Chapter 1362 (2/2)

And despite his recent improvements to the image, the heat was overwhelming. Especially because that image had originally been heat-producing itself. His body was slowly turning red. When he released another breath, it came out as steam.

Randidly licked his rapidly drying lips. “Yea… it’s supposed to feel like this…” He was the inferno incarnate. The buzzing of the Aether Mines in his Soulspace and the shuddering fury of his muscles slowly morphed into one giant sense of resonance. Wind swirled around Randidly’s position, gradually forming a tornado as his steaming body heated the surrounding air and pushed it upward.

Crack!

THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP-THUMP

With steam flowing out of his nostrils, Randidly pressed his foot to the ground and launched himself forward. He traveled just at jog at first, although each of his strides covered several meters. But then Randidly continued to accelerate, his momentum steadily rising in time with the slamming beats of his heart. Soon the wind was howling past Randidly as he practically flew forward, feeling an uplifting sense of freedom in his supreme speed.

The grass became a green/brown/gold blur beneath his feet. Even the clouds that had previously seemed so distant started to slowly draw nearer as Randidly moved more quickly than any human had a right to. Each of his steps shattered the ground, destroying several meters of grassland in his passage. Nether and blood flowed in reverse of each other, drawing an intricate, natural diagram within his body.

“Just a bit more…” Randidly muttered. His veins were sticking out all along his body as they slowly grew accustomed to the new amount of blood they had to handle. Randidly could feel his body rapidly adjusting to his new demands, helped along by the deft touch of Yggdrasil and the stubbornness of the Grim Chimera. Under the internal pressure, some part of Randidly’s body was finally reaching for the power that he had access to.

He released another breath of steam. The Stillborn Phoenix hummed with the strain of containing the rampant heat running through his body. Feeling that he was close to the limit he had been trying to smash to pieces for the past month, Randidly pushed his Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart a little further.

Thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump

His heartbeat became a constant thrum through Randidly’s body. And with a rising wave of heat pushing him forward, Randidly saw the limit.

Congratulations! Your Skill Revelation of the Atramentous Threshold (T) has grown to Level 270!

Gauze drifted around Randidly, with an airy ease that belied the speed at which he was traveling.

Time seemed to slow down even as he raced through the landscape around him. Randidly could feel each stream of superheated water vapor flowing out of his nose as he rushed forward. His foot touched the ground and pushed himself forward even before the dirt he impacted was finished collapsing beneath the force of his step. The wind whipped around him in a powerful slipstream.

And there, hanging in the air and outlined by the revelation energy, was the limit of what should be physically possible. It shimmered and billowed and absolutely surrounded every inch of him. Randidly’s eyes narrowed. It was spread ahead of him like a spectral cloth only a few meters away from Randidly’s body. That distance remained constant even as he rushed forward at the fastest speed that he could manage. It wasn’t anything quite so concrete as air resistance or him being able to see the speed of sound, however. No, this was very literally the limit of the human body that Randidly could see.

It was a subconscious limit. Or perhaps it was the image his subconscious held about what was possible.

Or at least, to Randidly, that was what it was. He lengthened his stride and pumped his legs. His steaming breaths came out more quickly. Everything from his neck down in his body was on fire. The sensation wasn’t painful, just all-consuming. Randidly’s physical body was slowly overwhelming the senses of his mind. The noises from the engine had largely ceased, compensating by releasing a blooming nova of heat.

He continued to pick up speed. Randidly gained ground on that strange spectral curtain in front of him. It looked like a foggy pane of glass, preventing Randidly, even with his Revelation of the Atramentous Threshold energy, from seeing beyond it. So Randidly gritted his teeth and pushed himself as hard as he could to catch up with the barrier.

Congratulations! Your Skill Monstrosity’s Appalling Physicality (A) has grown to Level 275!

Where the Stillborn Phoenix wasn’t quite enough to push him there, the Grim Chimera rose growling to the challenge. The muscles of his body flexed and contracted. Randidly lifted his left hand and reached forward toward the curtain. His fingers tightened on the air, closing just short of it.

“This strength… is MINE!” Randidly roared.

And then the taloned hand of the Grim Chimera reached forward and seized that amorphous substance and, for a brief instant, tore it asunder. Just as soon as the gap in the spectral curtain was made, it began to close. But Randidly had enough Nether Brawn to step forward in that brief opening.

BOOOM!

Randidly released a sonic boom as he briefly shot ahead, liberated from what should be physically possible. Space had cracked open and he used that to practically teleport forward. The air he passed through shuddered and was blasted apart by his passage. But as soon as he blinked in shock at the accomplishment, the human limitation caught back up to him and his almost uncontrollable speed and speed vanished.

Still huffing out steam, Randidly began to slow down. When he had come to a stop, he turned and looked behind him. Then he scratched his head; he honestly had no idea how much time he had just spent running. Hopefully, it wouldn’t always take him that long to work up to breaking through that limit.

But I got it. I felt that sensation. Randidly looked down at his hands. Now that he had seen the roadblock in front of him, he could distantly feel the limitations of the world draped over his body like a cloth, even now. It followed his every move, always resisting as he struggled to move beyond it. Now I just need to be able to reach that state more reliably…

“Which means more training,” Randidly said. But he was grinning as he said it, continuing to look down at his hands. They clenched into fists.