Randidly watched the sun sink toward the horizon with the fatalism of a starving monk who has accepted that his body has turned against him. For the past two hours, he had rested, but still, the ghost of an overuse headache hung over him. Honestly, he didn’t know if he would ever escape those headaches.

Still, there was work to do. And although it wasn’t based on anything logical, Randidly always found that his image work was most easily done once the sun had disappeared below the horizon. Dusk signaled the beginning of his most intense training sessions. With a small smile on his face, Randidly produced his Philosopher’s Key and pointed the tip toward the horizon.

“Open up, dusk,” Randidly said to his empty floating island.

It had been two days since Randidly had flushed out and confronted Kaan Swacc. Two days of brutal battle training where Randidly threw himself against the Special Investigator until he collapsed, exhausted, into a meditative nap. Then he woke up and did it again. And again. Luckily, it had been a few days where he was largely unburdened by both the Eidolon Crucible and by any political concerns; every group was too busy beginning their conquest of the Danger Zones to bother him.

Donnyton and Zone 11’s task force had already located the final bastion of the Corrupted Invader’s resistance at their location. The other groups were less far along but were making quick time to reach a similar result. In the process, the groups from Earth had probably killed thousands of monsters and Corrupted Invaders and earned only seventeen deaths in return.

Randidly’s head throbbed and his smile fell away.

It was a deal everyone on Earth agreed was worth taking. Yet for Randidly, that was somehow worse. He even chided himself. After all, how could he balk at these seventeen lost lives to make sure Earth grew into its own strength when Randidly had allowed so many people to die at the football game to teach them about their mistakes?

Yet his heart ached for them. Those were seventeen people who would no longer have the chance to grow into the images that Earth needed to survive. Seventeen less people who could stand against the Calamities. The likelihood of them being the determinative factor was small, but still…

Shaking his head, Randidly did his best to put that emotional pain out of his mind. At least for this, the ghost of the headache was a welcome distraction. He already had so much to deal with, so adding additional emotional turmoil seemed like asking for trouble. Yet the human mind was clearly not as intelligent as it claimed to be.

His anguish over the deaths forced Randidly to reconsider his decision to not allow any of his Frontline forces to assist with the Danger Zone expeditions. The only real exception was Helen, who Randidly didn’t count as she had come from Tellus with him rather than spending any time on the front lines. As for the rest, they were explicitly barred from being part of those task forces. The Order Ducis too, although that was largely because Kharon needed them to serve other functions.

Yet that same cold fear that had held back Randidly’s assistance in the past once more reasserted itself. He would not change his mind now. Even if the Epic Danger Zone was going to be even more difficult, that was the point; that challenge would spur the people of Earth to even greater heights. This run-in with Kaan Swacc had made Randidly even more sure that he wouldn’t be able to remain on Earth very long. He needed to move deeper into the Nexus to protect his home planet.

Perhaps to protect his home planet from forces trying to capture Randidly himself.

Luckily, these past two days had also seen the Special Investigator remaining completely absent from any sort of interference, as far as Randidly could tell. Because of that, Randidly was extremely careful not to practice any great workings of Nether while not within the Dreamcatcher of the Long Night. He didn’t want to give Kaan Swacc the excuse to move that he had been waiting for.

The calm before the storm, as they say...

Randidly had tested that strange Nether suppression many times through the Dreamcatcher of the Long Night in the past two days. And basically, he had come to the conclusion that unless there was no other way, he essentially couldn’t beat Kaan once the suppression had manifested itself.

The disc of the sun grew wavy as it was partially eclipsed by the horizon. The colors in the sky slowly darkened to the color of slow healing bruises. Releasing a sigh, Randidly pressed his eyes closed and tried to focus. The headache drifted away throbbing beat by beat.

For now, Randidly believed he had reached the limit of what he could accomplish by just practicing the fight against Kaan Swacc. His physical gifts were certainly overwhelming, but it seemed like they weren’t singular in the whole of the Nexus. It was clear that Kaan had some experience fighting in similarly disadvantageous positions in the past. His reactions and tactics quickly adapted to Randidly’s abilities.

With infinite time, Randidly believed he could develop his fighting methods to the point where he would have a firmer advantage. But he had spent a little bit of time investigating the issues of his Nether interacting with Aether thresholds a bit, and had discovered that it might be a little too late for him.

Whatever functional purpose that the Aether working Randidly and Neveah had come up with to make his Nether flat was supposed to have, what Randidly didn’t expect was for it to also begin to influence his Nether Nebula directly. He thought it would just affect the energy outside of his body.

