As he traversed the sea of fire, Randidly’s bed burned away beneath him. It was a fragile boat that couldn’t handle the sweltering temperatures. He touched down, his feet pressing directly against the seething surface of orange and gold and red. The bottoms of his feet tightened and began to smoke underneath the searing touch. Grimacing, he walked the rest of the way, guided by his instincts.

And as he walked, he became angry. Then infuriated. Then explosively wrathful. His hands clenched into fists until his knuckles popped.

Heat waves stretched and distorted the surrounding world. There was only Randidly and the emotional heat, with insinuated itself into his body and sliced away all of his other thoughts. There was only the oncoming confrontation and the churning, piping hot capability of his body. There was only the anger, where it had been simmering inside of him for so long.

He continued to walk until a spot appeared on the horizon.

Within the sea of fire, he found a black island. He adjusted his vector and strode up to this new landmass. If anything, his feet hurt even worse stepping onto that ground. The colorless and dull ground radiated a much uglier and more violent fervor than the lake of fire.

In the middle of the featureless black island stood one of his doppelgangers. His eyes were red and smoking, pointed up toward the sky. Even as he stopped nearby, those eyes didn’t flicker or swivel around to him. The lack of response set Randidly’s teeth on edge, but he forced himself to release a breath before speaking. “What, I don’t need to go through a memory to find you?”

“Not me,” The doppelganger growled. He wheeled slowly around, almost moving with a mechanical stiffness as he positioned himself. He studied Randidly closely and immediately Randidly could see there was something different about his eyes. The redness aside, they were curiously inert. Both self-hatred and envy had bled their emotions into the surrounding air like a plague. And yes, the heat and sense of fury seethed constantly through the air. But the expectation was entirely different.

Fury’s lips slowly curled into a smile. “We don’t need all that shit to handle this. This is simple.”

“And you want to control my body as well?” Randidly asked slowly.

Rage’s chuckle was dry. “Heh, for me, this has never been about your body. Or control. This is about things that are real.”

That phrasing through Randidly for several seconds. Being confused even for a moment was infuriating, but he suppressed that feeling. He tried not to allow the environment to get to him too much. “What do you mean? Are you saying that I’m not real?”

“I’m saying that everything gets so fucking concerned with who they are, who’s in ‘control’ of the body. How, why, where, for what reason they do things.” One by one, with that same mechanical stiffness, his fingers straightened and flexed. “But consciousness isn’t discrete like that implies. Despite the fact you’ve been suppressing us for so long, do you think we haven’t shaped the way you behave? Grip is irrelevant to the concept of control: you are dominated by the influences you fear as much as the influences you consciously allow into your life. Attempting to limit that just twists you up more.”

“So what, you want you lecture me on philosophy?” Randidly replied, almost impressed that Rage would be so concise.

The Rage Randidly grinned. “No. I want to force you to acknowledge your own greatest power: your rage. Everything you’ve ever wanted, every enemy that offended you… I’m the weapon you used to strike them down. Being angry saved you a thousand times; without your persistent vindictiveness, you would have died long ago. And yet you continue-”

At the last word, Rage gritted his teeth. The angry flames in the surrounding lake rose, grasping at the sky to tear it down. The temperature pulsed noticeably and Randidly felt his own emotions growing agitated in response. The two stared at each other for several long seconds, heat warping the gap between their positions.

Rage leaned forward. “I don’t need control. I’ve always controlled you. Now, I just get to fuck you up for being such a fool about it. Ready yourself.”

Again, the flames surged. Randidly allowed his own emotions to rise with the heat, filling him with one sweeping certainty: the only way to solve this problem was to fight Rage. His heartbeat began to quicken, shooting blood through his entire body. Clenching his fists, he leaned forward and threw himself at the condensed core of emotion with the intent to smash it into submission.

With a bark of laughter, Rage met him in a flurry of limbs. Hands smashed and jabbed several times in quick succession.

It honestly took a few moments for Randidly to adjust to the fact his enemy actually possessed the same high Stats and instincts that he did. He feinted with a sharp jab, which Rage ignored entirely, then planted his feet and zig-zagged at a rapid clip while weaving his head. Rage barreled straight forward, hands suddenly liberated from their mechanical jerkiness.

He threw out a haymaker of a hook and Rage’s body practically disintegrated from that position in a barely possible dodge. But Randidly didn’t have much time to curse his own ability, because a vicious knee ripped up to shatter his jaw.

He used his left hand to slap the blow off target then stepped forward to slam a clenched fist into his guts. But Rage used the momentum from the slap to spin around, bringing a high heel kick cutting for Randidly’s temple. He ducked under the blow and just unleashed a sharp palm thrust at his opponent’s lower back.

Rage blocked it directly, the impact creating a small sonic boom. When Rage landed, he shifted his weight and launched himself forward on the offensive. His blows were sharp and penetrating, methodically forcing Randidly to take more and more of them, even while Randidly did the same to Rage. Their penetrating strikes reduced the dodges the deflections and the deflections to blocks, until soon both had planted their feet on the center of the island and were simply wailing away on each other with every drop of Primordial Nether Juju they possessed.

