Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Sensation (L) has grown to Level 707!

Congratulations! Your Skill Cutting Tide of Amenonuhoko (T) has grown to Level 730!

Randidly released his tight control over the Nether flows, no longer trying to contrive every rippling interaction between the elements of his Nether storm and instead simply observed the way the changes spread outward. His eyes, one emerald and one swirling black, followed the varied pattern interactions, both breaking down into organic elements and moving together to become something larger.

A strange shadow began to stretch across the sky. Long spindly fingers of the patterns wormed together like larva squeezing out of a wound. Yet somehow, this wasn’t a change in lighting; the very character of the rainstorm seemed to stretch into a grotesque caricature of itself. Randidly bit his lip, tracing the slanting lines of the clouds.

Somehow, the formerly innocuous storm began to lean back on itself. His instincts whispered quietly of danger and wrongness, quite like attempts at human animation from the pre-System era approaching the uncanny valley. All the mundane details of the storm remained the same, the heavy layered clouds, the precipitation slanting and splattering off the alien trees, and the constant feel of the wind against his face.

Yet underneath it lurked a wholly unnatural pattern that perverted what a storm was supposed to me. It twisted and bloomed, a stinking and rotting rafflesia.

I can learn a lot from the bone charm, but its patterns are dangerous. Randidly reflected on his small adjustments.

By and large, it was an unsuccessful attempt to improve his ominous Nether storm. But certainly, it was a valuable experience testing his theories. Thunder rumbles and blue bolts of electricity danced across the heavy clouds. Even the increasingly sophisticated society of ants paused in their vine clearing duties to glance up at the clouds overhead.

Randidly had no idea what they saw with their limited sense, but they swiftly shifted and trundled their rain-slicked bodies back to their mound. Their feet moved in unison.

Crackling his knuckles, Randidly checked his Status screen. He had trained without pause for the last several weeks and now there were only a few days remaining until the large barbecue that had been spread throughout the training zone and even to Kharon, the one opportunity he would give the Vulpis Squad to cease handling the electromagnetic radiation from the Hierarchy of Burden and relax.

However, Randidly felt somewhat aggravated as he felt the stretch of training coming to an end. If anything, he felt like he needed a few more months before he deserved a break. He might not have as distinct a goal as when he was motivated by revenge against Wick, but he wanted to stay active. Those thoughts he kept close to his heart, because he knew how Neveah would react, but one of his main goals was to improve his Stats and felt quite far away.

The Stat Evolution Path cost ten thousand PP. Currently, Randidly only had a little over two thousand PP, even after he sat down with Neveah and began to grind up his long-disused Aether and Engraving based Skills. Still, half as much would likely get him the PP he needed; Randidly only needed to use five thousand PP in order to trigger another PP Tithe.

Skill growth was slow right now, but it would steadily accumulate. And if he could increase his Endurance to something useful, it would begin to accelerate even further. He could push forward with the Hierarchy, he could expand his experiments with Nether, he could specialize his emotional affects for each image…

Randidly looked down at his hands and flexed them. He vocalized the secret thought that drifted across the surface of his mind, isolated and unmoored. A constant remnant of the toils that had brought him here. “Will I be strong then?”

As soon as he had spoken, he felt a strange sense of helplessness. He looked back up at the clouds as they settled into their previous patterns of organic Nether flows. Gradually, the ants seemed to cease their doomsday preparations and left the next to clear out the rapidly spreading vines.

Their gleaming forelegs served as excellent scythes.

Abruptly, Randidly felt hollowed out and dry. His shoulders slumped and he leaned his neck, allowing the flexible top of his spine to keep him from tumbling back into the lava. More than empty, he felt alone. And as the ache spread through him, he suddenly realized that it was exactly at times like this that Helen would bluster into his training area, demanding a spar. Thinking about it brought a wan smile to his face.

“Not that I think she knew… that her actions kept me from looking down into the gulf left in myself from this focus on training,” Randidly said, speaking directly up toward the eye of the storm that showed him blue sky. “But just that we worked together well. Extremely well. Perhaps better than we understood at the time.”

He snapped his neck forward and then rubbed his scalp. “Is it bad that I’m relieved you were probably just as oblivious as to the vital way we interacted? That it probably never even occurred to you how much I needed your spars?”

Obviously, the sky didn’t answer in Helen’s voice. But looking up at the blue did shift his focus to another woman: Vualla.

Randidly sighed. He felt such a powerful and sudden connection to Vualla when they had met. They both had the same well of desire hidden in their chests. The lonely fire he felt constantly licking at his ribs had finally found a companion in Vualla. And obviously there was an element of attraction and respect, considering her beauty and overwhelming image.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Yet so much time has passed… the whole grief over Helen, preparing to assist Claudette, the training, and then the confrontation with Wick… all that occurred without my mind wandering toward her very often. If I’m being honest with myself… she completely slipped my mind. If her presence is my life is so light, are my feeling for her genuine?

He remembered her azure eyes. Some part of himself wanted to send a message to her, but she wouldn’t be able to respond. Randidly’s time moved much more quickly than hers. And through the strain of time, their bond had grown thin and weak. His heart ached to see it.

Or perhaps the real reason that his heart hurt was how little he felt when he thought about her but emptiness.

