Pullas stepped forward in front of the other members of the Ascension Pact, her small form upright and determined. Black Nether Hands continued to churn in a circle around the group, keeping Randidly Ghosthound behind her tense and with gritted teeth. But Pullas’s eyes went to the massive, undulating sable fingers that drifted closer, their ill intent cast like a long shadow across the group.

Randidly has done so much to help us arrive here, Pullas’s eyes blazed. Her image began a low song, right at the vertebrae where her neck became her spine proper. It’s time we pay him back a little bit.

A pale light spread out from her body as her image unfolded, continually inflating and intensifying and being painted into existence with bold brushstrokes of color. Her wish to protect resonated, increasing the volume of her image’s song. The robbed figure of death with which Pullas had so long walked, now skipped forward with a wide smile on her face, finally confident that she had found an answer.

Perhaps not a perfect answer, but one she totally believed in. For so long, she had been working to gather elements to later incorporate. Now she moved past that stage and felt prepared for her image to come into its own.

Pullas felt Xershi and Fiona moving beside her, activating their own images. However, they stood back, swirling and vigilant, to support her efforts. The power of her image continued to churn and intensify, like electromagnetic imbalance in a storm before a jump and thunderous discharge. Milky mist spread out from her body. It danced around her fingers and oozed from her ankles. She took another step forward and raised her hand to unleash the power she had been gathering.

With a silent descent, one of the massive black fingers swept down from the sky to make good on its promise of violence. Pullas probably wouldn’t have been able to track it without the boost in Stats from the Ascensions Pact. To her, the mechanical voice didn’t bother to speak. It simply moved to eliminate her.

Pullas let loose a tinkling laugh. “Let’s see what I can do, yes?”

Her mind was drifting, or rather racing, or rather receding back from the physical details of the oncoming confrontation to somewhere deep within her memories. The song rose within her, drowning out almost everything else. Somehow, she sought out a foundational truth for her image, teetering as it was at the cusp of revolutionary power.

The details began to fill in themselves, rushing toward a solid power.

The moment stretched. She remembered her hundreds of years working on Idylla, dragging the bones of the city from the ether, constructing homes and markets and courthouses for the population, creating a systematic framework to try and provide all the necessities that these powerful Nexus citizens needed to reach for the Pinnacle.

She worked so hard so it truly was an ideal place. The ideal launching pad. She gathered more and more information and understanding, trying to make even the minutia purposeful.

She remembered her pride as the population of Idylla rapidly increased, as more and more houses were built around the core cluster she had made, to the point that Pullas began to hastily zone the surrounding space and maintain a healthy infrastructure within the accumulating sprawl.

Bit by bit, work on her image had fallen by the wayside as administration required more time and effort. Pullas didn’t mind; she sought a good death, a death that would not leave anyone lost like her parents’ death had left her so devastatingly bereft. These things she would build could support the next generation.

She worked and worked. Brick by brick, that entire city became close to perfection.

And yet.

In the present, Pullas flexed her fingers shrouded in milky light. The specter of death reached up and tugged at the edge of its hood. A rumbling change began to occur beneath its hazy shadowy, filled with the joyous song ringing through her body. Beside her, Xershi and Fiona braced themselves for impact. Randidly still seemed lost in whatever trap had been laid for Nether beings on this layer.

Pullas licked her lips. And yet she had been endlessly frustrated, hadn’t she? As Idylla had fallen into cyclical patterns of bickering, posturing, and small-minded jealousy. The things she provided soon became too little. The population wanted more, additional roads to improve, not just a city, but a launching point. They needed some assistance to achieve greatness.

Pullas invented more rules and regulations. She appreciated the, admittedly, bitter-edged complaints of the residents. She felt that distance between where she was and where she wanted to be. Organization made sense to her. It should be possible to build a scaffolding to close that distance.

And yet.

If her hundreds of years of work had been the right path, why had only a single meeting with Randidly Ghosthound shaken Pullas? Why, after journeying with the Ascension Pact for only a few weeks had she begun to see an answer that hundreds of years of toil, however misguided, had been unable to bring into view?

A belief crystalized in Pullas’s chest. The rippling arrival of this realization spread through her body, down her arm, sharpening and clarifying the milky light she released. The specter of death became her, the same small hairs running along her outstretched arm, the same freckles, the same wide and confident look in her eyes as she pushed back the hood.

Her face, confident and gleeful. Looking at her own approaching death.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

The accumulating stuff never mattered. After all… if my parents had still been around, I would never have needed things in the first place. I needed them. A good death is surrounded by the people you love.

That’s it. Protecting those bonds is everything.

Still silent, the massive finger slammed down on her upraised palm. Her image released a brilliant light. A gleaming, uncompromising promise to herself. The long fingers of death wagged back and forth.

You can fuck right off.

Pullas’s image stubbornly resisted the dense projection, burning strangely both with exposure to the caustic energy of the fingers. Even worse was the physical clap that shook her whole body, dealing immense damage to her internal organs through the aegis of both her image and her boosted Stats. Had not Fiona and Xershi essentially propped her up with their own images, Pullas would have collapsed directly, a bug smashed scraped against the ground by a heel.

