Nirva couldn’t understand what was happening.
I... was nervous?
It was the first time in his life he had ever felt this way.
He had faced countless strong opponents before, but never once had he felt truly overwhelmed.
The closest had been Ludger Cherish, yet even then, Nirva had not known fear.
If anything, it was like a human coming across a tiger in the mountains.
Not barehanded—armed, with at least a chance to fight.
But this was different.
It was like the sensation of hundreds of cockroaches crawling across his entire body at once.
As if every insect imaginable had been mashed together into one indescribable form.
He had always looked at humans and called them insects with disgust.
But this... this was beyond disgust.
And there was a reason.
As Apostle of Dreams, Nirva governed what people dreamed.
The imagination, the energy, the essence—all of it was tied to ordinary dreams.
But the being staring at him from within that darkness was the opposite.
It resembled dreams in nature, yet it was darker, danker, more suffocating.
Yes.
This was a nightmare.
Not just any nightmare. A nightmare I have never seen before—one mixed with countless grudges, hatred, and primal savagery.
Sedina and Julia also noticed that Nirva’s reaction was strange.
“Wh-what’s going on? Why did he suddenly stop attacking? More than that... doesn’t it feel colder?”
“That’s...”
Sedina’s gaze turned toward the pitch-black corridor Nirva had blown open.
From within, something writhed—something massive, filled with malice and icy hostility, just like before.
This is the same as when I escaped Sky Island with Senior Seridan. No... this time it’s even worse...
Back then, Sedina had been chased by a giant beast.
If that beast was what she thought it was, then what lurked beyond that darkness now was surely...
“S-Senior?”
She didn’t even finish the word.
Flash!
From within the darkness, two enormous crimson lights appeared.
Sedina and Julia realized it instantly.
The reason nothing was visible in the tunnel wasn’t because it was simply dark.
What they had thought was “darkness” was, in fact, fur—fur as black as midnight.
And that fur-covered being was glaring at Nirva, its eyes rolling white and red.
BOOM!
The massive hole Nirva had created—
From beyond it, an even larger black torrent burst out, swallowing him whole.
CRASH!
The surging wave hurled Nirva into the wall and slammed him against it.
The endless flood of black fur receded.
Srrrk.
As the dark mass slowly withdrew, Julia’s voice trembled.
“Was... was that a hand?”
Had something just swatted Nirva away—Nirva, that monster—with a mere flick of its hand?
Julia shivered like a leaf.
She understood now just how impossible the being behind that wall was.
But Sedina, who had more experience, didn’t freeze completely like Julia.
“Julia! While it’s distracted—run!”
With her small frame, she supported Julia, trying to get as far away as possible from the gaping corridor.
“If we don’t escape now, we’ll be caught in it!”
Her warning hadn’t even finished when—
KRAAASH!!!
The wall with its stairs, doors, and railings collapsed completely.
Debris and clouds of sand dust filled the air.
Through the falling rubble, a colossal beast’s silhouette glowed with crimson eyes.
Julia, running alongside Sedina, turned back and gasped.
The creature revealed itself, defying every limit of her understanding.
Thud.
As it stepped, the ground shook with its weight.
“Th-that... is that the Beast of Jévaudan?”
On a night of a blood-red full moon, it had reigned as a calamity upon an entire nation.
A cryptid remembered in history.
ROOOOAAAR──!!!
The living nightmare let out a bellow straight at the Apostle of Dreams.
“Impudent!”
A massive sand greatsword shot forth, skewering the beast’s chest.
Or so it seemed.
Crunch. Crunch.
Still standing as if nothing had happened, something writhed inside its torso.
They were heads.
Dozens of animal heads squirmed within, gnawing away at the sand blade until it crumbled.
“You brainless, witless beast! And you bare your fangs at me in my domain?!”
BOOM!
Nirva tore free of the rubble and charged straight at the Beast of Jévaudan.
The beast’s gaze never left Nirva.
Just as Nirva instinctively recognized the beast as his natural enemy, the beast too recognized Nirva as its predator.
Riding waves of golden sand, Nirva surged forward, his eyes glowing with fierce light.
