Charlotte Wick swayed slightly while standing at attention, as though she wanted so very badly to be pacing back and forth across the grass. At her side, Jieu Ronault served as a foil, the flames of his fire elemental body having been purified and petrified from their last brutal offensive to discover the purpose of the Engraving.

His existence didn’t even quiver. He had no breath, he had no life, he seemed very convincingly to have no emotion.

Edgar, the most honest of the group, wept openly in front of the small and sharply cut stone markers. His shoulders shook and every few seconds he used the cuffs of his uniform to wipe away thick waves of tears. Around him, the other foot soldiers of the Vulpis Squad tried to make up for the breach in etiquette by being physically as transfixed as statues, but Raymund Ballast would not reprimand them for any flaws, not today. Besides, his eyes mostly flicked sideways to check on DiOrtho Vant.

His discipline holds, for now. Raymund felt so drained. Yet all living beings have a limit. Even I.

The demon man gritted his teeth, his emotions so violent and furious that he stirred up a low wind in the area around him. The freshly turned dirt shifted slightly, restless in the face of this restless grief.

After bowing his head briefly, Raymund Ballast lifted his chin and assumed the mantle of the Squad leader. “Today, we bury heroes. A moniker earned through sacrifice and dedication. Elucidating further cannot capture the risk these soldiers faced, nor their willingness to put their lives on the line in order to protect the people of the Alpha Cosmos. Their hearts swam through fear without letting it distract from their grim purpose. And in fact many, on their deathbed, wounded and struggling on those alien battlefields, only expressed they were sorry not to have done more for their families. The Order Vulpis… walks into hell, itching for their next challenge.

“Let us hope they need not face it. That what comes next for them is writ with serenity and peace.”

“The only thing they needed to do,” Charlotte Wick whispered. “Was to make it home with us.”

Raymund Ballast shot her a reproving glance but continued without acknowledging her breach. “We will remember their names. They trained with us, they fought with us, and they were the first to die for us. So long as the Vulpis Squad exists, we will remember them. Duon Mlo. Tzerik. Falnor. Heiffal. Kimbant Lar. Vizzeret Clamman-”

“That fucking dumbass dog,” The air around Vant snapped. Suddenly the Machine Horror was there, razing its chainsaw arms, grinding its ancient, drill teeth, screeching out a keening wail of mourning. It was a body of jagged edges and barely contained energy. Even after an hour of rest and recovery, the image proudly bore the wounds it had taken during the fighting, leaving huge rents in its sheet metal body. Vant’s pupils dilated. “You… if we had stayed in formation… you didn’t need to buy us a last few seconds, holding off Pine’s gaze all on your own…”

I cannot call it festering, being composed of metal. Raymund thought. But this soldier is not in a good place.

“Vant,” Jieu’s voice was cool and cutting.

DiOrtho Vant gave him two middle fingers for his trouble. “Seriously, why are we fucking acting like he did something great, when he gave up his life so easily-”

“Vant,” Raymund Ballast snapped his teeth shut on the name.

The demon man glared at him for several seconds, temper and grief igniting into a horrible conflagration. The tension hummed the air, a mirror of the strange, rumbling changes occurring across the sky of the Alpha Cosmos. Raymund Ballast did not reach for his image, but simply stood and looked.

In the end, Vant looked away. Ballast cleared his throat and enunciated the rest of the names. His heart broke at how long the list was. With two more deaths, they would have lost fully half of their number. A few others amongst the foot soldiers began to cry, Vant’s display at least waking them up from their shock and giving them a chance to grieve.

However, finishing the names did not mean that Ballast’s responsibilities had come to an end. While various soldiers drifted to the different graves to pay their respect, a wild-eyed squad leader marched up and asked. “What now?”

Several of the other soldiers looked over, their eyes somewhat bleak. Raymund released an inward sigh. And without reading their mood, Charlotte Wick stepped forward and executed a sharp salute toward the sky. “We watch and observe. Can you not see that the Ghosthound still fights for us? So long as the war continues, we must be ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice. We hold our weapons ready, waiting for the call.”

The sky roiled and bulged, an amorphous blob of distortion undulating its way down to touch the Alpha Cosmos with its infectious world-state. As the soldier watched, clouds erupted with misty tendrils shaped like roots, wrapping around the distortion and restraining its descent. Yet each second, wave after wave of distortion pressed downward, steadily forcing its way forward through the barrier.

“What can we do against that…?” One soldier whispered. And Raymund could understand the exhaustion in her expression; they had risked their lives to protect the Alpha Cosmos, they had fought and won to discover a secret. Yet every individual had their limits. At some point, they fought for too long and no longer had the imaginative energy to consider the consequences of fighting or not fighting.

Which was a perfectly fair response, when so much had been asked for them. When they barely had a few minutes between burying their dead and being asked to consider the next threat they needed to address. When quite a few of the reasons they fought… were now buried in the ground in front of them.

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“Our gazes have meaning, our presence has meaning.” Charlotte’s eyes burned as she looked toward the sky; she had chosen to grieve by clenching her fists and throwing herself into the next challenge. “We need to be present for the Ghosthound-”

“What Wick means is that she acknowledges the fighting has gone past the point where we can intervene. But that does not mean the fighting is over. Out of respect, we will stand vigil for the conflict.” Raymund Ballast gestured. “At ease, soldiers. We might no longer have the clout to appear on this battlefield, but we will observe the fighting done by Randidly Ghosthound and wish him well.”

