The Legend of Randidly Ghosthound

Randidly looked at the barriers of time that had been built around this battlefield. He felt the subtle flows tugging at his wrists and ankles-- the net had ensnared him deep enough that he would need to tear through a few temporal beats in order to escape. His expression turned harsh, both for Fiero for managing this and for himself for missing this area’s construction. He needed to be better than this.

“Are you willing to capitulate?” Fiero asked. The question sounded like a taunt. Randidly made a promise to himself that he would really pause and savor the next time he drove his fist through the ancient Vulpine’s jaw.

A thousand considerations glittered in his awareness. A thousand worries, a thousand solutions. The Alchemist in his chest narrowed his eyes.

Randidly considered taking a step back; that Path would put less strain on his isolated subordinates. But he also knew he would be surrendering the initiative he had grasped through his fights thus far. The Alchemist in him had been carefully considering the miracle ingredients he could manipulate, but suddenly he would shift into a new role. Randidly rubbed his thumb along Acri’s carved handle.

Time and time again, Fiero had proven he couldn’t be trusted. His whole kingdom was built upon a foundation of pilfering and repurposing. Randidly did not wish to show his back to such an individual.

Through his Nether and Aether connections, Randidly felt the compressed struggles of the Vulpis Squad. With his attention, he saw the lines that had severed. Their suffering sizzled through and made his hackles rise. Randidly gritted his teeth. His heart burned to not simply rip his way through to assist them, but Fiero wouldn’t have come here without a plan in place.

He had clambored to this point by relying on others. He should not falter now.

Advance, the Dread Homunculus whispered to him in a voice that was both mournful and anticipatory.

If Randidly had to bet on his chances of escaping the prepared traps for the two traps laid before him, he unfortunately had a lot more confidence in his fighting his way through the direct ambush. He spun Acri and then aimed the point at the withered chest of his foe. Randidly Ghosthound stood tall and did not capitulate.

“Your people will die,” Fiero spoke while eyeing the gleaming blade.

Randidly released a long breath. He felt like taking an hour break to cry, mourning the fact Lyra had believed she had no avenues forward but to become a restraint upon the danger that a Devick had become with a Deviation Rarity Skill. He wished he could sleep for a year for all the lives extinguished, a few more sparks of fuel cast into that maw that was his own drive. “I wish I could save my people from all dangers. But I can’t. I can just… give them every opportunity to succeed.”

Fiero snorted. “What a peculiar methodology. But fine, this time, I am ready for your insurgency. The Seventh Fist: Pinnacle’s Shibboleth.”

Fiero’s tails blazed with power, cracking and smashing the ground beneath his feet with the pressure of his image activation. From his body emerged a note of imitation; a near-perfect replication of the resonance that had earned him and Elhume a full moment at the Pinnacle. It contained the hint of truth and the potency of a vessel. The air quaked and seethed. A tail-turned-fist sailed in Randidly’s direction, a blow that was proof of the heights Fiero had reached.

He felt curiously numb, struck with a sense of detachment and deja vu. His eyes were wide and suddenly, he saw.

Congratulations! Your Skill Emerald Eyes and Dove Whispers Certify the Objective (GD) has grown to Level 1559!

Congratulations! Your Skill Truth Within the Primordial Flux (GD) has grown to Level 1101!

Very quickly, Randidly had three almost irrelevant thoughts as he witnessed the patterns thrown in his face during these fights. The first thought was almost inarticulate, a blaze of emotional intensity that seared through his body. It burned from his wrists and calves, following the charred and incendiary remnants of his grief until it slammed into his emotional sea, full of heat and intensity.

The second thought was an acknowledgement of emotional exhaustion. His fury shot out into his emotional sea and vanished within the wide expanse. The breadth of the emotion Randidly had spent over the last hour lingered like a suffocating storm front and extinguished any new sparks with just the ghost of its presence. He stood on the balls of his feet with Acri raised. And he felt totally anchored in place by the gulf inside of his heart. His people needed him. He was also needed elsewhere.

