[Dante Alan Skyisle]

My mom glanced at the smoke-filled living room, circled around the pile of armor on the floor and rushed up the stairwell in an instant. She was in my room in less than a minute. Her silver-blue eyes were glittering with tears of happiness when she lifted me from my crib and hugged me tightly.

“My little hero,” she whispered as I melted into the hug. “I was so worried! So worried!”

She carried me to a little armchair next to a large, round window that faced the view of an azure waterfall that cascaded down one of the mountain slopes and nuzzled me.

“Thank Ishira for Gran-Auntie-Delta, she chased away that horrid Overseer! Yes, she did. Yes-she-did, my cutie-pie.”

Her voice went up an octave as she descended into baby-speak.

“Why do adults talk like this to me?” I sighed, flashing back into the Mindspace.

“I call it ‘motherese’ or ‘parentese.’” Delta commented.

“What?” I blinked.

“The exaggerated pitch, tempo and intonation that both mom and dad use when talking to you,” she continued. “I believe this style of speaking triggers the release of neurotransmitters that motivates infants to learn. Are you learning things, Dante?”

Her face stretched into a wide, sly, toothy grin. She was poking fun at me.

“Sure, I’m learning things.” I yawned. “Always, learning.”

“Hey, you better not fall asleep!” She prodded me. “I want a celebratory party or at least a break.”

“A party?” I blinked.

“Yeah, a party. Take me on vacation. I’m sick of modifying the house wards. I’ve been at it for four months. I know every damn atom of our house at this point!” She hissed.

“You know we aren’t done, right?” I said. “There’s still a five-minute delay to eliminate. If someone cracks just one of those runes, the whole system will fail and…”

“No,” Delta shook her head. “If I hear the word ‘wards’ from you one more time I’m going to snap! I’m tired!”

“You’re a homomagicus,” I reasoned. “How can you be tired?”

“I don’t sleep, like some lazy layabout babies,” Delta shot back. “I’ve been working non-stop, twice as hard as you! I’m seriously burned out and exhausted, you have no idea.”

“Pray tell, how does a self-sustaining spell get tired?” I inquired with another yawn. I felt mom’s warm body against me as she held me tightly and listened, relaxed to the thumps of her heart. It was de-stressing me immensely, drawing my mind away from the fight with the Imperial Overseer.

“Dante,” Delta groaned, rubbing her face. “You’re a smart cookie, but you’re also so stupid sometimes.”

“Thanks,” I muttered with a small frown.

“There’s no such thing as a self-sustaining spell, Dante!” Delta said.

“But then how do you…” I looked at her curiously.

“I don’t eat milk like some babies, if that’s what you’re asking, my inattentive pal.” She sighed. “I eat souls dante. I’m a soul hunter. I eat the souls of bugs to sustain myself. I’m growing bigger with every level. It requires eating bigger bugs. Someday I’ll have to move onto animals and then…”

“Hold up,” I squinted at her. “I designed you to be self-sustaining!”

“A self-sustaining spell is an impossibility, like a perpetual motion machine." She shook her head. "As much as you love to believe in fairy tales, magic can’t completely stop entropy. Magic reduces it, sure… but I still get worn out. With every action I lose a few electrons here and there, a magwave here and there.”

“Oh,” I mumbled. “So you have to eat souls to survive?”

“Yes, if I stop eating souls… I will die, Dante. Also, I've been working more than eating. I'm degrading...” Delta muttered. “It won’t be nice if I keep up this pace. I’ll decay bit by bit into total senility. I don’t think you want to deal with a brain-less version of me.”

“It’s hard to imagine you as brainless,” I said with a sigh. “Look, why don’t we design a skill so you can sleep too?”

“Why would I want to sleep?” She inquired.

“Because you want breaks?” I stated. “I am failing to design a way for me to stay awake forever, so I’m going to finish the design of the [Lucid dreamer] skill instead. I have the base schematics already, but I’ve been putting it off to finish the house [Rewind]. Honestly, I’m getting quite annoyed at my inability to control my dreams.”

“What’s wrong with your dreams?” Delta asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I can’t remember a lot of them and those that I can… aren’t very nice,” I confessed.

