Chapter 1050 (1/2)

When Randidly came back to himself, everything was fuzzy and blurred. It was like someone had left a sticky residue over all of his perceiving organs. Sensation was strange. But some deeper necessity from his core urged Randidly force himself into wakefulness. So he scowled and forced his gummy eyes open.

Randidly was sitting in a small bubble about five meters in diameter filled with swirling ash. After thirty seconds, his gaze shifted to the limit of that bubble. Beyond that, the familiar sight of the Great Rift loomed imposingly in the background.

See? Alive and with a bit of Aether surrounding me. It seems that I barely need to be conscious in order to slaughter batbeasts. And I cannot sense anything in the surrounding area. No need to wake up from my nap yet…

After closing his eyes, Randidly allowed himself the briefest moment of surrender to the aches and pains that he was now strapped with. Then he forced his eyes back open.

...I would say if I wanted to die here. Randidly groaned and forced himself to stretch and strand. Which was surprisingly difficult, considering the mauled and wane form of the Grim Chimera’s image. As Randidly shifted, he realized exactly how much damage he had sustained fighting against the batbeasts; Randidly's left arm was completely gone and one of his legs was melted up to the knee.

Charming fuckers.

Groaning again, Randidly began the fuzzy work of bringing the Grim Chimera back into focus. The left arm was the most important because without it Randidly was basically left with a single chopstick with which to go about his daily life. Comical as such an image would be, it would certainly undermine the violence and urgency of the image.

After that rather pressing bit of repair work, Randidly did a few touches on his head and torso to remove the vicious scarring the claws of the batbeasts had left on his flesh. Which turned out to be a very time-consuming activity. Finally, Randidly began the frustrating task of trying to recall how the inverted joints of his legs worked.

Certainly, he remembered that the knees and ankles were inverted. However, he had never really examined the mechanical shifts of the joints enough detail to reproduce them. So Randidly was forced to experiment in his small bubble of swirling ash.

All the while, the all-consuming headache continued to pound like a hammer against the base of his skull. Shaking his head, Randidly did his best to push that away and focused on recovering his ability to fight. With Eternal Cravings of the Wraith, Randidly sucked in a bit of the surrounding Aether to take the edge off of his pain. The swirling sphere of ash around him decreased by a full meter.

Randidly eyed the space bitterly. Well, at least my bubble is still intact. And that Aether helped a lot...

Randidly checked his body out once more and could only wince. Perhaps even worse than his patchy skin, which appeared to have been set on fire and then boiled, was the sludge-like byproduct that resulted from Nether and Aether fizzling out on top of each other. His body was covered with that ooze.

Several layers of it, in fact. It was possible to see where earlier layers dried and then were covered in a new layer.

Irritably, Randidly wiped the gunk away. Or at least he tried to while using the ungainly remnant of his bone spear. But he mostly just managed to smear it across himself. Even worse, it seemed that more oozed out of his image every second like an oozing sore from third-degree burns.

Growling in frustration, Randidly slumped back and allowed himself a few seconds of rest to cope with the pain coming from his head. His Willpower was blunted and depleted after all of the major repairs had been accomplished. Yet this was only the beginning of the recovery process. With no way to accurately measure how much time Randidly had been in here, he could only act like he would be required to stay here for quite some time.

So with the most pressing repairs done, Randidly allowed himself to sink into a more focused recuperative state. The flow of blood had been stemmed, now Randidly needed to give himself the chance to regain his clarity. He allowed time to drift away to the realm of unimportance. His mind settled down into a hibernative state.

When Randidly felt well enough to pull himself out of that meditation, he found that although the pain was still present, it had faded to a dull ache. A tiny mallet playfully tapping against his temples. Much more pressing was the fact that the swirling sphere of ash had shrunk to only a meter.

Randidly eyed his chest doubtfully. No touch ups to my area, main body? A little bit of Aether would go a long way right now.

Minutes crept past and there was no change. Shaking his head, Randidly set that problem aside for the immediate future and turned his attention outward to the ominous fluctuations of the Great Rift around him.

What he found made Randidly swear quietly. It was clear that at some point while Randidly was indisposed, that huge mass of Nether in the distance had drifted closer. In addition, Randidly could feel a dozen batbeasts or similar monsters slowly spreading out away from that mass of Nether. They didn't appear to be rushing over toward Randidly, but it was easy to see them as a net that was slowly spreading out to surround him. Although their movements were slow, that only made him take the threat more seriously.

Heh, if you want a fucking fight, I’m ready and willing.

Snorting, Randidly pulled back his focus to his body. But as he did so, he felt the faintest glimmer of resonance from his chest. It was a low thrum like a single guitar string being plucked.

What was that?