Ruthless V5Ch51-Oblivion

The Panther Queen sat at a long table in her tent, a banquet set before her.

Noise drifted to her ears that seemed to come from outside the tent. From somewhere else entirely, perhaps.

“Murder and mayhem?” she murmured, confused. “I hear the sounds of it outside, do I not?” She sounded almost drugged as she spoke.

“All is well, my Queen,” murmured a sycophantic human in a collar next to her throne.

One of her generals proposed a toast before she could give the matter any further thought.

“To our fearless leader!” He raised a goblet, and the Panther Queen responded in kind, though the slight frown never left her face. Something was wrong.

James felt the Panther Queen stirring even through the toast, and he tightened his mental grip over her.

She would not awaken. Not if he had anything to say about it.

James had kept her enthralled the past hour with tantalizing visions of success. Conquest, reproduction—finding the ideal mate seemed to be a particular obsession of hers, from prior dreams he had visited—and personal growth. Now she was at a victory feast.

But the Panther Queen had sharp hearing. The noise of slaughter going on just outside her tent, the clash of steel and sinew, the claw on claw action taking place, occasionally penetrated into the dream.

James could feel the Queen turn uneasily in her sleep. It went against every instinct ingrained in her body to slumber through a battle. For all that he disapproved of in her—the fact that she was basically a slaver, abused her powers of mind control, and held feelings of racial superiority over humans, among other things—James could not deny that the Panther Queen was a true warrior and admirably effective war leader.

In the dream that he had conjured, the Queen had been in the middle of a feast, celebrated by her top subordinates, with a very handsome and well built male Pantherfolk waiting for her in her bedroll. But the sound of battle, cutting through her state of slumber, had made her pause in the middle of taking a bite of meat.

Everything else about the dream was convincing.

Every single figure in the tent except for the Panther Queen herself was being puppeteered by James, as he knew the Queen well enough by now to imitate her inner circle fairly convincingly. The noise coming through from outside of the dream was a difficulty, but he already had her halfway forgetting about that, by the strange power of dream logic.

No fact had permanent purchase. Nothing but present sense data existed for very long.

Still, safer to shift to a new vision rather than leave her questioning those sounds.

Everyone downed their drinks, and as the Panther Queen’s vision was blocked by the wine in her goblet, the scene dissolved.

He was moving to his backup plan, open rule by fear.

As the vision broke apart, James made himself visible to the Panther Queen for a moment. Not using his real face, but a mask he had decided to wear. He had made himself look like Anansi.

Against a backdrop that looked a lot like Dreamspace—but was actually the inside of the dream still—a being that looked like the Spider God appeared before the Queen. It was a fitting image for James to take. In the dream world, despite the location being someone else’s mind, James almost was a god.

Compared with the towering divine form before her, the Panther Queen was the size of a toy soldier. Yet she still knew who she was. She stood before him, defiant.

But James had decided to go all in on fear, on breaking her spirit to keep her out of the fight.

He now addressed himself to the Queen as he felt a god might.

“You are in my realm, child. Your hour of triumph was a lie, and now you will suffer for your arrogance. Witness oblivion, the destruction of all that you hold dear, and despair…”

The air shook with the force of his words, and for a moment, even the Panther Queen shuddered as the sound reverberated through her flesh and bones.

Then the background dissolved again, as James showed her a new vision, more directly conjured by her own mind, shaped by her own greatest fears.

The same figures from before were present, but now everyone was on a battlefield, surrounded by countless vicious creatures.

It didn’t make sense. The transition was impossible, if this was not a dream. Just like the previous transition had been. There was no rational cause and effect. Then again, dreams did not have to be logical. The events only needed to be gripping.

And after all, the most powerful emotion to seize someone’s heart was fear. Thus, the most captivating kind of dream to imprison someone in was a nightmare.

The new vision began to move.

Thousands of Pantherfolk, accompanied by a smaller contingent of humans and monsters of other Races, were forced to fight against hundreds of thousands of hideous chimera monsters that attacked from all sides.

As the battle ensued, the Pantherfolk and their allies fought valiantly, to the point where James was impressed by their valor. The aura of the Panther Queen was upon them, and every soldier fought like he was a squad of warriors condensed into a single individual. For several minutes in dream time, the Panther Army seemed to be winning the battle. Each Pantherfolk fighter cut a bloody path through the enemies, leaving dozens on the ground for each soldier they lost to injury or death.

But every path they cut through the monstrous chimeras only led to more chimeras.

The dream Panther Army was awash in a sea of tentacles, hoofs, horns, fur, and claws. Lion-headed elephants charged into the mass of her force and shattered the Pantherfolks’ formation with the weight of their bodies before being cut down by a few of the Queen’s more elite warriors. Snake chimeras with narwhal horns and wings swooped in after the elephants to gore and bite the fallen Pantherfolk. Then they too were cut down by some of the Panther Warriors surrounding them.

