Raymund Ballast stood strictly at attention as he stood on a low hill above the smoldering and charred remnants of a forest and received the elite group’s orders from a representative of Military High Command. His hands were clasped behind his back and he kept his chin raised, despite feeling slightly nervous.

As soon as the representative relayed the order, she turned and activated a tool to step directly into the Nexus Ways. In the next second, she was gone without noticing his tenseness at all. Raymund’s lips curled upward at his own behavior and he reached up to rub his neck.

While Helen had taken Randidly to recuperate with the Pinnacle Seekers, the Foxman had moved with DiOrtho to return as quickly as possible to the previous position held by the other members of the Elite Squad. Luckily, it seemed that aside from the final isolated space, the others were only shaken by Elhume’s attack; the elite squad had barely received any damage to speak of as the areas collapsed back to the planet.

When the Vulpine returned to the group waiting on the upwind side of the hill, Charlotte Wick and Vizzeret Clamman both looked at him with extremely sharp eyes. The flame elemental Jieu Ronault schooled his flickering features better the other two, but Raymund could tell that all three of the individuals who had inherited portions of the Ghosthound’s images were chomping at the bit to prove themselves. The fact that they had been too weak to accompany Raymund and DiOrtho in following the Head Drill Sergeant was a source of immense frustration.

Still, the only reason the emotion has so stubbornly persisted is that fool Vant, upon his return, immediately claiming he needed solitude to adjust his mental state, due to a recent epiphany regarding his image. Raymund thought helplessly as he looked at the restless group in front of him. Not that he could blame them.

Their pride had been wounded. For those who had been dotingly raised by the Nexus’ elite, such a state was intolerable.

Every one of them had received instruction from the Ghosthound and his subordinates and only after coming here, and witnessing the force of the Nether Heralds, did the group realize how valuable that experience was. Each was desperate to repay the Ghosthound in any way that they could.

“I have received our orders,” Raymund said formally. “As the Nether Forces are beating a rapid retreat after we… and this is in the representative’s own words, ‘achieved a decisive victory over the cowardly Nether King’, we are to pursue the Nether Forces and eliminate as many as possible.”

The Foxman showed his teeth to the rest of the group. “So let us sound the horns; the hunt soon begins.”

*****

Helen sipped her tea, feeling her lips tingle as she took the mercurial liquid into her mouth. Then she politely put the cup back down on the delicately wrought ice table, wondering how long it would take until her tongue would stop being numb from the ‘homemade’ tea provided by the Frost Matriarch.

She was currently alone, but it felt disrespectful to spit it out on the floor. She settled for half-choking on the liquid for several seconds as her body struggled with the decision of whether to swallow it or not. Which, in retrospect, just kept the liquid in her mouth for longer.

Thank god Randidly isn’t a political type. Helen slapped her cheeks. That’s when the portion of her mouth that touched the liquid began to change.

Currently, it felt like a small blizzard was gleefully making itself at home in her mouth, coating her tongue and gums with a thick layer of ice. Helen coughed lightly and shook her jaw; the joint seemed to function normally, indicating that the miniature blizzard didn’t actually exist. Which only served to make her more disturbed and firmed her resolve to sample no more of the Frost Matriarch Specialities.

Helen was currently sitting in a wide hall on the Frost Matriarch’s base planet. Aside from three ornate, robin’s-egg-blue chairs and a crystalline table, Helen probably had all of fifty square meters to herself. The high ceilings made the space seem even larger still. Behind her was the passage that led deeper into the Frost Matriarch’s compound, but the wall in front of her ended in several large thresholds framed by ornately carved archways.

Helen’s lips twitched as she looked out through those archways at the seemingly endless stretches of tundra that lay beyond. The Frost Matriarch had billed this room as ‘famed for its views’. A chilling wind blew white snow into heavy drifts in strangely mesmerizing wave patterns as Helen watched. There is… certainly a bit of natural beauty to this place, but mostly…

Thankfully, the heavy tread of feet indicated that Helen’s private mouth torture was over. A few seconds later, the Frost Matriarch’s long-limbed gait carried her into the room. Rather than trying to fit her form on one of the Helen sized chairs, the Frost Matriarch waved a hand and conjured a ‘casual’ throne of ice and sat down.

The casual chair was covered in lifelike sculptures of wolves romping across a glittering tundra. Helen made a mental note to, when she had achieved an oppressive level of mastery with her Depths of Horror Domain, engage in painstaking practice so she would be able to ‘effortlessly’ conjure an imposing black wicker chair at the drop of a hat.

“Any change in the Ghosthound?” The Frost Matriarch asked politely. Helen shook her head; as the Frost Matriarch had indicated when they had escaped, Randidly needed some time to recover from his predicament. Currently, it had been two days since the Nether King had escaped right out from under the hand of Elhume and their group skirted their doom. However, Helen wasn’t worried; her connection with Randidly informed her that everything was fine with him.

In the meantime, she had asked for the Frost Matriarch’s help in gathering some information on the situation outside.

