Devick accepted the fourth offering from Enmya, an unadorned copper blade that had been hammered into shape using solely Nether. The workmanship of the weapon was rough, but it felt both heavy and warm in her hands. More annoying than any of the details, however, was how powerful this common weapon seemed to be.

She suppressed the urge to brandish it back and forth, like a child play-acting at war. Despite all the import of this ritual, she felt quite bored. And as though the multiverse heard and understood her frustration, the Alpha Cosmos shivered.

Holding the refined weapon, Devick felt the strangest sensation beneath her feet. As though the solid ground were cracking and she now was balanced precariously upon a tiny barge of substance drifting on the stirring sea of Nether within the Alpha Cosmos. The ground became an unstable ice floe. Any wrong move could overstrain her vessel and result in her plunging into its depths.

Even Enmya began to frown, looking down at his now empty hands. The Nether Rituals circling their positions pulsed and flickered, casting strange shadows across his face. “This… should there have been such an immediate response on only the fourth offering?”

Devick did her best to stay still, although she felt a strange tugging upon the weapon she now held. Malice leaned closer, peering at the energies sloshing within it. Probably this could be used to slay a god, too. Even the small items in rituals used to empower Randidly Ghosthound are so powerful. Can I really belong at his side…?

No, that’s the entire point, isn’t it? Devick’s grip tightened on the weapon until her knuckles were white and she felt the metal deforming in her hand. Her vessel shook, very slightly. I claimed a place by his side because I refused to imagine a world where I did not. Unreasonability is my greater weapon.

Balance was just an illusion. Only those who looked past their illusory refuge could see the most daring Path forward.

Lowanna drew her fingers in the air, tracing small patterns. Her lips thinned at what she discovered. “We knew this arrangement was without any comparable predecessors. The potency of the response simply proves we are on the right track. As the volume of Nether grows… unexpected wrinkles in the pattern are inevitable.”

“Shouldn’t we be more cautious in how we proceed? We will not get a second chance at this,” Enmya frowned. “Can his body really handle this…?”

Devick had a moment of monstrous clarity. Just sitting through the ritual would not bring her any closer to her goal. And she knew in her bones that Randidly was altogether too much of a fool to have taken the ‘stable’ route.

She knew what she had to do.

Devick adjusted the sword in her grip and pointed her blade toward the ground. With Malice grinning, she drove the copper blade into small central point of dirt without any glowing symbols on it. Both Lowanna and Enmya froze and watched her with wide eyes as Devick gripped the hilt and twisted it, popping open an even larger flaw in the small bit of stable significance beneath them.

“What are you doing?” Enmya gapped.

After a single warning tremble from the ground, a grander ritual unfolded on that ‘key’ Devick wielded. A thousand organic Nether patterns swirled up out of the ground and created a storm of significance around their position. The calcified skin of energy cracked and revealed the beating heart and lifeblood of the work they were doing. More and more patterns slithered out and bled into one another, forming a massive, churning maelstrom of patterns.

A dome formed above their heads, blotting out light from the sun with its swirling arrangements.

Twilight felt cool against Devick’s skin after the heat of the daylight. Rising winds tore down the small trees nearby and tossed them across the surrounding hills. However, the more ominous development was the long fingers forcing their way out of the ground. Soon forearms and Randidly torsos followed, blank-eyed zombies shambling to their feet and turning their misty gazes toward the three individuals working in the middle of the Nether Ritual.

“Fascinating,” Lowanna announced with a remarkable amount of poise. She nodded to Devick. “She used the sword to carve her way from the surface of the Randidly’s significance to its very core. Can you see the patterns Enmya? You were perhaps correct; we will need to make some small adjustments.”

“But what the fuck are they?” Enmya waved a hand as the first few Randidlys began to stumble toward their position.

“Subconscious impulses. Monstrous dreams. Dark sublimated desires from the Alpha Cosmos. Deviations or contradictions that developed within his Nether Core. Flaws, which upon being cleansed will make the result all the more overwhelming.” She raised her hand, her own Nether beginning to flow between her fingers. “Do try your best to hurry, Enmya. I am not sure how long I will be able to hold them off.”

As one, all of the Randidlys opened their mouths and began to release keening noises of hatred.

Devick, personally, thought that she wouldn’t really mind being swarmed from every side by an army of ravenous Randidlys. But she knew Enmya was probably too temperamental to handle this delicious truth at the moment.

*****

Congratulations! Your Skill Randidly Ghosthound, Executive of Nether Reborn (GD)(U) has grown to Level 1700!

Randidly didn’t blink as he forced his way forward through the lashing and stabbing of her infectious chains. His body, his mind, his emotions all swam in madness. Its hooks aimed for the soft flesh of his emotion, to penetrate and twist.

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But his mind sat safely in the core of an event horizon. His emotions might be warped and mutated by Devick’s influence, but they would never lose track of their target-- Randidly had long ago abandoned his humanity in exchange for power. His body was anchored by the significance built from his memories of his time with Lyra.

Lyra who now-

His hand a claw of vengeance, the monstrous Ghosthound ripped through the chains and reached for Devick’s body. Darkness roiled and shredded its way through aura of protective rust. Both of their images were so agitated by the emotions that the contact became almost mutual detonation, emotion against emotion. While he seethed, she howled in response.

Their mental force pressed as close as lovers, destroying each other with their barbed embrace.

But just as Randidly believed he would shred her, the body of the Actus Suprem opened like a cocoon. A twisted creature of madness flung itself backward, avoiding the strike. He crunched the discarded skin in between his fingers and unleashed waves of roots and branches, after her. She skittered sideways, avoiding his attack. His lips twitched.

