Nirva couldn't understand the current situation.
'I... got nervous?'
This was the first time in his life he had felt this way.
Until now, he had faced countless strong opponents, but he had never felt overwhelmed by them.
At most, there was Rudger Chelici, but he had never felt fear toward him.
If he had to compare it, it was close to the feeling of a human encountering a tiger in the mountains.
Not barehanded, but with a weapon, making it a somewhat fair fight.
But this one was different.
He felt the sensation of hundreds of cockroaches crawling all over his body at once.
It felt like facing something indescribable, like a mass of various insects merged into one.He had despised humans, calling them insects, but this was something beyond disgust.
It couldn't be helped.
What Nirva, the Apostle of Dreams, controlled was people's dreams.
The imagination and energy they contained. All of that was focused on ordinary dreams.
But the being that had spotted him from the darkness was the opposite.
It was fundamentally similar to dreams, but much darker and murkier.
Yes.
That was a 'nightmare.'
'And not just any nightmare. A nightmare mixed with countless resentments, hatred, and savagery that I've never seen before.'
Sedina and Julia also noticed that something was strange about Nirva's reaction.
"Wh-what? Why did he suddenly stop attacking? Besides... hasn't it gotten colder?"
"That's..."
Sedina's gaze turned toward the pitch-black darkness.
The large passage that had been blown wide open because Nirva couldn't control his power.
The being that had revealed itself was a monster far beyond her common sense.
-Kuung.
As the monster took a step, the floor shook with vibration.
"Is, is that...the Beast of Gevaudan?"
On the night of the blood-red full moon a cryptid that remained in history as a calamity for an entire nation.
Wooooooo───!!!
The nightmare of all living things roared at the Apostle of Dreams.
"How, dare you!"
A giant sand sword made of sand flew and pierced through the Beast of Gevaudan solar plexus.
Or at least, it seemed to pierce it.
-Kaduk. Kaduduk.
Something wriggled and moved in the abdomen of the Beast of Gevaudan, standing firm on its two legs as if nothing had happened.
It was the heads of beasts.
The sand sword was being devoured from the tip by countless beast heads.
"A beast without reason or wisdom! Baring your fangs at me in my territory!"
-Kwang!
Nirva exploded the debris covering his body and charged toward the Beast of Gevaudan.
The Beast of Gevaudan's gaze never left Nirva.
Just as Nirva instinctively acknowledged the Beast of Gevaudan as his natural enemy.
The Beast of Gevaudan also recognized through its animal instinct that Nirva was its natural enemy.
Nirva rode a wave of golden sand toward the Beast of Gevaudan.
His eyes flickered with a golden light like a devil's aura.
The Beast of Gevaudan roughly shook its arms, tearing the air and causing a strong gust of wind.
"Not so easy!"
The dream sand wave was not a shallow attack that could be negated by such an action.
Countless grains of sand engulfed the Beast of Gevaudan, swallowing it up to its waist.
The sand surged and quickly bound the Beast of Gevaudan's entire body.
"I'll squeeze you to death like this!"
Nirva's voice carried a deadly intent.
The Beast of Gevaudan looked at Nirva, then raised its head.
-Awoooooo!!!
The heads on both its shoulders and its main body howled.
When the strange wave contained in the howl permeated the dream sand, something amazing happened.
"Wh-what?!"
The dream sand that was trying to devour the Beast of Gevaudan lost control and spilled to the floor.
Nirva couldn't understand what he was seeing.
"A mere beast dispersing my power?"
This power to manipulate dream sand wasn't a simple magic.
This was a great power bestowed upon him by the goddess.
It shouldn't be so easily nullified by the howl of a mere beast.
Nirva bit his lip.
The original plan was to safely recover his strength by eating wandering people but because of that black beast, the plan had been disrupted.
To face that thing, he would have to use up all the power he had absorbed so far.
"This one, that one."
His anger surpassed irritation and surged.
The first to interfere with him was Rudger Chelici.
