For the last bit of his approach, Randidly warped gravity around himself and simply accelerated upward. Perhaps he could have gotten right up against the Sonara with the Alchemist’s Passport, but he wanted to get a feel for this ominous object before he entered into it.

He wasn’t going to miss a chance to take advantage of his sharpened senses. Especially when the stakes were this high.

And certainly, shooting upward and watching the Sonara seem to continually expand, the churning discs rotating above him with a timeless quality, gave him a certain sort of expectation for his journey into the looming drill. Spending so much time looking up into the mesmerizing rotations left no doubt that this object was developed with a grim purpose.

Elhume… Randidly bit his lip. How changed must you have been from a father desperate to save his newborn son, to have looked down upon the entire Nexus and slowly built up the implement to crush it all.

At some point, he began to hear the motions of the Sonara. Part of it was the mechanical reality of the spinning layers, but a baleful dirge resonated outward from the massive construction as it continued its ceaseless motion. It hummed with unfilled purpose and brief fragments of alarming images. It reminded Randidly vaguely of whale songs, sped up and edged with violence.

From his original point, it took almost an hour of his acceleration and the Sonara seeping outward to become an all-consuming presence before he neared it. But after that slightly tense hour, with the song of the Sonara growing louder each minute, he saw a small blip attached to the bottom-most plate of the Sonara. Likely, that was the entrance. Randidly lowered his head and allowed the Stillborn Phoenix to howl a firm denial of the song around it. He sped upward across the last stretch and saw his entrance.

The staging area wasn’t very complicated: it hung from the bottom of the Sonara, a cage that supported a small town. Randidly slowly floated closer, bleeding away his speed. There were a few dozen buildings and wide streets set up in a grid pattern. All of this was situated around a central staircase that led up to the first rotating ring of Elhume's actual creation. Examining the area, Randidly suspected that this was originally a home for the workers who had constructed the Sonara.

Of course, it was now a ghost town. His bare feet settled onto an extremely chilling concrete surface.

The streets were empty. Signs that had hung above shops had collapsed and had the letters worn away by time. The atmosphere in the area was thin, but some of the vast mass of the construction above kept enough that space dust now clustered thickly between the buildings, giving the impression of a thick fog slithering between the structures. Stones and chunks of metal had formed drifts, pressing up against the buildings. Not a soul lived here any longer. With the addition of the Sonara’s low and unhappy song, it was not a hospitable place.

Randidly glanced around. He inhaled deeply through his nose, then grimaced and sneezed as too much debris lodged in his nasal cavities. But he couldn’t sense even a single lifeform in the area.

Waving a hand, he created a wave of gravitation force that opened up the haze of cosmic dust and created a tunnel to the staircase. Randidly floated forward, unable to resist taking the journey slowly and examining the collapsed surroundings and destroyed town. His heart continued to sink

When Elhume gathered these people, what did they believe they would accomplish here…? Randidly wondered.

He reached the base of the staircase and had to clear away some rubble that had built up. A blast of gravity knocked away the impediments. With another twist of the Stillborn Phoenix, he generated a downward force on his body that let him step up the stairs. As soon as his bare feet touched the glossy material, he stiffened.

If the noise approaching the Sonara was loud, the tremors he felt now were deafening, transferred directly into his flesh and bones through vibration. And feeling the waves of noise became almost torturous, like swimming through a river lined with knives and twisted iron. A million image fragments echoed outward through the droning noise and careened into each other in a mad series of catastrophic vehicular accidents. Occasionally, one particular colossal surge broke through the surface in a shrieking wail, landing with enough force as to make Randidly grit his teeth.

It was a constant grind against the psyche, preventing anyone approaching from having a moment’s peace on the stairwell. Randidly rolled his shoulders. His stubborn heat rose in his chest. The Stillborn Phoenix opened its wide maw and devoured as much of the vicious cascade of noise and images as it could. The image interference settled down to a manageable level and he began to climb.

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Each step twisted the volume knob up, one click at a time.

A glittering gold barrier sat at the top of the stairwell. Randidly paused in front of it, scanning the Engravings around the edge for its purpose as sweat dripped down his cheekbones and neck. To his surprise, it limited the ability of images to escape. He considered the barrier with a frown. The Stillborn Phoenix continued its constant devouring, lowering the image static to barely manageable levels. If what he dealt with now was a limited amount of images, the interior might be more problematic than he thought.

