34: The Dreamer
She scanned for Dante and noticed he was still cowering behind the skip, head grasped between his hands as his aura began dancing in a pattern similar to what she’d witnesses in Godhand’s manor. Maybe the creature noticed her distraction because it scrambled towards the hiding place. Phantasia dived forward but knew she couldn’t reach Dante in time.
Yet the creature didn’t attack. The head lurched forward and stopped dead in front of Dante’s face. For a moment it appeared as if they’d locked eyes in a staring contest and then the head swung back to slam an off-guard Phantasia through a wall. As she picked herself up from the rubble the creature scurried towards her, but its successful attack had been the key to its defeat.
“You can’t hurt me,” she said, “Your attacks are all physical. That one just there didn’t have an ounce of magic behind it. All your magical power is doing is…”
She darted towards it. The head/tail lashed out, but passed through her now-incorporeal body. The dark energy that tied it to the body passed through her and, as it did, she send her purifying power along it like electricity through water. As the corruption dissipated into light the body itself crumbled into dust.
Phantasia found Dante collapsed by the skip, unconscious. Sensing that people were close by, she picked him up and snuck away. The boy had been overwhelmed enough by the evening’s events – leaving him to be found by strangers wasn’t going to help. Hopefully a night of rest in the church, with Phantasia soothing his troubled aura, would help.
***
Dante turned and saw what Phantasia had been looking at but trying to hide from him: a three-metre tall giant of stone, its body formed from the very ground on which they stood. He wanted to run away but his body was rooted to the spot like some kind of stubborn tree. The next thing he knew Phantasia had flipped over his head like a top-level athlete and was staring the eyeless giant down.
Then it made towards them, claws swooping in to slice them apart. And Dante still couldn’t move.
He found Phantasia’s arms around his waist and, before he could prise her away, he was flying into the air. His head swam with vertigo as he glanced down at the earth below, then the two of them plummeted. Had he not been in such a state of shock and confusion he might have screamed.
They landed as if they’d only jumped from a small wall. Phantasia ushered Dante into the space behind the skip, where vermin made their nests. He closed his eyes and buried his head in his hands, hoping everything would go away. Especially that voice.
When he next looked up, the creature’s stone head was floating right there in front of him.
This isn’t just a dream…
Dante turned to escape the monster and found himself standing in an exquisite mansion with crimson carpet at his feet and walls lined with velvet drapes. He had to find Katrina! She was trapped in here somewhere. They were going to execute her if he didn’t do something about it!
He flung open door after door, finding nothing but empty studies and abandoned lounges, all with vacuumed carpets and polished tables. That such insidious, cruel people could afford all this whilst most people he knew had to struggle just to keep their cluttered apartments in order gnawed at his tolerance. The bag of explosive material he’d swiped weighed down in his pocket, begging to be used to tear apart the undeserved luxuries.
Then he opened a door into room filled with red robed cultists. Someone else might have uttered a witty retort to the shocked faces of the enemy, but Dante could only yelp fear and run away, his heart pounding as if in time with the stomps of chasing feet behind him.
