Which meant…
I focused entirely on him. “He’s real,” I whispered.
“Of course I am. She’s told you that, hasn’t she? She’s suspected it for a long time now, that I never really let her go.” He reached out, cupping her chin.
I couldn’t move, as though he controlled all the space here. A mentalist who could not only resist me, but keep me from moving?
Then again, corrupted had proven how powerful they could be…
“Don’t touch her,” Carter snapped, though he didn’t move either.
“You have no say here. You’re nothing but annoyances who got too comfortable touching what isn’t yours.”
I struggled against his hold, but it felt impossible to break. It wasn’t just that he held our minds, but he seemed to control the very space inside Yun’s mind, turning it to concrete around us so we couldn’t shift a single muscle.
“She doesn’t belong to you,” Carter said.
“She sure as fuck won’t once we slit your throat,” Ingram tacked on. “Dead people don’t own shit.”
The figure let out a soft chuckle, which confused me all the more. I’d dealt with corrupted, and they were insane. Their minds warped due to the excess corruption, and it made them unable to think things through, and quick to violence. The restraint this figure showed made no sense.
Was it because he was technicallyina dungeon?
I recalled how Yun had said the monsters calmed when the portal closed, as though the portal somehow turned them to madness. Could a closed dungeon offer a reprieve?
Did it matter? Whether he was sane or not didn’t change what he’d done, or that we could not allow him to continue to live.
“You have that backward,” he said, his voice vicious yet still controlled. “The last thing I need is to risk any complications when I am ready to retrievemyguide. I certainly don’t need the four of you getting in my way.” With that, pain lanced through my temples.
Worse? It wasn’t mental pain, not fully. Even in this state, I felt the blood leak down my face as my physical body lay with Yun. The bastard wasn’t just causing us psychological pain—he was hurting our bodies.
I suddenly understood the truth. He could kill us if he wanted.
And he certainly wanted to.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Yun
Another nightmare. Shear was supposed to keep them from happening, but maybe that was too much to expect anymore.
Still, at least this one felt different.Hespoke to the men, not to me. The fact the men were in my dream—dressed—struck me as strange as well, but I lacked the ability to think it through.
“You know, it’s funny how life works out. After everything, after all these years, to be back here?” He shook his head as though it were an inside joke I didn’t understand.
I turned my head to find Shear having fallen to his knees, the others looking no better.
Oh, I see…
That was why this was different. It seemed my psyche had finished tormenting me with my own memories, and now it wanted to hurt the men I loved in front of me. The mind never did run out of ways to torture us, did it?
“I mean, what were the odds? Of all the guides, of all the squads, how could things have come together just like this? How could this have happened? I certainly never thought there was any god out there looking over me, but now I wonder, what if it was me all along? What ifIwas the deity I should have been praying to? I mean, how else could I account for my good luck?”
Blood leaked from Shear’s nose, from his ears.
Something felt strange though. A touch to my mind, something familiar.Shear’s power.
It woke me up, made me recognize that maybe this wasn’t a nightmare. What if my fears had come true? What if somehow, he had gained access to them through me?