Death scowled down at her, speaking to her in a sing-song language of regrets, aches, and deep emptiness. Death complained how easily her System-body folded underneath the pressure. Death needed a little more freedom to truly dominate. But Death assured Pullas, still in alien sing-song, that if that space was given, she would be unstoppable.

Probably everyone’s image promises that, right at the end, Pullas’s reasonability pointed out. But still, she believed.

She released a long breath, blood-tainted mucus leaking out of her nose. Yet the image version of her, the good death she had so long sought, straightened her robe and released a brilliant smile up at the finger, which twitched in confusion at her ability to resist its strike. Those curved lips promised an even more effective counterattack in the future. In the surrounding area, more black hands skittered forward, these ignoring Randidly and instead focusing their efforts on creating a Nether Ritual targeting her.

She wiped her nose on her sleeve. It’s about attitudes. The way people view the world. I had so long been in Idylla, trying to adjust the environment to be proper. Yet just a perspective of a young man made it possible to see the death I wanted.

In a way, relying too much on Aether as the energy to become powerful is a problem. You lie to the universe, you lie to yourself, all to become powerful. Your Willpower warps existence into what you desire.

But what if that warping power twists too far? What if you lose grip on what ‘reality’ is? You think you are twisting only a little, but you whirl yourself increasingly far, your balance eschew. Soon you twist endlessly on yourself-

The sable finger whirled back around to crack down again on Pullas’s head. Xershi and Fiona had stabilized themselves and once more supported her image with their own. She sucked in a deep breath, her thoughts racing and regressing, still seeking that core. More ripples spread out from her heart, rubbing at the edges of her image, changing it, maybe purifying it.

Hopefully purifying her projection. From image fulfillment, she approached Full Comprehension.

Warning! Your Great Fate, Wisdom of the Nesting Death Lvl 298, is experiencing extreme strain! Warning, your beliefs are diverging from the foundational oaths you took upon creating a Great Fate!

Calculating…

Considering the Level of your Great Fate, should it shatter, death will result.

In a way, haven’t I been dead since I left Idylla? A very important part of me died, anyway. A whole part of my life, already atrophied and hanging inert. Pullas giggled. Everything seemed so light and amusing. She raised her hand again, an even more brilliant and gorgeous liquid light, the first precious drips as dawn juiced itself on the jagged peaks of a mountain range, radiated to fill the surrounding space. A life I lived ended. A sad belief was set aside. And now, rising through the Sonora, I can finally take another step.

The next impact drummed her body and forced out a wheezing, phlegmy cough from Pullas. The milky radiance she released hummed furiously, resonating with the impact. But this time, the long finger was tossed almost fifty meters into the air, being directly overpowered by her image. Next to her, Xershi seemed confused, but Fiona’s eyes were intent on Pullas. Perhaps she sensed something.

Behind them, Randidly’s face twisted into a grimace, grey flames whispering along his skin. His own problems dominated his attention.

Pullas raised her head, ignoring the ache in her chest. Driven by that massive mechanical core in the distance, two more tentacle-like fingers whipped over. The first had been driven backward by the collision by sustained no real damage; whatever corrosive image constituted its body resisted Pullas’s power, even with this blooming capability.

Death whispered for her to take that last step. To give her the freedom she needed.

Further. The attitude to earn myself the death I craved. To protect the life I need to lead to get there-

Warning!

Pullas decisively squeezed on her Great Fate, the rippling banner that stretched up from her completed Class. Her deviated path, her obsession with avoiding any recurrence of the loss of her parents, was obliterated by the resolve to step forward into the future, no matter the cost. For so, so long she had been afraid. Deeply afraid, petrified internally, fiddling with rules and regulations and creating a small little box into which no fear could enter.

Although maybe this is even crazier than believing in your own image… more sociopathic than never questioning whether the basis of your Aether has shifted. Pullas blinked several times, unable to see through the writhing light that emerged from her own body. But this is my decision, even if its scary.

The walls that had so long protected her collapsed. All the power woven through her Great Fate and into her carefully constructed oaths were eviscerated by her sudden move. Death shrieked with delight. But then an abrupt suction emerged in her body, the System immediately arising and demanding repayment for all the power it had given her. It was like blood being sucked directly out of her veins, her flesh cleaved off and sold.

Pullas swayed, but she did not fall. Her light flickered, then erupted from her body. Because in that emptiness, she found freedom. Instead of doubting, she moved forward in the space within her body, bolding drawing a path forward for herself.

Weirdly, she didn’t feel like ripping out so much of her Soulspace had left her adrift. Because there, churning quietly within her core, Pullas felt the bond of the Ascension Pact keeping her grounded.

In a sudden birth of inspiration and force, Pullas gushed through her own inner world, carving her image in a sudden reiteration, avoiding the flaws and only arriving at the gorgeous whole of the finale. Her energy rose to a fever pitch; her briefly fractured projection of herself in the cloak of death laughed and clapped her hands.

Her heart ached, but looked up and gathered her power around her body. Death raised her arms in preparation for the waltz to begin, the inner music spreading out into the surrounding layer.