Chapter 56: Enemy Planning

"...Nio... where could you be... I know you’re running from me... that calls for punishment... she’s really running from me, how utterly frustrating... a wife running away from her wife... I’ll have to teach her so many things..." Typhon gazes out at a completely devastated island in the middle of the sea; she has literally flattened the entire landscape with a single attack.

Trees, boulders, hills, animals — everything has vanished into a blazing hell of intensely toxic, noxious green flames. An electric hissing, almost like radiation, can even be heard.

All the sand and soil on the island has likewise turned into a kind of fine black grain, like a soft, warm sifted landscape.

"Nio isn’t on this island either... normally Nio would move her palace to the ocean to make it harder to find, so why is it so difficult? I’ve been flying above the sea for weeks and haven’t found a single trace..." Typhon sighs.

"Maybe the problem is the second Nio who’s currently awake? Did she change the route?... or maybe... the island can’t be moved from where it is? Since both Nio and I are currently weakened, Nio has no way to take her palace off this planet... so I know she’s somewhere in this world..." She calmly weighs the possibilities, deciding which one to test first.

"What does Nio want... knowing her and her drive to fight me... she wants to stop me, to defeat me, and to save what she’s built... that being the case, Nio will try to create shields against me... maybe... Nio is near this world’s civilizations? Even if they’re underdeveloped, they’re still more things for me to destroy..."

"Killing... I must not kill Nio, but Nio will try to kill me... what a pointless hassle this is going to be... clever girl, she knows that. In our next fight, she’ll undoubtedly hold nothing back and will be prepared." For the first time in a long while, she feels genuinely frustrated.

"Wait — I might be able to pull Nio into my dreams... she’s a nightmare dragon. Even if I can’t find her, if I pull her into my dreams, we could have peaceful conversations where I can gather information about her... that sounds good." Typhon brightens at the thought.

Though Nio treats her like an absolute monster, Typhon’s general demeanor is quite calm and rational, and she truly only intends to talk with Nio, to help her, to earn her trust. Nio is her beloved, her wife.

And Typhon would never hold anything against Nio as a being; she only takes issue with the things Nio possesses. To her, these are mere disagreements. She loves Nio, but she must destroy everything Nio has built.

An almost alien mindset, since love and a desire to destroy everything your beloved has built cannot be reconciled in a relationship. Nio would inevitably end up at a disadvantage in such a bond.

"Nio, as a nightmare dragon, will slowly consume my vitality once she enters my dreams... but that’s fine. I can recover it easily with a single day of rest." Nightmare dragons are akin to succubi.

They invade dreams and consume vitality, but the difference is that succubi consume vitality through pleasure and carnal acts, while nightmare dragons consume vitality and negativity — they generate bad, disturbing dreams and feed on the negativity produced by those nightmares.

Since Nio sleeps daily instead of hibernating, it means she’s susceptible every single night to entering someone’s nightmares and shaping them to feed herself. ℴ

’Most people go mad until death when their dreams are invaded by nightmare dragons, but that’s because those dreams last far too long. Since Nio wakes up every day after just a few hours of sleep, the dream ends quite quickly. There are zero risks to me, since I can defend myself even while asleep.’

"Nio needs to sleep every day; if she doesn’t, she’ll eventually fall into a deep slumber that lasts for years. That means every nightfall is an opportunity for me to pull her into my dreams... I should prepare..." Typhon looks around at the island and then plunges her hand into her chest.

A sickening sound of tearing flesh echoes as she grabs her own heart and pulls it out of her chest as if this were utterly normal — she doesn’t even feel pain doing so.

"This should suffice for a forced astral summoning ritual. If I do everything correctly, Nio will be pulled into my dreams every time she sleeps. The success rate per night should be around 0.5%... which means that in 100 days, the likelihood of her appearing at least once in my dreams is quite decent."

"Once I find Nio... I should start by decimating her entire palace first. Then I can take my time killing her servants, and afterward I must destroy her entire reign... the palace is her greatest source of pride as her creation, so it must be my priority target..."

"But... I’m operating at reduced power. Her servants could pose a problem... Hmm... I need to think this through carefully. Nio is no fool, but her servants aren’t trustworthy. Maybe I could turn one of them into my ally?" In Typhon’s mind, if one of the servants betrays Nio, that servant is no longer a target, because they’ve ceased to be something that belongs to Nio.

"Yes, if I make them betray Nio, I can achieve everything with a more stable margin. Then I simply have to kill the traitors for having betrayed Nio." Despite everything, in Typhon’s twisted logic, if they betray Nio to help Typhon, they must die for that betrayal — a true paradox where she will kill them regardless of whether they’re Nio’s servants at that moment or not.

"Nio, I hope you accept my heart and vitality... and that tonight, you enter my dreams!!" She smiles, envisioning Nio in her dreams feeding on her. Just the image alone fills her with pure ecstasy — even as a meal, it is still contact with Nio.

"Perfect!! Our game began with you at an advantage, Nio, but I’ll reach you soon! As soon as I perform the ritual tonight, I’ll resume searching for some intelligent civilization you might try to infiltrate to hide." She begins using the blood dripping from her body to draw on the ground.

And she will use her heart as a sacrifice for the spell. Typhon possesses many sacrificial magics with different functions — spells Nio has never seen and would be shocked to learn exist.

Typhon’s very power is already something strange, since there were no known attacks that release the kind of toxicity she emits almost naturally when using certain strikes.

She is still holding back from displaying her full power, because she knows just how strategic Nio is, so she is being every bit as strategic in turn.