Evangeline leaned her head against Damon’s shoulder. The motion was slow, almost hesitant, as if she were testing whether she was allowed to be this close. A quiet thought crossed her mind whether she should have just said yes, even if he’d only been joking.
She bit her lip, her gaze drifting downward to the hand she was holding. Her fingers tightened slightly, then loosened again. She hesitated.
But she didn’t really have a choice.
She knew how her friend Sylvia felt about Damon. The elf girl might look harmless on the surface, all smiles and softness, but Evangeline knew better. Sylvia was sharp, possessive in quiet ways, and deeply invested.
Still... right now, with just the two of them like this, Evangeline didn’t quite mind.
"Hey..." she finally spoke, her voice low.
"Hmmm?" Damon answered, eyes still closed, feeling the city slowly drain his mana like a parasite gnawing at his reserves.
"Do you think we’ll ever go back ho?"
Evangeline voiced the worry for the first ti. Maybe because it was Damon, she allowed herself to sound uncertain, allowed herself to sound afraid.
"Why not?" Damon replied casually. "I already have a plan. We just need to kill a god and go ho through his fancy magical gate."
Evangeline shifted slightly, her hair slipping loose and brushing against his shoulder.
"But what if we just end up in a past version of our world?" she asked quietly. "What if we never wake from this dream?"
Damon frowned, slowly this ti.
"A dream?"
His tone wasn’t dismissive, it was inquisitive. Evangeline knew him well enough to hear the difference.
"Yes," she replied. "This is the nightmare of soone called Lazarak. There was a voice when we ca here..." She paused, recalling it clearly. "Victory is an endless nightmare, and defeat is the mont of wake."
She rested her chin on his shoulder, not caring that n and won weren’t supposed to be this close. It was cold in the city, and this warmth mattered more than rules.
"There’s also a reward," she continued. "Those who survive to the very end will be given the boon of a fourth-class advancent."
Damon turned his head toward her, their noses nearly touching now. His frown deepened.
The Nightmare of Lazarak.
He knew that na. He knew where Lazarak was supposed to be. He also rembered the system ssage, it had said the sa thing.
’Victory is an endless nightmare.’
That phrase... it was the work of the Unknown God. The sa being who had dragged them here through a nightmare, who had devoured the dungeon gate itself using the nightmare.
Then this could very well be a—
"Nightmare," Damon muttered.
But what he hadn’t heard before was the boon. The promise of rising to the fourth class simply by surviving.
Evangeline had a point.
If this wasn’t the past, but a dream, artificially constructed, then...
Damon shook his head.
The clues were there. But when dealing with the Unknown God, even a dream could be reality. This was a god who could fold the entire omniverse if he felt like it.
Is that why he ca personally?
He had used the body of that priestess from the snake temple, it had to an sothing.
Damon stood up abruptly.
The question was simple.
Was this the past?
Or was it a world deliberately designed by a true god?
"You are dreaming the Nightmare of Lazarak," Damon muttered.
"You are..... not Lazarak is..." He stopped himself, brows furrowing. Think. Lazarak in the real world was dead, he had to be. Damon had found the tomb of the lesser gods Lazarak had created. The Goddess wouldn’t give him a second chance to disrupt her order.
So Lazarak must have already been destroyed.
Which ant—
The ones dreaming right now... were all of them.
"How do we wake up," Damon murmured, "from a bad dream?"
Evangeline narrowed her eyes. She could see it now, Damon was deep in thought, far deeper than he let on.
"We can’t die here," she whispered. "If we do... I have a feeling we truly die."
He nodded slowly.
"Yes. I’m aware of that. The nuance isn’t lost on ." He exhaled. "But at the sa ti... the Unknown God loves riddles. ’Victory is an endless nightmare.’"
He turned to face her fully.
"Does that an if we win... we never wake up?"
She furrowed her brows.
"But we also can’t choose defeat as the mont of waking," she said slowly, "because if we’re defeated... we die."
Her hair fluttered softly in the night wind.
"We’re trapped in a paradox. If we win, we lose. If we lose, we die." Her voice hardened slightly. "As expected of the god of the demon race. He really is a sinister being."
Damon took a deep breath and shook his head.
"That’s true. But for now, we need to find the others, including the demons." His eyes sharpened. "My guess is they’re sowhere in the inner city due to their power. We’ll need people like Sylvia, Lilith, Renata... and whatever talents the demons bring."
He clenched his fist.
"If this is the Nightmare of Lazarak," he said coldly, "then so be it. Let see what horror Lazarak faced in the past."
From his tone, Evangeline could tell, he knew sothing about Lazarak.
"Who even is this Lazarak anyway?" she asked carefully.
"Lazarak is a minor god of darkness, peace, serenity, and repose," Damon replied. "Though he often leaves out the latter."
He continued calmly.
"He is the first entity that existed in Aetherus, and the older brother of Aetherus."
She opened her mouth to ask, but he raised a hand to stop her.
"Yes. Aetherus is actually a person. Or rather... a god. The planet itself. The god of light, life, and war."
He paced slowly as he spoke.
"For a ti, everything was in order. War spread across the world, and lesser gods were worshipped on altars of war. Until Lazarak, the god of peace rebelled."
His voice darkened.
"The rebellion failed. Everything changed. Lazarak was imprisoned in this world for thousands of years, buried in the deepest layers of the imaginary prison—Eidolon."
Damon crossed his arms.
"Eventually, I imagine he escaped. He brought an end to the lesser gods. That marked the end of the Zero Epoch. And in doing so, he introduced the Unknown God to this world."
He sighed.
"Faith in the Unknown God only truly began in the First Epoch, thanks to Mugu the Wicked Prophet. The first demon. He planted the seeds of the demon race, which Ashcroft later cultivated into a powerful empire in the Second Epoch, before the Goddess destroyed him."
He paused, finally.
"I imagine we’re at the crossroads of history," Damon said quietly. "Watching—or living—the mont Lazarak’s final rebellion begins."
His expression softened, tinged with sothing like sadness.
"The last act of his tale."
Evangeline bit her lip.
"If only we knew where Lazarak was," she murmured. "We could stop him."
Damon lifted an eyebrow.
"Stop him?" he echoed. "Why would we do that?"
Evangeline raised an eyebrow in return.
"You know where he is."
Damon scratched the back of his head.
"Well... we were sort of cellmates in Eidolon."
Evangeline’s eyes widened.
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