Hydie Mordath’s lips twitched. A vein throbbed in her temple. She considered her words carefully. “Oh. So you all were… here, just enjoying the view?”

Three vaguely smiling faces turned to her. Tatiana sat in the middle, a veritable glass menagerie of empty cocktails on the low tables around her. The installation was a testament to the time she had spent here and the determination with which she ran away from sobriety. Raymund Ballast sat to her left, reclining in a chair and holding a heavy-looking green bottle of alcohol next to him. At the very least, his eyes looked alert. Commissioner Arrietti sat on the right, holding a half-finished sudoku puzzle.

Weirdly, Arrietti looked the worst, red-eyed and strained. Apparently, the puzzle wasn’t going well.

“We are on a vacation,” Raymund Ballast. She watched him raise a hand to cover up a large burp.

“A well-needed break from the mundanities of leadership,” Arrietti spoke through gritted teeth. He set his book down on the table, but knocked against a few of Tatiana’s discarded glasses. With Hydie’s aura of misfortune, a half dozen tumbled off the table and shattered on the ground.

Tatiana squinted at the broken shards and then waved a hand. The shard sprung into the air, whirling up and melting… until they formed one giant glass, about the size of a laundry basket. All four of them looked at it for several seconds. Tatiana blinked. “Hum, that’s quite strange… That should have just remade the broken glasses-”

Hydie cleared her throat. “Anyway, I just wanted to give the report regarding the preliminaries to the tournament. Most are now on their final days, with most of the participants having been finalized. Despite our preparations, we aren’t cutting enough participants; our goal is 8,192, and we are projecting the final tally to be a little over twelve thousand. We don’t want to change the preliminary rules, so Naffur has suggested we just add another, secondary preliminary round. Endurance in the presence of Nether as the method of differentiation, to eliminate the remainder-”

“Sure, sure,” Tatiana yawned. Then she rapped a knuckle against the massive glass, testing its structural integrity.

“What an idea,” Commissioner Arrietti chimed in, clearly trying to sound like he was listening while his attention wandered back down to the puzzle in his hand. He stuck out his tongue in concentration.

Hydie felt a headache building. She wished that reliable bastard Moss hadn’t also taken the bait and agreed to the vacation. Probably right this moment, he and his new wife were boning each other’s brains out in a hotel room. Meanwhile, Hydie had to deal with the mess that no one else seemed to want to manage.

Of course, she felt a great deal of empathy for Tatiana after this experience. The woman was a saint for cleaning up the small messes that Randidly’s wild actions made. But at the moment, it was a cold comfort.

Right now, it was Hydie’s turn. Because Naffur was handling the final preparations for the tournament itself.

She cleared her throat again. “The only other issue is the complaints about the actions of some of the Ghosthound’s Lancers. So far, reports of nineteen instances of violence have emerged. Most of them center around a few troublesome preliminaries, but already news stations are questioning whether they summons should be given positions of responsibility.”

“Honestly, that’s lower than I was expecting,” Tatiana said before slurping the last of her drink out of her cup. “We are just lucky that the Ghosthound isn’t present. He makes a certain sort of person crazy.”

Yea, everyone who works for him, Hydie grimaced.

*****

Randidly relaxed his shoulders and smiled; today was a good day. The preliminaries would soon end and the tournament would move to its more serious conclusion. Already, the Nether Ritual at the heart of Expira began smelting with more vigor; the production of Nether Weight increased as more and more expectation was poured into this event. The pressure was accumulating.

He felt some truly powerful individuals begin to shine, sharpening their edges in the constant combat against similarly powerful peers. Well-known figures sharpened their edges on each other without going all out, waiting for the single-elimination competition waiting after the preliminaries. The tournament wasn’t so long that a truly unknown individual could become dominant, but he was interested to see who would end up taking the prize.

Randidly checked his own Nether Core. Then he examined his images. He thoroughly examined the nooks and crannies of his inner world. Slowly, his affinity for Yggdrasil’s emotional affect was growing. He had slowly brought himself to terms with the Grey Creature and began fine-tuning those emotions. The problem remained the Stillborn Phoenix, but he couldn’t begin to refine that so long as he hadn’t figured out the Unborn Duo.

Meanwhile, he had used the last week to make a steady push into the Hierarchy of Burden. At this point, the Fatepiece has grown to Level 58. He only needed to withstand two more levels of Entropy to break through to the next layer.

Ivory: a layer labeled with nothing more detailed than ‘spatial collapse’. Weirdly, Randidly was looking forward to it.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Of course, he hadn’t yet found that sort of boundless energy that would allow him to keep entropy at bay indefinitely. But with his improved Egg’s Illusory Plume, he could shrug off a lot of the dangers of the chilling degradation. At least for a time. The impossible feathers of the Stillborn Phoenix became a reliable bulwark.

Randidly closed his eyes. I’m getting closer in all of the ways I wanted to improve during this training period. Plus I have quite a chunk of PP remaining. I’m just… not quite there.

He opened his eyes and looked over the lip of the volcano to the lava bubbling within. Heat waves slithered upward. Lucretia had sent him a few messages over the past few days. The situation with the Patron of Feathers was accelerating. A malicious gust of wind could rip her to shreds and crumble her like a dried leaf. His heart ached to hear it and to feel the way the other adopted Patrons grew nervous watching their old friend suffer.

