The Demon Who Feeds on Nightmares
"KYAAAAAAAAAK――――!!"
A girl's agonized scream rang shrilly through the dim room.
The girl — the Demon of Dreams — clutched her chest and writhed across the floor, contorted by a terrible pain that felt as if her whole body were being torn apart.
The vast chamber where she lay was filled with hundreds of humans sleeping silently in their beds like the dead, and not a single one of them reacted to her screaming.
It hurts! It hurts!! It hurts!!! It huuuurts…!!
After writhing in agony for what felt like an eternity, the Demon of Dreams finally managed to lift her head, her face smeared with tears and drool.
"Hhk…"
Beyond the pain of her body came an indescribable agony that shredded her very soul, and the Demon of Dreams dragged herself across the floor, her wide eyes trembling violently.
Had any other demon witnessed a High-Ranking Demon reduced to such a wretched state, crawling servilely along the ground, they would surely have been struck speechless with shock.
"H-hu, hu… hungry… s-so, so hungry…!"
Despite the commotion, the Demon of Dreams crawled toward one of the hundreds of humans lying limp and motionless on the beds around her.
Only one thought filled her mind: she had to devour a human, right now, to quell the convulsive agony wracking her body and the ravenous hunger flooding through it.
Dragging herself onto the nearest bed, she seized the sleeping woman by the hair and stared down into her face.
"Hnngh…!!"
At once, the woman's sleeping face contorted in torment as though she were being ravaged by a horrifying nightmare, then slowly flooded over with pure pain.
"P-please, save me! AAAAH―!!"
She gasped violently as though she would die within moments, her body jerking and bucking so hard the bed groaned beneath her.
"Save me… *hack*!!"
The instant the woman's eyes snapped open, blood surged up from her lungs and erupted from her mouth like a fountain.
Her convulsing body gradually went still, her unfocused eyes staring blankly into nothing as her pupils shrank smaller and smaller.
With one last ragged breath, like a final utterance cut short, the woman stopped moving.
Drip…
Blood trickled from the corner of her lolling mouth and stained the sheets.
The Demon of Dreams showed no further interest in the dead woman; she flung her head aside and turned toward her next meal.
"Hkk… next… next… meal."
In stark contrast to the woman, the Demon of Dreams looked slightly better than before as she crawled onward across the floor.
Improved, yes — but she was still too drained to stand on her own two legs.
Ordinarily she would have tormented the humans leisurely inside their dreams, savoring every nuance of their despair before killing them. But not tonight.
The precious collections she had gathered to savor slowly she gulped down in a frantic scramble, all for the sake of sheer survival.
"Mommy, save me!! Mommyyy――"
"Sob… honey, it was my fault… please forgive me…"
"I'm sorry… I'm sorry…"
"GAAAAH!! Kill me! Just kill meee―!!"
"Ehehehe!!"
One by one, the sleeping humans died, shrieking out their own screams, laments, and curses as they suffered the nightmares the Demon of Dreams had shown them.
With every death she regained a little more of her vitality, and yet the pained expression never left her face.
"It hurts…! It still hurts… that demon… no, that monster… it's a monster… a nightmare!!"
Wrapping her trembling body in both arms, the Demon of Dreams shuddered with visceral terror at the formless thing she had encountered.
A High-Ranking Demon who had lived nearly a hundred years, the Demon of Dreams possessed the ability to enter the dreams of humans.
By intruding into another's dream she could exercise a variety of powers — and among them, she had by chance discovered one more.
Foresight.
Dreams sometimes revealed futures yet to unfold in this world, though such cases were rare — and even when they occurred, it was usually the future of someone she didn't care about, or some vague future in which no specific person could be identified.
Because of that, this secondary ability could hardly be called a true power — unlike the Demon of Prophecy, she had no way to pick and choose the futures she wished to see.
But as time passed, a future surfacing again and again in the dreams of humans had grown clearer and clearer.
A world turned pitch-black.
A single man.
And the formless thing she had glimpsed earlier… a demon.
