For a while, Randidly simply sat.

His current reality stood right beyond the threshold of his body, lengthening in every direction like a pervasive shadow. No matter which direction he turned his head, the current reality continued to remind him in a thousand different ways that Helen was dead. His closest subordinate… probably his best friend, too, was dead.

Randidly kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. And against this reality, he threw himself, again and again. He gripped pointless at the space around him with his Willpower, just attempting to crush air into tighter and tighter balls.

His body remained inert during the whole process. He wasn’t trying to rail against reality or to change it, not really. But he simultaneously couldn’t bear to do nothing and couldn’t find the right steps to escape the pit of his grief. Every moment was a fresh realization; the shadow remained all around him. So he seized the air and crushed.

Congratulations! Your Skill Conviction of the Celestial Cataclysm (T) has grown to Level 449!

Randidly could feel Neveah sighing through their Soulbond, but she tactfully kept from disturbing him. Instead, she continued to study the inert Aether constructs of his Class. For long stretches of that mental mashing, Randidly forgot to breathe. Then when would realize the omission, he spent several minutes purposefully breathing, distracting himself with the sensation of air filling his lungs.

Nothing distracted him from the shadow around him for very long.

Eventually, his restlessness jumped from the mental realm to the physical. The longer he sat, the cooler and tighter the fist in his chest became. His skin began to itch. He flexed the fingers of his right hand and methodically worked his jaw, cracking it back and forth. And from the physical, a mental imperative arose that soon that earned unanimous support from his three images.

In a move that was very unusual for him, Randidly decided to approach this problem with a social touch to start.

Rather than any growth spurring this choice, he just couldn’t bear not to acknowledge this horrible action. As he typed out his message, he kept seeing the twisted form of Helen, left on the ground in front of his recruits. Only her face was different; in Randidly’s mind, she no longer had bloodstained lips and popped eyes. She had that fragile smile from his Fatepiece.

Somehow, that was even worse.

You killed my subordinate. Randidly sent to Commandant Wick. I’d like to make sure I understand why.

Immediately after he sent the message, that cooling core of emotion within his chest began to buzz with heat once more. Randidly’s Nether stirred uneasily, sloshing back and forth in his torso like he was a barrel of salt water. This time, he noticed as the emotional buzz began to radiate out from his body and activated the Stillborn Phoenix to devour the ambient emotions.

Everything snapped back to outward tranquility. He cracked his knuckles to pass the time. Until the response came and transfixed him.

Heh, you are surprisingly frank. This is why you could be a useful subordinate to me. So let me be equally direct; at your current strength, you are naught but a tool. A tool I am happy to use, but one who appears not to know his place, considering your recent actions. Killing that woman will hopefully teach you your own insignificance.

It is by MY hand that you could achieve greatness.

Randidly’s eyes narrowed into a tighter and tighter bunch as he focused on the message in front of him. He hissed out his boiling hate and didn’t stop flames of Weight from manifesting across his body. Very soon, his image physicalizations followed. His body stretched and grew, his humanoid form sharpened and intensified toward violence. The floor began to shudder as the Grey Creature raised its head and roared along with the emotional vibrations. The Stillborn Phoenix twisted gravity in the surroundings. Both used the stability of Yggdrasil to spread that disturbance to a larger and larger platform.

And soon that resonance spread to his Nether-

“Randidly!” Octavius’s panicked voice finally reached Randidly and he gritted his teeth and forced himself to pull back. The strange resonance sputtered and sighed out of existence, leaving him with the Commandant’s message. He forced himself to reply.

Am I correct in saying… this was precipitated by the public display of the Elite Squad?

Hmph. Am I, your superior, supposed to celebrate you treating me like dirt? Considering our relationship, a demonstration was necessary. Inciting others to treat my name casually cannot be allowed. I would have preferred if you had been there to witness it, for you to observe how important strict systems of control are for a functioning society. Heh. Who would have thought that your woman had such delicate control over the connection between the two of you? Right until the end, she didn’t let any of my… interference alert you.

Randidly felt so very cold reading that message. A part of him wanted to say that he had not incited the Elite Squad at all, he had been too distracted by the Patterns. They had acted on his own. But the more he talked with Commandant Wick, the more he understood the man’s twisted worldview. Randidly was the superior officer to the Elite Squad. Therefore, their actions were his responsibility, always.

Then Randidly read the second portion of that message once more. Randidly began to shake at what was implied there, at the reason why only the Grey Creature had noticed something was wrong with its ultimate Skill. Helen’s ruined hands appeared in his mind, with the cross-armed form of Commandant Wick standing above her. She spat in his face and told him to fuck himself… and had restrained their Aether bond from dragging Randidly into danger.

His tail lashed out behind him, ripping open his cot and spilling the foam padding out of its cloth covering.

Commandant Wick followed up with another message. I would have insisted, had I not been swayed by your woman. She, much better than you seem to, understood that she was simply your tool. When she was no longer useful to you, she resolved herself to quietly die. That is a sentiment that I can respect.

“You fucking--!” Randidly growled. His hand that was pressed against the ground instinctively tightened, his fingers ripping through the wooden flooring like it was paper mache. Once more his image physicalizations flared to life and he quickly suppressed them.

He could still see Helen’s brittle smile when she asked him not to throw everything away to get revenge. So Randidly dragged his tongue across his front teeth and tried to soothe his emotions. When that didn’t work, he simply typed out his response message with sharp, brutal strokes.

