Madman in a Fantasy World – Chapter 54

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Translated By Arcane Translations
Translator: Vine
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“Hee hee~ It’s so delicious~”

Nightmare, Lilith, sat on the roof of the inn in the Marquisate, which was thick with pink mist, licking her lips.

It was night and everyone was asleep.

She was bathed in the moonlight, enjoying her gourmet meal all alone.

For her, a meal was not something physical, but something semi-physical.

The best examples were emotions like fear, anger, and sadness of others.

The pink mist covering the Marquisate was one of her abilities.

The mist’s power was to force people into sleep and give them the power to have dreams.

It’s not always that everyone is asleep at night.

Soldiers on patrol, couples doing enjoyable things, and children who get up to go to the toilet.

No matter the reason, there’s no time when everyone is asleep at the same time.

Moreover, dreams are always random.

You don’t have dreams just because you want to dream them.

Some days you have a good dream filled with all your ideals, some days you have a nightmare that shows you the most horrific scene you don’t want to see.

All of that was a variable.

With all of that being random, Lilith had to force humans to sleep and make them dream at the same time.

That’s why she used the ability that she learned first, Puppet.

It was named that because it was an ability to control the minds of humans.

That was the identity of the pink mist that was thick in the marquisate.

It acted as a sleeping pill, and it also forced them to dream in order to remove any variables.

In addition, the dream was designed to appear as a nightmare.

“Hehe~ there are quite a lot of good humans here~”

She could see other people’s dreams.

The same was true now.

She was having her meal by using the negative emotions she was seeing from other people’s nightmares as nutrients.

The nutrients varied depending on the level of emotions humans felt.

For example, which would be a stronger emotion, the sadness of a child crying over a scraped knee or the sadness of an elderly person who has lost their life partner?

The answer is obviously the latter.

In that sense, there were many humans in this marquisate who were having high-quality nightmares.

Who was having what kind of nightmare, why they are angry, sad, or scared?

Those were all outside of her interest.

She just wanted them to be angrier, cry more, and be more scared.

That was all.

“Humans are so weak.”

Why are they struggling so much over a dream that isn’t even real?

However, humans were creatures that could easily be broken by a dream.

But she had no way of knowing that.

Her ability was, in some ways, stronger than having strong combat prowess alone.

It was similar to attacking the weakest spot by infiltrating their subconscious mind where defense was impossible.

“Alrighty~ then shall we go take care of my target?”

She got up and spread her wings.

She had covered the entire marquisate with Puppet, but her original target was just one party.

Lilith first infiltrated the room where the beastkin woman was through the window.

A beastkin woman was lying on the bed, crying.

Lilith put her hand on the woman’s forehead.

“Hoo… This is quite the nightmare. You have more trauma than I thought?”

She felt so full just by seeing a glimpse of the nightmare, her lips were twitching.

“I’ll be waiting? Cry more for me~”

Then, Lilith left the room and headed for the other side.

This time it was the room where a small, silver-haired woman was.

Just like before, Lilith put her hand on the silver-haired woman’s forehead and looked into her dreams.

“Oh? She’s a vampire? I heard they were all dead, but I guess not.”

Not just any vampire, she was a queen.

“Why is she here?”

It was an unexpected variable, but it didn’t matter since she was having a pretty good nightmare.

At this rate, she thought things would end smoothly.

And lastly.

Lilith, headed to the room next to the one opposite her, and was able to confirm the black-haired man was lying on the bed.

This time, she placed her hand not on his forehead, but on his stomach.

It was to use her other ability.

“Okay, let’s go and finish up.”

Her other ability was that she could intervene in other people’s dreams.

The ability to infiltrate other people’s dreams, in other words.

It was her most powerful ability, if not for a few problems.

The first problem was that, because she had to personally go into the dream, unless she was able to use a doppelganger ability, she could only infiltrate one dream at a time.

Even with that, it was still a terrifying ability.

The scariest point of this ability was that, if she killed the target in the dream, she could mentally break them.

They wouldn’t die in the real world, but when they woke up, they would become a vegetable with no reason.

And like that, her form was sucked into the man.

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The feeling she had when she entered the dream wasn’t joy or pleasure, but bewilderment.

The first thing she saw after entering the dream was a pitch-black room.

No, to be exact, it was covered in darkness except for a few streaks of light.

Nightmares were supposed to be dark and gloomy, so that wasn’t strange.

She had seen the dreams of a child trapped in a room by their parents before.

Lilith looked around the room.

A desk, a bed, etc. All of which she knew, but their appearances were completely different from what she knew.

Furniture that looked much more luxurious than what she knew.

And the most suspicious things were the box that emitted colorful light under the desk and something that resembled a box on the desk that emitted a pure white light.

She had never seen anything like that, and she wondered if the person having this dream was a daydreamer (夢想家).

Her doubts were short-lived, and she remembered her original purpose and started searching for the owner of this dream.

She had been so distracted by the boxes of light earlier that she didn’t notice properly, but when she looked carefully, there was a man sitting in a chair in front of the box emitting light.

But this was strange.

Since she was the only one in this dream, that meant the man sitting there was the dreamer.

But he was clearly different from the man she had seen before.

A face with dark circles and exhaustion.

The only thing they had in common was their hair color.

Aside from that, even the color of their irises and the shape of their face.

All of it was different from the man she had seen earlier.

“…You. Just who are you?”