The beast swung its massive arm, the air splitting with violent winds.
“It won’t work!”
The dream-sand tide was not so weak as to be scattered by mere wind.
It engulfed the beast up to its waist, binding fast.
The sand writhed, quickly coiling over its body.
“I’ll crush you to death here and now!”
Nirva’s voice seethed with malice.
The Beast of Jévaudan only raised its head.
AwooOOO!!!
Its main head and the heads on its shoulders all howled at once.
The strange vibration in its howl seeped into the dream-sand.
And then—
“What?!”
The sand that had been binding the beast lost cohesion and collapsed to the ground.
Nirva couldn’t believe it.
“A beast... unraveling divine authority?!”
The power of dream-sand was not some mere magic.
It was a divine gift, a mighty power granted to him by the Goddess herself.
There was no way a mere beast could break it apart with just a howl.
Nirva bit his lip.
His original plan had been to devour the wandering humans and safely regain his strength.
But that black beast had completely derailed everything.
To fight it, he would have to burn through all the power he had absorbed so far.
“These pests... every ◆ Nоvеlіgһt ◆ (Only on Nоvеlіgһt) last one of them.”
His irritation boiled into fury.
First it had been Ludger Cherish who interfered.
Because of him, Nirva had wasted much strength and had been forced to change his original plan.
Then came Zantman and Sedina, dragging out time.
Because of them, reinforcements had arrived, and he had endured humiliation by touching the offerings meant for the Goddess.
And when he had finally cast aside all dignity and was regaining power by devouring humans—
Now this beast, his absolute nemesis, appeared to ruin everything.
Interference.
Interference.
More interference!
Veins bulged across Nirva’s forehead.
“All of you do nothing but obstruct me!”
The sly, ever-smiling Apostle was gone.
What remained was a demon whose face twisted in rage and slaughterous malice.
“Fine then. Let’s see how far you’ll go in defying me!”
Nirva gathered dream-sand around himself, whipping it into a storm.
The Beast of Jévaudan inhaled deeply and unleashed another howl.
Nirva instantly summoned winds to create a vacuum, cutting off the sound.
But the beast’s howl wasn’t a mere sound carried through air.
The strange resonance within it shattered the storm of dream-sand anyway.
The worst possible matchup.
Yet Nirva did not see it as hopeless.
It can’t completely nullify my authority. If it could, even my prosthetic arm would’ve been destroyed by that howl.
The sand was shaken, yes, but the tightly condensed core had not lost control.
If brute force isn’t enough... then I’ll change my methods.
Nirva slammed both hands onto the ground.
Dream-sand gathered from all directions, reshaping into chains that wrapped around the beast’s body.
The Beast of Jévaudan thrashed, snapping chains one after another, but more formed faster than it could break them.
It opened its maw again.
And Nirva had been waiting for that.
“If you’re just a beast, then wear a muzzle!”
The massive prison of sand coiled tightly around the long snout of the beast of Jévaudan.
Its jaws were sealed shut in an instant, cutting off its howling.
This was the timing to bring it down.
But Nirva’s plan collapsed the moment the beast of Jévaudan revealed its next form.
Scrape. Scrape.
The chains of sand binding the monster began to unravel, one by one, falling away.
The countless beasts that made up its body had chewed through the shackles.
And the aberration did not stop there.
Awooooo!
One wolf’s head howled, and the other wolf heads followed in resonance.
Awoooooooo───!!!
The harmony of beasts that composed its whole body weakened the cohesion of dream-sand once again.
“They can pour out that bizarre wavelength through their entire body?”
The force was weaker than the original body, of course, but even that alone was enough to nullify most attacks.
Nirva’s expression hardened, icy past anger.
This was dangerous.
The monster could not defeat him, but neither could he find a decisive way to bring it down.
‘And maybe it’s just me, but...’
That beast of Jévaudan—it seemed smaller than before.
Its huge bulk looked slightly diminished, its bloated size slimmed down.
Rather than hope, Nirva felt unease.
Normally, when a creature shrank, it meant it had weakened.