“Would I like to see her right now?” Randidly asked himself aloud. The biological systems of his body mulled that question over as he stood. His stomach remained inert. His heart rate stayed even. Ultimately, he could only include that he would like to see Vualla again. But some of the magnetic pull between the two of them had evaporated.

Losing Helen and reckoning with all she meant to me also ended up making me see what Vualla might not have meant to me. Even at the beginning. I was just looking for a way… not to be alone. And I might have been turning toward an imaginary romance. Randidly hung his head. Then he straightened. Because at least that thought gave him a sense of direction.

He had no agenda for visiting Helen’s grave, just the knowledge that he was sure that he wanted to be there and pay his respects. He produced the Philosopher’s Key and opened a portal. The out of the way ravine and the smooth stones felt strangely familiar, pushing away the surrounding world and leaving him alone with the swirling ball of Nether that remained of his dear friend.

He felt two presences in the area withdraw some distance to give him some space. Somehow, Randidly felt too exhausted to acknowledge their care.

Since he had last seen the Nascent Nether Prince, it had deepened its grip on the surrounding area. It had also shrunk somewhat, becoming only the size of a basketball. But in exchange, Randidly could see that the interior patterns had folded themselves into precise and beautiful arrangements. Even he, after spending so much time studying the usage of Nether, couldn’t help but be impressed by the simple genius of its arrangement.

Of course, he could only catch glimpses of the swirling layers. He dare not look any deeper than that; the only way to extract the secrets of a Nether Prince was by entering it and consuming it, as they had done on the frontlines. And Randidly dearly didn’t want to do that to the last remnant he had of Helen.

His eyes ached as he stared at the inky darkness, but no tears began to fall from his eyes. He simply stared blankly at the glossy surface of the Nether sphere. Belatedly, he realized he should have brought flowers or something-

His gaze sharpened. Because he could sense a very familiar sensation hovering around the edges of the Nether Prince. With great care, he stretched out a hand and brushes his palm against the strange energies radiating from its edge. The corners of his mouth curved downward; the energies that Randidly sensed were the very same types of radiation that he dealt with through the Hierarchy of Burden.

Randidly raised his gaze. “Do you have any idea why these energies are seeping in around her?”

Lucretia and the Patron of Blooms stepped out from behind a rock outcropping. The Patron of Blooms spoke first, her voice rich with faux-concern. “You know, that Nether Prince isn’t truly Helen-”

After the aching introspection of Randidly’s last ten minutes, it felt good to loose the reins he kept on his emotions and just burn with fury. He might not have nailed the emotional affect for his various images, but his efforts had certainly paid dividends in terms of potency. His anger became a physical presence, towering over the Patron and warping the ambiance of the ridge.

The Patron of Blooms coughed to a stop and lowered her gaze. With an empathetic glance at Randidly, Lucretia gestured for him to pull it back. For a second his temper flared again, but he knew Lucretia was right and begrudgingly pulled back his fury. The heavy pressure in the air vanished, leaving the Patron of Blooms with an awkward smile as she stared at the ground.

“Actually, we do know why those phenomena manifest around Nether Princes,” Lucretia said easily. She gently waved at the Patron of Blooms. “She can explain better than I.”

Randidly’s gaze shifted to the plant woman, who shifted uncomfortably underneath his scrutiny. Whether it was her desire that he make more Soulseeds or the previous show of temper, she was suddenly much more well behaved. “Ahem. Well, yes. You know, Nether Princes are actually a side effect of the Nexus being an isolated universe. Elhume made arrangements to gather and recycle the souls and images of the weakest individuals and obviously took great care to ensure that no powerful images could escape his engine, even by hiding away in the Tier III area… well the attention to these areas meant that there is a small subset of the population that can ‘escape’ in death.

“There are a few very special individuals, who usually die early, where their soul at the moment of death is more powerful than their image. So when the System attempts to gather them, they rip through the net. A failure on one part of the System leads to a cascading series of failures… even I don’t quite understand the details. The soul is too strong to be contained by the ‘weak’ net sent for them. And therefore the image and the soul fall together, tearing holes in the System all the way down… until they crash into the edge of the Nexus.”

Randidly’s eyebrows rose with something akin to alarm. Meanwhile, the Patron of Blooms continued her explanation. “If that soul is weak, the impact disperses it. Problem solved. But if that strange and perfect construct possesses enough integrity, it rips a hole through the edge of the Nexus and escapes back to the original universe. And the actual Nether Prince that we see,” The Patron of Blooms pointed to the sphere of darkness, dancing with patterns. “Is a plug of significance the Nexus creates to stop itself from leaking out through these holes.”

“A plug?” Randidly frowned.

“Mostly significance, donated by the Nexus,” the Patron of Blooms nodded. “But of course, the base is the individual’s image; it cannot follow the soul to escape the Nexus and is left behind. And the Nexus engorges that image with significance to hold the gap. Which is why the image eventually refines itself into something truly valuable, with the image and the significance. And I can already tell that Helen’s remnant will be quite special.”

Randidly raised his head back and laughed. “So even in death… Helen left one last fuck you for the Nexus, huh?”

Even if he still felt alone, he felt light. If Helen, tortured to death by Wick, could still make trouble for the Nexus, what excuse did he have?