Randidly’s eyelids fluttered.

Warning-!

Recalculating…

Evolution occurring! Due to extreme stress and ambient energy, a change is occurring within the core of your being! Biological functions being analyzed… Examining shift...

Everything pulsed with the beating of his heart. Such was the heat dripping from his brain down through his spine that air flared and ignited when it brushed up against the skin of his neck. His blood howled through his body, driving him to new heights. However, rather than his physical body that had been remade from its human origins, this heat burned away his more complicated and delicate grey matter, allowing something new and profound to grow in its place.

Randidly could feel his tail twitching and his Nether running with around him, but other than that-

Your Stat Wisdom is evolving!

Recalculating…

Warning-

The heat rolled off his body in waves. The muscles of Randidly’s jaw tightened and popped as he struggled to contain the strain running through him. And the pain-

No regrets.

Congratulations! Your Stat Wisdom has evolved into Unnatural Capacity (Ru)! Efficacy of each Stat point increased! Adds a small boost to the Mental portion of Reaction! It becomes easier to recognize patterns more quickly.

A switch was flicked. New hardware engaged with the horrifying avalanche of information. The molten heat through his brain began to ease. Slowly, his eyes opened. His awareness gradually returned, finding that the storm of natural energy had dispersed during those two hours where he had given himself over to the heat.

Randidly looked up at the sky and heaved a breath out of his chest. The ground around him was the damp, black unearthed loam that represented a hundred years' worth of fallen leaves and small animals decomposing on the forest floor. With the grey clouds above, the flickering points of Nether, and the black dirt below, he lived in a world of monochrome.

Finally returned to consciousness his tail began to flick purposefully, gathering natural energy and recreating his storm.

That black and pockmarked desolation spread around him for about a kilometer in every direction. Small sparks of Nether still intermittently flickered in the air around him, but they silently chomped out clumps of dirt without fanfare. Other than that, the surrounding area had been abandoned.

About ten minutes after Randidly had unleashed himself, even the mosquitos had learned their lesson and fled the surrounding area. As he had said when he started, he taught them to fear humanity. He now had an entire stretch just to himself.

Steam hissed out his nose. The heat had spread from his head, where a remnant inferno still bogged down his thoughts and spread slowly down his spine. A needle of lava dripped slowly down, inflaming his nerves and leaving him feeling extremely overexposed. As Randidly had expected, overtaxing his brain and nervous system led to an increased acuity of sensation. The evolution of his Stat was just a happy accident The cascading interaction of patterns because easier for Randidly to follow.

And now… He reached up and snapped his fingers. A dozen pinches of Nether flared to life.

Achievement recognized! Your Synechdochence increased to 52%!

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Sensation (L) has grown to Level 550!

However, Randidly reached up and rubbed off some of the dried blood underneath his nose. His ability to understand the patterns increased; the small reverberations that his Nether explosions released into the surrounding air were increasingly clear to him, without causing him mental pain any longer. Now that I can understand more clearly-

If anything, the difficulty of wielding more of his core’s power had increased. Randidly’s understanding of the flaring manifestations had been rough, so he hadn’t been able to understand exactly what went wrong, which kept his Synechdochence around 50%. With Unnatural Capacity came understanding, but no easy solutions.

Seeing the minute reverberations from his previous pinches still lingering in the air, Randidly could sense the way they had always interfered with the efficiency in his next attempt. His manifestations muddied the air, creating disturbances that made the following attempts even more difficult. The more he made, the worse this interference became.

Randidly shook himself and created a wave of new pinches, obliterating the air and strengthening the churning vortex of air around him. There’s no easy fix for this. Compared to the other Nether Attributes, Synechdochence is deceptive. I suppose that’s why you unlock it at the Legendary Rarity and get rewarded with both Weight and Scope.

I can focus on activating a pinch without any disturbance already present, but then I won’t have much capability when the battlefield becomes chaotic. My Synechdochence will be empty. But focusing on a particular deployment is even worse; the different energy environments have vastly different requirements for execution and Nether is such a finicky energy. Just a few stray ripples and-

Randidly blinked. Then his grin crept across his face, warping the remnant crush of blood on his upper lip. That’s right. They are just ripples. Nether Ripples, but as long as I create a foundation to manipulate them in the same ways I do natural energy…

Instantly, Randidly focused on those reverberations that kept him from manifesting the full power of his Nether efficiently. At first he couldn’t get the trick of treating Nether as energy ripples, but then Randidly unleashed his humming Nether Core even further, creating thick pythons of Nether that ran through the storm around him. Then the thin strands of Nether could be steadily gathered by the energy flows, allowing Randidly to-

Congratulations! Your Skill Left Hand of the Nether Oracle (M) has grown to Level 521!

Congratulations! Your Skill Motif of the Hungry Deep (P) has grown to Level 411!