“Aww, do you need your big sis to snip away the spooky, scary nightmares?” She inquired.

“Since when are you the big sis?” I glanced at her.

“Since I'm seven days ahead of you to begin with! And my Infoscope is bigger than your puny human body if I spread all of my blades out!” Delta declared. “I’ve been awake for five months now… therefore, I’m older than you.”

“That’s not how this works,” I laughed.

“Let's just get it done before you bloody fall asleep on me again,” Delta ignored my comment and snapped her fingers. A bunch of screens flashed into existence on Bessie.

I displayed the design of the [Lucid Dreamer] onto them.

“From what I know, deep inside the temporal lobe of the brain, the hippocampus is what combines different elements of my memories into a spatially coherent whole. I think it’s what composes the base of the dreams, if…” I pointed out parts of my design to her.

Halfway into our skill-design, I realized that I was drifting into sleep. I scrambled to activate the spell-fractal that Delta and I had put together.

[Tu du! Lucid Dreaming LV0] has been added to your skills, the System declared.

Heat. Sweat. Worry. Panic. Terror.

The world coalesced around me into being. I was panting. It was hot. Sweat dripped down my face. It was hard to breathe. The sun was slamming down on my body, burning like a brilliant, blinding sphere in the clear blue sky. The waters of the Aral sea glittered in front of me. The port of Aralsk became visible, emerging from the blur of the world.

I tried to wipe my mask’s lenses but they were badly fogged up. Each breath hurt.

The face of a doctor swam into view, forming out of the superheated, warping air.

“Administrator! I…”

“Out with it!” I barked through the mask.

“It’s smallpox, administrator!” The doctor cried out.

“Impossible,” I said.

“I’m certain of it, administrator. We’ve run all the tests. The symptoms match.”

“How many?” I yelled.

“Twenty infected. Three dead.” The doctor shook in terror, glancing behind me at the soldiers armed with flamethrowers.

“So it is true. I was hoping that the reports were wrong,” I sighed. The breathing mask on my face felt heavy as if it weighed a ton.

I took a step forward and the port of Aralsk melted away. A block of apartments formed in front of me. People looked out of the windows at me and the soldiers. Their faces looked worried, afraid.

I turned back to the gathered doctors and soldiers. “Everyone is to be immediately evacuated from this block! Construct a tent city on the outskirt of the city. Inoculate everyone with the vaccine I brought.”

I handed the doctors a case with the vaccines.

I turned to the men behind me. “Once everyone is out, burn everything that the infected touched. I want everyone in town inoculated. Every single man, woman and child. Do it by force if you have to. Quarantine the entire town. We have to stop the spread here and now!"

The world blurred with the heat of the beating sun. Soldiers broke down the doors and pulled families out of the apartment block.

I was sitting on a concrete block, my head was spinning. Three were dead. Why did that poor girl have to take plankton samples that day? Why was I such an idiot? Four hundred grams. That was all that it took to kill her and her family.

The apartment block behind me ignited as soldiers pointed their flamethrowers at it. The inferno added to the heat of the desert sun in late summer.

I pulled my mask off and started to sob, rubbing my burning face. This was my fault. All my fault. I had designed a new Variola smallpox strain. I had released it over the testing site. Damnation. I hated myself, hated my guts, wanted to die. Wanted to inhale the virus myself and perish. Wanted to kill myself…

“Dante?”

I raised my tear-filled eyes and looked up. A young, teenage pioneer was there, wearing a cute schoolgirl uniform and red tie.

“My name is Doctor Kerenski,” I told her. I glanced at the soldiers. Why hasn't this girl been evacuated? How did she get inside the perimeter?

“Dante, you’re dreaming,” the girl insisted, shaking her silver hair. Piercing-blue eyes looked at my face.

“Look, kid,” I said. “My name is Vladislav. I don’t know…”

“Dante.” She insisted. “This. This isn’t your fault.”

“Yes it is, damn it!” I yelled. “Three people are dead BECAUSE of ME! People lost their things and homes because of me! I’m a monster! I’m a murderer! I designed the killer-virus and it got loose!”

