Chapter 1041 (1/2)

Randidly woke up with a wicked smile plastered across his face and a headache that drummed against his frontal cortex more violently than even the vilest hangover he had ever experienced as an undergraduate. With a groan, he rolled onto his back and attempted to sit up. The world began immediately to spin. His stomach gurgled unpleasantly.

Randidly obediently leaned back against the ground and stared at the ceiling of the tent. After the rotating world slowly settled back to only the normal amount of extra motion, Randidly raised his fingers to his temples and tried to massage away some of the pain. But of course, his bone spear simply smacked against his head and the claws of his left hand drew blood as he pressed them against his temple.

Groaning, Randidly rolled over onto his stomach and pressed his eyes shut. They weren’t wrong about image growth being rapid during those trials… I feel like the Grim Chimera really took a step forward after that. I even gained almost 20 Skill Levels… but the difficulty is a bit…

“Here, let me-”

Randidly jolted upward as his instincts screamed that there should be no inside the tent with him. That terrible paranoia that the Grim Chimera held roared to life with a vengeance. His spear was already blurring forward when several thin vines twisted upward and pulled his reflexive attack off of its previous course toward the being’s heart.

For a split second, Randidly was lulled into a shocked numbness as a golden and emerald treant stood in front of him. It didn’t have a face, but Randidly could sense form it a kind sort of patience toward his violent response. And of course, he was intimately familiar with the details of the treant’s body-

Then Randidly’s eyes caught up with his movement and the world began to spin. And then the two misbehaving layers of the world once more demanded his attention, heightening the wild movements of the world to an even more nauseating degree.

Randidly returned once more to the ground and took several deep breaths to steady himself. The cool feeling of dirt against his back was like his only anchor preventing him from willingly letting his mind drift away from this miserable moment and settle into oblivion. It grounded Randidly.

The golden treant, who Randidly now recognized as the personification of Yggdrasil, leaned over him. “...I didn’t mean to startle you. Let me assist with the healing. It’s the least I can do after your bore the weight of the Eidolon Crucible for all three of us.”

Randidly’s eyelids flickered. “Thanks. I”m glad you woke up. I was beginning… to wonder whether something had been done to the tents that suppressed images within it.”

Although he could not see them, Randidly sensed roots curling out of the ground to surround his head in a complex pattern. Tiny, immaculate leaves grew out from the roots and began to glow. Almost immediately, a cool sort of relief began to worm its way into the inner workings of his mind. It was like someone was pouring a bucket of chilled aloe directly over his overheated brain stem.

“No, it wasn’t the tent. When we… the three of us I mean, were ripped out of Randidly, I rapidly felt the connections between us deteriorating. We don’t have much in common, after all. I worried that without the presence of Randidly Ghosthound… we wouldn’t be able to work together well enough to escape this strange predicament. So I used every bit of my strength to forcefully remove the bits of Randidly’s personality that were present in myself and Ignition Essence… and pour them into you. That’s why I was so exhausted I needed to sleep. And Ignition…”

Yggdrasil seemed to wilt a little. “I worry… that I did something that I shouldn’t have done. The wounds I left… might be a bit too deep for it to recover from in the short term.”

Randidly's mind buzzed faintly as he processed that news. But very quickly, he realized that the much more important task was to recover from his own wounds. So he let those thoughts fall away and simply enjoyed the sensation of that cleansing energy and didn’t worry about what it all meant.

Randidly floated. He breathed. Other than that, Randidly bothered to do absolutely nothing.

Of course, such a reprieve couldn’t last forever. Or even for very long. After only two hours, Randidly leveraged himself back up to a sitting position and sighed. The one benefit that had come with experiencing that image trial from his Skill was that Randidly was briefly teleported to a location where the two fabrics of reality weren’t constantly spazzing away from each other and creating headache-inducing visuals.

But considering the fact that he was so swiftly brought back to this damned tent, it might be more of a torture device than a reprieve. Already Randidly felt the seeds of irritation at this damned place burrowing into his mood.

Still, Randidly felt much better than he had earlier. In addition, he could cope with the visuals without any difficulty once more. So he turned to Yggdrasil and said. “So, I’m not… actually Randidly?”

Yggdrasil shrugged. “Who is to say? Certainly, in terms of similarities to Randidly, you are the closest being in the universe.”