Randidly looked up at his companions from the ground, completely inert to avoid activating the defensive Engravings.

The moment stretched as the three other members of the Ascension Pact looked at Randidly with sour expressions at his pronouncements. Xershi especially seemed tense, his neck oddly arched. Whatever strange funk he had slipped into inside his isolated orb, it lingered now on this next layer.

Randidly wanted to clear his throat or point out it was mostly a joke. He sent a pulse of meaning through the Ascensions Pact and activated his Alchemist’s Passport so that it manifested in front of his fingers; if they didn’t need to rip through spatial walls and weren’t afraid of attracting more attention, they could simply use the single Fatepiece to move across the layer.

At this point, letting Elhume know he possessed a Fate that could rip through distances seemed the least of their problems.

Pullas and Xershi continued to look around awkwardly, as the Ascension Pact transfer of meaning once more brought the rumblings of the Engraving. Plus they felt the tingle through the bond, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it. Fiona understood and waited for the energy to pass. When the energy had dissipated, she moved next to Randidly and carefully lifted his arm.

The process of locating the destination ended up taking about six-minute as Fiona shifted her grip further and further down Randidly’s arm, so she could make increasingly minute adjustments to the tip of the key, allowing them to arrive nearer to their goal. By the end she had his pointer finger in both of her hands, making minute shifts. The only reason this process ended was because Randidly grew impatient and simply pressed the key forward, folding space around them and carrying it away even as the Engraving tried to clamp down on the group for the Nether running through his body.

They popped out about a half-mile from the exterior staircase, finally stirring Xershi to sling Randidly across his back and just carry him to the steps. When they finally got away from the restrictions on Nether, Randidly twisted at the waist, popping his back. “I suspect the next layer will be even worse. Defense wise. For whatever purpose the Sonara was made, we are getting close to it.”

Pullas adjusted her glasses. “It wasn’t so bad for us. You just became dead weight.”

Clicking his tongue, Randidly led the group in heading up to the next layer. He didn’t slow down at all as he moved through the golden layer into the forty-eighth floor of the Sonara. He also tried not to think about the concentration of image echoes in the flaw they left behind.

Randidly didn’t make any sudden moves, immediately freezing past the barrier. However, as he gradually unthawed his movements to test, an Engraving didn’t form. The strange darkness of Elhume’s layers continued, with the pulsing red alarm periodically filling the space. But he could find no new way to trigger an isolating reaction. Not even releasing his image changed the space.

Randidly frowned. Is it because it’s taking its sweet time, or are there really no defenses here? Also, the lack of porcelain puppets makes me a little concerned…

Worse, when Randidly brought out his Fatepiece and probed around in the air, he couldn’t make sense of the information he received. His mouth twisted into a scowl; there were spatial barriers around them, thousands of them, shuffling and shifting constantly. Although his senses couldn’t detect it, they seemed to be sitting in the middle of some complex diced spatial arrangement. The more his senses attempted to spread out, the more confused he became.

The contradictory information fed to him by his body versus from Nether gave him a headache.

The group came through and filled in the space behind them. Randidly was already pulling out his Fatepiece, but Xershi’s gaze immediately whipped to directly behind their arrival point like a fisherman had yanked a hook in the corner of his mouth. Pullas looked at him in concern. “Xershi? Is something wrong?”

“He’s been here,” Xershi growled. His voice was higher-pitched than usual. “Not- not now, but recently. I know this feeling. We are in one of the creator’s games. He’s been here.”

“I can’t detect them normally, but we are definitely in a sea of spatial distortions,” Randidly commented. He narrowed his eyes and moved his Alchemist’s Passport around. Even his Fatepiece fed him gibberish in terms of feedback on the environment. “Well, more accurately a series of stacked spatial cubes. From what I can see, they have very direct transfer functions from one side of this cube to another of the innumerable cubes-”

Xershi was already walking toward the edge of the nearby space. Without pausing, he reached the end of the five-meter cube and vanished. The air didn’t even ripple. He was simply gone, zipped somewhere else.

“Tsk,” Fiona shook her head. Then she caught Randidly’s eyes and gestured to the two of them. “At least we were easy to empathize with during our acting out periods.”

Randidly gave her a sour look in return, earning an awkward cough from Fiona, but Pullas giggled. Then the trio hurried after the liger man. The spatial transfer felt extremely smooth, so much so that Randidly paused for a second to admire the weaving of space together. No wonder his physical senses couldn’t detect anything; how could light pass freely through the barriers while any sort of matter was transferred? Whatever else this creator of Xershi’s could do, their work on the maze was stellar.

Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

As they settled into a new cube, located at some other place within the layer, Xershi was already passing to the next. They essentially just saw his leg vanishing. Randidly cursed quietly and followed after him. What followed was a series of short dashes across five meters of space. Sometimes Xershi would jump up, passing through the top of the cube. Sometimes the group would appear midair, needing to utilize their image to keep themselves from passing through the bottom of the cube and completely losing track of where they were in this maze.