The powerful fist, with the hint of a Pinnacle’s truth, slid toward him. His Nether Core shivered in response.

The third thought was a weird moment of connection and clarity around where he might accumulate power. The more he learned about the Pinnacle, the more he learned that the power came not from the truth, not in the long term, but from the vessel. His emotional sea, the burning intensity that animated his attacks most of the time, had been spent through repeated clashes at the height of his potential.

But the bowl that contained all those emotions remained, vast and hollow inside his consciousness. He had already intuited the way his body physically became more due to the presence of the Alpha Cosmos, but this was different. He, Randidly Ghosthound, notoriously poor at handling his feelings, could now contain an emotional multitudes.

That, too, could be a weapon. He raised the ‘bowl’ and its hollow ghost.

Randidly released a breath. His Nether Core spun, faster and faster, pulling significance into a whirlpool around his body. He executed a thrust, his whole existence becoming part of the movement. The frame of his emotional sea became the weight behind the blow, blending seamlessly with his muscle and Nether.

Acri cracked open Fiero’s stolen Seventh Fist and buried its head deep in the ancient Vulpine’s chest.

Fiero snarled down at the wound. “You insolent wretch!”

A wave of Fiero’s image, a grasping hand, scrabbled against Randidly’s attack. The ancient monster of the Nexus sought purchase, to pry away the image that had been wielded against him.

The Dread Homunculus cackled.

Because Randidly hadn’t wielded an image against this old bastard. He had simply relied on the vessel he had become. And Fiero’s ‘grip’ wasn’t enough to hold him. He wretched Acri sideways, twisting the spearhead and deepening the wound. He left Fiero groaning as he pulled out his weapon and twisted his left arm backward. A pulse of pure glee came from his Nether Core. From within the depths of the mist, a gem began to sparkle.

Randidly threw a left hook with all of his accumulation in the System behind it. When he felt the jaw of Fiero crack, he grinned wolfishly. The ancient monster’s body bounced its way through a collapsed tower.

He fucking savored the moment of impact. No matter what else could be said of him, Randidly Ghosthound made good on his promises.

Just as Randidly was about to pounce and followed up with more blows, channeling this existence as a vessel into every movement, Fiero waved his hand. The sky above them suddenly bristled as Timeless fists phased into existence through the temporal barriers. Not just a machine gun’s worth, but millions, a horrible invasion of fists.

They weren’t even homing in on Randidly’s position. They descended in a wave, smashing and obliterating the collapsed stone buildings that littered the ground. Like a cement roller, they ground closer.

Randidly looked up at the sky and flexed his hands; his exhaustion became armor, allowing him to adjust without feeling. His pupils dilated as he estimated the new threat. His Nether Core continued to accelerate its spin, the misty barrier steadily dissipating. He felt immense. So, so drained, but that just added to his sense of weight.

He heard the roar of blood in his ears. He raised his spear. He sent a pulse through his left arm. Ready, you two?

His two Soulseed companions hummed in contentment. This time, he pulled his images together inside of that immense cavity of his dry emotional sea. His three core images burned, becoming the animating emotional force behind his attack.

The whole of Randidly Ghosthound’s existence moved to violence.

Erebus’s Baleful Waltz. Dawn Opens the Sky and Reality Stirs. Singularity Engulfs the Finite.

Congratulations! Your Skill Singularity Engulfs the Finite (GD) has grown to Level 631!

Congratulations! Your Skill Dawn Opens the Sky and Reality Stirs (T) has grown to Level 1051!

…

Congratulations! Your Skill Singularity Engulfs the Finite (GD) has grown to Level 744!

Randidly, who had found this new point of emotional zen, swung his spear. A thousand screaming revenants flickered into existence and imitated his movement. He manipulated their spears until they had woven themselves into a tapestry of resentment and resistance. They met the descending crush of fists directly, ghastly spearhead gleaming.

A second powerful woven strike followed the first, then a third, then a fourth, on and on as the fists refused to cease their arrival. Randidly stood at the head of an army of bitter ghosts and fought against the font of bitterness and greed in the Nexus. Halfway through the repeated concussive impacts, he sucked in a breath and the army of the damned moved inside of him-- as a vessel, he could house them.

