The streamlined Randidly wasn’t just good at training; his mind also adapted quite quickly to fighting. His attention was a razor that would cut to the issue at hand, no matter what the situation was.

Even against these strange creations, Randidly initially had quite a bit of confidence. However, it quickly became apparent that Randidly had chosen his foes poorly.

Should have fucking stuck to bullying Nether Beasts… Randidly’s senses scrambled to keep track of his foes in the surroundings.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Randidly’s left arm struck against the approaching slam of out of the porcelain automatons which forced him through the air sideways. Without leverage, he could only retreat before their overwhelming power. At the same time, he couldn’t reflect on that attack for too long; his right arm shot upward to lash out at another automaton that approached him, whirling like a helicopter propeller. He twisted to avoid the spinning clubs and half-lunged forward. As long as he could strike in that small opening-

Crack!

Randidly’s pink finger snapped as his blow came up just short and was then blasted away by the rotating automaton. His hand throbbed in pain as he rapidly retracted his arm. Before the impending counter-attacks could arrive, Randidly twisted around and shot himself downward-

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

Randidly was struck directly in the jaw, dazing him for a split second. The bone of his jaw fractured and he painfully pulled a muscle in his neck as he was twisted around. His instincts contracted his body, bringing his limbs together and guard his torso. As he did so, he finally realized the largest problem with continuing this fight.

It’s my sense of direction… not only do I sometimes dodge a different direction than I intended, but as soon as they create the slightest bit of distance, I forget where they were… are these things fucking invisible at all, or am I just-!

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

Right on cue, one automaton gathered both of its massive arms together and slammed them down on Randidly’s side. His right arm blocked most of the damage, but he still grunted in pain. His skeleton creaked as he was buffeted sideways. There wasn’t a single part of Randidly’s body that didn’t ache from being treated like a rubber ball during a children’s kickball game over the past ten minutes.

But even though he was battered, Randidly’s mind continued to furiously process information. The longer he fought against these things, the clearer it became that they weren’t truly trying to kill him, only drive him deeper into the shaft. Perhaps, as he theorized earlier, these things were designed to keep powerful Nether creatures from escaping upward and he had attracted their attention completely by mistake. But either way, they behaved predictably, which gave Randidly a chance to strike back.

Mentally, he reached out and seized his emotional tether. The deeper he went into the shaft, the more difficult it was to ‘grip’ the emotions that stretched like a lifeline upward from his current position, but Randidly was able to steady himself after a few seconds of struggle. He was barely able to detect hints of their movements, but Randidly knew that his sudden deceleration had the automatons repositioning themselves.

Let’s see how you can handle this… Randidly thought with a grin.

Immediately, his skin began to tingle; his Grim Intuition was sure that the automatons were approaching, to continue driving him downward. Once more, Mana flooded out to the microbes in his skin and he became a vine amoeba, floating in the dark. His tentacles lashed out widely with thorny edges.

Those thorny vines hit the automatons and did not one lick of damage to the approaching opponents. The thorns were silently repelled by their porcelain exteriors. But the swelling plant matter once more gave Randidly a picture of three automatons in the surrounding area.

What he saw made his eyebrows rise upward; all three were in the helicopter mode, cutting cleanly toward Randidly from his lower right, behind him, and directly above. It seemed that these things possessed some sort of collective intelligence, which allowed them to adjust their tactics after fighting for a time.

Still, it wouldn’t be enough.

Even if the spinning increased the automaton’s power, Randidly could take advantage of it. He activated the Grim Chimera and displayed a burst of speed. His image was immediately wiped out by a pulse of energy that enforced the dull reality around him, but he had already shifted around to the side of the nearest automaton. He moved past the dangerous hoop and struck at the core with all the venom of a rattlesnake.

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The destruction of one set off the piercing chain reaction of noise through the surrounding automatons. Even though he expected the response, Randidly felt somewhat alarmed as blood spurted out of his nose; there were more gathering than he had guessed. Their combined volume inflicted more damage than he had been expecting. But although the noise made him dizzy, it did rather directly reveal the locations of those automatons in the surrounding space.

There were ten automatons, slowly circling closer to Randidly.

It also displayed the porcelain constructions fury, but that just amused the current Randidly. His own fiery emotions flared higher in glee. As he silently chuckled, he retrieved a dozen spare ingots of Black Gold from his interspatial ring. His heart began to pound as he flexed his fingers and gripped the first ingot. It was a bar about as long as his forearm and as thick as his fist. In his hands, the weight of it was extremely reassuring.

