Chapter 2158

Chapter 2158

Randidly and Neveah parted rather amicably on this night. They had drawn in the energy games all eight times, preserving the fragile pride both had for their usage of their more natural energy.

By tacit agreement, this would be the last night of the energy games. Based on the likely timeline, they wouldn’t have the spare attention for training, starting tomorrow.

Neveah returned to the cidery, wanting to try new mixes for alcoholic beverages. Over the past week, she had found a real knack for creating popular flavors. All the better for Randidly, who simply wanted to create an alcoholic drink and leave it at that.

With the continued festivities as they approached tomorrow’s semi-final match of the Hobfootie tournament, Randidly’s farm’s cider had become a staple of revelry. They were expecting a staggering amount of demand for cider, to the point that even Randidly’s energy-fueled orchards couldn’t keep up with production. As such, Neveah wanted to have a few ‘special’ batches to tide the upper class over.

If nothing else, the hunger marketing tactics Neveah imported from Expira seemed to invigorate Malloon’s upper class.

Randidly flexed his left hand; these days, leaving it still for too long meant it became stiff. For his own part, Randidly’s attention flowed toward two separate problems. First, significance once more had begun to gather in the sky above Malloon. The long-awaited confrontation would soon happen, but even with his well-honed senses, he couldn’t figure out exactly when Bleak Sky’s attack would occur. And considering the strange pulse of Nether they had witnessed a few days prior, Bleak Sky might not be the only foe they needed to deal with.

Tension from the mass of significance had become palpable this morning, growing worse as time passed. To the point that Bogart commented on the air feeling strange. Every hour, more significance pooled in the sky. The swirling darkness held a sea of potent meaning, the intangible gaze of history gathering in this one location. It was just a matter of how important this confrontation would be for the Nexus.

The other competing problem had been one Randidly hoped to have been rendered moot by the climactic arrival of the first. That is, tomorrow was also the day of Devick’s fake birthday party, scheduled for after the Hobfootie match. Had the attack come in these intervening days, he wouldn’t need to get her a gift; after all, they both understood it wasn’t actually her birthday. But if the attack would come after-

Most likely during the party, Randidly thought with a thin thread of misery. So I’ll have to endure the horrid first half of a party before I can just fucking fight with this ancient Nether being. Well, I suppose it isn’t here for me. Observe a fight between an ancient Nether being and the Aether forces.NewW novels updates at novelhall.com

But I shouldn’t forget the Aether forces might take this opportunity to lash out at me, considering my identity as a Nether King...

Snorting out a breath, Randidly pushed those thoughts away. Since he was going to this party, he wanted to give Devick a gift. A high-quality gift, considering her advice about Bogart had born fruit: when he had tailored the training away from physical fitness and toward mental capability, rather quickly Bogart became a better fighter.

Apparently, the demon man’s mental Stats had been so pitifully low that they held him back this whole time. A few Skills wouldn’t completely bandage that wound, but Randidly had made it abundantly clear that this sort of weakness, and being for so long unable to recognize it, was unacceptable.

As he spoke the words aloud, some of the gathering Nether in the area shifted to surround him. Threads spun down into a circle in front of him, already envisioning the shape it would take. Likely a bracelet, Randidly judged, and it would pass both as a gift for a woman and as one suitably nonromantic. A thick band of Engraved metal, worn on the arm.

He could at least concede that some amount of precious gems should be used. Likely either onyx or a blood opal, to match Devick’s usual aesthetic.

Randidly looked unseeingly forward with half-closed eyes. The patterns in his head roiled and changed, seeking a permanent shape to give them power. He nudged and twisted, emphasizing some traits while playing down others. Step by step, he closed in on the meaning he sought. All three of his own images raised their heads to add a hint of their essence to the Engraving pattern. Yggdrasil to provide a way to grow and live. The Stillborn Phoenix for the cheerful capability to spit in the face of the possible. Last of all the Grey Creature, barring its teeth as it gave its entire existence to the labor of survival.

He saw the pattern’s manifestations, too. Those same chains, cursed with rust-colored madness. But twisted to a new end; the bracelet he would provide for her could save Devick’s life. After her body, split almost in half by a vicious blow from a foe, those chains would erupt out of her flesh and suture her back together. Her will and those burning chains could sustain her, even as the rest of her body would begin to fall to pieces. With the underpinning of a Nether Ritual laid within the gems, those chains could stretch from her will and seize upon existence, destabilizing other’s images or domains.

It remained an image of madness. But the madness of stasis, of maintaining the status Quo. Of refusing to be wounded by reality, or to push forward despite deepening injuries.

Down that path, Randidly saw darkness as well. The darkness was personified in his own Alpha Cosmos by Alta, who progressively replaced her flesh and humanity with an unflinching machine of iron and smog, to accomplish her goal. With a tool of the power Randidly considered crafting, Devick could do something similar. But she would essentially be using her future power to stitch together the past, which... would not end well for anyone involved.

“...I’m not going to try and shape your future, Devick,” Randidly whispered, almost surprised to realize he genuinely meant it. “This darkness... your own madness... you’ve already embraced it. Empowering it like this will probably accelerate the process... but you will need to deal with it eventually. The rest will be up to you.”

He saw the bracelet in his mind’s eye. After casting about through his interspatial ring, he found a plethora of rare materials that would serve to hold the Engraving he planned. He began to narrow down the possible combinations for the greatest synergistic effect, but his skin tingled with an altogether unexpected and ominous sensation. The Grey Creature looked away from the gradually coalescing working and hissed out a warning.

Randidly pivoted on his hill to find a grotesque, wireframe triplicate skeleton ending in the limbs of a fleshless dinosaur. The hulking thing had been moving with remarkable stealth over the low hills, avoiding both his physical senses and the Nether Rituals for observation he had thrown up to prevent exactly this.

If not for the preternatural instincts of the Grey Creature, this being may very well have walked right up to Randidly without him noticing. And it only took a single glance at the color of the flame billowing around his body to know who this was.

“I wanted to meet you once, before tomorrow,” Fatia Cerulean’s raptor skull tilted to the side. “You can sense it too, I’d imagine. No, perhaps even better than I. The storm approaches. Yet when I see you... it is strange, Nether King Hungry Eye. I feel a kinship with you. We both walk the Narrow Path and it has been a long, long time since I have met another fellow with as much potential as you. However...”

As Cerulean’s emotions turned, the air quivered around him. “...the same qualities that engender admiration make me believe it is best to kill you now before you can grow into a problem.”