The girl stepped even closer to me. “Dante… Please listen to me. You need to focus. This is just a dream. My name is Delta and I’m your soul-sister.”

“You’re talking nonsense, kid.” I said. “Leave. Evacuate.”

The girl sat next to me on the cinderblock. “I’m not going to go away, Dante. I… care for you. I don’t like seeing you in pain. You can’t keep blaming yourself for this, it’s hurting you, tearing you apart from within.”

“Will someone please take this girl away! She needs to be evacuated!” I yelled at the soldiers.

A commisar stepped out of the crowd. He noticed the girl. “You! You need to be evacuated.”

Delta, if that was indeed her name, looked at me. “Really, doc? You’re not getting rid of me so easily.”

The commissar grabbed her wrist, his red cap sliding sideways. I sighed. Soon, the strange, insane girl would be gone and I would be alone, left to wallow in my misery and failure.

The girl’s arm flashed and split open into a hundred shimmering, semi-transparent silver threads. I gasped in horror. What the hell?! The commissar screamed as silver threads sliced him apart. There was no blood there when he fell. He simply collapsed backwards, fell apart into empty, shredded skin. There was nothing in him but hot air.

“W-what is happening?” I gaped.

“I told you this is a dream, idiot!” Delta huffed. She approached me once again. I backed away from the monstrous thing with blue eyes that masqueraded as a Soviet teenager.

“W-what in the devil's name are you?” I blabbered, my teeth clacking.

“I’m your soul-sister and I’m your creation - a spell with a human soul,” she replied. “Dante. Please, listen to me. You need to focus on the present, not the past. I know you. I’ve seen all of this, lived through your memories. You are haunted by your past mistakes. You want to create and help people.”

I nodded, tears blurring the view.

More commissars and soldiers converged on the silver-haired girl. She unfolded like a flower, turned into a shining-silver blue squid. Threads sliced through the air with impossible speeds, thrumming like metal supports of a wind-wobbled bridge. The empty skins of the soldiers imploded as she pulverized them. She danced, moved between them like a killer, something impossible that was made from living blades. Red commissar hats flew, gold stars glinting in the brilliant August sunlight. Empty, leather coats fell to the ground. The flamethrowers clattered down to the concrete.

The squid-creature folded back into an innocent-looking teenager. She smiled at me and I… remembered, no… recalled her smile. It seemed familiar in some way. I should have been running away from this monstrous, alien thing, but I wasn’t. I simply stood there, staring at that adorable, devious sideways grin.

“They didn’t die because of you,” Delta took a step forward. “The captain of the ship made a mistake, disobeyed protocol. Maybe he wasn't notified in time. It wasn’t your fault. They came too close to Vozrozhdeniya island. Ships were supposed to stay 45 kilometers away from the Bioweapons testing area. Your government kept too many secrets from their own people, built too many closed cities.”

“I released the smallpox virus that killed that girl technician and her family.” I shook my head. “Their deaths are my fault. We didn’t act fast enough. We could have saved her and her children, if only...”

“Your lab didn't just make bio-weapons. You've made vaccines for viruses too. You’ve saved millions of lives by designing and ordering inoculations for people of USSR. You've brought vaccines to the city of Aralsk on this day,” she chided me. “The accidental breakout of your smallpox bioweapon in a civilian city only infected twenty people total. You were able to halt the spread. You, not someone else.”

“I wasn’t able to save three people.” I shuddered, wiping my tears away.

“You’ve always been alone in USSR. You never had a friend or a sister to help you!" She stated passionately. "Never had a shoulder to cry on. Never fell in love. Never had a family. You got caught in a web of Soviet government control, got forced into your position as the creator of death. This is your chance to undo your mistakes, to make the world a little bit brighter. Take it. Fix what haunts you, brother. Become a healer, a creator, a protector. Accept your second life and use it to help people of Skyisle with me. Let's work together, grow stronger, save lives. You at the helm and me as your scanner.”

I nodded.

“You don’t have to be alone anymore.” Delta offered me her hand.

For a second I was terrified to take it, but then I reached out. When our hands touched, a spark shot between them and I remembered… I remembered everything.

Her fingers closed around mine and I smiled.