“Show it to me—your dream.”

With the first stroke, Elena cleanly severed one of the suppressor’s arms.

“So this strength lies in precision…”

Every strike, every guard, and every parry flowed like patterns of a dance between Elena and her spear, but none could tell who was leading. Right now, even the dream leeches were nothing more than witnesses to her understanding.

With each step, her Possibility condensed tighter around her form.

“Control it. Don’t waste a single drop.”

It was as if she could hear and feel the original owner of that spear beside her. His voice, forgotten yet present, explaining what he had learned on his travels—his techniques, heirless, overlapping with her own movements.

She had been wasteful in her first encounter with a dream leech. Yes, she could command Possibility, but wielding such a massive force of it was unnecessary.

“Sharper.”

Suddenly, she nodded, as if she finally had an epiphany, and sprang off her toes, driving the spearhead through the suppressor’s chest.

Boom. Her compressed Possibility rushed ahead of the spear’s path.

A hole carved its way through the leech’s body.

“Not enough. Let’s try this again.”

The cavity within its chest oozed and patched itself up as it turned to face Elena once more, reopening its 12 eyes. Only, she didn’t flinch, her gaze remaining cold and constant, staring back.

“It won’t work,” she declared to the dream leech. She knew it couldn’t understand her, but she didn’t care. “This isn’t shaping.”

As she leapt back into the fray, Waker couldn’t do anything to brush aside the emotions welling up within him.

“I can’t remember his face…” he mumbled.

And that was why watching Elena hurt so much. Watching her, whose very style of existing proved she was no Dream Hunter.

His lips quivered as he crumbled down onto his knees. “So why… Why does her form remind me so much of him?”

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t reconstruct the face he had grown up alongside in his mind.

“Why…”

But now, she, a person that never could’ve known who he was or who he wanted to be, became his spitting image on the battlefield.

He couldn’t stop the tears anymore.

It was a bitter truth that plainly stated his brother was unable to grasp his aspirations, and that someone else could just as plainly pick up that legacy with barely a second thought.

Just then, a small yet calloused hand rested on Waker’s shoulder.

“Watch her.”

He couldn’t believe the audacity Irin had to say such a thing, but before he could reply, Irin continued.

“I haven’t been by her side for long, but that was more than enough time for me to know. She doesn’t obey the worlds we’ve always seen. So, maybe… you’ll see something in the future you’re fighting for too.”

“Future…” Waker echoed in his mind. He couldn’t remember the last time he properly gave that word some thought.

Some distance away, several buildings lining the road had crumbled, their debris pouring down and out like a landslide as the remaining Dream Hunters repeatedly rammed the other dream leech against the stone.

It was a brutal, wasteful, and inefficient sight, but Elena could sense its presence gradually fading.

“Guess I’ll wrap this up too then.”

She returned her eyes to the one before herself, just as Irin steadied his eyes on her figure.

“I won’t fall behind,” he repeated those words in his head almost like a chant. “I’ll see it for myself. I’ll understand the world she sees.”

For the first time, he stretched his arm out, willingly opening his palm to something that only he could see. 

In his eyes flickered a panel glowing with a gentle blue light, and on its surface, a single sentence was displayed.

《Your [System] is insufficient.》

“You won’t hold me back anymore.”

This time, for a reason he couldn’t fully understand—maybe his bearing witness to how Elena wielded that spear—he spoke to it.

“Show it to me. The world she sees.”

Shaping - First Command: Creator

《Your [Roots] have been established.》

His eyes, which had spent his life thus far tightly shut, merely listening to the worlds others lived through and strived for, now opened.

The flow of Possibility, the way its tide shifted across the battlefield, he could see all of it. It was a world of color, of vivid reality bleeding its borders with the unreal, where movements and futures could be outlined and understood before they even happened.

This was what it meant to witness and understand Possibility, but even the mere weight of this task was already flooding every corner of his consciousness.

“She’s able to fight like this?”

Despite the vision he had been granted, some part of him buried deep down still wondered: “Is this really the world she sees?”

Since the leech’s attempt at suppression had failed on Elena, it had grown much less aggressive, defensively responding to her attacks instead of charging in.

“The output from one thrust isn’t wide enough. It just regenerates.”

Glancing down at the spear, still humming, she suddenly spoke out loud, “Yeah, I’m listening.”

Then, without a moment’s delay, she widened and lowered her stance, her arm wound back in preparation.

“Right… What was that word again?”

She could clearly see it now. The answer was neither one massive wave of Possibility, nor was it one condensed burst of it.

“Ah, that’s right. I remember now.”

Her mouth moved, but to her spectators, the sound seemed to follow with half a beat of delay.

“Creator,” she muttered, almost halfheartedly.

Instantaneously, six spears appeared behind her, soaring forth in the same thrusting motion she had previously executed.

Six was all she needed.

With nothing left to hold it, the guard’s axe fell to the ground with a resounding ring.

As Elena approached the axe, she flexed her open hand, her eyes returning to their distant gaze.

“That word… It’s still not quite right…”

With that same hand, her fingers gently wrapped around the axe’s handle. She slightly frowned, her eyes glossing over.

“I see… So you’ve been going on like this for some time now.”

The axe began to disintegrate within her grasp, its fragments trailing away on the breeze until there was nothing left.

The sound of approaching footsteps brought her back to her senses—two from ahead and one from behind.

As she looked up, the slightly battered Dream Hunters passed by her without sparing a glance, tossing a handful of emptied cartridges aside before meeting with the other hunter behind her.

They seemed to be whispering about something, but for whatever reason, it felt as if their words were being filtered out of her hearing. However, one word did manage to slip through: “...untapped…”

By the time she turned around, the Dream Hunters had vanished, with only their careless litter and the swordsman’s trail of blood to mark that they were ever there.

Her eyes fell now to the crowd of adventurers, still motionlessly watching the street ahead as if the fight hadn’t yet ended. A silence weighed down over all of them, its own oppressive pressure—a collective pressure that resisted acknowledging her with all its might.

Only this time, they weren’t given a choice.

Elena had already cast her first waves in the Outer Realms.