Duulys paused by the central staircase and turned around. He felt an itch below his skin, one that he needed to scratch before he continued. Heat spread through his body like a contagious disease. “Ah, one more thing before I go. I’ve got a question for you.”

The elegant swan bowed its giant head. “Anything my liege. I am at your service.”

The phrasing made a wicked smile spread across Duulys’s face. The heat continued to intensify. His muscular shoulders bulged as he methodically began cracking his knuckles. “That’s so wonderful to hear. However… did you attempt to slow this group down at all? These trouble makers that so vex me?”

The temperature in the sky ring immediately changed. Several of the surrounding clouds drifted away, pushed back by Duulys’s naked antagonism. The heat around his body rose until all the clouds began to dissipate around him. The swan seemed stunned. “What? My liege, you gave no such order-”

“Answer the fucking question,” Duulys growled. His image gurgled under his skin, its intensity rising.

The swan’s eyes began to bulge with fear. Then it mastered itself and raised its head in quiet resistance; it was, after all, a powerful dweller within the Sonara. “I did not impede their progress. But only because-”

“The truth is,” Duulys interrupted. He shook his head, his dreadlocks bouncing pleasantly around his face. “They are racing up to my floor. They might need to trek out to the exterior stairwell, but they had a big head start on me. All because other subordinates of mine misled me about their location. Because weirdly, everywhere he goes, Randidly fucking Ghosthound makes formerly loyal aids take his side. Is that what you are doing? Taking his fucking side?”

The swan clacked its beak. “I can assure you-”

“What’s going to happen,” Duulys’s voice thundered over the swan. “When they make it to my fucking ring and I’m not there? For all that I admire about this Ghosthound, one fact is abundantly clear; his feet are bare. After walking through these filthy rings, he’s going to waltz into my home without putting on shoes? No, the fact that you aided and abetted this travesty… you deserve a harsh judgment.”

Despite its bravado, the swan shivered at the vehemency in Duulys’s voice. But when it spoke, its word were sharp. “Humph, if you punish me, won’t you also be letting them get further ahead?”

Duulys laughed. He stepped down off the staircase. As he did so, a massive spectral lion formed in the air behind him. It leaned forward and wrapped its massive paws around Duulys’s body. A silver helmet, showing a roaring lion and a gleaming mane, condensed around him. He blazed with silver fire.

“You… overestimate yourself. Teaching you regret will take no time at all.” Duulys laughed again. Crimson drops began to seep out from the fangs of his image helmet.

The swan hesitated, unsure of how serious he was being. That was its mistake.

Duulys Ambar made no false boasts.

*****

After each of them trained or chewed on their personal emotions, the group moved on to the next ring. The long staircase led to the golden portal and another new space. Thirty-eight was a massive void with a positively enormous crystal scorpion sitting in the middle of the space.

Fiona gestured for them to remain quiet when the group arrived. Xershi erased his presence with remarkable ease, once more showing that ability that had him almost catch Randidly unawares. Pullas quickly lowered her presence too; death was a force that could arrive without even the slightest warning.

Of them all, it was Randidly who struggled the most to sneak. He could control his body, his Nether, and his images to erase most of his presence, but in fact how many powerful abilities he had came back to bite him. At all times, he had to absolutely control each separate capability he possessed. Due to the emotional turmoil of the Grey Creature and the prankster nature of the Unborn Duo, this was an exceedingly difficult prospect.

Crack.

Randidly froze as the ground beneath his feet shattered. In the end, his focus on his images meant that his powerful body had slipped; he had stepped with just a little too much force. He glared at the ground for its failure. What the hell? This area hasn’t been empowered with Aether at all! The ground is more fragile-

“Okay,” Fiona shrugged as a shiver went through the air. “Guess its time to run.”

In the distance, the massive crystal scorpion body trembled. Then it lifted itself off the ground, soon rising to a towering height that made Randidly pale. Some part of him wanted to test his powerful body against this foe, but its vicious image of crystalline poison blasted outward and made him decide Fiona was right.

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Even Xershi willingly turned and fled before this single foe. The group sprinted across the void, a constant quake rupturing the ground as the massive scorpion chased after them. At one point, Randidly scooped up Pullas so she wouldn’t be left behind.

Fiona left behind beguiling images of taboos. Pullas released blasts of pure death. Randidly released waves of roots and gravity to slow it down. All these forces washed against the massive scorpion but failed to slow it at all. The sheer size of it meant that their images only could remain potent enough to lap against one of twelve legs, without reaching its enormous body at all. The monster continued.

Randidly accelerated, Xershi and Fiona barely able to keep up with his movements. The air began to stretch around them.

