Randidly leaned forward, concentrating all his weight into the toes of his right foot. Devick’s face morphed its way through varying degrees of surprise.

He gathered his images to himself. His emotional sea surged, between fury and anticipation. His Nether grew into increasingly complex patterns, breeding and reflecting itself in his Pangu’s Asymptote. His whole body shifted, more and more of his potency held upon his toes, ready to explode forward.

The note Randidly now understood as the stirrings of ‘Truth’ become loud and clear through his Soulspace every second. All his potential wound together as he prepared to face Devick.

Finally, her face reached the end of its transformation— Of all the possible reactions to him so clearly manifesting his dominance with his First Authority, what Randidly hadn’t expected was a genuine smile. She beamed with anticipation. And as the first sparkles of rust-colored energy gathered around Devick’s body, he suppressed a shiver. Because in those first notes of power, Randidly could feel an almost familiar, discordant resonance to her energy.

His eyes widened in recognition. She has a Deviation Rarity of her own. And fuck, the power of her image-

Against this strange deviation, Randidly felt his own images rousing themselves to action; once he had recognized the rival, a nervous anticipation bred and exploded through his limbs. The Accord of Three Moiraes and an Alchemist especially seethed with barely controlled indignation at this interloper. An instinctual desire to rise and suppress this fellow Path surged through Randidly’s body. He restrained his wild impulse it, but he didn’t bother to stop all his focus narrowing to the foe in front of him.

Randidly Ghosthound cracked the knuckles holding onto Acri’s shaft. Devick offered a small bow. Her body released a horrible sense of wrongness, his instinctual offense spreading from his own Deviation Rarity images to that note of the Pinnacle humming in his heart.

All his concentrated weight erupted.

Their images exploded out from their bodies, small supernovas radiating such heat and energy that the balcony beneath them shattered. The walls and floors of the ballroom began to melt and ooze. The rest of the surrounding ghost city cracked and began to collapse

Randidly’s first strike was one of force. He choose to corral all of the significant power he wielded into the blade at the end of Acri. Flames of Nether Weight danced across the shaft. His Stats had broken through the Nexus’s limits and then continued to climb released repeated sonic booms. Opposite him, Devick spread her hands wide; her eyes glittered as though she were on the verge of tears. Her image dug and dug and penetrated and infected the fabric of space around her body, burrowing deeper into the fundamental ordering of the universe.

Her wrongness only seemed so deepen. Randidly felt his stomach twinge.

Their images washed against each other for a second until his easily forced hers to the side-- Randidly attempted to gather power while she laid the foundation for later imagework. He narrowed her eyes at their respective tactics. She quirked an eyebrow. “What, you think a single strike is enough to eliminate one such as I, Randidly? I hope you don’t regret your hubris.”

The two non-Pinnacle image notes rattled against each other. His skin crawled at the spreading corruption her note was becoming, not sung by simply a single note, but-

He unleashed his prepared response; Randidly thrust his spear with more than enough power to doom an entire world. All his Stats were concentrated and focused to the tip of the weapon. The Actus Suprem didn’t even block it-- her smile stretched wider and wider, as though she planned to laugh her way entirely through the impact.

Or as though she would just swallow all his resistance with that manic mouth of hers.

Randidly gritted his teeth; it annoyed him to no end how this was exactly the sort of reckless method that he would use. But by the same token, he understood exactly how vulnerable the Actus Suprem was at the moment. He just didn’t trust the wrongness that blazed within her body. Even viewing through his energy halo awareness, he couldn’t quite understand the source of this horrid aversion.

Acri ripped into her chest. Randidly’s eyes blazed as he applied more pressure, intending to tear her torso entirely in half-

Devick released a shocked gasp along with a spray of her blood. But Randidly’s violence slammed into a series of dense images, trapped and pressurized within Devick’s body. His eyes widened as his momentum ceased, broken by the dense power of the images he found there. Devick’s back arched as a wave of kinetic force passed through her body. The building behind her shattered and caved in as though a giant had driven his fist into a sand castle.

As though Devick’s internal organs had begun to rot, the wrongness intensified as it splashed out of her wounds. Her horrible, poisonous note became clear.

