One enthusiastic demolitions expert and three observers drifted into the ornate interior of the home of Duulys Ambar. And for this particular project, the wrecker decided to start with a bang.

Randidly’s lips twitched as he watched Xershi do a flying dropkick on the high chandelier that hung above Duulys’s elegant entrance hall; he had no idea that Xershi had meant his smashing quite so literally. All it took was three steps and he was sailing through the air, all mean intent and glee.

His kick cut through the air, accurately striking the fixture in its stem.

The massive construction of curved horns, gold, and pearl fell from the high ceiling without making any noise. There were several moments of repose, with Xershi tumbling above it with a shit-eating grin on his metal face, that were also silent. The intricate working glittering in the torchlight as it rushed to meet the patterned floor. Next to Randidly, Pullas pouted. “What a waste of a nice chandelier…”

“You wouldn’t say that if you knew what he did to acquire those materials,” Fiona responded. Randidly, reading the history of pain hanging around the crafted pieces, felt his jaw tense.

The inevitable crash was anything but silent. Soft metal screamed as the impact sundered the multilayered piece from its elegant, tiered-structure. The horns screeched across the ground, leaving thin marks on the probably expensive material beneath their feet. The crystalline and pearl adornments shattered, sending bits of shiny mineral spinning and skipping in every direction. The main portion crumpled under its own weight, releasing thin wisps of anguish that dissipated without the physical cage.

Randidly pursed his lips as he created roots of air to knock away debris from spraying the group in the face. Not that he knew, but… good for Xershi.

Yet despite the massive mess and the pointless violence, Randidly couldn’t help but agree with Xershi for another reason, based on the result. Fiona leaned forward and laughed for almost a full minute, unable to control her glee as the harvested materials skittered across the floor. The remnant bits of dust had finally settled by the time she straightened and wiped her eyes. “Oh, my. Duulys will be livid.”

The smile on her face now was much different from the dazzling, high-watt variety she pasted on to cover up her exhaustion. Randidly could see some small amount of release in watching this massive ornament break. Through the Nether Ritual, he was vaguely aware of her emotions moving in more productive flows.

She began to prepare- after all, the meeting she had been dreading for so long would soon come to pass.

“So many rooms,” Xershi raised a hand and yawned. He kicked a long horn and sent it spinning toward the far wall. “We are going to need more time to wreck all this. Leave a message that this Duulys character won’t soon forget.”

“...what do we do if Duulys doesn’t show up?” Pullas interjected, her gaze flicking from Fiona to Randidly. Inwardly, Randidly had wondered the same since they had arrived. The time limit wasn’t so pressing as it had been, but he didn’t want to linger here for too long. If Duulys wasn’t here to bar their path even after a few days, he would want to continue.

Fiona ignored the statement and addressed Xershi. “Actually, we don’t need to work our way through the entire thing. Most of this stuff is covered in dust, anyway. There are only a few special rooms. As long as we move our way through those, his pride will be dearly wounded.”

So the group followed Fiona up a massive obsidian staircase, curving outward in two graceful rings. Randidly idly drew his fingers across the heavy wood railings. His eyebrows rose as he applied some pressure and couldn’t damage the wood. He pressed harder, allowing the Grey Creature’s image physicalizations to manifest. His nails on his right hand lengthened to claws. With the added image, he easily cut into the material, but it was still intriguing that the material could resist his Stats; this was an area that had been heavily reinforced by Aether, for a long time.

Xershi glanced over his shoulder and gave Randidly a thumbs up, an obvious encouragement to join the silver ligerman in rampant destruction. He rolled his eyes when Xershi turned back forward.

Fiona continued to stalk through the house, ignoring the wide upper balcony area above the entrance hall and the branching passageways and continuing to climb the staircase. Soon they had reached an outdoor grotto area, a roof complete with an installed fish pond, gazebo, and apple orchard. The light up here was pleasantly gold, with a warm breeze blowing across their faces. It seemed eternally early autumn in this place, before winter sucked away light and heat for a season.