*****

Randidly did not discard his personality or body, but rather the framework holding himself together. The pieces came loose a thousand dazzling bits of accomplishments now unsure of how they meshed.

Growing with the System had begun with the establishment of his original anchors, his Stats. As Randidly had grown more powerful and evolved himself beyond humanity, he had completely remade those anchors. The shift in anchors allowed him to manifest even more ridiculous displays of power. It had given his images a little extra leverage, based on those anchors.

This time, using a reverse-engineered method derived from bringing people out of the Sonora, Randidly obliterated the grip he held on reality. The working that erupted from Pangu’s Asymptote cut through like a guillotine. He maintained his anchors; those powerful Stats would be carried along with him to whatever sort of ‘existence’ would be in store for him.

But they couldn’t accurately be called anchors any longer, because they held onto nothing. All aspects of himself drifted in separate directions, ephemeral and loose as a cloud. The Alpha Cosmos remained his Core, but rather than being his body, the separate universe almost became just a body, one that dreamed him into existence.

One which lived and breathed his Legend, giving him legitimacy. It wasn’t entirely a correct metaphor… but this process had essentially turned his life into a world-state image. They believed in him, so he was.

That was just how the world worked.

Randidly exhaled, even though he didn’t feel any need to. His body pulsed and shivered, clammy and fiery at the same time. The shift came with a slew of just slightly uncomfortable sensations. He still felt his self and images being spread across separate timelines, but now that he was unmoored, he began to pull those pieces back into alignment. He felt as though he sat at the conflux of a thousand rivers, each current trying to pull a part of him in a new direction. He was the dream, not the dreamer, and corralling himself proved tiresome.

…honestly, extremely tiresome. Especially with Elhume and Fiero gazing soulfully into each other’s eyes and continuing their little melodrama right in front of him. Despite the dangerous ripples he released, they didn’t acknowledge his dramatic accomplishment.

Most likely, most of it was muted by the choppy radiation of Laplace and Pine. But still, it doubled Randidly’s aggravation as he listened to them.

“...no, I will not rely on you this time.” Elhume finally said through gritted teeth. He pivoted and looked up toward Pine. At this point, ripples periodically pulsed out of the event horizon, even as the destructive hunger from that being liquified the ground. “Perhaps this development is fine. So long as Pine can be healed-”

“You speak with such absolute confidence. Yet I wonder how long that attitude will last.” Fiero said. “If you truly possessed this sort of resolve, we would not have ended up like this, over and over again.”

Randidly pressed with Grey Monarch’s Authority, isolating the distorted version of his images and bringing them back into alignment. When this proved extremely exhausting, Randidly began remaking his images from scratch. Which proved disturbingly easy, as his sharp memory gave him all the details and emotional affects he needed to recreate them.

Yea, this is going to take some getting used to… Randidly bit the inside of his cheek but kept working, moving from his images to his body, and then from his body to his Nether Core. But here, he began encountering more difficulties.

Immediately, it became clear that his efforts stirred the general consciousness of the Alpha Cosmos. As he nudged the general world-state image, a referendum was passed to the mass of consciousnesses providing his legitimacy. Could Randidly Ghosthound fight against an Eternity and overcome its mandate? The people of the Alpha Cosmos didn’t have any reckoning of what an Eternity was, but Randidly did, and a distorted and vague impression filtered down through to them.

Could Randidly Ghosthound wrestle and overcome a dimensional horror crawling into the Nexus?

Randidly left Elhume and Fiero and was suddenly in the Alpha Cosmos. Dusk fell across the mainland of Expira, covering the world in twilight. He flitted across the sky, looking at the way his significance restricted the mandate left by Laplace, that time was fickle, keeping it from infecting the Alpha Cosmos. In his half-whole dreamstate, he steadily lost ground but would be able to keep the force at bay for a while.

The question settled across the isolated universe. And unfortunately, the initial reaction was… not good.

Fear and worry exploded within the hearts of the denizens of the Alpha Cosmos, a thousand tiny sparks sizzling in the homes and neighborhoods. The response came mostly from those who had not developed their Class very far, who found pleasure developing lifestyle-related Skills, who had gratefully put behind them the days they needed to fight to survive and Level.

They also reacted most viscerally to the presence of this new monster, looming over them.

Fathers and mothers sat up in their beds, their minds briefly going blank at the prospect of their children being exposed to the danger. Partners still awake that night looked over at their sleeping love and considered what it would mean to lose them. Teachers hunched over their desks to grade papers flashed back to those early days of the System, when violence was rampant and children were often the first to suffer. All these individuals didn’t want this next generation to be exposed to a repeat of that bloody chaos. Fear slithered through their hearts, its cool scales warping their perspective.

The question was about Randidly Ghosthound, but all understood how they existed within him at this point. So the people began to get distracted. If he were to throw down against an extra-dimensional being, what would that mean for them?

Then these individuals walked outside to get some fresh air and consider. Their impression of looming doom was not alleviated when they looked up and saw clouds grappling with a monstrous-seeming distortion. If anything, the visual was worse at night, when it seemed as though a tide of oblivion swept down from the heavens to drown them all.

A reality-less Randidly felt his own efforts turning sluggish in the face of their doubts. Whatever strange form he had achieved would let him avoid some of his other problems… but he could not do it without the blessing of the Alpha Cosmos.

Just as Neveah had desperately warned him.

She was the one pure beacon of support in the frothing panic spreading across the Alpha Cosmos. She steadied him, but she, alone, would not be enough.

The question spread and settled further across the Alpha Cosmos.

Opposite their reticence, Randidly felt his own resolve hardening.