“You’ve been eating some of the Grand Fates you’ve taken?” Randidly whispered, feeling the buzzing notes of at least a dozen different images crammed into her body. He didn’t hear a single note, but a horrible song of pain and forced unity. A song of madness echoed out from the Actus Suprem.

The Deviation note prevented any of the individual Grand Fates from approaching a Pinnacle sort of Truth, but he could also see the beginning of a harmony Devick created to replicate an attempt on the Pinnacle in a monstrous fashion. A different sort of approach, a different sort of truth.

A powerful Deviation Pinnacle event. Between the two of them, Devick was much closer to finding a Path to reach her own bloody ‘truth’.

When she first tried to speak, Devick just vomited blood. She spat to the side and then smiled at him with teeth dyed crimson. “Only the tasty ones. Just as a way to pass the time, while I waited for you.” Her eyes sparkled. Impossibly, her smile stretched even more wide, a canyon of bloody teeth splitting her face. “Would you like to see my favorite?”

One of the Grand Fates within the depths of Devick’s body began to tremble. The ground beneath them became a placid lake. From Devick’s contorted back rose a crimson moon. The reflection spread across the water’s surface like a rapacious infection. Randidly’s entire world was dyed red while his face went white.

He recognized that image, from the challenge from Donnyton. But he also felt the familiar shape of a certain woman’s stubbornness, her brutal focus, her wild imagination, and her peculiar insistence on her own methods.

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“That’s Lyra’s image,” He said. He pressed forward, more and more force sawing through Acri into Devick.

“Maybe it was.” Devick cackled, more blood leaking from the corner of her mouth. She barely tried to prevent the currents of dense significance from ravaging her body. While her torso twitched and trembled, she just smiled and smile and smiled. “But once I’ve taken it, doesn’t that mean it’s mi-”

For most of this fight, Randidly had considered himself a force. Without even realizing he had made that decision, all that high-minded distance fell away. His palms became sweaty. The veins of his arms bulged.

He became just a man, his blood roaring in his ears.

Randidly’s jaw cracked from clenching. He admitted to himself that he had made a mistake; his experience with the Devick borne in the memory had colored his interactions. He had forgotten who she was by knowing who she could have been. He had taken his time and tried to appeal to her.

Lyra… is dead? The question echoed out through his suddenly hollow mind. Not a single other thought seemed to exist any longer, so that one painful phrase bounced back and forth through him.

Lyra… is dead?

While he had been giving her a chance to repent and change, she ripped out Lyra’s soul. His heart squeezed and squeezed as the thought bounced and rebounded through him, wringing out drops of horrid, hateful emotion.

Anger made his Nether magma, seething within him.

In a split second, he transformed into the most monstrous arrangement of his image physicalizations. Vicious and leafless branches stretched from his back to form wings. A scorpion’s tail hung over his head and ended in a heavy guillotine of a spear blade. And his entire face had been lost within the swirling event horizon of the Songstress of Absence. It spread further and further as he gave into that oblivion until a dark swirling void floated above his humanoid form.

He would kill the Actus Suprem for this.

Yet the emotions from his heart continued to leak out. Behind the event horizon, Randidly Ghosthound wept. All his careful preparations, all his calculations, all the different ‘elements’ he had been observing in this grand game against Fiero and the Nexus, he forgot about them. Instead, he remembered the struggle he went through when the System first came to his planet.

Lyra Silver too-young and her cheekbones faerie-sharp, looking at him unleashing Mana Bolts and Arcane Orbs, her eyes filled with wonder.

Lyra wishing him well as he returned to Tellus, the first time he chose to leave the problems to the people of Donnyton, being the distraction so their Tribulation would reveal a weakness that could be targeted.

Lyra Silver, her human body discarded, his heart cracking. He remembered the haughty lift of her chin, her refusal to concede the foolishness of her decision when she had chosen to become a Village Spirit.

Lyra… was dead?

And now Devick had gulped down her image. He could see it there, like the bulge in the body of a greedy snake. Any lingering hesitations vanished. He would crush and tear his way through this wrongness, no matter the cost.

Congratulations! Your Skill Hungry Heart, Hollow Eyes, Cadence of Tragedy (GD) has grown to Level 1065!

