Pullas gathered her image more tightly around her body, observing as Duulys Ambar unleashed several thunderous blasts of silver fire into the hole Randidly used to vanish. Huge bursts of light and heat radiated outward. Based on his tightening expression, Randidly had escaped from any serious damage.

His pride injured, Duulys raised both of his armored arms, conjuring a dozen silver blades that pointed directly at the ground. With a sharp gesturing, he skewered the area beneath him with missiles of blade and silver flame. More holes were burned open in the wide onslaught of images.

Each blade was powerful, even to Pullas’s senses. Yet the high reinforced ground meant that it was difficult to damage it easily. Even before the image of Duulys Ambar, the ground sucked away energy as it melted and dribbled out of the way.

If anything, this attack only seemed to infuriate Duulys further. Through the tattoo of the Ascension Pact, Pullas could sense that Randidly had again avoided harm. More than that, he seemed to be thriving, rapidly building up his power beneath the ground. The powerful storm of Nether he could create rapidly expanded around his body.

Pullas took a steadying breath as her attention turned back to her own predicament. Her vision swayed; not only did the heat of Duulys’s image warp the air, but she had also continued to push her image far past the limits of her mental stamina for the entire fight. With Fiona still lingering behind, Pullas was the only one of the group that could meet the silver flames of Duulys directly.

She had no choice but to continually step forward.

The responsibility felt like an iron-lined blanket draped across her shoulders. Pullas’s pupils dilated as she straightened. She began to hyperventilate. Even worse, forcing out so much of her image power was rapidly progressing her through the image fulfillment stage. At some point, she would reach the end of her world’s potential and-

“Randidly’s got this guy positively spitting,” Xershi cackled, nudging Pullas’s shoulder. “What the hell is he doing down there, anyway? Insulting his mother?”

Pullas swayed from the touch, feeling curiously unmoored and light. Almost instinctively, she smiled and shook her head at Xershi’s thoughtless words. The familiar motion managed to pull her out of her own spiraling thoughts. She took another steadying breath, this one much more effective than the first. “Regardless of what he’s doing, we need to assist him. No matter how durable his body is-”

She gestured to Duulys. His eyes seething with silver light, he raised his hand and conjured almost a hundred pillar-sized blades roared in the sky around them. They were giant nails, prepared to drive into the ground and bite deeply into the ground. The silver lion paced back and forth above this massive display, snarling at the ground. The air hummed, gathering in support of the desires of the ring owner.

“Sure, something like that could kill anyone,” Xershi nodded coolly, as though Duulys wasn’t pouring the entire force of his person into an extermination event aimed at Randidly. He scratched his cheek as the swords swelled in size, ballooning underneath Duulys’s zealous preparations. “We should probably get around to running some interference.”

Pullas was already mobilizing her tired image, torn between exasperation and true worry. Duulys bellowed and the destruction began to accelerate down. Her image shuddered as she urged it into motion, an old vehicle asked to shift into gear long after it should have rightfully been sent to the scrapyard. Yet she could sense that this was the way to move forward. Interacting with these three people, as exasperating and anxiety-inducing as they were, helped her close the distance to the good death she wanted.

She advanced along the path she had sought for so long, simply by moving with them.

Pullas thanked her lucky stars that she had heard Randidly speak and decided to abandon everything in Idylla. She glanced quickly sideways at Xershi. Sometimes it was difficult to tell how much the metal man noticed, so she offered a warning. “And no more activating your tattoos. You can feel Randidly creating a working of Nehter in the ground, right?”

“Yea, yea,” Xershi launched himself forward. The massive, pillar-sized blades continued their descent and Xershi manifested his liger image and ran directly into the jaws of this attack. Cursing quietly at his foolishness, Pullas lifted both her hands. Behind her, her own image did the same. The cool, yellowed light of her death began to brighten.

To die a good death is to know that those close to you learned from your efforts and absorbed the relevant lessons. Pale energy fluctuated around her body. She could feel her image rapidly expanding. At that moment, she felt like an infinite balloon, rapidly swelling with air. Powerful flooded through her, even as her mind struggled to control all that force. To know that your role in their life was to guide them toward their own truth. To protect them from their own demons.

Duulys’s gaze begrudgingly slid up from the ground and fixed on the approaching Xershi. For a second he seemed torn by indecision, but then he thrust his left palm forward in a brutal signal. Three of the massive blades tumbled midair, ending with their points aimed at Xershi. When all the blades shot forward, these targeted the two standing on the surface. Compared to the bombardment aiming toward the ground, it was a small percentage. But each possessed an intimidating destructive capability. Yet Xershi didn’t even respond, his image focused on moving quickly forward.

Pullas’s lips twitched. Worry fluttered uselessly in her chest, a sparrow with a broken wing. Well, I had planned on dealing with these small impediments for you, but at least pretend like you are concerned I won’t make it in time-!

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He very clearly relied on her. It was… a strange feeling.

The energy fluctuations of death around her intensified. Weirdly, the activation of her tattoo had given her a new insight into her own image; after all, death wasn’t bound by a linear passage through space. And Randidly had deep insights into the way that space destabilized under the influence of powerful forces. The boost in Stats Pullas received from Randidly had largely doubled her physical abilities, but it wasn’t enough to rip through space as he could.

But her image, the specter of death, had more than enough power to shred the mundane confines under which everyone struggled.

