“Shit.”

Randidly surprised himself with the word, waking him up from a strange dream where the world turned flaky and grey and began to dissipate. He blinked several times to try and ease the itching around his tear ducts. He was on his knees. The rustling of Yggdrasil had risen to a roar; all of the ambient soundscape was blanketed by a horrifying drone of white noise. Everything else was smothered.

Somehow, he managed to loosen his grip on his arm. His trembling hand reached out and pressed two fingers against Helen’s neck. Just in case, he gathered an enormous quantity of Aether in his body, ready to flood her with it and heal Helen’s wounds.

Randidly-

Randidly pushed away the intrusion. His gaze was intense on his fingers, refusing to allow his gaze to linger too long on her ruined hands, the shredded flesh on her thigh, shin, and forearm where bones poked out beyond the skin, and the sagging organs in her opened chest cavity. One thing at a time.

One step at a time. That’s how…

He didn’t know how to finish that thought.

Unfortunately, Randidly’s Absolute Timing Skill… just failed. He blinked several more times, conscious of nothing but the fragile feeling of Helen’s skin on his fingers and the roaring noise. Yet he had no idea how long his fingers had been there. Perhaps… the reason he hadn’t felt a pulse was that he simply had not left his fingers there for long enough?

Even in his current state, Randidly knew that thought was incorrect. His Grim Intuition reported the truth of what was in front of him. But he didn’t dig too deeply into the why right now.

He couldn’t. He refused. He ached and blinked.

He kept his arm still for as long as he could. The roaring in his ears grew louder. The tightness in his chest lingered. But ultimately, it was the shaking of his hands that forced him to pull back; at this rate, his uncontrollable spasms would crush Helen’s neck-

Randidly sucked in a sharp breath and stood. He pressed his eyes shut. Helen… was dead. She was killed-

“Head Drill Sergeant!”

Through the howling roar of noise in his head, a distant voice reached Randidly. Creaking like old oak, Randidly slowly turned and forced his eyes to open. He found a whirlwind spinning rapidly around him and Raymund Ballast barely able to stay on his feet before the violence of the elements.

Aether and Nether crackled in a circle three meters in diameter around him and at some point Randidly had activated the Hierarchy of Burden. Serpents of crimson electricity swam out from his arms and used jagged jaws to tear at the surrounding space. I… can’t even feel these...

Randidly dully looked down at his arms, almost impressed by how sharply his limbs had shifted even as they were ravaged by electromagnetic forces. His fingers were long and deadly, ridged with black lacquer armor. Golden veins pulsed beneath his skin. An enormous, segmented tail snapped back and forth behind Randidly, scoring the ground in impatient arcs. And of course, huge, pale flames danced across his skin.

The entire of his Weight was strained to its limits. The air around him whined and disintegrated. As his eyes slowly absorbed the details, he also noticed that the zone of destruction around him was slowly spreading. The combination of image, significance, and electromagnetic radiation was destabilizing the surrounding space in a cascading reaction.

Randidly parted lips as his mind spun. Somehow, he must have subconsciously activated his image physicalizations and Nether Core with more potency than he ever had in the past. Plus, he was searing himself with all twenty Levels of the Hierarchy of burden, transforming himself into a spatial bomb. The thought almost made him giggle, but that impulse was devoured by the aching void in Randidly’s Aether Crossroads. Instead, he slowly inhaled and his limbs shimmered and regressed to normal. He released the Hierarchy of Burden.

He was suddenly just a human standing over the corpse of a friend. An emotional fork was inserted into Randidly’s gut, twisting and swirling his intestines together in a distressing clump.

The wind around Randidly died, revealing, the slumped forms of most of his elite recruits that had been caught in the rapid escalation of power. Randidly didn’t even have the emotional charge to feel guilty as they began to stir. Without the subconscious manifestation of his images, everything was abruptly silent; the tingling soundless left Randidly pained and numb.

Wordlessly, he turned back toward Helen, but not all the way to the messy calligraphy of her body. Not right now, not with the fork continuing to insistently twist. Instead, Randidly looked down at the three shattered spears just outside of the reach of Helen’s twisted fingers… and the shattered remnant of her Fate.

Next to the black harpoon, Randidly knelt again. His left arm wasn’t cooperating, so he once again reached out with his trembling right hand. Helen had refused to allow Randidly to see her Fate for quite some time. She had vehemently refused to bring it out in any of their spars. Yet now, here, in this horrible moment, it lay before him.

Since Randidly had seen it last, the weapon was almost unrecognizable. Part of it was probably the strain which had destroyed it and its mistress, but the weapon had twisted and thickened and corroded to become an incomparably more gothic implement than the original harpoon. The new form made Randidly think of the fire poker used by Satan to invigorate the coals for infernal torture.

