There was no warning like an earthly tremor or airy fluctuation. The world simply went still as something immeasurable and ancient turned its gaze into the battlefield. It was like a tide that had always been waiting just beyond the edge of perception. The presence did not roar or announce itself with grandeur. It arrived the way the deep ocean arrives around a drowning man, silent and total.
In the instant that presence touched the ground, the world reacted as if struck by a divine command. Runes extinguished themselves before a thought could be formed around them. Every fragment of power that had been swirling in the air winked out, not shattered or nullified in a violent clash, but removed as though the very concept of runic energy had been judged inappropriate in its presence. The remnants of Raven's shadow barrier faded like smoke that had never been lit. Her twin shadow blades dimmed and broke apart into loose dust that melted against her hands. She inhaled sharply and then froze, the air forced from her lungs in a single breath that she did not choose to release.
Arias and the Dragon Gang stiffened mid motion. Their nerves spasmed in a singular synchronized moment of pure shock. Their blood chilled as if submerged in winter waters. Muscles locked in place and refused to obey, not out of fear, but because their bodies recognized instinctively that movement was no longer permitted. Their eyes widened into a silent acknowledgement of something older and heavier than terror.
The Flesh Beast, a building sized abomination whose tendrils had been a blur of violent intent moments earlier, halted in perfect stillness. Its spiked limbs, frozen inches from impaling Jaune and his team, began to crumble and tear. The outer layers of flesh sloughed away like sand. Sinew collapsed inward as if the creature's very structure had been misfiled in the Sleeper's perception and was now being quietly corrected. Tendril after tendril disintegrated into dust that streamed upward before fading into nothing. The immense torso deflated upon itself and shrank with terrible serenity. Within seconds the monstrosity that had nearly killed them shrank until there was nothing left except a single man.
He was tall and broad shouldered with a sculpted muscular frame that did not match the horror he had previously been. A Grimm mask fitted tightly across his face, obscuring his features entirely. He did not kneel. He lay fully prostrate on the ground with both hands pressed flat against the dirt. His spine curved inward and his head touched the earth with such absolute submission that it did not look like a position of fear or defeat. It radiated reverence. As if he had witnessed a miracle. As if he were begging forgiveness. As if the Sleeper were the only authority he recognized.
The ground beneath Jaune changed as well. The slurry of terrain that had been induced by his of weakness rune and the grotesque deformation of the ground had vanished in a heartbeat. The warped earth smoothed and settled. Cracks healed. Distortions dissolved. The ground righted itself like a picture frame being straightened by an unseen hand. Jaune felt the sudden emptiness in his connection to his rune. It felt as though someone had quietly closed the door through which his power flowed and locked it with a key he was never meant to possess.
Even Qrow's clones ruptured into black mist. One after another they flickered, faltered and then disappeared entirely. All forms of power surrendered without resistance. It was not an argument or a struggle. It was the natural reaction of candles extinguishing at daylight.
Out of the corner of his vision he saw Ruby's expression. Her silver eyes were wide and glassy, fixed on nothing. Her mouth hung open but she could not scream or speak. Her body was caught between two impulses, to flee or to collapse, and neither could complete itself. Yang looked no better. The bravado that usually filled her expression had been crushed at the root. Her limbs trembled despite the paralysis. She stared upward with the horrified recognition of a creature that had finally learned what lived above the food chain.
The air thickened even further and even gravity seemed confused. Jaune felt the battlefield bending inward as though the Sleeper's attention was a vortex with infinite mass.
Jaune felt the presence turn toward him. It did not have shape or movement in the way anything mortal did, yet the sensation was unmistakable. Heat prickled up the back of his neck. His skin crawled. His bones felt hollow as if his soul were leaning out of them to stare upward. He felt a growing pressure against the inside of his skull, not intrusive or painful, but invasive in a way that made thought itself become a fragile and trembling thing. He felt the Sleeper noticing him. Like a person glancing at an insect that had wandered too close to the edge of a page. The Sleeper was scanning him. Not violently and not gently either. Simply aware. It examined him the way a scholar would examine a sentence that did not fit the paragraph it belonged to.
Jaune felt every memory he carried twitch in response. Every failure and every mistake rose like bubbles in a dark ocean. Every moment of inadequacy and terror vibrated together like strings plucked by an unseen instrument.
It read his intent.
And then his vision darkened.
There was no pain or disorientation. Just a slow steady fall into blindness as though the Sleeper were closing a book that had reached the end of its allowed chapter. Jaune felt Ruby's form collapse and Yang's body fold backward as they both were forcefully kicked from the landscape of the dream. Even Raven and Qrow had fallen like statues that were tipping over.
Jaune however, did not fall. He seemed to drift backwards into mist. The dream realm, the battlefield, the skyless void above them all pulled away as everything folded into black like an ink drop blooming through water.
When he opened his eyes again, the world had walls.
Cold air touched his skin and the faint hum of engines vibrated beneath him. He felt the soft cushioning of a sleeping pod and the faint glow of runic light tracing patterns around the interior.
He was back on the bullhead.
He was awake.
And the silence around him felt like the held breath of a world that had no idea what had just looked at him.
Suddenly, Yang burst out from her sleeping pod. The lid screeched against its hinges as her hands clamped around its edge and tore it free with sheer panic driven strength. She pushed herself upward with jerky, disoriented movements, scrambling out of the pod with the desperate urgency of someone escaping a coffin that had tried to keep her inside. Her breaths came in uneven gasps and her eyes were wide and unfocused. She looked like she had been dragged out of a nightmare by the throat.
