The Engraving beneath their feet crackled with energy, rapidly erecting and tightening the barrier around the trio. Randidly bit his lip, his body wavering with the strange sensation of activating two of his Fatepieces at once and having difficulty keeping both energies in line. His chest tingled. Some connecting fulcrum, some core of his Fateset began to shiver and awaken within his Soulspace.

Without that bond holding the two together, he somehow sensed it would be a very bad idea to try and just force the two to activate in concert.

Dense energy crackled around his body as a new function began to activate, utilizing two of his Fatepieces. Raw Aether churned through his body, drawing power through Neveah to fuel this sudden activation. Randidly sucked in a breath and then released it slowly.

However, the bonding barrier in front of them began to strengthen itself and tighten as Randidly’s Fateset made its preparations. The dense walls swirled closer, more and more complicated sigils forming and erasing themselves on the inside of the barrier as they writ themselves into existence. Randidly’s focus fractured, one part of him observing the Engraving with interest, another part managing his activating Fatepieces, a third noticing the worried expressions on the faces of Pullas and Fiona.

Xershi just bubbled with tension, a fatalistic commitment to violence writ plain in his expression. Randidly just felt relief he wasn’t flaring his image, considering how murderous his stare was.

“Randidly, sooner would be better,” Pullas whispered.

The barrier began to melt into itself, becoming an invisible truth, rather than a constantly advancing presence, but Randidly’s Acute Nether Nose still felt the limit on their new prison world approaching. His hands began to tremble, hosting more and more Aether and Nether that swirled together between his Hierarchy of Burden and the Alchemist’s Passport. The two energies flowed against one another, their friction generation some vital spark. The inner connector almost began to glow with power, forcefully brought to life before all six of his Fatepieces had been assembled.

The trap around the group deepened. Even his Nether senses could no longer feel the barrier. A sky opened above them, a seductive expanse that whispered they were not being locked into an isolated world, but rather given the opportunity to run free-

A huge shudder ran through Randidly’s body, powerful as it was, as that inner mechanism engaged. Aether and Nether, a cacophony of emotion and shape running above a river of connection and memory, both ignited into a furious hand searing harmony. Energy flowed smoothly between his two Fatepieces, as his Alchemist’s Passport key-form lengthened to become almost a dagger, pointing directly at the tiled square of the Hierarchy of Burden.

Randidly hefted the weapon as bits of crimson electromagnetic discharge teased the end of his Fatepiece. “Alright, I’m ready. Everyone, come and put a hand on my back. And be ready- I suspect this is going to be a rough ride.”

All three placed their hands on his back. Randidly could tell who was who based on the thickness of the fingers and lightness of the touch. But he shoved those bits of minutia from his mind, his eyes now scanning the wide horizon in front of them. Fluffy clouds had formed and drifted randomly, as though the wind was fickle enough to blow two adjacent clouds in different directions. His expression darkened; it was not a good sign that he could no longer sense the edge of this bounded place, even with his nose.

Ignoring this troubling fact, he thrust his key weapon forward. The first layer of the Hierarchy of Burden slid backward, engaged by the movement of the other Fatepiece. They accelerated forward, faster than sound. Dense pythons of lightning crackled around them as the group rapidly accelerated, moving along space, rather than through it. Randidly’s lips pulled back from his teeth as everything blurred into white lines, the combined activation hurtling them forward with more power than even he expected.

“Shit!” Fiona hissed, her fingers tightening until she held a bunched fist of Randidly’s shirt. But it was the bonds of Nether that kept them in one place, the Ascension Pact resonating between them. Without that, the wind pressure alone might have blown his companions away.

Randidly’s attuned senses felt thousands of possible landing spots, but he flew past them all and continued to accelerate. Light stretched into fluttering ribbons, adorning the edges of their motion. His expression darkened very quickly. Because it quickly became clear that while they felt like they were moving, he hadn’t encountered the barrier that was locking them into a fake world.

They were running on a metaphorical treadmill.

Need more power or speed, huh? Randidly’s eyes glittered. He leaned forward and twisted, pressing the stretched Alchemist’s Passport even deeper into the Hierarchy of Burden. After a grinding noise, the light radiation level engaged. Their speed jumped forward, erasing the ground beneath their feet.

Abruptly, all those melted edges of light became spears. The group’s movements became even faster, so they crashed through the light radiation and shattered it with their passage. The jagged edges tumbled through their bodies, occasionally snagging on their organs. Randidly was used to the feeling and took the brunt of the force, but he could feel the three behind him beginning to hunch over from the sensation. Xershi especially seemed sensitive to the bolts of light radiation.

They continued to accelerate as Randidly pressed on the gas, activating the second layer of the Fatepiece to its limit. A smile began to stretch across his face, feeling the energies in his body rising to a fever pitch. He couldn’t quite break them out of the isolated space like this, but he could feel gauze stretching across their speed, constantly bleeding some away. In the same way the System imposed a physical limitation, this space now tried to stop them from taking that last step forward.

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At one time, you could have limited me, Randidly admitted. But no longer. Break for me.

