“BOUNDLESS!”

Actus Suprem Devick felt a shiver run through her body as the fight began in earnest. The two images spread out and ground against one another. Very happily, she glanced up from the tiresome job of dragging unwilling Grand Fates into line and looked at the battle between her son and Elhume.

The specters of their image (complexity from Randidly and an unrivaled fist from Elhume) already hung in the air. The Aether they wielded seemed more sharp and bright and colorful and real than even reality.

She had been waiting for such a titanic confrontation from the moment she discovered the existence of a figure at the top of the pyramid. For a long time she feared she would need to be the one to upend the status quo, but finally, A challenger had finally arisen!

In the one corner, the monstrous Elhume, a being whose power had warped his features to the point of being melted wax, a twisted existence that hid some secret that Devick could smell wafting off his complex image, but couldn’t quite grasp. For three thousand years, he had maintained a stranglehold on the Nexus. From atop his mountain range of crystal Aether, he had reigned. None had been able to ascend and rival him on the Pinnacle. His Eight Fists had defeated all comers and obliterated even the traces of their existence.

The champion’s fists clenched. The air throbbed with his confidence.

In the opposite corner, the challenger, her son, her lovable underdog, Randidly Ghosthound. A true Nether King, through some mysterious opportunity he had encountered, the first the Nexus had seen in generations. An innovator, a miracle. The source of so many delightful impossibilities, including these Deviation Rarities to which Devick had been given access. Quite the filial character, Devick had to admit, although his delicate sensibilities placed them in a minor spat at the moment.

His image felt calm. She heard the soft rustling of leaves. She heard the long silence as roots curled deeper and deeper into the fabric of existence, strengthening its hold. Randidly Ghosthound stilled the air with his presence.

Both images spiraled up, rising higher and higher to rival each other.

She prided herself on her sensitivity. So while she continued wrapping her fingers around the rusted chains and dragging them in, she also spared quite a bit of attention to the climactic confrontation. In pure Aether, Elhume’s presence could only be described as overwhelming. He had access to this enormous hunk of crystallized Aether. His fists had been baptized in those lapping waves of energy for so long.

And Randidly-

Devick felt the moment when Randidly changed. Not his energy, but his methods. The leaves rustled again, pitched slightly higher. The roots began to curl and twist.

Randidly Ghosthound faced a fist without bounds and spread his arms wide. A massive tree manifested above his head, an ancient trunk inscribed with a thousand myths about the creation of universes. Genesis had been writ cleanly upon that bark and the emerald leaves rustled with confidence. Roots exploded from his back, spreading to become vast wings that flapped lightly, forcing back the oppressive image state of this place.

The fist constricted around him from every direction; Randidly Ghosthound might have been on the receiving end of the punch, but the pervasiveness of Elhume’s image meant that the delivery had more in common with being squeezed. In the face of this pressure, the fabric of his root wings changed. They wove themselves together into new patterns. Esoteric, swirling patterns that seemed to catch and drag as they moved through foreign energy.

Edged with darkness and shadows, Devick’s chosen son slashed with one of those massive wings. Elhume’s fist ground to a halt immediately upon impact— the smack of the impact hit Devick so hard she almost lost grip on the Grand Fates. The Boundless Fist… cracked open like a dropped egg. Beaming rays of dawn leaked out of the fractures.

Releasing a hissing breath, Randidly Ghosthound stabbed his second wing into that flaw and popped the entire image open. The confidence of that domineering fist wavered.

He hit exactly upon the flaw in the image. Devick narrowed her eyes. Images as massive and calcified of Elhume’s are heavy, but they’ve existed for so long that pressure is bound to have built up somewhere. Yet how did he sense it?

Warmth and light flooded out in every direction. Randidly Ghosthound had opened a door that led to a realm of eternal and endless dawn, a place of radiant golden light and the constant birth of new possibilities. But he wasn’t yet done; he launched himself through that opening and pulled the light along and into his hand. By the time he had reached Elhume, all that light had suffused his spear and become a massive, radiant weapon. “Your hold on the Nexus…!”

“The Fifth Fist.”

The Ghosthound planted his feet and executed a perfect thrust. His eyes narrowed. “Is over!”

“Regret.”

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At the moment when they both executed their attacks, the spear of light seemed overwhelming. Dawn seemed poised to explode and bathe the entire Nexus in its warm radiation. The world would be changed, bettered by the baptism. Some part of Devick felt a quiver of anticipation; she wondered if even she could be healed by the spread of that light. For once, cleansed of the smoldering and fermenting darkness she experienced.

But Elhume’s fist wasn’t just a variation on the strike he had used thus far.

For the first time, Devick could feel the ice-cold spine beneath his blurry energy. Elhume seemed to sigh and the air congealed.

Oh sure, his image destabilized the surrounding space as it manifested. His poisonous emotional affect seeped into the essence of the environment. Nothing else mattered but this fist and the bitterness leaking out of its flaws. But in the face of the luminous spear, the powerful Aether radiance of Elhume dimmed. The blurry body faded.

