The flickering clouds became a sigil. That sigil rushed forward, becoming a mental sledgehammer with enough force to crack the personality of an average Nexus dweller like a pile of chicken eggs.

To be fair, Wick unleashed every ounce of his Willpower in concussing the Ghosthound. He had learned his lesson with using emotions as the weapon and this time just cracked against his personality with a direct mental ambush. Rather than trying to confuse him with emotions, he relied on an overwhelming impression of oblivion, driven directly into his psyche.

For a brief moment after the attack landed, the Ghosthound’s face split in two, half dominated by darkness and the other by a fiery green blaze. Both eyes fixed on Wick’s core above him, which flitted behind the thick layer of grey clouds, safely out of the young man’s reach. For a few moments, he fought that one-way ticket to oblivion and teetered on rising above it.

But then those moments of adrenaline passed; the foolish boy swayed and then fell, almost in slow motion. Despite the fact that Wick’s image was so much more powerful, it was hard to feel reassured by this victory. During the entire extended moment of collapse, Wick half expected the Ghosthound to shift and plant a foot before launching a vicious counterattack. But the strike never came.

Randidly Ghosthound collapsed. His crumpled form sent some of the small stones beneath his body skittering across the ground.

The flesh titan took a step forward, raising a hand to strike down at the exposed body, but Wick blasted it with his immutable grey smoke. Its eyes clouded as the smoke forced its way into its nose and mouth, becoming the only thing that the image projection could sense. Wick wiped away its connection to the outside world, as he usually did. Its heavy shoulders heaved with a long sigh. “Ah… to die…”

Next to it, the copper spikes twitched fitfully. Wick stretched out a hand. After a moment of dithering, the cowed image floated to him and slid smoothly into his body; he had trained this one well.

Wick cataloged and restricted the other two potent image, even while feeling quite pleased with himself. The Ghosthound hadn’t made any sort of mistakes, but how could he know that Wick could wield the copper image so freely without revealing his true colors? It was a long-laid trap, with his Ominous Horizon image lurking for exactly this moment.

Of course, the current situation wasn’t ideal.

Emotions gurgled in Wick’s chest, frantically trying to rip their way out of his grasp. Even the docile copper image wriggled as he compartmentalized and bound everything in his person. As Devick’s binding unraveled, each second held a greater threat of their soul collective collapsing into a mass of chaos and destruction. However, this much he could still handle on his own.

“True power,” Wick spoke to the Ghosthound’s stunned form even as the heavy grey clouds rolled together into a thick column above them. “Is controlling the entire fight. Manipulating the details. Never losing sight of your goal. Never becoming caught up in the machinations of your opponent. And in that... You failed.

“However, I am not angry,” Wick settled on his haunches in front of Randidly. The oozing and twitching form of the rust-colored flesh titan collapsed into a puddle and then oozed back into Wick’s body. “In fact, you taught me a valuable lesson. We both learned from this clash. The combination of that improvement… when we are one, we will both benefit from your capabilities.”

Wick reached out. At the moment, he played a dangerous game. The emotions were becoming more demanding, wanting to run wild now that the walls had fallen. Thin tendrils of grey curled out from his fingers, meandering through the air toward the Ghosthound. Yet Wick couldn’t help but bite his lip. He began to sweat.

As those tendrils stretched out, he began to work on a very familiar set of bindings. Even his firm Willpower faltered as he erected the walls around himself. Wick, after cursing these very restrictions for most of his non-blurred memories, rebuilt the prison around his soul. More tendrils spun out, gathering momentum, approaching their target. The thickening grey mist forced opened the Ghosthound’s mouth and dug in through his nose and ears.

Wick could almost imagine he could hear Devick laughing.

Because when he needed it, even now that he had been freed, it was in her hand that he spoke. These choices were hers. Wick moved with all the independence of a glove, meekly cupping her hand.

Wick didn’t try to deny that truth. But the reason his mouth tasted like swamp mud was how easy it was. He had studied it from the inside so many times, perhaps subconsciously assuming there was something profound to the working. Some secret that would stump him, if he tried to escape. Yet now that he created it himself and found no such secret- found that he had been in charge of his own destiny for so long-

The mist formed a bridge. The images within him were cupped in that grey haze, bound by Wick’s wavering Willpower while the clouds infiltrated the body of the Ghosthound. He would need to travel into his subconscious and merge them directly before he could fully bind the whole of the new ‘them’ together.

