"We are launching an assault? Attacking the Great Rift directly" Randidly frowned as he stared upward. His eyes carefully followed the expanding lines of the blue veins that were snaking across the Great Rift in delicate patterns. Rather than a portal, the working above them was so intricately detailed that it looked like a grandmaster of art was confidently wielding a graphite pencil. "Is that... possible?"

"It is always an amusing prospect to have you try to explain reasonability to me," Lady Iellaya said with a dry chuckle. Shrugging, she continued. "But yes, it should be possible to disturb what is occurring above with a powerful enough image. Perhaps slightly exhausting, but… It is in our best interest to delay this working anyway. Threatening to strike against it will force them to commit energy to deploy a defensive force. Or would you rather simply watching as this thing is created?"

As long as you don’t expect me to be the one to create the image large and piercing enough to reach that distance place. Randidly squinted upward, trying to gauge the distance. Very quickly, he gave up; the Great Rift didn’t closely follow the concept of space anyway. Whoever struck the blow would be relying on Willpower to bridge the gap.

Randidly's gaze was still upward, tracing the lines with a focus toward meaning. It was difficult to make out the details, but Randidly could get the barest sense of its purpose from the shape of the working. His knowledge of Nether Rituals allowed him to see that this grand sigil wasn't to teleport the Nether King, but it rather to have a stabilizing influence on the surrounding area. Whatever power this Nether King possessed would be amplified as long as it could remain in the scope of this working.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Ritual (A) has grown to Level 119!

Lady Iellaya smirked as she watched a powerful frown take hold of Randidly's face. "Exactly. It is not a simple thing that these Nether savages are attempting to accomplish… Better to destabilize it as quickly as possible. The energies from it... well, they aren't simple."

"What's my role then?" Randidly asked. Could he reach it? Perhaps. But only if he expended everything he had been saving up in the attempt.

And that was assuming he was given the time and space to work without interruption.

Lady Iellaya nodded to the deserted battlefield. "Mostly reconnaissance and herding of the weaklings. Obviously you barely have enough power to stand against a true Nether Gatekeeper... forcing you to reach up and swat at that thing will just end up with you a corpse. But when it comes to managing a battlefield… you are practically invincible. In addition, that strange creature that consumed the trench earlier would give a Nether Gatekeeper pause for a brief amount of time. We can always fall back on that if I am overwhelmed."

Randidly pressed his lips together. Controlling the battlefield, huh…? "There is a cost of that move."

"Then let's hope you don't have to pay it." Lady Iellaya raised her arms above her head. Her shoulders popped. "Are you ready? We should not tarry any longer than necessary."

For a second, Randidly thought about the question. Was he ready to change the battle like this? Thus far they had been enduring the Nether King attacks rather passively. This would be the first time that they antagonized this distant figure directly. And Randidly only had to look at the Nether working in the sky to understand how powerful it was.

It hadn’t even moved, yet the whole battlefield began to orbit the Nether King’s influence.

No stopping once this starts. Randidly raised his chin. He glanced once over to Vualla, who he could sense was practicing with her new gauntlets. It was almost reassuring to see her there, simply moving through the simple motions of her body. She threw her fist forward and pivoted, energy building up through her hips and shoulder to explode out of the tip of her fist. Throwing a punch at them directly changes this into a fistfight. Which it was always going to be, but this is the time where knuckles will end up bloody.

Then Randidly looked forward to Lady Iellaya and nodded. It wasn’t in his nature to falter from moving forward. That was his greatest strength. That was his resolve.

Raising her head to the sky, Lady Iellaya began to cackle wildly. "Then let's show these bastards the folly of standing against us! We will devour the sun and caper amongst the corpses of their fallen! Tonight, Apep the Peregrine Serpent will dine on the tragedy of your deaths! Do not weep, because I will devour your tears just as gratefully as I take your life.”