If Skill attacks won't work… Randidly grinned. Then, with blood continuing to trickle out of his orifices as that horrible noise annihilated his mucus membranes, he flicked his wrist and launched the metal bolts.

Chink! Chink! Chink!

In quick succession, those three bolts pierced through the cores of the nearest automatons and destroyed their cores. Randidly’s smile widened. The cores were even more fragile than he had expected. But his glee began to ebb for two reasons. First, any automaton more distant from him than five meters was unaffected. Or rather, Randidly had missed his throw.

Whether it was his lack of direction or that the automaton dodged, his effective range was limited. Very much so. Frustratingly so.

The second reason that Randidly’s mood turned so swiftly was that his skin was beginning to tingle in a very different manner from his earlier anticipation. Not because of any intuition or fear, but due to waves passing through the air. These most recent three casualties hadn’t erupted in shrill noises to call their companions when they had been destroyed. No, instead they fell silent. Or at least, silent to the normal human frequencies.

The remaining automatons communicated with each other using subsonic pulses of sound.

Worst of all, Randidly was once more floating in empty darkness. He seemed entirely alone. His own emotions spread to the surrounding area, but otherwise, it was a blank space.

Worrying about what the automatons were planning, Randidly stored away all but two of the Black Gold ingots and activated Absolute Grasp of Yggdrasil once more. Thick vines wrapped around Randidly’s body, bulging and warping. They swelled and slashed outward with their thorns, looking for the automatons. The pulsing heart of vines grew to three meters in diameter and then five meters without encountering anything.

Randidly’s scowl worsened. Pulses of energy from the surrounding space continued to disperse his image and Skill, meaning Randidly had to mobilize Absolute Grasp of Yggdrasil over and over again. In addition, the cessation of the Skill meant that the plants he had already grown would quickly disintegrate and turn to ash after a short amount of time. But during that time, he forced himself to keep expanding in the face of the Skill neutralization. He would follow this Path to its end.

Soon, he covered a ten-meter diameter sphere based around his body. Yet he hadn’t encountered a single automaton. Randidly rubbed his thumbs across the bars of metal in his hands. Already, the bonfire in his chest was heating up, making his stomach uncomfortable. If he didn’t act soon-

At the same time, seven projective automatons forced their way in through the thorned plant exterior. The roots and vines that were reinforced with Randidly’s Mana were annihilated simply by the layer of air that the automatons generated as they pierced forward. A split second was all the automatons needed to arrive right next to Randidly.

Even his hyper-streamlined thought process was a half step too slow to respond in time to the impending threat. Randidly barely had time to twitch before the automatons were there with their arms raised, clearly intending to smash him into gore and visceral. His fingers tightened on the ingots in his hands.

But even as his reaction time proved woefully inadequate, the Grim Chimera raised its head and silently howled. The rotation of Randidly’s Nether Nebula quickened. Instinctively, Randidly activated the most powerful Skill in the Grim Chimera’s arsenal: All Else Succumbs, Yet Time Whirls the Earth.

Randidly’s awareness branched off into two, then four, then eight, then sixteen different Randidly’s standing in the same spot. In those precious fragments of time, each reacted differently, based on their slightly different timelines. They each flourished, struggled, struck, attacked, clashed, and fought in different ways.

Randidly’s Grim Intuition buzzed as he felt them all severely wounded by every exchange they attempted. Although the feeling was faint, he could sense that beyond this first killing net that spun down around him, more would come. Randidly had finally destroyed enough of the automatons that he had earned their full attention and ire.

It was an honor that Randidly had never hoped he would receive.

However, even in the face of death, the Grim Chimera was decisive in its actions. And with very few other choices, Randidly allowed the image’s instincts to guide him. As the automatons arrived, he blasted an enormous amount of Nether upward; fully a third of his Nether Nebula was discharged between the automatons. Even in those small moments before the automatons impacted him, he felt a tremor running through their bodies.

As a distraction, it could be considered only partially successful.

The blast of Nether also produced a concussive force to propel Randidly downward. The slight pause as the automatons rapidly gobbled up the Nether and the sudden shift from Randidly was enough to push him outside of the danger zone, but two automatons still slammed into him. Their first shattered through his hastily condensed image physicalizations and broke the bones in his left thigh and knee. Shards of bone tore their way out of Randidly’s flesh and tumbled weightlessly in the air behind him, a trail of gore that testified to the danger of his current situation.

The second hit Randidly in the side, caving in his already fractured ribcage. Even his powerful heart skipped a beat due to the impact.

Like a broken kite, Randidly tumbled downward in darkness, barely able to sense his surroundings.