‘But why does it feel like its power is being compressed instead?’
The thought refused to leave his mind, as if it were evolving in real time, transforming into some higher existence.
The more he tried to deny it, the more that unsettling suspicion gnawed at him.
“......Right. I can’t waste forever locked in battle with you.”
There was no need to push for a decisive fight.
He had already cast away pride long ago.
The beast of Jévaudan lowered itself and charged at Nirva.
The ground suddenly sank, pulling its body down.
Growl!
The beast kicked off with its hind legs, leaping high.
The spot it had just stood on collapsed downward like falling blocks.
“This place is a prison I created. I can’t alter the main structure, but I can give it little shifts like this.”
With a gesture, Nirva made the ground where the beast was about to land sink away again.
The beast twisted midair with animal reflexes, planting its paws on the side floor and launching upward once more.
Agility unmatched for its massive frame.
Nirva’s face stiffened.
“As I thought. It wasn’t my imagination.”
The beast was compressing in real time.
The countless animal heads sprouting from its body vanished, while the living heads on its shoulders closed their mouths and hardened like shoulder blades.
Arms that mixed beast and human gradually shifted toward human form.
It was changing—metamorphosing into something else.
Whatever the end of that transformation was, it was nothing good for him.
The beast twisted in midair, bounding off walls with three-dimensional movements.
Its smaller body made it swifter, sharper than before.
It closed the distance to Nirva in an instant, raising its arm.
But that arm never swung.
It instinctively realized the Nirva before it was a fake.
Its head turned wildly.
Its sniffing nose sought out the true Nirva’s scent.
“Sharp senses.”
The real Nirva emerged from the ceiling with falling sand.
At that moment, the dream-sand forming the decoy Nirva stabbed into the monster’s eyes.
Kruaaagh!
The reduction of heads became poison here.
Blinded even for an instant, the beast faltered.
In that brief gap, Nirva stripped away all the surrounding floor blocks.
The ground collapsed, dragging the beast down with it.
The beast’s eyes cleared and crimson light burst from them.
Flash!
It stomped falling blocks midair, using them as footholds to leap back upward.
One by one.
Like stepping stones, the beast of Jévaudan surged skyward, swiping its hand toward Nirva in the air.
─But its black-furred hand did not reach him.
The fate awaiting a monster whose final strike had missed was only one.
A plunge into endless darkness.
Uwoooooo───!!!!
Its last desperate roar burst out of the dark, echoing through the prison Nirva had built.
“Tch. Flailing in vain.”
Nirva restored the blocks to seal the gaping hole.
The beast would crash into the deepest pit of his prison.
With its vitality, it would not die from this.
But that did not matter. He had known he could not kill it—buying time was enough.
‘So, this is the second defeat.’
He had chosen flight rather than face it head-on.
Had he fought properly, in his current state, he would have lost.
“If only my strength were intact...”
Muttering, Nirva let out a bitter laugh despite himself.
“All these ifs and maybes. For me to have become this broken.”
He shook his head, casting off useless thoughts, recalling the beast’s final movement.
That last strike, the hand swung at him though it could not reach.
To most, it would seem like nothing more than the instinctive thrash of a beast.
But Nirva had seen it.
From its palm, something sharp, white as bone, had begun to protrude.
It seemed exaggerated to call it so, yet—
Its shape resembled a ‘sword.’
If their fight had lasted longer...
Just what form would that beast have evolved into?
“......Well. Whatever the case, I’ve driven the beast away. Now it’s time to hunt down the humans who ran.”
Nirva turned, following the vanished traces of Sedina and Julia.
Time had been delayed, but they could not have fled far.
* * *
Aidan and his companions entered a new space.
Seeing no one inside, they thought they had wasted their time and prepared to move to the next.
If not for the distant cry echoing, they would have.
Awooooooo.
The air trembled with the faint sound of a howl.
It was distant, but unmistakably a wolf’s call.
Seridan pricked up her ears, turning toward the direction of the sound.
“Hans?”
As confusion spread through the group—
Ludger’s little finger twitched as he lay in quiet sleep.
Twitch.