The weapon combined the cold cruelty of a practiced butcher and the poise of a victorian agent of the crown. The handle was roughly wrought but possessed an undeniable aura of nobility. Randidly wondered, between their spars and her training of the elite squads and her relationships with Neveah and Tatiana, when Helen had time to pour so much effort and imagination into adjusting her Fate. Even in its current form, he felt the budding image that had been planted and cultivated to its current state.

And now the shaft was shattered and the serrated tip had been snapped off. The handle had been cut into three pieces and the remainder of the body appeared to have been chewed on quite enthusiastically by a toothed-toothed shark. Yet still, Randidly reached out and picked up every piece of cool metal, one by one. They were small coals of a dying fire, barely retaining the heat of Helen’s image. But he refused to miss a single fragment of her.

Randidly hated the way he could feel his Nether Core immediately strengthening as he absorbed the shattered remnants of Helen’s Fate, but at the same time, he pictured Helen’s expression if he refused-

Be fucking practical, she would have said-

Randidly pressed his eyes shut again. Then he straightened and turned around to look at Raymund Ballast. Randidly was about to speak, then hesitated due to a bit of strangeness he perceived; only Raymund, DiOrtho, and Charlotte Wick remained behind him. The rest had disappeared. From the marks on the ground, it had been a while since Randidly had lost control.

Briefly, Randidly grimaced and pointed his ire inward at Absolute Timing. Why the hell won’t you fucking DO YOUR JOB! You shitty failure of a Skill… You just-

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Randidly shook himself and cleared his throat. He needed to remain as focused as he could manage, despite the fuzzy ache that pervaded every part of him. “...clean up the body and bury it here. And then… continue your training.”

Randidly couldn’t think of anything else to say right now.

He already fumbled and produced his Philosopher’s Key to get away from this place, but he inexplicably dropped it between his fat fingers. The tool tumbled end over end until it clattered to the ground. Randidly had to bend over and snatch it off the bloody ground. When he straightened, a voice distracted him.

“Head Drill Sergeant…!” Charlotte Wick stepped forward. “I’m… I’m so sorry. I’ll accept any punishment-t you n-n-need.”

“Huh?” Randidly wheeled around and looked at her, barely suppressing an immediate urge to lash out and rend her flesh. At the moment, he couldn’t even be bothered by the fact she very visibly flinched backward as she met his gaze. He studied her for several seconds, his buzzing brain trying to figure out why she had spoken. Then his expression rapidly darkened. “Oh. Because you are related to Wick.”

Randidly face warped as his twitching muscles pulled by the skin of his cheeks as far as they would go. “Do you… really believe that you are relevant right now…?”

And with that, Randidly turned away and opened a portal back to Edraine’s base.

The transition was slightly blurry, but somehow he found himself sitting in his personal room on the padded cot. The ache in his Aether Crossroads hadn’t recovered; if anything that was worse. But there was another problem: somehow, he had picked up a bit of vibration on the journey over here.

Everything in the room was vibrating. Randidly frowned and used his right hand to tap the ground. His first instinct was that there were more quakes radiating upward through the shaft, but his hand didn’t feel any vibration. Then he raised his hand and realized that he was also vibrating.

Randidly looked around. Everything was vibrating and pulsing. The walls, the dresser, the cot, the door-

Knock.

“Yes?” Randidly asked curiously. But he was somewhat surprised by how hoarse his voice sounded. It was a voice of an individual that he barely recognized. But perhaps that was just because that his voice vibrated, too.

The door opened and Octavius Shrike poked his head into the room. “Ah… Randidly, I understand if you might be… somewhat upset based on the current situation. But you need to control your reactions.”

“I don’t feel much of anything,” Randidly asserted, frowning at Octavius. “What are you talking about…?”

Octavius winced. “Your emotions, Randidly. You are irradiating the entire neighborhood in violent emotions.”

Randidly blinked. He activated the Stillborn Phoenix and unceremoniously devoured all the emotions in the surrounding space. As though it had never existed, all the vibrations in the surroundings vanished. Suddenly, everything was too sharp, too focused. Everything ached. Randidly looked at his hand in wonder for several long moments, before glancing up at Octavius. His voice was still hoarse. “Is there anything else…?”

Randidly wasn’t even sure if the rhinoman answered. After he blinked, the door was closed. Scratching his head, he tried to remember what he should be doing next. Training, probably. But Randidly now wanted a very particular sort of training. He pulled out his complex Dreamcatcher of the Long Night.

For a few seconds, he spun the interlocking hoops and searched for meaning in the three-dimensional intersections of cord. Then he allowed himself to slip into a chiming memory.

Helen was wreathed in a blood mist, her eyes flashing in challenge. This was their prior spar, where Randidly had originally been adjusting his ability to utilize all three of his images together. She streaked across the distance between them with her weapon raised. Everything moved so quickly. Six wicker horror seeds spun together to her thrust, which rushed directly for Randidly’s chest-

BOOOOOOOOM!

