Randidly looked up at the three blazing fist attacks burning holes through the sky, each with enough power to still brutalize his images on the way to slamming into his gut. His heart fluttered as he scrambled for countermeasures. Even now, his internal organs struggled to rebalance themselves after withstanding the first attack.

He sucked on his teeth, eyes blazing. Are you making fun of me? Throwing three punches toward me, one for each of my images? Or is this number just a coincidence?

At the very least, by the time you recognize the outcome of these attacks, the second step of the process will be done. Randidly’s eyes flicked sideways, peering out through the storm of energy around him to where the Nexus proper continued to cover the memory with a film of energy, to create a Cohort. Only a small portion remained uncovered.

So, it came down to this attack. If he endured through this, the only wall left in front of him would be the actual accomplishment of transforming an imitation into reality.

“A warm-up is just what I need right now. Today’s been so dull.” Randidly straightened and rolled his shoulders. He could feel the ground still shaking beneath him from the prior impact, but he needed to move. Acri and Sulfur hummed their support for him. Acri suggested that they utilize the monstrous image physicalization and create the spear tail and that gave Randidly an idea.

All at once, his counterattack sprung fully formed into Randidly’s imagination.

He glanced around, his vision cutting through the choked air, still unsettled from the storm ravaging the ground and then the explosion of the first Timeless impact. Corpses could be seen strewn around in the area, remnants of the earlier fighting and testaments to why you shouldn’t get caught too closely in Randidly’s struggles. Broken limbs and twisted bodies, staining the ground with their blood. He breathed out a breath, aware of the impending attack, and closed his eyes.

The Dread Homunculus beckoned at the torn battlefield with long fingers.

The restless dead and damned rose, ten thousand specters masked in the storm and forever bound to furiously wander due to the violence of their end. Aether soldiers and Nether Warriors came, one and all, their figures flickering in the storm of black winds and crimson lightning around Randidly.

He looked at them with compassion. His image spread its arms wide, accepting the small hunks of negativity that anchored their remnants in place. Don’t you hate it? To be forced to leave off here. To cease moving forward. But help me and you can linger. Help me, and you will build futures for your people.

I need your power. To change this cage. Please.

He delivered the entreaty, knowing some would reject him. The flickering remnants of significance he spoke to now possessed little by way of intelligence. Mostly what remained was instinct. And about a third of those twisted forms began to fade. Their motivations pulled them elsewhere, away from the current Randidly offered.

But those that lingered… their eyes began to sear out of their place of rest light burning coals. Randidly’s Fateset grinned. Gotcha.

Congratulations! Your Skill Erebus’s Baleful Waltz (P) has grown to Level 1042!

And then those phantasms that wandered through his storm raised their heads and bellowed out a call. The air began to hum with their resentment. An emotional gong sounded, its reverberations seeping into the ground and bouncing across the sky, moving impossibly quickly. They flickered back and forth, traveling out of the storm, speeding toward the previous battlefields around Homewell, to the vast mounds used as unmarked graves inside the Badlands.

The raced to the edges of the memory, couriering Randidly’s offer to all the bitter dead.

Congratulations! Your Skill Erebus’s Baleful Waltz (P) has grown to Level 1045!

Congratulations! Your Skill Erebus’s Baleful Waltz (P) has grown to Level 1046!

The memory shivered. Because as the spirits called and called, pulling more and more of the lingering embers of dissatisfaction into a furious burn, the memory as a whole began to respond to the sentiment. Not through Pine, as Randidly used to activate the Cohort functionality, but the raw materials by which this altered history had been created. The progenitor’s wish, long hibernating and dwelling at the bottom of so much architecture, raised its head with desperation in its eyes.

Randidly swayed, suddenly overwhelmed by all of the outflows of attention. The storm, his images, his Nether Core… he felt drained dry. His mental landscape was more parched and salted than the Badlands. But he remembered how much worse he could endure, from his struggle against time. He bit his lip. He poured more and more focus into the Dread Homunculus, as it marshaled him an army.

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Their emotions bubbled up through the storm, dragged along with their significance. Frigid pins danced across his skin as he felt their hollow hatred for the way the world was. He grasped it and pulled it all to the surface, unearthing the raw ore of the unsatisfied memory. In the depths of his Soulspace, the manifestation of the Alchemist raised his hands and cracked his fingers.

Congratulations! Your Skill Erebus’s Baleful Waltz (P) has grown to Level 1050!

…

Congratulations! Your Skill Erebus’s Baleful Waltz (P) has grown to Level 1076!

