The Plague Rider’s body rippled and tore as it settled into a combat stance. Its overripe flesh popped and sagged, although it didn’t acknowledge its own body’s steady collapse. Opposite the certain Nether King, Randidly held his spear loosely for a few seconds before waving a hand and having Acri slither back around his waist. The Cloak of Utter Night across his body darkened until he seemed to be a walking silhouette, a specter of death in the hills.

He intended to test the Dread Homunculus with this enthusiastic training partner.

“Even if you beg for mercy, I will not spare you,” The Plague Rider seemed thrown by the stowing of Randidly’s spear. The Nether King hesitated, but its significance continued to infect the air with sickness. Eventually, its eyes narrowed. “Too much has occurred to turn back now. Our paths have been set.”

Randidly bowed his head, no longer trying to dissuade the Nether King. His own wild glee doubled and tripled, the Dread Homunculus laughing and his emotional sea erupting in blazing flames. The image details intensified across his body, his thick Aether creating physicalizations for the new image beginning to form. His body tingled and cramped, accepting the shift. He flexed both his hands, savoring the pulsing sensation of power.

Emotions seethed and twirled together, forming the most intense resonance he had ever managed for a prolonged period of time. And it felt like this was just the beginning.

Plague Rider began walking slowly toward him. The effect the Nether King had on the significance swirled around Randidly, seeping into his body like wriggling fangs. Yet the Dread Homunculus didn’t even flinch. His Cloak of Utter Night whispered as it condensed fully across his body, leaving him with only his luminous eyes visible.

Ponderously, the Plague Rider raised his hand. A yellowish liquid pulsed out of open sores on his fat palm, quickly drying into crust along his wrist and forearm. A green haze congregated around the limb. “If you don’t act quickly-”

The Plague Rider’s face contorted in shock as Randidly flickered forward, the Cloak of Utter Night allowing him to sheer through space and arrive before his foe. Randidly pivoted back and then whipped his left arm around in a hook. But this Nether King had long inhabited the theaters of war; it quickly clenched the raised hand and brought the blow hammering down to meet Randidly’s strike.

Congratulations! Your Skill Cloak of Utter Night (P) has grown to Level 960!

Congratulations! Your Skill Erebus’s Baleful Waltz (P) has grown to Level 982!

Within the folds of his obliterating and silky darkness, Randidly felt the infinite specters stirring at his act of violence. The fiery depths of his emotional sea reverberated with the movement, waking hundreds of ghasts and ghouls that existed beneath the cover of oblivion. The specters didn’t even understand why, they were just a thousand flimsy reflections of Randidly’s movements. As he did, they did.

In the end, almost twenty thousand specters flung their hazy limbs in an ugly approximation of Randidly’s strike. All their differently-sized limbs swung as best as they could, reflecting the movement. They weren’t necessarily powerful on their own, although each would likely have the power to have broken the jaw of a normal human. But combined with Sulfur’s whirling momentum, he felt immensely confident in the force he unleashed.

The two blows slammed into each other, a few pattering strikes from the specters arriving a bit too late. Most of the physical force Sulfur directly absorbed, but the significance contained within the Plague Rider’s attack was more difficult to handle. Randidly’s Nether Core groaned and accelerated, seeming to resist outward attacks by hurtling itself more quickly toward a shredding collapse.

Simultaneously, the significance impacted the creeping grip of energy that had gotten into Randidly’s body. The pressure activated the plague elements that had managed to force their way into Randidly’s powerful body, exploding in small rotten blooms of fever and pain. The aches in Randidly’s body increased.

But only slightly. The Dread Homunculus clicked its tongue in distaste at mundane diseases. Randidly planted his foot and took a step forward.

Congratulations! Your Skill Homunculus's Monstrous Tenacity (P) has grown to Level 870!

Meanwhile, the Plague Rider skidded backward from the overwhelming physical force Randidly unleashed. Half its body jiggled and then ruptured, one of the pumpkin shoulders simply popping underneath the strain. The Nether King wheezed and staggered a few more steps back. Its eyes were wide. It gestured and the Nether in the area swirled to his bidding, but the pattern felt loose and vague. “You…”

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“I don’t intend to die,” Randidly whispered. He ghosted forward, the Cloak of Utter Night transforming him into a silhouette of vengeance. His mind whirled, all the computational understanding of the Dread Homunculus whirring as he considered the proper use of Erebus’s Baleful Waltz. Because all those disparate elements, staggered and diffused by timing reminded him-

Randidly raised his right arm, his hands curling into vicious claws in the darkness of the cloak. The Plague Rider straightened and slapped his chest, popping a few more blisters. When he spread his arms wide and became a pillar of plague incarnate, more unknowable liquids dripped down his body. The Nether formed a halo around his body, a boundary within which its significance congealed. Its lips pulled back, framing a mouth full of increasingly rotten, flat teeth. “I will drag you down to hell with me!”

