  With the explicit breaking of scale invariance by the trace anomaly of QCD
rephrased in terms of spontaneous breaking, low-energy strong interaction
dynamics of dense (and also hot) matter can be effectively captured by -- in
addition to the Nambu-Goldstone bosons and the vector mesons -- two dilaton
fields, the "soft" ($\chi_s$) field that is locked to chiral symmetry and the
"hard" ($\chi_h$) field which remains unaffected by chiral symmetry. The
interplay of the soft and hard dilatons plays a subtle role in how chiral
symmetry is manifested in hot and/or dense matter. The scale anomaly in which
the soft component intervenes vanishes at the chiral transition in a way
analogous to the restoration of scale symmetry in the Freund-Nambu model, while
that of the hard component remains broken throughout the QCD sector. Most
remarkable of all is its role in the chiral anomaly sector through a
"homogeneous Wess-Zumino (hWZ) term" of the form $\omega_\mu B^\mu$ on the
structure of a single baryon as well as dense baryonic matter. It figures
crucially in predicting a "Little Bag" for the nucleon and a "quarkyonic phase"
in the form of a half-skyrmion matter at high density. We show how the
vanishing of the vector-meson mass at the vector manifestation fixed point in
hidden local symmetry theory can be related to the property of the "matter
field" in the Freund-Nambu model that leaves scale symmetry invariant. The
emerging structure of dense hadronic matter in the model so constructed
suggests what could be amiss in describing dense matter in holographic dual QCD
at its large $N_c$ and 't Hooft limit.
