The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound

Randidly knew Xershi was correct. However, some part of him felt deeply regretful he couldn’t sneak in and peer into the remnant Nether Princes from such a formative time in the Nexus. Considering his ongoing journey to figure out a weakness of Elhume’s it was almost an ideal opportunity.

And perhaps the sort of traps waiting would be just as geared to capturing a Nether King as these had been. Maybe he could-

“Hey, Randidly, what’s that look on your face,” Fiona scowled and prodded him in the back with her knuckles.

Randidly forced himself to focus. Still, worst-case scenario is that I would try and sneak through the portal and find Elhume himself waiting on the other side. Or his consciousness, whatever portion of him isn’t trapped within that mountain range of crystalized Aether. At that point, I don’t think he would just let me waltz around and figure anything out. He would crack me open and rip out my Fateset and Alpha Cosmos from my body…

He flicked his wrist and produced the Alchemist’s Passport, still not quite trusting the lack of response from the hands in the surroundings. Immediately, he grimaced as he activated the Fatepiece; still the towers might be, but they hadn’t stopped isolating the space. He gestured to the group. “I’ll be able to move us, but we will need to rip our way out. Gather around.”

Fiona and Xershi moved and put their hands on his shoulder. All three of them looked at Pullas, who was just standing there, her expression blank. Small motes of light continued to dance around her body, the momentum from her previous defensive showing maintaining their motion.

“Pullas, you alright?” Xershi said.

She blinked and turned to look at the group. Even as she looked right at them, her eyes never quite focused to pull them into frame. Her mind was clearly elsewhere. “Oh, yes. Just… getting a feel for my image. It’s nothing.”

As she moved to join the group, Randidly took another glance at Pullas. In terms of outward appearance, she seemed fine, but he frowned as he noticed the way she was hemorrhaging Aether. Her body leaked the previous energy like a cracked vase. Her suddenly overwhelming image became even more bewildering, in Randidly’s mind.

While moving his wrists and beginning to feel at the edges of space in front of them, Randidly deepened the connection between the two of them and the Ascension Pact Nether Ritual. Then he flooded that bond with Aether. Immediately, the energy began to flow from high concentration to low, sliding gladly to fill the vacated space inside of Pullas’s body. She continued to leak energy, but at least that would probably stave off any permanent consequences for a while.

Randidly’s directed a very specific flourish of his hand, feeling two portions of his Fateset activating in tandem. The transformed, flat Hierarchy of Burden spun out in front of the Philosopher's Passport. Randidly pressed the key forward, moving into the first layer, ripping through space with enough speed to create roaring serpents of crimson electromagnetic discharge around their bodies-

-and was almost immediately yanked out of the activation, his Soulspace and Nether core aching and shaken from the sudden deceleration. The other Ascension Pact members were even more confused and stunned than he was. Pullas and Fiona fell sideways and Xershi careened forward for about ten meters, slamming into the base of one of the suppression pillars and toppling it with a loud crash.

Randidly’s chest wouldn’t relax; he couldn’t breathe. He turned his attention inward to try and figure out the cause just as the voice of Elhume returned with an edge.

“Both of you are such idiots. The two of you will stick to your principles, even if it requires you to sit back and watch everything you held dear turn to ash. Even if you are guiding the entire Nexus to its doom. Nothing is more important than your pride.” The voice buzzed against Randidly’s skin. For the first time, he could hear the hint of emotion, a roaring inferno of emotional affect, even though this was just a recording. “If I’m being honest, I expect you will choose this option and trigger the emergency defenses. Fine then. Die. Your corpse and the Nether Prince that results will be plenty valuable enough for me.”

The massively sized fingers swirled down, almost twenty moving in on their position to join the previous three. Pullas spread her arms wide and milky light poured out of her. Randidly’s spinning mind finally clicked into a place of understanding about what had tripped him up. It was the mini hands. I had pulled myself out of the pattern, but a fair chunk of them still had a grip on my significance. So abruptly, I was dragging them all into the spatial tunnel with me. Even I couldn’t handle it.

Pullas’s image spiraled up, beginning its dance in response to the new threats. Her image had become so radiantly powerful that Randidly could feel it on his face, its presence just as warm as the sun.

Xershi groaned and pushed himself out of the debris of the broken tower. Glancing back, an uneasy smile crossed Randidly’s face. But on the positive side, those fuckers were mulched by that. So as long as I activate the Fatepiece again-

Events began to accelerate around the group. More tiny hands began to swarm toward this position, rising out of holes in the bottom of the layer. The first massive fingers, huge cyclones of fake Nether, slammed and were rebuffed by Pullas’s image. If anything, Pullas seemed even more solid, moving and unleashing powerful attacks that hand the whole layer shaking. Once more those thunderous collisions filled the vicinity with noise.

Her power kept rising, purifying and refining itself, the teal and gold ballroom spreading over a larger area. The powerful fingers corrupted and corroded, but Randidly watched in real-time as Pullas’s image knitted itself back together, stronger and more determined than ever. He was floored by the amount of emotional energy it must be taking to fuel this. That, combined with the leaking of Aether from her body, made this improvement seem ridiculous-

The Grey Creature reached out and pinched Randidly’s consciousness, shocking him back to his current issue. The Grey Creature looked at him in something akin to disgust; it wasn’t dying here, just because Randidly was impressed by Pullas’s image. He tried to still his Fatepieces and bring them once more into resonance with each other.