The sense of chill grew stronger.

And Devick was shocked to see a smaller, slighter, wizened and aged body waiting in the middle of all that concentrated power. A clawed hand made a fist, the slender and liver-spotted fingers seeming so incredibly frail. Tufts of grey fur clung in sporadic patches to the fingers and hand.

Just looking at that fist, Devick’s felt her own tiny, wizened, inoculated heart tremble. Because a single glance at that hand-carved regret into her body. All it took was a look and that fist’s bitterness oozed down her throat, suffocating her. The emotions weighed her down.

Devick, an old hand at dealing with the Nexus’s monsters, figuratively wiggled out of the way before it could sink too deeply. She shunted all that image-power down her chains, inflicting upon each of her targets a small fraction of that overwhelming regret. Although the amount was small, it was another point of pressure completely separate from the coercion Devick had been utilizing so far. She felt about a dozen capitulate. She reeled those stumbling individuals in, dragging out their souls.

Meanwhile, the weathered hand shattered the spear of light into a thousand glittering pieces. The first ripped forward and slammed into the Ghosthound’s side, knocking the air from his lungs.

Elhume’s projection took a step forward and looked down at a grimacing Randidly. His right hand remained unremarkable, just a beast person’s hand poking out of a muscular energy body. But when Elhume spoke, all the sonorous authority had vanished, leaving a surprisingly exhausted voice. “You covet the influence I wield? You cannot fathom the costs I have paid to earn this.”

Despite the loss, Devick’s son didn’t stay down long. His eyes blazed emerald as he straightened and took a fighting stance. “I’ve witnessed your past.”

In a move that shocked both Devick and Randidly, Elhume laughed.

The sound was hollow and high, like dice bouncing around a bone cup. The noise felt human, vulnerable, and aged, as though Elhume would stumble into a coughing fit if he laughed a bit too hard. The tone was edged in an incalculable surety that would not be shaken by circumstance or persuasion. A fist clenched, but without any authority, only desperation.

“You witnessed my first real triumph. Or a version of it,” Elhume said. “You have no comprehension of the string of frustrations and setbacks that I’ve experienced since then. You know nothing of me.”

Elhume’s energy projections started speaking without sound, throwing soft punches out into the air around him. Randidly spun his spear, eyeing the ephemeral energy released by those punches, then pulled kinetic force from the environment. He thrust spikes of energy in several targeted attacks. One by one, those silent reverberations unraveled.

Randidly pressed his lips together. “I’ve seen your Timeless Fists too many times before. They will not land.”

“I preferred you weak.” Elhume boomed, part fury and part frustration. Yet the process of shedding the energy form continued. Its light continued to dim. The strong and blurry countenance of Elhume faded. The greying, almost ratlike creature waiting within made Devick simultaneously shocked and delighted.

Yes, exactly. Pull out more of my son’s prodigious potential. The real confrontation is just beginning.

“Fiero,” Randidly said the name as a statement yet the delivery of the word contained a question.

Devick’s eyes widened, connecting the dots. Fiero, the lauded Patron of the Borrow, a being who had been believed dead for a thousand years, sneered. His tails hung bald and limp behind his body in a clump. His spine rounded near the top. “Did you not believe you understood me, boy? Ah, I remember the confidence that came with that first success. Heh. Let me teach you a lesson. For each success of mine you wish to undo, there have been a thousand failures. Witness.”

Fiero raised a desiccated wrist and gestured. From the other entrances to this central chamber, hundreds of stick-thin figures shuffled.

Each was the same race as Fiero, and each looked as though a monster had sucked them dry. Their skin was paper, their fur aged and spotty, their muscles atrophied, their tails limp and wasted, their eyes dead. Blood leaked from their mouths, and some also had thin trails of rusty brown coming out of their nose and ears.

“My most recent convenience has been liberated. So what?” Fiero pointed. The shuffling zombies began moving to surround the group of soldiers that Randidly had brought with him. Their physical forms spoke of immense weakness, yet they released waves of intense images. Echoes of Elhume’s, or maybe Fiero’s, image. “They bore me for a time before they broke. As my vessels, they will gladly harvest your little seeds. A pity they’ve not had time to grow.”

The images from the husks continued to rise. Not nearing the heights demonstrated by Devick, Randidly, and Elhume, but still each possessing an overwhelming image that would qualify for the Fulfillment stage. Blood began to flow from their eyes, crimson tears of pain and suffering.

“Our fight-” Randidly said.

Elhume’s cackle interrupted him. “This is the detail you have missed, for all your ingenuity, Ghosthound. This fight was never about us.”

“Lethal Tide-” Randidly spun his spear.

But Fiero shot sideways, his waifish form intimidatingly solid. Those aged fingers clenched into fists. “What was it you said to me? Kismet? Heh. The Sixth Fist: Folly.”

Now the air seemed to flee from Fiero/Elhume, unable to even withstand his presence.

Devick ground her teeth in frustration. What the hell! Why does this minor character get such cool lines and I’m just here watching?!