What should have been just another fight had turned into an unwinnable battle against an entire forest.
Tree after tree awakened with malicious awareness. Jagged maws split open as trunks tore themselves from the soil, just enough to walk and devour the humans trespassing through their territory.
'This makes no sense at all!'
Giovanni was equally terrified and frozen in disbelief.
He had felt it in real time.
Plants transformed into countless nightmare creatures, marching toward him to crush him to pieces.
Eric didn't allow himself to hesitate, charging at the ivory trunk like a raging buffalo. His athletic, enhanced body outpaced the slow, heavy creature by a considerable margin.
The aberration tried to push him back, firing a burst of boiling blood from inside its mouth, which seemed to be filled to the brim with the crimson liquid.
The heavy, broad shield completely blocked the powerful jet, becoming stained a deep shade of red.
The impact splattered across the metal with a hiss and a sour stench rose instantly.
The attack itself, however, was the least of their problems. The liquid didn't behave like normal blood, but like a sinister acid.
Even an Awakened Memory was melting. Its surface dissolved slowly, consuming the metal with voracity and eating deeper into the thick, dense layers of the equipment.
"Perish."
Eric's cold sentence was absolute. His body spun, delivering a devastating blow into the monster's open trunk.
Its maw was torn apart, and the creature, split in two, went still, seemingly dead.
The enemy's defeat brought no sense of relief or pride. It merely allowed Shelly and Eric to grasp the scale of the danger they were facing now.
From all sides, more than twenty awakened trees advanced to join the fight.
They moved in uneven rhythms, roots dragging through the soil like nails over stone. Every step made the ground vibrate faintly.
Shelly simply froze, staring at a legion of massive Awakened creatures, capable of melting her and tearing her apart with a mere touch.
"W-What the hell do we do?!" Shelly shouted, anxious.
Gladius moved in front of her, serving as a living shield as he raised enormous earthen spikes beneath the creatures, trying to injure them or slow their advance.
"We fight. Raise as many rock walls as you can, don't let them have an angle to shoot their blood," Eric replied, tense.
The Legacy understood just how dangerous and likely suicidal a direct battle against dozens of Awakened nightmare creatures was. But it wasn't as if they had another choice.
Running blindly through the forest would force them to cross the vampiric woods without protection or planning, which would kill them either way.
The method they had been using until now, creating packed dirt roads, was far too slow for a chase. They would be forced to fight one way or another.
'It won't be enough...'
The Mimic, restrained by the combined effort of Gaius and Giovanni, broke free, crashing down on the group in a frenzy.
Eric's shield collided with its branches, protecting the other Sleepers from its fury, but the opponent wasn't alone.
Four more maw-trees opened their maws, firing pressurized jets of acidic blood. Giovanni raised a long wall of stone with the golem's help to protect himself, while Shelly slipped out of the trajectory with agile ease.
"Gaius, take care of them!"
The Echo charged through the earthen barrier, reshaping its body to look as tall and threatening as possible, drawing the attention of two ivory trunks.
Even though it was only a Dormant creature, its immunity to physical attacks made it the perfect distraction while the two youths dealt with the other two ferocious monsters.
Crash!
Ivory branches moved one after another in a savage sequence of strikes.
Long and heavy, yet flexible like whips, Giovanni felt as though he was reliving the nightmare of facing Beako and his dozens of attacks all over again.
Except this time, getting hit meant real danger. One misstep, and he would be dead.
The shadow of the branch tips tore through the air in a succession of diagonal and horizontal lashes, trying to split the boy in half or at least pulverize the bones in his ribcage.
Practice allowed him to dodge with grace, but retreating only meant drawing closer to the rest of the grove.
Within seconds, Giovanni found himself forced to evade the fury of two ivory giants trying to tear him apart from both directions.
The air around him felt crowded, whipped by branch strikes that stole his breath even when they missed, each lash leaving a ghost of pressure against his ribs.
'Think, think!' he urged himself, searching desperately for a solution.
Not far away, Shelly was struggling just as much, if not more. Dodging wasn't the problem, but you didn't win a fight by only running.
The sharp stone knife Gaius had created wasn't able to pierce the reinforced trunk of the enemies, only chipping its blade on impact.
Worse still, every time the Mimic vomited its acidic blood, a new deadly puddle formed, ready for her to step into.
The puddles didn't just spread, they crept. Their edges shimmered with a thin, oily sheen.
Shelly had to stay constantly aware of her acceleration and where she would land after each use of her Aspect.
A single miscalculation, one poorly placed foot, and she would end up with a melted leg.
Meanwhile, Eric seemed to be on an unstoppable streak of kills, blocking the branches with his shield and dodging the blood jets to minimize the shield's degradation as much as possible.
The Mimic was about to fire another jet when an enormous weight crashed down upon its body. The space around it trembled, affected by intensified gravity, leaving only Eric himself unaffected.
Boom!
The warhammer connected with the trunk of the briefly stunned creature, shattering ivory and reaping yet another beast.
In its place, three more Mimics stepped forward, each delivering a crushing attack simultaneously.
Surrounded, Eric focused on a point behind him and created a powerful gravitational pull.
His dodge accelerated violently, dragged by the warped region of space.
"Argh!" Giovanni grunted, pain radiating from his shoulder. The branch, even grazing him, carried inhuman force.
At that point, simply using his legs to dodge had become insufficient.
So a wave of earth shifted beneath the boy's feet, accelerating his movements in the desired direction and allowing him to make sharp turns when necessary, needing only to twist the ground he was surfing on rather than his own body.
