The air seemed to crackle with a strange electricity as Randidly’s gaze shifted to Neveah’s rising form. Luckily for his nerves, her time resting was only a fourth of what Randidly had required to recover. The more time passed, the more his instincts realized that soon he would be fighting against Kaan Swacc, the first truly dangerous fight he had to look forward to in quite some time. As the edges of his mouth curled upward into a grin, the Nether Nebula in his chest began to stir

With a light touch, he pushed it back downward. Soon. Soon I won’t need to restrain myself any longer. Soon we can create an enjoyable memory.

Neveah stood and Randidly rolled his right shoulder around to loosen the joint and familiarize himself with the motion. Truthfully, Randidly had to set his excitement aside for the moment. Because he first needed to address the relatively uncomfortable task of attaching his new metal limb. And he hadn’t overlooked the fact that the increased complexity and power flowing through Neveah’s new Aether Engraving would likely increase the pain of the process.

As soon as Neveah shook her head like a wet dog and yawned, she looked around at Randidly and said. “Want me to grab a box of tissues before we begin?”

Rolling his eyes, Randidly didn’t bother to reply and simply approached the stone that supported his new arm. Unlike his prior arm, the exterior of it was now and would never be bright or eye-catching. It was just the color of aged rust. Although the surface of the limb was smooth, the mottled color palette across the limb made it seem rough and uneven. Even setting aside the base color of the ore, the patterns were likely caused by the forceful forging process.

Rather than a Legendary ranked equipment, it looked like old trash left out in one too many rain showers.

Somehow, this made Randidly love it all the more. A legendary arm based on me.

Carrying Neveah’s hope...

Neveah approached with a pout when Randidly didn’t rise to her words. But then energy began to crackle around her fingers. She reached out and dragged her pointer finger across the elbow of the limb. From that contact, the lines of Engraving flashed outward across its surface, shimmering in the projected shape that the Living Engraving would one day take.

The symbols shifted and blended before Randidly’s eyes, lines of violet color swimming freely across the scale mail as the Mana depth warped the shape. The effect was lovely to watch. Then Neveah pulled her finger away and the light dimmed. “Are you ready for this?”

“Let’s hurry,” Randidly growled. His heartbeat was slowly accelerating. He shivered. “I want… to fight.”

“You always were a masochist,” Neveah said with quite a bit of fondness in her voice. Breathing out through her nose, she hefted the dark, orange-red arm and brought it with great care toward the stump of Randidly’s shoulder.

Closing his eyes, Randidly also released his breath. The metal of the arm pressed against his body and he was surprised by how warm it was already. Likely it was still cooling from the Engraving that Neveah had done, an hour and a half earlier. There was a hissing noise as the Engravings activated and Randidly’s skin stung as it was seared as a side effect of the high-energy Engraving activating.

Then Aether crackled between metal and flesh as the control runes for the limb began digging into the skin of Randidly’s body. His veins along his torso bulged outward as the electrical charge produced by the Aether blasted outward through the medium of his flesh. But these veins had withstood the trial of his heart’s ferocity precipitously increasing, so none of them ruptured from the strain.

But then the Aether Engraving connected to his nervous system and the sensation ran like truant lightning through his spine.

To Randidly, pain had come walking hand in hand with the System. From the very start in that Dungeon the first day, Randidly had been covered with acid that had quickly taught him that the new changes to the world weren’t playing around. Then he had met Shal, who seemed determined to make Randidly realize that his own body could be the producer of just as vicious a sort of pain as an attack from enemies.

Shal had also told him that sensation after training was ‘satisfaction’.

And pain had always come to Randidly in the form of colors. Pain came as black when it was pain that threatened to rob Randidly of consciousness. This was the pain Shal taught Randidly. It crept inwards from the edges of his awareness and ripped away at the edges of his thoughts. It was a consuming pain, one that sapped his will.

It was a pain that asked him to give up.

Meanwhile, white pain annihilated. It pierced through the brain and left nothing but brilliant emptiness in its wake. That sort of pain numbed him rather than straight knocking Randidly unconscious in the past. Still, it was a more dangerous variety in the heat of battle. Black pain could be resisted, but white pain had to be essentially ignored. Addressing it directly was impossible. The void it left in its wake was simply black from exposure to that vicious pain.

This pain, appropriately, was rust-colored. It hit his entire nervous system at once, setting every nerve ending on fire as the power of the Aether contained in the Legendary arm burned through him. Then, after the connection was thoroughly established, the initial rust darkened and everything in his body seemed to age and decay.

