Hyu's Adventures

This one is kind of old and happened right after my last entry.
I haven't really found the time to write it down until now.
My dreams are also getting kind of long, which is amazing, but also kind of a pain to write down.


The time is ticking.
I have no choice but to diffuse the bomb, there is no way we'll get out of the explosion radius in time.
I quickly grab an electric screwdriver from my back pocket and start removing the digital clock mounted on top of the bomb.
There is less than one minute left on the timer.

"Hurry up!"
"Shut it!"

Removing the clock reveals a highly complex maze of cabling.
Screw this!
I remove the electronics as well, in the hopes of finding a simpler set of cabling leading to the warhead.
Fortunately I am right. The whole electronics are wired to the warhead by only two thick cables.
I can do this!
But my short burst of confidence is quickly shattered by a rather troublesome discovery.
The warhead is nuclear.
How the fuck did this happen? How did anyone manage to acquire a nuclear fucking bomb?

A quick look at the dismantled clock reveals that I have 7 seconds left.
I decide to cut one of the cables at random.

"I know this setup! Cut the red one!"

I move my knife to the red cable, but it shifts colors with the other yellow one.
Whenever I switch, the cable colors switch as well. It's impossible to cut the red one. WTF!

Seeing the last few seconds run out, I notice that I'm not really scared to die.
I wonder why that is.
Oh...

Yeah...
I start rubbing my hands but am interrupted by the bomb hitting zero and audibly powering up.
Well... this is not good. I might wake up because of that.
I think about quickly portaling the bomb away before it goes off, but then I notice that it is plugged into the wall with an extension cord.
Really?
I unplug it and the warhead turns off.
Lol.

I resume rubbing my hands but I am yet again interrupted, this time by the DC that was with me.
I unsummon him because I have no time to deal with DC's right now.
I need to stabilize the dream and get my second lesson in time dilation...

... I'm in Haven with Yuya and Liv.
I have trouble stabilizing the dream but eventually manage to get there.
Once stable I immediately get back to doing the awareness technique from the previous dream, sort of to show off in case Yuya tests me.
But she doesn't. There is simply no need, she is fully aware of my thoughts and how aware I am right now.
Liv is curious about what we are doing and I have a difficult time explaining it to her.
She is unaware of the difficulty of remaining in a dream or the concept of stability.

We walk along a path that I remember. I've been here before but I cannot quite remember what I was doing.
Then I see the water pools, yep, this is the fighting practice area.
Yuya starts walking onto one of the pools and I follow her.
Walking on water is second nature to me nowadays, but thinking back, it's the first thing that Yuya taught me when I met her again.

I suddenly get goosebumps and instinctively power up and take a defensive stance.
Huh? It was Yuya.I felt the shock of her suddenly powering up.

"Nice reaction!"
"Cheers. What are we doing?"

I barely manage to block her attack as she blinks towards me.
Without my recent training she would have knocked me unconscious with this.
I'm kind of in the mood to fight her now, I wonder how I compare to her nowadays.
I smile.

"Awareness Hyu."
"What? Oh, you've got to be kidding me! During a fight???"
"Why? Are you scared that I'll slap you across the face?"
"Hahaha, alright, let's do this!"

I awaken the dragon and charge towards her.
She easily blocks all of my attacks. No surprise there though.
So far so good, I manage to remain fully aware of my surroundings.
The fight is pretty tame, I don't get myself into uncomfortable positions, have I gotten closer to the skill level of Yuya?

She summons her pressurized spheres.
Well shit. I forgot about those.
The spheres are horribly dangerous and difficult to fight against.
She basically creates 5 water spheres about the size of a basket balls.
Then she compresses them down to the size of a grain of sand.
I'm not even sure how it's possible to compress a liquid at all.

The pressure of these spheres is immense. They can be used both defensively and offensively.
She moves them around telepathically at extreme speeds and can make them burst whenever she wants,
releasing the contained water at extreme pressures, cutting through anything in their way.