Because of him, Nirva had to use a lot of power and choose a different method than he had initially planned.
What about after that?
When he tried to recover his strength, he was delayed by Zantman and Sedina's interference.
Because of that, reinforcements arrived, and he had to shamefully touch the offering that he should have presented to the goddess.
Throwing away all dignity, he had been recovering his lost power by eating humans fallen in prison.
And now, a beast with extreme affinity against him appeared to interfere.
Interference.
Interference.
More interference!
Veins bulged on Nirva's forehead.
"Everything just keeps interfering with me!"
The Nirva who always maintained a sly attitude, never losing his composure and smile, was now gone.
Only a devil with a face as distorted as a ferocious spirit remained.
"Fine. Let's see how far you'll interfere with me!"
Nirva surrounded himself with dream sand, creating a storm.
Seeing this, the Beast of Gevaudan inhaled again and released another howl.
Nirva immediately created a vacuum in the air by raising wind.
But the howl of the Beast of Gevaudan was different from a sound that simply traveled through the air.
The sound was blocked by the vacuum wall and couldn't be heard, but the strange power within it disrupted Nirva's dream sand storm.
It was truly the worst compatibility but Nirva didn't see it as entirely hopeless.
'It's not enough to completely nullify my authority.'
If it had been, the right arm he had made of sand would have also disappeared in that howl.
Despite some wavering, the strongly condensed sand did not lose its control.
'If strength against strength is not enough, I'll have to change my approach.'
Nirva placed both hands on the ground.
The dream sand gathered from various places and transformed into chains that bound the Beast of Gevaudan.
The Beast of Gevaudan struggled, breaking the chains one by one, but they were being added faster than they were breaking.
The Beast of Gevaudan opened its mouth again.
Nirva had been waiting for this moment.
"Like a proper beast, take a muzzle."
A restraint made of sand wrapped around the Beast of Gevaudan's long snout.
With its mouth suddenly blocked, the beast couldn't release its howl.
He had to defeat it at this time.
Nirva's plan, however, was bound to fail due to what the Beast of Gevaudan showed next.
-Sak-ak. Sak-ak.
The sand chains binding the Beast of Gevaudan unraveled one by one and fell to the ground.
The countless beasts that made up the Beast of Gevaudan's body had gnawed through the chains.
The beast's abnormality didn't stop there.
-Awoo!
When one wolf head howled, the other wolf heads howled in resonance.
-Awooooooooo───!!!
The cohesive force of the dream sand weakened again under the resonant harmony of the beasts making up its entire body.
"So it can release that strange wave from its entire body?"
Though less powerful than the main body, it was enough to nullify most attacks.
Nirva's expression froze cold beyond anger.
This was dangerous.
He might not be defeated by that monster, but he also had no decent way to defeat it.
'Besides, I'm not sure if it's just my feeling.'
That Beast of Gevaudan seemed smaller than before.
Should he say its size had decreased?
Its once massive body seemed to have become somewhat more slender.
Nirva felt anxiety rather than hope at this sight.
Usually, a shrinking size meant the opponent was weakening.
'But why does it feel like that monster power is being compressed?'
He couldn't shake the thought that it was evolving in real-time, transforming into some higher being.
The more he tried to deny it, the more that delusion continued to disturb his mind.
"...Right. I can't keep wasting time fighting you forever."
Did he really need to settle this properly?
He had already discarded his pride as much as he could anyway.
The Beast of Gevaudan lowered its body, preparing to charge at Nirva.
At that moment, the floor caved in, and its body fell downward.
-Kreung!
The Beast of Gevaudan jumped high by kicking the ground with its hind legs.
It could see the ground it had been standing on collapsing like a block and falling.
"This is a prison I created. I can't change the main structure, but I can certainly make small changes like this."
Nirva gestured, and the ground where the Beast of Gevaudan was about to land caved in again.
With animal reflexes, the Beast of Gevaudan rotated its body, stepped on a side floor, and jumped up again.
