Chapter Text
The tower had eleven backup generators, four independent security grids, and a ward line of seventeen S-rank heroes stationed in the lobby alone. Every one of those numbers had been printed in a public safety briefing at some point, because the Commission liked reminding the country of how safe it was.
All that promised “safety” meant nothing by 9:07PM cause Nightmare decided to waltz in at 9:04.
He came in like a regular dude: no announcement, no explosion (yet), no dramatic speech. The automatic doors slid open like they would for anyone, and he walked through them like he worked there; normal pace, hood up, mask on, and a lighter sitting in his jacket pocket where it had been sitting for three days while he’d been dreaming of this moment. In fact, he looked so normal, he wasn’t even granted a glance.
Until the axe.
A large, tall netherite axe—taller than Nightmare himself—floated a foot off the ground on strings nobody in that lobby could see, trailing him through the doors like a dog on a leash. The thing looked like it needed both hands and a running start to even lift off the ground, yet it hung there patiently at his shoulder the whole walk in, waiting for him to want it.
The first hero to see any of it—a rookie named Castellan, four months on the job—opened his mouth to call it in and found that his jaw wouldn’t move.
The first thing that clicked in every single mind in the lobby was that their body wasn’t listening. The second was that this random Tuesday could actually be their last day alive.
Nightmare took another step and seventeen S-rank heroes went down in ninety seconds. Weapons hit the floor—not thrown, not knocked away, but released, fingers relaxing the way they do when sleep first comes. Farrow, ranked fourth in the country, felt her knees fold under her and watched the marble floor come up to meet her face while every party of her screamed at her legs to catch her weight. They didn’t. She went down soft and slow, like something being laid to rest.
Her senses were muffled, until the tell-tale sound of footsteps getting closer. Her head, which hadn’t moved since the second she saw Nightmare, suddenly shot up at an unnatural speed, her neck stretched at an uncomfortable angle. Nightmare knelt right in front of her, and suddenly, she saw.
She saw his green eyes through that unsettling white mask, she saw the strings, originating from his fingers, stretched around the room like a crime board, and she saw his eyes harden.
She also saw that horrifying axe, blade facing her, fly at her face.
The number four hero, who facilitated countless villains being detained, died without a single cry.
Nobody screamed. Screaming takes air, a working throat, some sliver of the body willing to listen. Most of them could only breathe, fast and shallow, pulses slamming in their ears, kneeling on the floor like furniture while Nightmare got up and walked past them toward the stairwell.
He didn’t take the elevator. The elevator was fast, quiet, and easy. He didn’t want fast, quiet, and easy. He wanted to cause pain.
Floor two went the same as the lobby. Floor five was worse, because floor five was where the elite response team had been running live drills all week preparing for this exact scenario, and not a single of those drills mattered. They’d got into position around him—eleven of them, a ring, weapons up, textbook definition of practice—and none of it mattered, because Nightmare didn’t let it matter. He let the axe go.
The axe flew in a full spinning arc across the width of the room, and where a normal thrown axe would need to be caught or dodged or reset, this one simply kept going. Two strings pulled it short mid-flight, hauled it around in a tight, impossible turn, and sent it through the formation a second time from the opposite direction before anyone had finished flinching from the first pass. It caught a shield-bearer across the chest plate hard enough to punt him through a support pillar. It sliced the head off of someone unlucky enough to take a slight step back. It cut another’s arm, another’s leg, and by the time it looped around a third time and rested back at Nightmare’s shoulder, the formation wasn’t a formation anymore. He hadn’t thrown a single punch, barely moved a single finger, and the heroes were dismantled. He snapped his fingers once, almost as an afterthought, and the rest of them—the one’s still alive—dropped, strings tightening at their throat until they couldn’t breathe; until they couldn’t see; until they couldn’t think; until their heart eventually stuttered out.
Floor five is also where he lit the first fire.
