Dream Realm.

  Leonardo dove through the rift first, riding the bark-scaled wyvern like a spearhead, then Oowrie followed an instant later, and the air in the Dream Realm rippled like water.

  Everything felt kind of wrong here. The sky was a ceiling of drifting world-size bubbles of different colors, and the ground beneath them wasn’t soil. It was something soft and pulsing, like a carpet made from old breath.

  And the nightmares came, blocking Leonardo’s and Oowrie’s way. They weren’t longnight spiders but some other nightmare creatures. A flock of faceless birds swooped in, each one stitched together from black cloth and teeth. They laughed like children hiding behind a door.

  Vines snapped out of the wyvern’s body and speared through the flock in a single sweep, turning them into falling scraps.

  From the ground, a strange deer rose, charging toward Oowrie. It had too many joints, and its antlers were made of maggots. Oowrie didn’t even slow down. She swung a wing like a blade, splitting the thing in half, and melted into smoke.

  More nightmares crawled out. There were worms with human hands, masks that floated like jellyfish, a tall figure made of mirrors that showed faces screaming behind the glass, all kinds of creations that could only be found in the strangest dreams. Leonardo’s wyvern exhaled a razor-straight beam of green light that swept across the swarm, wiping them out in one pass.

  “Keep moving,” Leonardo growled. “Those rats aren’t far.”

  Ahead of them, three trails of fleeing magic tore through the dream-fog like deep scratches across glass, their glow still fresh and unstable.

  “Damn it, they’re still on us!” Carlios cursed, glancing back as panic crept into his voice.

  “We won’t outrun two grand beings. Split up!” Nicolas barked.

  Without another word, Carlios slipped into a fold of darkness that opened like a curtain in midair, his body dissolving into shadow and vanishing from sight.

  Nicolas veered sharply toward a field of swaying red grass, sprinting across it with a strained laugh, as if trying to convince himself this was still some twisted game. The priestess chose a different path, running straight ahead with her black robe streaming behind her like spilled ink, heading toward a cluster of dead trees whose twisted branches stretched upward like claws grasping at the fractured, bubble-filled sky.

  “I’ll take the fat one,” Oowrie said, voice sharp in Leonardo’s mind.

  Leonardo’s gaze locked onto the priestess. “Then I’ll go after her.”

  Oowrie dipped her wings and shot after Nicolas, closing the distance in seconds.

  Nicolas had barely run a few miles before it became clear that Oowrie was almost upon him. Panic finally broke through his forced laughter.

  He reached into his jacket with both hands and started throwing things behind him: shriveled corpses, twisted animal remains, even what looked like preserved human limbs. The moment they hit the ground, they swelled and split open, snapping back into motion as small corpse-servants. Dozens of them shot into the air, shrieking and stumbling toward Oowrie in a desperate attempt to block her path, but it was useless.

  Green wind burst outward from her wings and tore straight through the revived bodies, shredding them into scraps before they could even touch her.

  Nicolas gritted his teeth and hurled out more, chanting under his breath, forcing the dead to rise again and again. Some clung to Oowrie’s feathers, some tried to drag at her legs, and others exploded in clouds of rot and poison in her path. He twisted and darted through the red grass, burning talismans, throwing up smoke screens, even trying to bend the dream-fog itself to hide his trail.

  Oowrie broke through every barrier as if they were paper. Her presence alone crushed the lesser creations flat. The gap between them shrank with each heartbeat. Nicolas stumbled, breath ragged, eyes wide with the realization that all his tricks, all his preparation, meant nothing against a grand being in pursuit.

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  His fate had already been decided the moment Oowrie and Leonardo decided to chase into the Dream Realm.

  Oowrie dropped in front of him before he could change direction again. He tried to twist away, one last spell forming at his fingertips, but a dark cyclone lashed out from her wing and passed cleanly through his neck.

  His head separated from his body in a smooth arc, disbelief still frozen on his face. For a brief second, his body remained standing, arms half raised as if about to protest, before it collapsed, and etherized red blood burst from the severed neck like molten lava surging from a broken crater.

  “Got one.” She sent a message to Leonardo. “Damn it, that spider bastard slipped away.”

  She turned and raced back toward Leonardo's direction.

  The priestess ran into a spooky forest. The trees were tall, thin, and black as burnt bones. From every branch hung dolls. They were ragged, filthy, swollen with rain that fell year-round. Some were missing limbs, some had stitched-on smiles, and some had real hair.

  All of them swayed, gently, as if breathing.

