“You…. what are you trying to say?” Lay’mel Tuuellethe spat into the communicator. His fingers gripped the metal edges so tightly that blood wasn’t able to flow into his extremities. He stood at the edge of one of the observation platforms of Military High Commands base on the Fifth Cohort, barely even noticing the struggle that played out across the sky.

Velio Dunn’s laughter was grating through the communicator. “Heh, Lamel, do you truly miss me so much after such a short amount of time part? But I’m sorry, I don’t wanna play around right now. Believe me when I say that I am very interested in how the Ghosthound survived in the shaft… but I ain’t coming. The currents around the Fifth Cohort are deep.

“I’m gonna wait a bit and see if I can catch a big fish. Don’t contact me again over this matter.”

The line went dead and Lay’mel looked at the communicator with the intent to reach through and strangle this bastard that had routinely mocked, harassed, and humiliated him. He had endured so much just to keep the fickle mercenary happy. And suddenly all his suffering became meaningless. But the former Drill Sergeant also knew that he was powerless.

His fingers slowly loosened on the communicator. His head dropped to his chest.

Compared to Velio Dunn, Lay’mel was nothing. He was simply a tool of the Swacc Family that would be discarded when he outlived his uselessness. His eyes steadily reddened as he was continually infuriated by how unfair existence was.

Power… Lay’mel’s thoughts were filled with bitterness and spite. If I was only born lucky enough to seize power...

A large metal hand clapped down on Lay’mel’s shoulder, waking him from his turbulent emotional state. After blinking, he looked into the eyes of Evick Swacc, a thuggish humanoid who gummed a cigar from one side of his mouth to the other while he grinned at Lay’mel. When he spoke, smoke wafted outward from his lips and stunk of rotten meat.

“Relax, my crew will be more than enough to handle Randidly Ghosthound.” Evick slapped Lay’mel’s back several times to emphasize his statement and then nodded to the dozen or so similarly grimy and well-muscled humanoids standing around them. “Besides, better not to rely on an outside force. This is a Family beef, so a Family man like myself will be more than up to the challenge.”

Lay’mel opened his mouth to point out that because Randidly had survived several encounters with Dunn, there was no way that Evick would be able to handle him, but stilled his tongue when he saw the lines around Evick’s eyes changing. Evick had seen the conclusion that Lay’mel was jumping to and didn’t like it one bit that a fucking tool like Lay’mel dared have such an offensive opinion.

Lay’mel swayed slightly, only a single step away from triggering violence. But luckily, he possessed enough grace to survive the tempestuous Swaccs.

Lay’mel nodded meekly, earning a guffaw from Evick and several more slaps with a little extra venom. A couple of Evick’s thugs chuckled along with their boss as they watched Lay’mel with cruel eyes. Compared to an actual member of the Swacc Family, Lay’mel was nothing.

But inwardly, he had some anticipation toward the moment when this group tried to ambush the Ghosthound. No matter who ended up dead… Lay’mel would rejoice.

*****

As soon as Randidly began putting PP into Glimpse of the Shallah, he felt a pinch of regret in his heart. The total cost for the Path was 20,000 PP. Which was a little under half of the amount he had remaining. But even so, Randidly resolutely poured his PP into the Path, earning himself a free Stat every 50 PP spent.

Yet as he added more and more PP, the rewards changed; they grew quickly less respectable. After the first 10,000, he only earned 1 free Stat for every 100 PP that he spent. And in through the entire last 5k… Randidly only earned a single free Stat point. The experience had him pressing his mouth into a thin line as he finished the Path.

Congratulations! You have completed the Glimpse of the Shallah Path! In the expansive wilds, some of history’s secrets are buried more deeply beneath the shifting sands than others. The wheel of time spins and those who ride it are convinced they forge a new Path, even when all patterns follow the same arch. For the individuals who have climbed to the heights you have now reached, their ears may sometimes catch whispers of the wind, which hint at the race that started everything.

They call themselves Shallah, and out of reverence, we do the same.

The current Nexus plays with the broken pieces of the great discoveries and inventions made by the Shallah at their height. Or at least, that is our belief. Only by digging out the artifacts of their works out of the sand can we hope to glimpse, even briefly, the power they once wielded.

Yet beyond the hints of their capabilities lies another question; what happened to them?

Congratulations! For completing the Path, you have received a rare chance to grasp at the secrets of the Shallah! Depending on your compatibility, the effect will differ. Please be prepared…

The notification in front of Randidly began to swirl and droop as though it was a creation made of wax that was left too near to a roaring fire. At the same time, Randidly could sense the complex network of Aether constructs forming in front of him. Just like Ulaat’s ashes, reaching into this swirling notification would grant him the opportunity to be tested.

But unlike Ulaat’s Path… Randidly grimaced and felt his palms begin to sweat as he examined the interlocking pattern of Aether that appeared in front of him. This power… shit, these aren’t Aether principles that its using… And even the complexity...

The emotions rising in his chest forced Randidly to pause and release a breath; it truly had been too long since he experienced genuine fear.

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Simply observing the swirling notification birthed an instinctive sense of weakness into his heart. His Grim Intuition was absolutely convinced that this Path had revealed to him a higher existence. The Path he was now treading was extremely dangerous. And when Randidly recognized the danger, he had a small thought.

How had he triggered this Path?

Still, it was a little late to spend much time pondering the origins of the Path, now that the swirling mass of energy floated in front of him. The potency of this Path began to steadily warp space as he allowed the Path completion to stall out in front of him.

Resolve quickly hardened in his eyes. Even if he was afraid, Randidly would not take a step back; even from the beginning, he had grown because he was always moving forward. That was a lesson that had been beaten into him by Shal.

