Drake sheered his way forward through the barrage of attacks without apparent difficulty. When he slashed with his weapon, Randidly could feel Dead Man’s Last Wish strengthening the slashes. Curving arcs of bright light cut down entire swaths of the tentacles with very little effort.

Ugly, bulbous brown pieces of grown flesh fell to the ground and wiggled for several seconds. But without the connection to the Primal Force, they eventually died and withered. After another second, they almost seemed to turn liquid behind Drake and spread out across the ground. The sundered stone soon had a weird brown layer of moss across everything, thick with the scent of death.

In this way, too, Randidly seemed to have influenced images in an unexpected way.

However, Drake’s momentum carried him away from this dangerous area increasingly dominated by death, directly toward Charlotte. With his sharper emotional affect and this dense combination of Fate and image, he could rival her power. She gathered more tentacles together into heavier attacks, yet he seemed unstoppable. His thinner image burned through the flaws in her combination and continued to advance.

His sword glittered with power. His steps were sure. His jittering movements made him nearly invulnerable. He was Judgment incarnate, seeking the head of Charlotte Wick. In his madness, Drake had perhaps stumbled across a secret recipe for becoming the first champion of the All Alpha Cosmos Tournament.

Meanwhile, emotions continued to build in Charlotte’s body. Her face twisted into a grimace. “You cannot… this is not the place to be working through your pain! Just accept and bury it. Get over yourself and your loss.”

Drake was a human lawnmower. From the emaciated form of the Primal Force behind Charlotte, wave after wave of stabbing leeches aimed for his body. Yet his sword was unstoppable. The light it released burned away the scent of death that attempted to rush up behind him and corrupt his body. The emotional determination he had been tempering through the competition served him well now.

Charlotte’s image was massive and powerful. Yet it had been stitched together. Skillfully, Randidly had to admit, but there was still an inherent flaw in it. Before Drake’s offensive, Charlotte could only watch her image force be severed and dispersed.

“Did you think you’ll find an answer?” Charlotte demanded in a slightly shrill voice. Drake crossed the last several meters between them, burning away the thick underbrush of death with his activated Chimeric Fate. That sword seemed to release drops of sizzling intensity, cleansing the brown moss off of the ground. “If you keep struggling like this, will you feel better?!”

Drake leveled the blade at her chest in a smooth motion he had perfected over a thousand practices. Charlotte’s shoulders were heaving, incensed by his assault. Behind her, the Primal Force raised its head and stared balefully through Charlotte’s body at her foe. Steaming ichor dripped out of its mouth; it lay in wait behind its creator with so much anticipation it had begun to drool. Randidly could hear its fluttering and uneven heartbeat.

“Can you promise me this victory won’t be hollow?” Charlotte cackled as the weapon ripped toward her chest. She brought her hands together, aiming to catch the thrust with her bare hands, albeit empowered by the surging aura of life from Primal Force. The last surge of life it could manage.

The two images met in a grinding crash, the blade quickly melting through Charlotte’s initial image burst without too much trouble. That emotional affect sharpened the edge to a deadly degree. The ground beneath them shook and cracked, unable to withstand the force. The last remaining portion of the original arena stage collapsed around them, leaving only broken stone. The fur of Charlotte’s hands began to smolder and burn as the blade surged closer. The last dregs of her life image were stronger closer to Charlotte’s actual body, but it still eventually parted before that emotional scalpel.

“Weak,” Charlotte hissed. Behind her, the Primal Force shot out its tongue. “Pathetic. She meant so much to you and died before you could tell her that.”

Randidly shook his head. Of course, she has been talking to herself this whole time.

Charlotte allowed the blade to dig into the flesh right above her heart. Meanwhile, the Primal Force’s tongue punched through her ribcage and erupted toward Drake in a sneak attack. He instantly jittered sideways, but his dodging ability was limited by the fact their images were so entwined. Her scalded hands squeezed the incandescent Chimeric Fate blade.

His expression was solemn, Drake pivoted on his toe at the last second. The tongue bit a chunk out of his neck but expended its violent momentum and horrifying aura of death without inflicting a deadly blow. The flesh of Drake’s neck began to turn a strange color around the wound, but his purified image rose and began to burn the remnants away.

Drake’s sword sank deeper into Charlotte’s body. His image burned its way through her veins. Yet her gaze softened and her eyes went distant; she didn’t even seem to notice his presence on the stage, attempting to end her life.

“Yes,” Charlotte whispered. Her arm trembled as she raised it to throw one last punch. “Those petty tricks… the ugly combination… Helen would have hated those sorts of images. She would- she would have thought them cheap and weak. No… If Helen was here, she would tell me-”

Randidly hands tightened into fists. His awareness shifted to the Nether movements in the air above the arena. So much significance had gotten churned up in their earlier clashes that now a dark cloud hovered above the arena. More seemed to be generated every moment by the presence of the cheering crowd. The tournament had built to this and now most people were swept away by the passage of history. They continued to chant Drake’s name while he carved a path to the monstrous foe waiting for him in the tournament finals.

