Randidly unleashed Man is Proud, But the Chimera Takes and accelerated upward. But at the same time, he didn’t forget that he and this invisible opponent were essentially in freefall, heading down toward the abyss below. His acceleration was only relative. With his sense of timelessness, it really would be possible for him just to fall down to the depths in one go.

Still, Randidly didn’t overthink that issue; one threat at a time was enough.

Randidly’s right arm lashed toward the empty space where he expected this foe to be floating. His fingers harmlessly tore through space. He spun around and dispersed his momentum. Then he slashed left and right. Still nothing.

The silent expanse around him seemed to mock his efforts. But Randidly continually scanned the surrounding area.

But after a while, he gnashed his teeth. How long had he been waiting-

On cue, his Grim Intuition gradually seemed to discover trace discrepancies in the air to his left. He exploded into motion. But just as quickly as Randidly unleashed Man Is Proud, But the Chimera Takes to unleash a flurry of piercing thrusts, his image physicalizations wavered and receded due to a strange pulse of energy from that spot in the air.

While mastering his shock, Randidly twisted around clapped his hands together. A wave of gravity spiked downward as Randidly mobilized Hallucinations of the Bloodless Heart. The Stillborn Phoenix screamed, first in fury and then in unwillingness. Just like the Grim Chimera, this image was dispersed with a pulse of strange energy as well.

Suddenly, the empty space next to him seemed incredibly dangerous. The air continued to ripple. Due to the close proximity, Randidly’s instincts warned him in time to raise his arms to defend against the invisible strike crashing down toward him.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Randidly grimaced as the bones of his forearm and shoulder throbbed painfully after enduring the most recent strike. It was definitely growing stronger. His focus was completely dispersed and he was once more driting downward. Unless those first two strikes were warning strikes or-

BOOOOOOOM!

Even while Randidly’s senses could spy the barest hint of the opponent that floated above him, he was completely clobbered from the side. When the blow hit him, Randidly felt like he was just being smashed by a giant club when he was struck; the strike possessed all the brutality of a tribal warrior from the stone age.

After tumbling through the air, Randidly landed back against the bone wall and steadied himself. He barred his teeth toward the empty air around him. Were there truly two of these things, or could it simply move extremely quickly…? With this distance between them, he couldn’t sense these things at all.

Plus, it seemed like they were relatively well-equipped to handle him, even after all the improvements he made down here. The foes dispersed images and devoured Nether. And Randidly was getting worried that each time they did so, they got a little stronger. At this point, their attacks were painful but not enough to overcome his physical gifts. But if this continued...

Randidly had to grasp an advantage as soon as possible.

With a light tap, Randidly pushed himself away from the wall and drifted back into the space. He was like a teenager wading out into a placid lake in spring, completely oblivious to the predators that waited below the surface. His image physicalizations pulsed as Randidly marshaled his Willpower. But in order to fight back, he would need to locate his foes. And in order to pin them down, Randidly had two ideas.

Absolute Grasp of Yggdrasil. Randidly flexed the fingers of his right hand and seized upon the tiny microbes that covered his skin. As they were flooded with Mana, they rapidly swelled until they were thick and thorny vines that spiraled through the surrounding area. His own body was the heart of an expanding plant monster.

Just in case that didn’t work, Randidly touched the Stillborn Phoenix and released a vast exhalation of concentrated emotions from the black hole. Since the Stillborn Phoenix had been steadily devouring destroyed Nether Cores, the emotions it released were steeped in madness. So violence and intensity radiated out from Randidly like heat from a sun. Since they sucked away the emotions before they attacked, he hoped this would reveal them.

Glassy eyed, Randidly cast his gaze around. There was a strange sense of lightness to his movements. How long had he been standing here…? No, it couldn’t have been long, since the emotions still remained...

Lowering his shoulders to banish his doubts, Randidly charged forward. The thorny vines that grew from his body lashed out in the surrounding space without hitting anything. Nether Sensation and Grim Intuition continued to monitor the surrounding space, but Randidly felt a sinking feeling in his chest. If I can’t find these things… Heh, I’ve taken for granted how valuable Perception is…

Randidly didn’t slow down as he charged forward, even as directionlessness started to afflict him with a sense of nausea. But he ignored his flipping stomach. A slight eddy in the emotions Randidly released was all the warning that Randidly needed; he flooded almost 1000 of his now rarely used Mana into his roots and had them exploded in size. They split and forked over and over again until a towering mass of vegetation speared toward the movement.

Even if Randidly couldn’t see the cause, it was enough to sense the squat form that ripped its way directly through the roots. So Randidly spun sideways, barely avoiding the first strike and raising his left hand to counter-attack.

But not only were these things powerful, but they were quick. Randidly barely could make out the outline of what appeared to be a floating torso with two powerful clubs for arms when his purser spun. In a split second, its acceleration vector completely changed and its other arm ripped through the plant matter to strike at Randidly.

At the same time, Randidly felt a tingling from behind him. He wasn’t sure whether he should be frustrated or relieved, but there really were two of the things present. The image of the Grim Chimera that he was preparing to use to attack crumbled to nothing from the radiation released by the second enemy.

