Randidly’s arm whipped back into a cocked punch, low and pressed to his side. Each beat of his heart spread blessed heat through his body, animating his limbs. He had already deftly grasped the flows of kinetic energy in the worn training area South of the farm, far enough away that he wouldn’t damage the facilities. Only a few meters away from him, Neveah sniffed disapprovingly and raised an eyebrow. “Now what do you think you are doing?”

He didn’t bother to smother a sly quirk of the lips. “I’m generating outside forces. It’s not against the rules of the energy game.”

She grimaced, “Are you really going to spit into the spirit of the challenge? I said first one to destroy the other’s Working without touching each other or the workings. Are you trying to claim that because it’s kinetic energy it doesn’t count as touching? The few victories you’ve received in our games have transformed you into an ugly and petty creature, Randidly Ghosthound.”

Randidly didn’t stop gathering force to his body, creating a pressurized missile of force around his punch. He planned to do exactly what Neveah said. “Few victories? If I recall correctly, I won quite a few more than I lost last night.”

“You also cling to history to soothe your ego,” Neveah serenely concluded. He rolled his eyes; that accusation was pretty rich, coming from her and her almost six days of running the energy games without being defeated. She raised her hands and settled into a fighting stance. “However, if you believe you will be able to seize a decisive advantage by distracting me with combat, you are sorely mistaken. I may not willfully throw myself at every fight, but that doesn’t mean I am weak.”

“Weakness is relative,” Randidly growled. He punched. The world shivered.

He pulled up the blow at the last second, allowing only the finely honed drill of force to shoot forward and impact her. He also took care to erase all undue influence of his images. He might rather flippantly attack with force, but he wasn’t going to try and toe the line too much with what constituted ‘touch’. Behind Neveah sat a humming Nether RItual she animated, while behind Randidly was an Engraving. The energy of the two workers were already beginning to grapple against each other, seeking to find a weakness.

Their bodies became small pieces on a larger battlefield of energy dominance.

Truth be told, Randidly admitted that in a straight-up match, Neveah was better in those energy games that allowed her time to plan and prepare. Her Nether Ritual was worse than what he would have done, and by far worse than what she could do with a few minutes to think about Engraving, but it would hold up against his own rather uninspired Engraving.

So Randidly sewed the seeds of chaos upon this battlefield, trusting his innate flexibility would be enough.

Snorting, Neveah raised a hand and batted the force attack away with her own impressive physicality. She definitely was powerful enough to simply crush this amount of energy. For a brief moment, purposefully, Neveah allowed the constant illusion of humanity she maintained to flicker. Behind that stood a four-limbed Bone Wyrm, her maw numbering over a thousand jagged teeth, her arms armored and heavy. After Randidly’s transformation of all his Stats, he now stood larger than her.

But it was not by much. The bloodline of the Bone Wyrm remained strong in her.

Randidly grinned to himself and swirled the energy in the environment around the two of them. The waves of broken force and disturbed force he gathered, purified, and repurposed in only a moment so that he pulled back his arm for another punch and an even more destructive onslaught.

She snapped her fingers and a fist-sized space warped with grey flame. For a split second, Randidly felt genuinely surprised. Out of the air, a blurry spear of Nether Weight manifested and shot toward his chest. His pupils dilated at the close attack. Using Synechdochence? A good thought to try and take me by surprise by not adjusting the environment, but you forgot something.

Instead of trying to block the attack, Randidly stepped forward, lifting his chin in invitation to have his throat slit. Cursing, Neveah undid the working so that a fat bundle of Weight simply splashed against his face. He moved forward without slowing down in the slightest.

“Nether Weight counts as touching,” Randidly spoke with a mock disapproving tone, but while he did so he accelerated forward.

“Cheeky statements like that make me have a lot of empathy for all the people who have tried to kill you, over the years,” Neveah responded. She pulled her Nether Weight back together to create a defense even as he crossed the rest of the distance, a thousand complex veins of force flowing through the air around him and through his body.

Congratulations! Your Skill Cutting Tides of Amenonuhoko (T) has grown to Level 986!

He planted his feet and pivoted, wrenching all of that force out of the pretty pattern he had made and detonating it in front of Neveah’s face. Having witnessed Randidly’s response to her Nether Weight spear, she did the same. However, his arm was a feint; most of the force rushed down through his bare feet and into the stone ground. Aside from a pillar behind him grounding his Engraving and a chunk of ground around Neveah’s Nether Ritual, most of the unlucky stone ground beneath their feet exploded.

Obviously, Randidly adjusted and continued his offensive in a flash.