The Frost Matriarch leaned back in her throne and frowned out toward the vast white tundra that surrounded her base. Then she seemed to shake herself out of a reverie. “...I have been carefully monitoring the situation in the Fifth Cohort and also the movements of Military High Command. They are much easier to observe than the secretive Engraving Guild… and things are falling out pretty well for your Ghosthound.

“The official stance of Military High Command is that Elhume won a decisive victory and the Nether King was wounded and forced to flee. For the moment, the Pinnacle Seekers have managed to keep from undercutting this propaganda. In addition, both the Engraving Guild and Military High Command groups that were present in that final crater were able to escape; so there is no public reason for these groups to fixate on the Pinnacle Seekers’ survival.” The Frost Matriarch gave Helen a long look. “But don’t let that fool you. My people are fickle. Soon they bring a needle to the orthodox factions’ balloon, if just for the pleasure of revealing their hypocrisy.

“And when that happens, they will want to have a PR distraction prepared. I would be very surprised if both groups weren’t taking this time to investigate Randidly Ghosthound more fully. They won’t realize how much culpability he had in our escape… at least at first. But perhaps they will soon receive word.”

“And the other thing? With Seeker Dusk Jackal?” Helen rubbed the back of her neck, wishing the numbing sensation wouldn’t keep spreading through her body. At this point, her neck had begun to tingle. The whole situation left her feeling rather powerless.

The Frost Matriarch chuckled after taking an offensively large swallow of the tingling tea. “The Dusk Jackal said that if the Ghosthound hasn’t recovered in eight days for their duel, he will just crack open his cocoon a little bit, to make sure nothing is wrong. In this case, I can do nothing for you, as it was a promise between the two of them that was made in front of witnesses. Pinnacle Seekers do not meddle in each other’s affairs casually.”

After a few more minutes of discussion regarding more of the mundane details of their stay in the base, the Frost Matriarch turned and walked away down the hall. Helen watched her go and waited for the noise of her footsteps to fade. Then she picked up the teacup and teapot that were sitting on the table and carried them to the edge of the haul. There, she dumped the mysterious ‘specialty tea’ onto the frozen tundra.

Feeling incredibly refreshed, Helen returned the tea set to the table and walked across to the hallway herself. She took several sharp turns to end up on the far wing of the compound, where she reached a rather plain-looking wooden door and opened it. Within, the cocooned Randidly continued to recuperate.

“You are so fucking ugly right now,” Helen muttered as she scanned the marred, maroon grey covering for any signs of change. There were none.

While he was sitting in the core of his Nether Ritual, it had been difficult to see Randidly’s movements. A shining halo of light covered his body, even as the radiance did nothing to cover the sickening cracks and tears of his flesh being repeatedly ruptured. When the light had faded, they found a nearly humanoid form on all fours that had been covered with a strange maroon substance. It looked like plaster and smelled like shit.

This heavy, mudlike goop was especially heavy around his back and waist so that his hunched formed seemed grotesquely large. Actually, all of Randidly seemed just a little bit too large with the strange material covering him; his arms seemed to bulge and his fingers seemed ungainly.

Helen had scratched off a bit of the substance liberally coating his body and realized to her disgust that it was just a dried mixture of blood, flesh, and bone that had spurted across all of his limbs as he received the wounds. In his current form, he seemed to lurk, sitting on his haunches.

Randidly was crouching, with his knuckles pressing into the ground while his hands curled into claws. His chest and back was covered in strange ridges of his dried blood, signaling that the material had dried, broken open, and then bled out to fill in those new spaces. The Ghosthound’s head hung forward, meaning that the details of his features melted into the maroon goop dried across his face.

Honestly, Helen decided that his features being obscured might be for the best. She could easily imagine his face both contorted into an agonized scowl or held ominously blank by the force of his Willpower. Both options would have made it difficult to do little else but focus on the pain that Randidly had endured to protect them, which would have triggered the sense of helplessness in her chest even further.

As it was, after checking to make sure that Randidly hadn’t moved and broken out of his bone/blood goop, Helen began to practice her Depths of Horror Domain. Her image had been powerfully shaken by the clash against Techetadore, but that experience had just strengthened her understanding of the Depths of Horror.

Over the past few days, she had been continually pushing herself deeper and deeper into her Domain to understand the secrets it held. For now, Helen continued to avoid the sonorous heartbeat that signified the core area, but she used that central signal to explore the far corners of the darkness. Sometimes she stumbled across twisted monsters in those hidden areas which forced her to engage in a battle with a mental demon. Other times, she would discover new currents of energy that would inspire a different method of utilizing her wicker lines.

Today, she thought she would-

Crack!

Helen paused in her introspection. Releasing a breath, she rapidly ascended from the depths. Once she had shaken off the lingering mental pressure she felt from her Domain, and noticed to her dismay that the tingling numbness from the tea had now spread to most of her torso, she shook herself and looked toward the crouching gargoyle Randidly.

Crack! Crack!

Thin lines had formed across the pointer finger of his right hand. When Helen looked closely at the appendage, it was clear that a slight tremor was running through it.

After two and a half days, Randidly Ghosthound was waking up.