The Slumber Trap
Moonlight filtered softly between the countless elevated highways crisscrossing the night sky. Beneath it, a single shadow darted swiftly between the buildings. I have to get out of this city. Soon the Absolute Being would descend upon this world. Whether he was the leader of Immortal, the King of the Dead, or the Heavenly Demon Cult's founder, it made no difference. No matter what infamy a person once commanded, before an Absolute Being they were nothing but a pathetic novice. Even the name "Heavenly Demon," which once made children in the Fan Empire tremble, would be reduced to a mere joke.
The one small mercy was that the Grim Reapers could not interfere with the living. If Thanatos had been able to exert her influence on him as well as on the Heavenly Demon, he would never have even attempted to flee. "……" Still, he had no intention of staying just because his opponent could not attack him. Pride was here, and above him stood Agni Zbel, leader of the Special Investigation Unit, along with another of the Seven Deadly Sins. The operation that had sent two superhumans to Vivaldi Territory to capture Jealousy had backfired. He had no desire to be overwhelmed by sheer numbers. If not for the Absolute Being's arrival, he might have been able to break through them all like the Heavenly Demon had, but he lacked that level of power. The gap between superhumans was painfully clear, especially when both sides stood at the same rank.
He's just going to die again anyway. Eun Ma-hyun knew the difference in strength between himself and the Heavenly Demon, yet it did not particularly bother him. Whether strong or weak, survival was what mattered. He could always grow stronger later, once he had escaped. He was grateful that Pride had walked into the trap set for him, but there was no loyalty between them that would compel him to share in that foolish death. "……"
With that thought, he continued racing toward the city outskirts until he suddenly stopped. The streetlights flickered irregularly, a sign that the bulbs needed replacing. He had seen this same sight several times while running. It was rare in the Mendelssohn Grand Territory, where any problem was dealt with immediately. I'm running in circles. He had been sprinting straight ahead, yet no matter how far he ran, he never reached the city's edge. The scenery repeated like déjà vu. Even accounting for the uniform cityscape, seeing the exact same view over and over was clearly abnormal. Someone had artificially created a maze. The fact that it could deceive even an 8-star martial artist's senses left no doubt about the culprit.
"Sloth……" "You noticed faster than I expected." Sloth, one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Her silver hair shimmered as though each strand had been woven from moonlight. Her skin was paler than flour, untouched by sunlight for who knew how long. A large blindfold covered her eyes. Dressed in pink pajamas and barefoot, she looked as though she could not tell whether she was indoors or outside as she approached Eun Ma-hyun. Clutching a light-pink frilled pillow to her chest, she walked toward him in a half-asleep daze. His expression hardened.
"I was hoping you wouldn't notice until tomorrow morning." A sharp whoosh cut through the air. A red line appeared across Sloth's neck as she spoke, and her head rolled onto the cold ground. "Oh, you startled me." Then she woke from the dream. Sloth's corpse vanished. Reality shifted, the world peeled away like a layer of skin, and Sloth—who had been lying on a bench behind him with the pillow under her head—bolted upright in surprise. Drool still trailed from the corner of her mouth. Without bothering to wipe it away, she lifted her blindfold and glared at Eun Ma-hyun with her mysteriously shimmering violet eyes. "What was that for while I was talking? That hurt!"
Perhaps because of her childlike appearance, even her angry expression looked like a cute tantrum. Eun Ma-hyun paid it no mind and swung his hand through the air again. This time her upper body was sliced diagonally, spraying red blood. "I told you to stop attacking first." Another layer of the dream peeled away. This time Sloth appeared beside a flickering streetlight, nodding off. "Your blade is pretty sharp even without a sword." Eun Ma-hyun's main weapon was a sword, but the absence of one did not mean he could not cut down what stood before him. At the level of an 8-star superhuman, his body itself was a weapon. "By the way, why aren't you wearing any clothes? You could at least steal something from a nearby store."
She was completely naked. Her gaze alternated between his rock-hard, compressed muscles and the relatively modest elephant between them before she pulled the blindfold back down, as though she had seen something she should not have. "……" The moment Eun Ma-hyun felt a strange sense of disgust, he blinked. A peculiar sensation brushed his skin. Something soft and fluttering wrapped around his body. When he looked down, he found himself wearing clothes—a fluffy pink dress with puffy frills everywhere, the kind a princess in a children's fairy tale might wear. Rrrrip. He tore it apart without hesitation. He would rather go naked than wear such a ridiculous outfit. "Aah! I went to the trouble of making you clothes, so why did you rip them? They were pretty!"
