“Ozark!”

Moonlight Blade’s voice sunk into Ozark’s back like he imagined a wolf’s teeth would if that ire was ever directed at him. Miserable and not really understanding why he of all people was being called, Ozark hopped to his feet-

-and slammed his head against a rock. He crouched over and cradled his skull for several seconds, all imperatives knocked away by the pulsing ache that scrambled his thoughts. However, he quickly remembered the demand in Moonlight Blade’s voice and hurried through the dark tunnels, knocking his shins and elbows against walls that he couldn’t quite make out. He arrived harried and trying to gulp down breaths as quietly as he could manage.

In Moonlight Blade’s main room, at least, a thin ray of moonlight shown down through a crack in the rocks. In the dim light, the powerful Pinnacle Seeker’s fur glittered like spun silver. He favored Ozark with a blood-thirsty smile, seemingly looking him from head to toe and weighing mentally how much meat he possessed.

“Y-you called?” Ozark detested how much his voice squeaked. He folded his hands behind his back.

“Compose a letter,” Moonlight Blade’s chest rumbled with aggression; each hot breath was heavy with fury. He leaned forward. “Let Randidly Ghosthound know-”

Moonlight Blade’s eyes flashed with an implied threat. He bared his long fangs and the air in the cave grew hot. “-know there are… no hard feelings between us. Then request-”

The wolfman’s lips pulled even further back from his pearly teeth. More than what he said, Ozark, felt the weight of what he wasn’t saying: the consequence if the Pinnacle Seeker didn’t get his way. “-that he facilitate additional equipment for me… along the same vein as this bracer.” Moonlight Blade fixed Ozark with a piercing glare. Ozark swayed, his palms sweaty. “The maker is from his homeworld, after all.”

Ozark wanted to cry. He had heard the rumors about the young man, seen how he had brutally attacked his superior officer, and then heard how the Ghosthound had managed to briefly fight Devick to a standstill. If you want to so boldly threaten the Ghosthound, why use me as a messenger? He might just kill me for being disrespectful.

But Ozark could only nod. That was the lot of being a minion.

He tried to maintain his dignity as he left the room, then spent several minutes shivering in a small tunnel with his back pressed against heavy stone. Only when the adrenaline turned to sludge in his veins did he begin typing a message.

*****

Randidly woke up with a gasp. His dreams had been thick and chaotic with heat and impressions. In some of them, he was haunted by a cruel-eyed Wick, in others by a madly laughing Devick, but the worst of them all were those where Randidly could only grit his teeth and try and endure the overwhelming fists of Elhume himself. The pressure of their images still seemed to weigh against him.

His palette was damp and steam wafted off of his shoulders and arms. Randiddly rubbed the bridge of his nose with fingers from Sulfur’s arm, which was much cooler than his flesh. He had felt a sense of accomplishment, finally reaching a point where he could tear apart Wick. However, he still found himself wanting against the image of both Devick and Elhume.

For a brief moment, the deflated, loose-skinned version of the defeated Wick flashed in front of Randidly’s eyes. He sighed. I won. But… it’s really just the beginning, isn’t it?

The current Randidly still had much to do to catch up to those two. Even worse, Devick had pretty much come from nowhere, even for the people of the Nexus. How many more characters were lurking, likely in the Tier 3 Citizenship Zone?

He shook himself and reached up to wipe sweat off his forehead and cheeks. Then he shivered as he saw his own hands, feeling as though they belonged to another individual altogether. They sat, foreign and poised like jumping spiders, at the end of his arms. His fingers twitched subconsciously and Randidly almost flinched.

He folded his elbows and put the offending hands in his armpits. Then he knelt on the ground, steadying himself with the familiar pulse of Nether. It had absorbed the boost in significance from Wick and now flowed more deeply than ever. Each rotation of that vital energy was a reminder. This is your body. These are your same hands. You are still Randidly Ghosthound. What you’ve accomplished is significant.

These are the hands you used to slay Ep-Tal, the Tribulation of Turtletown. These are the hands that struggled for so long against Yystrix. These hands forged the arms you used after you created the Alpha Cosmos and had to give up a portion of your body. These are the same hands, all those years ago, that traced the lines of Helen’s-

“Well,” Randidly squeezed his eyes shut, feeling torn between embarrassment and a lingering ember of arousal. “That certainly feels like an inappropriate thought right now…”

He leaned back and sighed. But at least he felt more himself than when the hanging cobwebs from sleep covered him. The lingering strangeness worried him, but he supposed it couldn’t be helped. Wick truly had thrown all of his Frankenstein personality against Randidly. Although Nether had kept the influence of such efforts low, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t bear some scars.

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Honestly, that the side effects aren’t more pronounced is a certain kind of victory.

Randidly slapped his cheeks. One part of him wanted to go train for a bit, figuring out where he stood with both his ability to recognize and adjust ripple patterns and the Nether he could produce. Both experienced huge amounts of growth during the struggle against Wick. Especially Nether. Randidly sensed that he could deepen his understanding of both his First Authority and Synechdochence if he poured time into it. If he had enough improvements on that front, he might be inspired to finish his half-formed ideas regarding a Nether Penance.

In addition, the power and emotional force of Wick’s image made him clearly sense the limits of his own abilities; it felt like it was time to experiment with the Path of Dreams, that second area that Randidly had stolen from the Mountain.

