My Wives Are A Divine Hive Mind

Chapter 45: The Dream Devourers

"Took a while."

Samael exhaled slowly, her breath curling through the dying air.

She held out her cinquedea, the once-clean silver now coated in thick, burnt ichor.

Without pause or gesture, the blood lifted from the blade in tendrils of defiance, peeled away by the subtle manipulation of her Soul Entanglement skill.

The debris rejected from the edge dissolved into ash as the blade shone clean once more.

Before her stood a twisted figure, unmoving and monstrous.

Its body was a grotesque fusion of spiked obsidian wheels and jointed spider limbs, supporting a central carriage whose front bore the snarling visage of an oni—horned, wide-mouthed, its fangs gleaming through cracks of half-melted iron.

From within its carriage-like structure, faint whispers and echoing wails spilled out like steam from an opened tomb. Its red-lacquered panels twitched faintly with each breath it took.

The street around them was scorched and fractured. Thirty of its kin lay broken in mangled heaps, limbs bent backward, eyes gouged out, carapaces torn open like fruit.

Samael chuckled as she tilted her head slightly. "So the infamous Dream Devourers of the East really are migrating through Vaingall." Her voice brimmed with self-satisfaction. "I should thank you. I’ve needed a few tough Nightmares to round out my current attributes, and maybe a couple of levels up."

The lone Dream Devourer made no sound of fear. Instead, it raised its main carriage forward slightly and stared through its sculpted oni-eyes.

Its voice rasped through a gullet of grinding metal.

"You left me alive. Why?"

"Welp, my time is up." Samael blinked once and turned her head toward the east. "You’re the lone sacrifice to feed my hungry and anxious, wingless angel."

Before the Dream Devourer could ask more, Samael’s fingers twisted in a gentle, downward stroke.

A cloud of fog bled from the ground.

It moved with unnatural silence, devouring the corpses of the Dream Devourers like ink spreading across old paper.

Flesh, ichor, carapace—all pulled into the mist, leaving no trace behind.

The Dream Devourer stared. "What are you—"

"Also," Samael’s gaze shifted. "I don’t want her to find my presence."

Samael then vanished into the mist, her presence dissipating as if folded into the architecture itself.

The last Dream Devourer remained still. Then it turned, chittering quietly to itself.

"There is still one more." Its core growled in hunger. "My family fell, but I must traverse still. A prey is needed to fuel the voyage."

It crawled across the cracked pavement with the fluidity of a thought given limbs. Its spiked legs clicked softly as it moved. "Still caught within the false reality we spun. The Exo-Human shrouded her...

"There has been no third attempt to leave. No spiritual ripple of it. That masked human must still be inside..."

The Dream Devourer stopped at an intersection. It scanned the surroundings, its spiritual sense reaching into the fractured world it had fabricated. It began its mental tally of residual impressions.

The remaining single prey should suffice. If it could extract the entirety of that one soul, it could complete the second cycle and sustain its migration westward.

That was the plan.

Until it wasn’t.

A pulse exploded in an ineffable process.

Raw Hemo Psyche and Mana Psyche flooded outward in a radial cascade. There was no malice in its intent—it had its claw digging and searching.

And it struck the Dream Devourer dead-on.

"What is this?"

The pulse expanded further, a formless sonar of soul-rending awareness.

The Dream Devourer recoiled as the effect of the pulse became evident.

Someone was using it to pinpoint its location.

And they had found it.

"How... could this be...?"

But the Dream Devourer couldn’t pinpoint where the pulse came from.

Its senses flared, extending across the illusion like fire over dry fields. And everywhere it looked—it was there. The caster’s presence.

It was in the walls. In the wind. In the fallen leaves. In the cracks of ancient glass. It was in the sunlight, in the corners of abandoned rooms. It was everywhere the pulse had touched.

The Dream Devourer once encountered something similar to this in the past and it lived to tell the tale—a powerful eldritch being of unfathomable proportion.

But this being had already died, the humans and their organized army and weird weapons vanquished this eldritch being.

"Impossible," it whispered. "It might be a similar skill, but it is too similar."

The presence wasn’t scattered like a bowl with multiple leaves turned over above the ground. It was unified like the strands of silk that encompass a handkerchief. The distribution was total.

The Dream Devourer began to circle in place, limbs clattering on concrete, confused yet imbued with hunger.

