"It's your fault for being so slow! You missed the best part!!"
"Those were the Fla-Gold Quartet... what happened? Were they already defeated?"
"Shh——"
Atop Babel.
The gods' assembly hall was packed to capacity. The great Divine Mirror broadcast live everything unfolding within the Pleasure Quarter at this very mont — every last thing happening inside that enormous "nightmare" that had swallowed the city was laid bare within its reflection.
And so it was that the assembled gods had witnessed that breathtaking scene just monts before.
The Freya Familia's Fla-Gold Quartet — brought low by a single pitch-black figure. And in the instant that entity appeared, even the gods themselves had been unable to prevent a single na from surfacing in their hearts unbidden —
[Black Night King].
"OHHHHHH — just who is this guy, he's so cool!!"
"Is it so child's Skill or Magic? No, wait — that is unmistakably Divine Power. How can a mortal be using it? Where is Ouranos? Soone make him co out and explain himself!!"
"Quiet, quiet — it's about to start."
Compared to the Fla-Gold Quartet's battle, what drew the gods' eyes now were the two remaining Lv.6 adventurers from the martial nation.
The Kali Familia's arrival in Orario was hardly a secret — mainly because they had made absolutely no effort to keep it one.
They had sailed into the port city on a grand ship and then proceeded to stir up trouble everywhere they went. Reportedly, several second-tier adventurers had nearly been dragged off by the Kali Familia won as "playthings" — if the Guild hadn't intervened, so might not have made it back at all. More than a few male gods had even gone to "experience" things firsthand, only to be found the next morning dumped by the roadside, utterly spent and hollow-eyed. So of those n had even been on the receiving end of contemptuous laughter from the Amazon warriors.
It had beco the city's biggest recent news.
Among those present now was Kali herself — the Goddess of Destruction. Dressed in traditional garb and wearing a white bone mask, the petite young-looking deity was lounging lazily to one side, watching the Divine Mirror's feed with obvious amusent.
What an unexpected bonus.
She had only sent Bache and Argana to deal with the Gulliver Brothers — and then sothing even more interesting had shown up.
[Black Night King].
How very entertaining.
Kali humd quietly to herself. As previously stated, the Kali Familia had co to Orario for very simple reasons. Beyond the benefits Ishtar had promised them, their purpose was pure and unadulterated: they wanted to fight. They wanted to fight until they were thoroughly, deeply, completely satisfied. Even their desire to obtain [First-Class Armants] and cursed weapons was ultimately in service of that sa goal — to be able to fight even more gloriously once they returned ho. The martial nation simply couldn't produce such things on its own.
Kali was also curious. What kind of powerhouses lurked in this city, exactly?
The creature in the mirror didn't look anything like an adventurer, whatever it was. But no matter — as long as it could provide an interesting fight, that was enough.
So then — would it be Bache or Argana who went first...
It was decided almost by instinct.
Neither of them had ever once considered the idea of two Lv.6 adventurers joining forces against a single opponent. Unless the enemy was Ottar — the city's absolute strongest — no one else deserved that honor.
This wasn't just Kali's thinking. The majority of gods present felt exactly the sa way. Even Bache and Argana themselves shared that conviction.
Which was precisely why, when the Fla-Gold Quartet had been fighting the Black Night King just now, neither of them had lifted a finger to interfere.
But now, the choice was no longer theirs to make.
An incomparably massive greatsword swept down from above, its swing threatening to cleave the very vault of the sky in two. The blade's length shimred with dazzling starlight, blindingly brilliant in that single instant.
Unlike the Fla-Gold Quartet with their lavish equipnt, the two Amazon won wore neither armor nor carried conventional weapons. This was especially true of Argana.
As the close-combat vanguard, her fighting thod was the most primal imaginable: bare fists and bare feet.
The instant she moved, the lithe woman was like a dense, suffocating whirlwind given form. Not a Skill. Not Magic. This was sothing born entirely from the body itself — pure, absolute speed and power compressed to their ultimate limit.
Swift. Heavy. Stripped of all ornantation. And yet carrying a destructive force that beggared belief.
The earth beneath her shattered in an instant.
The power erupting from that beautiful woman's body was simply inconceivable.
But what was even more incomprehensible — to gods and mortals alike — was that a blow of that magnitude, landing squarely on the [Black Night King]'s body, produced absolutely no reaction whatsoever.
This had nothing to do with pain.
It simply did nothing at all.
A Lv.6 adventurer could land a single strike powerful enough to shatter Orario's soaring city walls. Demolishing an entire building with her bare hands was trivial by comparison.
