Chapter 1353 (1/2)

Randidly watched the sun sink toward the horizon with the fatalism of a starving monk who has accepted that his body has turned against him. For the past two hours, he had rested, but still, the ghost of an overuse headache hung over him. Honestly, he didn’t know if he would ever escape those headaches.

Still, there was work to do. And although it wasn’t based on anything logical, Randidly always found that his image work was most easily done once the sun had disappeared below the horizon. Dusk signaled the beginning of his most intense training sessions. With a small smile on his face, Randidly produced his Philosopher’s Key and pointed the tip toward the horizon.

“Open up, dusk,” Randidly said to his empty floating island.

It had been two days since Randidly had flushed out and confronted Kaan Swacc. Two days of brutal battle training where Randidly threw himself against the Special Investigator until he collapsed, exhausted, into a meditative nap. Then he woke up and did it again. And again. Luckily, it had been a few days where he was largely unburdened by both the Eidolon Crucible and by any political concerns; every group was too busy beginning their conquest of the Danger Zones to bother him.

Donnyton and Zone 11’s task force had already located the final bastion of the Corrupted Invader’s resistance at their location. The other groups were less far along but were making quick time to reach a similar result. In the process, the groups from Earth had probably killed thousands of monsters and Corrupted Invaders and earned only seventeen deaths in return.

Randidly’s head throbbed and his smile fell away.

It was a deal everyone on Earth agreed was worth taking. Yet for Randidly, that was somehow worse. He even chided himself. After all, how could he balk at these seventeen lost lives to make sure Earth grew into its own strength when Randidly had allowed so many people to die at the football game to teach them about their mistakes?

Yet his heart ached for them. Those were seventeen people who would no longer have the chance to grow into the images that Earth needed to survive. Seventeen less people who could stand against the Calamities. The likelihood of them being the determinative factor was small, but still…

Shaking his head, Randidly did his best to put that emotional pain out of his mind. At least for this, the ghost of the headache was a welcome distraction. He already had so much to deal with, so adding additional emotional turmoil seemed like asking for trouble. Yet the human mind was clearly not as intelligent as it claimed to be.

His anguish over the deaths forced Randidly to reconsider his decision to not allow any of his Frontline forces to assist with the Danger Zone expeditions. The only real exception was Helen, who Randidly didn’t count as she had come from Tellus with him rather than spending any time on the front lines. As for the rest, they were explicitly barred from being part of those task forces. The Order Ducis too, although that was largely because Kharon needed them to serve other functions.

Yet that same cold fear that had held back Randidly’s assistance in the past once more reasserted itself. He would not change his mind now. Even if the Epic Danger Zone was going to be even more difficult, that was the point; that challenge would spur the people of Earth to even greater heights. This run-in with Kaan Swacc had made Randidly even more sure that he wouldn’t be able to remain on Earth very long. He needed to move deeper into the Nexus to protect his home planet.

Perhaps to protect his home planet from forces trying to capture Randidly himself.

Luckily, these past two days had also seen the Special Investigator remaining completely absent from any sort of interference, as far as Randidly could tell. Because of that, Randidly was extremely careful not to practice any great workings of Nether while not within the Dreamcatcher of the Long Night. He didn’t want to give Kaan Swacc the excuse to move that he had been waiting for.

The calm before the storm, as they say...

Randidly had tested that strange Nether suppression many times through the Dreamcatcher of the Long Night in the past two days. And basically, he had come to the conclusion that unless there was no other way, he essentially couldn’t beat Kaan once the suppression had manifested itself.

The disc of the sun grew wavy as it was partially eclipsed by the horizon. The colors in the sky slowly darkened to the color of slow healing bruises. Releasing a sigh, Randidly pressed his eyes closed and tried to focus. The headache drifted away throbbing beat by beat.

For now, Randidly believed he had reached the limit of what he could accomplish by just practicing the fight against Kaan Swacc. His physical gifts were certainly overwhelming, but it seemed like they weren’t singular in the whole of the Nexus. It was clear that Kaan had some experience fighting in similarly disadvantageous positions in the past. His reactions and tactics quickly adapted to Randidly’s abilities.

With infinite time, Randidly believed he could develop his fighting methods to the point where he would have a firmer advantage. But he had spent a little bit of time investigating the issues of his Nether interacting with Aether thresholds a bit, and had discovered that it might be a little too late for him.

Whatever functional purpose that the Aether working Randidly and Neveah had come up with to make his Nether flat was supposed to have, what Randidly didn’t expect was for it to also begin to influence his Nether Nebula directly. He thought it would just affect the energy outside of his body.

By the time Randidly had noticed the effects, it had reached to the core of his Nether and fundamentally altered the way it functioned. Which meant that when Randidly investigated the possibility of suppressing his Nether to go into a Dungeon, he had been horrified to discover that the diameter of the thin disc of Nether he released almost doubled in size since he last checked it.