Randidly released a light breath; with the second huge blast of power from Ileot, the four Nether Heralds fighting Lady Iellaya immediate turned and fled to assist the Nether King. This allowed a disdainful raven-winged serpent, covered in wounds, to snort and lift its nose as though it couldn’t be bothered to play with these fools another longer. Randidly barely repressed the urge to roll his eyes.

Seems Lady Iellaya’s pride is still an integral part of that image. That’s… reassuring.

Still, the important point was what was going on in the conflict in the center. Although the Nether King acted again to block a portion of Ileot’s attack, this most recent blast knocked away even more of the blue veins that constituted the grand working, so that only about half remained. Huge holes had been ripped open by the last two attacks. The sky glittered with the exploding lights that Ileot had produced, illuminating exactly how much damage had been done.

A second later, Lady Iellaya was leaning against the edge of the battlements next to Randidly as she returned from her image avatar form. “...you look worse than I feel.”

Randidly’s grin was bitter; he couldn’t deny that this was probably the case. “Still will be a little bit before I can honestly stand up here next to you and fight something like a Nether Herald. Just call me during the next wide-scale Nether invasion.”

“Most people spend their entire lives trying to come within ‘a little bit’ of this amount of power,” Lady Iellaya used her hands to smooth her obsidian feathers and check for places where some had been ripped out during the fighting. Then she cracked her fingers. “I would say you can be relatively satisfied with this performance. But believe me, you would be the first person I would call when the Nether invades again.”

For a second, Randidly hummed. He looked over the battlefield, up at the darkness, then over at the shattered working that seemed to be slowly falling apart. “Is this enough to kill the Nether King…? Or at least force him to retreat?”

“How would I know?” Lady Iellaya shook her head. “But I believe we are about to find out.”

As the last vestiges of Ileot’s attack began to fade, the incomplete formation of blue veins slowly began to glow. From the strange, luminous blue color, the veins gradually brightened to a piercing yellow. And what followed was the blooming of a fuzzy black flower, sitting in the middle of that broken arrangement. It started rapidly rotating and pulsing, a strange bulging blub that squirmed and shifted.

HOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGG!

Something in the air changed as that noise rippled outward. Randidly didn’t even need Grim Intuition to sense it; probably everyone across the battlefront felt the change at that moment. No longer was the Nether King hanging back, gazing over the battlefield with lantern-like eyes. No, the Nether King had endured long enough. His strange, resonate moan was filled with range and unwillingness. It shook the air. That bulb opened up and released all the power it had built up.

The bulb bloomed. Dark tendrils drifted outward, seizing the surrounding working. Energy began to pump outward. Despite the fact that his vessel was flawed and filled with holes, the Nether King moved with purpose. Its voice smashed down against the battlefield.

HOOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGGGGG!

It was like some support system had been ripped away and the weight of the Great Rift crashed down against the battlefront along with the Nether King’s voice. Behind Randidly in the courtyard, Salazar’s story faltered and stopped. At the other camps, all the infighting ceased as everyone was brought low by that pressure. The noise was a direct attack on the physical and organized space of Aether. The resonance struck out to sever the bonds between atoms, destabilizing matter, reducing everything to the primordial darkness of the Great Rift.

Stone cracked. Flesh trembled and tore. Screams weren’t drowned out by the noise so much as smothered. Nothing existed but the looming Great Rift and the Nether King’s terrible rage.

Hoooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggg.

As the noise lowered its volume, it dragged itself across Randidly’s skin like a rake of rusty nails. His eyes bulged as the pain spiked upward. The yellow of the Nether King’s working had gotten so bright that it was increasingly easy to overlook the vast holes that Ileot had punched in the formation, seemingly without slowing it down in the slightest. The pain was growing so intense that the exhausted version of Randidly could only tremble and struggle to endure it.

Congratulations! Your Skill Monstrosity’s Appalling Physicality (A) has grown to Level 251!

This is the Nether King with a flawed weapon, striking down at us. Randidly could only grit his teeth as Grim Intuition stubbornly continued to feed him the visions of suffering from those individuals behind him in the courtyard. Across the battlefield, many people died directly as the Nether King roared, their bodies destabilizing to the point they popped like overfilled water balloons. This… the Nether King…!

Congratulations! Your Skill Yyrwood Flesh of Yggdrasil (L) has grown to Level 241!

Congratulations! Your Skill Stigma of the Lifeless Phoenix (L) has grown to Level 225!

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Yet just as the physical pain grew close to the limits of Randidly’s endurance, there was the sound of soft flapping wings and Randidly felt Lady Iellaya’s raven-winged serpent image spread out to shield them all. Panting, Randidly looked over toward Lady Iellaya and saw her eyes were bloodshot. The crimson lines crossing her image’s brown scales were so vividly scarlet that the drew the eye.

“These are my people.” Lady Iellaya hissed. “If you think I will let you harm a single hair on their heads… I will break you.”

That loyalty to her subordinates hasn’t changed either. Randidly reflected. Maybe… I put too much stock in the strange darkness present now in her image.

