Within the vast and towering main chapel of the Hymn Cathedral, a battle of sanctity versus desecration continued. Under the holy light wielded by the nun, the savage black beast had reached its end.
As the spear of light pierced Duval’s heart and continued evaporating his body, the direwolf—already ravaged and depleted from the earlier battle—finally exhausted its strength and reached the end of its life. When the Sunlight Spear in the nun’s hand carved through his body, Duval’s enormous and ruined form collapsed to its knees and, powerless, began to fall forward.
“We’ve won!”
Seeing the creature collapse, Vania couldn’t help but feel a rush of joy in her heart. Yet, what she didn’t expect was that in the very next second, the corpse—supposedly dead—would undergo a sudden change.
“Watch out! He’s not dead yet!”
At that moment, Dorothy’s voice suddenly rang out in Vania’s mind. Hearing her warning, Vania’s heart went on high alert. Through her Insight, she saw one of the fallen direwolf’s mutilated arms lurch toward her.
Vania leapt backward just in time to dodge the blow. After the arm missed, the massive body—still falling forward—planted its severed arm stumps against the ground. With a sickening squelch, new fur-less wolf claws sprouted from the bloody ends and propped the beast upright once again. Witnessing this, Vania’s eyes widened in shock.
“This thing… it can still move?!”
Staggered, Vania immediately swung her long spear of light again, slashing at the seemingly reanimated wolf corpse. But the hulking body leapt backward, dodging the attack and putting distance between them.
What happened next shocked Vania even more: the evaporated flesh on the wolf’s body began rapidly regenerating. Whether it was the pierced heart or the shredded heads, all began regrowing—raw, exposed, and skinless.
Within the cavity of its chest, blood vessels and muscle tissue surged inward, reforming a grotesquely large heart—bigger than two or three footballs—throbbing like a drum in plain view. On the right wolf head, only the lower skull had remained, but now a new brain was growing atop it, along with fresh flesh, an upper jaw, and gleaming fangs. Meanwhile, the entire body grew thin and emaciated, its sturdy muscles seemingly redirected to restore the most critical organs.
“ROAAAR!!!”
With no fur and its brain and flesh exposed, the lone remaining head of the direwolf opened its maw and unleashed a horrifying, fearsome roar. The powerful shockwave howled forth, whipping Vania’s robes with wind. The stained-glass windows, depicting countless mosaic religious scenes, shattered from the blast, showering the cathedral in sparkling fragments.
This terrifying roar surpassed even the Fear Howl it had used previously. Caught at such close range, Vania’s mind wavered for a moment, despite being under the protection of the Hymn Cathedral’s divine focus.
Sensing this, Dorothy immediately shared the effect of her Black Moon Talisman—its resistance against the Shadow path’s influence—with Vania, allowing her to endure the intensified roar at such close range.
Return-Death Berserk—this was the Dread Devourer Direwolf’s final ability. It triggered the moment the main body passed from near-death into true death. This power forcibly reactivated its dying body by converting every last trace of unused spirituality into a highly potent stimulant, rapidly healing its most vital injuries.
Under the influence of this stimulant—similar to a mystical adrenaline surge—the direwolf’s body grew thin and feral. Its injuries healed just enough to allow it to move again. Its overall physical stats surged by half a rank, nearing Gold-rank levels. However, in return, it lost all reason, becoming a monster driven purely by hunger and rage, capable only of killing and devouring until it had gorged itself enough to reclaim a shred of rationality.
The more severely wounded and tormented the beast became, the more its primal instincts overwhelmed it. Entering a near-death state vaporized its reasoning completely, triggering a full berserk transformation—Duval's current condition.
Now berserk, the direwolf locked its savage crimson eyes on the nearest living being: Vania.
At once, Vania felt a sense of danger she had never before experienced. Her Insight told her she was going to die.
The Insight, which could pierce through and even foresee enemy actions in battle, would normally allow her to preemptively parry, dodge, or counterattack. But this time, every single predictive outcome her Insight offered ended in her death. No parry or dodge would help. In the wolf’s next strike, she had no chance of surviving.
This was the result of absolute disparity in physical prowess. The berserk wolf’s speed and strength now exceeded every limit Vania could contend with. No matter her technique or insight, they were meaningless against such overwhelming stats. Though her body had been strengthened multiple times, it still couldn't move fast enough to follow the Insight’s instructions.
Before even a second ticked by on the clock, the rampaging direwolf launched itself. With a stomp that cracked the stone floor, it transformed into a black blur as it pounced at Vania. At the same time, another shadow darted out from the side, aiming to intercept the beast.
Sensing the ambush with its enhanced instincts, the wolf swung its claw in a flash and struck the approaching black figure mid-air. In an instant, the Anecdotal Night Demon was shredded, dissolving into a dark red mist.
However, at that very moment, a spiritual thread extended from the Night Demon to the wolf’s body. Through it, Dorothy poured vast amounts of Revelation spirituality into the wolf, attempting to control its rampage—and along with that, delivered an electric shock.
The combined effects of spiritual thread control, the shock, and the Night Demon’s distraction would have held the direwolf for several seconds. But in its berserk state, the direwolf’s physical power was so elevated that all this merely slowed it by less than a second.
But that moment… that sliver of time was enough. Vania’s Insight now revealed a new possibility.
Following this path… she would still die—but that death would be different from any other. It would bring a distinct outcome.
Wearing a grave expression, Vania did not flee. As the berserk wolf broke free of its brief restraint and lunged, she charged forward instead, raising the Sunlight Spear to strike.
The wolf’s massive claw came down. Vania evaded most of it with footwork, but even the edge of its little finger scraped her—yet that glancing blow alone obliterated her left abdomen and chest. A third of her torso vanished instantly under the immense force. And even then, Vania did not stop. She pressed forward, driving the Sunlight Spear ahead.