The mud obeyed like muscle, rolling under him in a tight surge, slick and cold.
In his mind, every memory he had lived since they arrived in that forest played like a film, reviewing everything he knew.
The creatures, the vegetation, the terrain, the lake… the lake?
His eyes gleamed with a dangerous light, the light of an idea.
"Everyone, regroup!" he shouted, surfing across the mud at high speed toward Shelly and Eric, dragging a pack of Mimics behind him.
The insane command made the other two Sleepers show surprise and confusion, but Giovanni didn't stop.
The moment he reached his companions, the boy slammed his hands into the ground. It was all or nothing.
Activating his transmutation at maximum output, the environment around them began to transform violently in every direction.
The effort put insane stress on Giovanni's mind, and he felt his brain burning... meter by meter, the dry area became a complete swamp.
"Are you serious?!" Shelly exclaimed, disgusted as she felt her feet sink into the soaked earth.
Giovanni continued turning soil into waterlogged sludge until the ground itself became a flooded trap. He transmuted like a madman, flooding a wide zone in the middle of the Ivory Forest. To Eric and Shelly's surprise… the monsters that had been charging wildly froze, hesitant to proceed.
As for those too close to avoid the region, something bizarre began to happen.
The vampiric trunks trembled erratically, and within seconds, water began flooding their maws in a violent stream.
Giovanni remembered that there had been no vegetation near the lake's water, even without knowing the exact reason… so he simply decided to bet everything on it.
The nightmare-creatures' roots, designed to drink spilled blood and feed the plants, couldn't distinguish their prey's fluid from pure water… and so they kept sucking without pause.
The three watched in real time as the water diluted the blood and overflowed from the maws, leaving them incapacitated.
"Good work…" Eric briefly praised the ally's strategic move and used the window of opportunity to cleave the helpless creatures in half.
The five Mimics paralyzed by drowning were split open by the giant's merciless attacks.
The move had been clever, but a mere trick wouldn't decide the outcome of the battle.
There were still two dozen Mimics surrounding the flooded area, quickly adapting to the obstacle.
Giving up on advancing, the trees formed a living wall along the edges of the miniature swamp and opened their mouths, raining acidic blood endlessly onto their prey.
Gaius and Giovanni raised a dome of stone, covering the group in every direction. The earth exploded with every impact, threatening to collapse.
"The defense won't hold!" Giovanni shouted through clenched teeth.
"Just keep them distracted… I'll handle the rest."
Eric murmured, beginning to summon a Memory in midair.
Wanting to free one hand, he threw the heavy shield toward Shelly so she could hold it for a moment.
Then a medieval helmet, forged from black steel and intimidating in appearance, materialized in the palm of his hand.
"What… are you going to do?" Giovanni asked, sweating cold as he struggled to maintain the defenses.
Eric fitted the helmet on, allowing the two to see a violet glow leak from the visor for a brief instant.
"Try to keep up."
The giant seemed to dematerialize in midair, becoming undetectable. Giovanni, even with his seismic sense, could only faintly feel the presence of something beside him.
Eric took the shield back and burst out of the cover, sacrificing the equipment to reach the living wall of trunks safely.
The collision between the two giants was brutal. The invisible hammer split the creature apart and opened a path for the Legacy to escape the encirclement.
From that point on, the invisible opponent became a deadly threat to the Mimics linked together.
The aberrations tried to disconnect, but Giovanni, Shelly, and Gaius acted at that moment.
The dome that had been defensive opened up and became a wave of sludge in every direction, crashing into the wall. The water carried with the flow seeped into the trees' roots, slowing their movements.
Meanwhile, Eric's undetectable threat crushed everything in its path like a train, splitting trunks open one after another with their backs exposed.
The battle that had once seemed completely lost shifted entirely in the Sleepers' favor, as they exploited their enemies' weaknesses to the limit.
Giovanni couldn't hold back his admiration for his classmate's raw power. Threats fell one by one, and Giovanni could only watch, unable to help finish off the Mimics.
Shelly, too, seeing the boy's power firsthand, couldn't understand how Giovanni had ended up at the top of the list.
Compared to the knight, the dark-haired boy was completely ordinary.
Crack!
Space warped, pulling the hammer with growing speed toward the last Mimic, driving into its mouth in a lethal blow.
"Ah… ah… ah…"
Giovanni felt his knees give out, unable to stay standing. Even with almost no injuries, he couldn't breathe… he had pushed his Aspect to the limit and was paying the price.
His lungs refused to fill properly, each breath shallow and useless. His vision narrowed at the edges, and the world pulsed in time with his heartbeat, too loud, too close, too fast.
"What were those things?..." Shelly, now feeling safer after killing the threats, was shaken by what had happened.
"Doesn't matter now. We need immediate shelter. We'll collect the Soul Shards later."
Eric removed the helmet. He didn't allow himself to show exhaustion… but he had already been fighting nonstop for hours. That last battle had been the cherry on top.
"Gaius, open a hole for us!"
Shelly walked over to Giovanni, grabbed him by the arms, and dragged him toward the hiding place the golem was opening.
Giovanni, feverish-minded, let himself be moved without resistance… but his attention was on something else.
For a moment, he swore he heard a melody…
"Is… someone singing…?"
"What the hell are you talking about?!" Shelly, already stressed, just tossed the boy into the hole and climbed in right after him.
On a blood-soaked battlefield, the second day in the Dream Realm came to an end.