Randidly spent the time closely studying the way space had been woven together. He had become increasingly minute in his image of how space was destroyed, due to the example of the Hierarchy of Burden, but creating stable space out of such an unstable concept was impressive in an entirely different way.

The distortions released by the Stillborn Phoenix became increasingly ominous, now possessing keen insights into how stable space could behave. Because the long tongue of its violence needed that much more severity to tear everything to shreds.

Of course, the improvements in the Stillborn Phoenix triggered something akin to jealousy in the Grey Creature. Not that the image wanted to improve, but the dangerous emotional mixture that washed ashore in Randidly’s subconscious from the Alpha Cosmos began to simmer again. Hopefully, they could quickly rise through these last layers and he could take some time to address the issue.

After about an hour of rapid, flickering transfers, they arrived at the base of the central staircase. Randidly looked sourly up at it, wreathed in flashing red lights and wrapped around a complex central tower of humming machinery, but he had to admit arriving here so quickly was a godsend.

Had he been left to his own devices, who knew how long it would have taken to find his way out of the maze of spatial cubes. Probably, he would have defaulted to just moving very very quickly, ripping his way directly out of the problem.

Xershi was walking toward a squat building at the base of the staircase. The group moved behind him. Inside were several workbenches with scattered bits of machinery laying half-finished next to the tools used to make them. These items hissed and clicked noisily, functional but also severed from their place of use on the whole. Xershi continued to move forward, making a beeline past the materials and experiments to the far wall. There, hanging above a strange chemical fire spout was a painting.

It was oil on canvas. But the weird thing was that no individual was featured in what was clearly a portrait, there was just an empty chair in the middle of a cool pool of light. Yet despite the lack of a central figure, Xershi came up to the portrait and stared intently at it. He seemed to be drinking deeply from the painting.

Pullas nudged Randidly. “Do you see something in the frame?”

“Just the chair,” Randidly reached up and rubbed his neck. Fiona folded her arms across her chest. Her tight expression revealed a similar unnerving quality to the moment.

Much to the group’s surprise, Xershi soon twisted around in much better spirits. His gaze had firmed up quite a bit; no longer did he seem to be balanced at the edge of a precipice. “Let’s go. And I think we should climb the central staircase. The creator wouldn’t have built a dwelling here without a reason.”

Based on the fact the creator was able to create a spatial maze here under Elhume’s watch, that reason is probably that he’s working for Elhume, or at least has Elhume’s permission to be here. Randidly pressed his lips together but didn’t say anything. The alternative was using his two Fatepieces to forcefully rip through millions of small spatial barriers. Despite the low strain he had encountered so far, Randidly didn’t want to attempt it.

Besides, the terminus of that tearing spree would be even more violent than the impact that had inflicted a flaw lower in the Sonara.

So the group walked outside and climbed the staircase to the forty-ninth floor, one below Elhume’s hidden facilities. This time, Xershi’s sudden burst of enthusiasm had him leading, half a step in front of Randidly to pass through the golden layer.

So by the time Randidly passed through, he witnessed one of Xershi’s arms being severed by a powerful slash. So clean and stark was the strike that the air glittered and refracted in small beads around the impact like the weapon had been dipped in water before attacking.

Randidly shifted into a fighting stance to address the threat, but then jerked his head backward. A powerful blast of sunlight seared past his face and began to melt the ground. He wheeled around just in time to feel a powerful image moving beneath the ground. The strange floor exploded with a rush of vegetation. Thick tree trunks unfurled into powerful columns, wide-leaf ferns flaring out to block his vision.

Randidly’s eyes flickered in recognition; he knew these images. That knowledge made him smirk. Heh, powerful these might be, but I’ve faced the real thing.

The First Authority: Seize.

His Nether Core spun and unleashed a domineering pulse. Randidly looked across at the puppets arrayed in front of him, each bearing the images of one of the original Patrons, and grinned.

Each looked like a normal porcelain doll, except the material of their bodies was tinted. The Patron of Blooms doll was a soft green while the Patron of the Sun was golden. Xershi was being slapped around by a black Patron of the Abyss and a grey Patron of Blades.

Randidly’s skin tingled as he felt the gravity turn so sticky around him that space began to congeal. With raw physical force, he twisted around and looked behind him. His eyes widened, having missed a clearly important installation here on the layer. Three massive tubes were situated on a raised dais in the central area, connected with heavy metal transistors. Exhaust ports blew out grey sighs near-constantly, a testament to the continued activity of this device. The interior of the tubes was filled with foggy blue liquid, time steadily blurring the items within the five-meter-tall tubes.

Standing in front of those tubes were four more porcelain dolls. One purple, one pink, one indigo, and one white.

If one of those is the Patron of Feathers, then the other three must be… Randidly’s eyes narrowed. The deceased Patrons. Patron of the Deep, Patron of the Borrowed, and the Patron of Truth.