CRACK!

This time, the goop fractured from Randidly’s wrist up through his forearm in a sharp fracture. The whole of his form began to tremble and cracks began to appear both more frequently and more quietly along its length. Helen licked her lips, felt nothing due to the numbness, and suppressed the rising excitement in her heart.

Obviously, I didn’t think he would be stuck in there forever but… having him fucking moving again is kinda a relief…

Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack!

Rapidly the whole of the Randidly statue began to quake and shudder. Small pieces of his dried blood began to flake off and cover the floor in a thin coating of reddish dust as bits of the goop burst under the pressure. Considering the general pristine, ivory decor of the place, Randidly Ghosthound’s molting was a cataclysmic mess.

Helen watched him messing everything up with relish.

CRACK!

With a sharp twist, Randidly’s front wrist shifted and his hand exploded with thick flakes of dried blood. His hand flashed with a glint of copper as the genuine limb managed to escape its restrictive confines. From that initial fracture, thin yet deep fissures stretched outward to weaken the imprisonment of his forearm. Small bits of crusty blood exploded from his other hand. Then a seismic anomaly began to form around his torso.

CRAAAAAAAAAAAACCKKKK!

Randidly rolled his shoulders and his hunchback, maroon torso exploded. Helen’s hand moved lighting-quick up to cover her mouth, but that couldn’t prevent her face and the exposed skin of her arms from being covered in a spray of blood dust. In fact, the thrown debris caused the rather small room to be choked with floating particles, vastly lowering visibility.

Once his shoulders were moving, the dusty hand came up and gripped at the dried gunk across his torso. In huge handfuls, Randidly tore his way out of his gargoyle skin. The pieces came away flaky and disintegrating, the material seeming to be much more hollow and porous than appeared from the outside.

Randidly rolled his shoulders again and then slammed his still immobilized metal left hand against his chest, smashing away the crusted material. Then he truly got to work, his hands blurring into veritable envoys of annihilation as he cleared off his person. The crouched, hulking giant was steadily trimmed down to the typical Randidly frame. When most of his joints were cleared, he began to more carefully pull away large plates from his face and neck. A few seconds later, he sucked in a deep breath through his now unimpeded mouth.

“Well shit,” Randidly finally said, which initiated a long spree of coughing. He spat an indeterminate kind of particulate onto the grown and then grimaced. “I feel… disgusting. And I think this shit is all through my hair… Heh, is my hair longer...?”

Helen shrugged. “I can’t see much about your hair through all that gunk on you… but I have good news and bad news. Which do you want first?”

“Dangerous news?” Suddenly there was a heaviness to the air and Randidly looked at Helen with sharp eyes. Her mouth twitched and she shook her head hurriedly to ease the mood. The dangerous edge in Randidly’s expression disappeared and he pondered for a few seconds. “...alright, I’ll take the non-dangerous good news first.”

“We each have a private bathroom,” Helen announced and gestured to a door across the room. “I don’t know how they manage it with the local temperature, but they have working showerheads. Not as sophisticated as Expira, but definitely better than dunking yourself in a barrel, like on Tellus.”

“And the bad news?” Randidly was working on his waist now, clearing out the enormous pile of gunk that covered his lower back and down his thighs.

Helen steeled her gaze and spoke with a look of the utmost pity. “This is the home of the Frost Matriarch. There is no hot water.”

“Ha.” Randidly snorted. Then he shook his head. Almost immediately, Helen felt a change in the temperature of the room. Randidly was pumping out heat more effectively than a furnace, even as he grinned over at her. “Annoying… but I think I can manage.”

Fucking bullshit side-effect of all the physical training you do, Helen thought sourly as Randidly turned away and waddled awkwardly toward the bathroom with his legs still partially encumbered. At the moment, it looked like he was carrying a suitcase-sized plaster tumor on his lower back. As soon as he had gone, Helen spared only a single glance for the reddish mound of dirt and debris that Randidly had made on the ground before she turned on her heel and marched back to her own quarters. Until he finished cleaning himself up, Helen planned on meditating on her image.

She sat on the ground and quickly got into the right mindset, but then was quickly distracted by a steady stream of steam flowing from beneath the door of her own bathroom into her resting quarters. The two bathrooms were sandwiched between her and Randidly’s quarters, so the commotion that he was making leaked over into her area. Which was double frustrating, not only because of the distraction it caused to her training but also because of her own agonizing experience with cleaning herself. Yet here Randidly was, somehow managing to turn the whole wing of the Frost Matriarch’s compound into a sauna.

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With a throbbing vein in her forehead, Helen closed her eyes and ignored the rising temperature and humidity. Luckily, it didn’t seem like Randidly struggled to clean himself off; five minutes later, there was a knock at her door. But what she hadn’t expected was how awkward Randidly sounded when he cleared his throat behind the door.