All at once, the multitudes became a single figure standing against a sky full of fists.

He became an avatar of the Nexus’s forgotten and used. He burned with ghastly strength; Acri and Sulfur moving tirelessly. Each strike shattered a Timeless fist. He carved a path through the descending obliteration, carrying an abused universe’s exhaustion on his back.

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And then the sky cleared. Randidly stood for several seconds, panting, his chest rising and falling slowly to the rotation of his Nether Core. The skin of his chest and arms tingled, the prickling resentment of the ghosts lingering inside of him. But the feeling wasn’t wholly unpleasant, even as his emotional sea began to slowly fill back up.

Yet when the dust of blasted stone parted, Fiero stood with his arms crossed and a sneer on his face. The temporal shackles on Randidly tightened. “You have made a mistake, making an enemy of me. You may consider my time in the Nexus to have been wasted, but believe me, you just have not seen the eventualities I have been prepping for.”

On cue, the sky filled with another wave of fists. As they rumbled down, he could sense another wave forming behind the first. Then another, then another. A thunderstorm had appeared and its drops were fists with the power to level a city.

Randidly felt a stirring of recognition as he heard the words, watched the fake expression on Fiero’s face; this was not his strongest blow. For whatever reason, whether to delay him or to test him, Fiero wasn’t attacking full force.

A mistake. Randidly showed his teeth. This isn’t enough to slow me down.

Yggdrasil shivered, housed inside the vessel of the filling emotional sea. As Randidly planted his feet and charged forward without even a glance up at the descending Timeless fists, it sank its roots into the emotions. Its branches stretched up and up, filling the wide vessel of the emotional seed.

In the depths of the Alpha Cosmos, while under assault from all the subconscious demons plaguing Randidly, Devick accepted the sixth and final ritual offering from Enmya. His Phaea to the Alpha Cosmos was complete; it took a moment of stillness as the new path was recognized, but then Nether surged and roared through the connection.

The triangle had been completed. His Nether Core rotated perfectly, the mist dissipating in a second. In the middle of a crystalline grey bubble was a gleaming emerald teardrop. Its flawless facets caught the light, reflecting different shades of green: moss, mint, seafoam, fresh grass, sage, chartreuse, and olive.

Just as quickly as the emotion began to return to Randidly’s metaphysical vessel, Nether began pumping and mixing freely. His images and Nether Core hummed as they mixed; at this stage, the two energies were so interrelated there was no rejection. Yet the Weight within the Nether pressured Randidly’s Aether… to the point that, at the bottom of the emotional sea, his Aether began to turn liquid.

Chapter 2394

Charlotte Wick stood at the back of the group, her blood curdling with tension as the other soldiers prepared for their departure and the assault waiting at the end of it. There was so much tension in the air that even her image hummed with concern. She ignored it and continued to dig.

DiOrtho Vant paused in his labors, his shovel poised above the ground. “Does it really make sense that we dig the graves evenly? Their bodies aren’t the same size. Feels a little callous.”

“We make the grave of a hero of the Vulpis Squad. Consistency and exacting standards are how we are trained and how we will retire,” Jieu Ronault’s flame body had calmed considerably in the weeks of fighting. He seemed practically static as he worked. Charlotte wondered whether the lack of fluttering was due to a prodigious jump in discipline or the malaise working against them all.

Not too far away, Charlotte could hear the curses as the defensive line threw back another wave of attacks. Double dangerous because the guard had been reduced to a skeleton crew, so the Vulpis Squad could make their final preparations.

Charlotte ignored her aches and scooped up another shovel of dirt. She had been raised at the knee of Commandant Wick, plucked out from his other descendants but never allowed to forget from whence she came. So she was very familiar with how quickly life could vanish, could be plundered. Anytime she became close with one deemed ‘unworthy’ by the patriarch of her family, that individual would be slaughtered to give her some emotional grit.