Randidly squared his shoulders. Since he had left the Vulpis Squad out in the open, he couldn’t just take his time. He walked briskly up the last few stairs, pushing his head through the cool barrier. Instantly, his ears began to ring. He began to tremble and falter in his steps. The constant grinding increased exponentially, as though a monster with images for broken teeth chomped down and began to chew him. Even the Stillborn Phoenix shrank back before this massive onslaught.

It wasn’t just one image that was thrown against him, but a million. Old images, new images, powerful ones, weak ones… just like the whole of Expira was steadily narrowing the gap between themselves and him, the spirits of those who utilized the Sonara and the machinations of Elhume crashed down on his shoulders. His momentum rapidly vanished. His foot was extremely heavy as he raised it and pressed it down on the next step.

A hundred image daggers ripped into the meat of his new body as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other and lifted himself partially through the portal. Another wash of pain lapped at his senses.

The experience reminded him of wading out into freezing ocean water at the beach, in reverse. His upper body recoiled from the brutalizing dirge of images. Yet Randidly bit his lip and forced himself up and up and up-

Randidly popped out on the other size, his head ringing at the sudden lack of pressure. The image interference had fallen to a murmur; luckily, the static was only at its most painful along the boundary.

He took about ten seconds to recover, then examined his surroundings. A golden circle on the ground revealed the passage Randidly had stumbled through to get here, but the interior of the Sonara seemed to be a desert. Panting slightly, he spun in place. Sand, brown and stubby rock outcroppings, wide cloudless sky… There was very obviously a staircase about a mile from Randidly’s current position, but otherwise the entire place was barren.

At least that horrible image noise stopped, Randidly shook himself, setting his stomach after the trauma to enter. He released a probing image pulse and couldn’t feel anything special about the environment. He also seemed to be entirely alone on this level. The frown on his face deepened. Well, maybe the image amplification isn’t working because this is the bottom level. The only way to know it to continue on. That’s the central staircase then, but-

Randidly planted his foot and threw himself up into the air. Even from a height of ten meters, the surroundings remained strangely mundane. He took several long leaps, quickly closing the distance to the central staircase. It spiraled upward, heading toward the sky almost infinitely. An Engraving ran along its length; after studying, Randidly was able to discern it bent space. Which likely meant you couldn’t physically travel upward outside of the staircase and reach the next ring.

Randidly turned away from the staircase and sprinted across the desert. With his improved body and his Dreadful Alacrity, he was a blur of momentum and power. His stride lengthened and devoured the distance. But after about a minute of hard sprinting, Randidly began to detect something strange. He slowed his pace, narrowing his eyes at the edge.

In front of him stretched more desert, except without any outcroppings. From the horizon to a few meters in front of Randidly, it was entirely uniform. Just sand. However-

Like a balloon inflating, the edges of ‘reality’ puffed outward and unfolded, briefly revealing a few more stone outcroppings poking out of the ground and what might be the edge of a staircase similar to the one in the middle. It sat, half-made, impossibly bisected in Randidly’s vision. But then space slowly began to collapse, erasing first the half-revealed outer staircase and then claiming also an expanse of sand and those few outcroppings.

The conjured world inside the ring had limits.

After a few seconds passed, the space expanded. Humming to himself, Randidly took a few cautious steps forward. Immediately, he began to grit his teeth. The painful image interference he believed to have left behind ascending into the Sonara was now back, just as bad as ever. Randidly eyed the few meters between himself and the partially revealed staircase. Then he retreated backward as space folded.

Maybe this is one of the reasons why people don’t use the outer staircase. You need to have a pretty strong image related to space in order to stabilize the area and ascend. And then you need to handle all the static-

The Stillborn Phoenix rose in Randidly’s chest, its event horizon turning light and space milky around it. But he quieted it with a shake of his head. I have no doubt you could manage it, but we are both on a time limit and don’t know what else is around here. Since it doesn’t appear like anyone is guarding the central staircase, better to use that and conserve my energy.

The Stillborn Phoenix gurgled unpleasantly. The two Unborn flitted in and out of it, gleefully mocking the image for being so upset. Randidly ignored all three of these characters and turned his attention back toward the central staircase. It took another minute to return and then he cautiously stepped onto the construction, expecting an ambush at any moment.

He stayed on that bottom step for almost five minutes, simply measuring the resonance in the strange material of the stairwell. Then, gathering his images to himself and whirling his Nether Core, he ascended toward the next ring.