They moved through a winding path to a series of free-standing stone arches arranged in a semicircle. Fiona muttered something to herself and walked to a bush right at the edge of a nearby pond. After squinting at her reflection in the water, she jabbed down with a finger and dug it through into the mud. A new Engraving activated and all but one of the archways vanished. And through that remaining archway was the interior of a warmly decorated house.

Compared to the massive gate and entranceway they came through to get here, this felt minuscule.

“His personal dwelling,” Fiona said carelessly as she strode forward across the threshold. A fireplace crackled against the far wall. Randidly sniffed; it smelled like warm apple turnovers. Pullas clicked her tongue in distaste as Xershi bounded across the room and tore down a portrait of a muscular, shirtless man, presumably Duulys, who looked intently into the middle distance.

Xershi methodically shredded the portrait into small bits and fed it into the fire. Meanwhile, Fiona had stopped in front of a bare stretch of wall. Randidly walked up behind her as she reached out and pressed her fingers to the unadorned stretch of stone.

“We had a nursery here,” Fiona’s lips barely moved. Her finger tapped the wall, as though searching for the opening. Or for a scrap of proof the room had existed. Yet the sad tap of her finger was just the prelude to the yawning abyss of grief. Randidly almost recoiled from the expression that crumpled her face; if the laugh earlier had been healing, this blank expression was the exposure of the root wound in her heart to the world. All of her artifice and coping fell away, letting the festering and scarred absence manifest itself.

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Her emotions moved with such violence that Randidly ached to be near them. Swaying slightly, he took a step back.

Sometimes, his companions reminded Randidly of the ways he still needed to improve. For all his emotional growth, that desperate and unfulfilled craving in Fiona’s heart was something he wouldn’t be able to face.

“He got rid of it.” Fiona continued. Her lower lip was trembling. Suddenly the pieces of her stitched together seemed so small and fragile compared to the fissures of pain that ran through her. A vast and inescapable depression wafted out of her. “The coward. He couldn’t even stand to look at it.”

“Anything else we should hit?” Xershi swaggered over to the moment, clearly oblivious to Fiona’s emotional turmoil.

But almost immediately, those worn stitches that maintained Fiona tightened and covered up the emptiness that had been steadily eating its way through her soul. She turned around with a smirk, leaving Randidly wondering whether he should be concerned or not. “Actually, there is one room in particular that he would-”

Before she could name their next target, a shiver ran through the entire ring around them. Randidly spun around, alarmed at how the back of his neck began to tingle. Fury bled across the space, dying the horizon an angry orange, with twinkling eyes of baleful silver fire flickering overhead. Fiona sucked in a breath and blinked several times, as though she was waking from a dream. She walked slowly back across the room and looked out at the changing sky. “Duulys has returned.”

Randidly moved to join her, his expression serious. Earlier, he had noticed the ease of deepening an image was severely reduced in this ring, but he had been more distracted by Fiona’s mental state and hadn’t thought much of it. But now, as the presence of Duulys Ambar, the most powerful figure in the lower Sonara, pressed against his body, he understood what had been happening. This ring was completely under the thumb of this man. No other image could thrive in an area so dominated by the Silver Lion.

Yggdrasil and his First Authority both twitched with emotions somewhere between admiration and envy as the space continued to churn in response to Duulys’s arrival.

“Oh man, he must have really liked that chandelier,” Xershi cackled, arms akimbo. The sky continued to darken as Duulys’s rage dug its greedy fingers into the space.

Yet Fiona shook her head. “No, he’s still in the bottom area. He hasn’t even seen the chandelier…” A frown crossed her face. “Also… is he injured? Something on the lower rings must have-”

A surge of wild emotion smashed against the group, carried along by a deep rage that squeezed the orange to something darker and duller than baked clay. The sky rumbled, a stormless pressure that built and built. The ponds outside dried up and the grass withered.