Randidly didn’t bother to dodge. He couldn’t. He just stared wide-eyed at Helen as her image and physical force slammed against him. He took a half step backward and bit his lips with enough force that he tore through his flesh.

For a brief moment, Helen’s image flared with power, but then she pursed her lips and scowled at Randidly. The rising tide of red wine around her ebbed. “Okay, okay, what’s got your panties in a bunch? If you aren’t fucking ready to actually fight, let’s stop now.”

Randidly’s throat was so tight. He looked at Helen until he had to blink away tears to keep his vision from blurring. Helen’s expression transformed from annoyed to serious in a second. She tilted her head to the side. The casual movement made her braid sway behind her back. “Randidly? What’s wrong?”

“I’m so sorry…” Randidly pressed his eyelids shut for several long seconds, squeezing out the moisture. His shoulders heaved as he bit back a sob. A muscle along his ribcage was spasming as he looked at her. “I should have protected you. That was the deal. You follow me and I-”

After feeling how furious Commandant Wick was, I should have understood how close he was to going over the edge, Randidly thought as he stared at the confused Helen. Even with my performance with the Patterns, it was never about me. It was always about his own pride and prestige. And when the Elite Squad visibly tossed their affiliations to his faction onto the ground, the lack of emotional reaction wasn’t because the Commandant wasn’t pissed…

...but just because he had decided how to get back at me. And I didn’t even notice.

Helen licked her lips as she examined Randidly. Something bright dimmed in her eyes. Her shoulders slumped and she released a long breath. A small pulse of mental strain began to tug at Randidly as the memory diverged sharply from the original. Yet at the same time, Randidly’s Nether Core began to spin with so much furious intensity that the friction of Nether flooding through him produced heat. The sensation was scalding.

Strangely, Helen slapped her face with her palms. Then she looked at Randidly with clear eyes. “... I’m guessing this is your Fatepiece, the Dreamcatcher of the Long Night. Right now, I’m just a memory. Because I’m a corpse.”

Randidly shook with more and more intensity.

“Fuck,” Helen cracked her neck. Her lips trembled. Randidly could tell how hard she was trying to stay strong. “And the little shit that did this to me? Did we get them?”

“...yea,” Randidly lied. He hunched forward, burying his sobs in his lungs.

Helen tilted her head to the side. Her amber eyes were piercing as she examined him. Her expression softened and she reached up to touch Randidly’s cheek. Her fingers were scorching. “...that’s good then. But we all knew we’d fuck up and die someday, right? That’s why we trained so hard. Because that’s the sort of world it is.

“And if you didn’t actually kill the bastard… be patient.” There was a tremor in her voice. Helen’s arm fell to her side. “Be realistic, for once in your fucking life. Don’t sacrifice everything you are working toward; you have time.

“And also… and this is a bit awkward.” Helen’s smile was so brittle that Randidly couldn’t breathe. He felt like his shaking was going to break the surroundings and everything would tumble and tinkle to nothing around him. “My mother… is one of the survivors on Tellus. She’s always been pestering me about… well, I know this is so shitty of me to ask, but can you tell her that you are impotent? I never had the heart to tell her that after the first time, you never wanted to continue meeting me intimately.”

“It’s dumb right? That right now… All I can think about… is the one person who will never think I’m good enough…” Helen trailed off as she stared at him, hands at her sides. Randidly choked back the bastard child of a snort and a sob.

“Don’t worry,” Randidly sucked in a powerful breath through his nose. “When it comes to feeling like I’m not good enough… no one understands better than me…”

“Randidly…” Helen smiled at him. “This isn’t your-”

He didn’t let her finish. His Dreamcatcher of the Long Night fizzled and failed, leaving him in his dimly lit room sitting on his cot. For several long minutes, Randidly just sat there and cried.

When his tears had dried, Randidly knocked his knuckles against the floor. His eyes were pale and luminous in the dark room. “What is the fucking point of having power… if I can’t use it to protect those that are important to me…?”

Nether swirled in his chest, rushing into the space but failing to fill the void that Helen left in him. A smile with no joy stretched across the face. Gradually, the fog around him began to clear. The wheels of his mind began to turn.

Don’t sacrifice everything you are working toward, Helen had said. Be realistic.

But right now, Randidly had found his next goal. She was right that he had time; there was no reason to charge over right now and force the issue. But this was not something that he could forgive.

Randidly’s smile without happiness stretched wider. He opened his right hand and brought the wrought-iron, serrated blade of Helen’s Fate. “Commandant Wick… after I’ve taken your precious pride and shredded it to bits… I’ll imbed this blade between your eyes. Lives are not toys.”