Dream and Reality: Chapter 6

Chapter 6
Dream
‘Five minutes!” I hear yelled at the back of the jet. The Barber was more generous than we thought. We had shown up to Lance’s house with a jet in his driveway. It was filled with swords and guns. A surprising amount of swords. Despite this being a future society, we use a lot of swords and suits of armor in battles. Who cares. I like swords.
In the back, I had found a suit of white and gold armor and a longsword. It's labeled with my name, and I can see why. This is the only armor with small holes in the back for my wings. I literally couldn’t take any other suit.
I sit in the back of the jet in my armor and the sword by my side. I personally think I look badass. Lance walks over to me and sits down. He is also geared up in armor, but instead of a sword, has two guns. I've seen that kind of gun before in pictures but never up close. If I remember correctly, these things shoot microbombs. They are the size of a bullet but create an explosion on impact the size of a person.
“So,” he begins, “that man with you when I picked you up. He claimed that they had found you guys and looked right at you, but saw nothing.” He looks at me for a few moments waiting for a response. “Ya” is all I can say. He understands that I don’t have any more information and stays quiet.
After a minute, Lance stands up to address us. “Alright,” he says, “our objective is to free the prisoners. They are kept in a small underground facility in the center of their Military City 1. There is a gate that we have to get through to get in. It has hundreds of lasers shooting across, making it impossible to get through. Evan and Zoe, you both have to stay above and fight people away from me, Henry, and Maya. I will stand at the door and keep it open. Its security is made to reboot every ten seconds, so I have to repeatedly disable it to get us in and out. Henry and Maya will go in and take out the inside guards. After that, Maya will run and work on freeing the prisoners while Henry guards her. Once they are free, we all run out. I open the gate and let everyone out, we escort everyone to the jet, and we fly off and get ourselves some medals.”
I wait a moment to see if there is more before standing up. “Sounds perfect.” He smiles. We check the map to see that we were going to arrive in about two minutes. I look around the jet. Maya is sitting there with no armor. Just some kind of vest. A sword sits on her lap, and she is just looking out a window. Evan and Zoe are sitting together, Evan watching over Zoe’s shoulder while she texts someone. They both have strange looking armor on. I don’t know what it is about it, but it looks odd. Lance is sitting in the front of the jet right next to the wheel. The jet is on autopilot.
As the timer reaches one minute till we get there, all of our armor starts to glow red. We all look around confused. “Please state your name,” a woman's voice says from Lance’s armor. “Um… Lance Lucid?” The armor starts to shift fitting to his body, before finishing and changing to a green glow. “Wow! It feels so much better now!” He says excitedly looking at his armor. The woman’s voice repeats now from my armor. “Henry Ransom,” I say. The armor takes a minute processing what I said. It takes way longer than Lance’s. Finally, it begins to morph. I understand what Lance meant. It feels so much better!
Maya goes next, and the same happens with her vest. Next is Evan. “Evan Hansed.” The armor begins to morph, but instead of his face looking relieved, he starts crying out in pain. It closes in on his chest as I hear the snapping of bones. Finally, he collapses dead. Screams fill the jet. “Dark spy eliminated,” the armor says. We all go silent. “Evan was a spy?” Maya says. We all turn to Zoe. “Please state your name,” the armor says to her. It's all silent. She looks around for a moment than jumps at Lance’s guns. She grabs one and shoots at the front of the jet. It explodes into fire.
Maya tackles her and Zoe swinge the gun around to her. She fires the gun right at Maya’s head. “No!” I yell. The smoke clears and Maya is unharmed. The vest had expanded out creating a thin layer of silver metal. Despite it being extremely thin, it's powerful enough to remain unharmed by the explosion.
Th jet starts spiraling down to the ground. The armor on Zoe comes off and flies away from her. “Please state your name and put back on” it says. Lance throws himself toward Zoe and grabs back the gun. He aims and fires. Within seconds Zoe is dead. Before I can see her remains, Lance, Maya, and I are thrown out of the jet.
I stretch out my wings and dive to them. I grab Lance and Maya than pull up. We start gliding just like I did on my birthday. We all stay silent.
I land us down and stumble into the sand. I lay there panting for a few seconds before sitting up. Lance grabs my sword and takes off the glove of his armor. He stabs his hand. “What are you doing!” Maya yells taking the sword from him and handing it back to me. Suddenly, Med appears. “Where are we?” he asks healing Lance’s hand. “Were only about a minute walk from the city. Evan and Zoe were Darks.” He looks around. “Are they dead?” “Yes,” He sighs. “What will we do now?” We all turn to Lance. He starts thinking.
“How about I call some more people?” I sigh. “Who? And how would they get here?” He smiles at me. Med disappears, apparently knowing who Lance is talking about. We wait expectantly.
This is my first time getting a good look at what a military city is like. It's much less tall skyscrapers and more bunker-like buildings. It's not pretty, but it's practical.
We sit for a few minutes before Med shows up again with a group of FIVE more people. Three guys and two girls. “Theses,” Med says proudly, “are Lance’s friends.” Each of them names off one by one. First is a short dark brown haired man. “I’m Will,” he says. Next is a red-headed man. “Jack,” He says in a deep voice. The last dude, tall and strong extends his hand to me. “Names Ace.” He looks intimidating. Jack and Will, on the other hand, look fairly friendly.