It had an agility that didn't match its huge body.
Nirva's expression hardened at the sight.
"As I thought. It wasn't my imagination."
The Beast of Gevaudan was being compressed in real-time.
The countless beast heads that had covered its body disappeared, and the living heads on both shoulders closed their mouths quietly, transforming into something like shoulder blades.
And its arms, a mix of beast and human, were gradually leaning toward the human side.
Gradually, it was metamorphosing into something else.
He didn't know what lay at the end of this transformation, but he knew it wasn't good for him.
The Beast of Gevaudan, having spun its body in mid-air, demonstrated three-dimensional movement by stepping on walls.
Thanks to its reduced size, its movements were faster and more nimble than before.
The Beast of Gevaudan, which had approached Nirva in an instant, raised its arm but it didn't get to swing that arm.
Instinctively, it realized that the Nirva it was trying to catch was a fake.
The Beast of Gevaudan's head lost direction.
Its sniffing nose tracked the traces of the vanished Nirva.
"You're quick-witted."
The real Nirva appeared from the ceiling with sand.
The dream sand that had been composing the fake Nirva stabbed the Beast of Gevaudan's eyes at that moment.
-Kwaaaaak!
The reduction in the number of heads acted as a poison in this aspect.
In the brief moment when the Beast of Gevaudan was confused after losing its sight, Nirva removed all the floor blocks around it.
The floor collapsed and the Beast of Gevaudan fell with it.
At that moment, the Beast of Gevaudan, having recovered its sight, flashed its red eyes intensely.
-Pa-at!
The massive monster stepped on the falling blocks and leaped upward with its legs.
The Beast of Gevaudan, jumping up as if flying by stepping on invisible stepping stones in the air, swung its hand towards Nirva, who was floating in the air but the hand covered in black fur did not reach Nirva.
There was only one fate awaiting the beast whose final attack had missed.
It was a fall towards that endless darkness.
Wooooooo───!!!!
As if making a last struggle, that massive roar burst forth from the darkness and echoed throughout the prison Nirva had created.
"Tch. Useless struggling."
Nirva restored the blocks of the floor that had been blown open.
The Beast of Gevaudan would be thrown into the deepest part of the prison below.
Considering its vitality, this probably wouldn't kill it.
But it didn't matter. He had known long ago that he couldn't kill it, and he just needed to buy time.
'That makes it my second defeat.'
He didn't face it head-on properly and chose to run away.
If he had fought properly, his current self would have definitely lost.
"If only my power was intact..."
After muttering that, Nirva unconsciously let out a self-deprecating laugh.
"If only this, if only that. Have I, of all people, become this broken?"
Shaking his head to clear his thoughts, Nirva recalled the Beast of Gevaudan making its final struggle just now.
That motion of swinging a hand that wouldn't reach him.
Someone else might see it as the instinctive struggle of a beast but Nirva had seen it.
The beast's hand reaching toward him, and something sharp made of white bone about to spring forth from that palm.
It might sound a bit exaggerated, but its shape resembled a 'sword.'
If the fight with the Beast of Gevaudan had lasted longer, into what form would it have continued to evolve?
"...Well, whatever. I've chased away the beast, so now I need to hunt down the escaped humans."
Nirva moved, tracking the traces of Sedina and Julia, who had disappeared by now.
Time had been delayed, but they couldn't have escaped far.
* * *
Aidan and his group entered a new space.
Seeing the empty space, they thought they had drawn a blank and prepared to move on to the next space.
They certainly would have if they hadn't heard a huge howl from afar.
-Wooooo.
The faint sound was a wolf's howl that made the atmosphere vibrate subtly.
It was coming from very far away, so the sound was dim, but it was definitely the sound of a wolf.
Seridan perked up his ears and turned his head in the direction of the sound.
"Hans?"
As everyone was confused about what the sound was.
-Twitch.
The little finger of Rudger, who had fallen into a quiet sleep, moved.