Randidly’s eyes were bright and gleeful as he raised his right hand and stuck it into the notification. He didn’t know what he would find, but he would step confidently into the unknown. As soon as his hand sank into the dense energies, a wave of sticky darkness exploded outward to blanket all of his sensations. Even the acute emotional sense that Randidly had developed in the shaft was instantly smothered.

After a chaotic sense of vertigo, Randidly’s senses snapped back into place. He was standing on a thin strip of grey stone floating in a vast abyss. The stone beneath his bare feet was cool. He cast his gaze around and soon fixated on some movement on his right.

Randidly watched as a glittering, red-violet wind spun together to form a condensed drop of liquid Aether. Then his eyes followed that individual drop as it was merged with countless others and surrounded by complex, rotating Aether constructs. With a bright flash, those drops of Liquid Aether were merged to form condensed Aether crystals.

Randidly’s eyes glittered as he traced the Aether constructs. But just as quickly as he began studying them, his attention was pulled away.

To his left… a black wind whipped through the darkness beyond the stone path, a dervish animated with dense Nether. As Randidly watched, as had happened on his right, that Nether quickly gathered together and created a tiny grey bubble. It tumbled weightless in the air for a few seconds before traveled further down the path.

As it continued to go forward, hundreds of those grey bubbles steadily were amassed, slowly accumulating and scuttling into a precise position, until a mysterious grey chrysanthemum about the size of two fists floated there.

Randidly blinked; the resemblance of Nether to a flower was an illusion. But the edges of the tightly packed bubbles now sat in such a rigid pattern that it was very easy to simply see a chrysanthemum when you did not look closely. The edges of the pattern aligned perfectly to fool the eye on the surface, but Randidly gradually sensed that the truly sublime arrangement of this item of Nether was its complex interior intersections.

Once the chrysanthemum and the crystal floated on Randidly’s right and left, they shot forward as though they were urging him forward. Somehow, space was bent. Although they rushed alongside the Path on which Randidly was standing, he somehow also knew that they were shooting directly toward each other.

And when they collided at the end of this stone path…

Randidly’s eyes were bright as he lifted his feet to advance toward the end of this Path. Already, he had obtained quite a bit just from watching the Aether constructs condense an Aether Crystal and witnessing the formation of the grey chrysanthemum. But somehow, he knew that an even deeper secret would reveal itself when those forces impacted each other.

That would be his glimpse of the Shallah.

But just as Randidly went to take a step… something tapped lightly on his shoulder. In the isolated world of the Path, the touch was so shocking that Randidly couldn’t stop a soft “eh?” from escaping his mouth.

A chill ran down Randidly’s spine as a strange voice spoke into his ear.

COME

The word smashed against Randidly’s body with enough force that he could feel part of his intestines rupturing. He gagged out a half-liter of blood, which splattered across the stone path. The blood that hit the stone caused it to bubble and seeth, but Randidly’s whole perspective seemed to buckle underneath the pressure of that single word.

As he quickly hyperventilated and struggled to recover, Randidly’s new Uncommon Metabolism activated. Although his internal organs were smashed to smithereens, they rapidly gathered back together and began to heal. His flesh was tough; even this strange phenomenon wasn’t enough to-

Randidly was horrified to discover that he was partially frozen. But his foot was planted and he was gradually pivoting backward. Still right next to his ear, that strange voice spoke again.

FIND

The second word was even worse than the first. His entire Soulspace was set to humming from the impact. The bones of his arm near the voice shattered, with bits tearing out of his flesh and dropping onto the path to join his sizzling blood. After a split second of dizziness, Randidly snapped back to focus. He abruptly realized that he had experienced this sort of sensation before; the source was different, but this was the same damage Randidly had sustained when the attention of Elhume landed upon him.

At least this time it didn’t shatter my Class, a fiery-eyed Randidly briefly reflected. But then he threw everything he had into trying to escape.

His muscles twitched and flexed helplessly. Even his significant physical power could do nothing but help him heal. He strained as much as he could, but Randidly couldn’t escape the grip of whatever now held him. His mind rapidly ran through options to break out of this situation, but things were moving way too quickly and his eyes were pulled upward. As he turned, he saw what had lain behind him on his right.

The red-violet Aether flowed together into a body, gradually strengthening that body and fooling the universe. The image physicalizations grew increasingly overwhelming. Then that capability to fool the universe became so convincing as the related images were strengthened that gradually the body’s eyes became blank and empty.

The image had become so all-consuming that the user had been devoured. The consciousness that birthed the image had forgotten that anything else existed.

Randidly had spun almost all the way around now, so he could also see what was on the Nether side of the Path. Familiar Nether energy spun together to create a core. Then core steadily grew in size and power until it resembled a black hole, devouring any hint of significance and crushing space and time in the process. That entire side of the stone path teetered on collapse as the Nether Core demanded more and more

In comparison to the hopeful feeling that Randidly had when he had been facing forward, these images that he saw in reverse chilled him to the bone. They showed power without restraint, driven to their limits. And he didn’t miss the way that his growth more closely mirrored this reverse direction than the original visions he saw.

Yet what truly set Randidly trembling was what he saw directly forward.

No grand fusion would occur at the end of the inverse path. No, the two sides were now separated by an immense gulf, Aether turned dangerously inward while Nether was turned outward.

But within that void between two extremes, an abhorrent being floated in a few dozen pieces. A tumbling hand, a pumping heart that spurt blood into the air, a twitching toe, a head that was cut in half-

The eye on the bisected head stared directly ahead as it rolled lazily through the air. Yet as that gaze passed over him, Randidly was transfixed.

ME

The third word was like a spell; after it was said, all Randidly knew was darkness.