Lucifer groaned out a hot breath and tried to sit up. As soon as he made the attempt, his left hand rushed up to his head as though he was trying to stem a bleeding wound. A terrible, splitting headache struck at him as he moved. The muscles of his body tensed from the pain, holding him in that hunched, half-sitting position, waiting for that horrible motion sickness to run its course through his body. Almost instinctively, Lucifer’s hand that was propping his body up tightened and his fingers buzzed with the grainy sensation of dirt underneath him.

But even worse than the sickness was the sensation that followed. Lucifer felt strangely hollow as the sickness receded from his mind and left him aching. He was adrift, where he used to know solidly where he existed. He squeezed his eyes shut and flexed his image to try and overcome the sensation with brute force. It had worked in the past.

Yet when he activated his image, Lucifer paled in horror; the sense of feebleness was only worse as he tried to reach for his image.

The raw, instinctual sensation of a cough yanked Lucifer back to the present, reminding him of the predicament of his body. When he opened his eyes, he was surprised to find that his vision was blurry. Around him were only vague blotches of color that melted into each other. His head was still swimming. And that was when he started to wonder if today would be the day that he died. That thought wandered through his body like a determined tadpole, winding its way through the confused and deserted veins and settling finally into his image. The small being made slow progress, but its vitality soaked outward into his person as it spread.

I refuse to die today.

Lucifer growled to himself and released a pulse of his image. He could clearly imagine his body moving through the motions of his Lucifer Slash. That familiar motion became an anchor that allowed him to open his eyes and focus to see the surroundings.

The weakness was still appalling, but the image did work as a focus. His vision slowly settled into something usable.

Lucifer was sitting up in a long line of bodies that were laid rather casually on a flat stretch of ground. His head flared painfully once again, but Lucifer ignored it. The memory of attacking the Ghosthound without being honest about their intentions rushed back to him. Wincing, Lucifer raised a hand and pressed it against his temple. Was this some sort of punishment…?

Goddamnit it, why do I feel so weak… Lucifer gritted his teeth while focusing on the figures that were already up from the defeated bodies. They slowly resolved themselves into the figures of Kayle and Lyra, who were talking quietly to each other. From the tight expressions on their faces, Lucifer guessed they were suffering from similar nausea. He wondered if he looked that blotchy and unsettled.

They both noticed when Lucifer saw them, exchanged a glance, and began walking over toward him. But Lucifer was distracted by a large blur to his left. His first instinct was that this sudden intruder a monster, and he tried to leap to his feet. But that ‘leap’ ended up being simply a whole body spasm that sent his head spinning with nausea. He collapsed back down onto his back.

Even worse, the blur raised its head and Ancho gave Lucifer a rather unamused look. Then the horse lowered his long face and resumed his gleeful ransacking of the unconscious Hank’s pockets. The horse pulled out a repeater from its holster, chewed on the handle experimentally, then shook its head, and placed the gun delicately on the ground. Ancho sniffed in Lucifer’s direction but seemed largely unimpressed by the possibility of him possessing treats. So the horse turned away and investigated the other unconscious individuals.

While Lucifer’s spinning mind settled back down, Lyra and Kayle arrived at his feet. Kayle spoke first, in a quite voice. “Are you alright?”

Lucifer considered the question seriously for a bit of time before licking his lips and answering. “I… I feel physically alright. But my head-”

“Yea,” Lyra cut in. Then she grimaced. “The Ghosthound… he stayed long enough for me to wake up. He said he took quite a bit of our Nether for having the nerve to ambush him like that. Ugh… he said that…” She raised her hand and pushed back her tawny hair irritably, so that the offending strand was tucked behind her ear. “But he had a stupid grin on his face when he said it, so I know he got something out of it.”

“So you guys too?” Lucifer asked, just to confirm.

Kayle nodded. He glanced at Lyra, but she seemed to be seething with fury and in no mood for further talking. So Kayle spoke again. “From what the Ghosthound told Lyra… the phenomenon will last anywhere from two weeks to a month. The motion sickness should disappear first, but the sense of weakness… that is what will take a while to recover.”

“I’ll have to feel…!?!” Lucifer’s eyes widened. Suddenly he could understand Lyra’s fury. He made a fist with his right hand, raised it a few inches off the ground, then brought it back down softly into the dirt; it was the most aggressive display he felt he could manage at the moment. “And he did this to all of us… this is an attack on Expira! How DARE he?!?! What if we don’t manage to recover before the First Calamity-”

“That date is over four months away,” Kayle answered placidly. Lyra very visible bit her lip hard enough that it bled, clearly agreeing with the spirit of what Lucifer was saying. But Kayle only sighed. “We could have challenged him directly, as we did in the past. It would have been another grand event, and likely a wide audience for our loss. Instead, we did it secretly, hoping to gain a significant advantage with the suddenness of the attack. And to be fair, I suspect he did fight us with a rather large handicap.

“Randidly Ghosthound sought to strengthen the planet and prepare us for the Calamity, sure, but more than that…” Kayle looked upward as he was speaking. Lucifer couldn’t help but follow his gaze. The sky above was overcast, painted with the soft blues of night right before dawn. Which meant that they had been unconscious for perhaps ten hours. The fact that Lucifer was still sore after being knocked out for that time was shocking.

