Cthulhu couldn’t utter a single word. Ode was clearly taking advantage of him. At that moment, the only one who could truly sense the full force of Cthulhu’s fury was Chorazin—
In the midst of his fierce struggle with Faust, Chorazin suddenly felt his body melting like a pat of butter, seized by some enraged, overwhelming suction. By the time he reacted a half-beat too late to what was happening, shock and rage intertwined, forcing a bellow of utter unwillingness from his throat: “No!!”
“Faust,” Eva called out warily from the safety zone, “Chorazin’s readings are dropping fast. Something’s devouring his power!”
“What?” Faust’s brow twitched. As Chorazin lunged at him heedlessly, Faust sidestepped effortlessly atop the alchemy array. Even without Eva’s warning, Chorazin’s wildly inaccurate strikes made him furrow his brow. “Why would he—wait… Who’s draining his power? It couldn’t be… Cthulhu?!”
Faust and Eva couldn’t help but turn their gazes toward Chorazin, as if hoping to glean some answer from the enemy.
But in Chorazin’s eyes, everything was already growing dim… His body, his senses, his very sense of self…
Before his vision plunged into total darkness, all he could see were his own futile hands flailing in the air, the enemies’ faces flashing by in shocked uncertainty.
Thump.
Thump.
What was that? Chorazin’s fading consciousness caught a dull, powerful rhythm pulsing within his body.
Panic gripped him briefly at this new sound from inside himself. He spun wild theories—that his disloyalty had been discovered by the main body, who now planned to replace him with a new avatar. But as his body grew heavier, the odd thumping turned labored and faint.
…Oh. He suddenly realized this was what humans called a “heartbeat.”
How strange. He’d never considered whether he even had such an organ—probably not. Yet he remembered this sound, both alien and familiar… The first time he’d heard it so clearly was in that eerie lab in the Sahara Desert.
It had been nighttime. The desert wind was bitterly cold. But for a being like him, who dwelled eternally in the ocean depths, the desert’s chill was nothing.
Following the main body’s orders, he’d tracked Dagon’s death curse and Khirra’s aura to the lab. To better sense the link between the blood sample and the original, he’d swallowed that jar of blood… And then what?
Thump.
He’d heard his first heartbeat.
As if, in that instant, he’d truly been born into the world for the first time.
And now, that strong heartbeat was weakening.
As his consciousness scattered further, in his final moments submerged in darkness, Chorazin’s vision flashed with a deep crimson shadow.
So unwilling… he thought. He’d been born because of that deep crimson shadow—and now he would die because of it too.
So unwilling…
On the deck, Chorazin’s form fully dissipated. The thick fog enveloping the ghost ship scattered with it.
The moment communications restored, Faust heard El’s booming voice in his earpiece: 【Hello, hello?? You guys still alive?? Listen, some scrawny kid just showed up, saying he can open a door to the Phantasmal Dream Realm. From there, we can detour into Cthulhu’s dream. We’re on our way—hold on!】
Normally, Faust would’ve fired back with a couple barbs at being sidelined while others took the front lines. But right now, with Ode holding the line instead of him, sweat poured down his face. If reason hadn’t reminded him the hostages needed watching, he’d have jumped overboard himself: “Hurry up, hurry!! That little punk Ode somehow pissed Cthulhu off bad—he just ate one of his own avatars right in front of us!! When you get here, grab the hostages and go. Anyone who can swim, dive in with me for backup!”
“Ate an ava—” El dropped the jokes. “You know what Cthulhu did when we hammered the real R’lyeh with everything we had? He ditched it—sent his main body straight into the dream realm!”
This was all-out intent to crush Ode in the dream realm… El didn’t even want to imagine, after all this radio silence, whether Ode was dead or alive—
【Ahem.】 Ode’s polite cough crackled timely through the earpiece, proving he was still breathing. And, 【I have a plan.】
“You’ve got shit for a plan!” Faust snapped. Wasting no time, he hiked up his trench coat and crouched to carve covenant inscriptions into the ghost ship’s deck, ready to hurl the whole vessel into the sea as an antisubmarine missile once the dead weight cleared out. “Plan’s synonym is ‘safe.’ Yours? Suicide! Every damn time, I have to chase after you cleaning up your messes—”
Ode knew Faust wouldn’t go for it: 【Hear me out.】
It was actually kind of funny—when Faust led from the front, he favored bold gambles. Like charging a bank with unknown enemy intel, risking GORCC exposure, just to neutralize the threat ASAP… But shift him to logistics, and suddenly it was all about playing it safe.
Maybe this was a variant of that old saying: “You never know how tough parenting is till you’re the parent.”
Either way, Ode felt zero guilt screwing with Faust like this.
Back at the Sahara outpost, the instructors had dragged Faust out as a cautionary tale more times than he could count. Ode figured if they could handle Faust, GORCC could manage his improv too. As for convincing Faust… Ode was sure he could, since his plan really did minimize the damage:
【How big is Cthulhu’s dream realm? Could I… detach my own dream from the Phantasmal Dream Realm and use it to swallow his? That way, I’d get the dream realm boost and suppress Cthulhu.】
Faust’s inscription-carving hand slowed to a halt. “What? How the hell do you detach your dream from the Phantasmal Dream Realm? Never heard of such a thing!”
【No idea. Up to you. I’ll focus on stalling. Bye.】 Ode shot back quick and cut the line, clearly knowing his words would infuriate a whole platoon of Fausts.
“!!???” Stunned as the connection died, Faust looked up to meet Eva’s smirk of “Ha, your turn now.” “I—”
Life-or-death moment. Life-or-death. No emotions. No emotions.