I will remember this.

Perhaps feeling that the business was laid to rest, Commandant Wick didn’t bother to respond. Emotions swirling around his chest, Randidly lowered his head.

*****

Claudette knocked on the door. “Randidly? Your… friend said you would be in here-”

“Come in,” A hoarse voice said from within the room. Claudette’s skin prickled; there was a strange vibration to the voice that caused her instincts to instantly bristle. But still, she steeled herself to push open the wooden door. Today’s the day we are supposed to descend into the shaft and begin the preparations for my image refinement, but he hasn’t been responding to my messages… weird, does Randidly have a cold-?

The door swung fully open and Claudette’s instincts became more and more alarmed. Randidly Ghosthound was sitting in a dark room, a long-limbed shadowy form producing not even a hint of an image. Behind him, a cot had been ruthlessly shredded until it was a lopsided pile of bedding material. But worse of all was the heavy stillness that infused the space around him.

Something at the core of Randidly Ghosthound was leeching all the life out of the surrounding air. He left the room somehow empty even while sitting before her, which alarmed Claudette’s combat instincts.

“Randidly…” Claudette said slowly, still remaining beyond the threshold of the door. The emptiness felt so vast that she would fall into it, should she take one more step. She chided herself for being dramatic. “Is everything alright?”

His neck slowly pivoted, bringing his head to focus on her. “Ah? Well, yea. It will be.”

“Oh.” Claudette really didn’t know how to respond to that, especially when Randidly then lowered his head and returned to his disturbingly still posture. She steeled herself and stepped into the dimly lit room. Instantly, her nose twitched; it smelled like he had remained in here… for quite some time. At the very least, the smell added a sense of mundane to the strange experience. The mood continued to be strange, but she forced herself to continue. “Ah… Randidly, are you prepared? Today is the agreed-upon date for the… preparations for my image refinement. I have contacted the Frost Matriarch and received some guidance for my image. Now we just need time.”

“It… really?” Randidly seemed bewildered. He shook his head slowly, side to side. His black hair hung across his face. “How… how long has it been since- since the Imperium Ball?”

“...a week,” Claudette replied. She certainly wasn’t filled with confidence as she looked at Randidly’s disheveled hair, his stubble, and the torn cot behind him. Has he perhaps… been preparing with such focus that he lost track of time?

“A week, huh,” Randidly’s expression sagged as though her words had kicked out the supports that propped up his cheeks. Then he rolled his shoulders and slowly stood. Weirdly, even while moving, Randidly retained the ominous sense of stillness. The individual movements were a series of stitched-together frames. He had lost his usual fluidity of movement.

Every moment, Claudette’s instincts whispered that he could spring into motion and shred her. Those snapshots failed to capture the something that stitched the moments together into this patchwork and empty whole.

Suddenly, Claudette also had a difficult time imagining that only a week had passed since the Imperium Ball.

His eyes were haunted, his expression tense. To try and cheer him up, Claudette pulled two heavy tomes out of her interspatial ring and offered them to Randidly. “Ah, finally, here are the documents I promised you. The methods for the Rex-Style Nether Cores are a bit archaic in their language, but you’ll probably have an easier time understanding it than I do.”

Randidly shook himself again and raised his metal left arm to take the books. Finally seeing him behaving like a human, Claudette sighed in relief and passed the books over. But after she placed them on his hand, the tomes immediately slid sideways and thumped onto the floor. Both stared at the invaluable records that were now sprawled on the floor.

Claudette pursed her lips and wondered if she had underestimated the seriousness of the change. Then her eyes narrowed as she looked at Randidly’s metal arm. “Randidly… what the hell happened to your arm?”

“Ah?” Randidly glanced down at himself. Halfway up his bicep, there was clearly a deep indent of a grip on the metal limb, squeezing it down to only half of the arm's usual thickness. Even worse, there were occasional sparks of energy and flaring symbols along the metal limb due to the malfunctioning Engravings on that portion. Randidly reached over and rubbed at the finger grooves that had compacted the material. “Huh… well, it looks like I’ll have to replace this. But thank you. These methods… will be helpful.”

Randidly waved a hand and the two books lifted themselves off the ground and then vanished into his dimensional storage. Even though his emerald eyes did appear to be focusing better, Claudette still felt uneasy. She tried a different conversational tack. “So, before I returned to the Beigon State after the Imperium Ball, I spent quite a bit of time sparring against Helen. She truly is extremely talented.”

“Yea, she was,” Randidly said, his voice edging back toward that raw stillness, like the broken wreckage after a bombed town after the dust had settled. His tone was all fractured glass and the crunch of bones. “She was my… my one and only, knight. But… Helen is now dead. That might be why… my responses are a bit hollow. It’s been a rough few days.”

“What?” Claudette brought her hand up to press against her chest. For a few seconds, she couldn’t make sense of what Randidly was saying. She could still picture Helen’s dismissive smirk when she had stopped their spar and demanded Claudette stop holding back.

“Commandant Wick wanted to teach me a lesson,” Randidly shook himself again. “It’s been a week… well, shit. But I can’t just stay in here forever.”

His emerald eyes flashed as he looked at Claudette. The intensity that she saw there hit her with as much force as a hand tightening around her throat. “Time to get to work.”