Randidly’s bones ached from the bludgeoning, but his eyes were narrowed with seething fury. Both incarnations’ bodies were steaming constantly, the heat on the island was becoming unbearable. But that was part of this place. Here, the heat consumed everything eventually, melting down the unfortunate things that lingered here into the essence of rage.

First on shoulder, elbow on the diaphragm, foot on the lower leg, foot on arm in front of temple, fist on arm in front of face…

Their movements began to accelerate, the dull thump of the impacts becoming a tribal cadence that began to gallop away. Sweat poured down their bodies. Randidly stood face to face with his own rage, feeling it whirl through his body. Rage laughed and laughed, the expression twisted into something dark and feral, each strike sucked in more of the surrounding flames into his body. His blows were crushing and abrupt, and each time Randidly barely managed to get his defense up in time.

The struggle seemed entirely balanced. In a split second, they crashed into each other and separated like two rabid electrons, whirling about the nucleus. The fires around them grew larger and the air trembled from the collisions.

And then, rather strangely, Randidly realized he had access to his images. With a requisite amount of heat in this place, a switch had been flipped. He gestured sharply and roots of liquid fire surged out of the lake and stabbed at Rage’s back underneath the grip of Yggdrasil. But Rage’s left eye began to warp, becoming a swirling event horizon.

All that heat and emotion were devoured cleanly by the manifestation of the Stillborn Phoenix, leaving the two of them exactly where they had begun. Growling, Randidly pulled his images together through his body. His limbs warped and transformed to become armored but his skin almost translucent. His hair became emerald and his veins were shimmering and golden within his body. His left eye also began to swirl with darkness.

Meanwhile, Rage mobilized the other configuration that Randidly had discovered. His limbs were also armored, but it wasn’t just the left eye that fell to darkness, but both eyes and the mouth. From his back, branches ripped their way out of his flesh and spread out in jagged forks. Small green leaves grew and created a living pair of wings behind his back. Those wings pulses, throwing off waves of scorching air.

Randidly crouched down, settling into the familiar balance of utilizing three Skills at once. Dawn Opens the Sky and Reality Stirs. Wicked Waltz of Tartarus. The Vindictive Chimera Smites.

Congratulations! Your Skill the Vindictive Chimera Smites (M) has grown to Level 780!

Across from him, the darkness-filled mouth of Rage bellowed its own combination. “The Maelstrom Entity Approaches! Hallucination of the Bloodless Heart! Darkness Withers the Horizon and the Waiting Carrion Grins!”

Randidly felt the environment turn against him, feel the way Rage manipulated paths of heat and light energy to become a wild storm of gravitational pressure he used to tighten around his body. In fact, the combination Rage utilized sucked away all the energy of light and used it to create a whirling maelstrom around his body that fueled the grinding squeeze against him.

Meanwhile, Randidly was light and momentum, surging through the suddenly black and empty abyss toward his one foe. The pressure he experienced was almost as great as had been wielded by Dogeol, in that surge of worldwide image. His bones and organs creaked as he gritted his teeth.

To force his way through the pressure again him and smite his opponent, Randidly pulled more and more emotional force into his image. His images began to shiver, transforming and resonating with his intent. He burned with rage and the desire to overcome this opponent. Like a comet, he blazed forward, forcing a path through the jaws of gravitational doom.

Yet even as Randidly pulled at emotional force, so did Rage. Heat was generated and sucked away into the squeezing gravitation singularity so quickly that the wind began to howl. From twenty meters to ten, Randidly crossed the distance and felt the pain growing in his internal organs. Both were gathering more and more force, and the fact they were so equally matched infuriated Randidly to no end.

He crossed the line of five meters to Rage, his raised hand burning with power. His fingers were locked into a claw-like position, ready to rend his opponent. His eyes bulged.

Rage was invisible except for a dim outline, the manifestations of the Stillborn Phoenix consuming his torso almost entirely. But this close to him, it was possible to feel some ambient heat that wasn’t perfectly converted to gravitational power. The few drops of sweat remaining on Randidly’s body evaporated and left him crusted in salt.

Only two meters separated the two bodies. Randidly’s long arm swung forward at Rage. Both channeled more and more emotional force into their abilities. The light contained in his hand grew brighter. The void grew more ominous and domineering.

Both were incendiary with anger. Some part of Randidly, separated from all the emotion and heat, knew that anger and Rage meeting would not deliver a victor. And yet, another part of Randidly, knew that you couldn’t reason with Rage without first demonstrating you would not flinch before it.

And perhaps Rage was right; for a long time, Randidly had flinched before his own anger. He wouldn’t acknowledge it, lest he be perceived as someone dominated by that emotion.

Bones in his ribs popped. Some of his internal organs tore slightly from the constant pressure and eviscerated themselves. Small pieces of viscera spat out from the pressure impacted his pumping heart, disturbing its constant churn. His arm swung down, the claw of his hand sheering through the silhouette, the shoulder, and into the chest of Rage.

His opponent’s fury mounted, transforming into a distinctive, vindictive surge of power.

Randidly’s disturbed heart sputtered and stopped.