Time receded, revealing itself for the illusion that it had always been. Pain was the constant, but that, too, rose and fell intermittently. What remained was steady the constant Struggle. The Struggle was the labor to live that would never cease. Through inscrutable lines of Nether, the destructive forces of Elhume strike were stripped of their dangerously infectious emotional component and fed through to Randidly’s body.

His person was the battleground of the Struggle.

Parts of Randidly were constantly fracturing or tearing, resulting in a mix of bodily fluids spraying up out of his wounds and drenching the ground around him. A huge gash ripped apart through his side and smashed into his hipbone. The flesh and cartilage of Randidly’s throat was crunched together into a fist-sized ball. His eyes swelled and popped. In the wake of those agonizing waves, he would take the damaged pieces and rapidly attempt to remake himself.

His neck healed well enough to raise his head and his eyes regenerated in only a few seconds. Through a hazy gaze, he saw the bright runes of the Nether Ritual shining through a small puddle of blood, but then he closed his eyes to focus his attention on the rising stack of problems plaguing him.

Congratulations! Your Skill Grit of the Ascendant Bane (T) has grown to Level 408!

The most surprising realization was that the only reason Randidly had any hope of successfully enduring this attempt was due to his monstrously high Health and Health Regeneration. These had been passively rising as he inflated his Stat, but the Attributes weren’t relevant in most of his previous confrontations.

Well, perhaps that wasn’t true. The true staying power Randidly possessed was due to his body holding two planets; most of the force he endured needed to expend a planet cracking amount of force to even wound him. And wound him it did.

His body was taking the brunt of the damage, but he felt a few tweaks of guilt because Expira and the Alpha Cosmos were probably feeling some of this. Then he banished those thoughts; right now, surviving was the most important thing.

Randidly laid back on the ground, feeling his chest collapse and his ribcage fracture. His organs were spun and pureed within his torso. His back spasmed and twisted as his vertebrae were smashed together until they cracked. The invasive burst of force hit him in unpredictable and random ways; the only consistent note was that they started at the level of his skin and tore into his flesh.

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimeric Impunity (M) has grown to Level 368!

Each of Randidly’s three images flared to life, assisting his high Attributes in keeping himself alive. Yggdrasil was the nurse, carefully using life energy to stitch Randidly’s sundered flesh back into a pretty realistic semblance of a body. The Stillborn Phoenix howled and pulled at the disparate pieces, using its hunger to hold everything together in a living whole. In addition, the Egg of Depression devoured any fragments of dangerous emotions managed to make it through the surface layer of his Nether Ritual.

As for the Grim Chimera… the Grim Chimera remade the body of Randidly Ghosthound, piece by piece. It had assumed the role of the make-shift architect that designed his resistance.

Waves of pain splashed against Randidly’s consciousness, keeping most of the details fuzzy. But when his flesh was left torn and broken, it was the poignant vision of the Grim Chimera that guided the pieces back together. Every healed muscle and regenerated bone was shaped with the Grim Chimera’s determination to survive.

Congratulations! Your Skill Grit of the Ascendant Bane (T) has grown to Level 409!

Congratulations! Your Skill the Emerald Sap of Yggdrasil (L) has grown to Level 299!

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimeric Impunity (M) has grown to Level 369!

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimeric Impunity (M) has grown to Level 370!

Gradually, some part of Randidly’s perception was numbed. Grim Intuition turned a blind eye to first the outside world, then to the slew of notifications that his physical damage earned him.

Each iteration was a small step forward. Randidly’s cells had been empowered to contain his Stats when he had torn his body in the ambush by Lay’mel and the Swacc Family, but he was still had rebuilt in the shape of a human.

Now, with the Grim Chimera at the helm, that constraint was thrown out the window.

This time, with the fury of Elhume repeatedly burning away his flesh and organs, the design of his being started to take advantage of the vastly superior foundation of his new cells. He didn’t have enough attention to think about it; he just threw himself into fueling his images. But even without guidance, those images accumulated insights.

And as he started to gain momentum in his changes, Randidly made the conscious choice to stop shunting so much of the force he endured from Elhume onto his inner worlds. By adjusting his Domain Skill, he began minimizing the reverberations that those innocent people would be forced to face.

Right after he made this executive decision, he began to regret it. But then his consciousness began to lose some of its coherence.

The pain was all Randidly knew, the only sensation that existed outside of the Struggle. But Randidly didn’t try to rid himself of the pain, because it was an efficient signal of the growing problems of a body torn to pieces. By paying attention to the greatest sources of the pain, he continued to prolong the Struggle with small successes. No one battle could win him the war, because the state of Struggle had grown into something eternal. But Randidly could at least seize the opportunity to stay in this permanence with his own hands.

Steadily, as the images continually expended their energy to heal and remake him, Randidly grew weary. His focus became blurred. The original sharp stabs of pain became vague impressions. Rather than continuing to stubbornly meet his grievous wounds in the same manner, be began to adjust his response to account for his diminishing acuity.