These fucks make Kaan’s image countering look like child’s play. Randidly activated Chimeric Impunity to briefly avoid club-like arm of the creature, but began to sweat as the other foe once again canceled his image. Had it acted just a bit sooner, that arm would have likely ruptured some of his undefended organs. It isn’t countering my images and Skills… It’s just… somehow invalidating them?

Randidly pressed his lips together. If I think about the way that Vualla described images, instead of creating something from nothing, this being has the ability to reinforce reality. It doesn’t fool the world, it strengthens it…

His thoughts flitted through his mind at high speeds; without so many distractions, thinking was a relatively instant process. So Randidly could reflect on his foes while also minutely adjusting his body position.

The enemy in front of him was smashing around wildly and Randidly couldn’t avoid for much longer. And lurking behind him was the second specimen. Due to its slower approach, Randidly felt rather confident that the berserk one in front of him was the one that had absorbed the Nether earlier. Seeing the way the second one didn’t go crazy from just canceling his image, Randidly decided not to antagonize them further with Nether.

Suddenly, the way the Nether Beasts completely avoided these things made sense. Perhaps Nether was what fueled this one to such a sudden increase in power.

So Randidly mobilized the strength in his body to strike; he couldn’t just run. As the foe in front of him brought its massive and invisible arm downward to smash Randidly, he turned sharply sideways. The blow skidded past him, ripping the surface layer of Randidly’s skin off his chest as it passed.

Bastard!

In that instant, Randidly activated all three of his images together. Two tails, a swirling event horizon in his left eye, lines of armor covering his torso and down his legs... the image physicalizations snapped right back into place. Three images worked in concert. Randidly normally couldn’t activate his three images so quickly, but the hints of each image he was creating in his Nether Engraving added weight to those images.

Randidly’s waist twisted and he brought his metal arm around in a brutal strike to the core body of the invisible foe. He had experienced the arms enough to know that strikes there wouldn’t make any difference. All three images howled with their concentrated power. With the powerful pressure of necessity, the emotional sharpness of each grew even more viciously ominous. At their base, all three mixed cleanly.

There was a pulse from behind him, but Randidly had a split second of unfettered explosive power; the foes could disperse his images, but it didn’t seem like they could prevent him from mobilizing them altogether. And that small space… was enough.

Clink

The noise was unsatisfying because Randidly couldn’t produce noise himself. But Randidly’s metal hand punctured through a relatively fragile barrier. Small pieces of broken glass flew sideways and impacted the metal arm, finally making a noise. Immediately, he could sense a searing blast of electricity that was conducted up through his arm to his body. Randidly’s hair stood on end and he grimaced.

But Randidly was still in a good mood; his strike had worked.

CHIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPP

CHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRPPPPPPPPPPPPP

A piercing cry exploded from the thing in front of Randidly, quickly picked up by the other one nearby. The shrill noise seemed to fill up even the vast empty space of this hollow spine. It wormed into Randidly’s ears, making him dizzy.

Still, the one Randidly had struck sizzled and then fell still. Randidly tossed the thing into his interspatial ring for later inspection and turned to fixate on the second one. Although the noise was annoying, and Randidly began to feel a soft dribble of blood from his nose and ears, as long as he struck at their weak cores-

BOOOOOOOOM!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

Randidly was speared sideways with enough force to daze him, but it was the impact against the bone wall that truly sent him reeling. After the first impact, the missile that struck Randidly had accelerated. Perhaps he would have even been knocked unconscious, if not for that unavoidable fire in his chest; he must not rest. With a gasp, his blind eyes bulged open. Consciousness flickered back on a split second later.

Are my… ribs cracked…?

So Randidly groaned and forced his buzzing limbs to feel down at the being that pinned him to the wall. To his surprise, he found that this one had used its core to hit Randidly and its arms to keep him in check, so the impact had done just as much damage to it as it had to him.

After another painful discharge of energy into Randidly body, the thing pinning him went limp. But somehow, it was difficult to feel positive about the fact that these things displayed enough commitment to their aggression that they would sacrifice their existences to hurt him.

You fucking shits… Randidly tried to growl, but of course, he produced no noise. A blank space surrounded him; his Grim Intuition still couldn’t get a grasp of these foes. Once more, the placid lake of darkness stretched in front of him. The emotions he had released earlier were draining away.

These things had the ability to make Randidly truly blind.

Still, that didn’t bother him very much. But the mechanism by which they avoided detection was the problem. These automatons were clearly not beings of Nether. If anything, they seemed to be an anti-Nether automated defense. Perhaps they were related to the Aether Refinement Facility that was at the base of this shaft and constantly releasing dangerous emotions.

Randidly wanted to take a breath and gather himself, but of course, he couldn’t. His subconscious no longer allowed him that luxury. So instead of taking a useful action, Randidly reached down and gripped the body in front of him. They really were two heavy cudgels attacked to a fragile, oblong core. He shifted his hands to the attachments between the core and the arms.

Rather than metal, it felt like these things were made of cool porcelain. As he made his preparations, he savored the refreshingly smooth feeling beneath his fingers.

Then Randidly barred his teeth and ripped the limbs off of the piece of shit. With a casual gesture, he tossed the scrap down into the shaft. As he silently laughed, he could feel the drones approaching.

They appeared as small drains that subtly sucked away emotion in the surroundings. As far as he could tell… six more were gathering around him.