Ruby, following her sister, jolted awake just a second later. Her pod lid slammed upward as she kicked it open with both feet and half rolled, half launched herself onto the floor. She hit the ground and scrambled backward until her shoulders pressed against the wall. Her hands shook as she pressed them over her heart, feeling the frantic beat hammering against her palms. She made a sharp, startled sound that was too high pitched to be a scream and too controlled to be a sob. Her face was pale. She was breathing too quickly. Her eyes darted around the interior of the bullhead as if she expected the monsters to materialize again from the shadows.
Qrow and Raven were far more composed. Raven opened her pod with slow measured movements. She pushed the lid aside and sat upright with her shoulders tense but her expression cold. Qrow simply pushed his own pod open and climbed out with the bleary steadiness of someone waking from a bad but manageable dream. Both moved with restraint, but Jaune noticed the tightness around their eyes. He noticed the stiffness in the way Qrow flexed his fingers before rubbing his thumb along the edge of his palm. He noticed how Raven's pupils were contracted to tiny points.
While they might have been calm, they were certainly not unaffected.
Jaune sat up in his own pod. His breath was controlled and his hands were oddly steady. His mind felt raw but not frantic. He had felt Her presence before and the memory of it had tempered his reaction. The awe and terror had not lessened, but the shock had. He had been braced for it. Ruby and Yang had not. Their bodies were still reacting like prey animals that had been stared at by something far above them on the food chain.
Yang finally registered where she was. Her gaze swept over the metal walls and the dim lighting and she blinked as if her vision were struggling to adjust to reality. She swallowed hard, tried to stand, stumbled, and caught herself on the edge of Ruby's pod. Her breath stuttered. Her voice cracked when she whispered Ruby's name. Ruby answered weakly, barely more than a whimper, still curled inward with her knees drawn partially to her chest.
Qrow moved before either sister spiraled further. He crossed the space in two steps and placed a firm hand on each of their shoulders. He applied pressure, grounding them with the steadiness of someone who had anchored them countless times before. His voice was low and rough, but steady.
"Breathe kids. Just breathe. It's over. We're out and we're all safe."
Yang swallowed again, fighting to get her breathing under control. Ruby closed her eyes and inhaled shakily through her nose while Qrow counted softly under his breath. The tension in her shoulders slowly eased, though her fingers continued to tremble.
Raven approached Jaune once the girls were no longer on the verge of collapsing. Her footsteps echoed softly against the bullhead floor as she stopped in front of him. Her expression was unreadable, carved from cool stone, yet her eyes betrayed something sharp and discerning. She regarded him for a long moment before speaking.
"That was the most stupid and reckless plan I've ever seen."
Her tone was flat but not entirely accusing. It was more of an evaluation. She crossed her arms and tilted her head slightly as if replaying everything she had witnessed in the dream realm. For a moment her gaze flicked to the dormant lighting along the interior of the pods, as if confirming they were truly back.
"If that invocation had failed, or somehow turned its intent into something else" she said, "the consequences could have been catastrophic."
Jaune met her eyes and nodded. He wouldn't pretend the plan had been safe. It had clearly not been. Yet, Jaune had been desperate. Likely, that was the only option with any chance of success.
Raven watched him, searching for something deeper beneath his expression. After a few seconds she asked the question that had clearly been circling her mind since the moment she regained consciousness.
"How were you sure we would be sent back to the real world? Invoking that thing may have stopped the Sleepless agent, but there was no guarantee it would return us back into reality."
Jaune exhaled slowly, not as a release of tension, but as a way to steady his thoughts. He rose from his pod and stood facing her. Qrow and the girls listened despite their shaken states. Even Yang kept her attention fixed on him, still pale but present.
"I was never fully certain," he admitted. "But I had reason to believe it would work."
Raven narrowed her eyes slightly.
"The Sleeper doesn't care about us. It doesn't care about the Sleepless either. A fact that they know quite well. It's a neutral entity. Completely indifferent. When I invoked it, I wasn't asking for help. I was only disrupting the battlefield with something none of us have the authority to stand near. That includes the very concept of runes itself."
Raven's gaze sharpened. Qrow turned toward him with a frown.
Jaune continued.
"When my father forcefully dragged me into the dream, the Sleeper's presence pulled me out of reality entirely. Not because it chose to help my father, but simply because its presence destabilizes the layers of reality. It rejects us and everything below its domain. So invoking it in the dream realm was the same as putting a hole through the floor."
Raven absorbed his words with a thoughtful stillness. Her eyes drifted briefly to Ruby and Yang, then to Qrow, then back to Jaune.
"You gambled that its presence would collapse our connection to the dream and eject us rather than destroying us entirely," she said.
"It... doesn't exactly have the power to destroy us. All it has is presence. A presence so strong that it can... apparently... even stop the effects of runes and even movement." Jaune explained.
Raven breathed out slowly. She did not look impressed, but she did look convinced. And perhaps begrudgingly respectful.
"It truly was a dangerous gamble," she said quietly.
Jaune agreed. It had been dangerous. It had been reckless. It had also been the only path out.
Behind him, Ruby finally found her voice.
"W-what are you guys talking about... what... was that thing?"
Her voice trembled. Jaune looked at her, and for the first time since waking, he hesitated. He needed to tell her.
He also needed to decide just how much truth she could handle.
.
.
AN: Advanced chapters are available on patreon