All that potent Nether began to spiral downward and cram itself into Charlotte’s body. Her spine stiffened, the tremor in her raised arm vanished. Drake took a half step back and then twisted his sword, inflicting more damage. Charlotte settled into a lowered stance as memories bubbled up through her body. The barrage of significance unearthed all her buried feelings about Helen, all the half-forgotten moments, all the tips and advice that Helen had given to Charlotte during the training to create the Vulpis Squad.

Congratulations! Your Skill Nether Sensation (L) has grown to Level 954!

Congratulations! Your Skill Right Hand of the Nether Polymath (M) has grown to Level 801!

The patterns of Nether within the bearwoman’s body were gorgeous. A gossamer circus dripping gleaming motes of starlight spun in her chest. She hadn’t created a Nether Core, but she had condensed something similar. Perhaps soon, a genuine Nether Core would solidify and she would be able to follow in Randidly’s footsteps.

The Path he had walked left trails that some people were beginning to follow.

Watching Charlotte’s fist tighten, Randidly habitually folded his perspective. And suddenly he saw how connected he was, his desires were, to the development of the tournament. To the execution and the results. His subconscious arrangements had pulled so many things together.

He had cleansed Charlotte’s consciousness, freeing her up to begin developing again after the wound of Helen’s death had been festering for so long. The bracket had been arranged so that she fought against Vant, but he didn’t possess nearly the resolve to win and prove himself in the same way that Charlotte did.

Meanwhile, the two foes who could legitimately threaten an emotionally wounded Charlotte, Alana and Kimpap, fought each other. She fought a wounded Alana, who was too busy figuring out her own image in preparation for the challenge against Randidly to push Charlotte to her limits.

On the other side of the bracket was Drake. Similarly broken, but with different advantages. A wild and insane emotion that sought to break out from the seal of guilt that bound it. His Path forward needed to take long enough that the emotional edge would emerge from its pressure chamber with a significant amount of power.

Not that his matches were easy, but his capabilities countered most of the foes in his way.

The two broken individuals met in the finals. Charlotte’s cobbled together image pressured him just enough to shatter his own silence and make him face his failure to Sydney. And seeing someone else overcome their own pain in the middle of the match had finally pried open that sealed cauldron of emotions. He had even used the word Knight, instantly ripping open Charlotte’s emotional wound and allowing any further infection to drain away.

After recognizing the past, the folding gave him a glimpse into the future. Randidly saw the winner of this confrontation. He saw the requests the winner would make of him, one which he would agree to and the other he would deny. And he smiled, in spite of himself.

Drake’s empowered sword continued to intensify the radiation of his image. Most of her fur had been burned away at this point, leaving a scared and bare torso. Behind Charlotte, her Primal Force collapsed, genuinely dying. Its delicate organs failed. The balance between life and death that Charlotte maintained finally fell to pieces.

All she had remaining were emotional force and image fragments. And yet-

From amongst her memories of Helen, a few burned with intensity. They nudged her in a particular direction.

“Bloody River Fist,” Charlotte said. All those fragments and emotions crystallized. Randidly’s eyes widened in alarm, sensing the bloodthirsty and destructive power contained within that small name.

Somewhere, Helen laughed long and loud as Charlotte clenched her fists.

Drake seemed to sense what was coming. He ripped out his sword from Charlotte’s chest and slanted it defensively across his chest. The Chimeric Fate shifted its affect. From the burning heat it released earlier, it became a protective aura. A Dead Man would give anything to protect his most important person. Yet before that surging power-

She threw a punch. She tore a hole from which a very familiar crimson light began to rush.

The sword melted before that light. Drake’s face contorted in pain as his Chimeric Fate was forced out of the weapon and damaged in the process. Yet the red radiance birthed by the collapse of Primal Force wasn’t so easily sated. It bulged and stretched, its mouth yawning to devour all of Drake and then reap across the stands behind him.

Randidly hesitated a fraction of a second. But as Drake twisted sideways, mobilizing all of his image and physical gifts to avoid it and he couldn’t manage it, he realized this was too powerful a force for his barrier to withstand. The red light took a thousand more minuscule bites, eating into his side and torso. Randidly blinked and then surged into motion, his Nether Core whirling with all the force he could muster.

He reached out and Seized the attack. For a few seconds it bucked against the touch of his hand, but soon the surging mass of dense Nether Randidly wielded rendered the attack inert. Through sheer force, he broke that wild power. Despite its destructive capabilities, it had to shape. So it could only begrudgingly begin to fade before his guidance.

As it departed, it howled, shaking the air with the ferocity of its hunger. The bright red light that Charlotte briefly unleashed faded, leaving the cracked and smoking stage revealed to the entirety of the audience.

There, on the stage, Drake lay on the ground, looking up at the grey sky with a huge hole bitten out of his side. He had collapsed backward onto the ground. Blood began to seep out between the piled debris beneath him. Above him, Charlotte stood with her hand outstretched. Her gaze was distant, too, but it was clear between the two of them which was in better shape.

Next to him, Sydney released a sob. Randidly sighed inwardly and stepped out into the sky. Nether swirled downward. He could feel it already, heavy chunks of Nether Weight forming within Charlotte’s body.

“There you have it,” Randidly raised his head and looked around at the stands. “The winner of the All Alpha Cosmos Tournament… is Charlotte Wick.”