Chapter 262: The dream
After taking it all in and finally calming down, Jelo lay back down and forced himself to sleep.
Morning came quickly.
Jelo had made up his mind.
After thinking it through, he decided they needed to meet Tongen. His new ability wasn’t something he could ignore, and there was no one better suited to guide him.
So they set out to meet up with Tongen.
After getting dressed and preparing for the day, the four of them left together.
The streets were quieter than usual.
Too quiet.
Jelo walked slightly ahead of the others, his hands in his pockets, his eyes scanning everything without really focusing on anything. The dream still clung to him—the ruined city, the Dabas, the way Ken had gone still in that thing’s grip like the life had simply been pressed out of him.
He shook his head.
It was just a dream.
That was the right answer. The logical answer. He repeated it the way you repeat something when you’re trying to make it stick.
It didn’t stick.
"Are you even listening?" Mira’s voice cut in.
Jelo blinked and glanced back at her. She had her arms loosely crossed, not angry—just watching him the way she always did when something didn’t add up for her.
"Yeah... I am."
"You’ve been acting strange since morning," she said, narrowing her eyes slightly. "What’s wrong?"
"Nothing." The word came out too fast. "Just didn’t sleep well."
She held his gaze for a second longer than necessary, and Jelo could see her deciding whether to push it or let it go. She let it go—but only barely, the way Mira always let things go, which meant she was storing it somewhere to come back to later.
Ken glanced at him but didn’t say anything.
That was somehow worse.
Ken not saying anything meant Ken had already noticed and already drawn his own conclusions. He just wasn’t going to share them unless asked, and Jelo wasn’t going to ask, so they both walked forward carrying whatever they were carrying without naming it.
Atlas kept pace beside them, quiet in the easy way he usually was in the mornings—present but unhurried, like the day hadn’t fully started for him yet.
They kept walking.
The path to Tongen’s place led them away from the main academy grounds, toward a quieter section of the complex where the buildings thinned out and the training areas opened up. The walls here were older—tall and worn, the stone darkened with age and weather, covered in places by moss that clung to the cracks like it had been there longer than the academy itself.
The air felt different here.
Heavier. Denser. Like the space held pressure that hadn’t fully released.
Jelo had walked this path dozens of times and it had never bothered him before. But today his steps slowed as the training ground came into view, and a feeling settled into his chest that he couldn’t immediately name.
Not fear.
Not quite.
Something more like recognition—the specific, unsettling kind that arrives before you understand what you’re recognizing.
He looked ahead.
Tongen was already there.
Standing still in the middle of the training ground, arms folded, positioned near the center like he had been there for a while. Not pacing. Not warming up. Just standing, completely motionless, the way Tongen stood when he wasn’t waiting idly but waiting with purpose—the difference always visible in the set of his shoulders.
He didn’t look at them when they entered.
Then he did.
"I was wondering when you’d show up," Tongen said calmly.
The four of them stopped at the edge of the ground. The worn stone beneath their feet was familiar—scuffed from training, marked from countless sessions—but Jelo’s attention had narrowed down to Tongen’s face, reading it the way you read weather.
Mira frowned. "You knew we were coming?"
Tongen didn’t answer her immediately. His gaze shifted—moved past Mira, past Ken, past Atlas—and settled directly on Jelo with a weight that felt less like being looked at and more like being located.
"I knew he was."
Jelo’s chest tightened.
That feeling again.
The same feeling from the dream—not the fear of it, not the images, but the specific quality underneath all of it. The sense that something larger was in motion and he was standing in the middle of it without knowing the shape of what surrounded him.
Tongen uncrossed his arms and took one step forward. Not aggressive. Not fast. Just deliberate—the kind of movement that closed distance without rushing it.
"Tell me," he said, his voice steady but carrying a seriousness that sat differently than his usual tone, "what did you see?"
Jelo froze.
The question landed wrong. Not because it was strange—but because it was exact. Not did you sleep well or you look off today. Not something general that he could deflect with something general.
What did you see.
"...What?"
"You heard me," Tongen replied. His eyes hadn’t moved. "That wasn’t just a dream, was it?"
The silence that followed had texture to it.
Ken looked between them slowly, his expression shifting from neutral to attentive. "Wait—what are you talking about?"
Atlas had gone still beside him, reading the room the way Atlas always did—not speaking, just absorbing, waiting to understand what kind of moment this was before deciding how to exist inside it.
Mira’s eyes had moved to Jelo completely.
Jelo swallowed.
He hadn’t told any of them. He had gotten up, gotten dressed, decided they needed to come here, and said nothing. And now Tongen was standing in the middle of the training ground asking him directly, using the exact phrasing that made it impossible to redirect—and the images were already there, already surfacing before he gave them permission.
The ruined city. The smoke. The way the Daba moved without urgency, without feeling, its head tilting the way something tilts when it isn’t choosing to tilt—when something else is doing the choosing.
Ken, in its hand.
The sound.
His fists had clenched without him noticing.
"...I saw everything burn," he said quietly.
The words came out smaller than he meant them to. Not dramatic—just honest, the way things come out when you’ve been holding them since before dawn and you finally stop holding them.
Tongen didn’t look surprised.
He didn’t straighten up or widen his eyes or let anything shift in his expression that suggested the answer had caught him off guard.
If anything—
He looked concerned.
Not in the way a person looks concerned when they learn something new.
In the way a person looks concerned when something they already feared has been confirmed.
He held Jelo’s gaze for a long moment before his eyes moved briefly to the others, then returned.
"Sit down," he said quietly. "All of you."