Next is a woman with dark blue hair. “I’m Olivia,” she says cheerfully shaking my hand just long enough to be uncomfortable for me. The other woman has red hair and is almost two feet taller than me. “Call me Lena.” I look at the two girls. Where did I know them from?
I look at all of them. They all would be here just to fight. I’ve never even met them and they are here to fight for me. “What is wrong with all of you? What makes me special enough to deserve all this help?” They look at me in silence. They look around at each other with a worried look on their face. Finally, Maya steps forward.
“I recently learned this world was the creation of someone’s dream. It used to be someone else, and we all should have died with him, but you were born the second he died. We don’t know how, but these dreams are now linked to you. If you die, this world will collapse, killing us all.” I stand there processing this. “So that's it. You’re all just trying to save yourself.” She jumps back. “No! Lance only told me this now on the jet, and he only learned from the Barber in a note in the jet.” Med steps forward. “I’m only learning this now.” The other five-step in as well. “This is new to us as well.” I look around at all of them.
“Thank you,” I say, “for that. I jumped to conclusions. You all truly just want to help.” I turn to the city in the distance. “Let's do this.”



The city has guards swarming the street. I guess we know who Zoe way texting. They all are heavily armed, unlike us. We had enough extra armor and weapons for everyone, but it still wasn’t much compared to them. I look at one of the guards very carefully for a few seconds.
I turn to everyone. “Drones,” I say. “They are being piloted from somewhere else. Have no mercy.” They all nod and we get into our starting positions. “3… 2… 1…” We all run in. Gunshots immediately ring out as we storm in. I see Olivia and Jack fly up. Olivia is a fellow wing bearer, and Jack has a power increasing how smart he is, so he has a jetpack.
They both fly over the city and begin dropping bombs. On the ground, Lena, Will, and Ace are fighting. Ace has super strength and Lena has guns that come out of her arms. (Told you.) Will has no combat-related powers, so he is just swinging a sword at people. Lance, Maya, and I run to the center.
A line of guards stands to block our path. Lance shoots his guns taking out the far sides of the line, and I swing my sword slashing the center group. We don’t even stop running for a second. If we don’t do this fast enough, they could send in their whole army.
We immediately see that the entrance to the bunker where the prisoners are held is surrounded by drones. They all lift their guns to fire, but they never get the chance. Olivia flies above the group and drops her strongest bomb. It's the size of a baseball but can generate an explosion the size of a house. The coast is clear when the smoke fades out.
Lance pulls out a disk and a laptop. He throws the disk on the ground right next to the door and jumps on it. A small bubble closes around him. He starts typing into his laptop until the doors lasers dissipate. I see him mouth good luck before we run in.
We immediately are greeted by gunshots. They do nothing to us. I run and swing my sword, cutting the drones in half. My victory is short-lived because I next get blasted back by an explosion. There are four guards with the same guns as Lance. One of them shoots again when I begin to run at them. This time, Maya jumps in the way and blasts against the wall. That gives me enough time to go and slice the bomb gunners up. Once down, I run back to Maya. “You okay?” I ask. “Yup, she says grabbing my hand and pulling herself up. “Never better.”
We run farther in taking out guards until we reach the cells. We see men and women locked up in cage-like cells. The room is filled with huge drones. One runs and smashes me to the ground. He swings down again, but I stick up my sword. His arm impales right through. I smile and fling the sword over my head. It carries the drone and slams it on the ground. The head peace caves in and it go offline. An idea comes to me.
“Olivia!” I yell into our earpiece. “Fly to their other military city and take out their main tower. All the drones will go offline. It should only take a minute to fly there.” Maya looks at me and grins. “Smart.” Jacks voice yells over the call. “NO!” Maya and I jump with the shock of the sudden yell and get punched against a wall because of it.
“M-man down,” He says. “Ace is down.” Oh shit. This is still devastating news to me, but what about Lance. Ace was one of Lance’s friends, and one of us has to tell him. He is still in the bubble, so he can’t hear us. Shit.
The drones punch at us again but we both roll out of the way. Sadly, we both roll in towards each other. We slam into each other and trip back. I feel the cold metal slam into my stomach when I fall. I open my eyes, however, to see the lifeless drone on my chest. Olivia had done it. “Go, Maya!” I yell. She runs to the cells and starts sawing through. Once through, we grab the prisoners and start running. They are all hanking us and crying tears of joy, but I don’t even notice. My mind is running faster than my body right now, and damn, I’m zooming right now.
We get to the gate and see it still open. We all run through, and Lance immediately joins us. “We did it!” He cheers. I don’t think that I could tell him. I instead remain silent as we reach the border. Jack, Will, Med, and Lena all rejoin us there. Lance looks around. “No, please no.” Tears start to form in his eyes.
We all grab each other's shoulders as Med teleports us home. Lance remains frozen. We appear in Light Military City 1 in a strange looking office. Guards run in and look at us. The suddenly start saying things like, “Oh my god,” “You freed the hostages?” and “How?”
After that, it's all just a blur. I remember getting the medal we request. I remember getting to see the hostages returned home. I remember pinning on the medal before I went to sleep. But there is one thing I wish I could forget. I remember Lance leaving the moment we were home.