Chapter 261: A Nightmare
Jelo found himself standing in the ruins of the academy.
What used to be towering buildings were now broken skeletons of stone and metal. The streets were cracked open, smoke rising from the remains of the city. The air smelled burnt—like dust, ash, and something worse.
"Mira, Ken—everyone, move!" Jelo shouted. "We have to get out before they find us!"
The Dabas and the Ihe had wiped everything out. Every professional Supa was gone.
Now, they were hunting the rest.
In the distance, the Dabas roamed—massive, distorted figures, their bodies heavy and uneven, dragging across the ground with slow, unnatural movements.
But they weren’t the real threat.
The Ihe were.
Invisible. Watching. Controlling.
"Ken! They’re right behind you—faster!" Jelo yelled as they sprinted through the broken streets.
Footsteps thundered behind them.
Not fast—but heavy.
Each step shook the ground.
Jelo glanced back.
A Daba was closing in.
It stood nearly seven feet tall, its body thick and twisted, like it had been forced into the wrong shape. Its skin looked rough and cracked, like dried stone stretched over muscle. One arm hung longer than the other, dragging slightly as it moved. Every step it took displaced rubble without effort, stones skittering away from its feet like they were afraid of contact.
Its head tilted... not naturally.
Like something else was guiding it.
Not curiosity. Not instinct.
A signal.
Jelo faced forward again and ran harder. His boots hit the broken ground in uneven rhythm, dodging collapsed walls and shattered glass. The smoke was thicker here, low and gray, curling around their legs as they moved.
He could hear Mira somewhere to his left, her breathing sharp and controlled.
Ken was just behind him.
Or he had been.
Something felt wrong.
Too quiet.
The footsteps behind him had stopped.
He turned again.
Ken was gone.
Jelo stopped so suddenly his feet scraped against the ground. His chest tightened as he looked around wildly, scanning the smoke, the debris, the hollow doorframes of buildings that no longer had walls.
"Ken?!"
His voice echoed back at him, swallowed by silence.
Then he saw it.
The Daba had him.
Its massive hand was wrapped around Ken’s entire body, lifting him off the ground like he weighed nothing. Ken struggled, kicking hard, fingers clawing at the thick grey flesh of the creature’s fist—but the grip didn’t move. Didn’t flex. Didn’t acknowledge him at all.
Ken’s face was pale.
His mouth was open but no sound came out.
The Daba’s arm wasn’t even raised high. It held him at mid-level, almost casually, the way someone might hold something they hadn’t decided what to do with yet.
Its head hadn’t turned.
It was still looking ahead.
Still waiting.
The fingers slowly tightened.
Just slightly.
You could hear it.
A low, sickening crack—the sound of pressure being applied to something that wasn’t built to take it. Like something deep inside Ken’s ribcage was being rearranged, slowly, without urgency.
Ken’s struggling slowed.
His hands were still gripping the creature’s fingers, but the strength was leaving them.
"KEN!!" Jelo screamed, already running.
He moved without thinking—pure reaction, legs driving hard against the fractured ground, arms pumping, eyes locked on Ken’s face. He had no plan. No calculation. Just motion, fueled by something that lived beneath thought.
The Daba didn’t rush.
It didn’t react.
Its head turned slowly toward Jelo as he closed the distance—not snapping toward him, not startled, just... rotating. Taking him in. The eyes, if they could be called that, were dull and flat, pale beneath the rough texture of its face. There was nothing behind them. No hunger. No aggression.
Just direction.
Something else was looking through them.
Something invisible.
Jelo felt his skin crawl even as he ran. The wrongness of it—the total absence of anything natural in how the Daba moved, how it observed—hit him harder than the fear.
This isn’t an animal.
This is a tool.
He was ten feet away when—
Its grip clenched.
Hard.
A sharp, crushing sound split the air.
Not loud. Not dramatic.
Just final.
Ken’s body went limp.
His arms dropped. His head fell forward. The struggling stopped completely, replaced by a stillness that was worse than any sound.
"No!!"
Jelo’s voice broke before he could stop it, the word tearing out of his throat raw and uncontrolled. His legs were still moving but the ground felt wrong beneath him—tilted, unstable, like the street itself had shifted.
The Daba turned its head fully toward him now.
Still unhurried.
Still guided.
Ken hung motionless in its grip, and the creature raised its gaze to Jelo like he was the next item on a list—no anger, no anticipation, just recognition.
The world seemed to collapse around him—
—and he jerked awake.
His body was soaked in sweat. His chest heaved as he struggled to breathe, his heart pounding violently against his ribs. He sat upright in the dark, one hand pressed flat against the mattress, the other gripping the blanket without realizing it.
The room was exactly as it had been.
Still. Quiet. Safe.
"It... it was just a dream..." he whispered, his voice unsteady.
The words came out the way they were supposed to. The shape of the sentence was right. The logic was right.
But his body didn’t believe it.
His hands were still tense. His jaw was clenched. The back of his neck was cold where the sweat had dried.
Beside him, Atlas slept peacefully, completely unaware—breathing slow and even, turned toward the wall, one arm hanging off the side of the bed like nothing in the world was wrong.
Jelo looked at him for a moment.
Then looked away.
He stared into the darkness, his breathing slowly easing, ribs expanding and contracting with deliberate effort. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The technique Tongen had drilled into them—for focus, for recovery, for the moments after something shook you loose.
It helped.
Mostly.
But something didn’t feel right.
The image of the Daba lingered—not fading the way dreams usually did the longer you stayed awake, but sharpening. The way it moved. The sound it made. The flatness in its eyes and the wrongness beneath that flatness, the sense of something remote and patient operating through it.
The way it had looked at him.
Not like prey.
Like a problem it had already solved.
Jelo exhaled slowly.
It didn’t feel like just a dream.