His muscles trembled. His heart rate continued to rise. Randidly gritted his teeth as he fell to his knees. “Seriously… fuck.”

Neveah shook her head sadly as if to say ‘I told you so’.

Still, the pain quickly passed, followed swiftly by tingling in his newly attached left arm as sensation came to it. Coughing Randidly sat back and did his best to control his breathing as the pain began to fade. He looked sharply up at Neveah. “Alright, set up the barrier.”

Neveah’s eyes gleamed. Even without relying on their connection, Randidly could tell that she wanted to wait a little longer. But Randidly also knew that the more time that he used to recover, the less effective this move would be. If they waited too long, the gamble would fail. Perhaps sensing Randidly’s determination in his gaze, she lowered her eyes to the ground and began to carve a complicated Engraving into the stone around them.

Randidly glanced warily around while flexing his left hand. The surrounding highlands were a series of wide slopes, periodically dotted with caves. Not a bad place for a final showdown. Definitely important that it’s so far away from anyone else. Now, let’s see if my gamble on Kaan Swacc’s nature will pay off…

Randidly didn’t know anything about the Nexus Ways that surrounded the Earth. He had learned a little from Octavius Shrike, but in the short term, he would not be able to compare with Kaan Swacc, who had used them for most of his career in the Xyrt Brigade. But what Randidly did understand was the Ways allowed Swacc to observe people on Earth without typical Skills being able to perceive the former Special Investigator.

It was the equivalent of two-way glass for Skills. So while Kaan Swacc could watch Randidly like a hawk, Randidly had very few ways of observing his opponent. Perhaps he could use the Philosopher’s Key to open a portal to next to Kaan Swacc, but that would both reveal his ability to use the Fatepiece and also perhaps take him into a trap that Kaan had been preparing.

Perhaps Randidly would be forced to try that, but the best case was to lure Kaan out of the Ways.

The more time passed, the longer a period of time Randidly couldn’t work on his Nether Skills, and the greater the cost of that absence became. Already, he could feel his Nether Nebula beginning to go slightly haywire from the suppression. The importance of several upcoming events was too great; he couldn’t resist the evolution of his own Nether for much longer. It was too important a part of him.

So Randidly needed to pull Kaan Swacc’s attention. And more importantly, he needed to make Kaan Swacc commit to a fight. Considering Kaan Swacc’s sense of superiority, this was rather simple; once Kaan made any move at all, his pride as a member of the Xyrt Brigade would likely carry him forward to a direct confrontation.

So all that was really required was that first move. But while it was simple, drawing out such a commitment was not necessarily easy.

Neveah’s fingers continued to rapidly move, Mana flowing down to impress into the ground. The stone burned and hissed, releasing a small amount of smoke as she engraved. What she was creating now was an isolation barrier derived from Yystrix’s tomb. Having known the importance of such a barrier if they were to resist the Nexus, this was the second most decrypted of the ten areas. Therefore, Randidly had some confidence that it could block Kaan Swacc’s perception. Or at the very least, it would obscure the details of what was happening within.

Although the Ways kept Kaan from being seen by normal means, they provided no additional benefit for him seeing out of them. He would need to pierce through this barrier the old fashioned way.

Just as Neveah had circled a ten-meter area around Randidly, his fingers flexed. Most of the tingling had left his arm. Finally, he was adjusting to it. Having the benefit of practicing with the limb would be better, but Randidly had to be sure that Kaan Swacc was watching for what followed to work. And while Kaan Swacc probably didn’t watch the entirety of the forging process, he would definitely look over to watch Randidly attach the arm. Which was why it was important that Neveah immediately start the barrier, to keep his focus here.

Randidly Ghosthound was reasonably confident that he had accurately identified two traits of Kaan Swacc. And those would be the man’s downfall.

The first was his genuine desire to best Randidly. In this case, he was determined to reveal Randidly’s Nether affiliations. Even being abandoned by the Xyrt Brigade and left on Earth hadn’t shaken his resolve. Perhaps that would change with time, but it had only been a week. His passion still burned hot.

All the better for him to respond overzealously.

Randidly’s eyes narrowed. The timing had to be close to perfect. Neveah’s fingers continued to draw. There was only one stroke remaining in the barrier and Randidly opened his arms and released the full power of his Nether Nebula. It spun outward-

Neveah finished the stroke and the area around Randidly was isolated. As per their earlier agreement, she took a step backward and immediately began drawing a second circle around the first. This was rather useless in terms of vision obstruction, because if one such barrier could be broken, then the second could as well. But the actions just needed to give the (hopefully) watching Kaan Swacc the smallest sense of urgency.