She couldn't make out its shape, but instinct told her, at the very least, that the thing was a demon.
Within that apocalyptic world, only two people remained — a man and a woman.
She couldn't say with certainty what that meant, but it seemed self-evident that this world would one day be transformed into ruin.
And to translate that another way: it meant that her own life, too, would cease to exist within that ruined world.
So she had searched for the two of them desperately.
Even if the unknown demon could not be found, the man's outline had gradually taken shape, and with nothing but the fragmentary hints gleaned through dreams, she had hunted for him with everything she had.
And as a result, today, in a dream, she had finally found the man she had seen thousands of times before.
Yoon Dohyun.
At first she'd had her doubts — but the moment she touched him and that unknowable demon appeared, her certainty crystallized.
So what now?
Use the Low-Ranking Demon she'd brainwashed through dreams into worshipping her as a god to do more… no.
That demon must already be dead.
Dead, horribly, as the price of laying hands on him.
The mere thought of that death brought the agony surging back, and the Demon of Dreams shuddered as the pain of her encounter with the unknown demon washed over her once more.
She had only been observing the situation indirectly, through the illusion of a dream rather than her true body — she had possessed no physical presence there, and yet she had taken a blow that should have killed her.
The horrific agony of having her very existence torn away.
If her true body had been there, she thought, she wouldn't merely have died — she would have suffered something far worse than death.
…Should I just run?
It was the natural thought — but having now witnessed the coming future with her own eyes in reality, she realized how futile it would be.
Tap, tap…
The Demon of Dreams crouched in place for a long while, gnawing at her nails until they made an audible sound.
So deep had she sunk into thought and fear that eventually she didn't even notice she was biting her fingers until they bled.
"The Archdemons… I have to tell the Archdemons."
After agonizing over it again and again, the Demon of Dreams finally reached a conclusion.
She would report what had happened today to the apex demons — the beings of chaos and calamity of whom only ten existed in all this world.
Setting aside whether they would believe her or not, right now that felt like the only answer.
…Wait.
As her thoughts arrived somewhere, the Demon of Dreams felt a contradiction, a strangeness that should have been obvious.
The unknown demon had carried the presence of an Archdemon — or something beyond one.
But… among the Archdemons, there was naturally no unknown demon.
Then… just what kind of demon was that creature? Where did it belong?
Unless…
"…a Primordial… Demon?"
There was a saying that existed only in myths and legends, a phrase tossed around among demons themselves as little more than a joke.
The demon that made demons.
Their parent.
A bone-chilling thought flashed through her mind — but it was nothing more than a baseless delusion.
Whatever the truth was, she had to inform the Archdemons of this fact as quickly as possible.
[Peekaboo.]
"HIIIIK―!!"
The Demon of Dreams, who had been about to rise from where she sat, shrieked and collapsed back to the floor — for an instant, she thought she had glimpsed the unknown demon in the darkness, clapping its hands together and grinning playfully.
Fortunately, she realized it had been a trick of the light, but fear had already seized her, and for a long while the Demon of Dreams did nothing but tremble in place, shaking with terror.
"Found you."
As I tore through the darkness, casting the Apprentice Knight aside in order to carry out my god's will above all else, I spotted that man fleeing through the night with a human named Seohyun on his back.
Fortune favored me.
Perhaps because he was carrying a person, he had not yet managed to reach the crowded streets.
Which meant there was no one around whose gaze I needed to mind.
"Hah… hah…… ugh!?"
The moment I materialized on the unpaved road surrounded on all sides by forest, he slammed his feet down like brakes and skidded to a halt.
"Dohyun, would you care to have a little talk with me?"
"……!!"
I spoke behind a mask of gentle warmth, but he clearly had no intention of conversing — he scrambled to his feet and immediately turned to run.
My ability was a rather middling one — if it could even be called a supernatural power — that merely inclined others to listen to what I said.
Even so, I had used it to beguile Seohyun and bring down the Apprentice Knight. But if my target refused to engage in conversation, it became utterly useless.
Against an ordinary human, however, I had no need for abilities at all.