Once upon a ti, during the Great Feud, the Dark Familia's officers — first-tier adventurers all — had routinely leveled entire city blocks. The courtyard around them right now was proof enough of that principle: not a single inch of the garden remained intact, the ground cracked and sunken and buckled into a cratered, uneven ruin.
Yet a force capable of doing all of that — landing full and clean and without reservation on the Black Night King — still did nothing.
Argana stared.
The feedback traveling back through her fists and feet was unlike anything she had ever felt before. She couldn't even describe it — it wasn't the sensation of striking sothing hard, nor sothing soft.
It was void.
A profoundly, strangely empty void.
The physical contact was real — she could feel it — and yet she received nothing back. No resistance. No recoil. Nothing.
Fortunately, as an Amazon warrior forged in the crucible of countless life-and-death battles, Argana was not the kind of fighter who would freeze simply because sothing confused her. In battle, a single mont's distraction was enough to get you killed.
So she didn't stop. Whatever her fists and feet were touching — she didn't care. What followed was a storm of savage, relentless strikes, a torrential downpour of violence that did not pause for a single breath.
The very air began to vibrate, like the skin of a drum struck over and over.
In that mont, even Isagi — far away beyond the city — felt a strange, inexplicable resonance between the Amazons. Why does this woman's fighting style look so much like Tiona's?
At the sa ti, Bache entered the fray.
She had no choice — the Black Night King had been attacking her too. That trendous greatsword kept both her and Argana locked in its sights simultaneously, and made simply standing on the sidelines to watch an impossibility.
"Di Ashura — bite him to death."
The ultra-short chant was complete in an instant.
Using the language of the martial nation, Bache called forth a virulent purple poison that coated her entire body in a heartbeat. It was an additive Magic of the poison attribute. The twin daggers in her hands beca viper's fangs trailing thick, cold violet light — and in the span of a blink, she was already in front of her opponent.
Both Amazon warriors were tall won. But the Black Night King lood even larger — nearly three ters in height, and seemingly still growing, still shifting, still changing with every passing mont of the fight.
For instance.
Her attacks were already doing nothing whatsoever, and now the thing had grown an extra pair of arms.
Beyond the greatsword it had arrived with, it now also held a long katana, a short sword, a spear — and even, of all things, a magic staff.
There was no chant. No sound at all.
The azure Glintstone Magic simply materialized from nothing, scattering outward like a teor shower. Bache barely had ti to dodge even one — and that single small impact carried force enough to send her flying.
anwhile.
Argana had finally arrived at a conclusion: the opponent was far, far stronger than her.
And so at last she made the decision to use her Magic — an activation-type curse that required no chanting.
She closed on Bache in an instant, and her partner, in perfect, wordless coordination, extended her arm. Argana bit down without hesitation.
She drank deeply and greedily.
Argana's dark, beautiful face — now streaked and sared with the tallic reek of blood — twisted into sothing fearso and savage.
[Dark Goddess].
By drinking the blood of an adventurer who bore a Falna, she dramatically amplified her own Attack Power and destructive force. The price: her [Endurance] stat simultaneously dropped by an equally dramatic margin.
Her eyes had gone entirely crimson. She didn't bother wiping the blood from her lips. With a roar, she hurled herself back at the Black Night King.
The piercing crack of that impact — that single, all-out strike — was so violent that even the gods watching from Babel felt the tremor pass through the entire city.
A Lv.7 adventurer could land a blow capable of leveling a fortress and cleaving mountains in two. A Lv.6 could not quite reach that threshold.
But at this mont, Argana's full-power strike ca desperately, infinitely close.
And yet it still did nothing.
Because a nightmare cannot be defeated.
This was not Isagi's own strength at work — it was Divine Power. An absolute, irresistible force that the Lower World simply had no answer for. Like the Goddess of Beauty's charm, or the God of Wine's divine vintage — its very existence was invincibility itself.
Only Divine Power could defeat Divine Power.
And so Argana and Bache would ultimately fall. Both of them. This battle's outco had been written from the very first mont — the only variable was how long they would struggle before the end.
— — —
As the gods' collective gaze remained completely transfixed by the spectacle in the mirror.
At this mont.
No one noticed.
The true core of this nightmare's descent — the nightmare that had been written for her specifically — was Goddess Ishtar.
[Haruhi's departure was the Goddess's nightmare].
Because the fox-girl was the linchpin of everything. Only with Haruhi present could her Magic be used to elevate the Familia's vast numbers of Lv.4 adventurers to Lv.5, enabling them to contend with Freya's Lv.6 officers.
And simultaneously, with Bache and Argana boosted to Lv.7, they would then face the city's absolute strongest, Ottar.