Not a big one, but damaging. A supply closet, half a can of lighter fluid he’d carried with him, a flick of the wheel, and the whole east corridor filled with smoke inside ninety seconds, sprinklers screaming, alarms flaring, and the uncanny smell of burning human flesh encapsulating the floor. He stepped over Denholm—third-ranked hero in the country, dead before he hit the ground, never got a hand up, the blade of the axe having done that on the way past without Nightmare so much as breaking stride—and kept walking, boots crunching over broken glass from a case of commendation trophies the axe had gone through on a lazy backswing, not because it mattered, but because it was there and he felt like it.
By floor seven, something in his chest that had been coiled cold since that morning started to come loose, and it didn’t feel like rage. It felt like a strange mix between relief and…boredom. Every hallway in this building had been designed by people who’d spent his whole childhood deciding, in meetings he was never invited, what he was allowed to become.
Every badge reader on every door existed to keep people like him categorized, useful, controlled. He’d grown up in rooms exactly like these. He’d bled in rooms exactly like these. He fought, he killed, he cried, he’d even almost died.
So when he sent the axe ahead of him into the reinforced door of the seventh-floor command center—no windup, no running start, just a thought and a pull, the whole slab of steel crossing the hallway too fast to track and burying itself through the door like it was drywall—some ugly, seventeen-year-old part of him (because that was what he was underneath everything, no matter his unbelievable anger, no matter how many buildings he torn apart brick by brick) thought exactly one word: good.
But that part of Nightmare continued, it raged, it became…corrupted. He wanted the controllers to feel more pain, more fear, more sadness, develop anxiety, develop uncontrollable habits, develop anger. They deserved more because they took his control. They took his power, they took his sister, they took his everything.
But then he remembered: a promise—no matter how unserious the tone was in the moment—was made, and this had to be Nightmare’s last run. His last appearance. His last chance.
So Nightmare kept walking, kept calm, kept focused, because after tonight, Nightmare could never walk again.
On floor eight, three of the command center's ranking officers went for their weapons the second the door came down. Two of them got a shot off. Neither shot landed—Dominion had already found their trigger fingers and locked them mid-squeeze before either bullet left the chamber, and both guns simply stopped working completely. The third officer didn't reach for anything. He put his hands up instead, slow, and said something that might have been a name, might have been a plea, and never finished the sentence. Nightmare pulled the axe back out of the doorframe with a snap of his wrist, let it swing once through the air on its way back to him, and the officer—split in half—went down and stayed down.
It was the same feeling as every kid who'd ever sat through a bad year somewhere fantasizing about the building itself just not existing anymore. Not the people, not most of them—but tonight wasn't most nights, and by the time he reached the ninth floor he'd stopped pretending it was.
The ninth floor was where the top ten lived on the org chart, in the literal sense—corner offices, private conference rooms, glass walls looking out over the city like the view was something they'd earned. He walked the length of it with the lighter still in his hand, flicking it open and shut, open and shut, an idle habit that had nothing to do with function and everything to do with how much he liked the sound.
Ashworth, ranked ninth, tried to run for the stairwell and made it four steps before Dominion locked both his ankles mid-stride and put him face-first into the carpet, and by the time he tried to push himself back up, the axe was already there, planted an inch from his hand, close enough that he understood his life would end here before his vision went black. Marrow, ranked sixth, had time to get a barrier up—one of the strongest defensive powers in the country, a wall of solid light that had stopped artillery, lasers, even bomb impacts in field tests—and Nightmare let the axe go.
However, the axe simply bounced off the barrier, leaving not even a scratch. Marrow shakily smiled, feeling brief moments of relief; of hope.
Her hope shook when she saw Nightmare tilt his head. Her hope stumbled when neon green strings became visible in his hand and wrapped around her barrier. Her hope died as the strings tightened and tightened until her barrier burst into shards.
She fell to her knees. Nightmare swung his axe again. Her head hit the ground before the rest of her body.