“Ah… mmmm, there have been a few… changes to my body due to the Grim Chimera. So…”

He trailed off, still hidden by the door between. Eyes sparkling at Randidly’s obvious vulnerability, Helen leapt to her feet and walked quickly toward the door. Her lips were constantly twitching as she settled her hand on the doorknob, so Helen did her best to school her expression. Changes? To his body? Heh, used the Grim Chimera too much and suddenly you look like a monster? Serves you right. Tsk, tsk, kekekeke, I shouldn’t say this… but will a beautiful woman like Vualla really settle for some ghastly skeleton…? Ah, apologies Neveah…

Despite her wandering thoughts, Helen opened the door to her room with high expectations. When she saw the truth of Randidly, however, she was immediately frozen into blank shock.

The first thing she noticed about him was his hair; he wasn’t kidding about it having grown during his previous struggles. Randidly’s hair hung thick and heavy, rolling over his shoulders and cascading down to around his waist. At the moment it was still wet, so it clung tightly to his body. The color remained black, but when it caught the light in the right way, there were threads of emerald running through it.

In addition, Helen’s suspicion that Randidly’s face had become ghastly was completely false. If anything- ahem, Randidly had become slightly more appealing, in an aesthetic sense. The emerald color of his eyes looked especially bright at the moment and his cheekbones and jaw seemed more well defined than they had been previously. Framed by his dark hair-

Helen blinked and looked at Randidly’s body more closely. His skin… it hasn’t really darkened, but where he used to be somewhat tan, now he looks more metallic, closer to a bronze. It isn’t as easy to see his veins through the skin any longer, but-

Randidly reached up and pushed back his gushing hair, which had been falling down his chest, so she could see his bone structure a little bit better. What Helen saw in the lines of Randidly’s ribs was more in line with him becoming a monster. She studied Randidly more closely and then had to suck in a breath. He still looked to be the same size as he had been previously, but whereas before he was covered in lean muscle, he was now emaciated.

Rather than him atrophying or being forced to consume his muscles for energy, it seemed that his bones had grown and now dwarfed his muscles. His frame had grown larger.

But then again, it was more than that. The shape of his skeleton had changed in subtle ways. The bones of his shoulders and forearms had thickened and stretched, hemming in his flesh from expanding. It was like a few pieces of natural armor had been inserted into his body.

“Definitely some changes,” Helen finally said. But she could only shrug at the expression on Randidly’s face. “But do you think these small things really matter…?”

Randidly’s expression was dark. He sighed. “You haven’t seen the worst part…”

From around Randidly’s side became a tentative flicker. An enormous, thick as Helen’s fist at the base, two meter long, forest green, covered in fur tail flitted from side to side in front of Helen’s eyes. As her jaw dropped, Randidly’s expression crumpled.

“Ahem.” Helen patted her chest and stared at the naturally graceful movements of Randidly’s new tail as it undulated behind him. “Can I… touch it?”

*****

Eventually, Randidly shooed the suddenly enthusiastic Helen away and returned to his room to gloomily envision a future where all of his pants had to be adjusted to allow for a tail. Randidly sat down on the ground and his extremely long hair pooled around him. The only disturbance was the near-constant, subconscious movements of his tail that shifted the curtain of hair back and forth.

Randidly grimaced and considered whipping out Acri immediately to chop most of his hair off, but decided that this experience with the Grim Chimera probably was enough when it came to self-adjustments to his looks. He could enlist someone else’s help to have another person to blame if something went wrong.

Randidly adjusted his position with a frown on his face; having a tail made sitting cross-legged more difficult than he had expected.

On the one hand, he cursed the Grim Chimera for playing fast and loose with his body. This irritation was made worse by his mental state. His mind was still somewhat tired from serving as the buffer in the Nether Ritual, but when he came to, he forced himself to awaken fully and make sure there weren’t any latent dangers to the on-going situation. Luckily, Helen had allowed the Frost Matriarch to carry the two of them away.

The Pinnacle Seekers were just as self-interested as other factions, but at least they were relatively straightforward in their demands and they paid their debts. If saving Claudette on a whim earned Randidly a few days of protection, it was definitely worth it.

Randidly also knew that he couldn’t be too mad at the Grim Chimera for growing him an actual tail to match his image. Part of the adjustments made by the Grim Chimera was changing a bunch of the major joints in his body to add more flexibility. In addition, Randidly’s bones had been grown and strengthened, resulting in a heavy forward lean in a skeleton that was almost double its prior weight. Randidly could tell from his few fumbling attempts at movement that the tail was a necessary evil to balance that weight out.

He could just count himself lucky that there wasn’t currently a tiny tail growing at the base of his neck. Just to make sure, he reached up to rub the back of his neck and then sighed.

Then Randidly’s eyes flashed as he focused his mind on business. He had gained a lot from surviving this time. He had earned almost a hundred PP while he had been unconscious, all in Skills relating to his physical abilities. Plus, there definitely had been a breakthrough in his Nether Core; the energy he could now produce was dense and silky to his senses.

So his mind moved to the future and he began to arrange his priorities.

Soon, he would talk to Helen and arrange a meeting with Seeker Thunder Wing to discuss his newly acquired Fatepiece. He would also need to find a large area nearby where he could familiarize himself with how this body moved.

But for now…

Randidly closed his eyes and simply breathed, savoring the sensation of wholeness he felt. That, at least, was a side-effect of the new body for which he was utterly thankful