That was the theoretical path to victory. Which ant Haruhi was irreplaceable. And if her Magic wasn't powerful enough to sustain such a wide-scale level-up operation, then the plan was to find a way to make Haruhi herself stronger — or...
Ishtar had heard a certain rumor. In the distant Far East, fox-folk were an exceptionally rare sub-species among Demi-humans. Those among them who possessed a talent for Magic were known locally as sorcerers — practitioners of a mystical arts tradition quite distinct from the continent's common understanding of spellcraft.
And it was said.
A ritual existed in the Far East. By making use of a rare and precious treasure known as the [Sessho-seki], one could distill a single fox-folk sorcerer's Magic and bind it into an object — like a magic spell sealed within a Magic Sword.
Once the ritual was complete, the Sessho-seki itself would absorb the Magic from the fox sorcerer's body. And thereafter, anyone who held that stone — even a tiny fragnt of it — could invoke that Magic at will.
The price, of course, was that the fox sorcerer at the ritual's core would die.
Ishtar considered it worthwhile.
She had even begun quietly searching for a Sessho-seki.
This was, in the end, exactly why Aisha — the woman who actually ran the Familia day to day — had concluded that her Goddess had lost her mind entirely.
And now, seated in the great hall of the Familia's headquarters, reclining upon a plush bed draped in imported silk from distant lands, the Goddess of Beauty had slipped into an even deeper stratum of nightmare.
Haruhi's disappearance was rely the beginning.
For Ishtar, the most terrifying nightmare of all was, at its core, simply: failure.
Allying with the Dark Familia without hesitation. Sacrificing the lives of her Familia's children without blinking. Pouring every resource she possessed into years of ticulous preparation — only for it all to crumble into ruin at the end. That was the nightmare Ishtar could not accept under any circumstances.
And yet, pitifully, this was not only a dream. It would also be reality.
On her silk bed, the Goddess lived it again and again.
No matter how many tis she launched an assault on the Freya Familia in her dream, they were crushed effortlessly every single ti.
Ishtar dread.
She dread of Argana and Bache — who had taken centuries to claw their way to Lv.7 — being swatted aside by Ottar without effort. She dread of her Familia's captain Phryne, elevated to Lv.6, being kicked flying by Ottar with a single casual foot. She dread of her level-boosted Familia mbers being suppressed and dismantled by the Goddess of Beauty's warriors with easy contempt.
Defeated by Hedin. By Hogni. By Allen —
The officers of the Freya Familia cycled through her nightmares in endless variation, destroying her carefully cultivated warriors over and over and over again.
And more than once.
Ishtar dread of flas consuming her [Pleasure Palace of the Goddess], of total and absolute defeat. And through it all, Freya remained above it — watching her from on high, serene and untouchable. Even Tammuz, her most devoted and devoted guardian, was stolen by Freya's charm and beca her thrall without resistance.
And so, in the end, it was perfectly simple.
She lost everything. She fell from her tower. She was sent back to Heaven.
No one watched.
The Goddess's nightmares repeated in endless cycles, endlessly changing their texture and form, but the ending was always, always the sa — she would be left with nothing.
In those nightmares, there was not even the dignity of stubborn defiance. No sharp retort. No proud refusal. Ishtar had fallen completely inside, and in the end —
The night passed.
With the rising of the morning sun, the nightmare dissolved without a trace, leaving no visible wound upon the world.
For most of the Pleasure Quarter's inhabitants, the night had amounted to nothing more than a terrifying dream — one in which they or their clients had found themselves unexpectedly and humiliatingly unable to perform. A nightmare, no doubt, but a forgettable one.
For a select few, however, last night had been sothing else entirely.
For instance — from that day forward, no one ever found [Man-Slayer] Phryne Jamil again, that particular urban legend of the Pleasure Quarter. It was only said that sowhere in a certain pitch-black alley, people would occasionally hear what sounded like the terrible, grating wail and sobbing of a toad — an ugly cry that set the teeth on edge.
This gave the Pleasure Quarter yet another new urban legend to whisper about.
Beyond that, if one had to na a truly significant event — it was this: the Ishtar Familia disbanded.
The Goddess departed the city in silence. She didn't even take her dependents with her.
The forr mbers of the Ishtar Familia mostly transferred their allegiance quickly to the other goddesses who managed the Pleasure Quarter — Hathor and others — and their Familias.
The city's residents had no idea whatsoever what had actually happened. How had one of Orario's strongest mid-tier Familias simply... collapsed overnight, just like that?
Only the gods knew.
All of it was because of the —
[Black Night King].
____
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