Chapter 1044 (1/2)

A split second later, Randidly was floating in the Great Rift. Small azure paths of energy scurried by his face like schools of curious fish. Vast, black space pressed down on Randidly from every direction.

The first sensation that hit Randidly was a sledgehammer of cold. Not a physical cold, but a mental cold that felt like falling into oblivion and the hole you used to get there closing up behind you. Then an eternity seemed to pass, cracking through the neat processes of Randidly’s thoughts to rip at the core of his being. It was one of the worst feelings that Randidly had ever encountered.

Against the Judgment, Randidly had felt cold. But that was a literal cold that was so acute that it started to forcibly shut down Randidly's biological processes. His brain hadn’t been able to handle the temperature. That was the sort of trial that Randidly endured against the Judgment. But this cold seemed to extinguish Randidly's Willpower.

Don't lose yourself.

Randidly's eyes glowed with a furious emerald fire as he opened his mouth and roared. The noise started at the pit of his stomach and clanged back and forth through his organs, inside of his windpipes, and then ripping out of his throat. As if responding to the righteous fury and refusal in his chest, the snow globe clutched in his claw began to glow.

Simultaneously, something distant and ethereal began humming in Randidly's chest. Whatever was there began to slowly build as the cold continually pounded against his will to continue. As Randidly refused to give in, it budded like a flower in spring.

Yet it was the glow whipping outward into the surrounding darkness, smashing into the blue veins and shattering them, that finally freed Randidly from the vice grip of the cold. The outward expansion of light slowed and the energy whipped back to swirl around Randidly. The terrible cold was driven away and simultaneously the humming in Randidly's chest ceased.

But he found in himself a strange new capability; Randidly could use that light to shape the surrounding space. It was an instinctive feeling, but it felt impossibly true at that moment. Randidly could wave his hand and make.

Then that certainty trembled. Randidly spun around in his halo of light surrounded by darkness filled with azure veins and felt something desperately shooting toward his position through the unimaginably large space in the surrounding area. And as Randidly felt that expanded sense, he couldn’t help but gasp at the size of the darkness around him.

The teleporter had brought him out here, but Randidly could not for the life of him detect anything in the surrounding darkness but those intermittent azure lines. In the vast expanse of space, Randidly was completely alone.

For a second, Randidly thought while he tapped his jaw lightly. The strange certainty of creation, the huge distances, the lonely darkness… it all gave him pause. Yet he couldn’t wait around forever. It seemed that the response from the Nether was coming. Even here, a small island of slowly stabilizing Aether in the Nether, something was coming to kill him.

Randidly's face split into a grin. Some things are too comfortably familiar.

And with that thought in his mind, his will twitched and then spread outward in a nova of genesis. Within a second, that very same arena that Randidly faced the challenge of Donnyton and then the Eidolon Crucible condensed around him in stuttering waves of light and substance. The flat surface of the arena, the pristine waters of the quarry, the surrounding cliffs, the empty stands...

All was perfectly reproduced. The dreamland descended once more to surround Randidly.

Randidly's smile was the site of a vicious battle as hunger for violence and bitter regret warred across his face. There's a certain sort of poetic justice that I keep returning to fight in this place that I left annihilated… But I can’t help but fear that if I keep returning here, one day I will lose on this battlefield.

Then Randidly’s gaze hardened. But that day will not be today.

Then the Nether creature arrived, and all of Randidly's focus narrowed to a point.

Randidly wasn't sure what he had expected. But certainly, he didn't believe that this sinister existence, so reviled by Lord Miln and Zagnal, would turn out to be so... acceptable. Rather than some unspeakable horror with twisting inversions and an inside out body comprised mostly of hungry mouths, the being of Nether that pierced into Randidly's created area like an arrow was like a midnight black jellyfish. Its tentacles seemed rather dehydrated and wrinkly, but still, it was a familiar silhouette cast in inky blackness.

As it shot downward, it flailed wildly, ripping large gashes in the Aether that was pulsing out of his Aether Key.

Swirling it like an aura, however, was that same terrible chill that attempted to extinguish Randidly's Willpower. Yet with the admittedly fragile backdrop of the conjured world behind him, that same chill that had briefly left him stricken now filled Randidly will grim purpose.

”Let's see then, what a being of Nether can accomplish,” Randidly hissed as he stalked forward like a hunter going to meet game that had fallen into a snare.

The black jellyfish hit the edge of the arena like a comet, splitting the ground and sending shards of stone flying up into the air. Randidly activated Man is Proud, But the Chimera Craves and launched himself forward with all of the concentrated momentum of Spear Advances, Ash Trails. That very same aura of cold grew stronger as Randidly shot forward, but he ignored it. Even though the ground that the black jellyfish impacted began to slowly float upward as the concentrated Nether destabilized the space.

Randidly's emerald eyes were locked on the dozen or so tentacles that began to lash out and rip through the arena. Rather than an evil... Nether is just the opposite of Aether. It might be some sinister evil force whose invasion necessitated the System, but that doesn't change HOW it operates. And that way is to destabilize space by slowly sapping away the strength of inherent order of the world. Which... might just be an image...