“I couldn’t help but notice that you never allowed Drake to clash against you directly, with his emotional force,” Azriel said quietly. The two of them stood at the edge of his skyisland, surrounded by gleeful silver moon spirits, the night after the challenge.

Randidly knew Azriel would come. He had been waiting for her, feet dangling off the edge of the island. But he also knew he wouldn’t be able to give her a satisfactory answer.

Randidly released a noise balanced between a grimace and a chuckle. His hands stretched down between his knees, loose but not relaxed. In the end, he just shook his head. He felt strangely exhausted, all of his mental energy spent even though the fight itself hadn’t been very difficult for him. If anything, the fighting felt simple. It was dealing with the aftermath that left him feeling gaunt. “No, I didn’t let Drake just walk up and slash me. Because… well. You are right about the Grey Creature’s emotional affect. There is a lot… a lot of calcified something in my heart. I… yes, I hate Yystrix. I still do. She was- She kept forcing me to-”

His words stopped stuttered and ceased. His tongue felt thick and clumsy in his mouth. The more he tried to force them out, the hotter his neck became, as though it was some contrived friction that kept him silent.

Compared to explanations, fighting was easier.

His mind stalled out on those words, on the knot of emotion that still gripped him. Everything tightened around the eye of his Nether Storm. Truth be told, Randidly had not been able to stop thinking about his flaw since Azriel had come to him and talked about it. He closed his eyes and released a breath; he knew that Azriel had intended exactly this, planning on forcing him to acknowledge the flaw or risk losing the challenge.

What she probably hadn’t known is exactly how far about the eight challengers Randidly was. Someday, they might be able to rival them. That day was not today. This flaw didn’t need to be protected, just not purposefully exposed.

“If handling this was easy,” Randidly finally continued. “I would have done it a long time ago. I promise I’ll think about what I can do to hone that. But we don’t have any more time for me to delay. Whatever kept the Patron of Feathers alive is very close to running out.”

“Randidly, you have been running from one crisis to another from the day that I met you.” Azriel countered. She folded her arms across her chest. “Simply announce the truth; you feared a collision with Drake’s dense emotions.

Randidly helplessly shook his head. Another time he wouldn’t mind this sort of pressure, but right now he felt. He had shed the shell he had worn during the challenge, where he had forcefully stirred his Nether storm to adjust the eye. And that movement took his mind to dark places.

For example, after the fight, Randidly wondered why the two people he owed the most, his mother for his upbringing after his dad left and Yystrix for providing to him all the tools to excel with the System, were also the two individuals he resented the most.

Also, why hadn’t he ever tried to find his mother? Even now, the prospect filled him with a crippling anxiety. What if he found her? What would he say? What would she think that her son had become the most powerful man on the planet?

Would someday, in some fight against Elhume, the fact that he never faced these feelings make him suffer a loss? Would he fail at the last moment just because he wasn’t brave enough to seek out the woman who seemed intent on drinking and dating anyone so she didn’t need to face the son she had to raise alone?

Randidly knew his feelings weren’t exactly fair. And that only made him more depressed.

Perhaps reading his mood, Azriel pursed her lips and hopped off the edge of the island. She became a crimson streak, heading toward the horizon. Following her movement helped ground Randidly and allow him to drag himself out of the morass of emotions around him. After distracting herself for so long, it seemed like she finally resolved herself to return and deal with her upcoming marriage.

Randidly reached up and rubbed his neck. His skin felt cool and sweaty. Almost afraid that Azriel lingered just out of sight, he released a scanning pulse of energy. Then he forced a breath out through his nose and began to adjust his Nether rotation.

I can’t just leave it like this, Randidly bit his lips. He knew if he closed his eyes, he would be back in his childhood bedroom, pressing his pillow over his head to cover up the noise. Or he would be in endless darkness, as Yystrix demanded he give over control of his body. The memories floated so closely to the surface that they crept in at the edges of his vision. I need to restore some of the flow. Settle myself a bit.

The difficulty of restraining the disturbed significance had him gritting his teeth. For all that he had deeply buried these memories and it had taken the clinical dispassion he possessed in the challenge to unearth them, they also fiercely resisted his efforts to halt their wild rampage. Those previously still Nether flows now spun tightly around his body, pushing away other connections. They became insatiable and rabid.