The ground in front of the three redirected massive pillars of silver fire began to bubble and melt. Within the ground, more and more Nether swirled outward, almost oblivious to all the efforts Duulys took to extinguish it.

Death raised a long finger and drew dragged it through the air. Then it gripped the edge and ripped open a hole in space, spitting out electromagnetic pulses, blasts of entropy, and a horrible, incisive light. Death stepped across the threshold and appeared above the three pillars aimed at Xershi. Its eyes glowed with grim purpose as more and more power built in its body.

Pullas swayed to fuel her attack. Her image released a massive pulse that smothered the flames around the manifested blades, then rusted and shattered the remnants. Death arrived and reaped indiscriminately. She felt to her knees, dizzy and overdrawn. Xershi blasted forward, knocking aside the remnant pieces as he aimed for Duulys.

The lion’s share of the attacks began burrowing into the ground, seeking to annihilate whatever Nether preparations Randidly was making. Huge, glowing holes were left in their wake as they seared their way toward their target. But Xershi arrived in front a stunned Duulys, raising a massive clawed paw. The armored man pivoted, some of the force in his image attacks fading as he focused on this new threat.

A lion wreathed in silver flames roared at a constructed machine liger. One felt regal and oppressive, the other felt sleek and deadly. Both of the images built in intensity. The ground around them turned molten, seared by the hot spikes driven into it.

At the last second, Xershi planted his foot and grinned. Rather adroitly, he dispersed his momentum. “You idiot. I was the decoy the whole time.”

Pullas’s vision swam as she tried to follow the next few moments. Movements were so fast they were difficult to make out, but she could see the colors.

Pullas herself was a pale gold light of death, Duulys had austere and bright silver flames, but the figure that ripped out of the ground and appeared behind Duulys wore a desolate grey cloak that signaled bleak devastation. Randidly Ghosthound’s eyes were luminously emerald, his hair waving from an invisible wind. Nether condensed around his body in a thick and oppressive mist. His left eye was covered by a swirling darkness and his veins were faintly luminous, even through his skin.

Duulys barely got his arm up in time to block the Ghosthound’s sweeping kick. The concussive impact briefly knocked the air out of Pullas’s lungs, even across the cooling ground. For the first time in the confrontation, Duulys Ambar was knocked sideways out of his secure stance.

The Ghosthound moved after him in an instant, drawing a dead zone of grey light on Pullas’s iris that lingered for a few moments. Nether condensed rapidly in Randidly’s hands around his spear, but somehow Duulys managed to flip back up to his feet and manifest his massive silver lion above his head.

“Do you think a single blow changes anything!?” Duulys snarled, already moving to counter the attack. The silver lion swung its paw.

At the last second before impact, still gathering more and more Nether around him, Randidly’s body flickered. Duulys and the lion paused in their attack, trying to catch their opponent’s rapid dodge. However, Randidly didn’t dodge. After the feint, he just accelerated forward to the point he became a grey comet in Pullas’s vision, slamming into the lion’s paw and forcing his way forward.

Duulys cursed and stumbled backward, but the Ghosthound was already there. His spear thrust was somehow both possible to observe in every detail and also impossible to dodge. Duulys’s armor shrieked again, but this time Randidly seemed to have gathered enough force. His spear dug its way into Duulys’s torso. That massive payload of Nether that Randidly had been gathering expended itself into his body.

Pullas watched Randidly’s expression change, as he released all his gathered Nether and the silver lion didn’t even waver. For the first time, the man with the powerful body seemed genuinely surprised. “You-”

“Don’t speak, worm.” Duulys grasped the shaft of the spear digging into him with body hands. “Just die. Endless. Silver. Hell.”

The entire ring stirred in response to those words. An inferno of silver flames exploded out of Duulys’s body, the heat hitting Pullas’s face and knocking her backward. Her image groaned, trembling with weakness. But at the same time, she knew that she needed to help.

Wave after wave of silver flames curdled the air. They reached an endpoint, about ten meters in every direction around the shadowy silhouettes of Duulys and Randidly. Then the fire bloomed upward into a sinister bulb, melting the surrounding ground and releasing such intense waves of hatred and heat that it was impossible to sense what happened in the interior.

Xershi unleashed a powerful slash against the outside of the ability, but after a few seconds the heat burned it away and he had to back away to avoid his image melting. Pullas scrambled to her feet. Her image trembled, but it still came when she called. Death was exempt from its own power, moving forward long after it should have broken down. Through their tattoos, she could feel the horrible pain that Randidly was experiencing. Being able to protect a friend was the life she so desperately wanted. She needed-

Fiona’s hand clamped down on her shoulder. “Wait. You are not the only strong one in the group, Pullas. Sometimes, you need to trust in others. And there’s something only you can do. I… I’m almost ready. Soon, switch my place with Randidly. I will handle my husband.”

Pullas looked at Fiona. The blank emptiness in her expression frightened her. Some part of Pullas worried that she would move Fiona into that flame and the woman would just let the heat and image lick through her body, melting her to nothing. Yet she found herself nodding.

Her image hummed with the statement Fiona had made: sometimes, you need to trust.

Both women turned back to face the core of silver flames. Within that dangerous landscape, both figures were locked in a silent embrace, one experiencing agonizing physical pain, the other channeling that pain with his internal emotional wounds. At this point, it became a battle of willpower between the two of them, with how powerful Randidly’s physical body was.

“Soon,” Fiona whispered again. Despite the heat, a single tear ran down her cheek.