Soon, perhaps even before the end of the tournament, he would need to decide for sure how he wanted to handle this problem. To save her, he would need to leave the bottom of the shaft. Based on Solomon Rex’s warnings, the deeper monsters of the Nexus had begun to notice his activities. His defeat of Commandant Wick wouldn’t go unnoticed.

Then there was the continued threat of Devick-

But the truth is, when it comes down to it, Randidly’s eyes narrowed as he looked down at his hands. His senses instantly picked up the dense and complex network of Nether that animated his physical body. After a year of honing myself, I’m losing my patience a bit. There’s so much I don’t know about the Nexus and my place in it. And I’m finally in the position to ask questions and get answers. How unified is the resistance against Elhume’s new plan? What exactly happened so that his opinion on Pine changed so drastically?

What is the Nether King trying to accomplish?

How powerful exactly is Elhume?

To find the answers to these questions, he needed to cease training and leave the base of the shaft. Randidly nodded to himself. With Egg’s Illusory Plume and the tempering of the Hierarchy of Burden, there wasn’t much that could do serious damage to his body. At the very least, he had confidence in surviving.

Sighing, he shifted his focus once more from his own person to the participants in the tournament. Amongst them, he felt some extremely interesting images. Some of which had the distinct taste of his own flavor. The nostalgic tang took Randidly right back to his last visit to Tellus and that final fight. With a small smile on his face, he began to reminisce.

Yet before his mind could wander too far, he felt Neveah’s warning pulse of emotion, right before her message arrived. Randidly, the World Council released their judgment.

Slowly, his expression twisted. The tension carved deep canyons into his cheeks and forehead. From her emotional reaction and the fact that Neveah felt the need to reach out, he already knew what sort of decision they had come to. For a few seconds, he simply sat and rolled his shoulders. He allowed Nether to flow through his body and cool off the rising heat in his muscles. Then, he conjured a portal with the Philosopher’s Key and went to one of the computer terminals in Tatiana's home.

He moved quietly, leaving the lights on as he switched on the screen. He could sense Tatiana thoroughly enjoying her time off and knew she wouldn’t mind that he was staying abreast of current events. His hands trembled with the humming swirl of his emotions as he clicked open a news feed and looked at the announcement. As his eyes excavated the meaning, he barred his teeth at the screen. “Did you think you could put it out during the tournament and I just wouldn’t notice…?”

His eyes caught on a line near the bottom of the press release.

The various governments of Expira are unwilling to apply a vague common law to a very specific situation.

The rest of the article explained how even now, other suits were being brought up in the various Zones; Missy Carp would not escape punishment. The author opined that this was a good thing. Such a show of discretion on behalf of the world governments bodes well for the eventual creation of an actual worldwide set of agreed laws.

However, Randidly could only sit in that dark room and think about those children that Missy Carp had tortured, until their Nether had degenerated to the point that they could weaken their own significance. Of all the bodies that Missy Carp had bought and sold on the promise of gaining faster Skill Levels. The bodies she had used to profit.

Randidly stood abruptly. His first impulse was to charge out and destroy something, but he somehow sensed that wouldn’t make him feel better. That would just stoke the flames of rage that whispered their way up through his bones and into his mind. Motion would just strengthen the helplessness he felt.

For a few seconds, he considered paying Missy Carp a private visit. But somehow, he knew that would just bring her joy. More joy still if he strangled her himself, and she died a martyr to the tyranny of the Ghosthound.

Yet he couldn’t help but find the prospect oddly tempting.

He might have fumed for quite some time had not a communication come in to Randidly. Not a message, not some sort of emotional sense, but a young child speaking to the cloud avatar Randidly had left.

“It’s not fair, Mr. Cloud,” Randy whispered to the night sky. Randidly closed his eyes and his awareness ripped its way out of his anger and the darkness of Tatiana’s house. He followed the whisper North and East, traveling about eight hundred kilometers until he alighted on an orange ridge above a low basin filled with twinkling lights.

Randy lay out on the stone, looking up at the stars. “No matter how hard I work, the goblin doesn’t like me. I don’t think he likes anything about me; even if he can cook really yummy food, couldn’t you find a nicer teacher?”

Nearby, the monkey that Randidly had blessed with intelligence twitched as it heard Randy’s words. It fled, fearing Randidly’s retribution. But hearing a similar enough sense of helplessness from the child allowed him to take a deep breath. He spoke in a rumbly voice, more natural force than vocal cords. “Hard now. Better later.”

“How much later?” Randy sighed.

Randidly couldn’t help but smile. “Hard then opportunity. Difficult isn’t pointless.”

Randy continued to mutter and complain, but Randidly’s attention flicked away. Because suddenly, he realized that while he couldn’t personally take action, that didn’t mean he couldn’t use this outcome for his own gain. In Tatiana's house, his eyes opened. He looked down at the ground, to the grand Nether Ritual churning out Nether Weight below him. His grin stretched across his face.

Then he went to Tatiana’s office, in search of a notepad.