Emotions washed through Randidly in tightly packed waves, so he couldn’t even react to the arrival of the first one before the next was upon him. He stood in that suspended dream of his father’s old apartment, rapidly trying to stabilize his thoughts.

The Grey Creature, a proxy for his apparently disastrous relationship with his mother which now served as a rallying point for all the dangerous and free radical significance of the entire Alpha Cosmos, possessed an emotional affect that seethed and stormed. The destructive power it contained Randidly wanted to sew into his current attack patterns for an even more overwhelming offensive.

Yet that was not what he now experienced.

The emotion settling over him as he spread out his senses through the Alpha Cosmos and searched for Ezekiel Ghosthound felt quite different from that exuberant and vengeful energy. This emotion was dark, heavy, and vaguely wet. It settled across him like a moldy blanket, chill and suffocating.

In a daze, Randidly walked over to the bland couch and sat down. He shouldn’t be this thrown. He barely had any association with Ezekiel, not in the last few years. Randidly could look at the Nether connections between the two of them, suddenly appearing almost to visibly wilt and dim, were thin and relatively minor. This emotional response felt unreasonable.

“So why…” Randidly released a hissing breath. He raised his arms and wrapped them around his shoulders.

With a sudden gleam, a small glowing chestnut appeared in the middle of the room. Ezekiel’s voice, echoing from so far away, spoke again, without any more acknowledgment of the end of his life. “Here’s the memory I have to give you. It’s from the day we met, your mother and I. I bet we told you some cute story about how it went down… but it wasn’t like that at all. Your mother was very, very strong, Randidly. She just… was always fighting against something bigger than herself. She didn’t have much energy leftover, at least when she had to do something alone. Like raising you. Or like trying to love me.”

“H-hey, wait, I have something to say to you.” Randidly’s head snapped up. He ignored the floating memory and swept the room with a piercing stare. The blinds were in their perpetually slanted state, so light filtered into the room with a decidedly blue tinge. That wet emotion tightened around his body, sticking to his skin and dripping down his throat.

There was no answer. Randidly’s eyes began to blaze. “Hey.

“I’m fucking talking to you.

“Are you really just…

“Just like when I was alive, huh? You ship off when you got tired of dealing-”

Randidly sniffed loudly, interrupting his speech. He could feel it in the air; whatever remnant of Ezekiel had been here, it had slipped away after delivering that last message. Truly, the echo had fulfilled its promised role and moved on.

Biting his lip, Randidly leaned forward and stared at the mildly offensive carpet. That was what Ezekiel was always like; he left when he was ready, leaving with not a communication but more of a proclamation, his decision so firmly made he had no willingness to consider any alternatives. He felt concern for other people, but it stemmed from a profoundly selfish place. As far as Randidly could tell, it honestly wouldn’t occur to his father that someone would want to speak to him. Would want some closure on their own terms.

The apartment was very silent. In reality, it had been in a rather crappy neighborhood next to the highway so the windows often rattled with the passage of heavy eighteen-wheelers hauling freight. Yet this was just a dream.

Everything felt fake and frozen around him.

Randidly, tears forming in the corners of his eyes, began to chuckle. Although honestly… maybe I’m a little like that too. Sometimes I just make my decision and leave. And the people who I leave behind-

He released a shuddering breath. He felt incredibly frustrated, stifled in this familiar and uncomfortable room with its horrible, unnatural silence. Yet the longer he sat there, the more the wet emotion seeped across all of Randidly. More and more of his emotional affect, his images, the flow of his significance… all of it became thoroughly dyed by a quiet and listless grief.

More tears formed and slid down his cheeks, carefully following the path laid out by their predecessors.

Eventually, Randidly straightened. He released a slow, shuddering breath. The tension flowed out of him, relaxing underneath the dreary emptiness of the grief. A strange blank inertia took its place. His eyes went to the floating memory. He reached out and plucked the chestnut, taking it into his Dreamcatcher of the Long Night, but now wasn’t the time to view it. His emotions weren’t in the right sort of state to fight against that violent unconscious.

Yet with that yawning absence in his chest causing such widespread turmoil through his person, it occurred to Randidly that while bridling and saddling that vicious emotional beast might be difficult, it would not be impossible. Because this, what he felt now, the pain built of context, was infinitely more dangerous and potent. A small snap in connection, albeit to a symbolically important one like a father, brought with it a whole host of smaller issues that created an emotional extinction scenario. The number of connections raked in more meaning, until the situation became a mess of complicated feelings and reactions.

Comparatively, raw emotional significance was a much simpler beast to slay. When its body collapsed, nothing unexpected would be dragged to light by its fall.

Randidly released another breath. He rolled his shoulders. That purposeful blankness he felt seemed to intensify. With a thought, he banished himself from the dream world. Back in the area that housed his Nether Core, Randidly climbed up to the top and settled himself, in case some student managed to reach this area while he was there. He pressed both hands against the ground, still tightly wrapped in his slow grief, savoring the cool sensation of the stone beneath him.

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He didn’t have the emotional zeal to try and face the memory of his mother. But a sort of grim-eyed, unflinching resolve had been birthed by that same emotion and didn’t want to just waste away inside of him. He needed a fucking target. And Randidly intended to use that raw intensity to brute force his way through a rather more thoughtless training method.

The Hierarchy of Burden began to gleam and writhe when he summoned it. First the red bottom tip of the upside pyramid, then the translucent layer, then the sapphire one and part of the ivory layer. He didn’t even bother to contact the Vulpis Squad; Randidly wanted to throw himself to the wolves alone. Physical collapse tightened around him, its uncomfortable pressures doing an excellent job of covering up the tightness of grief.