In the space Randidly used to reveal his own monster, Devick leapt backward to open up some space. Her crimson hair flared out around her, making it seem like she bled outward into the environment, both the moon and the reflection and all of the agony. “Yes! Yes, exactly this! That’s how a son should look at a mother. Resent me! Hate me! For everything I gave to you, I took a treasure just as dear! Family are those who could reach into your vulnerability without you able to stop them.”

Congratulations! Your Skill Hungry Heart, Hollow Eyes, Cadence of Tragedy (GD) has grown to Level 1099!

Her words were practically nonsense. Randidly sought refuge in the oblivion of the consuming song, allowing his image to press against existence without a thought to the consequences. His movements made his body blurry, so much motion and force that existence could barely contain him.

Still cackling, Devick grasped into the underpinnings of the environment and began to warp it even further. She attempted to infect all with her wrongness. In a mockery of Randidly’s shift, the area exploded with the rattle of chains. They wound together and formed a hunched and monstrous spider of rust and madness, lifting its two forelegs to slash at him.

Randidly Ghosthound left hand tore through the first leg and he grabbed the second to drag the spider closer to him. Her madness sizzled against his fingers, but that was just more feed to pour into the Songtress’s annihilating ballad.

Congratulations! Your Skill Hungry Heart, Hollow Eyes, Cadence of Tragedy (GD) has grown to Level 1113!

“You know why I love you?” Devick giggled, without seeming to care Randidly’s wrath bludgeoned and overpowered her image as he dragged the massive spider closer. “You do not fear my touch. Because you know we are the same.”

Randidly unleashed a wordless scream. His grief curdled and lashed out, scraping his chest cavity raw. I wasn’t the one who fucking…!

Just as the massive spider came close enough for his scorpion tail to strike and pierce into Devick’s heart, the body exploded. All the disparate chains became reeling serpents, filled with self-destructive gluttony. They pounced toward him, intending to devour him, to bite him until more poisonous madness flowed through his veins than blood.

Like the fingers of the recently disturbed dead, the bare branches of Randidly’s wings twitched. In the next instant, Randidly’s back bulged as more and more cruel protrusions forced their way out from his shoulder blades.

While Devick could wield a near-infinite number of restrictive chains, the World Tree could produce enough branches to support all of existence. Chain and branch met and grappled, the swelling battleground grinding any remnants of the starting castle to dust.

Congratulations! Your Skill the First Tree Suffers Only Fealty (P) has grown to Level 1121!

Even through the haze of his fury, Randidly felt the power of Devick’s image. Her madness resisted his anger. A million serpents, half organic and half bloody metal, writhed and spat at each other. For several seconds, they remained locked in close contact. Not only had her Deviation somehow slithered closer to fulfillment than his, but she had been purifying her own image under normal System rules for a long, long time. Plus, the extra Grand Fates she was in the process of absorbing acted as batteries, adding a little extra juice to her

More madness sparked off her image and onto his as they ground against one another. The battlefield began to change. The touch of the metal against the branches became almost sensual.

He saw Lyra, her eyes sharp, within the grasp of the Creature, waiting for Randidly to come to save her. He saw her considering him when he finally arrived and she told him that she believed the Creature to be right; they could not fight against the entire universe, they should instead attempt to hide.

Those memories turned to embers within his veins. Now, with him just a step away from proving her wrong, Lyra as he knew her ceased to be.

Even so… even if you are gone…

Thick currents of Nether through his image prevented Randidly from being drawn into the strange warping power of Devick’s image. In a way, she was definitely right. They were similar. Both he and she opened Paths, his to a different way of existing, hers to a twisted version of reality filled with agony and malice. His to one where no matter how unreasonable your dream-

Randidly’s entire existence came into alignment. In a way, he learned from his close contact with her twisted Deviation Rarity. He saw how to advance further along his own Path.

Because for all the advantages that Devick possessed… Randidly had been given a secret Path. His vessel was already built; he contained worlds and worlds. When the depths of his emotional sea began to move, the balance abruptly began to tilt.

I’ll prove it to you. Randidly thought, tears still running down his cheeks. This whole Nexus? I’ll upend it.

He was incandescent, his emotions burning through his powerful body as he took a step forward. Yggdrasil snapped its way through the chains and the Randidly approached, a monster stalking its prey.