Meanwhile, at the bottom of the cruise ship.
The seawater under the cover of night was serene, carrying a silence that sent chills through anyone who sensed it.
The shallow waters rippled faintly. If anyone had dived beneath the surface at that moment, they would have come face-to-face with the grayish-white behemoth plastered to the ship’s underside.
It looked for all the world like a dead octopus, its unprecedented size enough to send marine biologists into raptures. Its vast tentacles tapered to flattened ends that swayed with the current, resembling the death shrouds of Stygian jellyfish.
“I can scarcely believe you fooled the Behemoth like that… But I must admit, I truly admire your mastery of feigning death, Khirra.”
Chorazin’s voice rang out abruptly. In the next instant, the “dead octopus” at the ship’s bottom changed color dramatically!
Its originally grayish-white skin was overlaid with red bases ringed in black. Sharp hooked claws emerged from the shroud-like tentacle tips with a sharp metallic snap, stabbing viciously toward the enemy that had discovered it!
“Boom…”
The attack stirred up a several-meter-high plume of murky bubbles in the seawater, but it struck nothing.
Chorazin glanced down at Khirra’s hooks passing harmlessly through his mirage body, then looked up with a helpless expression.
“If I’d come here to kill you, how could you have lived long enough to launch this attack, Khirra… my blood kin. I apologize for the foolish things I did in the past, but now, I’ve come to invite you.”
“In…vite…?” The long hooks coiled back sinuously, like sea snakes slithering along the ocean floor.
Chorazin smiled faintly. “Of course.” He had no qualms about revealing his plans to Khirra. “I’m preparing to kill the original body and take its place. But when everything is over, I’ll need you, Khirra.”
“The old me was shortsighted and foolish because I couldn’t see any hope of success, but now… since the original can revive through you, why couldn’t I do the same after replacing it?”
Chorazin’s voice was soft and gentle in the water, like the death shrouds drifting all around them. “So, have no fear, my dear blood kin. No matter who emerges victorious from this deathmatch, your life will be in no danger…”
“If by some stroke of luck it’s me who prevails—I swear to you, Khirra, I’ll take you with me on the path to true power.”
“…”
Khirra’s hooks hesitated as they swam through the seawater.
Chorazin had no idea that Khirra had already learned of his and Ode’s patricide plot through the deal with Eva. Its first instinct had been rage and obstruction, its second to immediately inform its father. Yet Chorazin’s unexpected visit sowed doubt.
If the outcome wouldn’t affect it either way, why wade into this mess?
In the seawater, Khirra’s eyeballs—coated in a hydrophobic membrane—swiveled once. “I want… Eva. That human… can help us… grow stronger.”
It was clearly softening. Chorazin’s tone grew even more sincere. “As you wish, my blood kin.”
Up on the deck.
Eva’s expression shifted subtly as the incessant shrieking in her mind abruptly ceased. But with the situation at hand, she had no time to ponder it. “Ode! Watch the ship’s structure. This old tub can’t take heavy firepower.”
Ode’s finger paused on the machine gun’s trigger for only an instant before he squeezed it without hesitation. Bullets poured forth!
“Thud-thud-thud…”
The rounds vanished into the mist, instantly churning the cloud sea into chaos. Fearing the Behemoth wouldn’t understand human speech, Ode deliberately mangled the R’lyehian he’d crammed in culture class. Glaring down imperiously at the fog below, he spat coldly:
“Mgehye.”
“…”
The Behemoth was finally and thoroughly enraged. The fog that had been quietly roiling across the floor surged for a moment before exploding outward!
Doors, windows, the ceiling… every gap that let in light or air was sealed tight. Darkness fell, so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.
Yet in this sealed chamber of black, bubbles harboring cold light bubbled ceaselessly.
Rapidly shifting yellow, green, and blue lights throbbed within the bubble-like fog, like a beating heart that gradually swelled, devouring the last pockets of oxygen and human space.
“Urgh…” Up on the ceiling, the old professor broke out in cold sweat as he forced his eyes open. Even on the verge of passing out from pain, his mind fixated on just two thoughts: first, “…What? Is that… Ode? How could someone so polite and restrained say something like that?” And second, “What language is that? Could I use it in my new cipher compiler?”
He lifted his gaze and caught sight of the proliferating unknown horror in the darkness. “Gah—”
【Damn. You’ve scared a few into fainting. Isn’t your taunt effect a bit too good? Ctharnid hasn’t brought back a reply yet!!】
Faust’s voice came through the earpiece, likely trying to lighten the mood, but the distortion at the end betrayed their dire straits. Right after—
“Boom…”
The entire banquet hall shuddered violently and began to rise.
Aging wooden planks were rapidly supplanted by metal, sliced into cubic compartments.
Ode steadied himself amid the shaking and looked up to see Faust manipulating the spaces like a Rubik’s Cube, swiftly carving out a fog-free zone amid the twisting intersections. He quickly pulled away the cluster of shaken middle-aged and elderly guests, then reached for Ode.
“No.” Ode retreated a step with clear-headed resolve, positioning himself in an adjacent cube offset from Faust’s. “I have to stay here. Buy time.”
“You…!” Faust clearly disapproved, but with crisis looming, dallying would be fatal.
His gaze flicked upward. With a few deft twists before the fog could cascade down from two cubes above, he whisked the Behemoth farther away. “Wanna play Rubik’s Cube?”