But the one who had given the gift apparently did not share his feelings. When Sloth cried out in indignation, the concept of severance rained down like a violent downpour above her head. Whoosh! Her body was precisely divided into thirty-six pieces by the fierce slash, fueled by his irritation at the doll-like game. This marked her third death. He had felt the sensation of cutting her, and the dismembered corpse sprawled before him was clearly real, not an illusion. Yet whenever he blinked, the body vanished and a new Sloth appeared somewhere in front of him. An inner world. This was clearly abnormal, a phenomenon that defied the laws of the world. Only one person in existence could do such a thing: a dark mage who imposed their own rules upon reality. No one else.
"Hey, I don't really want to fight you. Can't you just stop killing me?" Once again, the corpse Eun Ma-hyun had slain disappeared, and Sloth reappeared, pouting slightly. "This is probably just cleanup work Pride ordered, so I showed up, but fighting someone like you seems like it would get really annoying." "……" "Oh, aren't you hungry? You've probably been starving after all that torture from Pride. Do you have any favorite foods?" Pizza, pasta, hamburgers, french fries, chicken, cake, steak, pork cutlets, ice cream, and soda appeared before him in a full spread, from main dishes to desserts. From creating clothes out of nothing to manifesting food in midair, it was creation from void. Yet even Absolute Beings had never reached the realm of true creation. It was impossible for a superhuman who had only half-shed their human shell to reach it before them. Therefore, Eun Ma-hyun quickly saw through the trick Sloth had employed.
"A dream……?" Lucid Dream. Even an ordinary human with no power could reign like a god within their own mental world. What some called a Personal Space, Sloth had manifested her personal dreamscape into reality through her inner world. In other words, the very world Eun Ma-hyun stood in was a meticulously crafted miniature garden created by Sloth. Everything in it, including the Sloth before him, was fake. Sloth exists everywhere in the world, and nowhere at all. Her real body was probably sleeping peacefully inside some building. All of this was a dream. What stood before him was merely a fragment of her dreaming self. If he had to name the phenomenon, it was Dream Walker. The Heavenly Demon directly manipulated the astral plane, so it was not strange that Sloth could freely traverse another's dreams using her inner world. "Here, eat up. If you get caught by Pride again, you won't have time to eat while being tortured."
Sloth sat casually on the ground and lifted a slice of pizza with cheese stretching in long strands. Ignoring her, Eun Ma-hyun slowly looked around. At least her combat ability seemed relatively low compared to her sealing power, which could trap even an 8-star superhuman in a dream space without them noticing. If her combat ability had been high as well, she would have moved to subdue him instead of trying to persuade him. Roughly estimating her lethality alone, she was below Lust, whom he had fought in Vivaldi. Therefore, he did not think he would lose to her even with the handicap of having no sword. "……" Yet he was equally unable to defeat her. If this dragged on any longer, Pride would arrive here in no time. Recalling that unpleasant smile, Eun Ma-hyun furrowed his brows. Whoosh! In the end, what he had to do was clear. The first rule every ability user must follow when fighting a dark mage: neutralize their inner world by any means necessary. It was the same now. He had to destroy Sloth's inner world and wake up from this dream somehow. With that thought, he swung his hand blade. A slash imbued with the concept of severance grazed past Sloth and passed straight through the building behind her. Rumble. Roughly three seconds later, blood trickled from Sloth's earlobe as the five-story building collapsed down to the first floor. The string of the blindfold caught on her ear snapped, revealing her violet eyes. Their gazes met in the air. Sloth smiled faintly and shook her head as if she had no choice. "Looking at your eyes, you still want to keep going. How troublesome."
Unlike mages who countered dark mages by analyzing and dismantling their inner-world techniques from the ground up, martial artists fought them with brutal simplicity. A head-on breakthrough, shattering the opponent's rules with nothing but raw power. Boom! When Eun Ma-hyun stomped the ground, the city was mercilessly swept away. The asphalt cracked and surged upward, scattering the food Sloth had prepared across the rubble. "Well, go ahead and try. It'll be pointless anyway." Effort was the word Sloth hated most in this world. Telling him to try was therefore a kind of insult, a scathing mockery of his futile struggle. Rumble. The elevated highway crossing the sky was severed by the concept Eun Ma-hyun unleashed, its fragments raining down like meteors. In an instant, a scene of horrific destruction unfolded. The sight of an 8-star superhuman's single strike creating disaster. Amid it all, Sloth remained motionless and leisurely took a large bite of the pizza still in her hand. Whoosh! Eun Ma-hyun's slash did not target only the surrounding structures. In the middle of the collapsing cityscape, Sloth's neck was severed once more by his hand blade. Her headless body collapsed like a puppet with its strings cut. With her death, another layer of the dream covering the world peeled away.