The prey that it searched might be something dangerous, but the Dream Devourer’s sense of self preservation was too farsighted, that it pushed the importance of its own journey rather than its own safety.

"They know where I am, but I need to search for them."

Nothing to see. No one nearby.

Still, it felt watched.

It was being listened to.

From everywhere, every angle. Something might be watching, something might not. There was a moving shadow on the left, was that the dancing cloud or a delicious food?

"Sound of fireworks?"

The Dream Devourer turned a corner and gazed up.

Something burned through the sky.

A sleek, blackened cylinder tore upward before curling into a descent, its surface glowing with spiritual propulsion.

It didn’t know what it was.

So it didn’t dodge.

The missile collided with its face and detonated.

The blast caved in the upper layer of the carriage’s demon-mask, splintering pieces of outer armor and igniting the spider-limbs into fractal burns, as fumes expanded and covering the periphery.

"Ah, a dangerous object."

It staggered. Before it could reform its legs, three simultaneous attacks pierced its flanks.

Gunfire struck from one angle, then sharp instrument from another. The attack didn’t stop before a second strike—much closer—pierced a joint. Then a slash tore into the ribbing beneath its lower fuselage.

"Show yourself!" the Dream Devourer growled as it tried to find the assaulter.

The attacker was fast. Or perhaps there were multiple. Or perhaps it was simply so far outside its perception that it mimicked omnipresence.

The dust then cleared, revealing the surrounding once again.

Nothing.

The attacker couldn’t be seen nor found in any direction that it could access. The lingering omni-present essence was still there too, making it more harder for the Dream Devourer to pinpoint its own target.

The only thing it found was the Dream Devourer’s own blood, dripping thickly over the imitated natural asphalt of Fathomi.

It chittered in frustration and resumed its movement.

"A speedy bunny..."

Still hungry.

Still hunting.

The city around it was a ruin—natural and false, the illusion layered over real architectural memory.

The Dream Devourer slithered through the mimicry of modern decay, wandering until the pulse that had once struck it began to wane.

The presence that had once spread through every molecule now began to narrow. Like oil condensing under pressure, the caster’s spirit was retracting.

"Finally..."

That was the opening.

The Dream Devourer turned sharply, retracing the true source of the pulsation.

"Haah."

It found it.

Right beneath it.

No.

On it.

A presence was there.

The prey had been there all along, latching itself on the Dream Devourer’s back like an unrelenting tick.

It stared at the structure atop its own back.

The presence coalesced like a knot of thick, tar-like aura, so dense it carried weight, and consumed everything that came near it.

Could this be the prey that the Dream Devourer searched all along? Or could it be a foreigner that invaded the False Reality to hunt it?

The Dream Devourer was an existence of hunger and natural calamity, it hazed the field of living beings and reaped numerous lives by putting the soul of their prey into a False Reality, hunting them inside that illusion.

Those that were successfully hunted inside the illusory realm would immediately die of natural causes in the real world, fueling the Dream Devourer for its next hunt.

Because of this aimless hunting, it brought a lot of infamy, and thus a lot of vengeance-driven entities trying to exact revenge.

Could this scenario be one of them?

"You’re here all along..."

The Dream Devourer found something within this concentrated haze of presence.

A figure.

A twisted silhouette of shadow and smoke, draped in silence and heavy with power. It bore no face, only a mask, dripping malice and sadistic joy live venom.

And this figure was holding a scroll.

The scroll unfurled, and psychic screams poured from it, unraveling space with sheer spiritual pressure.

"Graah...!"

The Dream Devourer reared backward. Its limbs twitched, each movement delayed. Its mind couldn’t track. Its sensory scrambled.

Then it saw the figure raise something.

The same cylindrical bomb that had once flown right into its face. That very bomb glinted against the mirrored sunlight.

And that figure threw it. The missile arced downward and sailed directly into the Dream Devourer’s mouth—wedged into its internal cavity where no defenses lay.

The catalyst of destruction detonated inside the Dream Devourer.

The sound of tearing metal and rupturing screams erupted.

The creature’s body folded in on itself.

Its limbs curled upward as fire spilled through its sockets. Its dream-carriage shattered into drifting plates of melting sigils. Black smoke billowed out.

Viscera rained down, painting the asphalt with the demonic color and sadistic touch of its painter.

What was left of the mangled body of the carriage oni collapsed against the ground, and from within the crater, the illusion began to stutter.