Maybe because she had broken free from that life and believed she had now achieved power, fighting this last month in the strange dried sea bed had broken her in a way none of those ‘examples’ had managed.

Watching her squadmates die left her frothing and sundered.

Vant scowled and kicked his feet in the dirt. “I certainly hope there are other options for retiring than being stuck in a cookie-cutter hole in the ground. I have plans. There is a pretty rugged cliff face on Expira that I want to build a massive compound and enjoy the good life by the sea!”

Vizzeret Clamman, the canine right next to Vant and digging a perfectly uniform hole with rapid scrapes of his paws, paused and snickered. “You dumbass. A house by the sea, with your image? I hope you like scraping off rust from your gears.”

“Machine horrors don’t necessarily-” Vant rounded on Vizzeret, ready for a fight. But another voice cut across his.

“What’s the Alpha Cosmos like? Is it really that beautiful?”

The more senior members of the Order Vulpis paused and all looked at the speaker, a female selkie named Llethia, one of the newer recruits drawn in when Randidly was training elites on the Fifth Cohort Rally Station. Her face quirked in an awkward smile. “Yes, I’ve been there, but that was mostly for training. We were so busy. Never really got the chance to explore. I remember how energy-rich the air is… but is it really that special of a place? We’ve just been fighting for so long…”

“I’m of the opinion that half of a person’s experience of a place is the people they find there,” All fell into a rigid stance as Alana Donal and Raymund Ballast walked out to the cluster of graves. Alana flashed a wan smile. “You’ve accumulated more Nether now, so you’ll feel the difference when you return. But the strength of connections, the quality of character… I definitely want to believe a little bit in the myth of the Alpha Cosmos. It is the place we’ve all wanted for so long. That we’ve sacrificed so much to protect.”

“Name doesn’t even make sense though. Obviously, it wasn’t the first universe,” DiOrtho muttered, but his commentary earned a sharp look from Raymund and a growl from Vizzeret. The demon humanoid raised his hands and clenched his fists.

While the two animals snapped at each other, Alana continued walking forward. Charlotte watched the easy fluidity of her movements. It was difficult to believe how much of a burnt-out husk Alana had seen, only ten hours ago, her image pushed too far for too long. Even with her Primal Force assisting in the healing process, Charlotte had believed a full recovery would have been impossible.

But the Nether they accumulated acting as the overflow for Randidly’s transformation synergized and behaved in ways that Charlotte still couldn’t quite follow. Although Alana’s image had been completely broken down by overuse, Nether had lined her inner world and protected it from scars. Now, that blemish-free zone became a fertile bed to allow Alana’s image, which was proceeding through its own transition, to rebuild itself from the ground up in a new shape.

Alana spun on her heel and looked at them all. “We knew theoretically of the burden of supporting Randidly Ghosthound as he sought to dismantle the horrors of the Nexus. We chose to follow him anyway. And now, the load is firmly upon our shoulders. We bear wounds inflicted as those hooks and chains are removed from our bodies. We bury those who paid for the freedom of their descendants with their lives. For a moment, let’s bow our heads and pay our respects.”

The soldiers all bowed their heads for a moment, standing next to the thirty-four evenly made graves. They said thank you.

They said goodbye.

Charlotte Wick felt the pulse of their Nether, shivering as one. The bonds between the squad members deepened. Just as her senses tried to pick apart what exactly had shifted, Alana raised her head and began to speak again. “It might feel unbearable now but do not lose hope. I knew a woman whose people were a forged tool. Her entire race was a reflection, made to shatter or temper a ‘real’ people. In the end, they did not matter. They were dominated and manipulated by a tyrant pulled sideways by an obsession that had festered into madness.

“Yet this woman had a singular advantage. Against all odds, she had been born a Witch.”

Again, the Nether of the group pulsed. Charlotte released a slow breath, feeling some of her tension bleed out of her. All of the soldiers focused on the soldier as one of Alana’s new Skills took effect.

