Chapter 1652 (2/2)

Influence +11

The Nether King released a powerful halo of shiny darkness even as the dais beneath his feet began to crumble. At his gesture, his power flowed through the veins of his prepared Nether Ritual and completely resuscitated it. For a brief moment, the pressure of Elhume’s hand was screened. The two Nether Princes limped back toward the Nether King’s throne, each covered in wounds from their struggles to hold back the orthodox Nexus forces.

Randidly clapped his hands together to get some feeling back in his fingers. The noise sounded muted and distant. His rapid movements left him numb. He looked out past the barrier that the Frost Matriarch maintained and estimated that every wave of Nether could engulf him and shatter his Nether Core with its density. He quickly forced himself back into his work.

Influence +8

The Nether King’s aura of darkness was in stark contrast to the bright light that emerged midair between his body and that of Elhume’s hand. Despite the importance that he finish the Nether Ritual, Randidly couldn’t help but look up and take another glance at the much grander Nether Ritual happening right in front of him. Somehow, the Nether King was weaving a connection to the Elhume’s hand and drawing out something vital. That theft was fueling the entire process, creating that wondrous illumination that stalled out all attacks.

To put it another way, this Nether Ritual could not have happened without the presence of Elhume. Randidly’s mouth twitched. Why did the Nether King need Elhume? Because now that he saw it, it was clear where he had seen this arrangement of before, even if the truth left Randidly baffled: it was from Tellus.

“The Nether King is opening a door,” Randidly muttered. Then he shook himself, did his best to steady his trembling, and began drawing runes once more.

Congratulations! Your Skill Architecture of the Primordial Ways (M) has grown to Level 423!

Randidly’s idea for what came next in his defensive array was actually inspired by both his own training methods and his new Fatepiece. He hadn’t yet heard from the historically minded Seeker Thunder Wing how to activate his Hierarchy of Burden, but Randidly was already familiar with making his own movements more difficult by defraying some of his expended force across a large physical object. In this case, he would be the one that absorbed the force of the dangerous attacks; Randidly’s body would become the buffer between the isolation layer and the delicate infrastructure of his array.

He would bear the burden.

Randidly’s hands blurred once more as he began to draw the buffer array. Part of the reason that he chose this Path was due an epiphany; the height of his combined power was slightly misleading.

In every area except one, Randidly was talented but unremarkable compared to his peers in the Nexus. He had three images but was only a worthy foe for this tier of enemies when he combined all three. He could manipulate Nether, but this Nether King made him feel like a child building fake spaceships with the comically large legos for toddlers. He was increasing up his Nether Core’s Influence, yet compared to the Influence that the Nether Lattice had been able to subdivide and inject into those black spikes…

Only when it came to his body did Randidly have an advantage. He even felt that the advantage he possessed was relatively large after being able to so easily repel the Dusk Jackal’s physical strike. So to survive while taking on Elhume, he planned on taking advantage of his monstrous Stats.

As the portal stabilized and formed into a visible threshold of white light, Elhume’s hand changed. It didn’t just accelerate forward to strike at the Nether King, although it did indeed do that. A ripple surrounded the massive appendage and the shape began to change. The hand shrunk from large enough to crunch the entire isolate space to a hand that was about a hundred meters from the tip of the fingers to the base of the palm. The skin turned dried and grey and the palm was crisscrossed with an intricate pattern of scars.

The hand wasn’t just an idea of a hand, but literally, the reaching will of Elhume.

Seems like someone is in a bad mood, Randidly mused.

As the appendage rushed toward the doorway of light, the fabric of existence boiled with around its grey skin. Randidly was focusing as best as he could on the Engraving he was doing, but his senses flinched from the emotional potency that the hand was releasing. Suddenly, he was very, very glad that he made so many preparations.

Otherwise, he readily admitted that he would have been annihilated without any suspense. He finished the buffering Engraving with a flourish. Then he began to create the base stabilization runes.

“...is it strange that I feel like I recognize the door?” Seeker Three-Tails tilted his head to the side and stared at the portal conjured by the Nether King. An ornate frame was rapidly forming, even as Elhume’s attack rushed downward.

Seeker Ozaer began to laugh. “You wouldn't deserve the name of Pinnacle Seeker if you did not! Ha! No wonder Elhume is so incensed. I do not understand how he managed it… but that Nether King just opened a very famous door: the Path to the Pinnacle.”

Even Randidly paused in his desperate scrawl for a split second when he heard the truth about this conjured door. Then, with a sense of foreboding in his heart, he did his best to finish his Nether Ritual.

What would occur when Elhume’s strike landed on their protective igloo was quite similar to what had happened to the entire space when the hand first appeared. The difference was that Randidly was connecting the array to his body, so the ‘bulges’ that had so destabilized the space above the crater would be absorbed. Or rather, ‘handled’ by him personally. The effect was subtle, but those distortions had far-reaching effects. Enduring a portion of that force physical would prevent the interior machinations of his Nether Ritual from being frayed.

As for whether even his powerful body would be up to the task…

The Nether King gathered his two Nether Princes to himself and then sped forward in the direction of the light. Even as the furious Elhume moved to smash this foe, the Nether King reached the luminous portal. The ornate door frame glittered with complex and shifting symbols.

“Can a Nether being even make it to the Pinnacle?” Seeker Dusk Jackal whispered uncertainly.

The Winged Serpent shook its head slowly. “Imagine a being that could conjure the memories of an object from nothing. Such an individual could rewrite the past and we would be unable to do anything about it. Theoretically… the capability of a Nether being at the Pinnacle… is even more horrifying than an Aether being.”

A split second before Elhume’s attack arrived, the Nether King stepped through the doorway of light and vanished. Randidly winced when it became clear that Elhume didn’t bother to soften his blow due to its late arrival.

His fingers were still scribbling the last few runes of his Nether Ritual.

In a horrifying crash, that strange doorway was annihilated. Light and darkness surged and mixed in a chaotic froth of energy. A shockwave rippled outward to smash into all those bits of matter that were unlucky enough to still remain.