Yggdrasil creaked and rustled, as its full power was brought to bear. He built a cathedral to the sky and roofed her in. He wove spikes from the ground and prepared a massive coffin for the burial of this cancer in the Nexus. The event horizon opened wider and wider, ready to swallow her up.

Devick’s madness dug deeper into the fabric of existence as she eluded him. For a brief moment, the crimson moon and its reflection appeared again, but then chains of madness rattled and revolved around those two luminous orbs to form a giant humanoid form within the confines of the root cathedral. The gleaming moons, one cool and reflected, the other bright and bloody, become the chain avatar’s eyes. Other absorbed Grand Fates flared and expanded at Devick’s prodding to become other warped limbs. A crystal ax in the left hand, a serpent’s tail with azure and violent scales for its bottom half, and a seething core of necromantic energies in her navel. Devick’s true body sank into that necrotic power, fleeing even further from the reach of his roots.

The massive Devick raised its weapons, the ‘truths’ of those images screeching together in a horrible cacophony that shook the air. He could feel the way her presence warped the Nexus, the longer she was allowed to persist. “Is this all you have, Randidly? It won’t be enough.”

Randidly didn’t bother to respond, but Devick continued as though he had. The thick connections of her image wriggled and pulsed in the air around her floating form. They became veins, connecting body to image to Grand Fate to existence. Her wrongness trembled and writhed, a lithe body just an inch from a shattering orgasm. “I am more than just this body, now. You’ve shown me how to be a force. Where insanity can respire, so can I.”

The Nexus squirmed in protest as her words started to make it so. The notes were horrible and screeching, a dozen voices clashing against one another. Bound and chained Grand Fates screamed, but their resistance only fueled the furnace of her toxic revolution. Yet the real source of alarm was a change dawning in her, a light that spread and stilled existence in the surrounding area. The same sort of change Randidly had witnessed once, in the memory.

Devick began warping the world with the arrival of a deviated ‘truth’. Just as Fiero and Elhume, hand in hand, had changed the Nexus and reached the Pinnacle.

But a foe on the cusp was far from beyond him.

“You are just one woman who refuses to admit her faults.” The event horizon obliterating his head grew wider and wider. Randidly’s gaze never wavered; while Devick tried to distract him with talking, she had already begun to gnaw on other Grand Fates to absorb and use against him. Nether howled and swirled within his body.

Now was the chance to stop her. It would only get harder from here.

His fury burned through his muscles, trembling with the exhaustion of climbing to this point. Even his powerful body couldn’t bear the emotional intensity of an entire world for very long. For this decisive strike, he didn’t rely on images, just on his overwhelming emotional force. He breathed in and closed his eyes. An avatar of all the Alpha Cosmos’s rage settled into a fighting stance.

Vengeance incarnate, for all those loved ones killed by the System’s callous methods, thrust forward Randidly Ghosthound’s speartail.

The two reflected moon eyes watched the blow. Devick’s monstrous offhand reached up and caught the emotional force. Image met image, deviation smashed into deviation. Devick laughed, loud and echoing.

He could feel her soul, twisted and scarred. She was not unfamiliar with an entire world hoping she would die. She had endured such rejection for as long as she lived. Where his fury seared her image, her grief and pain chilled his attack.

Even through his fury, Randidly felt Devick’s power rival his own. He could feel the essence of her body rapidly shifting, being baptized by her strange transformation. He felt the wrongness proliferating, corroding and altering the fabric of existence. Her words seemed to haunt existence, a world-state adjacent image, but one affecting only her.

Where insanity can respire, so can I.

The light from the crimson moons brightened, a slightly different shade than the hair of the Actus Suprem. The reality of the current situation cut through the pounding of Randidly’s blood, his wild sense of loss and fury. Devick grasped her way up to a warped version of the Pinnacle, right in front of him. The sky had begun to rotate, the not-Pinnacle event warping the surrounding environment with its imminent arrival.

Randidly felt like his own personal grief took from him with just as much surety as his Visage of Obsession. Seeing his strike rebound shook loose a few more cracked pieces of his psyche. Rage lived and breathed within his chest, swelling to fill the missing pieces.

He would not stop until he had buried the Actus Suprem.

He raised his arms and shredded the edges of Devick’s avatar body. His wings beat and beat, the World Tree cracking the body in front of it. Nether roared through his body. His tail became a machine gun, drilling again and again with Acri. Striking the pure image reaction happening again and again.

With the force he wielded, he chipped and cracked her image array. But that only seemed to make it fester and solidify more quickly. His body was covered in sweat and his muscles trembled. The event horizon of the Songstress of Absence spun its way wider, beginning to eclipse the tops of his shoulders.

Neveah unleashed a powerful mental warning, to catch his attention. Elhume is moving again, in your direction. If you do not finish this soon-

Randidly just roared. He had wanted so badly to protect the people from Expira. And over and over again…

Lyra Silver, for all her flaws, was the first person to ever tell him, with her chin raised and sniffing, that he wouldn’t be able to manage it. A single man simply couldn’t protect everyone.

No powerful Randidly became, she had been right about that.

She had died because he wasn’t enough.

Randidly- Neveah tried to intercede, but already the pressure built and burst within his chest.

His scream was completely muted by the event horizon around his head, but then the Songstress of Absence amplified and weaponized his wild outburst. The Hungry Eye opened and revealed a mouth that screamed of cessation. A pure blast of oblivion carved through the wild, discordant notes of her image and crashed against Devick’s main body, wreathed in necrotic power.