15

The five sat bolt upright, each screaming something incomprehensible.

“Ahh! Ahhhh!”

“Wh... What happened?!”

“I-I don’t understand. The dream suddenly ended, like it was shut down...” Ran said several minutes after the panic had passed and she was finally able to talk again. “What happened to the Suiju? Was anyone able to see it through to the end?”

They all shook their heads.

“I remember we smashed the egg. But only up to there...” Ran’s face was stiff as she thought about it, but eventually she looked up. “Let’s go again.”

“Can’t we rest? My head’s feeling kinda fuzzy...” Kaede said with a dull look on her face, but Ran shook her head.

“We have to figure out what happened. Once we’ve confirmed the situation, we’ll come right back.”

Saya pressed on her temples and shut her eyes tight. It felt like she’d taken an awful lot of damage, but she had no idea where she’d been hurt, or how. Looking down to where she felt a tug on her clothes, Hitsuji was looking unusually forlorn as she pulled at Saya’s sleeve. When Saya lovingly reached out and grasped her hand, Hitsuji squeezed hers back.

The five of them laid down again in a bed still damp with the sweat they had shed while sleeping in it. Even if their Sleepwalk was interrupted, if they resumed it immediately, they could enter the same dream. Saya knew this from experience.

The blanket of drowsiness Hitsuji unleashed wrapped around them all, soothing their heightened nerves, and the five resumed their Sleepwalk to the spring from before.

We woke up in bed.

Heavy clouds looked down on us from outside the warehouse’s skylight.

“Huh? What happened?”

“I thought we went on another Sleepwalk...”

We looked at one another in bewilderment. It looked like something had stirred us; Ran let out a sigh of resignation.

“Looks like it’s not going to work today... I guess that’s that.”

“Let’s rest a little. I’ll make tea now.” Midori was the first to rise from the bed, rushing off to the kitchen.

Not long after, the water had risen to a boil, and the scent of coffee filled the air. Holding our still sleep-addled heads, we sat around the sofa like usual.

“I bought guimauves for today.”

“Wow, fancy.”

“Are they fancy?”

“They were in style a number of years back.”

With the colorful marshmallow cubes laid out on the plate in front of me, I started to cheer up a bit. Midori poured coffee into each of our mugs.

“Okay, everyone—” Having picked up a guimauve as she spoke and carried it to her mouth, Midori stopped still.

Her eyes went wide like she had seen something terrifying, and she was frozen stiff. Noticing something was off, Ran tried talking to her.

“Midori...?”

In a dumbfounded tone of voice, Midori whispered: “It has... no taste.”

With those words, the guimauves on the plate turned to sand and collapsed.

We stood up in shock, and around us the tall shelves that surrounded the bedroom began to shake and the rows of boxes all immediately burst open.

From beyond the shelves, evil bugs with lots of eyes, legs, and poisonous mandibles appeared, and they began to tear us to shreds.

From the ceiling the great face of some unknown person peered in, watching us expressionlessly as we screamed.