The dead moved quickly. The horn of regret sounded and a flood of specters walked from the ground into the violent storm. They teemed at his every side, massing in the shadow of the dust clouds and broken ground, hissing their envy in the crackle of lightning around his body. The three fists swirled together in swirling lines, aiming to slam into Randidly from every side. But with the Dread Homunculus suddenly gathering such a foundation, he leaned forward and launched himself in the air to meet them.

Randidly dragged the storm behind him, while he used the Dread Homunculus to add some substance and shape to the arrangement. So by the time he leapt across the sky, all the dead were blending together into a screaming, vicious, resentful whirlwind. Storm and violent undead mixed freely, with the deft fingers of the Grim Chimera weaving a weapon from their essence.

Randidly produced the oversized spearhead portion of Acri and tossed it into the air in front of him as he rose. By the time he caught up, his body had faded away and a seething darkness had taken its place. The World Tree Sips from Every Realm. Gospel within the Seething Torrent. Erebus’s Baleful Waltz.

How’s this for a thrust, Elhume?

The dark tide of energy became a massive spear, catching the tumbling spearhead and making it the gleaming tip. A blurry Randidly projection manifested in the air, grasping the enlarged weapon and thrusting with every drop of urgency he possessed. The whole of the memory seemed to move with him.

This whole place had been created due to the desire for this to be real. Now that Randidly had put himself out there, it was willing to lend him a scrap of its power.

By ascending quickly, Randidly aimed the massive spearhead and struck the leftmost fist. Due to their strange, looping paths, he reached that one a fraction of time before the others could respond to his movement. For the second time, spear and fist clashed.

Randidly shivered. He felt his muscles tearing as he maintained the body of the spear, floating in the middle of the groaning and muttering dead. But as he channeled all the unwillingness and desperation he found throughout the memory into the familiar movement.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nyx’s Successor Births Fate (GD) has grown to Level 1055!

With a roar, Randidly shattered one of Elhume’s Fourth Fist. Even using the Moirae of Ripples Skillset, his attack held together.

Acri’s gleaming spearpoint cleaved through the knuckles and unleashed ways of destructive energy lashing out to the left and right, which Randidly quickly gathered to fuel the Songstress. A grin broke out across his face. Even though he had borrowed heavily from the memory for the fuel, the shape and the thrust were all his own. And with his own hands, he had defeated a true image attack from a Pinnacle being.

He did his best to hold onto that victory as the other two punches arrived. He drew back the massive spear for another attack, but the souls of the dead were unruly. Most of the borrowed force collapsed. Randidly barely managed to manifest a plane of gravity beneath his feet and set himself before they arrived.

He shifted to the left at the last second, accepting the weakening of his stance so the impacts were staggered. The first still broke through the remainder of his images and mashed him bodily against his own gravitational surface. He didn’t even have time to make a sound before the second fist caught him in the side.

It was all Randidly could do to keep the Songstress of Absence singing. For a brief moment, the superposition he maintained ground to a stop, all the valuable momentum he had built up over the last half minute vanishing. Yet only in that state could Randidly’s image endure, as he hacked out a cup of blood and shot sideways like a kite hit by a baseball bat.

His body tore a hole through Homewell’s Lifeseal as it shot sideways.

Only when he crashed and tumbled his way to a stop in the Badlands did Randidly nudge the Songstress of Absence back into motion. Randidly might not have been able to see straight and every bit of his body felt like it had been chewed up, but he sagged with relief when Pine’s weight still pressed through him, activating the mechanism.

He gestured broadly with his right arm, laying in a pile of shattered shale. “The second step is completed, Elhume. The bubble is closed. And the third portion is about to begin. Once the energy pulse examines the area and discovers how compatible it is with the Nexus, you will officially have your new Cohort-”

The sky tore. The blurry and unmistakable figure of Elhume stepped into the memory. The bright light from his figure made it impossible to make out details, but he clearly kept the tear open as he looked around; he had stepped into the time dilation of the memory, but it appeared the creator of the wistful memory still didn’t wish to break it entirely.

“What can you do?” Randidly asked.

The brilliant figure probably didn’t hear him, but he waved a hand and created deft hooks of Aether. Those shot outward and for a split second Randidly worried Elhume would target the Songstress, stretching between the two Aether mechanisms. But rather strangely, most of those hooks spread out to catch the bubble blown to create the Cohort.

The few remaining hooks snagged onto the pulsing wave of time that passed across them all.

Randidly didn’t understand until the next pulse of time came through. The nudging of time pulled and tugged on the bubble around the memory. That pressure caused the bubble to drift slightly… with the pressure light enough that the bubble didn’t tear.

But why- Then Randidly saw it.

The edges of the memory Nexus, as the net of Aether to capture an area drifted closer, didn’t stop it.

Because, in the end, it wasn’t real.