God had ordered me not to kill him — nothing about not hurting him.
The man was neither a Knight nor a demon, just a plain human, and catching him would be no trouble at all.
Tag.
The instant I kicked off the ground, the distance between us collapsed, and I was upon him.
Intending only a light incapacitating blow, I aimed a strike at his leg—
Clang!
"……!?"
My attack, meant only to wound him lightly, rebounded off a transparent membrane that enveloped him.
Sizzle…
The knuckles that had struck the barrier burned hot, and smoke rose from my fist.
…A Holy Membrane.
A protective barrier created by that damned Order to repel demons.
How darling of them.
Seeing that not even a scratch had been left on it, I realized I could not break through the barrier by my own strength.
The man, knocked onto his rear by the recoil of his own attack, looked at the barrier surrounding him with relief — then looked back at me and remembered his fear.
Yes… that is the natural expression of a human beholding a demon.
Smiling inwardly, I fixed him with a kindly smile once more — safe within his barrier, but nailed helplessly to the spot where he sat.
"Dohyun, it seems there's been some misunderstanding between us."
The expression that surfaced: wariness.
This wasn't working.
"…Yoon Jia."
At the mention of his younger sister, his expression changed.
That's the one.
"I know a great deal about your sister, through Seohyun. A remarkable younger sister, isn't she?"
Wariness still flickered in his eyes, but thanks to the keyword "Yoon Jia," his attention was now fixed on me.
From this instant, my ability began to take hold.
"A lifetime of being measured against an exceptional younger sister must have been agonizing. Agonizing enough that you never wanted it spreading around school."
When I pressed on his weak point, his composure wavered.
Good, keep going just like—
Thud!
"Hah!"
A chill presence at my back sent my heart hammering, and I cried out and threw myself backward, putting distance between us.
Without a sound, without a trace, the Apprentice Knight I had beaten half to death mere minutes ago was standing behind me. I was stunned.
How?
She shouldn't have had the strength to stand — and even if she had miraculously risen, the idea that she could appear and take my back in so short a time defied comprehension.
Heh.
A strange smile flickered across the Apprentice Knight's face.
In that presence, visible only to me, I understood: the Apprentice Knight was someone else now.
"Wh… who… are you…?"
"Don't say such funny things, demon. Have you already forgotten the one you were fighting just moments ago?"
The Apprentice Knight's face, voice, manner of speech, and movements were all exactly the girl I had fought before.
Only the eyes looking at me had changed.
Though she had hinted at this presence all along without ever fully revealing it, at the very least I understood one thing — the horrifying, skin-crawling smile she wore now was not meant for the man behind me to see.
Rumble…
One of the Apprentice Knight's eyes swiveled unnaturally to the side, taking stock of the thing beyond my shoulder.
And in the very instant her expression froze solid—
"―――!!!"
An overwhelming wave of dread crushed down over my entire body.
A scream tore loose in my throat, but it never made it past my lips.
All I could produce was a soundless shriek, rasping as though my voice were being ripped to shreds.
Every hair on my body stood on end as my instincts howled of mortal peril.
The killing intent crushed the very air itself, and my breath nearly stopped.
In the gaps between my shallow, ragged gasps, I reflexively murmured please spare me in a trembling voice — so faint I could barely hear it myself.
"I have no wish to see such a look on my beloved's face. No one may bring pain to my love. No one."
The words that left that being's mouth were flat, without any rise in tone — but the emotion buried within them was sharp as a blade and cold as the grave.
Our eyes met.
Merely meeting those pupils stopped my breath, and I was seized by the illusion that I had already died.
That being — that demon — was death itself.
"As the price of daring to lay hands on him, I will erase you so thoroughly that you will never be born again in the next generation, nor the one after. I will erase your very existence. Every trace of the life you lived will vanish — without so much as a blank space left behind."
The words flowed out in perfect order, kindling a terror so vast it transcended death itself — and imparting a single realization.
That for daring to touch a single human whom a demon cherished, one would thrash in agony enough to regret ever being born into this world — and in the end, meet a death worse than death.