Chapter 135: What Beats Beneath the Gold

Freya stayed like that for a long while, lying in the grass, letting her mind settle little by little, along with the body that had itched so badly. And as she caught her breath, the sobs against her grew slower and further apart, until the two girls eventually fell asleep in her arms, just like last time.

This time, however, she couldn’t wait for them to wake up against her. She had no time to lose, and she had already lost more than enough.

So she gently slipped out of their embrace and laid them down in the grass with the utmost care, so as not to wake them. Then she went to the luxurious bedroom, came back with a large, light duvet woven from SilkWeaver silk and two pillows, slid the pillows under their heads and spread the duvet over them.

She watched them for a moment, curled up against each other under the artificial light of the last floor, then turned away.

The work that had been interrupted was waiting for her. Near the heart of her dungeon, hearts still lay scattered in the grass, spilled from the basket Na?a had dropped, so she started with those and tossed them into the heart one by one. Then she moved on to the trips between the storage chamber and the heart, running the whole way, because she had no intention of wasting another second.

Some had already passed the twelve-hour mark, of course. But that was how it was: she had never expected perfect efficiency from this system, and she had understood from the start that there would be losses. Which didn’t stop her from pouting every time a heart vanished into hers without giving her a thing.

Once the last one had been absorbed, she headed for the floor above. She crossed the meadow to its far edge, where the grass, the hills and the sky seemed to stretch on forever. Yet as one drew closer, it eventually became clear that all of it was just scenery: the landscape stopped dead against an immense wall that bore its image, blended so perfectly into the horizon that you only noticed it at the very last moment. And set into that wall, barely visible, a staircase led upward, which she climbed without slowing down until she reached the ninth floor.

The largest in her entire dungeon.

And also, incidentally, the hottest.

She had barely cleared the last step when the heat hit her full force. Before her stretched an endless desert, dunes rolling as far as the eye could see under a crushing blue sky, and in the distance, mountains of scorched rock rose through the shimmering air. A merciless sun beat down on all of it, so hard the sand seemed to quiver beneath its rays.

Well, I won’t be staying long. I shouldn’t even have time to sweat.

A drop of sweat slid down her temple.

Then a second.

Freya wiped it away with the back of her hand, her expression perfectly neutral, and decided not to dwell on it.

Just as the first floor had the [ Illusory Mist ] effect, this one had an equally peculiar one: [ Spatial Extension ]. It allowed an already immense floor to grow vaster still, and worked on more or less the same principle as the museum of wonders, as she liked to call it.

And, ironically?

The museum happened to be on this very floor.

She swept her gaze across the horizon. Dunes, more dunes, mountains, then dunes again.

He can’t be far.

Nothing. Not a shadow, not a movement, not even the slightest tremor in the sand.

Fine. There were surely more elegant ways to summon a divine beast, but this one was still the fastest. So she took a deep breath and shouted at the top of her lungs.

"YMIR!"

Her cry rolled across the dunes, drifted away, weakened, then faded into the distance before vanishing entirely.

It took only a few seconds.

First, the ground began to tremble beneath her feet, barely at all, then harder and harder, until the sand started sliding off the crests. Then, far away, something moved. At first it was only a shifting shape, immense, warped by the heat, advancing slowly between the dunes.

Little by little, it came into focus.

Legs, first. Dozens of long, jointed legs, thin and pointed, folding and unfolding on either side of the creature, just like a spider’s. There were twenty-four of them, lined up along its entire flank, and each one drove into the sand with a dull thud before lifting again in a cloud of dust.

Yet what they carried had nothing of a spider about it. It was a beast’s body, massive and feral, covered in thick greyish-brown hide, furrowed with old scars and bristling here and there with tufts of coarse hair. Along its spine, enormous bony plates overlapped, and on them rested something vast that stood out against the sky.

At the rear, an endless tail, ringed and heavy, dragged through the sand, leaving a deep furrow behind it. At the front, at last, came the head, low and broad, that of an old bison, crowned with two curved horns so long they could have held up a bridge. Beneath its brow, four eyes of cloudy amber stared straight ahead, slow and ancient.

Every step made the entire floor shake.

It was a divine beast of Nymeria.

Ymir approached unhurriedly, until its shadow covered Freya entirely along with hundreds of meters of dunes around her. Freya greeted it with a genuine sigh of relief, and not only because she had been looking for it: in that shadow, the air was finally breathable.

The beast came to a halt and lowered its enormous head to the level of the sand, and its hot breath lifted Freya’s hair.

A deep voice resounded, not in the air, but directly inside her head.

"You called me, Freya."

"I was looking for you, mostly." Freya crossed her arms and looked up into those amber eyes, each one bigger than she was. "You weren’t where I left you."

"This territory is vast. You gave it to me that way, and I roam it gladly."

A low rumble rose from its throat, warm, almost amused.