Randidly advanced the Alchemist’s Passport a marginal amount. But he reached the limit of the light layer and for the briefest moment, the blue layer of Entropy activated. The third layer slid smoothly forward, both the prior two layers stretching further away to make room. Light fragments turned runny, space began to melt. The partially reformed pyramid, hollow on the inside but with a point, caught the edge of this isolated space.

Randidly crashed into the small flaw and ripped his way into a passage between space, ignoring the hungry mouth of entropy that existed in this non-space. Its chill tongue lapped at them all, greedy for any hint of warmth. He felt the restrictive barrier resist for the briefest moment as they stepped into this new reality, and then it was shredded and the group shot forward-

--And immediately afterward were bouncing hard, having rebounded off of Randidly’s back. Randidly staggered, having been stopped dead as he ran face-first into an impediment with enough structure integrity to not simply crumble in front of him. For a second Randidly was stunned, thinking they had failed, been blocked by the Engraving. The prospect was galling.

Yet as he looked around and allowed his swimming vision to refocus, they were clearly back in the black, hopeful expanse of the layer. Behind them, he could distantly see a massive orb with a hole punched through the side. The orb began to sag and fall, like a giant rubber duck with a hole in it. They escaped.

“Shit, what the fuck was that,” Xershi groaned and wobbled back to his hands and knees, obviously even more shaken than Randidly.

“At least we are out,” Pullas pushed herself to her feet. Her left arm, the one she had used to touch Randidly, had fractured and now bent at a weird angle. She straightened it for a sickening crack, held it back in place for a few seconds so it could heal, then waved the arm tentatively. Then she rubbed at her eyes.

Fiona’s heavy voice brought them whipping around. “Unfortunately, it looks like that barrier will be the least of our problems.”

The group pivoted just in time for a low, keening alarm to begin ringing out across the layer. The darkness of the floor began to pulse with a strange red light. Randidly swore quietly to himself; the barrier that had finally stopped him was the exterior stairwell. They had worked up so much speed with the Fatepieces that they had zipped from where they arrived and crashed into the far edge of the Sonara.

A clear, body-shaped indication had forced itself into the exterior stairwell, crumpling the bottom few steps. The shattered materials spat out angry bursts of energy as Engravings attempted to activate but failed. However, the worst part was the tiny little, hair-thin crack that formed on the far side of the staircase, against the pulsing and folding space of the exterior wall.

It wasn’t even a true crack, it didn’t break through to the outside. It was just a bit of material that had been chipped away by their impact, primarily from Randidly’s body. However-

As they watched, the tiny flaw in the material began to wiggle like a worm. Its movements became impossible erratic, twitching and flailing. The flaw seemed to breathe, open and closing to experimentally. Randidly’s eyes widened in alarm, perhaps even more than weird red light pulses that problem signaled a much more violent security response from Elhume’s forces approached.

Because he could feel how all the echoing image fragments and flaws that buzzed through the outside of the Sonara now swarmed to this location. Where a small flaw gave them an escape or rather a re-entry into the interior of the Sonara, which allowed images to grow and thrive. The gyrations of the small flaw became so emphatic the worm widened into a small sphere.

Randidly couldn’t tell if the flaw was growing or simply the space around it began to edge backward, fearful of its stirrings.

“That… is going to rupture at some point,” Pullas took several steps forward. The almost anti-climactic red pulses of light cast a shadow over her face. “The accumulation of image flaws at this place will rip the entire Sonara open like a rotten-”

Fiona pointed upward. “Perhaps this is the signal that the mechanic is on the way. They will solve the issue with no one the wiser.”

“More likely an executioner, heading after the culprits with a bloody fucking cleaver,” Xershi observed. He peered speculative upward. “If it was a mechanic, the light would probably be green or blue-”

“Let’s just move before we need to find out,” Randidly interrupted. He hopped over the broken bottom steps and began to climb the staircase. The rest of the group followed. Randidly winced as he settled into a loping run up the stairs; either from the activation of the two Fatepieces or because of the impact, his bones ached like someone has sprinkled bits of scrap metal into his marrow. Even his high Uncommon Metabolism took its sweet time to knit together the microtears in his body.

Although I think the issue is less that I’m not good at healing and more that my body has become so high quality that an Uncommon Stat takes a while to reconstruct it. Randidly mused. However, the feelings had already begun to fade, so he put this rather minute problem behind him.

Because of the damage to the bottom, their ascent took longer than usual. The Engravings to accelerate the ascent didn’t engage until they were almost a hundred meters off the ground. The red light continued to pulse, a constant presence.

As they began to speed up to the next layer, Randidly paused and looked behind. Even from here, he could feel the flaws in the Sonara clustered down below them. In addition, he saw a veritable sea of porcelain dolls, each pulsing with smaller sources of the red light, clustering around the bottom of the staircase. They moved their limbs frantically, their arms flashing with Engravings.

Whatever they were attempting, it didn’t stem the dangerous, fizzing congregation of image echoes. The red light continued to sweep through the dark expanse.

“Gonna be a welcoming party above,” Randidly observed.

Xershi released a complex series of clicks from his mouth. Through their Ascension Pact, Randidly could feel some of that raw frustration that had emerged in Xershi when he first saw the machinery lining these layers. “There better be. I need to work off some steam.”