“Not my thing. Who’s got time for math?” Ode eyed the fog creeping through the cubed sectors, one by one encroaching on the space. His words sped up. “Seventh-order won’t hold it. Switch to thirteenth. I’ll stand right here.”
A thirteenth-order Rubik’s Cube had 866 subcubes. Even if the Behemoth wanted to fill them all, it would take minutes under Faust’s interference.
“—You’re really putting too much faith in me. I hate this crap too.” Faust leaped backward out of the cubic space. “Eva! Over here! Your turn.”
The light warped into surreal patterns from the slicing rotations; no one could make out Eva’s expression.
But when she took control of the alchemy array from Faust, the entire cubic space transformed from a sluggish, rusty mechanism into something nimble. The twisting sections spun with verve, like a lottery wheel juiced with steroids.
Eva’s cool command voice, laced with tension, crackled through the earpiece: 【Shrink it. I’m slicing to thirteenth-order.】
—No one knew if Ctharnid could secure the Elder Gods’ permission and open the gate to the Phantasmal Dream Realm in just a few minutes.
At the apex of the spatial slicing, Ode had to curl himself into the smallest ball possible. He felt like his limbs had been wrenched off and crammed into a piano bench.
But he knew full well that Eva was suffering even more right now. She had to wring every brain cell dry second by second—not only to avoid shunting him into the Behemoth’s path but to sever its routes of spread.
Rapid descent, ascent, inversion, sharp turns.
Gradually, amid the violent vertigo, Ode couldn’t stay fully curled. The slightest stretch brought the space’s edge crashing down like a guillotine on his body’s perimeter.
Blood soaked his vision. Ode suppressed the gasps that would only worsen things. The familiar dizziness from blood loss rolled in waves, only to recede bit by bit with his self-healing.
But he knew that in this interminable, maddening standoff, he wasn’t the only one in agony.
Cracking his eyes open a sliver, he glimpsed the Behemoth hurtling past him now and then through the howling gale, separated by two or three layers.
Its once-ethereal fog had turned into grimy, substantial foam from fury.
Masses of colored lights churned beneath the foam laced with gray impurities. It no longer evoked gorgeous auroras—instead, it resembled a massive, obese worm oozing fluorescent slime from its carapace, refracting kaleidoscopic illusions amid the ceaseless cubic spins.
“Damn… Has Ctharnid not gotten back yet?! Are the Elder Gods’ efficiency as bad as Downing Street’s bureaucracy?!” Faust puffed his cigar ever more fiercely. The longer the wait, the more a despairing impatience gnawed at him—like those endless hours outside his wife’s operating room, when he knew prolonged waiting rarely brought good news.
In his agitation, he yanked the cigar from his lips. For a moment, his gaze fell on the gold ring on his left finger. Hesitation and anxiety warred within him:
“Maybe…”
The next instant—
“Clang…”
From some unseen cube came the resonant buzz of piano keys being slammed hard.
“…?” Ode instantly recalled Cavendish’s words: “I heard piano music right when the captain was killed.”
Blinking through blood-matted eyes, he stared in astonishment at a slender, gaunt figure standing before him amid the whirling spaces—as if the rotations held no sway over it at all.
The figure looked about eighteen or nineteen, with blond hair, blue eyes, and endearing freckles dusting its face. Its eyes held the shy anxiety unique to students. “Can you see me? Stop being an idiot! You want to go to the Phantasmal Dream Realm, right? I can open the door for you! Right by your hand! You… go claim territory at my place!”
“Wait…!” Ode blurted in shock. He had a barrage of questions—who are you?—but with peril pressing, he cut straight to it. “How do I build?”
Some bastard had claimed it was a gift, then dumped him in front of a bunch of higher-ups, exposing his true identity. Said to claim turf in the Phantasmal Dream Realm, but hadn’t taught him how. Just lie down and dream?
The young man rubbed his hands, visibly excited and nervous—like someone steeling himself to try crab for the first time—giving Ode an ominous hunch that this might be his first time too. “Super simple! In your mind, recall the most memorable place from your life—the one you most want to go to. Ready?”
The last person to ask him that had been Chorazin. Ode’s sense of foreboding intensified. “Wait—”
Before he could finish, an immense suction yanked from below his fingertips, whisking him into a colossal vortex like a scrap of paper!
The world spun madly.
‘Is this really what it feels like to enter the Phantasmal Dream Realm?’ Ode wasn’t trying to doubt the young boy on purpose. It was just that this experience didn’t match any of the methods mentioned in his culture class: passing through specific gates or nodes, using potions or rituals, or being carried in by a creature from the Phantasmal Dream Realm.
Amid the endless tumbling, he found a grim sort of amusement in his thoughts. At least those hundreds of sessions on the human centrifuge hadn’t been a waste. See? He was putting that training to use right now in the job.
“…What do you want to learn? Piano? You’ve got to be kidding!”
In the darkness, a fierce wind howled past, carrying scattered fragments of words that echoed through the endless void:
“I can barely afford to put food on the table for you and your brother as it is. Do you know how rare a father with a conscience like me is in the slums?! And now I’ve got a new wife and kid, but I’m still dragging you two dead weights along!”
“Aw, come on, son. Your old man’s got no choice. But you’ve been sick nonstop, and I just can’t afford it anymore… Another lame leg—how much money do you think you can earn like that?”