But unfortunately for the group, two of those massive fingers curled in huge circles above their position. Immediately, Randidly felt these horrifying energy fingers somehow spun the space of their surroundings in on itself so that both sides connected to each other. As he raised the Alchemist’s Passport, he could already feel that the energy of these fingers reinforced the stability of the surrounding space. He could probably punch through by activating the Entropy layer, but he would need to go much deeper into it than he had previously.

Randidly pointed, “Those fingers somehow have a grip on the space. As long as they stay there-”

“Got it, get rid of them.” Pullas hissed. He honestly didn’t even know she was paying attention, considering her furious competency. Randidly only felt her answer through the Ascension Pact; the noise was buried beneath the constant kinetic earthquakes generated by her flawless defense. She glanced sideways, her image a blur of violent and overwhelming strikes above them. “Fiona?”

Next to Randidly, Fiona clapped her hands together. A mauve firework sizzled and launched itself out of her hands, shooting up into the sky. One of the massive fingers paused in its sweeping bombardment, twisting to slap it out of existence. But the firework pivoted and avoided the attack, moving past the barrage of fingers in a very impressive burst of speed. Ultimately, they let the small thing go and focused on slamming toward the group.

Once it was past them, the maroon projectile accelerated even further.

Pullas breathed out through her nose. “Death Never Hurries, but Always Approaches.”

She tucked an arm by her side, which began to steadily accumulate some of her image light. Above her, the image projection began to spin in place, also with one arm at its side. Then, with only a single hand, she released waves of power back and forth to crash into the attacking fingers. Each movement was perfectly timed, preventing an attack from ripping down and essentially pancaking them all in one blow, considering the thickness of each finger.

It felt somewhat like being underneath an umbrella of light during a torrential downpour, except instead of tiny drops of rain, the image shuddered underneath a barrage of coal-powered locomotives.

The glow around Pullas’s one arm intensified. Xershi lashed back and forth, disrupting the smaller hands gathering around the group that tried to seize Randidly’s Nether again. Randidly shot a probing glance at Fiona. She shrugged. “Did you think we didn’t make our own preparations while you were taking a nap?”

Abruptly, the maroon firework erupted, illuminating a very distant portion of the layer. One that Randidly recognized. His eyes widened. “You-”

Pullas still maintained an almost effortless defense, her image bright and clear. But her left arm finally moved, straightening and pointing at the maroon ball hanging in the distance. “A Good Death Arrives to Collect its Debt.”

The release of that pent of power smacked Randidly in the face with enough force that he reflexively closed his eyes. When he opened them, it didn’t change much; the light released by Pullas was so bright that his pupils could squeeze together quickly enough to make any sense of the surroundings.

But he felt the attack, even more than he saw it. She wanted to protect the Ascension Pact, to pry open a path to the next layer, more than almost anything else in the world. The desire made Randidly catch his breath, swept away by how pure and simple Pullas’s emotions had become.

That’s where the power came from. She somehow cut everything else out of her. Randidly’s expression became troubled. But… what happens when the group begins to split up?

That blast of pure energy, of death so righteously seeking to defend itself, soared up through the sky. Randidly heard the sounds of several massive fingers throwing themselves in the way, seeking to slow and defeat the projectile. But while these caustic hunks of fake Nether had a natural restrictive quality, they couldn’t quench something as pure as Pullas’s wish.

The attack surged farther away, revealing the group. Xershi seemed floored. Fiona smirked at Randidly’s confused look. “Before, Pullas asked me to identify the most vulnerable location in the area for her. In case we needed to create a distraction. My image might be nowhere close to the raw power of the current Pullas, but there are some things that are quite easy for me.”

“And you chose that,” Randidly whispered, watching the gleaming comet streak through space… directly toward the refinement area of that horrifying dense drop of antagonistic Nether. Even from here, he felt the empty depths that drop possessed, brought repeatedly close to overwhelming emotions without having any history being made.

In terms of Nether, Randidly hadn’t seen its equal ever before. The Nether King was a master manipulator of the energy, but that drop was a natural calamity, without consciousness or any real direction. Made increasingly dangerous based on the exposure to emotion.

Significance began rapidly flowing through the surrounding space. Randidly’s skin began to tingle; it was the same wave of significance that they had shifted earlier when the Ascension Pact was released. All the pent-up dreams of those coming to the Sonara, all the original goals, all the calcified emotions. Except now those waves of energy had rushed up from the starting point and hit the top.

Now that Nether came back down. Backwash, thick and tainted, rushed around them, building to an ominous shift.

Randidly could see it, as hundreds of massive fingers, so distant they looked no bigger than hairs, frantically spun together to try and keep that attack from reaching its target. Yet the current Pullas seemed unstoppable.

Suddenly, this empty vessel that Elhume is refining as a bomb is going to encounter a shape for the first time. Randidly licked his lips. And that shape… is death.

In that moment, he could suddenly understand why everyone he had encountered in the Nexus always considered him to be a destabilizing force. Watching that attack rush toward that drop of Nether, he became very sure that climbing to the next layer would be the least of their worries.

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