He was so angsty back then. Decklan used to hint very heavily that he would kill me someday...

Shaking his head, Randidly looked at the second item hanging on the wall. It was an extremely familiar dagger, one that he obtained during his time in that first Dungeon with Shal. After being thoroughly brainwashed in the superiority of the spear to all other weapons, Randidly had quickly given the dagger away after he left the Dungeon.

Decklan had been the one to take the dagger.

Of course, Earth had long since evolved past the point where a dagger such as this was useful as a weapon. But Randidly couldn’t help but reach out and touch the dagger after seeing it so prominently displayed in the small room Decklan had constructed. Compared to the metal used for his left arm, the materials felt cheap and light. Still, it was… nice to know that the dagger had meant something to Decklan.

“Decklan the Killer,” Randidly muttered to himself. Then he turned to the final item pinned to the wooden wall, which was a press release. Frowning, he leaned forward to examine the strange shape of the clipping. After reading the first line, Randidly froze in horror.

Decklan and Terra Hyde were married on a beautiful spring day in Franksburg, with almost one thousand people in attendance.

The next line almost stopped Randidly’s heart. The ceremony was officiated by the Village Spirit of Franksburg, Nul, who had watched the couple from the very beginning of their wondrous journey within the System.

The piece of newspaper stunk of Ileot Swacc’s energy. It was a blatant manipulation in its most egregious form. Yet at the same time, the events described quite plausible. Although Randidly would likely never know for sure, he could very easily believe that this piece of paper had come from an alternate Earth where Randidly hadn’t existed at. Where the first Zone on Earth was instead Franksburg, and the Village Spirit was Nul.

“And seeing this…” Randidly could only shake his hand as he pressed his fingers against the edges of the flimsy paper. From the way that the text was wrapped around a missing piece of the news story, there had once been a picture attached to the article. “What did it do to Decklan…?”

This was a consequence of Randidly’s capability. He had drawn the attention of Ileot Swacc and that had caused Decklan’s pain to be twisted beyond all recognition. It hurt. It hurt knowing that the chain of events that led to Thorn’s pain could be traced back to Randidly.

More than that, Randidly couldn’t deny that Randidly’s heart ached too. No matter how callous Randidly had become in the face of death, Decklan was one of the original people he had fought with to protect Donnyton. And now he was dead.

Randidly couldn’t forget that the Grim Chimera had turned away from Decklan’s pain. He had been disgusted by it. By the weakness of the man. By the lack of resolve he possessed.

Sometimes I can be arrogant, Randidly thought bitterly. Azriel’s warning about thinking the only way to survive was to win remained present in his mind. Randidly raised his head upward and released a long breath. The tips of his fingers tingled.

With Grim Intuition, Randidly quickly and accurately finished his search of the rest of the room; aside from the items he noticed earlier, there really was nothing. This was a room that had been stripped down to nothing but those things of which Decklan could not let go.

After Randidly was sure of his search, he snapped his fingers and created a spark of Ignition Essence. His heart was heavy as he looked at that shimmering source of light in the bare room. Without glancing behind him, he left the emerald and orange flame in the center of the wooden floor as he walked out of the building. By the time Randidly had casually about twenty meters along the dirt path toward the port city proper, cries of alarm could be heard from the area around the inferno that was once Decklan Hyde’s home.

Still, Randidly’s control of his image was extremely acute. His Willpower pulsed with cold fury and grief mixing freely together. Although some of the surrounding buildings were singed by the powerful Ignition Essence flames, the fires didn’t spread. After a little bit of panic, the situation quickly stabilized.

But by that point, Randidly was gone. And for the first time in a while, he wanted to work off some steam.

His first bad instinct was to rush toward the islands out in the sea where he could sense the Creature’s peculiar energy. That at least would be a fight where he wouldn’t have the luxury of being distracted. And he eventually resolved himself to begin using Nether Rituals and Grim Intuition to investigate the Creature’s movements tomorrow, but with the powder keg of emotions in Randidly’s chest, making that move now didn’t seem like such a good idea.

Instead, he went to another task that he had been meaning to get around to since returning to Earth, but had continually put it off: Leveling his Class.

Honestly, the value of each individual Level that Randidly received wasn’t that much in comparison to what he already had accrued with his many finished Paths. But because his fighting prowess was so far above his Level, it would be easy for him to grab quite a few Levels in a short amount of time. And with the amount of Stats that Randidly gained with each Level, enough Levels would quickly add up to improvement.

Controlling his anger as best he could, Randidly walked North. Eventually, he moved from sandy hills by the sea to a low mountain range that was covered with thick and leafy greenery. Although the temperature was still dipping down to the closest thing the Earth has had to winter since the System arrived, there seemed to be some geothermic heat rising up from the mountain range that kept the forest steamy.

And it was there that Randidly found his first targets: a dozen Level 72 Red-Scaled Raptors.

This was the Path Randidly had chosen. As a leader, he couldn’t avoid letting the pain of others influence him. But even more important was the fact that Randidly couldn’t try to cut himself off from these feelings. Sensitivity was important. Understanding was important.

Decklan had died. He had conspired to kill innocents before that in a mad bid to revive Terra, but he had died. It was a tragedy.

Another human, taken by the unfeeling Nexus that had them all dance to its tune. And as Randidly thought that, his cold grief quickly ignited to fury.

