Chapter 245 (2/2)

Randidly was in a clearing, and he paused, looking around. This… didn’t seem familiar. Shal was sitting against a tree on the far side, his head against his chest. Cradled in his arms was….

Randidly gasped. It was the head of that fucking Yeti. And on the ground next to the two of them was a sphere with a face in it. Dian’s face.

“Well, well, well. Who is spying on me now?”

Randidly spun around, surprised to hear a voice so near to him. The person behind him had the body of a woman, but her face was… blurred out, swirling with strange colors, so it was just a mess of colors. But she was tall and slim, with light purple hair.

“Ah, that’s smart. You can’t see me, I can’t see you. A clever way to do it. Looking for my location? Looking for my dearest Shal? But still, even if I don’t know who you are, I can still hurt you.”

The woman reached for Randidly, her hand beginning to glow a frosty blue-white color. But before she could touch him, Randidly snapped back into the rings, breathing heavily.

For whatever reason, that had given him the strangest sensation… of danger. What sort of memory was that? He had never seen Shal and the Yeti together… and Dian was there…? Maybe it was some sort of dream…?

“What…. what did I just see?”

The colossally big face floated closer, so much so that Randidly began to worry that it would seal the strange coliseum of stone rings, but it began to shrink, becoming simply the size an asteroid would need to be to cause a catastrophic loss of life when it descended to Earth. This allowed it to float marginally closer, and it seemed to breathe deeply, opening its huge maw wide and sucking in air, ruffling Randidly’s hair.

It was honestly somewhat pleasant, because the breeze at least cooled him off for a couple of seconds, while the temperature climbed ever higher.

“Kakakaka…..” The Patron of Ash rumbled. “Interesting. These test you, strike at your inner demons, your weaknesses. You need to be purified, in a way, to become my…. Anointed. What you saw, is an outstanding weakness of yours.”

“What does that even mean?” Randidly growled, but the Patron of Ash continued to just chuckle in its odd way, sucking in air occasionally, getting some sense of what Randidly saw.

Still, it left Randidly’s mind racing. He could be self reflective enough to admit that Shal probably was a point of struggle and weakness in Randidly’s psyche, probably because Shal fit so perfectly into the disappointed and distant dad role that had been open for years. Even thinking it made Randidly grit his teeth with bitterness.

Then that image was related to purifying that weakness? Or overcoming it? Or… was it showing him the state of that weakness right now?

Because that image definitely had a different feel to it than the previous ones. It wasn’t trying to immerse him and drown him, like the others, with familiar images or emotions. It was trying to show him something. A name rose unbidden in Randidly’s mind.

Lucretia.

Shal had left, but… where had he gone…? Divveltian seemed to think that he had been behaving weird, but to Randidly, he had simply shrugged and accepted it, because he had been conditioned on mentor figures leaving in his life. But perhaps he should have been more skeptical of the leaving. After all, so far, Shal hadn’t done much to abandon him-

Aside from beat him, berate him, constantly refuse to acknowledge him, and then leave him without a clue what to do and head off to a dungeon.

But setting most of those things aside, the only real abandonment was heading to the dungeon. Was it possible that already at that point, he was under the influence of something else? Driven and manipulated by his hatred of this woman to rush towards her. In a way, it reminded Randidly of what the Creature had done to him.

But where the Creature was a master of runes and Aether, this woman seemed to use more traditional means of emotional manipulation.

If this was the case, and that was a big if. But it also explained Dian’s sudden strange suicide on the ring. If she had been pushed by Lucretia…. Again, only an if.

The temperature continued to rise, and Randidly gritted his teeth. He couldn't just sit and think. He needed to proceed forward. So with a step, Randidly moved towards the 5th ring of stones, descending dutifully towards that crimson and black sphere.