You really can't let them touch you unless you don't mind loosing a limb.
Fighting against them requires a lot of blinking, which causes stability problems due to the distorted vision.

It would be rather useful to have my katana right now, but I'm not using it in a practice battle with Yuya, it's too dangerous.
I don't use the dragon eyes either, because the thought on using them on a friend scares the shit out of me.
In return she doesn't use her water extraction technique, which I wouldn't know how to fight against.
I only saw her use it once in a fight.
Within a split second she extracted the entire blood from her enemy and he died on the spot.
It's a really scary technique.

What am I doing?
I'm thinking too much. I should look for openings instead and strike whenever I see one.
But Yuya is way too skilled to provide such an opening, I'll have to force one.
I create and launch spheres of compressed energy at her. Those are rather explosive and fairly dangerous.
I got the idea from her water spheres. Attacks of compressed energy have their advantages.
They are much more efficient against single targets.
The technique is also cheap energy wise, so I can cast it a lot, making it an ideal tool to get someone off balance.

She is moving 3 of her water spheres into a defensive position to cope with my relentless attacks.
Time to get serious.
I make an aggressive blink, right in front of her, and try to strike her with a fist.
This is obviously not going to work, I expect her to blink away.
I'm using a multiblink attack, which is very difficult to perform.
I try to feel where she's going to blink to to dodge my attack and blink myself to the new location simultaneously.

Blinking usually has some sort of cooldown, making this impossible, but using enough energy it is possible to force it.
The energy required to do this is ludicrous though, so multiblink attacks are extremely exhausting.
But you basically put your opponent into a position where he is forced to multiblink as well to dodge the attack.
Yuya and I are skilled enough to do it about 4-5 times in a row, but after that everything hurts.
Your aura is completely unstable at that point and takes seconds to recover, during which you cannot focus your energy at all.

The reason I'm using such an attack is to nullify an immense advantage she has over me.
She doesn't need to stay lucid. She lives in this world, I am merely a visitor.

Here she goes.
2 Blinks... 3, 4, and finally a fifth.
The energy in my fist has completely dissipated due to all the blinking, and she can now easily block it.
I land on the water surface and have difficulty remaining on top due to my now unstable aura.

I attack her again, purely physically this time, as I neither of us can focus any energy.
Whoever manages to focus his energy first will have the tremendous advantage of launching the first serious attack.
I might have the advantage on this, dragonic energy is extremely unstable by nature, so I'm used to it.
I should be able to focus my energy before my aura has fully stabilized.

I can feel my aura tingling. This should be enough!
I focus energy into the tattoo stretched over my right arm and quickly cast a fire based attack towards Yuya.
She dodges it by blinking.
How the hell can she do that???
How is her aura stable enough already to blink?

I screwed up big time. I casted this before my aura stabilized, and now it's completely messed up again.
Yuya is over me charging towards me. She's casting a spell.
Shit, I can't do anything.
The water surface collapses beneath my feet and I am dragged underwater.
She's controlling the water, increasing it's pressure attempting to hold me in place.
I see her splash through the water surface still charging at me fast.
She is wielding a trident.

But she's overconfident. She's in her element, so she thinks I must be at a huge disadvantage.
Yet, even though I do not control water, I can make good use of it.
My aura stabilizes and I create an extremely strong electric field in front of me.
Electrolysis! I split water into hydrogen and oxygen. The correct mixture is highly explosive.
She realizes what I've done too late and I ignite the mixture with a fire sphere.

Oh shit. I didn't think this through.
The explosion is huge and we are both catapulted out of the water.
Everything is extremely foggy because so much water evaporated and water drops are going everywhere.
I can barely see. This is really dangerous, the dream could collapse.
I don't even know where up and down is.