The Red-Scaled Raptors stalked lightly around him as he proceeded deeper into the forest, their formation slowly tightening. Randidly’s smiled idly as he walked calmly forward without even bothering to glance at his surroundings. It seemed that Nether functioned not only as a way to lessen the influence of another’s image on him but also to dampen his own images from leaking out; these ‘predators’ didn’t sense anything amiss at all.

Normally, Randidly would have found it very difficult to completely control his images, especially the Grim Chimera, with his emotions fluctuating so wildly. But with the help of his newfound Nether density, those reverberations were completely masked. The Red-Scaled Raptors could probably see that he was Level 55, but that would give them no reason to fear him.

He was prey. And with his Grim Intuition, Randidly could hear the Raptors’ stomachs rumbling; they were hungry and he was fresh meat.

Randidly walked into the forest the same way he walked into the sea; the only article of clothing on his person was leather pants. The dark grey metal of his left arm gleamed dully as it swung at his side. He left both Sulfur and Acri back on his island. The rest of his equipment was in his interspatial ring. Randidly’s fingers twitched with impatience as the raptors took their time in surrounding him. The howling fury that he felt toward the way the world was needed an outlet.

But he suppressed that impulse to lash out immediately. It will be worth it to go wild when they finally attack.

It took almost ten more minutes of Randidly grinding his teeth and continuing to walk before the Red-Scaled Raptors finally worked up the nerve to ambush him. At the very least, Randidly would admit that they were extremely efficient once they made their move.

Randidly had bent over to pass under a fallen tree that was jammed against the trunk of another tree so as to cross the path about chest height. And when he straightened on the other side of the log, a Red-Scaled Raptor was pouncing at him, long and taloned legs first. Just as quick, a raptor attacked Randidly from each side and another padded quietly down the path behind him to block his escape.

Randidly released a breath. “About damn time.”

The leaping raptor slammed into Randidly’s chest and bounced awkwardly off of him. Its claw attacks managed to irritate Randidly’s skin and leave long red scratches, but otherwise did no damage to his torso. It growled in confusion and forced itself to its feet. With a quick bark, it set the two raptors on either side of Randidly to attack.

Randidly’s metallic left hand knifed upward and ripped through the skin of the raptor’s long throat on his left side. His hand continued cutting up through the flesh of its throat until he could grip the creature’s spine. Then, with a flick of the wrist, Randidly shattered its spine and threw the whole thing contemptuously to the ground. The move was so quick that the blood from the raptor’s throat hit the ground at almost the same time as the body that followed it.

At the same time, Randidly turned and looked at the raptor attacking him from the other side. With a little pressure from his will, the usually passive Lantern of Harsh Truths shone brightly in his emerald eyes. As the raptor froze, Randidly amused himself by imagining that the monster realized what would like to happen to it and its fellow pack of carnivores in the next minute.

Can I really someday become powerful enough that power won’t still be the most important truth about Earth…? That we won’t be a slave to the Nexus?

With a whimper, the unfortunate raptor collapsed to the ground. The Red-Scaled Raptor in front of Randidly seemed to suddenly sense that something was amiss and opened its mouth to release a cry. But Randidly took a step forward and used both of his hands to press the mouth of the raptor shut.

“It’s too late,” Randidly said. In his heart, he understood that the violence didn’t have a point. It wouldn’t help him. It was almost exactly what he had tried to hard to make sure Thorn wouldn’t do. It was exactly the sort of wasteful exuberance that the Nexus worshipped as it pursued the ultimate image.

And yet, at the moment, it was what Randidly wanted. The reflections could wait until later. Perhaps he had spent too much time over the past several weeks being only a leader, because now he wanted to lose himself in the violence of hunting.

Just as the raptor coming from behind stepped beneath the log and recognized the fallen forms of its companions, four more raptors leapt over the surrounding shrubbery and lashed out at the form of Randidly that attacked their leader.

One’s talon’s skittered off Randidly’s left arm, but the others weren’t even able to touch Randidly before their flesh began to hiss and bubble. Randidly’s Nether Wells operated at full capacity and he simply burned away the surrounding substances with a blast of raw Nether that hadn’t been aligned to his Aether.

All four raptors crashed to the ground in ungainly puddles of skin and blood as they shrieked in agony. Although they hadn’t been killed by the direct exposure to Nether, they didn’t possess enough of an image to resist its corruption in the least. Randidly quickly capped the open font of Nether in his chest and turned to greet the last group of raptors that rushed out when they heard their companion’s shrieks.

Using his bare hands, Randidly brutalized and ripped the raptors to shreds. A kick shattered one’s ribcage and he brought his clasped hands down to smash the raptor’s skull on the ground. One tried to run so Randidly seized its tail and yanked, broke its back, and then snapped its neck with a sharp twist.

Once they realized they couldn’t escape, the raptors at least provided some distraction to Randidly’s grief. They immediately threw themselves wildly at him, aiming to wound him even at the cost of their own lives.

It still wasn’t enough to quench the fire that burned in his chest for all the people that had died since the System had changed everything.

Before a minute was up, Randidly stood over the corpses of the Red-Scaled Raptors with their blood dripping down over his knuckles. The surrounding forest had gone completely silent; the only sound was Randidly’s own heavy breathing.

Congratulations! You have reached Level 56! +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, +6.5 to all Regenerations! +1 to Health and Stamina Regeneration!

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

Due to your Fateset, +3 Intelligence, Wisdom, and Focus!