Yet even as the strain on Randidly eased, he could see the tremors running through Lady Iellaya’s body. Blocking out so much pressure was not an easy feat.

Honnng.

The light above them flared and then went out. With a strange sense of finality, the bright yellow working shattered under the strain of amplifying the Nether King’s strength. Instantly the pressure it unleashed dropped sharply downward, but a wave of kinetic destruction spread outward with the echo of that final, resonant noise. The Great Rift opened up and dropped it downward.

It hit the edges of the badlands first, knocking up huge slabs of stone and then annihilating them as it bowled its way forward without a care for the damage it was doing. It happened so quickly that the edges of their lands didn’t even shake, but were directly devoured as that wave spread outward.

Lady Iellaya scrunched her eyes shut and braced herself. Allowing himself one long sigh, Randidly thought of absolutely nothing for a moment as the wave ripped its way forward through space, leaving only darkness in its wake. The physical ground was ripped to shreds. Lord Miln and Ileot were lost in the spreading avalanche of debris, while Lord Miln’s subordinates seemed to be eviscerated by that terrible noise.

The sky of the Aether was slowly deteriorating, gobbled up by the Great Rift in a horrifying spread of darkness. Tremors in the ground grew even more intense before the final wave arrived, signaling how close to collapsing this base of Aether had become. Earthquakes heaved beneath their feet.

Be safe Vualla. Randidly thought softly. And then the brilliant light of the Inscrutable Mien of Genesis surged outward. The ground behind Lady Iellaya’s camp was ripped to pieces slightly early as a small sapling poked itself out of the ground and then exploded upward in a twisting, surging growth. Soon it was a towering tree with rich brown bark covered in a sprawling golden script that told the history of all things that had been and will be.

Its branches and canopy spread wide, providing cover for Lady Iellaya’s camp. The leaves rustled, sending out powerful ripples of an image that Randidly was already having trouble projecting outward. He simply hadn’t had enough time to rest.

Lady Iellaya’s jaw was so clenched that she spoke through her teeth at Randidly, “How much of this can you really withstand?”

Yet Randidly didn’t flinch from her baleful gaze. “I guess I’ll need to handle whatever you cannot.”

Their gazes were locked for a second. Lady Iellaya couldn’t deny it, but she refused to give any sense of acquiescence either. The battlement between the cracked slightly as the foundation beneath their fort began to fall apart. Then the noise rushed forward to hit them.

For a brief moment, Lady Iellaya tried to withstand the whole wave of pressure that the Nether King had produced as it had shattered its own working with this final effort. Cracks snaked forward from the expanding Great Rift toward the base of Lady Iellaya’s camp. Randidly saw the huge trench they had dug and the small fortifications beyond that slowly upended by the wave of force and then disintegrate as space began to destabilize.

Then, as Lady Iellaya’s pride was forced backward by the viciousness of the approaching destruction, some of that pressure was passed onto Randidly. Their two images spread out over the base. The Golden Roots of Yggdrasil stretched underneath and seized hold of the ground, forcefully resisting the destabilization of the surrounding ground.

Randidly’s spine was on fire. The pressure was like nothing he ever felt before. The world was ripped away, leaving away a weird skewed perception remaining to Randidly that were only colors. The surrounding world was a deep, deep black. Lady Iellaya was a dim white light that was hovering next to him. And his spine… Randidly’s spine burned red, staring with a luminous cherry at the base of his skull.

Pain lost meaning; it was only another color that pressed down over Randidly. Yet even as Randidly’s mind struggled to protect him, he couldn’t escape the pain. The red color grew brighter and brighter.

Perhaps Randidly would have collapsed immediately from the terrible pain of hearing that noise, but there were suddenly two hands on his shoulders. Neveah was there mentally, making her presence know for the first time through all the suffering that Randidly had endured on the frontlines.

Your struggles are mine, Neveah whispered. Pain flowed out through Randidly toward Neveah, located on the distant Earth. We may live different lives, but we are one.

The pain eased somewhat. Yet even with Neveah adding her mind to the effort, Randidly’s image rapidly began to fail. He had done too much, for too long. This battlefield was just beyond his abilities.

I… can’t… fail… Randidly strange red existence was becoming increasingly feeble, barely able to stand up to that horrible noise. Even if he dearly wanted to protect all the people within Lady Iellaya’s camp, who would be eviscerated by this terrible noise, he didn’t have the strength remaining to do so. He had already given too much.

The monarch’s crown… is heavy… Randidly’s head fell farther forward. But more hands caught him on the way down.

Annie, Sam, Alana, Mrs. Hamilton. Suddenly they were there, hands on his arms to support him. Even when the wave of pain spread outward through them, they didn’t waver.

Randidly released a breath. Then a new color was added to his warped perception; emerald.

Randidly opened his eyes and stood next to Lady Iellaya, enduring the pain until the power unleashed by the Nether King had dissipated. Because the monarch was never truly alone. Not so long as there were people that called him liege and would support him when he needed it. That was the truth of him: Randidly Ghosthound had been built up by people who believed in him.

That emerald color grew brighter. As long as they are here… I won’t fail.