All of his experience with Nether was premised on corralling natural force and watching it flow together around his body. To ensure his lesson wasn’t diluted, he had demolished that entire structure. The rebuilding process became extra fraught due to his recent experiments in widening his perspective- the framework kept folding in on itself in unexpected ways.

It was when an edge of his sky island cracked and fell away that Randidly grimaced and warped gravity around himself to move elsewhere. Without that central pinion in his organization, it was difficult for the flows to cooperate with one another; there were several points of Nether friction that produced enough force to damage the surroundings.

Keep focused. Keep working. Keep advancing. Don't let the emotion catch up.

So he catapulted himself up out of Expira atmosphere and into the fuzzy and frigid silence of space. He tumbled through the air and steadied the rotation of his Nether Core. The light reflecting off Expira eventually pulled his eye. Even the relentless twist of anxiety could be distracted by something so lovely. The soft white swirls of the clouds and wide expanse of blue ocean made it easy for him to forget about emotions, and challenges, and necessity which had plagued him since the System arrived.

Instead, he could ease that drive and simply admire for a few minutes. A planet, with its delicate balance of physical laws that allowed it to exist, was a wondrous thing.

That thought made Randidly twist and stare toward their ‘sun’. He squinted at it and released more pulses of energy. His Grim Intuition stretched out as far as it could go, but his physical limits were still a bit short of being able to stretch across an entire solar system. What he could confirm was that there was definitely a giant ball of heat radiating energy in the distance.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

For now, he tore his attention away and once more began to work on the execution of his Nether storm.

For all that the eye of the storm became a haven for all the emotions that Randidly wasn’t quite ready to address, it also really simplified the rest of his Nether movements. Having everything based around a central location gave the right amount of structure to the organic patterns. Randidly bit his lip and frowned. Removing that underpinning… reduced everything he had intuited to chaos. And guided those potent emotions into destructive and uncontrolled rampages.

He marshaled his Grey Monarch’s Authority and guided them back into place. At least for now, his previous flaw would need to suffice.

Space shivered and strange grey lightning expended itself as huge waves of Nether slammed against itself. The emotions did not go quietly into the good night. A weird swirling vortex began to form around Randidly, drawing in increasingly large pieces of debris tumbling around in space. Groaning, he released a cleansing pulse of Nether and moved even further away from Expira; he didn’t want to generate an observable phenomenon.

Just what a reeling planet needs after I crushed the eight challengers. Randidly’s lips quirked. An inauspicious phenomenon in the night sky. The soothsayers will prophesize the end of days. The destabilized populace will riot and burn everything to the ground.

Eventually, things settled back into a semblance of normal. Re-domesticating that violent Nether was difficult. Learning how to bring it inside of his greater storm would take months of struggle and soul searching. Which was time he didn’t have, due to the declining health of the Patron of Feathers.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Sensation (L) has grown to Level 975!

Randidly allowed the thick waves of Nether to calm themselves and settle back into their usual flow. He drifted down to his skyisland and found Tatiana dragging a table out onto the roof and pouring her favorite whiskey into two glass tumblers.

Randidly raised an eyebrow as he alighted onto the roof and Tatiana laughed. “Don’t look at me; we both know that my Skill knows you better than you know yourself. And it tells me that you want to talk. So let’s talk. It’s about the challenge, right? How are you?”

Raising his glass, Randidly sipped the amber liquid. He could feel the nascent image within the drink, urging him to loosen up and be intoxicated. He inwardly shrugged and acquiesced, allowing the feeling to sink into him. Unfortunately for his stress, the single drink wouldn’t be enough. Its image was completely swallowed up by the obscene capability of his body and the stability of his own images. He set down the tumbler on the table, wondering how much he would need to drink to actually feel well and drunk.

Opposite him, Tatiana patiently waited. He could only sigh and nod. Randidly scratched the back of his neck as he tried to articulate what he was feeling. “You’re right, this situation has me… a little extra stressed. Because- because I need to go back to the Nexus now. I need to go back under the scrutiny, under a constant threat of an ancient sociopath now trying to kill his own son and a more recent sociopath who might even believe I’m her son…”

He huffed out a breath. Tatiana waited.

