Chapter 1112 (2/2)

There were plenty of ways Randidly could choose to die. And it was a very thin Path that Randidly walked to survive.

So he trained. Time began to pass more quickly as Randidly quickly found a pattern to his days. First, training his Skills that he had access to in his partial main body incarnation. Then some time spent trying to condense the false Nether cores. Finally, Randidly would use Nether abilities he was slowly growing to understand in order corrode the surrounding Aether directly and passively working on the lock.

Although the ivory lock was basically almost destroyed, Randidly’s attention was mostly directed toward depleting the Aether Key and managing the Fate blade he had already ingested. Based on the steady stream of energy that continued to flow from the dull grey blade, Randidly could sense that he wasn’t in danger of depleting it anytime soon. There was quite a bit more than he could absorb within its mysterious metal depths.

And this was just ambient energies of the blade. Randidly hadn’t even gotten near the cores images that had formed it yet. He had a long way to go.

Then after practicing with his energies, for a full 24 hours, Randidly would open up a Nether RItual and watch someone for 8 hours of their time and restart his two-day cycle. Mostly he focused on Vualla and Yggdrasil as they continued to endure the brutal attacks of a constant flood of Nether Beasts. He could see wariness building in the expressions as their postures continued to strain underneath the weight of their responsibilities.

Yggdrasil’s generosity was put to the test time and time against as more and more people in Lady Iellaya’s camp learned of his ability to help alleviate image damage. Yet to the Grim Chimera’s clenched-teeth shock, Yggdrasil never turned anyone away. If anything, he continued to push himself harder and harder in order to make a difference where he could.

The emerald leaves of Yggdrasil began to fade and look positively wilted as he constantly pressed his image to the limits of what it could endure. Yet Randidly could not find fault with Yggdrasil, not after he had done similarly dangerous things as the Grim Chimera. It left him feeling rather suffocated.

Vualla was even more aggravating to watch. Most of her time was either spent alone, fighting against Nether Beasts, or enduring the constant physical and verbal abuse of Cail Tweocs. She began silent and unreadable, often leaning forward to allow the veil of her azure hair to fall across her features while maintaining her silence. As Cail harassed her, she simply endured.

When Randidly didn’t look at either of those two people, he watched Earth and remember exactly why he was willing to sacrifice so much time and effort to protect this planet. He watched Donny and Dozer, continually serving as an example of exemplary leadership by example. He watched Mrs. Hamilton making frantic preparation for the next World Summit. He watched Simon sleep, but with the Nether RItual, he could follow the line of the human-turned-Champions dreams to witness the entire Zone reacting to the sudden threat of Zone 1’s weapon.

Randidly’s gaze moved to Hank Howard who was ruthlessly rushing after the trail of bodies sucked dry of blood in the newly arrived Zone 19. His understanding of Earth grew. His gaze grew solemn.

As days turned to weeks, and then months, Randidly began to finally have some consistent success with creating fake Nether cores. It was still a delicate trick to pull off but once Randidly had it happen once, it quickly happened twice. Within a week of his first success, he now had the four fake Nether cores he needed and he tried to push his energy to the next level.

At least that was the plan. It quickly became apparent that the true Nether core had too much of a stabilizing influence over the Nether, so he needed more fake cores to get the energy to reach the requisite density and instability to condense into one whole.

So Randidly created two additional cores before finally succeeding at condensing a second true Nether core with six fake ones and feeling his ability to work with Nether skyrocket once again.

Now, however, the density of Nether that was swirling through his body became a problem. With all of the ambient energy, the delicate balance he had gradually got the hang of for creating the false cores was thrown off. Randidly was forced to start the learning curve from the bottom, which was not a little frustrating.

In addition, the Fate blade was deeply suspicious of the increase in Nether density and behaved erratically for quite some time. Even as Randidly did his best to reassure it, the intermittent consciousness of the Fate blade wasn’t interested in his excuses. It was much more directly concerned with Nether.

And what really bothered Randidly was that the Fate blade between burning rage and a subdued relief at the possibility of its existence ending. Randidly could only shake his head and spend quite a few days working on his control of Nether so it wasn’t such a problem.

Then, after Randidly believe he had reached an equilibrium, Randidly confronted a fear that was building in his heart; that his father Ezekiel was the one who was committing the bloodless murders.

With a tired expression, Randidly wove together a Nether Ritual and studied the scene that appeared in front of him.