Back at the lockers, Reiko had just opened the locker that James had looked at, only to realize upon opening it that another locked door was all that was inside. "Damn it," she muttered. "I gotta do this again? Are you kidding me with this shit?"
Tokuhei remarked, "There's another smaller locker inside this one, huh? Seems like a good place to hide something."
Reiko sighed and said, "Hang on, let me open this other one." She then began to carefully pick the lock of the second locker.
As she did, they both heard faint gunshots from the ticket hall. Tokuhei told Reiko in a worried tone of voice, "Hey, uh, you might wanna hurry up!"
"I know! I heard them, too!" Reiko then continued working on the lock, worried that the team had been found out. Finally, after one last attempt, she got the lock open. "Aha! Here we go!" She flung open the door and pulled out a small folder. Upon opening the folder, she found exactly what they were looking for. "I got it! These are the instructions for the Winchester rifle!" She then folded it up and placed it under her clothes.
"Perfect," Tokuhei replied. "Let's get the Hell outta here."
Before they could leave, however, both of them were confronted by two men armed with guns. One of the men commanded them with a loud voice, "Drop the plans now! Drop them or we shoot!"
"Shit," Reiko replied as she quickly pulled her own gun. She then shot both of the men before they could shoot at her. One of the men, injured by Reiko's gunfire, tried to shoot Tokuhei, but Reiko shot him again, causing him to instead fire into the ceiling and miss. "We gotta go now!"
Tokuhei and Reiko raced out to the platforms as they saw many of the projections begin to turn their heads at them and look in disgust. This made both of them realize that they had managed to get James' dream to turn against them. Tokuhei thought to himself, "Fuck, they're all looking at us. That means we attracted too much attention!"
As they ran out onto the platform, three men armed with rifles stepped off of a train that had just pulled up and looked at both of them. Reiko said to Tokuhei, "I got three bullets left! How about you?!"
"I still got all six," he replied. "I'll shoot. You reload."
One of the three men shouted at the two of them, "There's the intruders!"
Tokuhei immediately opened fire on them, but both he and Reiko were forced to take cover behind another train and fire from around a corner. Once Reiko reloaded her revolver, she joined in on the firefight as well as the other unarmed projections all scattered and ran away in a panic. Tokuhei told Reiko as he fired a sixth shot, "I'm all out!"
"I still got half!" Reiko then fired her last three shots and killed one of the men. "I'm out! We still got two of them to deal with!"
"I haven't finished reloading," Tokuhei told Reiko as the two other men with rifles charged forward to confront them. However, before they could reach, both were taken down by four well-placed shots to the abdomen from behind Tokuhei and Reiko. "What the fuck?! Where did those shots come from?!"
"Right here," James replied as he ran up to them. "I figured I'd help y'all out. The armed projections I got can be a little intense."
"Wait," Reiko then asked him. "Does that mean we failed?"
"Failed? That depends on if the other half of your team found the plans."
"Oh, uh," Reiko then said, wanting to make sure James did not find out that she had the plans and doing her hardest to not look at where she had stored the folder in her clothes. "I don't know. We haven't talked to them since we split up. We don't know where the Hell they are." She thought to herself, "Fuck, I hope he doesn't find out I have the plans."
"Alright," James replied, seemingly suspecting nothing. "I'll go look for the others."
Tokuhei then asked him, "Will your projections attack you?"
"No," James shook his head. "They'll go outta their way to not attack me, even if I'm near y'all."
As James ran off, Tokuhei told Reiko, "That was way too close. Holy fuck, way, way too close!"
"I know, right?" The two then shared a short laugh before Tokuhei and Reiko fully reloaded their revolvers and ran in a different direction. "Let's just hope he doesn't find out!"
…
In the ticket hall, Susamaru checked a pocket watch she carried as she and Senjuro ran out to the platforms. She then turned around and told him, "We got another hour and twenty-five minutes to go before we can wake up! We gotta survive either that long or until you can confirm that you got the plans!"
"An hour and a half?" Senjuro then checked how many bullets he had. "I don't have enough bullets for that!"
"Then you better find another way to fight," Susamaru told him as they passed a board showing the schedules of trains. "The armed projections are just gonna keep coming!"
"What's the Kick Event going to be anyway?!"
