Chapter 1657 (1/2)

Congratulations! Your Skill the Glittering Leaves of Yggdrasil has grown to 324!

Humming to himself, Randidly cracked his knuckles and stood. After another two days of allowing his Nether Core and images to nurture his frayed, the last dregs of exhaustion had been cleared away. His emerald eyes were clear and sharp.

Randidly Ghosthound was back to his peak state.

But that thought caused him to grimace and shake his head. Well… theoretically peak state. If I were to be attacked right now...

Twisting around, Randidly considered his newly acquired tail. Just like an aloof cat, the tail flicked back and forth without paying any mind to Randidly’s observation. Compared to the size of his body, the tail was rather oversized. At two meters in length, there was enough length of tail to wrap the fluffy and strangely alien extension of himself three times around his waist and still have some to spare.

There was an unexpected benefit; the fur of his new tail was extremely soft. Randidly found it rather relaxing to sit and run his fingers along the tail while he thought. Plus, the tail was rather elastic in its shape and size. The same muscles that allowed him to manipulate it were extremely malleable. Once Randidly put his whole attention to it, he gradually learned to adjust the minute muscles along the tail’s length so that it could contract and stretch to a more manageable size.

The process wasn’t exactly quick, but the current Randidly had a monstrously high Fidelity of the Ascendant Moirae. Even acclimating to a new limb couldn’t slow him down for long.

Once successful, he differentiated between two forms of the tail: the condensed one and the battle-mode. While the tail was condensed, it shortened to a little over a meter and squeezed itself to a much more manageable thickness. That tail allowed Randidly to basically walk and talk as he did before, with his dense tail wrapped tightly around his stomach. His balance was still slightly off-kilter, but his powerful musculature could compensate at everyday speeds.

The battle mode stretched the tail to its full two-meter length and had all of the fur bristling, making it seem like he had a lithe green club whipping back and forth behind his body. Randidly even spent some time experimenting with his image physicalizations and was rather impressed with the result. When he manifested the Grim Chimera, the thick and formerly soft hair along his tail hardened and merged together to form dark green cartilage plates along the length of the swollen tail, calling to Randidly’s mind the image of a mecha dinosaur.

Then he would release it and the tail would meekly reassume its mild-mannered alter ego of a massive cat’s tail. While fully extended, Randidly also became rather proficient at picking up glasses and drinking from them with solely his tail.

Occasionally he was overzealous and crushed the unlucky cup, but that was simply the price of progress.

The real problem was the balance changes that the extended tail brought to his person; fighting right now would definitely be a haphazard affair. His altered bone structure made him lean forward aggressively so his center of gravity had shifted. The change allowed Randidly to focus more of his energy on explosive dodges and attacks, rather than blocks, but some of his prior habits would need to be retrained before he held much confidence in his fighting capabilities.

Equally important to Randidly as restoring his fighting capability was the Grim Chimera image itself, which was on the cusp of an evolution. The bright and tinkling bits of images that the Grim Chimera had absorbed had merged together into a dense nucleus and now only needed to be activated with the proper focus.

However, when Randidly examined that nucleus, his emotional senses had noticed something unfortunate. Because much of the impetus for this evolution occurred during that vicious Struggle against the shockwave of Elhume’s attack, the emotional notes within the evolution were entirely dark, desperate, and vicious. Quite like Vualla’s image during the worst of the Xyrt Brigade’s training methods, all the soft and cautious portions of the Grim Chimera had vanished. What remained was pure utility.

A brutal, beautiful utility that was an efficient solution in certain situations. But the resulting image would be a single-purpose tool.

For the same reasons that he had helped Vualla heal from those changes, Randidly intended to pause the evolution for a couple of weeks and rectify this emotional imbalance. He even had a few ideas about how to handle this situation: it was finally time to pay his debts to the Nemesai and others that he promised to protect their home planets. Without the Engraving Guild tracker, he could be much freer in his movements without worrying about ambushes from Velio Dunn. Hopefully, those positive actions would mollify some of the starkness of the Grim Chimera.

Plus, I promised that Nether Gatekeeper that I would help its kind within the Shaft… bah, that’s a bit more complicated, with everyone still ruffled about the conflict with the Nether King… And I wonder how that being is doing on the Path to the Pinnacle? The Frost Matriarch seemed to hint that traversing that Path directly could take a year or two… Randidly reached and scratched his head. Then he shook himself, his now shorter hair bouncing around and then settling back into place around his jaw.

Helen had agreed to cut his hair but recommended that he leave some of the length. Apparently, it ‘framed his face good enough to look at’. Feeling rather helpless about Helen’s frequent longing glances at his tail, Randidly had simply allowed her to do as she wanted in order to return to his solitude as quickly as possible.

And by solitude, Randidly had thrown himself after that haircut into the process of learning to keep his tail under wraps.