Something was drawing near.
Closer and closer...
Rhein could sense the unrest in the darkness rushing toward him at a swift pace.
When the outline of something roughly three meters tall gradually emerged from the darkness, Rhein's gaze slowly hardened.
"Ifige?!" Rhein's low cry also drew Sanders' attention.
There, in the darkness, a Demonic Beast that looked as though it had been piled together from layers of fat appeared before Sanders. It was still a stitched corpse demon, only far fatter than the previous one, its flesh stacked layer upon layer. Greenish grease seeped from its stitches, giving off a suffocatingly foul stench.
They had encountered stitched corpse demons once before, so seeing another seemed perfectly normal, even if this one was more massive than the last. But what truly shocked Rhein and Sanders was that a human head had been embedded in this stitched corpse demon's navel.
This human's eyes were tightly shut. Though his face bore numerous stitch marks as well, they could vaguely make out that he had once been a handsome man.
Moreover, both Rhein and Sanders recognized who this human was.
Ifige, the genius wizard from Deep Sea Song. Two months ago, he had unfortunately fallen within the ruins and never emerged again.
They had imagined that Ifige might have been controlled by a creature of the Nightmare Realm, much like the humans of Sleepless City back then, possessed by parasites and reduced to clowns who knew only how to dance to the tune of Nightmare Realm creatures.
If he had merely been possessed by a parasite, there might still have been a chance to save him. Yet they had never expected Ifige to end up like this, becoming a part of a stitched corpse demon.
Sanders had interacted with Ifige before. Though the man