The air around Lady Iellaya stirred immediately with the strange cadence of her words. There was a sense of ritual there, one that immediately amplified her image. Waves of subtle darkness seemed to be lapping slowly out from Lady Iellaya, washing up against Randidly’s skin like driftwood from a shipwreck. The sensation of the darkness was sticky and alarming, prompting Randidly to suppress an urge to step backward away from her. And as soon as that darkness had lapped up against his skin, Randidly’s Grim Intuition seemed to surge to life.

Where he hadn’t noticed it before, now the whole battle seemed to be currently soaking in a shallow puddle of this wide and mundane darkness. While the Nether forces had been driven back, Randidly sensed how all the surrounding soldiers had been carefully steeped in this darkness. It drizzled from the sky and bubbled up from the ground. More than something dangerous, it reminded Randidly of pollution. It was a chemical byproduct on a grand scale-

...It’s the grand formation that is producing this, as it spreads this… offensive aura. What the hell is this…? Randidly frowned as his eyes flicked from Lady Iellaya to the sky and then to the ground. But before he could figure out what was going on, the darkness changed again. A deeper darkness by far from the sticky and dispersed darkness that was seeping into everyone reared its head. It had the wings of a raven and dull brown scales tinged with rust. It raised its stubby snout and screeched, displaying misshapen and jagged teeth. Its breath oozed out in a foul cloud.

Its beady looked toward the mesmerizing blue veins of the Great Rift above with obvious anticipation.

“Let’s pull their attention then, shall we?” Lady Iellaya whispered.

If it’s just me controlling lesser Nether Beasts, I understand my presence, but… The sudden strangeness of darkness gave Randidly the whiff of hesitation that his previous resolve had largely been willing to ignore. The air seemed to hum strangely as Randidly felt Lady Iellaya next to him slowly gathering herself to move. But does someone at Lady Iellaya’s level need much help with that? What is my role in this portion of the mission…?

But there was no real chance to consider this point; Lady Iellaya’s image beat its wings and the ground shook underneath the air pressure it created. A second later, it was spiraling lazily upward in the sky, heading toward the Great Rift. Almost immediately, a ripple ran through the constantly expanding series of blue veins in the Great Rift; the change below had been noticed. The rapid creation of the pattern in the sky slowed in the area above Lady Iellaya’s camp as the Nether adjusted.

The raven-winged serpent’s mouth twisted into a gleeful grin as it considered the stalling patterns above it. It seemed… immensely pleased to have had this effect. Then, without much fanfare, its chest slowly swelled as it sucked in a deep breath. It released that breath, projecting a buzzing beam of darkness up toward the pattern.

Randidly’s eyes burned as he witnessed that darkness for the first time.

Hissing, Randidly brought a hand to his chest to stabilize the chaos occurring within his mental space. The effect was likely magnified because Randidly was standing directly next to Lady Iellaya, but that darkness the image produced…The darkness contained within was so complete and absolute that its existence seemed to grate against Randidly’s images. It was a darkness of devouring and destroying. Barely withstanding the reverberations, Randidly looked solemnly up at the beam of darkness, then to Lady Iellaya standing next to him.

Her eyes were bright and glassy as she witnessed the power of her own image. All across the battlefield below them, soldiers fell to their knees as they struggled to withstand the weight that their proximity to that darkness had earned them.

...still, the fact that I can stand here means I’m closing the gap. Soon, I’ll have this amount of power too…

The beam of darkness ripped upward. The motions from the veins became immediately frantic as a large portion had to swerve away from their original position and swirl together to form a defensive fortification against the darkness Lady Iellaya produced. Within a split second, the two substances encountered each other, the image of condensed darkness and the light blue veins of the Great Rift.

The collision was anticlimactic but effective. In a brief space in the Great Rift, everything disappeared. Or at least all of the veins had. The surrounding blue veins had been annihilated by an invisible and voracious darkness, leaving that portion of the Great Rift empty. In terms of the whole of the working, perhaps only one-tenth had been destroyed by the conflict. But it definitely grabbed the attention of the opposition.

The Nether King’s lantern-like eyes swept sideways. And that was all it took for the forces of Nether to surge into action.