He utilized Ripple of Amenonuhoko to guide Yggdrasil’s lines of life energy when he was sewing himself back together. The life aura that trailed in Yggdrasil’s wake meant that his healing efforts didn’t need to be as targeted, and the natural energy began to accumulate within his person. Just this adjustment alone stopped his downward mental spiral dead in its tracks.

Randidly used the flames of the March of Ruin in Valor to add a cauterizing element to his images and could then just burn some of his wounds closed. Again and again, the variant radiation of Elhume attempted to shatter Randidly’s body, but he could utilize brief spurts of Nether Weight to turn aside the final straw that would truly break his resistance and ravage his inner worlds once more.

With this brief respite, his images furiously healed his shell in preparation for the next wave of radiation. The Struggle persisted indefinitely.

Randidly’s focus narrowed even further. Distantly the pain registered, but he was more concerned with the details: this particular rupture began at his right shoulder and snaked downward toward his heart. Without feeling much of anything at the prospect, Randidly observed his own heart being torn in half.

At this point, a heart and a pinky finger and an ear were all similarly replaceable.

After the organ was eviscerated, the Stillborn Phoenix was able to hungrily devour the rest of this dangerous intrusion’s momentum. His body began healing even as strikes occurred at his left ankle and right hip. His left crunched into a muddy mix of blood and powdered bone while his lower intestines were diced into marble-sized chunks.

The bright light of the Inscrutable Mien of Genesis suppressed the worst of the problems so healing could begin. Yggdrasil gliding smoothly with the methods of Ripple of Amenonuhoko wove through his body. From the depths of the Grim Chimera, something began to simmer and release a pulse of light.

However, Randidly didn’t have time for trivialities. His rate of healing was slowing. After considering the problem, he began to actively guide the invading wounds to destroy him in more permanent and damaging ways. Specifically, Randidly used the invasive energy to induce a strange calcification in his wounded limbs that lingered as his blood dried.

He would still be able to heal such wounds, but the process would leave his limbs stiff and rigid. So in the aftermath of being broken, it would be more difficult to injure him further, rather than easier.

Randidly’s mind was fuzzy, but the Struggle was eternal. As it was with all things, the patterns of life repeatedly themselves endlessly.

Wound.

Heal.

Wound.

Heal.

Wound.

The light from the Grim Chimera continued to grow. Something could happen soon if Randidly could trigger it. He felt like it would be a positive change… but the current Randidly was numb and fuzzy. Rather than risking everything on an unknown gamble, he much preferred the relatively predictable devastation and reform across his body.

Wound.

Heal.

Wound.

Idly, Randidly wondered whether he would ever leave the Struggle. Did he even care if he ever escaped this cycle? At this point, the pulse of the Nether Ritual that transferred unstable radiation to his body was just a part of him. Yet his Nether Core reminded him that despite the strained scenario, this incident was small compared to the length of his life.

The thoughts were meaningless and light, like dried leaves. The next invasion of foreign energy drove them away. Randidly’s resolve firmed even as his consciousness faded further. He would fight forever. That was simply the person that he was.

*****

Gradually, that horrible grey light began to recede. The was a shifting rumble and Helen was briefly disoriented. In the next instant, she fell to her knees as the ground beneath her feet lurched and her exhausted limbs couldn’t handle the shift. Their isolated space began to tilt and tumble through the air.

But just as quickly as they began falling, the floating ice ll filled with Pinnacle Seekers landed on solid ground. Helen could feel the Frost Matriarch extending her image and creating a platform of ice beneath them. Careful not to look too closely at the current form of Randidly, Helen walked to the cracked edge of their snow globe and peered outward: they were back on the surface of a planet.

After five minutes of brutal destruction, Elhume’s attack had ebbed and the separated spaces were rejoined. From their current position on an ice shelf at the edge of a vast crevasse and the large number of ruptured ridges just in the field of her vision, it seemed the return to normal space had been rather jarring for all involved.

There was a cracking noise and the pillar of ice around the Frost Matriarch fell to pieces. She stepped out of the shards of ice and shook her head. Then she glanced down at Randidly and then toward the edge of her snowglobe. “Remarkable. Truly… remarkable. He endured it.”

“But we have a problem,” Seeker Thunder Wing frowned down at the maroon-grey gargoyle that Randidly had become. “He is clearly unconscious… but his array is still functioning. Will we able to break the array from the inside?”

“We could scratch through the runes,” The Dusk Jackal huffed, but his gaze toward the Ghosthound possessed a hint of respect.

“Not to worry.” The Frost Matriarch raised a hand and waved it. The snow globe walls shattered, along with the Nether Engraving that Randidly had made. Without that foundation, the other portions of the Nether Ritual flickered and began to fade. The energy around Randidly Ghosthound finally calmed.

“Now…” The Frost Matriarch looked around at the gathered individuals. She patted Claudette fondly on the head.

Then the frost giant turned her gaze toward Helen. “I suspect you are his second? You have a choice to make. You can take him yourself… but I recommend you come with us. Randidly Ghosthound shouldn’t be too seriously injured, but his recovery will take some time… and I recommend you go somewhere beyond the reach of the orthodox Nexus factions until he has fully restored his faculties.”