A place she had never seen before, a person different from the dreamer.

Unable to resist her doubts, Lilith spoke out on her own.

Then.

Click, clack.

A sound came from his neck, and it turned in the direction of where Lilith was.

Then,

-Grin.

His eyes, with a grin that stretched from ear to ear, reflected Lilith.

She blinked once, startled.

“Hi, Hiek…!”

The man who was sitting down earlier was now standing.

Was it because she was scared?

It felt like an optical illusion, as if he was getting closer every time she blinked.

No, now that she looked at it, it wasn’t an optical illusion.

He was actually getting closer.

“Let’s have some fun together~~”

“D-don’t come closer!!”

She raised her hand.

To change the dream to her favor and unleash magic at the same time.

But nothing happened.

“W-what mental strength…!”

The second problem with the ability to interfere with dreams.

She could change the dream to her advantage, but only to a certain degree, since the owner of the dream was still the dreamer.

Meaning, that man.

It was impossible to control him past a certain degree, and if the dreamer’s mental strength was strong, she could end up trapped inside the dream, or even get caught in a nightmare.

The reason she hadn’t considered that problem before was because she had never seen a human with that level of mental strength after going in and out of the dreams of thousands of people.

In other words, Lilith, who had entered the dream of that man with strong mental strength.

Was now a weakling who couldn’t use her magic or manipulate nightmares.

“Hehe…. A newbie… You’re so hot. Slurp. My mouth is watering… hehehe.”

“Please don’t come closer!!!”

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-I am Malenia, Blade of Miquella.

A woman’s voice came from two other boxes beside the box that was emitting light.

Soon, characters filled the two boxes in front of her.

-YOU DIED.

How many times was that now?

Lilith didn’t have time to be amazed by the strange objects she was seeing for the first time.

That was because of the fatigue.

3 days in the dream world.

72 hours.

4,320 minutes.

259,200 seconds.

That was the amount of time that Lilith and the owner of the dream next to her hadn’t rested.

Lilith didn’t die after that.

She thought it was a good thing, but as time went on, she gradually realized that it was better to die.

He was saying strange things that she couldn’t understand, and the sheer amount of it built up fatigue, even though she wasn’t listening.

Moreover, he wanted something from her.

He was manipulating a machine that she had never seen before, to make the picture inside the box move, and he was telling her some unknown information every 10 seconds.

“Use that attack! Run!”

“Heehee…!”

“That’s not it!! You need to parry three times for a counter!”

“Ye, yes!!”

Unable to escape, and her strength reduced to the level of an ordinary person, Lilith had no choice but to do as she was told in order to survive.

While she was doing it, she was able to gather some information.

The box that was showing the picture wasn’t a magic tool, but a machine, and that she was currently playing a game.

But…

‘Why do humans play such games?!’

The man who she thought to be herself in the box was naked.

No, to be exact, he was wearing underwear.

His skin was not human, but purple, and his face was more grotesque than a goblin.

All he was holding was a small shield and a wooden club.

The difficulty was insane, if she got hit once, she would die, and even if she hit, the health that was lost was just a sliver.

She couldn’t understand.

Why are they doing this?

No, before that, what was the purpose of creating something like this?

Was it to torment someone?

Why? What is there to gain from tormenting other people?

It was full of things that she couldn’t understand with her knowledge.

Moreover, the man next to her only allowed a specific skill to be used to parry the opponent’s attack, not just attacking them.

When she first swung her club, without knowing what it was, his gaze was truly terrifying.

His eyes were like… the eyes of a veteran who had come through countless battles.

Anyway, after that, she only did as she was told.

After 3 days of hard work, her effort finally paid off.

“I, I did it…!”

The woman, who had been tormenting her, knelt down and collapsed.

‘Finally, I can get out of here…!’

“Hurry, get ready!”

“Huh…?”

She thought it was over, but it wasn’t.

A red flower bloomed from the woman she thought had collapsed, then she threw her helmet off and flew away with wings.

“Phase 2 is starting! Phase 2 starts with a Crimson Aonia!”

Phase 2?

What’s that?

I don’t know that.

Wasn’t it over now?

When she regained her senses, a red flower was fully bloomed inside the box.

-YOU DIED.

“Ah… I died. I guess I have to start again. Now that I’ve seen Phase 2, maybe I can clear it if I try a bit harder?”

From the beginning?

Do I have to do it from the beginning…?

“No, I don’t want to anymore…!”

I don’t want to anymore!!

She desperately wished for it, and a door appeared in a room without a door.

Her desperation had created an escape route for a moment.

Lilith frantically got off her seat and headed for the door.

When she barely managed to open the door and leave, she was in the inn room she knew with a beastkin woman and a vampire standing next to her.

“Sa, Save me!!!!!!”

She begged for help from those two.

She felt like she was going to go insane.

Being trapped in a dark room and repeating the same thing over and over again for three days.

“I don’t want to anymore!!! Just kill meeeeeeee!!!!!!”

If it was impossible to escape, then death was better.

“O dildo manga?”

Thwack.

The familiar hand that grabbed her horns.

She couldn’t have forgotten the voice she had just heard.

“Kyaa, kyaaaaaaaaaak!!!!!!”

In the end, she missed her first and last chance to escape and was sucked back into the dream.

And like that, one day in reality passed, but after a week in the dream, Lilith barely managed to escape the nightmare.

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