Chương 135: Housecleaning?

June was starting to miss his natural night vision; his nameless vision technique simply provided him with a large field of vision; it could be expanded to effectively 360 degrees of vision, but at the cost of higher mental strain. Regardless of having 360 degrees of vision or not, this extended sense only provided him with mundane sight, which meant that he viewed the world around him through a regular person's lens aside from the expanded field of view.

He didn't have his night vision this way; he couldn't see spirits, or traces of Will, or much of anything even! He couldn't even focus his eyes with Will and count the pores on a person's face from a league away, though that might just be a trait of his Flesh-shaping and Dreamer mutation. Focusing Will on his extended sense now just made the immediate area slightly clearer. So why was June using the nameless vision technique to see instead of simply looking with his eyes? To put it plainly…

he was too short to see out of his shell's visor. Getting out of it to take a gander was also a no-go. Stepping out of an 8ft tall bone armor exoskeleton to look behind him was like getting out of your car to see if you hit a deer or a person in the middle of the woods.

'Horror movie tropes extend to real life as well… For now, I just need to pretend I didn't notice them.' Sensing presences was a mixed bag of tells: footsteps, breathing, scent, and even catching a glimpse of them counted as sensing them, but in the world of Dreamers and Nightmares, a few more quirks can be noticed with superhuman senses, primarily intent. Intent was the backbone of Will, and Will was an ever-present source; even unpowered humans carried Will!

The difference between a regular joe and the Dreamer is that a Dreamer is acutely sensitive to Will. From June's primitive understanding of Will, only a certain type of person can become a Dreamer; it isn't exactly something someone could work towards. Belief, Ideal, Mindset, Condition, and Determination seemed to be the core tenets of Dreamers.

His personal theory for why he intuitively became a Flesh-Shaper of all things was that during his long trek, he forsook the condition of his body for the goal of pulling a massive wrecked vehicle a long distance in order to save his remaining companions. Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

That, combined with the fact that he had no formal education about how to use Will, he believed that his single-minded goal to save his comrades, with carrying his ideal to help the ones who helped him despite his own condition, stoked his Will into Flesh-shaping. Without Flesh-Shaping, he had a feeling that he would have died during that long, painful trek.

'Ask, and you shall receive!' He stopped his mind from wandering further and went back to dissecting his understanding of his Dreamer senses to hide his nervousness from his two stalkers. Since everything with a pulse of sorts had some form of Will, a Dreamer who was particularly attuned to their own Will would catch trace bits of others who surrounded them. In this case, June caught a feel of his stalker's intentions, yet surprisingly muddied?

'Curiosity? Territorial? Hungry… very hungry? Scared? Not of me though, what are they scared of?' June had an idea; he was going to pry for what had his stalkers so scared by moving in the direction that they were afraid of, under the assumption that they would fall behind, or their intentions would shift as he got closer to the source of their fears.

'Let's just hope that what they're scared of isn't a problem for me too…'

June had hit a boundary wall of the sewers and decided to follow it in hopes of an exit, or at least to shake off his slow pursuers. He was half-tempted to blow through the roof in hopes of making it to the surface, but the idea of accidentally hurting a passerby or receiving a bill to compensate the city made him shudder all the same. He considered turning around and sprinting at his followers with all his Will, but he remembered the rebound that happened last time he did that when the Wendigo attacked Leonard.

June was forced to walk along maintenance paths with the unmistakable stench of waste permeating his nostrils. Fortunately… maybe? He was approaching the source of his pursuers' fears; he had long assumed that his unwanted audience was a duo of Sumeye, considering that he felt several eyes intermittently meet his back.

'It's been a while since I sang? I used to do that all the time when I first became a Dreamer, doesn't feel the same anymore without vocal cords vibrating in my throat… should I give this shell some?' June continued on his path while practicing solfège with his shell, constantly redoing and restarting the scales as he adjusted his shell's vocal cords. He felt a little red in the cheeks; June wasn't really the type to sing at all; his siblings at home made sure of that by ruining it for him.

Even now, with his bestial audience, he couldn't help but feel a little self-conscious. He continued repeating the scales until his voice trailed off due to a novel retching scent apart from sewage. The foul odor of rotting eggs with a hint of sharp garlic, accompanied by a stale sweetness and powerful malodor of fecal matter, penetrated his nose, making his legs nearly buckle from the stench alone. It was undoubtedly the scent of a rotting carcass.

However, the problem was that a single cadaver wouldn't produce a stench this strong. There had to be several.