Arknights: Living the Dream

Chapter 3: Adjustment

And I will enjoy my new life here.

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Lighty smiling to myself, I close my laptop and walk over to my nightstand.

I know that whenever I had a dream involving ice arts, I always had 2 weapons with me. A pair of daggers made that I can infinitely make from my ice arts, and my smile gets a tad bit brighter as I pull the second one out of the drawer, a simple engraved revolver.

Having this meant that I must have gone to Laterano at least once, but the 3 dreams that fit my early backstory had time between when they ended and when I had started in the Victorian Royal Guard Academy. I'm thinking this because of how I had most likely trained my combat skills before enrolling in the academy, so they work under the premise that I must have visited Laterano at least once during that time.

But going back to the revolver, it's nothing special.

A simple gun with nothing flashy or spectacular about it aside from personal engravings that I had added in my dreams because they look cool. I get to save on bullets by using my arts to make bullets out of ice.

Making bullets out of ice is probably the only reason why I had consistently used this weapon in dreams with ice arts. The idea just came to me one night and it became a sort of tradition.

It's weird holding it in my hand after all this time. Every time I imagined myself with ice arts, I always had this gun. I feel as if it was a long-lost friend that I had finally met up with after so long.

I slowly turn the gun around while checking the engravings. It mostly contains all the lyrics that resonated with me, though I can find small little images between the lyrics.

My face reverts back to its regular gaze as I melancholily look back on the images of my life.

I look across the engravings more until I break myself out of my trance with my own empty chuckle seeing the lyric, "A coward dies a thousand deaths." Which I slowly mutter to myself.

I sigh, calm myself, and close my palm.

...

I open my palm a second later to see 6 bullets made of ice.

I load them into my revolver one by one before taking a seat on my bed.

I stare at the bullets for a little while before allowing them to melt.

While I seem to be able to do the basic abilities of the ice arts I always dreamed of; making ice infinitely and being able to melt any kind of ice telepathically, limits need to be known, and what's the harm of getting used to actually using arts?

The ability to fight is about as common as the ability to speak in Terra.

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An hour passes, as I get a firm grasp on my arts' abilities and limitations.

The basic overview is simple. I can make anything out of ice that's smaller than a katana without tiring myself out. Anything larger than that can make me tired, the larger the object I make, the more I want to sleep.

I can melt any ice that's close to me. Whether I made it or not, I can melt it. I imagine it as a switch. The switch is automatically turned on, which allows the ice to keep its regular properties, but anytime I want to, I can flip that switch and allow it to melt instantly.

I can decrease the temperature of anything by touching it, and I'm given natural immunity to the cold.

Through testing and remembering old dreams, I figured out how to make a surface turn into ice. I can make a surface extremely cold, and then put an ice sheet on. The surface doesn't turn into ice exactly, but it carries out the same properties and it allows me to do it pretty much anywhere with an easy cleanup of having the ice melt, so who am I to complain?

...

That was tiring, but I now hold a baseline for combat, which I would say is a good tradeoff.

I have two options right now. I can go to bed and make a plan tomorrow, or I can make a plan now and throw out all my propositions of a good sleep schedule.

...

Well I've never had a good sleep schedule anyways.

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I take a large, long yawn as I finalize my basic plan.

The idea is to simply figure out my backstory and live a good life.

It's not a plan that takes a lot of thinking to come up with, but it works.

Rather than getting it from the seconds that I took with coming up with the plan, I gained this yawn from trying to execute it.

My first idea was to check my phone. If my contacts had been updated to my contacts in Terra, then I could see who I was connected to.

Sadly, my phone seems to be ripped straight from my own world, though it seems to have been cleared of anything relating to Earth aside from my music.

Maybe because I was listening to music while I had been transported, but who knows?

And who cares? I get to listen to my music and that's exclusively a plus in my eyes.

Secondly, I looked into the laptop that I owned.

Surprise, surprise, it was just a regular laptop. Nothing special aside from references to earthly things that I had probably written during my dreams at one point while bored.

This led me to another thing.

Has my mind been affected by this at all? Do I think more like Azrael rather than a regular human?

It really only matters in the small term. I always controlled Azrael in my dreams, so Azrael is pretty much just an alter ego of myself with the only difference being our looks.

Back in the bar, I had called Iberia hell without a second thought. Given that my ID said that I was an Aegir, I took note of this.

And because of that, and how I felt as if controlling my arts was as easy as moving a third limb, I think I can say that my mind has been affected a tad.

I have truly "become" Azrael, and while this doesn't really mean anything as I explained earlier, it at least gives me confidence in myself.

I really am living the dream.

...

I yawn again and make my way towards my bed.

I've calmed myself, made a plan, and all I have to do is see where it takes me.

I take a seat on my bed, open a window, turn up my music, and light a cigarette.

Despite the cigarette smoke in my peripheral, the Lungmen skyline stands proudly in front of me, obscured by nothing except its own glimmering lights.

I lightly smile as I begin to see snowfall again.

I haven't felt like this in a long time. 

I let a couple minutes pass by before freezing my cigarette, putting it out. I throw it away, turn off the lights, and fall into my bed.

As I lay in bed with my eyes half-closed listening to music, I'm left with one lonely thought.

What will I dream tonight?

(Another short chapter. The quote "you have 20 years to make your first album and 6 months for your second" really seems to apply here. I'm sorry for the short chapter and while I'm trying to make them a bit longer, baseball just started back up again and that combined with my regular motivation dips are making it hard to write over 1500 words. But I'm dedicated to this upload schedule, so I will be posting chapters even if they aren't that long. I won't be sacrificing quality, only length. However, I do promise to never release a chapter under 1000 words. I will try to get my chapters back into the 2000 word range, but that might take a couple more weeks while I try to adjust to this new schedule. But ignoring all that, Thanks for Reading :)

Uploaded on February 27, 2022. 1326 Words.