A whole new sort of thick blue vein twisted sideways, grasping like the fingers of the undead in tight, vicious hooks down toward the land of Aether. Then those thick-veins-as-hooks flexed outward and unleashed a torrent of Nether comets that shot down toward the ground. The already weakened rock outcroppings nearest to the Great Rift collapsed completely as this dense wave of projectiles hit the stone near Lady Iellaya’s camp.

“Randidly?” Lady Iellaya said serenely as she raised her eyebrow. But Randidly didn’t miss the way there was a slight tremor in her voice.

Thank god creating such a powerful image wasn’t completely effortless. Randidly joked inwardly as he closed his eyes and let his Grim Intuition glide to the place where the Nether forces had made their descent. Otherwise, I might be tempted to see if this darkness was really powerful enough to be worth it…

Within a second, Randidly’s eyes opened again. “All below the Nether Gatekeeper tier. Just fodder, most likely.”

“Take care of them. If they won’t open up shop when we knocked, I guess I’ll just kick down the door. Give me a few seconds, if you please,” Lady Iellaya took a slow step forward. Randidly grimaced but kept pace with her while he began to use Absolute Grasp of Yggdrasil to wound the recent arrivals to the battlefield.

Of course, there wasn’t any real danger that they would get close enough to Lady Iellaya to do any damage in a few seconds. The Aether forces were sitting in the way. But the sudden reinforcements were all at least nearing the four-star power level. Mostly, they would end up relying on Randidly anyway in order to finish them off quickly.

It was likely an elite squad, but it wasn’t enough. Since several hundred had come down at once, it was difficult for Randidly to cut through them quickly. But he put his mind toward the task, cashing in on a little bit of his mental strength in order to empower the offensive power of the roots.

Congratulations! You have reached Level 54! +8 Stats distributed between Vitality, Perception, Resist, Intelligence, and Control, +35 Free Stats! +1 Stat to a Mental Stat. +1 to a Physical Defense Stat. +1 to a Mental Support Stat. +2 Control. +36 Health, +45 Mana, +40 Stamina, +3.5 to all Regenerations! +1 to Health and Stamina Regeneration!

Due to Guidance of the Wraith Adder, +4 Agility and +2 Bonus Stats!

Due to the Philosopher’s Key, +3 Intelligence, Wisdom, and Focus!

Randidly quickly cut through enough of these powerful Nether Beasts to gain another Level. But his attention was so focused on the fighting that Randidly didn’t even have the chance to distribute his free Stat points. At the same time, the humming in the air around Lady Iellaya was growing intense once more. The weight of the images she was throwing off shook the surrounding space. Randidly’s chest buzzed with the barely contained power she wielded only a few meters away from him. Above, the stomach of her raven-winged serpent bulged outward, then it released a huge burp of darkness.

Again, Randidly had to endure several shuddering waves of pain from being so near to Lady Iellaya. There was a psychic static around her that was painful to handle in much of the same way that Cruel Indignation of Yggdrasil used to place mental strain on him. It was simply this vast sense of otherness that was present within the image that was just as damaging to the structure of Aether as Nether was.

...well, it’s probably just short of that. Randidly’s emerald eyes were locked onto the darkness that shot up toward the Great Rift. Pieces slowly clicked into place in his head. But its power is unbelievable. Lady Iellaya… her power shouldn’t have jumped up so sharply just from the potential that I sensed… Then this darkness… must really have come from...

That sense of certainty Randidly reached looking up at that darkness had some grim ramifications, but that wouldn’t mean he would turn away from this fight. Once more, blue veins were diverted to block the attack and once more the darkness devoured a portion of the grand working. Another huge bite was taken out of the Nether’s work. And Randidly didn’t miss how slow the edges that had been affected by Lady Iellaya were to heal.

This time, the blue veins in the sky threw out a single Nether comet. Rather than hitting the now largely stabilized ground, it exploded halfway to the ground, rapidly revealing a figure that sped forward directly toward Lady Iellaya.

As that figure moved, the space surrounding it warped; this foe was something a bit even beyond a Nether Gatekeeper.

Lady Iellaya showed her teeth. “Finally.”