“You wish for a decisive battle?” Self-Hatred called across the screams and roars of the dying Grey Creatures. The darkness around its body continued to thicken, even as the madness in its eyes curled with glee. “I see you managed to create a synergistic effect with your Nether Core. But do you think that will be enough to overcome the difference between us? Be reasonable, Randidly. Or have you come to surrender your body? Have you finally realized you should fear me?”

Randidly remained silent, marching forward. His certainty only grew with every step; this emotion was a part of him, yes, but it was limited by what it was called. Its essence blinded it to other options. Self-Hatred ceased tossing the massive black spears, its inky-black eyes glittering as Randidly crossed the distance, content to dwell on on a few details and movements. As he approached it raised its right hand, a mass of emotional darkness congregating there. A decisive strike, just as the previous attacks had been attempts at decisive strikes.

He made a mental note about the power of a name; perhaps some of these opponents were smarter than Randidly had considered, wanting to avoid earning the curse of the word Ghasthund.

With a few bounding steps, Randidly ignored the mass of Grey creatures slashing at him and crossed the last distance to Self-Hatred. It snarled and swung that right fist it had so long prepared. The air became thick with emotional force. Time seemed to slow. Just like the shaft, Randidly could feel the layers of time sweeping across him as the attack neared.

His eyes followed the blow. If it landed, Randidly would sink into a whirlpool of self-hatred that would last an eternity for each moment that passed. Its slippery coolness pressed against him even now, whispering that this was all he deserved. It urged him to cease his struggles and simply suffer underneath its yoke. Self-hatred wished to send him down into an endless spiral of dwelling and self-recrimination.

Randidly did not slow. He had trained too long against the pull of entropy to let a small bout of self-hatred affect his combat ability. Constricted by the press of inky darkness, Randidly raised his left hand in the face of the blow. It became a naked deflection.

The fist wrapped in darkness hit him in a horrifying impact. Waves of emotion and physical force swept outward, eviscerating all of the Grey Creatures in the surrounding ten meters. The projection area shook with enough force that below, Pullas glanced up briefly. Randidly felt his left shoulder groan in pain. However, he absorbed almost all of the attack. Sulfur, his left arm, hummed in pleasure from the kinetic force.

Self-Hatred opened its mouth to spit out some words, but Acri slid into its heart. Randidly’s thrust, even after all this time, was a thing of beautiful efficiency.

Shal had taught him well.

Acri ripped out of his target’s back, the sharp weapon easily penetrating through the reflection of his body. The emotional core swayed, looking at Randidly in disgust. “You… don’t deserve anything that you have. These equipments, these toys, all your subordinates… you don’t deserve any of it.”

“That may be true,” Randidly said quietly, feeling a strange mixture of relief and guilt at the presence of his two Soulseeds within this place. “But this existence isn’t so kind as to bother with giving or taking based on merit.”

If anything, Randidly’s response only seemed to infuriate Self-Hatred even more. It forced mocking laughter from its lips, even as black blood began to spurt from the wound in its chest. “Do you think this is the end? Sure, you have wounded me, but did you think you could fight your self-hatred into submission. I will-”

“This is a metaphor, you dumbass.” Randidly sighed as he tugged Acri out of Self-Hatred’s chest. A different sort of shiver ran through the surroundings. “I’m not literally slaying you, I’m accepting you. I haven’t addressed you before, but now it’s time.”

The projection in front of him shattered. A massive wave of emotional raw emotional force, wild and almost double the size of the emotions he had refined with the Nether Ritual so far, erupted from the body. His Nether working began to strain to contain all of it. Randidly felt himself burning, inside out, as he gritted his teeth and attempted to handle all the emotions pumping into him.

Yet also, Randidly received knowledge. Most of that knowledge took the form of a horrible parade of his worst decisions. Times he had hurt his friends. Slaughtering people thoughtlessly, enjoying their pain. Times he had let his anger talk him into lashing out. Time after time that Expira suffered from an attack he could have prevented, but didn’t.

Helen’s death featured heavily here. Her body inert on the ground, ribs opened up, organs pulped and removed, her eyes empty.

Yet as Randidly suffered through that emotional friction, as his Nether RItual spun faster and faster, absorbing all this emotional force, he also received some information he hadn’t known before. That Self-Hatred had been one of four emotional cores that had formed to torment him. The freest, the least restricted, the one that wouldn’t be waiting in memories from his past that Alta had carefully arranged.

The weakest, although not by much.