As quickly as those snakes were killed, another set of horrible monsters charged in to fearlessly take their place. A parade of monstrosities pressed the Panther Army, attacking from all sides, wearing them down and occasionally killing them. They were not so much mightier than the Pantherfolk—by all indications, the opposite was true—as exponentially more numerous.

James could tell that the nature of the nightmare was such that the horde of enemies might literally be endless. In fact, it probably was.

And the Panther Army was not endless.

As a result, it gradually became clear that the Panther Queen and her soldiers were fighting a battle they could not win. Slowly but surely, they were being overrun by enemy monsters. Every one of her soldiers who fell went unreplaced, while the enemy unleashed wave upon wave of chimeras without pausing. At some point, the physical tide turned. Each clash was less of a definitive victory for the Panther Army’s side. More of them were killed, and some enemies survived each wave to continue fighting in support of the next group of chimeras. Where the monsters broke through the Panther Army’s lines even briefly, they were vicious, dragging Panther Warriors or Panther Scouts off to be tormented or consumed behind the chimeras’ lines. Many of the Panther Queen’s soldiers were eaten alive as the battle wore on.

Some of the Pantherfolk were physically invaded by a particular type of chimera—a worm-like creature with a face like a rat’s skull—that used their bodies like it was a hand, and they were sock puppets. The surviving Pantherfolk and allies were forced to put down the bodies of their late comrades.

This vision, James could not help but note to his satisfaction, was much more consistent with the ambient noises that occasionally drifted into the Queen’s consciousness than the last one had been.

At the same time, the mood in the air had turned to one of despair, enough that it would have captured the Panther Queen’s attention even if the noises of the real world battle had been considerably louder.

That ought to hold her for a good, long time…

James had to keep the Panther Queen trapped here for as long as possible while his grand illusion did its work. The Panther Army was out there, and though James could only distantly sense what was happening through his Fisher King powers, he knew the soldiers were slaughtering each other as he occupied the Queen.

All according to plan.

That was the power of Complete Illusion Magic. The Panther Army looked at its own members, and it saw enemies. They touched the fur and muscle of fellow Pantherfolk and felt human skin. They listened to the death cries of their brethren and heard humans pleading for mercy or wailing in pain instead.

They had marched to the specific battlefield James had chosen—all those weeks visiting the Panther Queen’s dreams, he and Hester had subtly altered her sense of where the Fisher Kingdom was, corrupting her navigation process—and now they were dancing to the tune that James had arranged for them.

With every passing minute, more of her soldiers died, unknowingly by their own hands. It was by far the largest and most one-sided slaughter James had ever been a participant in.

If the Queen were to awaken and come to their aid, her boosting Skill, which enhanced all those enveloped in her aura—perhaps the entire army—might allow them to see through the illusion.

So James would keep her here until the battle was decided.

The Panther Queen cried out in her sleep as a monster with bear-trap-like teeth latched onto her leg. James had to applaud the versatility of her imagination. He would never have thought of creatures as terrible as the ones she invented to torment herself. He was fairly certain most of these monsters had never existed anywhere in the universe. He hoped not.

As the emotions of panic and dread rose to a fever pitch within the Queen, James felt something new and unexpected happening within her.

A sort of door within the Panther Queen’s mind presented itself to him. It appeared to be just slightly ajar. With the slightest push, James sensed that he could enter, and he knew intuitively what was behind it.

In her moment of weakness, in succumbing to terror, the Queen had made herself completely vulnerable mentally to the dream. He could feel her body moving, tearing apart her sheets, as the sleep paralysis that normally kept a sleeper from acting on their dreams became undone.

James glanced at the Panther Queen, still embroiled in the madness of her dream.

He looked to the door, invisible to all but himself. He hesitated.

And then he decided to go in. He knew that on the other side of this, he would gain control over not just the Queen’s dreams, but her very body.

James did not know the specific term for what the Panther Queen was going through—what he had pushed her into. But it was a night terror.

A few seconds after he went through the door inside of her mind, James felt the Panther Queen’s body rise. Her real body, not the body within the dream.

Her eyes remained closed. She wasn’t in the driver’s seat, after all.

She was sleepwalking. James was at the wheel.

The Panther Queen’s claws extended and shredded the remnants of her sheets just to get them off her more quickly. James wasn’t certain how long this would last, but he was quickly getting the hang of it. Grasping what needed to be done. He just had to manipulate the content of the dream a little bit to finely control her. That would be easy enough.

In both his dream form and his real body, he smiled. What a unique experience this would be!

He had never piloted another Ruler’s body before.

James marched the Panther Queen out of her tent and sent her to go and meet her soldiers.