Fiona snickered, but the sound had a heavy layer of tension. “Oh, that’s him finding the chandelier. Let’s move out of the house so we have more space for this.”

The group shifted back outside to an unrecognizable space. The trees, the pond, the idyllic pathway were all demolished, leaving baked dirt and a rising wind that sought to claw them all to shreds. Randidly closed his eyes and breathed in through his nose, feeling the rapidly rising tide of significance running through this place. As Duulys raged, so did the entire ring. The antagonism applied a consistent pressure that even Randidly’s powerful body felt.

Inwardly, he said a quiet thank you to the Nether Ritual for giving his companions the benefit of some of his Stats.

They stood as four, arranged in a loose semi-circle. Xershi and Randidly stood at opposite edges of the group, with Fiona and Pullas in the middle. Randidly kept having to resist the urge to look over at Fiona, to see what sort of expression she was making, as the wind continued to rake across their bodies and rip away their skin.

Yet he didn’t, he kept his gaze forward. One to give Fiona privacy, but also because Duulys Ambar arrived as a silver fireball, ready to impact the ground with enough force to destroy a continent. The powerful figure began as one of those eyes of silver fire, but it kept growing and growing. Sometimes, the flames at the edge of the silver sphere seemed to flicker into the shape of a mane and Randidly could just make out the face of a roaring lion in the steadily growing fireball.

It was not a good sign that this seemed more a subconscious manifestation than a flare of an image, yet still Duulys possessed such power. The ground around them continued to die, a testament to the murderous rage experienced by the ring’s owner.

As the fireball shot closer, Randidly began to sweat. Both in terms of image potency and authentic heat, Duulys Ambar filled the entire sky with his force.

His seething fury seemed to burn its way through even the wind until the whipping currents of air were buried beneath the thunder of his charge. Still, it continued to grow, so a massive island of silver flame hurtled right at the four’s position.

At the last second, Duulys released the enormous fireball in an explosion of silver will-o-wisps. With smoke streaming from his body, he crashed to the ground, catching himself with his knuckles. For a second he lingered there, head bowed and bare shoulders heaving. Randidly noticed the heavy musculature and the ornate bracelets and rings he wore. Then Duulys’s gaze rose and slid across the assembled group. Even without the image, the heat remained, making the air so thick that it was almost impossible to breathe.

Randidly felt his entire perception narrow when he met the eyes of Duulys Ambar. Such was the threat this man presented that he captured all of his Grim Intuition. In those intense eyes, Randidly saw a feral pride unlike anything he had ever encountered before. The sadistic power of Devick and the overwhelming fists of Elhume still dwarfed this image, but that didn’t mean he could let down his guard.

Sweat began to trickle down his spine toward his lower back. This was the first encounter since the fight against Commandant Wick that Randidly felt like the enemy in front of him could kill him.

“So… it was you…” Duulys growled, still looking at Randidly. His eyes brightened to almost white with the light of imagined flames.

Randidly was taken aback to be singled out; he had expected Duulys to fixate on Fiona. However, all the animosity was very clearly flowing toward him. Randidly straightened his posture, feeling his own desire to fight rising in his chest. His body began its own smolder, ignited by a pumping heart with every bit as much generative capability as a power plant.

Into this crackling moment of tension stepped Xershi. “Pah. Actually, your target should be me. It is I that redecorated your tacky house.”

Almost unwillingly, Duulys tore his gaze from Randidly and sized up Xershi. However, his expression was one of confusion. “You… who are you?” Then Duulys shook his head, as though to rid himself an insect that landed on his head. “No, it matters not. This man, Randidly Ghosthound, is the one who has run rampant through the Sonara, destabilizing the political order and corrupting my subordinates. And worst of all-”

Duulys’s show large, square teeth. “You walk through my kingdom in your bare feet? I’ll cut them off and have you totter around on bleeding stumps, you jealous fuck.”