The crystal scorpion rapidly gained ground, but the group just barely managed to reach the exterior stairwell as it arrived at their location. Up close, it filled the entire horizon, a being the size of a star, wielding a slight gravitational field. It clacked its jaws in disappointment, the small motion knocking the wind out of Randidly. In his arms, Pullas began to bleed from her eyes and ears. Then it turned and walked away.

“That… what the hell?” Xershi was panting. He too seemed badly damaged by the kinetic force of the scorpion’s movements. “Are you telling me that this fucking Duulys is stronger than that?”

“One of the ancient races. A very prestigious one. From before Humans were made,” Fiona wiped the sweat from her forehead. Then she frowned. “As far as I know, Duulys never fought against it. It settled on this ring of the Sonara in the beginning, before the project was abandoned. The owners of the thirty-ninth layer just walked past it to claim ownership of the Sonara, just like Duulys later climbed onto the fortieth to one-up them.”

“Any information you can give about the next layer?” Randidly asked. “These previous settlers?”

Fiona glanced sideways at Xershi. “This prick is going to love the next ring. But we should move quickly through that layer; this area has a population second only to Idylla, but the master of this place… is a dangerous being. We don’t want to face him. Not if we need to fight Duulys immediately after.”

With that enigmatic comment, they continued to climb. The group took its time, letting Pullas recover and walk on her own before they pushed through the golden portal and went to the next ring. Randidly grimaced as he passed through the painful image static. There was just too much conductivity right between the layers.

What he found on the thirty-ninth floor was a battlefield.

They stood on a hill, with broken weapons and dirty pools of water littering the slope below them. At the bottom, a dozen different warriors manifested their images and clashed with one another. When one duel was about to be finished, a golden specter shot down and plucked up the unconscious humanoid to carry them to an island in the sky. The victor spun around and attacked the back of a nearby butterfly, then had to defend against the belch of flame unleashed by a massive iguana.

The violence was chaotic and unforgiving.

As Randidly watched, sometimes a lone fighter, covered in blood, would wander over the hill and then dash down to join the chaotic melee. Sometimes, sudden bursts of noise in the distance demonstrated that some new fight had started; periodically, a golden barge flew down from the island, probably dropping off the healed fighters to continue their unending cycle of violence. It was a place of intense and constant training.

Of them all, Pullas seemed to have the most vicious reaction. The pale power of her image sparkled around her body. “A land without death…? What an ugly spectacle this place is.”

On cue, a lumbering giant alligator ripped its claws through the mud behind them, pulling its massive body up on top of the slope. It whipped its head around, beady eyes fixing on the group of four. Blood dripped from its jaws, likely from its previous victims in the melee. After releasing a booming bellow, it scrambled at them.

Randidly’s eyes narrowed, but he felt a new demand on his Nether Core. Xershi flashed past him, the Grey Creature tattoo on his back flaring with power. A mantle of woe, ash, and metaphysical impunity swirled around the metal liger man. When his image exploded outward and filled the air around him, his claws were also wreathing in distorted grey flames.

A metallic liger and an alligator rolled around for several seconds, tails and claws lashing and drawing deep gouges into the muddy hilltop. The booms of their images colliding spread across the area, drawing the wariness of some of the other competitors. Probably this alligator man was about equal to Xershi normally. But with the addition of the Nether Ritual boon and the fact it had exhausted itself defeating other competitors, the wounds on its body began to add up.

Right as it collapsed, a golden figure swooped down to grab the alligator. At the last moment, Randidly had a bit of insight and attempted to deactivate the tattoo still radiating its power around Xershi. By then, it was too late.

The golden figure that had moved with such unhindered freedom through images flew without a care into the veil of Nether and surly malevolence borrowed from the Grey Creature. It released a loud screech as half of its body disintegrated on contact with that peculiar power. It flared with a brighter gold color, fighting through the dissipating remnant to seize the alligator and fly away.

However, the vibe of the entire ring changed as the golden figure was damaged.

These eternal fighters paused in their individual duels and looked up at the group on the hilltop that had wounded their protector spirits. Their eyes were slowly dyed red. They began taking slow steps through the mud, trudging up at them.

“So, moving quickly and quietly is the name of the game, yes?” Fiona said with a heavy ladle of sarcasm.

Xershi scratched his head and began to reply, but three of those barges shot out of the central floating island. They swooped down and circled above the group, beginning to parachute powerful image users down around them. A massive suit of armor, a strange bone insect, and a shirtless man wielding a greatsword led the way. They landed in a smacking splash of mud, their images conflicting against each other but united in their antagonism toward the Ascension Pact.

Randidly nodded tightly. “Time to go.”