He kicked off a large chunk of rock and closed the distance to Neveah, dragging behind him a huge swath of kinetic force and Nether. Already, he shaped a massive Nether Ritual that would take on the task of cracking Neveah’s working. He had to prevent his Engraving from collapsing, but that didn’t mean he had to use it to strike his blows.

Congratulations! Your Skill Yearnings of the Nether Heir (P) has grown to Level 969!

Randidly showed Neveah his teeth, a sign of respect for an opponent he intended to thoroughly crush. Huge rivers of kinetic force gathered around his hands, almost creating gauntlets. But the larger threat lay beneath that, in the chaotic environment, a larger Nether Ritual began to form. “With this much opportunity, I’ll strangle you in minutes.”

“What a coincidence,” Neveah was too canny a foe to gloat. A smile flickered across her face as she unleashed her own trap. She let the truth of the situation speak for itself, as suddenly an absolutely massive Engraving buried about ten meters into the ground activated, dwarfing Randidly’s new Nether Ritual and covering the whole of the training field. Whereas Malloon’s barrier hummed from poor energy efficiency, this monstrous thing panted with raw power. “I was thinking the same thing.”

Randidly’s eyes narrowed. His few gentlemanly terms of engagement were tossed out the window. The next four minutes and twelve seconds were a vicious brawl in which he attempted to use his Nether Ritual and kinetic force to create a stay in the grinding squeeze of Neveah’s massive Engraving. He didn’t trust himself to create another Nether Ritual, so he had to rely on brute forcing the issue with thin threads of concentrated kinetic power, intending to dig them into the Nether Ritual and rupture the working from within.

It did not go his way. Neveah cleverly avoided his assaults and eventually smothered his own Engraving.

After a few minutes of panting, he sat up and growled at Neveah. “You cheated. What was that massive working? You must have created that hours ago, before you even suggested the particular energy game.”

“I had simply assumed your victories had nudged you toward a certain sort of hubris and took advantage.” Since Randidly had started winning more frequently, Neveah’s outward enthusiasm for the energy games had waned. Yet with this victory, her purring smugness had returned. “How was I supposed to know you didn’t bother to check the environment for preparations?”

Plots within plots, Randidly thought with fondness. Then he paused. A glimmer of an idea burned in his mind. He already had the giant Nether Working rebuilt around Maloon, modifying the weather to be more hospitable to his farm. As far as he could tell, neither Westrisser nor Bleak Sky really minded its presence.

Could he hide a more dangerous function inside of the work he already did?

“Based on the look on your face, It seems like you’ve had an idea.” Neveah released a long sigh. “Thank god. I could use a break. I’m going to go take a peak at the latest batch of cider. Let me know if you need any help brainstorming.”

Neveah left him to his own devices, buzzing with possibilities. Randidly shouldn’t be surprised by his capability, but he had always had been playing catchup, relying on compensating for his power with his Nether or powerful body. But he didn’t need to rely simply on tricks any longer, did he?

Not when he could modify the whole fucking battlefield to his benefit.

So when whatever battle looming on Malloon’s horizon finally arrived, he could crush it, as Neveah had done to him.

*****

“It is here?”

“Yes, Lord Cerulean,” Westrisser gestured to the two steles crackling with power in front of them. The energy discharge signaled he still didn’t have the anchoring formula quite right, but the hum in the air proved his experiment's power. “Right now, a servant of mine named Dogeol is within, taking advantage of the power. Based on our previous arrangements, he should soon emerge.”

“So we judge the garden based on how our little seedling has grown, eh? I suppose this method is effective, as long as more systematic experimentation is impossible,” Cerulean allowed.

On cue, the two steles began to glow. The ground rumbled slightly, due to the rough adherence between the surgically removed Phaea and the environment. Despite the rough activation, a hole in the world did yawn in front of Westrisser and Cerulean. In the next moment, the stone man Dogeol walked out of the opening.

“Report,” Westrisser ordered.

Dogeol looked down at his hands. There were no obvious changes to his image, but Westrisser could observe a sudden heaviness in the air. “Obviously, hard work cannot be replaced. This is just an opportunity. But I think- ah.”

Dogeol’s expression, not often more expressive than a series of stones piled on top of each other, crumpled into pain and fear. Over the next few moments, the sense of solidity from his image rapidly withered. In its wake, Dogeol leaned forward, his arms tightening around his body in a strange attempt to keep everything together.

With his senses, Westrisser had a front-row seat as his subordinate of three decades collapsed, from the inside out. His Class atrophied and broke, shredding his soul and leaving him nothing but a husk bleeding out all of his energy.

It took all of five seconds of Dogeol returning to the world proper for him to die.

“Fascinating,” Cerulean breathed next to him. Westrisser didn’t know whether it was better or worse that the towering raptor construct seemed genuinely enthralled by the failure they had both witnessed.