The rescue team rolled out of the rift in the nightmare world.
More accurately, they were forcibly dragged out by Merlin.
Metatron was the last to escape, and just as the entrance to the Nightmare World closed behind him, a phantom of Belphegor struck him with a claw attack.
Green Hellfire grazed her wingtips, and a few white feathers burned to ashes in mid-air.
The crack has closed.
The group fell onto the grass in the surface of the dream world.
Outside Trifas. Blue sky and white clouds. A gentle breeze.
It was as peaceful as if nothing had happened.
Merlin knelt on one knee, sweat dripping from her forehead and down her chin, her hands still trembling.
The tip of the Magecraft wand has developed fine cracks.
"I did open a door to a deeper level."
Ritsuka Fujimaru looked at her.
"But that door doesn't lead to where Mukuro Hoshimiya is."
I'm sure.
"What's behind that door has absolutely nothing to do with her. It's another dimension."
She paused, a rare unease appearing in her rose-red eyes.
"White. Nothing there. Like a blank sheet of paper."
My nightmare instincts are screaming at me not to go in.
"If you go into that place, you might not come out as the same person you were before."
A world of blank paper.
A space in the dream world used to correct the personality of sinners.
That door leads to that place, not to the core of the dream where Mukuro Hoshimiya resides.
The operation failed.
Astolfo landed on the ground on his Hippogriff, unusually silent.
Atalanta's ears drooped.
No one spoke.
Because nobody knows what to do next.
The nightmare world is the only path to the deeper levels.
But that path did not lead to Mukuro Hoshimiya.
It's like they found a road, walked to its end, and discovered that the road didn't lead to their destination at all.
"Let's all head back to town first."
Ritsuka Fujimaru finally broke the silence.
"Standing here doing nothing will only lead to no solution. Let's go back and rest for a bit, then think of other options."
The real world.
If it can still be called the "real world".
Earth's Greater Grail is nearing depletion.
The land of Romania is no longer cracked.
Because there's nothing left to crack.
The soil turned into a grayish-white powder, and the wind would blow up clouds of dust.
The forest is now just bare, withered remains, resembling a giant group of tombstones.
The ocean level has dropped several meters, and the exposed seabed is devoid of any life.
Even the air felt thin.
Earth is not enough.
Belphegor's consciousness transcended Earth's atmosphere, crossed the Moon's orbit, and extended into even more distant places.
Mars.
Venus.
Jupiter.
Saturn.
Every celestial body in the solar system with a planetary will sensed that Greed tentacle reaching towards it.
They reacted.
The will of the planets drove their strongest life forms, Ultimate ONE.
Jupiter was the first to strike.
A black, humanoid giant, tens of kilometers tall, rose from Jupiter's atmosphere, its body, formed from condensed black photon gas, blocking out the sunlight from Jupiter's orbit.
At its core, a sun-like object is radiating light at full power, its blazing white rays leaking from the gaps in its black body, like a star shrouded in darkness.
The black giant charged toward Belphegor.
The photon gas expands, its volume continuously increasing, attempting to crush the intruder entrenched in the skies above the Earth with its raw mass and heat.
Belphegor didn't even open his eyes.
Chains extended from the body in its dormant state, and green Hellfire spread along the chains, burning through the outer layer of black photon gas.
UO cannot be killed by conventional means.
But the Hellfire don't burn through matter; they burn through space itself.
The spatial structure upon which the black photon gas depended was torn apart, and the gas lost its foundation for condensation, beginning to dissipate in all directions.
The core of the simulated sun has been exposed.
Belphegor opened his mouth.
All the energy contained in that simulated sun was completely drained within a few seconds.
UO's soul was torn from his collapsing body and sucked into the dream world along an unseen path.
Saturn followed closely behind.
A cruciform mineral life form, three kilometers long, rises from Saturn's rings.
The glowing mineral surface began releasing a large number of electromagnetic shock projectiles, which fired in dense cross-shaped beams toward Belphegor.
The beam of light pierced through space, traversed the distances between planets, and struck Belphegor's body precisely.
It had no effect.
The cross-shaped electromagnetic impact projectile struck Belphegor's coiled chains like a stone hitting an iron wall.
Belphegor's chains extend towards Saturn.
Hundreds of millions of kilometers are meaningless in the face of chains.
The green Hellfire, carrying chains, tore through the space near Saturn's orbit, splitting UO's mineral body in two.
Glowing mineral fragments drifted slowly through space.
Energy is extracted. Souls are absorbed.
Venus. The Heaven's Corpse.
A giant carnivorous parasitic plant, measuring one kilometer in length, burst forth from the acidic atmosphere of Venus, releasing billions of angel-shaped predatory spores.
It swept towards Earth like a white blizzard.
The number of spores is enough to cover the entire planet.
But Belphegor only opened his mouth.
All the angel spores, billions of them, were pulled into that mouth by an irresistible suction force the instant they approached Earth's orbit.
Then comes the main body.
Hellfire through the spatial barrier between Venus and Earth, and chains, like predatory tongues, entangled the enormous plant of the Heaven's Corpse, uprooting it and dragging it over.
Energy was drained. Souls were absorbed.
The remaining UOs were not spared either.
UO of Mars. UO of Uranus. UO of Neptune.
Even the Pluto UO, which arrived last and whose body was filled with bloody fluid, lasted less than ten seconds in front of Belphegor.
All of UO's energy was completely extracted.
All the souls of UO were sucked into the dream world.
They became the pillars of the dream world.
Planetary-level souls are woven into the underlying structure of dreams, serving as the skeleton that maintains this global dream world.
With the UO soul as its support, the dream world became more stable, more perfect, and more eternal.
In the solar system, the only thing that still has any value is the star, the Sun.
The end of Belphegor's chain stretched towards the sun.
A green flame stretched from Earth to the Sun's corona.
Start the extraction.
The sun's energy is virtually inexhaustible.
With the star's immense energy reserves, this dream can be sustained for billions more years.
But billions of years is not eternal.
This was not the outcome Belphegor desired.
The Sloth Lord desires a dream from which he will never have to wake.
forever.
Not billions of years.
It is eternity in the truest sense.
Therefore, Belphegor's subconscious began to extend outward.
The weak points in the space were burned through one by one by the Hellfire.
A crack appeared.
One, two, ten, one hundred.
On the other side of each crack lies a different parallel world.
Different versions of Earth. Different possibilities for Human History.