That dreadful, foul-smelling mist had returned to her dream. It had no purpose, no direction, and no way of communicating—merely crawling forward day after day, slowly devouring the frenzied monsters that emerged from her dreams. Still, for reasons she couldn't explain, the thought of it consuming the dream-forms of her mother and father made her heart race with excitement. Of course, she had never considered that her real parents' souls had long since been devoured by that cowardly demon.
Ah yes, that cowardly demon—before the cultists threw her and her house into this fog-shrouded city, it had fled in fear. How pathetic.
Perhaps it had been frightened off by the god behind the cultists?
She swept her gaze across the room using the countless eyeballs scattered throughout the corridors, again and again, but saw no intruders. Her palms clenched and relaxed repeatedly—those two invaders had vanished once more, and along with them, the little girl she had intended to use as a backup vessel.
That was not good news.
Viola was important. Extremely important—that little girl's body had excellent magical potential; she could see it clearly.
There were still two weeks until the gate to the real world would open. She had already pinpointed where it would appear—an entrance that would directly connect to reality. The only problem was, this body couldn't leave the room. Why? Because she was the master of the house, the one chosen by the Moon Goddess… though she would much rather not have been chosen. That so-called honor was the reason the cultists had thrown her into the city, making her one of the dream-sources bound and caged here.
This room was a prison, and unless she was willing to give up this body—along with her magic—there was no way out.
—But really, what was so hard about giving it up?
She had never received a proper magical education, had never even left this house. All her knowledge came from that cowardly demon who had once been scared away by the Moon Goddess—or by the one who truly controlled this dream-city. And after being thrown into this place, she couldn't even leave this room.
If she weren't trapped in this so-called City of Torment, she would've already taken the girl's body and left.
But now… what, switch into that girl's body just to step out and die? Please, this wasn't the real world.
Just two more weeks. In just two more weeks, she could swap bodies and flee to reality. And yet, at this critical moment, that one-legged bird of hers had brought in two sorcerers!?
And worse still—they were a nauseating pair, like her father and mother... So where were they now?
Then, as if in response to her question, she heard a sharp scraping sound.
The door suddenly swung open, revealing a hollow blackness behind it, like a pillar of pure darkness.
And behind that door was the world born of her own dreams.
The door had opened?
She thought for a moment—who could've opened it...
By the Breath of Hood—it was those two sorcerers!
Then she heard a whisper even more vile than the creations of her dreams...
A power foreign to this world coiled around her like the tentacles of a colossal octopus. The bed, the floor, the blankets—all began to twist and writhe as if being wrung out like a wet rag. The air itself seemed to tear apart.
She raised her right hand, emitting a deep sound pulsing with a droning rhythm. The black mist spilling from her body writhed and spread, struggling to tear apart the unseen bindings—
At that moment, a transparent longsword pierced her eye socket. Pus burst forth, blood splattering onto an invisible figure. Thick smoke poured from her eye, igniting and blackening, spewing out with hundreds of ear-piercing screams that nearly drowned out the whispering voices...
That purple-haired girl—or rather, as seen through spiritual vision, a monster stuffed with gray-black necrotic spirits beneath her skin—was recklessly manipulating the black mist overflowing from within her.
The inquisitor's enchanted sword strike had turned her into a blind beast. The black mist churned like mad, condensing, spreading, and condensing again. It tore down walls, crushed furniture, and ripped the ceiling apart as if the room were nothing but a pile of sand.
The door shattered, and a black canvas-like fog devoured the tiny room, draining all color from within.
Masses of uncontrolled black creatures hurled by the black sorcerer—the Children of the Unseen—mutated within the encroaching mist.
They flowed over the fog like liquid, and in an instant—those once unremarkable black, bloated, toad-like creatures—twisted into black demons with nearly a hundred shrunken, whip-like limbs, each close to ten meters long: seven in total. With a deafening roar, their countless tendrils lashed at the purple-haired entity and the inquisitor standing beside her.
The wind slammed into Jeanne's protective shield like a hammer striking stone, tugging at her skin and causing the muscles in her face to ache from the shock. The hissing and howling filled her head; the thick fog and the endlessly whipping black tendrils made her feel as if she had fallen into the nest of some vast, shadowy invertebrate.
The black sorcerer's concealment spell wasn't of a particularly high level, and it quickly failed in the chaos of battle. Still, at least it gave him a strong opening—in absolute silence and invisibility—that gaping wound in her eye said it all.
An untrained spellcaster, lacking formal magical education, naturally wouldn't possess the means to counter specific spells.
Struggling to stay conscious, Jeanne tried to find openings in the chaotic battlefield—still wondering why the black sorcerer had asked her to destroy the necrotic spirits near the creature's eyes.
The ever-morphing, tar-like monstrosities continued to tear through the mist, unleashing blasts of violent wind. Their tendrils cracked the ground like tenfold-sized whips, ripping up the black-fog-covered plain. Broken floorboards were drawn into the fog and shredded like flying dust. The things Sather had summoned constantly shifted shape—at times compressing into a single massive boulder to hurl at the enemy, only to be swallowed and shredded by thick fog, then swiftly reassembled.
The intense impacts turned the ground into a buckling deck; shattered walls roared as they flew into the air like weightless pages.
Another black whip lashed against Jeanne's shield, the grating impact sending a wave of pain echoing through her skull. Cursing, she turned and ran.
Good—those necrotic spirits lingering near her soul that were prone to interference had mostly been burned away by Jeanne's earlier strike.
Using spiritual vision, Sather located another opening and chanted a spell directed at the hollow eye socket beneath that flying purple hair. An invisible ripple passed silently through the fog, straight into her eye. There was no physical damage, no burning of the soul—yet she let out a shrill, soul-rending scream—as if fear itself had erupted within her spirit. That was the usual reaction for first-time victims of the Infusion of Fear spell.
At the same time, a tendril from one of the Children of the Unseen pierced the near-uncontrolled black mist and lashed her body, sending it flying like a sheet of paper into the pitch-black sky—only to be snapped back, as if caught by an unseen force.
—The binding of a god.
—A screeching, ear-splitting pressure.
The black mist began surging against everything within dozens of meters, compressing the invading Children of the Unseen into droplets of viscous fluid. The very matter composing this world began to shatter, as though grains of wheat thrown into a mill, scattered wildly in the hurricane—like a lover's clothing torn away. Everything in this space was responding to the purple-haired girl's command.
An untrained wild mage—or a so-called "born witch," one of those laughable types—they were always this foolish.
Sather stood expressionless in the distance and launched another Infusion of Fear.