“Receive… the Lord’s judgment!”
In the end, Vania’s spear once again pierced the wolf’s heart. That enormous, exposed, drum-like organ—devoid of skin and bone—was instantly vaporized by the divine weapon.
In its Return-Death Berserk state, the Dread Devourer Direwolf had essentially run out of spirituality—it was merely running on borrowed time. In this state, if the wolf couldn’t consume anything, it would be unable to heal—let alone recover from fatal wounds. And since entering berserk mode, the direwolf had not eaten a single thing.
Thus, when its heart was pierced once more, its entire body lost vitality again. The crimson madness faded from its eyes, and its massive form tilted and collapsed heavily to the ground, finally succumbing to death.
On the other side, Vania—having just slain the direwolf again—also coughed up a mouthful of blood. The Sunlight Spear in her hands rapidly dissipated, and her blood-stained white form fell powerless to the ground. With a third of her torso missing, along with her heart and several vital organs destroyed, not even the blessings of enhanced healing could offer any chance of survival.
At the moment Vania hit the ground, a blood-red glow faintly lit up at her waist. On the pommel of a slender sword hanging from her belt, a large ruby—blood-colored and gleaming—began to emit a soft glow. In resonance with that light, the broken portions of Vania’s body responded.
Just like the moment when the direwolf had been brought back from the brink of death, a miraculous regeneration began to occur on Vania’s mutilated body.
Muscles and blood vessels squirmed as if with their own will—bleeding stopped, tissues connected on their own. Like saplings sprouting, new muscle, veins, and organs regrew upon the shattered remains. Her left lung visibly regrew before her eyes, and her heart—half missing—returned to its full form and resumed beating.
Nerves… vessels… organs… muscles… skin—within mere tens of seconds, the entirety of Vania’s lost flesh was restored. The ghastly wounds were completely healed, with the only traces left being the damage to her clothing. Beneath the torn fabric, her pale and delicate skin bore not even a trace of blood.
“Hahh... Thank the Lord…”
“And thank you… Miss Dorothea…”
Lying on the ground, Vania felt her once-fading consciousness clear again, her labored breath return to ease, and the unbearable pain vanish entirely. She let out a long sigh of relief and offered her heartfelt thanks.
“No need to thank me… we agreed to this beforehand, didn’t we? No matter what happens, I’ll make sure you’re safe. That’s my top priority.”
Still seated inside her carriage, Dorothy murmured telepathically to Vania. She’d genuinely been startled by Duval’s sudden resurrection. If it weren’t for her intervention, Vania would’ve been instantly killed before even realizing what had happened.
Although Duval’s berserk state had seemingly been resolved easily, the moment had carried extreme danger. In that berserk state, Duval’s strength and speed were simply too high. Under normal circumstances, not only would Vania’s body fail to keep up—her mind wouldn’t either. That explosive burst of speed and power from Duval could have overwhelmed her before she could even register it.
The Insight could help Vania perceive and predict enemy movements, but only if she could react quickly enough to the information it provided. After all, the Insight was a perception skill—not an information-processing one. And the berserk wolf’s explosive attack had already surpassed the thinking speed of most humans. It should have been able to rip Vania apart in less than a second—long before she could process her surprise, let alone coordinate with Dorothy.
The reason that didn’t happen was because Dorothy had shared her computational capacity with Vania. As a Crimson-rank Revelation Beyonder, Dorothy possessed immense mental processing power. With that boost, both of their thinking speeds were vastly accelerated, and their capacity for information processing sharply increased.
At that speed of thought, Vania could process more in less time—so much so that her senses perceived time as if it were slowed down, giving the illusion of temporal dilation. Everything, including her own body and her enemy, seemed to move in slow motion.
So in that moment, Vania’s mind was faster than the wolf’s berserk burst. The wolf was faster than her body’s limits, but Dorothy’s spiritual thread helped delay it just enough for the Insight to find a counterattack Vania could physically execute, even with her sluggish body. That was how she landed the killing blow.
If their thinking speed hadn’t outpaced the danger, Vania would have died before even realizing something was wrong—and once devoured, neither Dorothy nor the Heart-Devouring Cane-Sword could have saved her.
“Alright then. Now that this creature is well and truly dead, we should make use of it for cleanup.”
Seated in the carriage, Dorothy whispered again. Her intangible spiritual thread extended outward, linking once more to the direwolf’s corpse in preparation for post-battle procedures. But as she sensed the corpse’s condition, her brow furrowed.
“This is…”
Sensing something strange, Dorothy immediately sent a telepathic message to Vania.
“Vania, go cut open the wolf’s abdomen. Open up the stomach. I’ll guide you to the exact spot. Just be careful.”
“Open the stomach?”
Hearing Dorothy’s instructions, Vania—who had only just stood up again—felt a wave of confusion. Nevertheless, she walked up to the fallen direwolf, drew the blade from her hip—
—and sliced through its abdomen. Amid a gush of blood, she located the creature’s massive stomach. Once she opened it—
Vania’s eyes widened in shock.
Inside the wolf’s stomach, coiled up, was an enormous worm, roughly the size of an adult’s arm. This boneless, fleshy parasite was lodged in the stomach lining, its slime-covered body wrapped tightly around an open book with a dark red cover.
The pages of the book were inscribed with countless arcane symbols. The eyeless worm’s head extended numerous tendrils, which slithered across the text, brushing over each line. Once it finished a page, it quickly flipped to the next and continued reading with its feelers.
That book was none other than the mystical text: The Crimson Holy Mother.
And that parasite… seemed to be reading it.