Faust took several deep breaths, then whipped his head toward Ctharnid with a glare murderous enough to scream “Keep spectating, why don’t you!” outright: “Ode wants to detach his dream from the Phantasmal Dream Realm.”
“What?” Ctharnid echoed Faust’s shock. “Never heard of it. The Phantasmal Dream Realm’s never split off a chunk, not even that pack of moon-beasts on the moon that everyone hates.”
“But it’s never happened—not that it can’t,” Faust pounced on Ctharnid’s unusually hesitant tone. “You’re wavering… You want this to work too.”
Ctharnid’s ears flushed red. He looked reluctant to admit it, but finally muttered: “Of course… Feels like I’ve been stuck here a lifetime, barely able to lift a finger on anything. But this? Kicking a human turf out of the Phantasmal Dream Realm shouldn’t spark a war, right?”
Muttering self-persuasion under his breath, Ctharnid raised his gentleman’s cane and rapped the ground once before vanishing into the morning light.
At the same time, GORCC’s main force finally reached the dream realm. The moment Jack helped open the door linking the Phantasmal Dream Realm to Cthulhu’s dream, El’s eager head poked through first, belting out in broken-accented opera flair: “General, don’t panic! Your humble servant has arrived with a hundred thousand troops—mmph?!”
Faust swatted the Egyptian’s big head aside. “Perfect timing. Now take your hundred thousand and roll back—take these deadweights on the ship too. And it’s ‘this lowly general,’ not ‘humble servant.'”
“Why go back? Stay and help,” El shrugged it off, waving the team behind him to start hostage rescue. “And why not ‘humble servant’? ‘Lowly general’ sounds like no future at all.”
Faust had no patience for El’s banter. He finished the last strokes, stood, and beckoned Eva: “Let’s go. Who knows what that little punk’s dream realm looks like. What if it swallows us along with Cthulhu’s? The guy’s appetite let him devour an entire Dreamcatcher Town in three days—digestion so good he still looked half-starved after.”
No one raised objections to Faust’s call. His gut instincts were legendary in GORCC. If he thought Ode’s dream realm might share his boss’s infamous devouring prowess, best not to test it in a crisis.
The main force hustled their leaders back through the passage. El, on rear guard, glanced back at the dream realm’s clear, cloudless sky, hesitating—when a muffled rip, like tearing thick cotton, echoed from the distant horizon.
The bright sky tore open with a jagged gash. A sliver of the black-red Dream Beyond the Dream peeked through. War smoke, signal fires… and a massive eye peering in through the fissure.
The eye was grotesque: dull, lusterless orb in a shrunken, charred socket like a long-mummified corpse. Tar-like foul blood oozed endlessly from the corner, like tears that wouldn’t dry.
El’s heart skipped a beat. The next instant, two enormous hands—bandaged in runes—thrust from the fissure, lunging straight for him across the sky!!
“El! What are you dawdling for?!” From the passage, Faust yanked El’s collar just in time, hauling him inside.
Jack slammed the boundary door shut with a heavy thud, leaning back against it as he panted with lingering fear. Just then, he saw El slump to the ground, his face blank. After a long moment, El tremblingly touched the sockets of his eyes, then slowly lowered his head to stare at his own hands. It took several full seconds before he raised his head again, his gaze vacant and lost. “That was… Ode’s dream? That was… those were my eyes!! Those were my hands! But how could that be possible?! Those runes—those were sacrifice runes fueled by living humans. It takes thousands—no, tens of thousands of lives—to nurture a shadow of evil that massive with flesh and blood. How could I have done something like that?! Are you sure what Ode went through was really a time reversal, Faust? I can’t imagine that I—”
“Despair can drive anyone to anything,” Faust cut in coldly, interrupting El’s desperate denial of reality. “As for right now? We’d better pray your despair back then was thick enough to drag Cthulhu straight down to hell with you.”
“…” El shook his head helplessly, murmuring to himself. “Impossible… Despair harming a Great Old One? Then anyone could step onto the battlefield! What does human despair even mean to Cthulhu? A little spice? A passing whisper? How could something so fragile…”
—
“—hurt me?!”
Deep underwater, Cthulhu’s voice boomed like muffled thunder through the seawater. One of his massive tentacles lashed out from the darkness, crushing a swath of bony hands that had thrust up from R’lyeh’s foundations.
But in the next instant, the shattered hands reformed before the stunned and terrified stares of the surrounding Star Spawn. Amid a sky-darkening cacophony of shrill laughter, Ode’s crimson figure flickered like a specter from the southern end of the palace to the northern. He paused to lightly lick the blood and flesh from his fingertip, and the grand hall behind him—which had been packed with Star Spawn moments ago—was now nearly empty.
“…” Even Cthulhu froze in place after watching Ode devour his way through the palace in seconds, to say nothing of the Star Spawn whose kin had just been halved in an instant.
They recoiled in horror, but all they could hear from below the palace was the sound of rock being chiseled through by something unseen, followed by the mocking whispers rising from the corpses breaking through the soil:
‘Fodder delivery.’
‘Yeah, what were they thinking? A few months ago, Ode could have polished off an entire Deep Ones nest. What’s a few Star Spawn gonna change?’
‘Come on, you know it’s not entirely their fault. Blame that sneaky little brat Ode. He sliced up the Behemoth meat and held onto it without taking a bite. Who knew he could devour monsters? You think these poor saps were walking into a trap? They probably saw a lone human strolling in and figured Ode was the meal on legs.’