"Isn’t that what you promised me?"

"It is, yes." Freya gave a faint smile. "I’m glad you like it. Take me to the temple, would you?"

"With pleasure."

The beast then lowered one of its forelegs, long and jointed, until its tip rested in the sand right in front of Freya, like an invitation.

Freya climbed onto it without hesitation, and the leg gently rose to carry her toward its back.

As she climbed, she couldn’t help thinking back to everything it had taken to find this beast and bring it here. The hardest part, of course, had been finding a divine beast, as she called them, that would agree to cooperate. These creatures needed no one, and they made sure everyone knew it. But during their search, they had come across two of them fighting over a territory, and one of the two had been nearly dead.

Freya had seized the opportunity. She had promised it a territory larger than anything it could imagine, one it would rule alone. She had even promised it the right to choose what that territory would look like, and much more besides, in exchange for simple cooperation, exactly like this. This scorching desert, these endless dunes and these mountains of rock had all been the beast’s own choice.

A new territory, shaped to its own desires... only one thing was missing to make this fresh start complete. So Freya had given it a new name as well.

She had called it Ymir, after the primordial giant of Norse mythology. The name suited it, but above all, Freya, who herself bore almost the name of a Norse goddess, found it rather amusing. The beast, for its part, had accepted it with sincere gratitude, the way one accepts a gift, and had borne it proudly ever since.

But there was a slight problem.

Back on Earth, the old Freya had two great fears. The first one, you already know: spiders. The second was heights, because she suffered from vertigo.

So when an enormous spider leg began lifting her into the air, despite all of avarice’s hold on her, she couldn’t help murmuring to herself, her fingers clenched on the carapace.

"It’s not that high... it’s not high... everything’s fine, Freya."

The leg kept rising.

And rising.

And rising still, while the ground fell away, the dunes shrank, and Freya, already several hundred meters up, still hadn’t reached its back. She made the mistake of glancing down, immediately looked back up, and very firmly decided never to do that again.

"Thank goodness Kaguya was there to help us move it. Without her, it would have been impossible."

As she spoke the name, a pang squeezed her heart. She saw herself treating her follower the way she had, and saw Kaguya vanish afterward into a portal, head lowered, sad, without a word.

What’s happening to me?

She didn’t understand why she was feeling these pointless emotions. So she simply brushed them aside, the way one brushes away a fly, and refocused on what mattered.

At last the leg came to a stop, and Freya set foot on Ymir’s back.

Before her stretched a city. An entire city, running the whole length of the beast’s back, from the base of its neck to the root of its tail, built right onto the bony plates of its spine.

Its streets were paved with pale stone, inlaid with gold dulled by sand and sun. Houses with ochre walls lined both sides, set off by golden friezes and worn bas-reliefs, following the curve of the spine in successive terraces. Beneath her feet, through the stone, she could feel the slow motion of the beast breathing. And at the center, on the highest point of its back, stood an immense stepped temple whose stairs climbed toward the sky, like those of the lost cities of old legends.

Anyone else would have stopped to admire all of it.

Freya crossed the city at a brisk pace without sparing it a glance. She knew perfectly well what was there, since all of it belonged to her.

She climbed the temple steps to the top, then plunged inside, followed a long corridor, climbed more stairs, went down others, turned, again and again, until she came out into a closed room.

In the middle of it stood two portals.

Kaguya had created them and left them there. Unlike all the others, these were permanent: one led to Nymeria, the other to the tenth floor.

Freya had figured out that, for a floor to be accepted by the system, it only needed to offer a single way to reach the next one. More concretely, thanks to this portal, she would be able to remove the staircase she had just taken on the day a person or a group reached the ninth floor, which would then force them to take one of the two portals to move forward. For now, she left it in place, because it was very useful to her.

She walked past the two portals without stopping, and her gaze settled on the one on the left, the one that led to Nymeria.

Officially, it had been placed there to give the dungeon’s members a way to reach Nymeria. And unofficially?

It was one last trap.

Anyone other than them who stepped through this portal would be slaughtered the moment they arrived. An invader who made it all the way here, exhausted, at the end of their strength, would find themselves facing two portals and would have to pick one. A deadly coin toss, in short, one last warm little gift from Freya to her guests.

She smiled as she looked at it, very proud of herself.

Yet once again, a certain bitterness rose in her throat, because her thoughts were already drifting a little further. Toward the regent of Nymeria, the one who had placed this portal, the one who called her Big Sister and who, in a way, had become her little sister.

She tore her gaze from the portal and turned it toward the back of the room. It looked like nothing more than a plain wall, but it hid a mechanism that would take her where she had meant to go. She had come to see Upyr, and to see the rest.

"...So why does my mind keep wandering?"

She didn’t know. And since she didn’t want to waste any more time, now or later, she simply decided to do the most logical thing she could.

She stepped into the portal that led to Nymeria.