However, he didn’t quite feel like training right now. No, more than anything, what Randidly had now were a thousand questions about the state of the Nexus. And it felt like a gamble, but there was one spot where he hoped to find some actual answers.

Randidly walked out of the safe house and down the deserted street. Even now, he had only seen one or two individuals living in this deep neighborhood. Randidly wondered if there was any significance to this place, or it was one more left behind area as the Nexus added more Cohorts to itself. A small portion of the frame of the Nexus stretched around him, leaving him with still more questions about this place.

He spun open the door to the shaft and looked down. Emotions howled past him, feeling rather muted and lovable in comparison to the violence that Wick had spewed. Meanwhile, significance seeped downward in a constant flow, accumulating into something horrifying and dangerous.

“I’m coming to find you, I guess,” Randidly said lightly. Then he stepped off the edge and allowed himself to fall.

Congratulations! Your Skill Breath of the Cosmos (T) has grown to Level 551!

The Stillborn Phoenix released a last gushing breath of the emotions it had devoured from Wick, then happily began sucking in these new emotions. Rather than hunger, it did its work according to its voracious nature. The two Unborn drank small sips of the same emotion but felt that they were rather bland in comparison to the meals they’ve had lately. They raised their pig noses and sniffed. Randidly barely avoided rolling his eyes; he had never expected the two slugs to become snobbish when it came to their meals.

Randidly didn’t adjust his velocity as he fell. He simply allowed the flow of significance and the natural gravity of the shaft to grip him. He rushed downward, the air whooshing past him, feeling the Nether content in the air rapidly thickening.

With very little else to think about, Randidly began examining the Nether of the shaft. Compared to his own, the substance of it was light and oily. Not oily in its graceful thickness, which Randidly possessed in spades, but in the spottled, nearly speckled substance of the Nether. So many different connections and meanings seemed to have been condensed in this Nether. Like rather than a single Nether Core spinning it out, there was instead a massive well of Nether around this significance, where thinner and less refined Nether was forcefully pressed closely together, which eventually combined all those thin layers into Nether of a more serious density.

With time and pressure, a powerful material could be forged.

The prospect reminded him of the layered, jelly-like form of Wick and himself in that mental area. The fragility of ‘self’ made Randidly release a long sigh.

Very quickly he dropped down to the 50% Nether content layer. A small smile tugged at Randidly’s lips when he remembered his struggles before he condensed a Nether Core, barely able to maintain his position here. At that time, Velio Dunn had found him, forcing him to flee deeper into the Shaft and risk becoming a part of the significance at the bottom of this place to escape.

What came next was the area with the porcelain defensive automatons, which obviously let him pass without any harassment as he shot downward. However, right before Randidly passed their area, he felt the hairs on his neck prickling: someone was watching him. Someone potent.

He twisted his head around to look but he was already past that area. All that lingered was a bit of anxiety and a strange feeling of familiarity. Randidly frowned. Who do I know that would be this deep in the shaft?

Both Revelations of the Atramentous Threshold and Grey Creature Glimpses Providence activated. Yet even combined, he could not intuit the answer.

That question puzzled him even as he tumbled down past an increasing number of Nether Gatekeepers born in this place and hanging here in constant meditation. Reminded of an earlier promise, Randidly sent a message to the Nether Gatekeeper that had helped him and now lived in the Alpha Cosmos, the one with the powerful mantle of antlers. Perhaps on the way back up, he could talk to some of these Nether Gatekeepers and give them a new home.

The distribution of the Nether Gatekeepers appeared to follow a bell curve. There were a few at the edges as he blurred down and then suddenly there were dense clusters of them, all sitting in furiously silent meditation to resist the pull back down. Randidly slowed his speed just so he wouldn’t disturb them. Soon they were so tightly clustered that he had to swim between them. The Nether content around continued to rise.

Then suddenly the shaft opened up. Both figuratively and literally, as the amount of Nether Gatekeepers dropped precipitously and Randidly could see what the dense population had made him miss earlier; the shaft continued to widen into something ridiculously massive. He accelerated again, traversing the last distance. The substance of the atmosphere was so thick with Nether that Randidly could feel each of the Nether Gatekeepers, their deep significance that rivaled his own, even after he had borrowed so much from several generous donors.

These Nether Gatekeepers… Randidly spun his Nether Core and achieved equilibrium with the environment. Significance tugged at him, but he had enough power to ignore it. He looked at one Nether Gatekeeper in particular, a sleek armored humanoid that vaguely resembled an armadillo. The twirling patterns of Nether this individual produced were incredibly profound. Almost immediately, one of the Nether Gatekeeper’s eyes opened under his scrutiny; Randidly felt vaguely embarrassed to be caught staring.

Because this individual made his instincts warier than even Wick had.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Sensation (L) has grown to Level 663!

Rather than respond to his stare, the Nether Gatekeeper smirked and then closed its eyes. Its Nether spun in those same beautiful snowflake patterns, but then a screen of Nether rose to block him from observing it. Randidly released a breath and shook himself. That little taste wasn’t enough to give him much inspiration, but it did let him know that there was much more to learn about Nether.

Then he continued downward and the composition of the atmosphere changed further. With the sensitivity given to him by the medium around him, Randidly felt it.

Randidly had found the body of Pine, the existence that had inspired the Nexus.