"James planted explosives all around the station that are timed for when the two hours are up," Susamaru explained as they ran past several station attendants and cargo porters. "He planted enough to bring the whole thing down!"
"The whole thing?!"
"That's what I just said! The whole God damn thing!" Susamaru then saw several armed men with rifles walk out of a different train from the one that Tokuhei and Reiko saw, looking around for their targets. She sighed and told Senjuro as she took off her haori, "Stay back. I got this." She then summoned her two extra arms and four handballs. "Hey assholes! Over here!"
The four armed men looked over at Susamaru and aimed their rifles at them, but before they had the chance to fire, she threw all four handballs at them. All four hit their targets, and hit their heads so fast that they completely blew them off and turned them into a reddish pink mist and a massive blood spatter on the train car and ground as if the handballs were in fact cannonballs. All four handballs were only stopped after going through several more people behind the armed men and into a wall, where they made a loud boom upon impact. Senjuro remarked in shock, "Wow… You took their heads right off!"
"Take a rifle from them!" Susamaru and Senjuro then ran past the throng of projections that ran from the carnage, with each of them grabbing a rifle and checking it to see if it was loaded. Susamaru also used her two free hands to form two more handballs just in case, using her two regular hands to hold her new rifle.
Senjuro then shouted, "The crowd's coming back at us, and they look pissed off!"
"Shit," she remarked as she readied her rifle. "We managed to turn all of my fiancé's projections against us!" She then threw her two handballs at the angry and riotous crowd, taking out several people immediately as the rest of them began ripping up objects in their way and trying to use them as makeshift weapons. As she pulled the trigger of her rifle and opened fire on the crowd, she told Senjuro, "Stop standing there! Fight!"
Senjuro then took a deep breath and began firing into the crowd with the rifle, doing as told and ignoring his underlying feelings about killing. He had to keep reminding himself that this was just a dream, and that none of the people he killed were real. He silently told himself, "They're not real. Calm down. They are not real…"
The two battled back the angry crowd, taking down many of the projections as they tried to charge at the two of them. Once Susamaru fired her tenth shot and ran out of ammunition, she threw her rifle down and formed four more handballs. "This'll take care of them!" She threw all four into the crowd, taking out over twenty people at once and spilling their blood and body parts all over the hall before each of the balls hit the wall all the way on the other side and stopped with four loud thuds.
Both of them then heard a voice call out from the sidelines, "Holy fucking shit!" As they looked over, they saw Reiko and Tokuhei run over to them, with a shocked Reiko asking Susamaru, "Did you do that?!"
"Yeah," she replied. "Did you get the plans?"
"Yep," Reiko affirmed as she pulled out the folder from her clothes. "I got them right here."
"Congratulations," said James as they all then turned towards him. As he walked past the scores of dead bodies from the battle and the few remaining projections running for their lives, he told the group, "Looks like y'all found the plans. By the way, whatever happened to that Tsuyoshi kid?"
"He got hurt pretty bad," Susamaru replied. "So he shot himself to get out of the dream."
James told the rest of the group, "Hey, listen, it happens. It ain't gonna hurt you in the real world or out y'all in any danger unless you're in a really complex dream with multiple layers."
"So with all that out of the way," Tokuhei then asked James. "How do we get out of here?"
"Easy," James replied as he readied the fingers in his right hand. "With a snap of my fingers, this whole damn train station's gonna blow." Indeed, as soon as he snapped his fingers, every explosive he planted inside the train station went off at once, deafening everyone as the building came crashing down on them. It took less than half a minute for all of them to be killed in the dream as the train station, and subsequently the dream itself, completely and totally collapsed.
As soon as everyone woke up, Tsuyoshi, who had woken up a little earlier due to having committed suicide in the dream, asked the group, "Did you guys find the plans?"
"They sure did," James commended them. "Not bad for your first try. We'll do this again another time, and when we do, I'll up the stakes a bit. While I doubt the guy we're gonna go after is experienced with dream infiltration, ya never truly know until you get inside his head."
As everyone split up and began talking among themselves, Susamaru put a hand on James' shoulder and asked him, "Hey, dear, can I talk to you for a minute?"
"About what?"
She then whispered to him, "It's about Senjuro. I'm concerned for him."