“I have a choice,” Wick hissed to himself. Even to his own ears, his voice sounded distant and hoarse. More and more smoke pried open the Ghosthound’s mouth and crept down his throat. It was a metaphorical invasion, to make the mental one that much easier. “This might have been your plan, Devick- to make me reliant on your fucked up shape. But I do not need them like you expected. However, I am a professional. Since you provided these acceptable tools, I have no qualms over taking advantage.”

I could go on my own, abandon these, He told himself one more time. Wick almost felt numb as he continued to force himself into the Ghosthound’s body and remake the bindings. He almost seemed to be watching himself from third person, a glove around a capable hand. Then his expression hardened, right before he sank totally into his target. However… I have use for this power right now. But once I absorb Randidly Ghosthound, then I can figure out how to get out from under that mad woman’s thumb.

With the Ghosthound’s mental defenses still scrambled from the attack Wick had unleashed, he slipped right into the other’s subconscious. Their physical shells were shed, leaving Wick a bubbling concoction of emotions and images that weren’t quite fully bound together yet. Each moment threatened to end them in a massive explosion. Yet once his mental form became clear, Wick paused. Because already, he felt something quite strange about this place.

The subconscious space of the Ghosthound was massive. The soft blackness of this boy’s sense of self unfolded around the questing Wick almost infinitely. In one direction stretched flashes of crimson light and in another the strange ticking of a clock. And Wick arrived holding the metaphorical lit fuse of his current precarious balance, so he didn’t have much time to spare. But as he examined the surroundings, he couldn’t help but admit that the Ghosthound would have a much easier time handling all the bound emotions of Devick’s previous sons than Wick had.

The flames of this truth burned at the bottom of Wick, filling him with a caustic mixture of fury and envy.

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Then he began to move, floating through the void. He didn’t worry about finding his goal in the large expanse; he didn’t need to. The space that would have troubled him physically meant nothing figuratively. That was the great weakness of the subconscious. Now that he had become a part of it, he would work his way forward until he arrived at the location where he could do the most damage.

Of course, Wick did move quickly. One thing Randidly had taught him over and over again was how quickly the kid could recover. And this process would be much more smooth if the Ghosthound remained unconscious.

At the core of this place was a mental projection of Randidly. Once Wick found and touched that form, the strange substance of their souls would be forced together. Now their energies were already mixing, but soon the other portions would as well.

He swam through vast distances, ignoring strange shapes and flickering images that he saw out of the corner of his eye. He also avoid several massive tributaries of an inky river that seemed to flow beneath the whole of the subconscious. Insubstantial voices and faces appeared in front of Wick, sometimes looking like Devick and other times looking like a wistful woman with long, tawny hair and a bitter smile. Yet he soon encountered a problem; the longer he stayed here, the more he felt himself aligning with the massive subconscious.

Gritting his metaphysical teeth, Wick wrapped himself in a layer of image projection and began to accelerate. Damnit, he’s absorbing me. How the hell is his subconscious so massive? But I can understand why he’s having difficulty cultivating his images; with an emotional capacity this huge the amount of detail required to make a convincing image would be massive.

In the distance, Wick spotted a glittering tower. His instincts informed him this was his goal, so he immediately adjusted his vector. The strange whispers were becoming more frequent, whispering ‘Randidly, Randidly’, to Wick over and over again. His insides twisted as he felt a rising desire to answer those calls as though they were addressed to him.

What he had originally believed to be a tower turned out to be a massive edifice of carved Aether, held up by six massive support beams that ran toward the top. Etched with grace and poise, the six glittering and different styles of construction still added to an opulent and aesthetically pleasing exterior. The only problem was that the top portion fizzed and crackled, clearly left unfinished. It was only after the Ghosthound’s three images surged into place around the building that it occurred to Wick that this massive thing was the Ghosthound’s Class.

“Yet why is it unfinished?” Wick frowned as he drifted closer. Despite the rising pressure held in check by his Willpower, he couldn’t help but be flummoxed by what he found here. “Has he not begun working on his Grand Fate?”

Wick’s bewilderment intensified further as he saw the lake on which the crystalline Class structure was built. Small ripples ran across the surface of the inky black water, yet what waited below was not a reflection. Directly below the unfinished Class was a seething black heart, the nexus into which all the massive tributaries flowed, a complex and suffocating swamp of significance and motion. He released a gasp and tore his eyes away, unwilling to look at the pulsing core for too long.

Then he caught the reflection of the images; two only possessed vague and shadowy shapes, but the massive tree showed up as a wiggling, wingless dragon. Its head whipped around and it bared rotten teeth, apparently sensing Wick’s gaze. Its cataract-covered eyes narrowed into slits.