Kayle shrugged after his long pause. “He has always stressed that with the arrival of the Nexus, the world is much less forgiving: our actions have consequences. This is the price we have to pay for seeking a genuine victory over the Ghosthound.”

Lucifer mulled that over for a while, his anger settling like a choppy sea after the storm has passed. Gradually, the waves disappeared and left only salty water. Dawn inched closer, engaging in the slow process of illuminating the sky. And strangely, Lucifer stumbled across a realization that brought him quite a bit of joy. He grinned around at Lyra and Kayle. “Heh, it’s not all bad news, however. So we were the ones who woke up the most quickly…? I suppose-”

“Don’t pat yourself on the back,” Lyra said in a dead voice. She practically spat out the words. “Randidly told me that he took more from those that could spare it. So the hardest hit were Alana, Hank, Paolo, and Huang Li. When I asked him how much more he had taken from them relative to the rest of us… he just laughed.”

In that moment, Lucifer thought he heard an echo of that laugh, bouncing gleefully off the cracked ground around them. He could see the Grim Chimera standing before them, arms spread as though it was inviting challenges from all of existence. He could see the zeal and wild joy on the image’s face.

Lucifer shivered.

*****

He had to wait several hours for his psyche to recover, but it was worth it for this result. Randidly grinned down at the Dreamcatcher of the Long Night. Thin strands twisted across each other, setting into an entirely new pattern. The dense intersection of strands gradually settled toward order. A shape began to emerge. Jackpot.

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Dreamcatcher of the Long Night has grown to Level 93!

Congratulations! Your Fatepiece the Dreamcatcher of the Long Night has grown to Level 94!

To make sure that Expira’s strongest wouldn’t start thinking it was okay to attack him randomly while announcing things like ‘this is an assassination!’, Randidly had pilfered some significance from their memories with his Fatepiece. But it wasn’t until he had completely won and knocked Alana Donal unconscious for good measure that he understood that he was taking a bit of their innate Nether while he did so.

Which made Randidly scratch his head and go back over the unconscious bodies to examine the phenomenon. He didn’t take more memories the second time around, but he used his Nether Nebula to steal even more of each person’s Nether. He waffled for a while but ultimately decided to just take a flat 70% from everyone. Which resulted in a surprisingly significant boost to his Nether Nebula. He could sense that one of those grey bubbles was very close to being produced within that intensely compacted core.

In addition, the loss of Nether was an injury that would probably linger for quite some time. When he had tried it with Derek Moss He had taken memories from him without also reaching for some Nether on top of that. And even so, the man who was famously chipper had been listless for four days.

The Nether he took should gradually recover, with plenty of time to spare before the Calamity, but Randidly recalled the helpless feeling he had when Kaan Swacc used the Nether Suppression Cell against him in their duel. Even if you didn’t rely on it consciously, your significance within the Nether of your body grounds your image. Without it…

Ding!

There was an internal chime. The churning threads of his Dreamcatcher settled into place. A mystical, glowing pattern floated in front of Randidly’s eyes. He grinned and leaned forward, going into that place of chimes and intersection. And once he was there, Randidly thought of a specific moment and felt himself arriving in front of it. The smile on his face stretched wider and wider as he witnessed the result.

With the support of so many memories on the same moment, Randidly felt how much more stable this memory had become. The strands became thick supports, twined effortlessly together into thick cords. The memory itself hung fat and pulsing in the corner of his Fatepiece, on another tier altogether than his other memories. With so many perspectives, it had become its own, small world.

He released a breath and reached toward it.

Randidly entered into the memory as Alana. The world blurred and then he found himself looking at his own confused face, right at the beginning of the attack. The rest of the anti-Randidly faction was shifting into formation. Here, Alana would have delivered her inflammatory opening line, but Randidly didn’t bother with that. Instead, Alana rippled and vanished, replaced by the towering image of Yggdrasil. Wind whistled through the emerald leaves.

Congratulations! Your Skill Absolute Grasp of Yggdrasil (T) has grown to Level 317!

Real Randidly lashed out freely with Absolute Grasp, sending hundred of blindingly fast roots whipping at the various fighters around him. Taken by surprise, most were knocked away before they understood what was happening. A veritable wave of plant matter knocked them senseless and pushed them away.

Which just showed poor planning. Randidly shook his head rather sorrowfully; why weren’t they prepared to deal with his Yggdrasil Skillset?

Well… I suppose it makes sense that they would underestimate its true power… I haven’t demonstrated its capabilities much on Expira… but it IS a Transcendent Skill… You can’t just ignore it.

Meanwhile, the memory Randidly instantly realized something was wrong. His Absolute Grasp reached out and seized onto the spreading roots, and the two silently struggled until the roots stilled. Both Skills seized upon the roots with the same absolute power, resulting in a stalemate. Compared to the rather calm activation of Grim Chimera that had actually happened in the fight, the tight fury in fake Randidly’s eyes as he considered the real Randidly was an entirely different beast.

All three images had activated as he glared over at the new arrival who used his Skills. He snarled. “Who…. are you?”

Randidly paused. Ah, perhaps explaining this situation might be slightly awkward. Especially after my experience of Kaan Swacc.

But in more positive news, despite the deviation from the original memory, Randidly didn’t have much of a headache at all. Having so many memories form this recollection truly strengthened its boundaries.

Which meant he had some time to explain.