Chapter 57: Nightmare Born

Arthur crossed the final ridge and stopped dead.

The sector that had once been a network of bridges and dream-stone platforms was gone. In its place stretched a wide, raw crater of constantly shifting matter. Walls became mouths and then became walls again.

Fragments of palace corridors jutted from the ground at wrong angles before melting into rivers of black glass. At the center of the destruction stood the entity.

It was larger than any construct the dungeon had produced so far.

A towering mass of overlapping nightmares held together by a single pulsing core of lonely violet light. One of its arms ended in a cluster of drowning hands.

The other carried a distorted echo of the royal scepter. Its torso opened like a stage into the empty throne room Iris had shown him in the shared dream, except now the faceless figures inside were moving.

The crown that floated above its shifting head was made of broken broadcast crystals and thin, screaming mouths. Every time the entity shifted its weight the dungeon around it tore a little wider.

Iris knelt twenty meters from its base.

She was still alive. Blood covered the lower half of her face and had soaked into the front of her uniform. Her Grimoire lay open on the ground in front of her, pages thrashing like a living thing.

Strands of unstable dream energy and a thinner, pink-gold current of pure Eros mana streamed continuously from her body into the entity’s core. The monster was not simply near her. It was feeding on her.

Arthur’s stomach turned. 𝒻𝘳ℯℯ𝑤ℯ𝒷𝘯ℴ𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝑐ℴ𝑚

Mimi’s voice was tight.

"She’s the power source. That thing is built out of everything she stacked, but the Eros leakage is what’s letting it stay coherent and keep growing. Every second she leaks, it gets harder to kill."

The entity noticed him.

A wave of pure existential wrongness rolled outward. Arthur layered Mana Skin and Frost Sovereign at full combat density just before it hit. Even then the pressure drove him back two full steps and made the edges of his vision fracture into other people’s memories. He answered with a concentrated lance of absolute zero aimed directly at the core.

The lance connected.

A plate of frozen crystal spread across one section of the entity’s torso and then shattered as the nightmare matter simply reformed. The entity made the exhaling-crowd sound again and took a step toward him. The ground under the step became a patch of drowning darkness that tried to pull everything nearby under.

Arthur moved.

He circled hard to the right, laying down a rapidly expanding field of ultra-dense frost to limit the entity’s footing. Ice spikes forced their way up through the shifting matter, buying him seconds at a time.

Heavenfall Cyclone still sat unused in the second slot. He kept it there. Against something of this scale the temporary print would give him one major exchange at most, and he was not ready to spend it while Iris was still functioning as a living battery.

"Iris!" he shouted over the roar of collapsing dream-matter. "Close the book!"

Her head lifted slowly. Violet eyes found him through a haze of pain and mana drain. She tried to speak, failed, then tried again.

"Can’t... It won’t listen anymore."

Another surge of pink-gold Eros mana left her body and sank into the entity. The monster visibly swelled. New secondary limbs began pushing their way out of its back. Arthur cursed under his breath, froze a mid-air platform, and launched himself in a high arc to avoid a sweeping arm of drowning hands. He landed hard, rolled, and came up with both arms sheathed in absolute zero.

He needed to cut the connection.

Arthur charged straight through the entity’s reach, accepting a glancing blow across the ribs that his layered defenses only partially stopped. Pain flared. He ignored it. Frost Sovereign poured into the open Grimoire on the ground, attempting to freeze the pages solid and interrupt the flow.

For a moment the thrashing slowed. Iris gasped as if someone had cut a string that was pulling her insides out. Then the book screamed — a pure psychic sound — and exploded outward with a fresh wave of stacked nightmares that threw Arthur across the crater.

He hit a forming wall hard enough to drive the air from his lungs and slid down it in a spray of ice shards. Blood filled his mouth. The entity turned its full attention toward him now, apparently deciding that the new threat was more interesting than its still-leaking power source.

Mimi spoke rapidly.

"You can’t out-muscle this thing while she’s still feeding it. The Eros current is the problem. It’s not just dream mana anymore. It’s desire-flavored. Loneliness. The exact signature your Codex is built to interact with. That’s why the print reaction earlier was so strong."

Arthur forced himself back to his feet. Frost reformed across his arms in jagged plates. The entity took another step. Behind it, Iris collapsed fully onto her side, still connected to the monster by those thinning streams of pink-gold light.

The situation was clear and brutal.

Fighting the entity at full strength was suicide. Leaving Iris was impossible. The only variable he could still change was the fuel source.

Arthur wiped blood from his mouth with the back of a frozen hand and started walking directly toward the kneeling princess, keeping the entity’s bulk on his left. Ice platforms formed and broke under his boots.

Nightmare limbs crashed down around him. He cut one away with a crescent of absolute zero, froze another solid and shattered it, and kept moving. Each exchange cost mana he could not easily replace. Each second let the entity grow a little more defined.

When he finally reached Iris the air around her felt thin and over-saturated. The Eros leakage was strong enough that the Codex against his ribs had begun to resonate hard enough to vibrate against his bones. Iris’s eyes were half-open but unfocused. Her lips moved without sound.

Arthur dropped to one knee beside her, put his body between her and the entity, and spoke close to her ear.

"I’m here. I’m not leaving. But I need you to understand what’s happening. That thing is eating the part of you that you’ve been trying to starve. The more you leak, the stronger it gets."

A trembling breath left her. "...Knew the risks."

"The risks just became my problem too."

A massive limb of fused corridors and hands smashed down where Arthur had been standing a moment earlier. He dragged Iris behind a rapidly formed ice barrier that lasted just long enough for them to roll clear. The entity was done being patient.

Mimi’s voice cut through the chaos with unusual seriousness.

"Master. The only clean way to cut an Eros-sustained manifestation of this type is to complete the circuit it was trying to feed on. Give the desire a real outlet instead of a leaking wound. Your Codex is already halfway into a print resonance. If you finish it — properly — the entity loses its primary fuel and becomes just another high-order nightmare. Still deadly. But no longer growing."

Arthur looked down at Iris’s blood-streaked face, then at the impossible monster that had been born from everything she refused to let anyone else see.

The dungeon continued to tear itself apart around them.

He already knew what the next step had to be.

The only thing left was to survive long enough to take it.