A bolt of black lightning, Randidly struck. When an even larger number of phantasms condensed around his body and attempted to mimic the stabbing strike, Randidly massaged them gently. His eyes gleamed as he incorporated all the different limbs into a single onslaught. All the lessons he had learned from pushing his Synechdochence were channeled into the attack. The point isn’t that each phantasm will attack at necessarily the right time, but to prime the target so when the main blow does fall, it shatters everything in its path…

Randidly directed the attacks with the flawless precision of a maestro, layering them into an overwhelming force of nature. He ripped through the edge of the pillar of Nether without any difficulty.

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimera’s Suffocating Rebuke (T) has grown to Level 981!

Congratulations! Your Skill Erebus’s Baleful Waltz (P) has grown to Level 983!

…

Congratulations! Your Skill Erebus’s Baleful Waltz (P) has grown to Level 989!

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimera’s Suffocating Rebuke (T) has grown to Level 992!

The pillar of significance around the Plague Rider exploded outward as it broke, shards of significance tumbling through the air and sinking into the ground, likely poisoning this area for generations. Randidly’s aligned blow rushed forward, eventually smashing against the Plague Rider’s body and popping the rest of the abscesses across its form. The core of the blow annihilated the flesh of its body, laying its breast bone in a pulverizing hammer of force.

A much smaller Plague Rider crashed and bounced back across the surrounding hills, carving a new valley into existence with its passage. Randidly watched the Nether King vigilantly for a few seconds, then turned his focus inward. A few of those plague shards had landed on his body. With the overwhelming Cloak of Utter Night, the Dread Homunculus wrapped each piece of corruption and squeezed it to oblivion.

It only took a few seconds to rid himself of the worst of the pieces. His Nether Core took the chance to accelerate, threatening to burn a hole out of his chest with friction and float away, but he ignored it for now. As for the rest of this Nether King’s assault, he would leave it in his body to fuel Skill growth.

Randidly walked across the ground and found the limp form of the Plague Rider.

With rheumy eyes, the Nether King looked up at him. “When I die, my entire line will wither. Those that remain will not not have the fine control to equip the next generation. Finally, the plague will claim us all.”

Randidly stopped over the Nether King. He slowly frowned, the tight grip he held on his new image fading. It took him a while to place the expression he saw on the Nether King’s face, and when he did it only made him more confused. “...you sound almost glad.”

“Its strange, is it not?” Plague Rider closed its eyes. A pool of perhaps blood had begun to form around his collapsed and sagging form. “I have spent countless hours fighting to protect my family. To hone my edge, so we could continue and thrive. And now… now when I face the end… Hah, is it strange to be able to see how the world would be better without the small cruelties we represent?”

His instincts murmured indistinctly. Nether continued to hover in a ring around the fallen Nether King, despite his apparent frailty. Randidly just observed the exaggerated and insubstantial flutter of consequences, like light filtered through rippling water.

“And you… you eliminated my influence so easily. I had thought… Well, perhaps it is just no longer my era.”

For a while, the Plague Rider continued to breathe. Following the quiet lines of significance this being could wield, Randidly remained during the Nether King’s extended expiry. Now he knew what he was looking for, he saw the trap. The way pulling away would become a new sort of pattern, the slightest adjustment to the world, which would give the Plague Rider just a fraction of an opening. The Dread Homunculus would invalidate most of it, but it would be a lingering touch upon Randidly.

He invoked it by talking about his line coming to an end, Randidly felt the weight of history settling across their position. To fail to witness that, a moment of obvious significance can be wielded as a weapon? Interesting.

Despite the subtle attempt being made on his life, Randidly licked his lips and felt nothing but excitement. His Nether Core became even more enthusiastic in its self-destruction, buzzing and burning within him.

For fifteen minutes, they both waited, locked together by the significance of the events. At some point, the dynamic began to shift. The Plague Rider’s coughs became more frequent. Its body trembled with the exertion of holding on. The smell became horrid and overwhelming; to stay next to the dying Nether King was to breathe in rancid filth.

Yet the Nether King had tried to create a subtle sort of Nether attack Randidly had never witnessed before, a deft knot of energy that had seemed like nothing. And now that Randidly had lingered, the scales began to tip.

When the Nether King finally died, that edge would become his.