Chapter 1206 (1/2)

Randidly released a light breath; with the second huge blast of power from Ileot, the four Nether Heralds fighting Lady Iellaya immediate turned and fled to assist the Nether King. This allowed a disdainful raven-winged serpent, covered in wounds, to snort and lift its nose as though it couldn’t be bothered to play with these fools another longer. Randidly barely repressed the urge to roll his eyes.

Seems Lady Iellaya’s pride is still an integral part of that image. That’s… reassuring.

Still, the important point was what was going on in the conflict in the center. Although the Nether King acted again to block a portion of Ileot’s attack, this most recent blast knocked away even more of the blue veins that constituted the grand working, so that only about half remained. Huge holes had been ripped open by the last two attacks. The sky glittered with the exploding lights that Ileot had produced, illuminating exactly how much damage had been done.

A second later, Lady Iellaya was leaning against the edge of the battlements next to Randidly as she returned from her image avatar form. “...you look worse than I feel.”

Randidly’s grin was bitter; he couldn’t deny that this was probably the case. “Still will be a little bit before I can honestly stand up here next to you and fight something like a Nether Herald. Just call me during the next wide-scale Nether invasion.”

“Most people spend their entire lives trying to come within ‘a little bit’ of this amount of power,” Lady Iellaya used her hands to smooth her obsidian feathers and check for places where some had been ripped out during the fighting. Then she cracked her fingers. “I would say you can be relatively satisfied with this performance. But believe me, you would be the first person I would call when the Nether invades again.”

For a second, Randidly hummed. He looked over the battlefield, up at the darkness, then over at the shattered working that seemed to be slowly falling apart. “Is this enough to kill the Nether King…? Or at least force him to retreat?”

“How would I know?” Lady Iellaya shook her head. “But I believe we are about to find out.”

As the last vestiges of Ileot’s attack began to fade, the incomplete formation of blue veins slowly began to glow. From the strange, luminous blue color, the veins gradually brightened to a piercing yellow. And what followed was the blooming of a fuzzy black flower, sitting in the middle of that broken arrangement. It started rapidly rotating and pulsing, a strange bulging blub that squirmed and shifted.

HOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGG!

Something in the air changed as that noise rippled outward. Randidly didn’t even need Grim Intuition to sense it; probably everyone across the battlefront felt the change at that moment. No longer was the Nether King hanging back, gazing over the battlefield with lantern-like eyes. No, the Nether King had endured long enough. His strange, resonate moan was filled with range and unwillingness. It shook the air. That bulb opened up and released all the power it had built up.

The bulb bloomed. Dark tendrils drifted outward, seizing the surrounding working. Energy began to pump outward. Despite the fact that his vessel was flawed and filled with holes, the Nether King moved with purpose. Its voice smashed down against the battlefield.

HOOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGGGGG!

It was like some support system had been ripped away and the weight of the Great Rift crashed down against the battlefront along with the Nether King’s voice. Behind Randidly in the courtyard, Salazar’s story faltered and stopped. At the other camps, all the infighting ceased as everyone was brought low by that pressure. The noise was a direct attack on the physical and organized space of Aether. The resonance struck out to sever the bonds between atoms, destabilizing matter, reducing everything to the primordial darkness of the Great Rift.

Stone cracked. Flesh trembled and tore. Screams weren’t drowned out by the noise so much as smothered. Nothing existed but the looming Great Rift and the Nether King’s terrible rage.

Hoooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggggggg.

As the noise lowered its volume, it dragged itself across Randidly’s skin like a rake of rusty nails. His eyes bulged as the pain spiked upward. The yellow of the Nether King’s working had gotten so bright that it was increasingly easy to overlook the vast holes that Ileot had punched in the formation, seemingly without slowing it down in the slightest. The pain was growing so intense that the exhausted version of Randidly could only tremble and struggle to endure it.

Congratulations! Your Skill Monstrosity’s Appalling Physicality (A) has grown to Level 251!

This is the Nether King with a flawed weapon, striking down at us. Randidly could only grit his teeth as Grim Intuition stubbornly continued to feed him the visions of suffering from those individuals behind him in the courtyard. Across the battlefield, many people died directly as the Nether King roared, their bodies destabilizing to the point they popped like overfilled water balloons. This… the Nether King…!

Congratulations! Your Skill Yyrwood Flesh of Yggdrasil (L) has grown to Level 241!

Congratulations! Your Skill Stigma of the Lifeless Phoenix (L) has grown to Level 225!

Yet just as the physical pain grew close to the limits of Randidly’s endurance, there was the sound of soft flapping wings and Randidly felt Lady Iellaya’s raven-winged serpent image spread out to shield them all. Panting, Randidly looked over toward Lady Iellaya and saw her eyes were bloodshot. The crimson lines crossing her image’s brown scales were so vividly scarlet that the drew the eye.

“These are my people.” Lady Iellaya hissed. “If you think I will let you harm a single hair on their heads… I will break you.”

That loyalty to her subordinates hasn’t changed either. Randidly reflected. Maybe… I put too much stock in the strange darkness present now in her image.