Alice worked her magic, creating an opening in the inner mindscape that'd allow the boy to escape back into his clouded mind.
Expectedly, when that hole was formed, a torrent of pink energy came flooding into the vast expanse of his memories, accompanied by agonized wailing. It was every fragment of the Mind Demon's thralls, screaming as it subjected to a mental assault of its own. It wasn't just an ordinary mental attack either; Furfur was being dragged into another dimension, from his perspective. It was a terror the entity had never realized, and it was a pain it'd never felt either.
Miles worth of the pink energy flooded the space, and it didn't appear to occupy more than a mere dot in front of the child. Alice was controlling its size as it was dragged in, the network caught in the suction of a powerful vacuum. It was a wormhole, or perhaps it'd be more accurate to call it a blackhole.
The correct wording was irrelevant. All that mattered was under the sudden attack, which it had no time to prepare for, the Demon of the Mind was swallowed whole by Worthy's mind.
Immediately, it began retaliating. The mist warped and coated the layers of Worthy's memories in a viscous attempt at infecting periods of his past. If it'd succeeded, then the child would've begun to question why he ever doubted Lord Furfur's generosity in the first place.
It did not work. Alice didn't allow the mist to influence any of the memories, warping the path that miasma went. Like a conductor, she directed the flow of the mist and refused to let it anywhere near something familiar in the memory.
"Sorcery?! In what world did a being such as yourself learn sorcery?!" Through the miasma, Furfur's voice came out far more hellish than when spoken through his vessel.
Worthy did not know sorcery, but he knew what it was. The ancient being must've believed that the mystic arts were lost.
Well, he was not entirely wrong. The world Worthy came from was entirely different from the one that the Blood Marauder swallowed whole.
In that world, there were giants, incomprehensible entities, and a deity—the deceased Lord of Hope—whose blood drowned the world. Mysticals things were on a far grander scale than everything he had in his world beyond the Tower. Beasts existed and roamed, but there were few extraordinary species, and most of them lacked the same level of sentience as humans.
The child had no intention of disclosing the nature of his world to the foe, however.
He was feeling rather spiteful, after having his mind stolen from him three separate times. One of those times, he wasn't even aware that it'd happened. This time around he was, and because of this awareness he was dangerous.
'Whine all you want, you control freak! I'm only getting started!!' Of course, none of the things happening were entirely the result of his actions. It was Alice, whose control over the space reigned supreme against the demon's control.
The reason behind its helplessness was obvious: Alice was Alice.
The mental fragment was born from the memory of Alice in the Drowned World, where all was lost. Her powers were still supreme in that place, and with those vast abilities she managed to defeat the Blood Marauder, who was nothing short of a God.
She failed to kill the cursed deity, in the end. Either because of her own carelessness, a lack of power to substantially alter the life status of the God, or its own inability to die; it survived. It split itself into millions of fragments who all set out in hopes of merging with the other, and anything else they found, to become whole again.
Now, one of those fragments of the slain God was unknowingly feeling the wrath of the vindictive woman, who held just as much fury for the fragments of the Blood Marauder as she did for the deity when it was whole.
Worthy was carefully communicating with Alice through his memories, which only she could interact with at the moment.
[Hey, I'm enjoying watching this guy fly around aimlessly… Just… How are we going to finish him off?]
It was Worthy's idea to defeat the entity, but he didn't have any clue how he'd go about it. After all, Furfur was only inferior to Alice in terms of its influence in the mind. It could never hope to contend with the power of the woman, but that didn't mean that Worthy himself wasn't still in danger.
He wanted to leave Furfur trapped to be thrown around endlessly by Alice's fragment, but not while it was still so dangerous. There was no telling when the ember of the woman's existence might flicker one day, or become stagnant in its duty of endlessly fighting the Demon of the Mind.
Thus, the child was thinking about how he could permanently damage the entity inside of his mind.
Without lobotomizing himself, that is.
[We're in the back of your mind. My control is limited in this region. If you leave, I could most still uncover a method to permanently suppress this vile, contemptible specimen. Lest you're content with battling it yourself in this mindscape. Even with your tenacity, I wouldn't want to see such a thing.]
It was a humble way of saying she has no faith in the child. Worthy took no offense to it, being the mature child he was.
[Yeah? Well how about I take away all those privileges you have, huh? Then we'll see how well you fare against it.]
He was pretty certain, contrary to his tone, that Alice would still find a way to defeat Furfur in the mindscape even without absolute control over its happenings. He also did not know how he'd even revoke the control he'd given to a being infinitely more powerful than he was.
Maybe later down the line, he'd learn the secrets of some long-forgotten Mind Arts, which lets him engage in mental duels with his enemies, rather than relying on his physical might!
That'd be far too convenient.
[I won't engage in banter with you, boy. However, I must warn you that your chance to escape will close once it realizes that it can exit through the same way it came in, it'll do everything in its power to get there. As long as you are here, that hole will be open. You'll get enthralled again, and I'll no doubt have a harder time bringing Furfur back here a second time.]
[Wow. That's a long-winded way of saying it's now or never.]