Inside that barrier, Randidly focused on what he was about to do. The confrontation against this member of the Xyrt Brigade was only seconds away. This fight would decide the fate of Earth and give Randidly a reasonable approximation of where he stood in the Nexus hierarchy. Thick waves of Nether bubbled out, filling the surrounding ten meters.

Even Randidly was surprised by how much his Nether had changed during the time that he had been suppressing it. The initial blast outward threw out semi-solid chunks of Nether that had formed under Randidly’s iron will, but the wave that followed behind that was thick and oily. It was possessed the consistency of molten metal, swirling in that small area around him.

This Nether he didn’t suppress into a thin disk. Instead, he allowed it to flow freely, gradually prying apart that thin layer in which Nether was allowed to exist within the Nexus.

One second, two seconds, three seconds…

In each of those moments, Randidly let himself dwell on the weight of the approaching moment. Both for Earth… and for himself. This was the first time he was trying to seize control of Fate and manipulate the Path walked by another. He was relying on his own understanding of an opponent’s nature to plan for the future. If Randidly had claimed to have had any skill with human interaction, everyone who knew him would have laughed.

Yet suddenly, Randidly felt the beginnings of confidence in this area. This was different. He wasn’t trying to relate, he simply wanted to use past behavior as an indicator for the future. If anything… this was closer to math than art. Wreathed in Revelation energy, Randidly’s eyes never strayed from the Paths to the Future.

Congratulations! Your Skill Revelation of the Atramentous Threshold (T) has grown to Level 285!

Randidly submerged his consciousness in the vicious current of Nether whipping around him. Currently, his Nether was flowing on wild instinct, making up for the time that he had suppressed it. That dark energy crashed through his body like a liberated river, smashing through his resilient veins. The Nebula began to spin, faster and faster, thickening his Nether even further. Within that energy of memories, Randidly thought about Kaan Swacc.

For a moment, right before Neveah had closed off her barrier, Randidly had displayed Nether to anyone who was watching. Kaan Swacc would have seen it definitively for a split second: Randidly Ghosthound had utilized Nether.

It was exactly what the Swacc Family agent had been waiting for.

But then Randidly was isolated by Neveah’s barrier. And this was where the second aspect of Kaan Swacc would be weaponized by Randidly. Even though Kaan had been waiting for this moment, no perhaps even because he had been waiting for this, that brief sight of Nether would give the man the smallest sense of doubt.

Just like that? He used Nether after hiding and denying it for so long? Kaan Swacc would think. Then he would check the Aether Mines again and find they hadn’t been deactivated by contact with Nether. That small bit of doubt would grow a little bit larger. Then Kaan would look again and see Neveah creating another barrier.

The second trait Randidly targeted was Kaan’s military training with the Xyrt Brigade. Perhaps Randidly wouldn’t have thought of it before, but meeting Captain Quill and the disciplined members of his Clan inspired him. He had seen how different protocols were drilled into their bones. In that way, the Xyrt Brigade resembled military groups on Earth.

So Kaan Swacc would want to be sure about what he saw. He would pierce through the first veil and peek at what Randidly was doing.

Nether formed a chaotic storm around Randidly. The ground beneath him was already beginning to corrode, despite his best attempts to keep the Nether mild. It was a delicate balance he was striking, allowing his Nether to run loose but trying his best so that no traces would spread beyond the limit of Neveah’s veil.

The Grim Chimera grinned manically, manifesting and raising his head to roar with pleasure; It sensed the impending violence. The energy of darkness congealed and swirled. The density continued to increase. Randidly could feel visual distortions beginning to appear in the air around him. Space began to shake and come to pieces.

Four seconds. Five seconds.

There was ripple across Neveah’s barrier. Someone was peeking. Randidly grinned. Gotcha.

Because, while Kaan Swacc the Special Investigator might in normal circumstances see Randidly’s Nether as the confirmation he had waited for, Randidly was trusting that would be overwritten by a far older and more powerful instinct. Kaan Swacc peered through to see what Randidly was doing and encountered dense Nether.

He was a Xyrt Brigade member, first and foremost. His instinct, when surprised by powerful Nether, would manifest itself.

He had fought Nether for too long. So he would fight.

That familiar area of isolation slammed into place around Randidly, cutting him off from his Nether. And Randidly Ghosthound stood arms akimbo and laughed.