NEW! From the mind of someone who watches things like Fight! Iczer One, L.I.L.Y. Cat and Cyber City Oedo 808 while playing DOOM and reading too much cosmic horror, its:
Dreamscourge, or, I Held Her Hand as the Sky Split Open
When her girlfriend is lost to a biomechanical hellscape, a delinquent must wield dream-forged weapons born from their love to fight the horrors bleeding into our world, only to discover our reality is a fiction and their suffering is for an audience of one: a sleeping god.
In a quiet, rain-soaked suburb of District 23, sweethearts Ami (cheerful, secretly nihilistic former honours student) and Ren (stoic, sword-obsessed tomboy delinquent) share a tender morning routine, meeting at the crosswalk, exchanging lunches and whispering promises for the future. The banal realities, balancing work and life, the promise of a future together, seem like all there is, until one fateful day Ren watches in horror as a speeding kei truck blurs through the intersection and obliterates Ami, sending her body into a coma and her consciousness vanishing into the abyss.
She finds herself ripped into the nightmarish otherworld of Zin, a grotesquely beautiful science-fantasy hellscape where biomechanical demons and fractured kingdoms wage endless war beneath a bleeding neon sky. Awakening in a rugged, mountainous wasteland of graves, she sees a massive structure in the distance that dwarfs even the highest peaks, from which a light pierces upward into oblivion.
Around her, countless other figures are emerging from the graves to move toward the structure, some falter, others collapse, still more begin to join and move together, but all with singular purpose. Clustered in its shadow, the trappings of civilisation draw her and it is here that Ami learns that she is what the people there call “Graveborn”, warriors called forth from death and grafted to cybernetic witch-armour.
She, like the rest, has been called forth from the dark between the stars, those whose minds bridge worlds to forge weapons that will carve through the fiendish armies of Zin. The fate of all Graveborn lies within the Citadel of Ash, the nexus of life and death in the otherworld, and though it can be staved off for a time, all eventually heed the Call.
Wishing only to return to the Waking World, to be reunited with Ren and her friends, Ami must choose between lingering in the hell of Zin or bracing the trials of the citadel. She is not alone, however, for there are many in Zin who seek much the same and will help or hinder her as it suits them, new friends and allies, rivals and enemies, Graveborn all.
Meanwhile, Ren keeps vigil at her hospital bed, drowning in grief, unaware that the stars have come right until the horrors of Zin slowly seep through the veil between worlds, drawn by the link that now joins them. Ami’s comatose brain has begun to project fragments of the otherworld into Ren’s dreams: visions of cybernetic horrors, a dying cosmos and a mysterious warlord who speaks in riddles.
Worse, the psychic residue of Ami’s battles in Zin start bleeding into the Waking World, manifesting as shadowy entities that slither from the dark corners of the hospital room, clawing into reality through spectral rifts. The screams start as these demons begin to slaughter indiscriminately, warping reality wherever they touch; patients and nurses melt into grotesque hybrids of flesh and machine.
Confronted by Ibuki, an older woman who leads her through the chaos, Ren barely escapes with her life.
However, no one seems to notice and life continues just the same but, that night she dreams of Ami, not as a victim, but as a blood-drenched knight. She stands, unbowed, upon a mountain of corpses, fighting horrors beyond comprehension and, when she speaks, she says but one thing: "My dreams are your weapons.”
Armed with dream-forged arms (a chainsaw katana fuelled by Ami’s resolve, its teeth her laughter, guns loaded with her memories), Ren and their ragtag friend group (including Kuro, a nonbinary hacker, Ami’s transmasc ex, Taiga and Ibuki, an older, exorcist-gunslinger) must fight the hellish incursions. But Ren’s flesh begins to warp with every demon slain, her body mutated from absorbing otherworld energy, forcing them to grapple with a gender-shifting existential crisis, are they still human, or becoming a demon themselves?
Aiding the people of Zin through gruelling battles across that alien world, Ami learns the demons are cosmic antibodies purging "infected" realities as if from some empyrean ledger. Worse, she learns of the feedback between the worlds, that the stronger she grows in Zin (the witch-armour strengthened by Ren’s hatred, hardened by their despair), the more supernatural power bleeds into Ren, but so do the demons into the Waking World.
As Ami climbs the corpse-citadel at the centre of Zin and Ren fights a losing battle in District 23 now a demonic hunting ground, she finds at the top the truth of these struggles. Not merely antibodies, the demons are avatars of a dead but dreaming god-thing, the Waking World nothing but a fiction cobbled together from patchwork histories and misconceived cultures; simply entertainment.
Coming late this never, a biomech yuri apocalypse.
A love that bridges worlds becomes a weapon that shatters them. A girl fights as a cyber-knight in a hellish otherworld while her girlfriend battles the psychic fallout in their own, their bond mutating into the only force that can challenge a dead god's entertainment.
It’s a story about love as a cosmic wound, gender as voluntary annihilation and the question: Does humanity deserve to survive?
They promised each other the future. A dead god promised them a show. Now, their love is tearing the sky apart.
"I’ll tear heaven apart just to dream with you.”