[Your idioms don't interest me, Son of Coward and Evangelica.]
Man. The Tower had also referred to him as that when he entered. Now that he was hearing it from Alice, however, he wondered if the mysterious structure was being condescending to him too.
"You cannot keep me here forever, child! Soon, you will make a mistake! When you do, I will have your head!" Apparently, the entity could not see Alice. So that it thought it was only Worthy dominating its flow, and therefore keeping it imprisoned in this foreign region of the mind it'd never seen before.
Furfur had expanded itself deeply into the minds of others. Never before had it ever met a human whose mind was so boundless. No, it was not that the mind was boundless, it was that Furfur had fallen into a deep ocean. The Mind Demon had been walking along the surface of a sea; the human mind, and was then dragged into a whirlpool of tempestuous might. It was still a human's mind… but it was like a tumor, a cancer of sorts. Except, rather than eating at the mind, it was eating at Furfur itself.
Furfur, the longer the demon remained in the mentalscape, was having its own mind torn apart. Hidden within the distant tapestries, the boy's memories, there was forbidden information that even he must not have known of. That information was tearing through the space, aiming to infect the minds of foreign invaders. It was not a defense mechanism, but instead a natural law of the…
"The Tower?" The demon spoke aloud. If it had eyes, its avatar would've blinked.
It was not in the world it had devoured. No, it was still there; however the Laws that its progenitor—the slumbering Blood Marauder—once governed were no longer there to be bent in its favor.
Forbidden knowledge did not exist for a deity such as the Blood Marauder back then, and the same should've been applied to the most senseless of its fragments: the Mindless. It certainly shouldn't have had such a harrowing effect on the Enlightened, who inherited fragments of the Blood Marauder's own mind, on top of one of the powers the deity once wielded.
It was this place it'd been dragged to at some point, the Tower, making it susceptible to the secrets that held it together. Furfur, who should not have known these secrets, was having its mind destroyed to ensure those secrets remained unshared.
The child was not aware of them. His mind had been shattered and pulled back together somehow, and those memories were deeply suppressed to the point he could not see them when they rested right in his face.
"Goodness, I've never been in such a nerve-wracking predicament before!" Still, Furfur regained some of its composure. Through the various minds its infested, it'd learned many important things, including how to remain sound of mind.
Just as the avatar of the demon composed itself and began to think of a method of escaping before its mind was eradicated by cursed, restricted knowledge, a visage crossed its vision.
Something broke through the mist that surrounded it, and a moment later, the entity felt a sharp… pain… shoot through its abdomen.
"...?" It did not have any words to say, looking down to see the avatar of the child, Worthy, wielding a conjured weapon in hand. Confusion built and boiled over, and Furfur shouted as he raised a hand to strike the child. "You thought to confront me directly, you simian!?"
Furfur's might, even while in this space where the demon carried no real control, would've been enough to fragment the child's avatar with a single strike.
However, before its hand could hit the boy, the familiar gravity of the world pushed it back, away from the impish fiend.
Worthy felt the presence of the demon's hand narrowly miss his face, and almost let out a sigh of relief. He didn't, and instead continued forward to attack the demon again.
'Simian?! How about you speak some real words if you want to get under my skin, you troglodyte!'
"That…!"
Furfur raised a hand in time to block the approach of the child's knife as the distance between them closed.
Worthy had manifested his Blood-Absorbing Knife through his memories, and many of his memories of the weapon contained it at the peak of its strength, where cutting through anything was entirely possible. Even stalwart individuals like Walkyr would not wish to physically clash with the weapon without an enchanted tool of their own.
Having enthralled the entire city, Furfur knew this fact. However, the demon had not anticipated that the weapon would retain its overwhelming might.
Moreover… the demon did not anticipate the red thread connecting to the center of his being.
As the knife descended, Furfur was caught off guard. The child had created a link with Edwin Redglaive before and quickly came to regret it, yet now the boy was not seeking Edwin Redglaive, but Furfur…
The demon's eyes trailed down, and for only a moment, it panicked. It questioned what the purpose behind a link between them could possibly be. Their minds were already rooted together now, so there was nothing either could hope to accomplish by somehow unleashing mental assaults through the thread.
There was no point…
Furfur's eyes rose too late.
Worthy had created a guiding thread, connecting him to Furfur in the middle of his assault. It wasn't to cause any harm or improve his accuracy, though it would make sure the avatar could not hide in the mist. Instead, the thread played a far more simple goal.
It was going to guide Worthy to victory, as his enemy would surely stop the non-existent threat the link posed.
And in that instance, Worthy's knife cleaved through the forearm of Furfur's mighty avatar and continued down.
The knife went into the avatar's neck, and dug deeper until it came out of his chest, and the demon was left stunned in place.
'I told 'ya, you cocky jerk!' Worthy reversed the grip on his dagger, and there was a gleam in the eyes of his avatar as the fog manifesting Furfur's avatar shrunk, healing the injuries that it'd sustained just as it'd done in the real world.
'I'm just getting started!'
The next strike reached the demon's neck, and the treacherous puppeteer's avatar sustained another injury.
With that, the battle of minds truly began.