“To be a Witch is to possess profane flesh. To be an existence that transgresses. That warps and taints the world. Yet she was just a single witch, and the whole world had been set on a collision course. The reflection and the originals could only clash and grind each other to dust. On some days, she could not think of any method of adjusting this situation without being caught up between the two forces. All that she held dear and this intriguing other version of her people were doomed. She struggled, but could only accomplish small feats; Her small power of transgression was just within her blood and flesh. And she could feel the fate of the entire world running out.

“She suffered. Her people suffered. Death crouched low over her world and breathed deeply, savoring their pain.”

Edgar, the soldier who had taken it upon himself to fashion a backpack that contained Heiffal’s still functioning torso, let out a loud sniff. Every from here, Charlotte Wick could see how hard DiOrtho Vant clenched his teeth.

She wondered what sort of expression she was making. She suppressed the urge to reach up and feel her furry cheeks to find out.

“No hero arrived on this world, at least not yet. But the Witch had suffered in silence for long enough. Because her power was so tied to the flesh, she began experimenting on her own body, pushing her limits in order to find some way to escape this constant hell of struggle and violence. Her power proved to be just, just insufficient to overturn the controls placed upon her. The bindings stopped her just short of being able to escape the whims of the tyrant. So… she found the closest replacement for the hero who had not arrived, a talented young warrior from the opposite people. One who provided her with a spark of inspiration. She altered her body composition, to make procreation possible.

“When the two had a son, she named him Shal. Because through him, she swore to herself, the world shall end. One way or the other. And when that promised time came and everything that restrictive monster had built came crashing down, it was fucking karma that tore the edifice to pieces. Karma, and one woman who endured through the hopeless days to the first stirrings of an opportunity.” Alana luminous eyes swept around the area. She paused on each and every soldier, met their eyes, fed into the fire housed within them.

When her mouth opened, her smile bristled with fangs. “This Nexus… let’s go end it, shall we?”

*****

The volume of Nether pumping through him just kept increasing.

Randidly Ghosthound felt energy burning its way through his veins. The feeling was almost nostalgic-- few experiences these days were able to make his body feel so woefully insufficient as a container. Yet when the dense, translucent Nether swirled through his core, tempering his veins, and then Aether flooded through, compressed down to a liquid trickle-

Waves of heat rolled off his body as the rain of fists continued to fall down toward Randidly. Opposite him, Fiero’s eyes narrowed as the energy Randidly released shifted. “You… what are you trying to do?!”

I’m trying a different Path. Randidly took another step forward, the ground shaking and shivering; in his Soulspace, the distortions were even more prominent. His chest cavity felt aflame. Nether and Aether circled faster and faster, two concentric rings rotating in opposite directions, waves of powerful force spreading out through him.

The friction threw off sparks powerful enough to burn holes through most images.

Yggdrasil hummed in pleasure as it spread out its roots and dipped into the liquid flows of energy now running through his body. As Randidly accepted the concept of a ‘vessel’, the possibility for what his body could be multiplied. The connection between tree and energy was immediate and fulfilling. In a very real way, the World Tree seeded itself inside of him. The roots flexed and grew. The bonds deepened. It sank deeper, pushing into him. It drank more from the well of endless energy dawning within him.

Those sparks from energy circulation landed upon Yggdrasil’s branches, glittering like primordial gems.

Randidly’s power surged and seethed. Image and ‘vessel’ were both enriched by the connection.

Synchronicity detected… your Skillset Yggdrasil, the Universe that Was First a Tree is reacting!

Detecting influences…

Incorporating foreign elements…

Balancing the Nether infusion…

Recalculating…

Setting up parameters of Nether integration…

Pantheon Intervention. Recalculating…

Randidly raised his spear, his eyes flashing as he sensed the approach of the image evolution of his oldest and most reliable Skillset. He offered Fiero a hunter’s smile. You will regret holding back to this point.

Fiero seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same time. He shifted his stance as quickly as he could. His balance remained slightly off, but no longer did he just populate the sky with Timeless fists he had stockpiled. He threw a punch.

“The Eighth Fist: Truth.”