Chapter 734 (2/2)

Perhaps a relationship? One of the thick lines of karma he could see? Or-

In the core of Randidly, he found a floating figure. The powerful image he had spent much of today refining for detail, but which also held a great deal of emotional weight and memories.

His mother, if only in likeness. Randidly paused. Then he did his best to stop thinking about the ramifications of that. It felt right.

The timing would be important, but other than that, all he would need to do is let his inner images see it through.

The burning of his mother. Some part of Randidly twitched just thinking about it. Sure, she had put him through so much shit in his lifetime, but she was still his mother. She had given birth to him. There was really no harm in what Randidly was about to do, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like this strange mental act of rebellion was forbidden. It was a sacrilegious act of violence.

Randidly bared his teeth. That was, of course, where the power of burning it would come from. It was also while the Phantom he was slowly constructing for himself would be powerful. Because it signified something real that was lost to the darkness.

But to begin, Randidly needed his mother. Wide green eyes. Wavy, dark hair to her shoulders. A smile that only the charming troublemakers were able to pull off. Tall and slender for a woman, but shorter than him.

Then Randidly went in for the detail. Her perfectly white teeth from dental habits bordering between meticulous and obsessive. The bags under her eyes. The reddening knuckles of her hands as she aged. The perpetual frown she wore when she was trying to read.

The echoing sound of her laughter as she was in another room with one of her many male friends at night.

With his Mana back, Randidly once more called for an Incinerating Bolt. This time, he held that fire underneath his mother and watched as she slowly burned away.

Her skin rapidly dried and crackled. Then it flaked and smoked. Then slowly, her flesh caught fire. Her hair was rapidly consumed by the flames. The fat and skin on her body seemed to evaporate and leave ghastly white bone. Her clothes were lost in the hot conflagration around her.

The heat grew more and more intense because even after her face had burned away to leave the skull underneath, Randidly still could recognize it as his mother. Gritting his teeth, Randidly pressed with his will, urging the fire ever higher. The laughter continued to echo, joined by the tickling of a clock.

Those noises repeated until they lost meaning as the body was warped. With blazing eyes, Randidly witnessed every second of the changes.

If what fire does was reduce a substance to energy, take it all away. Wipe away the mark of my mother’s memory from my images, Randidly thought passionately. Burn it all away.

The skeleton bubbled and popped. The pure white of the bones began to fade into a dirty yellow. The bony fingers curled upward. The spine hunched forward. Wreathed in flames, the skeleton seemed to writhe like a piece of bacon on a hot skillet.

Fifteen seconds, Randidly’s Skill interrupted.

The illusion was shattered. His Mana long spent, the fire he held in his hand went out. His image collapsed with it, the heat and light dispersing instantly.

But Randidly began to laugh. Fifteen seconds. At most, his Mana was able to support two or three seconds of flickering heat and light. To increase that amount by five fold…

It remained to be seen whether that heat would be enough to light a fire, but it was definitely a start. More than that though, Randidly had also gained very useful from the image. With delicate care, Randidly plucked that image of a twisted and haunted skeleton and pulled it out of the fire.

Then he traveled deep into himself, finding the endless fields of frigid ash. There, he wrapped the skeleton in hundreds of layers of the ash, until it seemed to function as a core of a desolate world.

I’ll be back for you later, Randidly promised. Then, after a brief hesitation, Randidly reached out through the inner pathways he had discovered and found the connection he had to Acri. It had been a great relief to discover these because it meant that Acri and Sulfur hadn’t been destroyed.

But Randidly spread the vicious image of sharpness that Acri was eternally pursuing and spread it across the surface of the giant ball of ash.

For good luck.