Congratulations! Your Skill the Marred Yet Reliable Foundation of Yggdrasil (T) has grown to Level 820!

His body trembled, withstanding so many-layered forces directly. The electromagnetic ravaged his veins and muscles, the light radiation seared his organs, the entropy sucked greedily away at his energy. Yet of course, the most recent layer was the most difficult to handle. Randidly’s consciousness flickered and folded in on itself underneath the unpredictable spatial waves.

Unlike a typical occasion of this happening, Randidly didn’t even blink at the perceptional folding. It was painful, but without the flinch his reaction didn’t set off some sort of chain reaction that tore a portion of his body and kicked him out of the Fatepiece. He remained placid, if deeply suffering. Like a balloon in the hands of an enthusiastic but inefficient child, Randidly’s mind pried itself apart and began to inflate back to its usual size.

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 78!

Congratulations! Your Skill Grit of the Ascendant Bane (T) has grown to Level 670!

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 79!

Right at the cusp of passing through the ivory layer, the folded became increasingly frequent and increasingly painful. Sometimes, not only would the fickle pressures seize his mind and wrench it sideways, but follow-up forces would then arrive, seize on the smaller edges of the new compact Randidly, and try and crunch him in new directions.

The pain of a second fold was greatly exaggerated. Some part of Randidly howled and screamed, wept and shivered, as he experienced the compression down to a universe with different physical dimensions. Yet Randidly’s outward demeanor didn’t flicker at all. The grief became an unwavering form of self-hypnotism. His heart trembled, still coping with the knowledge that his father was gone, but no other response could be triggered. He barely even registered the pain.

The final Level took quite a while, even for the increasingly drifting Randidly. Because of his divided and relatively stiff attention, he recovered very slowly from the folds. And the spatial collapse kept striking at him and folding him in new directions during recovery. He began to accumulate Skill Levels in Grit of the Ascendant Bane, Chimeric Impunity, and Piercing Gaze of the Egg. The final Skill was primarily an offensive attack, but it required a sort of single-minded focus that let him endure the spatial collapse with a little extra rigor.

Steadily, Randidly acclimated. The spatial forces continued to aggressively smash and attempt to collapse his awareness down, but he accumulated momentum. He stabilized himself in that final Level and pushed himself through.

Congratulations! Your Skill Piercing Gaze of the Egg (A) has grown to Level 669!

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimeric Impunity (M) has grown to Level 801!

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 80!

Randidly pressed his hands against the stone ground with enough force that the material cracked. His knuckles were white. Yet he moved almost on autopilot, looking up at the Hierarchy of Burden floating in the air in front of him. The ivory layer was completely sparkling. So his attention moved to the top layer, the largest, the silver layer.

He pushed himself forward.

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 81!

Randidly shuddered. He felt dizzy and blood spurted from his ears. After another swaying moment, blood also began to dribble from his tear ducts and ears. His mouth tasted like copper, but again he didn’t flinch. Even in the face of the new pressures, the blank resolve held up.

The feeling was difficult to describe, but Randidly’s entire person had become a hammer. When entering the silver layer, the Randidly hammer had struck what he believed to have been a flat plane keeping him out of another universe. Perhaps this was the last rind of the space, the barrier that would allow him to break out of a separate space and back into the main universe. Or, theoretically, shatter his way out of the main universe and create his own separate space.

Yet at the moment of impact, as that pane of glass cracked and fractured, Randidly became abruptly aware that what he wasn’t striking was one single barrier, but infinite barriers all bisecting the single point. Each was arranged at a slightly adjusted angle from the flat plane he had meant to strike so that the point of impact became a node and flat plateaus forming edges along every possible universe became radials around the impact.

With the damaged space as its core, the surrounding space became infinitely dense with the looming presence of infinite universes, their possibilities seeping through the flaw and pressing against Randidly. His Stat-assisted mind sputtered and flickered, reaching the verge of failure. A horrible friction was created by the presence of so many possibilities, rushing around him. His Nether Core whined and strained, trying to function while being so pressured. His eyes began to bulge. More blood spurted out of his nose.

Yet his mouth twisted into a smile. Thin rivulets of blood dribbled down past his lips and stained his teeth. If you think possibilities would stop me…

His new image physicalization form came down across his body. His eyes and mouth were filled with darkness, but from that darkness, some purple-black revelation energy began to glimmer. Thick, emerald wings spread out from his back and caught the friction of the flaws in the edge of this universe. The Grey Creature raised its head and howled. Its blank, darkness-filled eyes opened and stared into the folding perspectives of the world.

Congratulations! Your Skill Revelations of the Atramentous Threshold (T) has grown to Level 899!

Congratulations! Your Skill the Grey Creature Glimpses Providence (P) has grown to Level 912!

With that same stoic countenance, Randidly forced his way forward. His mind burned and sagged under the onslaught of the different universes he could glimpse through the fracture he had made. His steps prying open that flaw and allowed more and more universes, as numerous as molecules in drops of water in an ocean, to inundate him.

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 82!

And yet, weeping blood, Randidly persisted. The pain, the numbness…

Randidly threw himself into it, wanting to briefly grieve his father in peace, without the chaotic interference of his thoughts. Effort washed everything away. Somehow, so long as he continued to push-

…

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Hierarchy of Burden has grown to Level 90!

His hands trembled. For the proud and solitary Ezekiel Ghosthound, he would not stop until he stopped aching.