“...Though millions are on my way, I will still go.”

--Mencius, 4th World Philosopher

“G, bring some men and mount the matriarch! I don’t know how long we can last down here! Kill her and put an end to all this! ” With Freyr’s order, divinity flowed through every single cell on Dalang---Gullintursti’s body.

Drums, screams, explosions, divinity blasts, and endless waves of rustling footsteps echoed through the hallowed center of the earth.

“Where on Terra are we?” Dolus asked himself.

Transformed into an owl, Dolus circled above a dusky battlefield in what seemed to be a different realm. Everything was dim, and the gravity was way off. They were not on Terra; they were within it.

A golden, flaming boar charged into a tide of anthropods, leaving a trail of burnt green body fluids, severed limbs, twitching antennae behind. A line of golden chariots followed closely behind, burning a path for the shield formations to advance. The grand army had hundreds of immortals and tens of thousands of mortals. Only a few gods knew the true purpose of that forgotten war.

There she was, a brood mother, a matriarch. With chitins so thick that not even Gungnir could penetrate them. Gullinbursti’s goal was to climb on her back and attack the joint that connected the titanic beetle’s thorax and abdomen.

The boar stopped after crashing into the matriarch’s foot and caused a dent. The legends were true about the toughness of the matriarch’s shell. Disabled his boar form, Gullinbursti exploded his golden armor and his chainmail beneath with his divinity. The fragments killed hundreds of bugs, clearing enough space for Gullinbursti to climb onto her limb.

The irony was unparallel. Dolus promised peace and serenity, yet conflict and unrest occupied most of Dalang’s mind. The battlefield was more detailly virtualized compared to his retirement Dalang had immersed in from the first illusion. Fantasies are always ambiguously hazy; memories are always brutally detailed.

Standing topless on the back of the matriarch, Gullinbursti recalled his armor, summoning all the fragments to his extending arm. In seconds, his chain mail reattached themselves back on his body, and a nine tooth rake was printed out in his palms.

Gullinburst stuck the rake inside the joint that connected the matriarch’s thorax and abdomen with just one swing. After several hits, a sizable crack appeared. The damage was negligible compared to the matriarch’s enormous size; however, a cut wound is enough for him to make a difference. He reached for his celestial pocket and snatched a foul-smelled barrel of mermen fat from the southern seas. Supposedly as fuel for illuminating tombs in the Nine States, mermen fat candles can last eons in a low oxygen environment.

Time was not on Gullinbursti’s side; hastily, he poured the sticky fat through the crack his rake created. With a simple fire rune, he was forced to take a step back from the heatwave. As the natives of the lightless realm, the anthropods are susceptible to heat and vibration. When they sensed a high heat signature on their matriarch’s back, some quickly reacted and climbed up on her limbs. As dozens of them approaching, Gullinbursti realized he had to stay and guard the fire.

“What a day. No. What a night, what a glorious, endless night!” Picked up his rake and infused it with his divinity, he tossed it at the line of Centaur Mantises that was ten paces away. The anthropods tried to block the approaching hunk of metal with their sharp cerci, but the sheer weight of the rake simply crushed through everything as if a brick landed on a pile of thin ceramics.

“Why is Dalang showing me this. Or why is he showing this to himself? Why is my voice not reaching him?” Dolus was unsure whether he should fly down and intervene or not. Eventually, he decided to keep spectating the battlefield for clues.

As Gullinbursti causing carnage on the back of the Matriarch, the grand army was suffering heavy loss. More and more mortal warriors fell at the endless, jagged cerci of the Centaur Mantises; crushed beneath the rock-solid shells of the Boulder Slaters; melted away by the scorching acid of the Canon Beetles. All the fire rune enchanted chariots extinguished and drowned under the marching steps of the anthropods.

With fewer mortals on the field, the weaker the immortals were. They were too far from the surface to supply their divinity from their believers; thus, the army was the portable charging station for them. Death and fear gloomed the army, destroying the mortals’ faith and will.

“Where are the Valkyries? Where are our reinforcements? Can we still reach Valhalla?” The mortals started panicking; despair began to spread like a disease. Their shield wall wavered, and their spears trembled.

Gullinbursti felt the fluctuation in the divinity. If the fire could not burn through the Matriarch’s joints and reach her artery and nerve system before the army was overwhelmed by the anthropods, all the lives lost were for nothing. Just as he started to worry, the matriarch started to squirm violently as she finally felt the burn on her back. The commands stopped for the marching anthropods, and their attack started to lose focus and cooperation.

The mortals saw the flames burning atop of the matriarch. Like a torch of hope being ignited, doubts and fear were lit up and burnt away by courageous warcries and clanking weapons.