By the time Randidly had noticed the effects, it had reached to the core of his Nether and fundamentally altered the way it functioned. Which meant that when Randidly investigated the possibility of suppressing his Nether to go into a Dungeon, he had been horrified to discover that the diameter of the thin disc of Nether he released almost doubled in size since he last checked it.

His influence had been naturally creeping outward as his Nether Nebula adapted to the change. He had reeled his Nether energy back into his body, but there was only so much he could do without completely dismantling his Nether at this point. Which was something that he was willing to do if he had more time, but…

Doing it now would be effectively throwing all the work I’ve done on deepening my Nether into the trash. The sun sank entirely below the horizon. The stars gradually made themselves known in the vast sea of space ago. Randidly slowly opened his eyes. It always comes back to time, huh…? I hope after this I’ll have plenty of time for a long break…

Almost immediately, Randidly chuckled. Who was he kidding? He was a man who had accepted in himself the habit of running directly toward danger. The future likely wouldn’t be any easier than it was now.

Because some part of Randidly wondered whether he would be able to survive in his current state during an extended stay of peace. It was easy with the presence of a threat to find the will continue to work hard. But with any stretch of peace… the last stretch of peace that Randidly had taken resulted in him exterminating the people of Ki-Kunot.

Shaking that thought away before it could take root, Randidly sucked in a breath of cool night air and turned to the task at hand: refining his image of the Stillborn Phoenix.

With a little bit of concentration, his consciousness sank to the core of his Soulspace and found the related image; the black egg now seemed to be ringed in a faint, milky light that disappeared when you looked at it too directly. It wasn’t a conscious change that Randidly had made to the image, but he liked the effect of it. He supposed it was a result of pop culture’s strange depiction of light under the influence of black holes.

Although pop culture was based upon real images taken from black holes, so it should be at least slightly accurate...

Of course, there was a point where light could not escape the grasp of a black hole. The event horizon. But before that, it began to… unravel the light and pull it in different directions. The light congealed and flowed, as though the event horizon melted it. For several minutes, Randidly tried to make his image of that light to be as bleak and forlorn as he could muster.

The runny, liquid light congealed like blood, to Randidly’s eyes, before it was devoured.

Then Randidly returned his focus to the core of himself and began to sink into those emotions that animated the egg of his Stillborn Phoenix, that was, of course, anything but a phoenix. That was the reason Randidly took such great care in making sure his new image was finely tuned. He didn’t want any dangerous mistakes to happen in the future based on a contradictory image.

Because while his image was a lie, it wasn’t a contradiction. Randidly’s image was a black hole. It was a star that had run out of fuel and collapsed inward on itself. Yet this was a star that had an obsession with being reborn and once more spreading light and energy across the star system around it.

The sad truth was that any life that a star supported during its original existence would surely be annihilated by its rocky transition into a black hole. Those precious lives the star had nurtured had been betrayed in a fundamental way. For those lives, it was too late.

Still, the star was an ignorant object; so it prayed to become a phoenix. Even now, rapidly absorbing ambient images and emotions present in the surroundings to become part of that singularity at its core, it continued to hope that this was just a transition stage. It hoped that after gathering a sufficient amount of mass and image power, it could be reborn.

Randidly decidedly kept himself from considering the transformation process too deeply for now. Doing so would bring his image more power, but both choices about how such a transformation would end came with costs that Randidly couldn’t yet decide between. So he sank into those howling emotions and acted as a stabilizer of sorts to the maelstrom of negativity that howled at the center of the Stillborn Phoenix.

Not that he attempted to slow the rotation in the core. If anything, he provided additional acceleration. What he did was create a broader sense of structure to the way the emotions were interacting with each other. With a deft hand from his work on Classes, Randidly easily wove a grand pattern to the emotions. The fierce violence with which the flows passed only a hair’s breadth from each other released waves of powerful ambient energy that became additional gravity to force more from the surroundings to fall into the endless maw.

By the end of the tuning, Randidly was gritting his teeth; truly, it was taxing to work too deeply with the Stillborn Phoenix. What he was essentially doing was digging up a mine during his work on the image. For every second of work it took him to dig down and improve the effectiveness of the image, it would take him another second of effort to extricate himself from that depth afterward.

Congratulations! Your Skill Visualization (R) has grown to Level 275!

Not a problem for the moment, but something to keep my eye on… Randidly thought as he considered the notification that popped up in front of him. Then he nodded. Really, it was more than time for him to spend all of the PP that he had been slowly accumulating over the last several days.

Even if it was pushing him toward the brink in terms of mental strain, the training against Illym and now Kaan Swacc’s projection was showing dividends. He had earned himself 992 PP that he could now spend.

Humming to himself, Randidly opened his Path menu.