Chapter 1076 (1/2)

With most of his mind freed up by simply following the cascading motion of his own momentum, Randidly was able to slap some much needed stop-gap fixes onto his heavily damaged image. There wasn’t any immediately noticeable healing, but the edges of Randidly’s will did stop annoyingly drifting away as he struggled to continue.

Fuck… that was much closer than I would have liked… Randidly thought through the pounding of his headache. I can’t believe I’m still upright...

Stemming the worst of the mental wounds, in turn, freed up a few more iotas of his mental strength and allowed Randidly to perform a few quick repairs and return his image to an even more stable state. Of course, this healing progress wasn’t free; while Randidly was carefully fixing himself and rushing headlong forward, the soldiers that followed him were furiously repelling the attacks of the Nether Beasts. It seemed that they no longer felt the need to wait to amass before attacking. They were simply flowing forward like an unending river that battered at them from every angle.

And Randidly was leading the charging group of soldiers directly upstream.

Who the fuck decided to put the exit point on the exact opposite side of the base from where we arrived, Randidly thought grimly. We have to push directly through their main forces to escape… And if I’m doing that while I’m trying to recover…

Randidly barely was able to keep up a basic perception scanning the surrounding area while they continued their mad dash. Not that there was any real point to it; He didn’t even bother to make even the slightest evasive maneuvers. Such an expenditure would quickly bankrupt his already overworked mind. When he looked too far forward, his vision seemed to shake as his mind couldn’t smooth out the rapid changes in information that he was receiving.

Too much was going on at once. The Nether Beasts were too numerous.

His brain hitting a limit was obviously not a good sign. But it just went to show how well guarded the base of the Nether Gatekeeper was. Although the number of foes Randidly had fought on this mission were small, they were all elites that he had defeated only by relying on his abilities with both Nether and Aether, not because he was more powerful than them. Perhaps even more troublesome was all the extremely dense Nether he had to swim through to travel around the area. Most of the time they had a protective image to take the edge off of it, but the most dangerous battles always meant that Nether was pushed through the protective image to eat directly at his body.

Pressing his eyes closed, Randidly allowed his own momentum to carry him forward. He really needed to steady himself. For a split second, his entire focus confronted the gruesome task of giving his entire remaining image a scan to determine if there were any areas that would be easily repairable. Because that was exactly what he needed.

Unfortunately. Randidly didn’t see any easy fixes. His heart sank. But as his attention stayed for several seconds, Randidly discovered something extremely strange occurring within himself.

His image body was healing automatically. It was slow, but even with the continued corrosion of Nether it was definitely happening.

Randidly’s eyes flicked open in shock. But when no obvious explanations for that sudden change presented themselves, worries began to congregate in his heart. A frown creased his face as he continued to rush forward.

Now that he considered the past couple of encounters more directly, it was extremely strange that he had been able to stabilize himself after being weakened and then smashed backward by the collision between Vualla and the Nether Wells. That alone should have knocked him out. Plus, Randidly then handled several seconds of the inner portion of his image being blasted by the Nether Well without any ill-effects at all.

Due to how quickly each of those events had occurred, Randidly hadn’t been able to pay much attention to them. He had just been thankful that he had been able to pull through the trials. But honestly…

Trying his best to ignore the grunts and groans of the soldiers following him, Randidly did his best to calm his mind and quickly find the source of this healing.

Once he knew what he was looking for, it didn’t take long to find the culprit. However, when he first traced the strange, healing reverberations, he couldn’t believe what he saw. From his two cores, an ambient warmth was spreading outward through thin tendrils of Nether that brushed against the wounded portions of his image.

When Randidly examined the cores more closely, he was shocked to realize that there was a faint outline of his prior image hovering inside of them, an exact replica of the image he possessed before coming to the Great Rift today.

Randidly shivered. Of course, the bubble doesn’t matter as much as the core. The outward image is maintained by the energy flowing outward to form the bubble. Which might also be a reason that too many cores begin to bog down a physical body; its attempting to heal the bubble to its prior form, but the body resists the change naturally. To the body, it just feels like a strange foreign image. But since I am a relatively more malleable image…

As Randidly’s awareness brushed up against the cores, a strange certainty filled him that he had no way of explaining; if he were to bring his cores to touch the edge of the ‘bubble’ around him, it would take a snapshot of his current image that would be the source of healing henceforth.

Obviously, that would be a waste at the moment, as those two cores steadily sending energy toward his image was the only reason he had maintained his clarity to this point. But it was a good reassurance that Randidly wouldn’t be stuck with his current image forever.

The only problem was that this would technically put a stop to the rather productive process of having the Grim Chimera image ground down to nothing and then steadily built back up again. However, sometimes long term growth needed to take a back seat for current survival. And considering the constant attacks that the Nether Beasts were launching toward them, Randidly could worry about becoming even more powerful at another time.

The growing noise of combat made Randidly groan and force his eyes open. His mouth twisted as he glanced behind him and noticed that two of the previously injured soldiers were not following along with the group any longer; it appeared that they had been completely killed by the barrage of attacks. Even more concerning was the fact that their formation was slowly spreading out as those who were protecting Randidly couldn’t keep up with him and his continued mad dash.