“Follow the flame, follow Gullinbursti, follow your glory!!” Freyr, riding on his ferocious reindeer, and wielding his flaming sword, led the final charge. Behind him were the mightiest mortals from the whole Terra. The boost in morale replenished the immortals with divinity; they healed their wounds, charged up their weapons and abilities, and unleashed their frustration and rage upon the brood mercilessly.

The matriarch’s piercing screech signaled that the fire finally reached the matriarch’s soft innards. The heat damaged her nervous system and left eighty percent of her paralyzed. Piles of dead anthropods fell from her back as she collapsed on her abdomen. Thousands of anthropods ran to their mother, only to be crushed by her gigantic body. The matriarch tried to rotate herself and escape, though she only had control of her front limbs.

The attempt had proven to be futile as the mermen-fat-fueled fire had reached her artery. The heat burst the vein; gross green liquid oozed out, resembling the eye of a spring. Bloodloss soon claimed the matriarch’s life and left her as a twitching husk. Gullinbursti jumped off the matriarch’s corpse, turned it into his Boar form, and charged back and return to Freyr.

“So, you’ve always wanted to be a hero,” Dolus murmured from above. “You always wanted to be the one who saves the day,” Dolus remembered Dalang mentioning the fight with the drakes by the roots of Yggdrasil; never had he mentioned the invasion of the Core World by Aesirs and the Vanirs.

Dolus realized that his illusions could not provide Dalang happy endings but endings Dalang wished upon himself. His mind was trying to undo his regrets, giving him a second chance to set things right.

The biggest fallacy of all worlds: “I could’ve.”

Dolus finally sensed Dalang’s psionic signature, together with the skull’s. He knew someone as resilient as the Golden Boar would not give up easily. One question remained unsolved: how would the skull manifest itself in this illusion?

Gullinbursti plowed through the fleeing anthropods with ease and stopped before Freyr: his mentor, his commander, and his friend. He changed back to his armored form and approached with open arms, “Go forth and the set the world on fire, they said. That’s what I just did.”

The army stood there, dead silent. Freyr approached him; his radiant aura was there no more; instead, his presence thickened the air and terrified Gullinbursti. His eyes glowed red; his limbs elongated to an absurd ratio, the antlers on his helm gradually grew larger and eerier.

Suddenly, the whole army started screaming and charged at Gullinbursti with their weapons drawn. Gullinbursti was overwhelmed by terror and guilt as he turned around and ran away.

“We are your pride; we are your failure. You sacrificed us for your victory! Now pay the blood price!” The bodies of the dead soldiers raised beneath the arthropod carcasses, chanting and cursing the immortal that could have prevented their death had he be more powerful and more resourceful.

The truth was, there was no victory, at least for those who perished. The grand army lost more than ninety percent of mortals and more than half immortals. Four separate armies attacked four major broods and destroyed all of them.

The gods waged their war, but the mortals paid the price; the sudden massive loss in population and resources sent Midgard and Vanaheim into unrest and disasters. Shrines were unattended, rituals were forgotten, farmlands were abandoned, and immortals became aimless wanderers.

The Alfather struck a deal with the sapiens. The invasion of the core world was to help the sapiens expand their habitat for their amassing population. The sapiens would, in return, worship him as their war god. The war depicted the new fifth world perfectly: docile mortals, scheming gods, and unknown danger creeping beneath.

For years, the battle haunted Dalang. All the mortals he trained and befriended had fallen because of his misjudgment. Dalang never used Mermen fat, nor did he possess any at that time. There were no flaming chariots, no Freyr nor his majestic reindeer, and no sufficient divinity. He had to break through the joint while combating waves of anthropods: a task proved his incompetency and arrogance.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.” Gullinbursti ran in tears; his aureate, extravagant armor shattered and crumbled in the thick darkness. Helplessness was a raging sorrow and a sorrowing rage

Dolus had to terminate the simulation before Dalang’s guilt, vengefulness, and regret had consumed him. The artfully engineered curse has infected Dalang’s mind and infiltrated every bit of his memories. No longer could Dolus allow Dalang’s mind to be the author of the illusion.

Once again, darkness engulfed all. Dolus painstakingly imagined everything in his mind--from the temperature of the sunlight to the sound of the flapping moths. He had written a script with Dalang as the protagonist with pieces of both of their memories.

Reading and manipulating minds felt like sailing for Dolus. Suppose a mortal mind reassembled a pond, an immortal mind, a river. In Dalang’s case, his mind was a rocky waterfall with inconsistency and contradiction crashed into each other or onto the rocks. Others’ memories flowed orderly while Dalang’s splashed destructively. Dolus could not lead Dalang mind into his own mindscape. Dalang's memory was filled with errors and loops. Improvise was the only option.

Once again, the curtain raised.