  Leonardo slowed at the edge, staff raised, eyes narrowed. Oowrie arrived beside him a moment later, landing with a heavy thud. “She went in here?”

  “Yes,” Leonardo said, voice low.

  When he was about to take a step forward, Oowrie snapped a wing out and blocked him.

  “Wait a little bit more.” Her eyes were fixed on the shadows between the trees.

  A sound drifted out. It was not a scream nor a chant; it was some soft and messy mumble, like someone talking in their sleep.

  Then, the hanging dolls near the forest’s edge twitched. One of them slowly lifted its head, and then the other ones started moving as well.

  Their button eyes glowed faintly, and their stitches tightened like muscles waking up.

  Leonardo felt his scalp prickle. “They’re all prime-rank! Where the hell is this place??”

  A doll turned its head too far, its neck bending at an angle no living thing should manage, and smiled wider.

  “And that one is a fucking grand being!” Oowrie cursed.

  More and more dolls stirred to life. Hundreds. Then thousands. The air grew thick with their presence, layers of prime-rank pressure overlapping, and among them were several deeper pulses that clearly belonged to grand beings.

  But it wasn’t just that. Deeper in the forest, something shifted.

  A pressure rolled outward, heavy and cold, so strong it made Leonardo’s breath stop, and Oowrie’s talons scrape back half an inch against the ground.

  “Back,” Oowrie ordered, no argument left in her tone. “Now!!!”

  …

  Half an hour later.

  A deep roar echoed, and the wyvern burst back out from the crack, soaring in the sky before landing. It carried Leonardo down and set him on the ground. Then the dragon shrank in size, twisting its body into a slender green serpent that coiled around his arm.

  The pair of massive rose-like hands that had been holding the rift in place loosened their grip, allowing the entrance to the Dream Realm to close in on itself. It gradually sealed shut and then vanished as if it had never been there.

  Oowrie landed beside him. Next to her floated a small spinning cyclone, lifting up the severed head of the fat man Nicolas. His frozen expression was grotesque, caught somewhere between a smile and a sob. At this point, both the mayor of Sicily and the city’s sacred beast looked rather pitiful. Leonardo’s priest cloak had been shredded so badly that he looked like a beggar, and one of Oowrie’s wings had already turned into stuffed cloth, like a grotesque doll’s wing.

  “I still can’t believe that crazy witch dared to rush straight into the lair of a dreamwalking baron,” Oowrie muttered, feathers still slightly ruffled. “If we’d followed her in there, we’d be corpses by now. Leo, every time I go somewhere with you, it turns into a disaster.”

  Leonardo gave her a tired sideways look. “Alright, alright, that one’s on me. Let me make it up to you. How does thirty liters of Rainbow Lavender perfume and ten full crates of Erus Powder sound?”

  “…That’s actually not terrible.” Oowrie paused. “Still, diving all the way into the Nightmare World and coming back with just one of those filthy rats dead? That stings. Maybe we really are getting rusty.”

  Leonardo let out a quiet breath. “Honestly, we should be grateful we walked out alive and in one piece.”

  He looked over the valley, at the torn earth and lingering smoke, and pressed a hand to his forehead.

  “There’s still a mountain of mess left to clean up.”

  Not long after, a streak of light shot across the sky from the center of Sicily, descending to land in front of the two of them.

  Three figures arrived together. One was a broad-shouldered young man in polished silver armor, his hands gleaming like they’d been forged from some kind of violet metal. Beside him, a tiny flame elf floated, dressed in a simple chiton, her body flickering like a candle in the wind. Padding quietly at their side was a snow-white wolf, fur pure from nose to tail, eyes sharp and alert.

  “Hey, Leo! Hahahahaha, what the hell happened to you?” The armored guy burst out laughing the moment he saw Leonardo. “What’s with that outfit? Trying out some new ‘ruined druid chic’? I swear, if my grandma saw you like this, she’d finally get over her crush.” He pulled out his phone and started snapping pictures without shame.

  The little flame elf chimed in. “Mr. Leonardo… are you ok? What happened here?”

  The white wolf sniffed the air, then gave a low, doubtful growl. “Two arcane mages and a prime beast, and you still had to call for backup?”

  Leonardo closed his eyes for a second and pressed his fingers harder against his forehead. “Can you not all talk at once? I’ve only got one mouth.”

  He let out a long breath. “Anyway… tonight’s mess probably started because of this.”

  He reached into his torn cloak, pulled out a small jade box, and flicked it open.

  “What???”

  It was empty. The Gift of Peace was gone.