The longer the fight between Kayle and Drake lasted, the more Randidly’s expression became increasingly serious. His eyes unfocused so he could watch the energy beyond their physical movements. It’s not just Drake’s emotional affect. I think I remember hearing that his memories were blurry, when he finally woke up from his long coma. He needed to work for a while before he pieced his life back together.

That steady Nether foundation he recovered serves him well…

Kayle cut three times, leaving gleaming flashes with each of his blades with his quick strikes. Drake’s armor screeched as he hopped back just a fraction too slow, allowing several deep gouges to be cut into the bone. These marred locations began to smoke slightly, evidencing a strange aspect of the Death Knight’s armor. Kayle ghosted sideways, seeking a new position.

While Drake adjusted his grip and raised his sword, his elemental on his shoulder shuffled his shoulders and pressed itself tightly into a ball. Then the small porcupine body began to merge into Drake’s armor and then later expand, until four long and insectoid pincers stretched from his back in a poor impersonation of wings.

The tips of those bone harpoons looked wickedly sharp.

Kayle reversed his grip on his long knives and rushed forward, intimidated not in the slightest. The upper two pincers twitched a little, but mostly just stayed behind Drake’s back as he prepared an executioner’s swing at his charging foe. Yet Kayle gracefully rolled sideways, landing like a cat and streaking past the bone warrior at an unexpected vector. Two new, extremely deep marks curved across Drake’s side.

Randidly’s eyes flashed emerald as these new flaws also began to smoke. A certain haze began to build around the arena, a sticky, oiliness to the air that released a strange starburst of color. It oozed out from Drake’s wounded form and stained the air. It had the glittery sheen of pollution. Oh? This-

Kayle’s eyes narrowed; likely his instincts also began to notice the strange behavior from Drake. His body suddenly accelerated, knives seeking weaknesses in Drake’s heavy armor. The larger man moved with surprising grace, his torso swaying so that the blows were only glancing. Drake then planted a foot and leaned forward abruptly, aiming to smash his shoulder against Kayle’s head, which might have cracked open the other man’s skull.

Like a ghost, Kayle slid out of the way and appeared behind Drake. With vindictive glee, he drove both of the knives into the large bone plate across his back. The sturdy material cracked. Just as quick as he had attacked, he was away, his eyes warily on the strange pincers that had spawned earlier. However, the protrusions of bone remind inert, even with Kayle right there behind Drake.

More oily gas spewed out of the gashes, but this time it was accompanied by the trickle of dark blood. Drake whipped around with his blade extended, a full second too late to land a hit. However, something changed in his demeanor. The ominous and overpowering image of the death knight, which was a mediocre image boosted by an immaculate emotional affect, began to change. An edge of madness crept into Drake as he hunched forward, his bone-covered shoulders heaving.

For all that the wounds on his back were obviously deep, only a few fat and heavy drops of blood rolled out of the holes in his armor.

A purple cloud now drifted around the fighters. It didn’t exactly impair visibility, but it had spread to fill up most of the area. Kayle rushed forward and Drake raised his sword into a high grip once more. But right when Kayle appeared before him, the sword remained still and Drake’s left fist whipped out in a surprise jab.

Kayle ducked under the blow and then scrambled backward and Drake aimed for another body check. As distance opened between them, Drake’s back arched and then he threw his bastard sword like a hatchet.

“You…” Kayle’s expression continued to grow tighter. He planted his foot, spun out of the way of the thrown sword, then accelerated back toward Drake. The Death Knight unleashed a few more vicious jabs to try and maintain distance, but Kayle was simply too fast. His long knives dug deeply into the joint around Drake’s left shoulder.

They slid cleanly into his flesh, this time earning a steadier trickle of blood.

It was, Randidly had to admit, slightly intimidating the way that Drake stoically endured the wound without making a single sound. Even as blood and gas sputtered out of the hole in the armor. A new crack ran down from the shoulder, through the entire piece of armor covering the arm.

Kayle danced backward, preparing for a counterattack. But instead, Drake seemed to have forgotten he was there. Instead, the man reached over and seized up the edges of the crack in the bone armor. After a few seconds, he had worked his thick fingers into the gap. As the entire crowd watched, he began to rip off chunks, exposing the sweat-covered flesh of his arm. The flesh there was dyed purple, a darker shade than the gas but similar enough to recognize. Ugly black veins visibly pulsed in that exposed bicep, a monster’s sickening Vitality at work.

Drake rotated his shoulder, the joint popping audibly. The trickling blood from Kayle’s attack ceased almost entirely. Then he reached over and ripped another large chunk of the restricting bone. Beneath the armor, his muscles began to bulge.

Randidly leaned back in his chair. The details of what exactly caused Drake’s coma are all hearsay because he hasn’t talked publicly about it and the only witness was Roy. However, that was during the time that people from Expira headed into Danger Zones. Upon reaching the center, you would be rewarded. You could either give the entire world a boost, your Zone a boost, or a personal boost, if I recall.

Drake… for whatever reasons selected a personal boost. Yet somehow, the application was twisted. The result was pure agony, so much so that his consciousness fled into his bonded elemental to survive. Which left his body as a thing of pure instinct and violence. To think… to think he managed to incorporate all that into his image… no wonder he has such a solid foundation of Nether…

Drake’s clumsy hands finally found an edge of the armor. He snapped off a huge chunk, revealing most of his forearm. Kayle gathered his own image, the tension in the air sharpening to a vicious point. His knives seemed to lengthen in his hands, so the cutting edge seemed to grow and curve like a murderous grin.