I decide to completely ignore my vision and rely on my sense of global awareness instead.
Good call! I sense 5 sources of compressed energy approaching. Water spheres!
I quickly locate Yuya's aura and blink towards her.
I catch her slightly of guard and manage to land a focused hit.
She blocks it fine, but still.
Focused energy attacks are better to avoid than to block.
They cause all sorts of vibrations in your aura making followup moves difficult.

I try to chain a few attacks together but quickly feel the exhaustion kicking in and I back up.
Most of the water has come down and my vision becomes useful again.

She performs a blink attack.
Shit! She's going to chain them up.
We blink a total of 4 times.
It hurts so much.

This keeps going for a few more rounds.
One of us performs a multiblink attack and gets us both completely out of position.
Then it's a race to the first attack and a matter of somehow defending against it.
It is absolutely exhausting.
My limbs become insanely heavy and I start to loose the ability to focus my energy properly.
We fight for maybe a total of 15 minutes, which is actually quite a long time considering the speed we're going at.

"Alright... let's call it a draw..."
"No... I win."

Oh come on. She's just as exhausted as I am, she can barely stand.

"You lost awareness of your surroundings."
"Fuck my life."
"Haha. You completely forgot!"
"..."
"And guess what? You're still here."
"Huh? I thought the goal of this was to remain aware of my surroundings."
"No, that's not the goal at all. The goal is to have deeper dreams. The goal is to remain here for longer."

...
Wait what?

"Hold on a second!"

She got that grin of her face.
That "she knows everything" grin.

"You're telling me the heightened awareness thing isn't actually necessary to stay lucid???"
"Of course not! How would you pull that off for multiple hours in a row?"
"..."
"I said your awareness level was too random, we did some training to fix that."
"So you're saying it is already fixed?"
"I am now convinced that it is already fixed."

Woah. That was fast.

"So.. what are we doing now?"
"Teaching you to let go."

Let go? Let go of waking life?
Not thinking about it all the time and rather focus on the dream?
Of course... she told me many times before...

I take a quick dip in the water to get rid of the smell.
I'm sweating like a pig.

We walk back towards Yuya's place, discussing dreaming and being awake.
I mention Dreamviews, which I haven't done very often before.
Yuya tells me to say hi to fOrceez and Dark_Merlin.
Liv doesn't say a word. I don't think she's ever seen Yuya and me fight, that must have been quite intense for her.

Damn... I'm so exhausted.
Why do you even get exhausted in dreams?

"Why wouldn't you?"
"Eh... yeah..."
"Indeed."
"So, what do I do against it?"
"... are you serious?"

>_<

"You sleep of course! Or did you think I would sleep just for fun?"
"Well... now that you put it this way."

Liv leaves us and we quickly get into bed.
Goddamn I'm exhausted. Every muscle in my body hurts.

"This is a problem"
"What is?"
"If I want to sleep I'll have to close my eyes."
"So?"
"I might wake up?"
"zzz, you've picked up a lot of nonsense"
"I have?"
"These 'dream rules'. Darkness is bad, don't close your eyes. Don't talk. Yada yada."
"Yeah, I kinda have, haven't I?"
"I know the not talking one is nonsense, I talk all the time."
"It's no different for closing your eyes."
"I know you're right. I only wake up because I'm scared that I might. But it seems hard to get over."

"Pff... hahahaha"
"What's so funny?"
"Hurr hurr, I'm a badass dragon, I can fight a goddess of water and do all sorts of shit."
"Yet I can't even close my eyes.... haha.... I'm sorry Hyu, but this is funny."

It kind of is.
Screw it. Let's do this shit!
I close my eyes.

"You know, when you exploded half of the fucking training pool you didn't see anything either."
"That didn't wake you up, so why would closing your eyes do so?"

Yep, my thoughts exactly.
I open my eyes again to sneak a closer look at her.

WHAT THE FUCK?
How am I awake? What is this shit?
I'm a bit mad, but happy to have made progress.
I take some quick notes and go back to sleep.