Those realizations gave way to the raw emotional agony of incorporating this power. Randidly pressed his eyes shut and simply burned.

*****

“Have you ever been married, Pullas?” Fiona asked, leaning and arching her back to stretch muscles sore from long sitting. She couldn’t decide whether she was bored or nervous.

Pullas, who had been previously staring with dangerous intensity at either the ripple-filled water or over at Randidly, blinked and looked around. “What? M-Married?”

“A marriage. Or any sort of bonding, to whomever you believed to be a viable match for you,” Fiona explained with exaggerated slowness; sometimes, she forgot how weirdly innocent Pullas was. She tilted her head to the side as she looked at the other woman. “You are quite endearing, you know. Your heart is good, you have attention to detail. You created Idylla, which now-” Her words paused briefly as the reality of what their actions in the Sonara had done to Idylla hung between them, but pushed forward. “You managed the city for hundreds of years. Surely, that power and influence saw many wishing to form a relationship with you.”

“Oh, yes. Quite a few came around, especially at the beginning. None of them worth knowing, not truly. They believed in their hearts, I think, that I could arrange for some sort of beneficial treatment that would allow their images to grow more quickly. But eventually…” Pullas trailed off for a second. Beads of water gleamed on her cheekbones from the constant mists churning across them. “Eventually, their pursuits ceased. It is strange to say, but I think that my pursuit of a good death disturbed them, somewhat.”

“It makes sense. Most of the residents of the Nexus are cowards, although they refuse to admit it.” Fiona’s heart wrenched as she considered her own husband, the most hypocritical, cowardly man of them all. A man who refused to speak out in defense of his own life, lest others learn of his flaw and think him weak.

She cleared her throat to refocus her thoughts. “But I noticed-”

Fiona stopped speaking. Gasping, Pullas wheeled around. Because suddenly, the sea of flickering image fragments hovering around Randidly vanished. In a giant inhalation, the lingering negativity vanished. Even the mists from the waterfall were affected, pulled and soaking Randidly through his skin.

Silence followed. Both women looked at Randidly. Flickers of those Grey Creatures they had seen condensed again behind him, but this time they were rapidly winnowed away. One by one, the raving madness that had somehow infected his image vanished. Each was devoured, the light and detail of the central Grey Creature building until it dominated the air about Randidly Ghosthound.

Then its eyes opened in a pulse of image powerful enough that both stiffened.

Yet before Fiona could determine anything more about what had happened, the images vanished. Randidly himself stirred, twisting his neck back and forth and earning a long series of cracks. He blinked several times, his gaze unfocused. When he could see them, he smiled at them both. “You two… thank you. You make for great allies.”

“And bad enemies,” Pullas said in a rare joke, her lips trembling as she offered a smile.

Randidly laughed and straightened. He looked down at his hands and another hair-raising image pulse came out of his body. Pullas sniffed and released a pulse of her own, one with so much intensity that Fiona jumped off of her stone and fell in the water.

When she spluttered back to the surface, Pullas pouted at Randidly. “Why are you being so aggressive? You scared Fiona.”

Randidly’s mouth twitched. “I didn’t mean for anyone to be alarmed. It really never occurred to me that my image had improved enough to so spook Fiona.”

Pullas nodded, full of self-righteousness, as Fiona dragged herself out of the water. “Short-sighted, but understandable. Still… are you well? All the darkness around you has vanished.”

Randidly offered a shallow smile. “I’m better.”

“But you haven’t eliminated the source of that image blurriness?” Fiona prodded.

Randidly gave her a sharp glance almost like he was annoyed, then shrugged. “Well, I can’t say I’ve completely gotten rid of the problem. Just got a good start on it. But for now, I will no longer be troubled by rebellions from my images.”

Pullas sucked in a breath. “So now-”

“I need to begin climbing again, yes,” Randidly bowed his head. He stood and hopped across the stones to sway next to Pullas. He wrapped his arms and brought her into a hug. Then he straightened, Pullas still sniffing, and hopped over to do the same to Fiona. She accepted the hug mutely, somewhat embarrassed how reassuring she found his warmth.

Her fingers tightened on his back. “Be safe.”

“I’ll do my best,” Randidly said as he pulled back. He looked up at the misting waterfall and grinned. With a wave of his hand, he conjured the strange key he somehow utilized to burrow through space. “This was a perfect location. Really, I couldn’t have done this without the two of you.”

“We will see you when you return,” Pullas said.

Randidly nodded. He thrust the key forward. He vanished.