Randidly sighed as he looked up at the wall in front of them, having reached the end of the layer. “Well, I guess that answers whether the bolt was an effective trap.”

Fiona’s laugh was hollow. “Who knew people were so fucking predictable.”

“Blunt and simple instruments are often the most effective, especially against diverse groups.” Pullas offered, but she also sounded shaken by the evidence in front of them. Xershi didn’t say a word, his eyes intense and brooding as he examined the wall.

If the prior floor had a little over a hundred individuals trapped in orbs, this level had about six hundred tiny little ornaments. They hung and swayed and burned with a fierce and repressed aura in their tiny cells, continually refining their image ad nauseum. A near-physical emotional curtain shimmered along the wall, generated by the ambient force of so many image users furiously image refining for so long. It was a woven tapestry of color, of Aether-based sweat, hanging in broad swaths of oranges, indigos, and emeralds.

What worried Randidly most about the situation was that the captured individuals were hung around the exterior stairwell. He couldn’t decide if that probably meant there were more around the interior stairwell, or whether it was possible the exterior stairwell helped transition the stolen energy more easily to the next layer.

Either way, the bodies were densely grouped in their tight orbs. The jagged auras mixed and clashed, due to proximity, each suppressed just enough by the Engravings that they couldn’t inflict any harm on each other. The more Randidly looked, the more he seemed to see a vast painting of a battlefield, drawn along the boundaries between the different images.

He stared and the shape changed, warping to plumes of dust and a wide blue sky. Forces marched into position. The different columns of forces cantered across a muddy expanse of contested terrain. Massive artillery strikes hung in the air, a whistling trail of smoke tracing their perfect arc and impending descent into the maw of the battlefield.

Significance swirled underneath the images, becoming a foundation for the strange illusion Randidly witnessed. A strange meaning seized this group of individuals being used as batteries, a hint of their true purpose that Randidly couldn’t quite intuit. The forces of each individual image bristled, various members of minor nobility in the illusion, silent and frozen with a sort of tense uplift of torso, implying each was in the midst of a moving speech about what this battlefield would mean for the future.

Yet of course, the forces never moved. They were locked away, frozen in a painting that wasn’t a painting but a tragic pool of significance and Aether, locked in a silent world that had meaning inside of it but not to any unbiased viewer.

Randidly released a breath. The strange impression of a painting dissolved into six hundred individuals, bristling with very different images. After Xershi had personally examined every inch of the containment system, they moved up.

When they arrived on the forty-third floor, Randidly came prepared for another trap or sudden ambush. He was almost disappointed when the bone-shuddering pain of the image echoes passed and he found himself in the same darkness, but without any immediate threats. Supposing that the trap would be a different sort of method, he advanced a bit and kept his senses as sharp as he could.

His skin began to tingle. Quite a distance away, Randidly sensed movement. He breathed deeply through his nose and received a better picture of the surroundings. There were massive holes in the ground around their arrival point, leading to deep warrens. And from those subterranean caverns came a swarm of porcelain puppets that defended the Shaft.

Randidly clicked his tongue as Fiona passed through to join him. “Get ready to saddle up. We need to force our way through. Some pesky bugs are crawling toward us.”

“Can you handle most of them alone? Even with the Stats boost you provide for us-” Fiona pressed her lips together as Pullas stumbled through the portal and wheeled around with wide eyes, apparently expecting an immediate ambush. She steadied the other woman with a touch on the elbow. “You are fine for now, Pullas. Just get ready to move.”

Randidly was already swirling his arms in alternating windmill motions around his body. The movements weren’t fast, but they followed a cadence that spread rippling waves of kinetic force out through the surrounding air. “Yea, I think I’ll be able to push back interference without using an image. So long as these are the dolls I think they are.”

Congratulations! Your Skill Cutting Tide of Amenonuhoko (T) has grown to Level 940!

Congratulations! Your Skill Motif of the Hungry Deep (P) has grown to Level 981!

Xershi stumbled through after an extended pause alone on the previous floor, adding a few more tingling suspicions to the queue forming in the back of Randidly’s mind. The heavy emotions he could sense through the Ascension Pact just strengthened those theories. But for now, the group began to move without dwelling on the newest member of the group behaving erratically; at this point, it was almost Pullas who was weird for not approaching a mental breakdown. Randidly rolled his shoulder with more vigor, Nether pumping along with his veins and heating his muscles.

The air filled with swirling energy. As he received a clearer picture of their foes, Randidly’s expression soured. Not that this is difficult, but with how fucking huge these layers are becoming… this might be slightly tiresome to maintain for the entire way.

In every direction, the porcelain dolls tumbled like gymnasts to surround them. Some flipped and spun in the air, jumping like grasshoppers. Kinetic energy surged out from Randidly, beginning to rotate around him in a churning storm. He swung his arm and smashed back the first few dolls, controlling his force so their torsos wouldn’t shatter and raise the alarm. Several clacked loudly into the next tumbling doll behind them, making Randidly twitch with worry, but the few small cracks they made weren’t enough to trigger their shrieking system Randidly had discovered from these beings when he had been trying to rise through the shaft.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

He captured more and more bursts of kinetic force from the collisions and harvested them to fuel his growing storm. Randidly narrowed his eyes in concentration, keeping his images completely uninvolved with the process. He only utilized the insights into energy systems he had gained climbing that mountain. He also took care not to release too much Nether; Randidly suspected that he shouldn’t rely on that power or else risk walking into a trap later down the line.

