In front of him, Pullas looked afraid.

Randidly squeezed his eyes shut, emotional potency raging through him like a hungry lion pacing the limits of his cage. His joints ached in a way he hadn’t felt in a long time; the presence of the Alpha Cosmos’s psychological darkness felt like a physical burden he now carried. One that sizzled and burned through his nerves and muscle fibers. The presence in his body felt like a curse.

He felt foolish, for having allowed the problem to grow to this point. At first, Randidly had believed all these emotions would someday empower him. That the unruly sea could be tamed and mastered.

Yet now he wasn’t so sure. The intensity sat across his body, bile and mud and shit and the accumulation of detritus. Hatred, anger, envy, hunger, vengeance. They swirled around him. The emotions were pollution, blunting his edge and filling him with rage. A powerful, all-consuming rage, sure. But one too unwieldy to bring to bear on an opponent.

A burden his body struggled to contain.

Suddenly, he was very conscious of his new, no longer human body. Shedding the shackles of humanity, some nebulous connection to Elhume through his anchoring Stats, had given him great power. Yet now, with these monstrous emotions prowling through him, he felt it. The near-limitless capacity of the new body for gleeful violence. His muscles shuddered with it. There was a definite way to embrace the force contained within the Alpha Cosmos. Each of his heartbeats carried waves-

His eyes snapped open; Fiona had suddenly appeared next to the stunned Pullas, still transfixed by the specters of dark emotion hovering around the Grey Creature. The woman took Pullas’s arm and led her forward, passing deeper and deeper into the oppressive negativity hovering around Randidly. His stomach groaned with a wild panic at their presence, his emotions reacting to the proximity.

Despite the fact they must be encountering increasing resistance from the air, their pace did not falter.

His attention soon became entangled with restraining those wild emotions in his body. By the time he resurfaced, Fiona and Pullas were wading across the shallow pool, the curtains of mist from the waterfall soaking their clothing. The trembling in his body got worse as the hopped up on nearby stones, only five meters away.

“What are you doing?” Randidly asked evenly. Moving his mouth and not just howling in a raw animal cry of suffering took quite a bit of will.

“Being here for you, you dumbass,” Fiona said tartly. She waved a hand and released a pulse of mauve light. Several of the degenerative copies of the Grey Creature fixated on this image demonstration, blasting antagonism her way. The image shield began to melt from their combined efforts. She frowned around, gesturing again and reinforcing the image. This time, it held.

She folded her hands in her lap and looked at Randidly. Her eyes were calm. “You are struggling. We are here for you.”

Randidly forced a smile on his face. “I appreciate the concern, but as I said, it’s not necessary. Besides, I’m afraid what comes next won’t be very pretty.

“If you have friends who just stay around because of how pretty you are,” Pullas said. “They aren’t very good friends, are they?”

Randidly gave Pullas a long look. She looked so slight and small, her hair dripping wet and clinging to her skull. She braved the violent emotional waste directly, not even bothering to shield her body with her image. Grey Creatures stalked around her, their long and insubstantial fingers flexing. All the while, she stared straight at Randidly with the same sort of intimate vulnerability.

It made Randidly uncomfortable for an entirely different reason than the emotional indigestion he experienced.

“You won’t be able to help,” Randidly reiterated in a whisper. He felt bleary and unfamiliar with himself.

“Oh we know, our presence here is primarily selfish.” Fiona shrugged. “We might be inconveniencing you, but we want to be up front in saying we are willing to cause any number of small inconveniences in order to have a few more minutes by your side. Huh, perhaps we’ve fallen for your charms? And a bit obsessive in our pursuits, I have to admit.”

“You-” Randidly couldn’t help himself; he snorted, then grimaced as his internal organs twisted in on himself. It took a few breaths to steady himself. He suppressed all the emotions with Grey Monarch’s Authority, simply studying the two women. They looked at him with empathy and understanding.

He pressed his eyes shut once more. “Once I start, I won’t be able to control what happens. I’ll need to attack and absorb the emotional force directly. There might be some… collateral damage.”

Fiona sniffed. “Do you think we need the warning? Just be happy Pullas isn’t trying to force your hand with the duel; she would wipe the floor with you right now. Look how messy your image detail is. Look how wide and unfocus your capability has become, no matter how massive your emotional affect.”

Randidly felt torn between annoyance, amusement, and genuine thankfulness. And that combination gave him the last bit of largess that he needed to accept their presence. He felt some inner part of himself relax and he sank deeper into his own subconscious. In a moment, he had returned to his childhood bedroom.

It was time to get to work.

Randidly slapped his cheeks. Well, past time.

He sat up slowly, careful not to let the wavy perspective of the dreamspace affect him. He still possessed the ‘items’ he had earned here previously, tools given to him by Alta in order to help him against the emotions being given to his subconscious. However, the problem was those systems were being overwhelmed by the sheer weight of negativity. It had reached a critical mass, some internal density going beyond safe levels and beginning to corrupt the surroundings in a cascading reaction.

The negative emotions had begun to spread too quickly. He needed to cull them back.

Randidly looked around at the walls of the childhood bedroom, noticing the new addition of thick, pulsating black veins crisscrossing the wallpaper. He could feel the acidic emotional force-feeding off those veins, growing more prevalent and dangerous every moment. It stained the air, hanging like a miasma inside of him.