“This subconscious…” Wick muttered to himself then shook his head. His gaze went to the source of the ripples; there lay Randidly Ghosthound at the center of it all, still oblivious to the invader inside of him. Wick accelerated forward.

He didn’t have much time to spare. Those strange tremors continued to rock his Willpower; the imagined laughter of Devick grew louder with each moment.

Yet Wick had only crossed a single step when the surroundings changed. Suddenly a gallery of watchers appeared at the periphery of the churning machinery of the Ghosthound. Several of their will-o-wisp lights were dim and nearly lost within the vast darkness of this place, but a few possessed a potent enough image that Wick paused.

A burning ray of sunlight. A deep, abyssal darkness. A flowering, incestuous plant growth. A horrifying hunger that breathed out spent ash.

He risked their attacks by continuing. But Wick resolved himself to ignore them. Each had power, but they couldn’t rival him, with all of the combined force of ‘Devick’s child’ gathered in one mental form. He took another step-

A new figure arrived on the edge of this subconscious world. A collective consciousness, moving in unison, taking the form of a monstrous city with a thousand legs. It scuttled over and crouched protectively next to the Ghosthound. Wick could feel the weakness of each individual will that spun together to form this city, yet together they possessed significant power. A strange mouth opened up on the side of the city and motes of silver light swirled around.

This time, Wick stopped, looking around at these strange developments with alarm. He only just managed to keep his mental form together. But just because he no longer moved, that did not mean that the surroundings no longer moved. One of the Ghosthound’s images, the massive eye of darkness with its swirling event horizon of syrupy light, lowered itself down and released two ugly masses. They shivered and resolved themselves into slugs, their mouths and eyes and everything about them poorly shaped. But the duo oozed forward, placing themselves to the left and right of the Ghosthound. Periodical ripples, syncing up to the beating of his heart, continued to spread out through the lake.

The torrent of emotional force swirled through Wick, his body resonating with its passage. Despite the infrequent shivers, he began twisting his focus. His foe lied there with his eyes closed, his face at peace. But after laying a trap, Wick wasn’t going to make the same mistake as his student. “How long did you plan this?”

The Ghosthound’s eyes flickered. Then they opened, the left side of his face lost to oblivion and the right dominated by a brilliant emerald eye. “Right before you touched me. For a few seconds, whatever you did genuinely knocked me out. But how did you know I was awake?”

“Instinct,” Wick grunted. But his focus flicked sideways in a very revealing manner. If the Ghosthound had truly been completely unconscious, his mental defenses would not have manifested in such an intimidating manner.

The Ghosthound shrugged, suddenly standing. Wick built up more and more force, all the complex emotions that tasted the freedom now that Devick’s bindings had been shredded and wished for more. They struggled and Wick corralled that force, preparing to release an oppressive image shape.

But he needed a bit more time to generate something oppressive enough to suit his needs. Wick offered the Ghosthound a wan smile. “Let me guess; once I revealed that the grey cloud image was mine, you switched your plan. You would endure the attack and recover and then spring the trap on me when I came here, to wrestle directly with your psyche.”

“More or less. If there’s one thing I have confidence in, its taking a hit.” The Ghosthound returned the smile.

Wick did his best to hide the humming vibrations. Even his tight control was strained to contain the force he now contained. “But you made a mistake. Even with these… strange defenses you’ve gathered, do you think it matters? Once I touch you, we will meet directly. You cannot overcome me.”

This time, the Ghosthound didn’t answer. But frankly, Wick didn’t care.

After allowing the silence stretched for a few seconds, he threw back his head and laughed. “Fine then! Let’s settle this.”

Wick gathered all the image potency he possessed with his last scraps of Willpower and shaped it around his body in a truly inspired manner. Using the two images from the weaker passengers in his body, he created an engine out of rust-colored flesh and copper. That became his body in this thought area, which he prepared to accelerate-

A strand, no an entire stream, of emotions broke off from Wick’s careful control and spiked sideways within the deepest area of the image shape. It tore open one of the fleshy sides of the engine he still created, all of the pressure suddenly hissing out. The image he had worked so hard to generate began to sag.

The Ghosthound chuckled. “Fine then. Let’s settle this.”

Wick’s eyes widened. Those emotions. Those were from the Ghosthound, when he blasted me with them earlier. And this entire time, he somehow maintained a connection with them- how the hell did he refine them to be so marked?!?

But he didn’t have time to consider. The Will-o-Wisps burned forward. The images released blasts of force. That reflected wingless dragon snarled and snapped. The city of many legs walked forward, its power rising.

All to drown out Wick.