Achievement recognized! Synechdochence increased to 61%!

This time when he flared his pinch of Nether in the relatively stable area covered by his storm, not only did he annihilate a massive sphere of space, but the smallest seed of his Nether Weight briefly seared the edges of that space. Underneath the prodigious oppression of his over 1000 Weight, the soft loam melted and bubbled.

“Closer,” Randidly whispered. After rolling his shoulders for a few seconds to savor the constant heat that sparked outward and crept through his arms and legs, he unleashed himself fully once more. The intermittent implosions of force multiplied to ten times their previous number, filling the air and rapidly excavating all the ground beneath him.

The winds of his storm curled around Randidly’s body, holding him aloft. The heat that had steadily dissipated after Randidly evolved his Wisdom steadily began to accumulate around his brain stem once more, even as the first wave of effects was still finishing his work through his body. Once more his blood howled through his veins, nearing its boiling point and changing his entire body to some monstrous, biological steam engine.

Randidly narrowed his eyes. Thousands of interactions and subtle energy variations were observed and cataloged in his mind. They bounced and refracted off of each other, creating millions of unique combinations. Need a tighter control.

Congratulations! Your Skill Right Hand of the Nether Polymath (M) has grown to Level 495!

His Willpower flexed and spun. Gushing rivers of Nether wormed their way through the storm around him, darkening the winds and thickening the air. With the topsoil annihilated, the heavy stone bedrock was steadily unearthed below. And before Randidly’s rapidly growing power, that dense stone was scoured away.

Randidly flared his Nether again and again in powerful flashes. His eyes grew bloodshot as he kept tracking the patterns as they mixed and combined. As soon as the Nether ripples were created, he gobbled them up and strengthened his influence in the air. He did his best to smooth everything down back to normal.

However, the more he looked, the more he realized how difficult it was to remove the minute fluctuations in power. Pain made his mind fuzzy, but his stubbornness meant that he didn’t waver. He exploded his pinches of Nether, examined the surroundings, tightened his control, then tried again. The oppression of the storm climbed.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Sensation (L) has grown to Level 551!

Congratulations! Your Skill Cutting Tide of Amenonuhoko (T) has grown to Level 605!

His senses grew more acute and he found the small mistakes in adjustments he had made. Randidly corrected them, even as his brain began to vibrate itself apart. He could feel his body trembling in response. Unnatural Capacity could transform his ability to recognize and respond to information, but he just approached Nether with even more greed. Randidly groped around with his awareness, attempting to perfect the flared power of Nether.

Just a little more… Randidly sucked away all the reverberations, pulling the Nether energy into the storm. Lightning cracked up and down around his body, due to the strange electromagnetic field conjured by the churning storm. The winds were dark and shadowy, an ominous cloud over this destroyed land.

Congratulations! Your Skill Left Hand of the Nether Oracle (M) has grown to Level 530!

A pinch of Nether ballooned outward in the air in front of Randidly, devouring the nearby atmosphere with fangs of Nether Weight. Randidly grinned.

Achievement recognized! Synechdochence increased to 65%!

This feel… as long as I push it… Randidly’s eyes burned. He created two hundred more flared bursts of Nether that were almost as effective as the first. He gathered the remnant bits of Nether into the storm. Plus I have another way to cheat Synechdochence now that I know these mechanisms.

Congratulations! Your Skill Motif of the Hungry Deep (P) has grown to Level 415!

Randidly looked up at the storm swirling around him. He licked his lips, his tongue tingling with heat up and down the fleshy appendage as all the nerve endings were remade. You cannot add your Nether’s force together through Synechdochence, but I can manifest my Nether in a hundred different spots at once. Those activations create ripples. And from there…

Randidly sucked in a breath, pulling in all the kinetic energy of the storm into his limbs. The winds and lightning vanished, leaving only the unnatural darkness of Nether. His muscles were already warmed based on the shift in Randidly’s nerves, but suddenly they, too, sizzled with heat. He felt the strain of containing this much energy, but Randidly’s abilities to manipulate force had been honed to a razor’s edge on the Mountain.

Above him, thick, coiling tentacles of Nether spun around a dense core of significance that clustered around his body. Heatwaves demolished what little visibility remained in that air. He clenched his fists.

The kinetic force sang in Randidly’s body. He lifted his head and yelled with all his might.

An enormous beam of raw power shot upward, ripping through the Nether and obliterating the low hanging cloud cover. Air along the edge of the blast was so superheated that it became plasma, burning and sizzling away the atmosphere and spreading outward, growing in size, until the sky above Randidly seemed to become a sea of flames.

His eyes glittered. A little rough in the execution, but this is exactly what I need. It’s nowhere near as consistent as being able to manifest a super powerful image, but for a brief moment, hopefully, I can flare brightly enough to make a difference.