So before I can start absorbing the parts associated with my memories, I need to burn my way through the pollution that's leaking out, Randidly grimaced. Gingerly, he pushed himself off of the bed and onto the ground. His body swayed as he attempted to get his bearings. The veins continued to pulse.

Opposite him, the door out into the hallway remained a fixture. He knew that if he passed out through that door, he would find the cavern leading to the different memories. Yet right now, Randidly let his eyes follow the veins back to their source. They wriggled and branched and he methodically examined them to follow minute differences in thickness that revealed which were stalks and which were extensions.

Eventually, Randidly tottered across his room to his childhood dresser. He pressed his small hands against the side and shifted the piece of furniture. Behind it, a dark tunnel stretched into the wall, filled with thick tubes of negativity.

“Well shit,” Randidly blinked in recognition. “This is where that stupid vent was. I cannot fucking believe-”

Then Randidly paused. Honestly, it made a lot of sense. Feeling a deep revulsion, he crouched down and began to proceed through the low-ceilinged tunnel. His lip curled up as he pressed against the black veins, uncomfortable with how warm they were underneath his child-like hands.

When Randidly was a kid living with his mother, they had problems with the house’s ventilation system. As part of that, a technician had come in and removed the cover on the vent in his room while checking for blockages. Randidly hadn’t even thought about the hidden opening that helped regulate the temperature in the room, until he came home from school and noticed that his dresser was slightly shifted to the side and the vent cover was leaning up next to it, removed from a vent Randidly hadn’t even known existed.

The next few weeks had seen Randidly constantly tormented by nightmares centered around the uncovered vent he now knew lurked behind the dresser. However, these were not the usual kind of dreams; Randidly was not the sort of child that feared monsters or snakes or insects crawling out of the hidden passage and entering his room.

No, each nightmare concerned the same very specific situation. No matter how much he tried to resist it, or not think about the opening, or smother his curiosity, or distract himself, Randidly would eventually find himself on his hands and knees, crawling helplessly down into the dusty passage. And eventually, he would find a dead end, trapped in the cramped ventilation shaft unable to escape.

The opening called to him. Drew him in, no matter how much he struggled.

He woke up screaming until his fed-up mother took away the vent cover. After that, the possibility slipped from his mind and his subconscious eased its tormented grip on him. Now, in the dream world, he pursed his lips at the irony he now needed to descend amongst the veins to try and face his fear.

Like his nightmare, the passage quickly became cramped. He started hobbling along, then crouching, then crawling, until he had to drag himself along on his stomach, every side rubbing up against the overly warm veins. Randidly’s eyes were brutal and harsh and he tugged himself along, proceeding deeper, feeling the negative emotions in the air thickening around him. It became difficult to breathe, the surroundings were so clogged with negativity. He swam through a haze of emotion, the passage ahead becoming murky.

He squirmed through a vaguely wet gap in the veins and forced himself into an open chamber. Cold air hit his face and brought his head wheeling around. He blinked at what he saw. No longer was he within the dream world, but he had become a floating projection in the soft mist surrounding the waterfall. His body sat below, with Fiona and Pullas watching him.

He floated in the air in his own form, no longer a child. His hands tightened into fists, feeling the satisfying feedback of a genuine body. “Ah, so it must be done the old-fashioned way?”

The surroundings were also filled with the twisted souls of the fake Grey Creatures and his words set them off. As soon as Randidly spoke, those hungry monsters jerked around and began licking their lips. More phantoms condensed out of the emotional darkness he carried, staggering toward him in a series of endless rows.

This was but a pinch of the darkness he needed to clear before he could address his own calcified emotion at the heart of the Grey Creature.

Randidly breathed out through his nose. Nether flames surged along his arms, covering him in an undulating grey layer. It’s not an ideal scenario, but I need to clean up some of the detritus before I can deal with the larger issues. Each of these projections contains threads of malignant emotion, given shape by the darkness within the Grey Creature. One by one, I can refine them and weave them together into my own emotional pattern. So long as the frame is a good one, I should quickly gather momentum.

Even as Randidly’s mind ran through a dozen very esoteric calculations to incorporate the emotional force into his own foundation, the first fake Grey Creature twitched and launched itself at him in a thrashing motion.

Although it possessed no finesse, the power it exerted was substantial; each of these seemed to wield his own physical capability. Its long claws lashed out, aiming to rip Randidly’s right eye from his socket.

He flared his images, but there was no response; he remained in a projected world with only a body, although the venue had become somewhat strange. Inwardly, he shrugged. Outwardly, he side-stepped the attack, snatched the monster’s wrist with one hand and shattered its elbow with the other.

The bone cracked to splinters and the forearm flopped around.

It hit the ground and scurried sideways, predicting his follow-up attack. It stepped sideways, right as he had predicted it would. Randidly’s eyes glowed emerald as his fingers raked across the thing’s throat with enough force to shred the skin and scatter core; this thing had his instincts, but it had no idea how to use them.

The body collapsed, releasing a thread of emotional force. Randidly spun it away into the enormous Nether Ritual he began to assemble. Then he beckoned to the rest of the stuttering Grey Creatures with bloody fingers. “Come on, then. I don’t have time to play around with you.”