By the time he reached the office at the end of the hall—third-ranked, a woman named Corvid who had been on every recruitment poster the Commission had printed in the last five years, the same tired, practiced smile every single time—there were four bodies behind him that weren't getting up again that night, and a fifth who wouldn't survive the ambulance ride, and he still hadn't raised his voice once.
Corvid didn't run. She stood behind her desk with her hands flat on the surface, breathing hard, and said, "You don't have to do this," in the exact same voice she used in interviews, calm and rehearsed and completely useless. Nightmare looked at her for a long moment, long enough that she must have thought, for half a second, that it was working.
It wasn't.
His strings around her tightened, almost to the point she couldn’t breathe. He set the corner of her office on fire on his way out. She didn't get out of the chair.
Halo, seventh-ranked, was the last one he really spoke to that night, on floor nine, kneeling with both hands locked at his sides same as everyone else, watching Nightmare cross the room toward him. He crouched down to his eye level—not out of mercy, just so he wouldn't have to look down at him while Halo couldn't move—and Halo got a few words out before his jaw locked the rest of the way shut.
"Who caused this? Who hur—"
He didn't answer. He stood back up, and Halcyon was one of the lucky ones, because he simply walked past her toward the stairwell, and didn't look back, didn’t kill him, and Halo spent the rest of her life wondering what the answer could possibly be.
The archive was four floors below ground, behind a door with nine separate locks that needed biometric clearance from council members who mostly didn't work there anymore. Dominion opened it the way it opened everything else—not violently, just completely, like the locks had simply stopped believing they were locks. Inside were two decades of files nobody outside a nine-person clearance list had ever read: black-budget programs, internal investigations that had gone nowhere, a training initiative from twenty-two years ago that had produced exactly one asset before being quietly shut down and buried, along with every record of who had run it, and how, and on whom.
He stood in the doorway for a long moment without moving. Then he took the lighter back out of his pocket, and this time he didn't flick it shut.
The archive burned for eleven minutes before the suppression system finally caught up to it, and by then there was nothing left in that room that could ever be cited in a courtroom, or referenced in a report, or shown to a single living person again.
Twenty years of paperwork documenting exactly what had been done, and to whom, and under whose signature, went to ash on a basement floor.
Every paper that connected Dream to the Commission was gone.
He walked out past the smoke, past the last of the bodies on the floors he'd already cleared past the same front doors he'd walked in through. By the time real backup arrived—some names people actually recognized, the kind who might genuinely have stood a chance in a fair fight if any fight with him had ever once been fair—he was three streets away with his hood down and his mask in his jacket pocket, walking like someone heading home from a long shift.
Which, in a way, he was.
The official statement released the next morning confirmed eighteen fatalities, dozens more critical injuries, and extensive structural damage to the headquarters building. Of the ten highest-ranked heroes in the country, nine never got back up. Halo was the only one who walked out of that tower alive. The statement called the attack devastating and unprovoked, praised the courage of the responding officers, and claimed no material had been compromised—a lie so complete that even the people writing it didn't yet understand how big a lie it was going to turn out to be.
A year passed the way years pass after something enormous—quietly, and then all at once, and then quietly again. No sightings. No further incidents. No Dominion signature humming through a single Commission sensor in the dead of night. Task forces were folded. Budgets were reallocated. The country, in the specific and forgetful way countries do, began to relax.
None of them guessed the actual person, because the actual culprit didn't fit any shape they knew how to look for, and the last place on earth any of them would have thought to check was a flower-and-coffee shop two towns over from the tower's freshly repaired façade, where a young man in a green apron was crouched on the sidewalk out front, humming badly off-key to a song coming from somewhere behind the counter, repotting a hanging basket of petunias that had clearly seen better days, entirely unbothered by the fact that the bell above the door hadn't rung in almost twenty minutes and he still hadn't once stopped smiling.