A Little Surprise

Su Tianqing had never imagined that the main battle tank from the Golden Heist would end up in the Mindscape.

Back then, to escape the heist scene at full speed, she had overloaded its engine with magic. Half an hour of nonstop speeding had wrecked the engine from overstrain, and after abandoning it, she had left it blocking an expressway exit to stop the pursuers. It seemed the Hero Association had later recovered and repaired it.

"So where exactly did you find this? Didn't I leave it at an expressway exit?"

The golden-furred fox girl sat in the commander's seat, looking at the familiar Fox Fox-customized thermal imaging and control interface before speaking to Hyacinth, who was checking ammunition at the gunner's position.

"Hmm?... Oh, you mean the tank."

Hyacinth, wearing a tanker's cap, turned around. She did not understand at first, only answering after a few seconds.

She pointed toward the rear of the tank and recounted everything that had just happened.

A sudden drowsiness at lunch, a brief nap with her head on the table, then accidentally falling into that familiar dense-fog illusion in a lucid dream—the whole process had been so familiar. Yet Hyacinth then mentioned something that puzzled both Heartmoon Fox and Scarlet Snow:

"When I fell into the Phantasm Dream, I had a strange feeling. It was like... umm... it's hard to describe. Let me think..."

Hyacinth raised a hand and gestured a few times, trying to grasp that intangible feeling and put it into words.

"How should I put it... Right! It was like getting called on by the teacher while you were secretly playing on your phone in class. Your whole body gets prickly, and the pressure is absolutely crushing."

"That's actually a pretty fitting description. You must've gotten caught playing on your