“Sanya-ketsu, Eight-Legged Dragons rank 002, Sown Dream cultivator.” She dipped her head at us. “I’m going to release you kids from the