Nether swirled in his body, but the storm was pure force.

The violence of the puppets' resistance against the growing wind only fueled Randidly’s kinetic dominance in the surrounding space. During his time on the Path of Blood, he hadn’t been able to really go toe to toe with the kinetic forces at play, but Randidly’s body had since been remade. His Stats had all evolved. His Skill Levels continued to climb, as both his images and Nether required the precise understanding of patterns he had been learning.

So after ten minutes of strained tension, Randidly making desperate, minute adjustments to balance between keeping the seemingly endless waves of puppets at bay without demolishing any of them, the group settled into a rather familiar loping run across a featureless plane. Wind danced at their backs, almost encouraging them to push themselves into running a little faster.

Around them, huge rivers of tumbling metal bodies curled around themselves in repeated loops. The puppets flailed their dangerous limbs in mute rage, quite unable to express their dissatisfaction with wanting to accomplish their mission directives and instead being plucked up and juggled. Without any images of their own, the puppets couldn’t shatter the tight vice of kinetic force Randidly maintained.

Congratulations! Your Skill Cutting Tide of Amenonuhoko (T) has grown to Level 947!

Unfortunately, the sheer size of the layer still meant eight hours were spent moving, dragging their contingent of doll bodies along with them. There were only five captured individuals along the wall with the exterior stairwell, trapped by the endless tides of porcelain guards and forced to release an image.

Randidly bowed his head, in acknowledgment of these anonymous individuals’ struggle. He wondered how far they had gotten, or whether some more dangerous beast was unleashed if a porcelain guard had been damaged.

The Ascension Pact left the discarded and spitting-mad puppets and climbed to the next level, grim and determined.

The silence that greeted them was almost more unnerving than the hollow bolt earlier. Randidly took several deep breaths through his nose as the group congregated on the next floor, eyeing the surroundings warily. Then he snapped his fingers, producing enough power to shatter a mid-sized island and a resulting wave of sound that bounced through the surroundings. Despite straining his sense, he couldn’t detect the smallest change in the environment.

“Should we rest here?” Pullas asked. “Gather ourselves?”

“The sooner we get out of this fucked up place, the better,” Xershi announced. Randidly looked at Fiona. Fiona looked at the ground, abstaining from the vote out of some lingering guilt from her tantrum in his Alpha Cosmos.

Rubbing his chin, Randidly nodded forward into the darkness. “Let’s keep moving. How well can we rest in this place, anyway?”

Pullas nodded and Xershi spat to the side, thrusting his hands more deeply into the pockets of his letterman jacket. The group began to move, rapidly gaining speed; in the end, they still needed to cross an entire layer before they could reach the relative safety of the stairwell. However, Randidly quickly skidded to a stop and waved for the group to do the same. “Shit.”

It was already too late. Some hidden trigger had activated and the ground glittered with initializing Engravings. Randidly warred briefly between gathering themselves here, accelerating to gather kinetic energy, or returning to the prior stairwell, but the Engraving pattern activated even more quickly than expected. Some function of the floor zeroed in on their location, creating a glowing disc on the ground for the surrounding several miles.

Space along that threshold began to spit bolts of red lightning and distort.

Randidly could physically cover that distance and rip through the forming isolation barrier, but the rest couldn’t. Just as his racing mind considered putting the group back in the Alpha Cosmos, Pullas cleared her throat. Her cheeks flushed. “If we are all going to be squished into a tiny ball, I think it’s time we talk about… ahem. Appropriate positionings.”

Despite the looming threat, everyone halted and gave her a long look.

“We won’t be conscious, Pullas,” Fiona said, almost gently. It was the first time in the last few days that she seemed genuinely to have forgotten her own angst.

The soft reception almost seemed to embarrass Pullas more. “A-ahem. Obviously, I t-trust all of you, but just in case there needs to be some contact-”

“Besides, we won’t be needing to settle into this cage,” Xershi growled. Already the activated disc of Engravings began to shrink. A glittering wall of energy rose up, preparing to fold around the group and bind them in place. The liger man took a step forward, his image rising through his body. “I’ll rip my way-”

“Easy,” Randidly’s hand clamped on Xershi’s shoulders, suppressing his image before it could gather too much traction. Randidly inclined his head at the ground, where a new level of Engravings began to activate. “You’ll still get pulled in by using your image. This trap activating doesn’t mean the other is now dormant.”

“Then can you, Randidly…?” Fiona gestured vaguely.

Randidly narrowed his eyes to look at the barrier the Engravings formed, with Neveah performing some rapid calculations in his mind. “Not with just kinetic force. There’s a pure image of spatial folding in this. But I do think… gather up, everyone. We just need to move through the barrier.”

Randidly produced his Alchemist’s Passport and groped out with his Fatepiece, sensing the breadth of space-

But almost immediately, he could feel the boundary taking shape in front of him. Randidly scowled. As he had expected, if the barrier could be avoided by simply tunneling through space, many more of the captured individuals would be able to avoid the trap. He pressed his will against the almost elastic sensation of the tightening space around them, unable to break through.

Time to rip open a hole then, Randidy’s eyes glittered. His Hierarchy of Burden spun up in front of him, the smallest middle portion activating and glowing crimson. He pressed the Philosopher's Key forward, both Fatepieces acting in concert to generate a genuine tear in space.