100 THE MIND CORE
The room went silent.
"I can't get out of this dream."
Damen froze, his heart pounding as the words echoed through the chamber — not from Ethen's mouth, but through the machines themselves.
Ethen's mind was inside the machine.
"How do we get his mind out? Can't we just turn the machine off?" Damen asked.
"It's not that simple," one of the scientists said. "The machine has a synthetic mind of its own and it's powered by its own meta-energy core. We can't just shut it down."
"Then what do we do?" Dorin asked.
"The subject's consciousness is trapped within," the scientist replied. "The only way to retrieve him is for someone to enter the system — to go into the machine and bring him back."
Dorin hesitated. "Who could do that?"
"I'll go," Damen said quietly. "He thinks I'm his big brother. Only I can wake him up."
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"I'll kill you, Ethen Crap!" Ray Gon screamed, wielding a baseball bat.
"No—don't! Big Brother will save me!" Ethen pleaded.
"There is no Big Brother. It's only in your mind, you fool," Ray sneered.
Ethen fell to the ground, trembling. "That's not true. Big Brother will not leave me…"
Suddenly, someone appeared on the horizon — a tall boy wearing a dark-colored cloak. He walked toward them slowly, the air thick with pressure.
"Who are you? Don't come any closer! I'll kill him!" Ray shouted, lifting his bat.
"You have no strength to bargain with me," the tall boy said, his voice calm but cold.
He clenched his fist. The air around them twisted, scooping inward as if the world itself was being swallowed. A moment later, the crushing force burst outward in concentric waves.
"Arghhh!" Ray Gon and his bullies were hurled through the air like rag dolls, their heads slamming against the concrete walls — and exploding on impact.
Silence followed.
Ethen stared at the boy through wide eyes. "You're here for me… Big Brother."
"Yes, I am," Damen said softly. "You must wake up now."
Before Ethen could answer, the scene shattered.
He found himself sitting alone in the cafeteria, quietly eating lunch. The smell of soup and detergent filled the air. Then, without warning, Ray Gon appeared again — and overturned his tray, spilling everything to the floor.
"What do you want?" Ethen asked quietly.
"I want to kill you," Ray said with a smirk.
Before he could move, a dark blur flashed across the room — and with a single strike, Ray's head was torn from his body. The students screamed and scattered in shock.
But Ethen didn't move. He looked up with a trembling smile. "Big Brother… you came for me again."
"Ethen," Damen said, standing over him, "you must wake up from this nightmare. Only then can I save you."
"I'm… in a nightmare?" Ethen asked.
"Yes. Keep telling yourself that," Damen said. "You've been trapped in a loop of dreams you can't wake from. You must remain lucid."
Suddenly, the world began to twist again. The walls melted, the lights flickered, and the cafeteria dissolved into a vortex of colors and screams—
—another nightmare beginning.
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Damen went through dozens of iterations of Ethen's nightmares. These weren't figments of imagination — they were memories, fragments of Ethen's trauma replayed again and again like a broken record.
Damen felt a deep sadness for him.
Ethen had suffered no less than he had in this cruel world. The only difference was that Damen had tools — the mining app, his meta abilities, ways to fight back, while Ethen had only one thing left to hold onto: Faith.
Faith that his Big Brother would save him.
"This isn't working…" Damen muttered, watching another nightmare begin to form. "No matter how many times I save him, another one just replaces it."
He frowned, thinking hard. "How can one person have so many nightmares?"
The human brain is designed to protect itself. It doesn't trap its owner in endless loops of pain. That kind of cruelty wasn't human.
Then it hit him.
"These nightmares… they're not from Ethen himself." His eyes widened. "It's the machine. It's generating them to keep him under control."
"Big Brother, please save me!" Ethen cried, trapped again in another illusion.
Damen dashed forward. With a single strike, he wiped out the bullies tormenting Ethen. There were no hesitation and mercy — these were just hollow puppets of the system.
Then a thought surfaced in Damen's mind.
"Ethen… do you remember opening the vault door for me? Cracking the code to the cash register?" he asked urgently before they entered another nightmare.
Ethen's face twisted in pain.
His hands clutched his head as flashes of memory struggled to break through. Something was suppressing him. Damen could feel it. The machine is tightening its grip on him.
Then realization struck Damen.
Ethen had once managed to break free of the machine's control — enough to help Damen breach the password in the vault.
That meant there was a backdoor in the system. Ethen just didn't have full access to it yet.
"Ethen, listen to me," Damen said, grabbing his shoulders. "You can get out of this nightmare. You've done it before — you can do it again."
But before Ethen could respond, the world flickered. The ground split open, colors twisted, and the nightmare changed again.
"Damn you, machine!" Damen shouted, his voice echoing through the collapsing dreamscape.
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"I must focus… control myself… I must get out of this nightmare," Ethen whispered, repeating the words like a mantra.
Suddenly, his mind began to respond.
The walls of the cafeteria wavered, their texture melting like wet paint. A rift tore open in the air — a shimmering window to the outside world.
Ethen froze, staring through the opening. What he saw made his stomach twist.
He was inside a tank — submerged in thick, glowing liquid. Tubes were buried into his head and spine, wires coiling from his body into the monstrous frame of a machine.
"This… this machine," he gasped. "It's the one giving me all these nightmares, isn't it?"
"Yes," Damen's voice echoed beside him. "They are. Can you break free from it?"
Ethen shook his head, trembling. "I've tried. I can't… I can't completely break free. Only temporarily. This machine—it's powerful. Evil. Especially its core."
"The machine has a core?" Damen asked.
"Yes," Ethen said weakly. "That's why I can't escape. It keeps pulling me back into the loop…"
Before Damen could say more, the rift began to shrink, its edges folding in like burning paper. The glimpse of the outside world was vanishing.
"Damn it," Damen thought. "I can't depend on Ethen to get us out of this."
He turned his gaze toward the machine looming beyond the closing rift. Instinctively, the glyphs of his mining interface flickered in his mind — scanning, analyzing, identifying.
Name: Mind Core
Description: The central quantum processing unit of the neural network. Without the Core, system functionality is severely reduced.
A spark of determination lit Damen's eyes.
"So that's it…" he muttered. "We're not escaping the nightmare…"
He clenched his fist, energy crackling around him.
"…We're destroying it."
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