“I realized two things in the middle of the fight,” Randidly began slowly, recalling his emotions during the actual conflict. He had tried to push back his connection with Expira; he ignored that the Alpha Cosmos was his body. Instead, he had viewed them dispassionately, as an invader from the Nexus might. He hadn’t exactly toyed with them, but he methodically destroyed their confidence, one at a time. His movements had been targeted, callous, and vicious. He had seized the initiative and hadn’t let go. “The first is that, while generous, Azriel’s goal of helping me was inappropriate. I cannot just use this place as a whetstone. These worlds are not trivial. A lot of lives count on me.”

Tatiana nodded. “Yea, this was about them. Preparing the population for the Calamities and other eventualities is important.”

Randidly hesitated. Perhaps usually he wouldn’t have pushed her on the subtleties of his point, but now his core buzzed with so much tension he couldn’t stand it. He ached, inaction was anathema to him. “Close, but not quite. Part of it is the Nether thing, and the emotional weakness, but I’ll talk about that later. But one side effect of dredging up all the accumulated shit in my Nether is that sometimes I can see a bit further into the future than usual. And there-”

Randidly’s eyes gleamed briefly with purple-black energy.

Congratulations! Your Skill Revelations of the Atramentous Threshold (T) has grown to Level 720!

I can’t see the outcome, but I can see myself smiling. For my face, it’s a strange expression. Tatiana’s face creased with worry, but Randidly just sat completely still, struggling to unravel the truth with his emotional response to it. And then the future version of me turns back and speaks directly to me, peaking into the future, ‘You’d do a lot to save the Alpha Cosmos, right? But how much would you give to save yourself?’

Tatiana’s eyes were bright. Her Skill guided her right through his thought processes.“I hope you realize that we all think the fate of this planet is fucking important. But you are too, Randidly. If we lost you, Expira-”

“Don’t go killing me off yet,” Randidly forced out a laugh, hating how hollow it sounded to his own ears. Tatiana’s expression darkened, but she didn’t push. Randidly felt far too sensitive; he hated what digging into these unresolved feelings toward Yystrix and his other mother did to him. Even though his Nether Storm had settled back into place, he couldn’t forget the press of those memories. That potent significance was just waiting for him to mine it. “I just… it’s a feeling. That a time will come where the Alpha Cosmos will need to face a threat of the Nexus without me.”

What’s most exhausting about this is that to obtain my Authority related to the Grey Creature, I’ll need to sort through all this shit.

Both held each other’s gaze for a long time. As one, both lifted their glasses and drained them. Tatiana dutifully refilled the cups and then leaned back in her chair. “Alright, fine, we will let that mysterious and ominous prophecy go for now. What’s the second thing you learned in the challenge?”

Randidly allowed an appreciative smile. “Well, this bit is a bit embarrassing. But… we’ve gotten so used to being able to improve ourselves with the System. That the proper framing, the right shape and emotion, can turn pain and weakness into a powerful image. Create something useful. In many cases, that’s true. There are certain sorts of trauma that are suppressed and left to curdle inside of you. Ripping those open and releasing the pain brings a lot of benefits. Honesty is liberating. But-”

He bit his lip and shrugged. “You know, it’s a bit embarrassing to admit. But I almost think that my pain isn’t quite like that. For all that I’ve gotten better, there are some things that are difficult for me to do. I’m an introvert, emotional confrontation is extremely difficult for me. Especially confrontation with two individuals who can’t defend themselves any longer. My unresolved relationships with them are my weakness as a person. Yea, getting rid of it would help me grow. But…”

Tatiana nodded slowly. “Change is difficult.”

“Change is difficult,” Randidly agreed. “And apparently, I’m still the guy who made those same mistakes to push things off until I was ready.”

“And now you go to the Nexus,” Tatiana said.

Randidly flexed his hands. “Now I peel back what should be the last layer of the onion. The Tier 3 layer of the Nexus… where Elhume himself and the rest of the monsters are hiding.”

"Are you ready?" Tatiana responded. The air between them began to hum.

"I have to be."

"You don't have to be. You're human too."

Randidly looked at Tatiana for a long second. It was oddly comforting thing to hear, right now.

"Well," He cleared his throat. "I'd better be. Because otherwise we are all going to die."

"Mmm, fatalism." Tatiana raised her glass. The moonlight caught the rim of her tumbler and danced across the edge. "Cheers to that."