Chương 129: The True Power of the King of the Mountain

A creature painfully familiar stood before Lloyd, one he had seen before, even if only briefly. The yellow dust around it kept drifting in slow, lazy spirals, lending the tiny, ghostly silhouette an almost living, trembling quality, as though the creature itself were breathing, stirring in time with some unseen rhythm, while the lantern's light dimmed slightly, as though making way for something darker, heavier. — The Nightmare represents the third rank of monsters.

The likeness of a monster Lloyd had once seen with his own eyes finally took full shape before him. Long claws resembling curved swords, a body covered in something distantly resembling natural armor — coarse, plated hide, etched with uneven, deep grooves, as though scarred by countless past battles. Though it was only a shrunken copy of the true creature, no bigger than a fist, Lloyd recognized it at once, his heart tightening involuntarily at the surge of heavy memory.

He murmured quietly, almost inaudibly: — The King of the Mountain... Even so, this ghostly, glowing silhouette still couldn't quite render its head — it remained blurred, as though wrapped in a thin haze, as though the magical dust itself were adjusting to Lloyd's imagination and fragmented memories, for the truth was, he'd never really gotten a proper look at that Nightmare's head.

Three piercing, unblinking eyes flickered through his mind at once, and he instantly recalled that very person who had made sure that, even during the Exam itself, Lloyd got to see the Nightmare's headless body lying in the trampled, blood-stained grass — the memory so vivid that for a moment he could almost smell that same sickly-heavy scent of blood that had hung over the meadow back then, mixed with the damp smell of disturbed, flattened earth.

Mippo nodded briefly at hearing Lloyd's quiet, barely audible murmur, the feathers on its head swaying slightly, casting three short, flickering shadows against the wall. — Yes, that really is the King of the Mountain, one of the monsters who reached Nightmare rank. That's the maximum rank of monster you can encounter in green-rank dungeons. Though running into one in dungeons like that is a one-in-a-thousand occurrence, extremely rare.

Far more often you'll find a Phantom there, or, if you're very lucky, just a Shade. Lloyd kept studying the ghostly silhouette, slowly rotating in the swirling yellow dust, taking in every detail of this tiny, glowing copy — the claws, the plated hide, the blurred, elusive outline where the head should have been — and finally added: — That was one of the obstacles in my Exam, though...

He yawned involuntarily and stretched his arms overhead, working out the stiffness in his shoulders, feeling his joints answer with a faint, barely audible crack after sitting so long on the hard floor, his chilled toes curling instinctively against the draft creeping in from under the door. Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more. —... I never got to see what it could actually do. It was already dead by the time I showed up on that meadow. But I'll be honest.

A single tear rolled down his cheek, leaving a faint, damp trail on his skin — whether from the recent yawn or from something far deeper, lodged inside him ever since that day. — Even just the sight of it made me shiver. Even dead... To Lloyd's surprise, Mippo let out a small chuckle, then tilted its head slightly to one side, the bell somewhere in the folds of its garment giving a short, soft chime that dissolved somewhere near the ceiling.

— I don't want to disappoint you, but I'm afraid that wasn't a true Nightmare. No level one or two Player could even hope to win against the real thing. A Nightmare is an entirely different tier — you can't even imagine the kind of fear you'd feel encountering a genuine Nightmare at full strength.

Hearing these words, Lloyd suddenly remembered something else — a fragment of a phrase thrown out by that very Creature back during the Exam itself, its voice still occasionally surfacing in his memory at the most unexpected moments, in the middle of the most ordinary, unremarkable tasks.

"That's not even half the King of the Mountain's strength" — that's roughly what it had said back then, if he remembered right. It seemed that had been the plain truth after all. Mippo, meanwhile, continued its unhurried lecture, the lantern between them swaying faintly, as though in time with its words, casting a new, slightly wider wave of golden light across the ceiling, sliding along the familiar crack and briefly catching the crooked door of the old wardrobe out of the darkness.

— If a true Nightmare had been unleashed during the Exam, it would have ended in that very same minute. I'm afraid the Players simply wouldn't have survived a phantasm of that caliber — only the weakest specimens of Nightmare rank might have left anyone a fighting chance. But the King of the Mountain is nowhere near among them.

Lloyd sat in complete confusion, feeling one single word in that long, detailed speech snag his attention far more sharply than everything else, catching on him like a fishhook snagging on cloth. The silence in the room thickened for a moment, and the yellow dust around them seemed to freeze in the air, waiting for what would come next, Mippo's own bell falling completely silent, as though it too were holding its breath along with the whole room.

He looked over the tiny, glowing figure of the King of the Mountain, still slowly rotating in the air between them — the sharp, curved claws, the plated hide, the blurred, featureless outline where the head should be — and suddenly, with a strange, almost frightening clarity, realized just how pitifully small his own understanding of the forces at work in this world really was.

Everything he'd seen over the past week — the Mushroom Wolves, the Whirlrunners, even those horrifying, half-rotted creatures — now seemed like nothing more than a pale shadow of whatever might be lurking somewhere out there, in the far deeper, far more dangerous corners of Oblivion.

The room around them remained quiet, steeped in soft, golden half-light, and outside, that same loose shutter occasionally creaked in the wind, but the air itself seemed to have thickened, grown heavier, as though it too felt the weight of the word Mippo had just spoken — a word whose meaning Lloyd had yet to learn. — A phantasm?..