That monster—Lily certainly hadn't forgotten the thing. She had captured it just a few days after leading her team into the Black Forest. It was a disgusting thing that could parasitize its victims' mental worlds, toy with their minds by manipulating dreams and illusions, and looked like a mass of black flesh constantly giving off smoke. Kalasios had named it "Shadow of the Nightmare," but Lily was more used to calling it Smoked Big Meat. Either name meant the same thing. It was a disgusting, stubborn, miserable thing, and if she hadn't planned to keep it around to claim credit with the Landlord, Miss Alpha Wolf would have torn it apart and fed it to the wolves long ago.
Because the monster possessed dangerous abilities that were difficult to deal with, its mental parasitism was practically an unavoidable instant-kill skill against anyone weak-willed. As a result, Lily had kept it under strict guard for days and established a thorough monitoring procedure: bears that didn't dream would guard the monster, ensuring twenty-four hours a day that it remained shackled by Imprisonment Stones; ordinary soldiers were forbidden from approaching the cage when mentally exhausted; and whenever the monster's condition needed to be inspected, three groups had to be present at the same time. The first group would approach the cage, the second would observe the first group from farther away, and the third, armed with weapons, would monitor both groups from even farther away. If anything went wrong, they were to kill it on the spot. These rigorous procedures had rendered the monster's power useless and kept it safely imprisoned until today.
But something seemed to have gone wrong this time?
Lily sprang to her feet. "What happened?"
Duke Ulysses, who was standing nearby, also looked tense. Over the past two days,