Yet what finally broke the moment were those bone protrusions on Drake’s back. One flexed threateningly and then stabbed down, piercing through Drake’s meaty forearm and then poking out through the other side. Then it began to flex, trying to bind the unarmored limb to his side and take away its freedom.

Those bulging muscles ignored this effort, ignored the blood dripping from the wound and gas escaping from the bone spike driven through his arm. Instead, the arm formed a heavy fist and experimentally smashed at the armor of his chest, side, and opposite arm. Finding no serious flaws in the armor, Drake raised his helmeted head and finally acknowledged Kayle.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Kayle muttered to himself. “Why do my opponents always seem to be the crazy ones…?”

The fight began to pick up speed and momentum, the purple gas refracting the fight and warping it into a caricature of itself. Randidly felt the minute mind-altering properties of the gas but decided that even an average person could handle the effect.

At the very least, it would make this high-level emotional battle quite memorable for the crowd.

Kayle sliced even more decisively, cutting deeper and deeper into the silent Drake as more of his bone armor splintered and fell away. However, Drake just used these wounds to grip the binding of the armor and rip it off of him. The madness percolated in the air like the smell of garbage, strengthening the longer it remained there without anyone addressing the issue. The combination of madness and mild hallucinogens made Drake move his massive body at speeds that seemed impossible. His joints contorted and twisted, even as those bone talons pierced liberated limbs and tried to restrict them.

A grotesque and muscular puppet seemed to caper across the stage, stubbornly resisting the will of its violent puppetmaster.

It reminded Randidly of Chimeric Impunity: the power rampaging on and through Drake was impossible, frightful, insane. It curled at the edges like smoldering paper and vanished if you examined it too closely. Yet the mental pressure of the thickening purple mist, Drake’s silence, and his continued anticipation of the wounds inflicted against him meant that Kayle couldn’t find an effective counter, despite his superior specs.

Several times, Kayle roused Randidly into protection mode as he unleashed continent-splitting slashes in an attempt to disperse the haze of insanity that now coiled above the arena. However, these attempts failed miserably. Yes, Kayle possessed the immense power to split something solid, but the genius of Drake’s image was its weakness.

Most people started their image with a holistic projection. However, Drake’s began with that small foundation, more of a germ than an image. It didn’t matter if a host of germs was split; each functioned as a small factory to propagate itself in the future, even without any outside support. They worked tirelessly.

Shattering their unity would do nothing. The only option was to eliminate them.

By the time that both of Drake’s overly muscled arms and one bulging thigh were revealed, he and Kayle fought in a bloodthirsty melee. Eventually, Kayle caught a turkey-sized fist and was crushed into the tiled ground of the arena.

Sighing, he waved his hands in surrender. Which left only a single match in the round of sixteen: Beatrice versus Illdan, of Tellus. This match Randidly had some anticipation toward, after the prior round. This was the fighter who borrowed Randidly’s Breath of the Spear Phantom and was named the Spearman Reborn.

Drake stood silently, even in victory. Randidly’s gaze sharpened at his hunched and entirely too still posture. Yet eventually, Drake pivoted on his heel and walked out of the arena, still leaking gas and blood. Randidly wondered how true the madness was and whether he needed some time to calm back down before he could lose that form.

Randidly raised his hand. Take notes. The best way is to annihilate Drake’s image. But if you can’t manage that-

The Stillborn Phoenix opened its maw and devoured everything, leaving the air relatively pristine. It rumbled pleasantly, enjoying the different sort of flavor that Drake’s image possessed.

The final two competitors of the round came up onto the stage and approached each other. Significance swirled around them, but in an entirely different dimension than what had been present around Drake and Kayle. Even Randidly was slightly flabbergasted as the two spent several minutes awkwardly flirting in the middle of the arena, while legions of young women chanted Illdan’s name from the stands.

The two young people shook hands stiffly. Tatiana giggled. “They are honestly pretty cute. Do you think they will become a couple, after the tournament?”

“Maybe. So long as the fight starts soon; some of Illdan’s fans are turning decidedly sour toward Beatrice right now.” He glanced down at the stands. His eyes could read the emotions wafting up from some of the more powerful audience members. “Can you feel that? Several of them are starting to hope that he breaks her head open and is permanently disfigured. Jeez, I’ll never understand fandoms.”

“You are lucky you project a very unapproachable aura. Or you’d need to deal with even worse,” Tatiana pointed out. Randidly shivered in mock horror, earning a laugh. “Do you know what some people would do to control the most powerful man in the world?”

Randidly’s face went to smile, but in that moment he thought of Yystrix, trying so hard to control him in the early days. Tatiana seemed to sense the sudden drop in his mood and reached toward him, but he shook his head and waved a hand. “Sorry, just some weird Nether indigestion. I’m feeling better, but this tournament is still exhaustion.”

Tatiana clearly didn’t believe him, but they both let the subject drop.

When the two opponents finally took their position opposite each other on the stage, he raised his voice. “Let the final match in the round of sixteen… begin!”