Chapter 1192 (2/2)

The destruction produced by her fists was pure and clear, but it wasn’t yet ready to bear all this weight.

There was a moment about twenty minutes into Randidly’s break where he fully intended to ignore Lady Iellaya’s orders and go to Vualla’s assistance. Yet the word trust made him take a single step toward the door out of his tent and hesitate.

Vualla was struggling, sure, but Randidly could never save her from every challenge in front of her too. And Randidly knew all too well how pissed Vualla would be if he tried to intervene. Yet even so...

So before he set out, Randidly examined his inner world to check his outflowing Aether. Because he was nervous and wondered whether this performance had to do with an unintended side-effect from him providing Aether to Vualla.

What he found was a huge river of Aether surging out toward Vualla. So much so that Randidly was briefly dumbstruck. Of course, it was quite small compared to the sea of Aether that both Helen and Alana took from Randidly, but it was only three-fourths the size of the Aether that Sam used. To see that Vualla’s Aether usage shot so sharply upward…

Was it just because that energy was being used to support her presence here in the current day…? It was so difficult to know which of Ileot’s statements were worth believing and which were absolute bullshit. That man had too much of an advantage over Randidly in regards to information and experience with Aether. But it wasn’t like there was enough time to research what was going on thoroughly with a Nether King trying to kill them all…

In the following twenty minutes, as he closely monitored the Aether going out and Vualla’s determined expression, Randidly slowly calmed down. Because a change was occurring in Vualla’s fighting style that slowly stabilized the situation.

If anything, her image of destruction was becoming fainter in her attacks. Yet each of her punches seemed so much sharper and more destructive as a base. Rather than trying to block or deflect Vualla’s attacks, Nether Gatekeepers now mostly jumped hastily out of the way to avoid conflicting with her. As the time between Nethers attacks grew longer due to this need to dodge, Vualla seized the initiative.

Yet Randidly couldn’t understand it and his inner paranoia slowly stirred to wakefulness; why were Vualla’s strikes becoming more powerful if her image was weakening?

Randidly’s Grim Intuition fixated on that one area of the battlefield and carefully filtered out everything else. Vualla gracefully stepped forward, throwing two sharp left jabs toward a Nether Beast. These blows were simple and quick, with barely a whiff of a destructive image attached to them. Yet they were almost blisteringly fast.

The Nether Gatekeeper 1 scrambled out of the way to avoid the jabs while Nether Gatekeeper 2 surged toward Vualla’s side with its claw raised. Spinning away, Vualla used the momentum from the twist to bring her arm around in a crushing hook toward Nether Gatekeeper 2’s jaw. It hastily pulled back, but Vualla stepped forward and turned her hook into a right straight that cracked the bones of its torso.

Which gave Nether Gatekeeper 1 and 3 enough of an opening to leap toward Vualla’s back. A long tongue and a huge paw both smashed toward Vualla. She turned immediately after completing her strikes against Nether Gatekeeper 1 and examined the oncoming attacks. Randidly could feel the emptiness around her, filled with the strange, immense weight she now wielded with her blows. Her eyes were dark and flinty, the azure color strangely muted.

The tongue Vualla dodged simply by tilting her head to the side, a movement so precise that even Randidly’s Grim Intuition was fuzzy on the distance by which she dodged the attack. In the same instant, Vualla threw a counter across the paw. The two attacks were both vicious, yet it was Nether Gatekeeper 3 that flinched away and pulled hastily back its arm to defend itself.

And it was at that moment that Randidly finally realized what the change in Vualla’s image was; the wild destruction she previously wielded was slowly being condensed down into the natural and organic movements of a punch. Quite like some individuals that Randidly had encountered on Tellus, it wasn’t a grand image that Vualla was relying on to grow more powerful.

She was simply refining her image of what a perfect punch was. It was exactly the same sort of heavy image that Skarch had created for herself, done on a much more potent scale.

Randidly had never slackened from his daily spear regimen that he learned from Shal, but he had steadily emphasized it less. The movements just had fallen by the wayside as he focused more and more time on refining his images and less on meticulously training the offensive shifts into his body. Part of that was how much more variability he could achieve with high Control without any training, but it had just seemed at the time that typical training became less valuable than image training.

Yet here Vualla was, using her prodigious knowledge of energy mechanics and her own body to create the perfect strike. It was abundantly clear that she had never slackened from her own analog training of her strikes. What she now refined was a strike that didn’t need to wish dearly for destruction in an image, because it was already so destructive on its own.

The change to her image was gradual, but now that Randidly was aware of it he could see it shift in real-time. Something was going on within Vualla. Some spark of inspiration had put her on a different path. Aether roared through the bond between them, rapidly solidifying the change within Vualla.

Even as her power spiked upward to the point that her four foes were being pressured, Randidly smiled in genuine pleasure despite his earlier misgivings; this was the woman who he wanted to partner with to destroy the System. This was the raw potential she possessed. Immersed in her impressive grace, Randidly slipped into a focused state where time passed relatively quickly.

Bit by bit, he continued to recover his mental power.

At about the two-hour mark of Randidly’s break, Randidly’s attention was finally dragged away as the sky above him darkened. As Abiodun began to struggle to hold back so many Nether Gatekeepers, he had lured the surrounding foes closer. They had begun to circle him like sneering sharks.

And now Lady Iellaya stepped forward to make them pay.