Within the grey, constricting emotion, Randidly mobilized his mind against the aggressive exhaustion. Each breath was a labored battlefield, someone escalating from a human necessity to inflating a balloon beneath a boulder. More and more of his muscles began to scream underneath the onslaught of pressure.

The grey pressure resonated with itself. The longer he held it at bay, the stronger the weight became. Every few seconds, it would exert all of its cloying, chilling suppression. His body groaned. His breath rasped between his lips. All his Stats were flared to their most capable heights. He was a being who had evolved beyond the limits of humanity. He had climbed and ascended, nearing the peak of the Nexus.

With that power, he was able to shred the greyness around him. Bodily strength could simply tear away chunks, disturbing the resonance. In this manner, he weakened the suppression against him and bought a few seconds. Yet no sooner had those shreds been allowed to fall than they joined back in with the hole.

As far as Randidly could tell, none of the damage he had done yet would really impair the emotion around him.

All three of his images roared and lashed out into the grey expanse. Yggdrasil’s vivacious roots flayed back and forth. The Stillborn Phoenix spread its influence, reaching out with such a heavy pull that it seemed to devour both space and time. The Grey Creature stormed out of Randidly’s body, forcing back a huge swathe of the grey exhaustion. Each shimmered with the power of the emotional affect they possessed, weakening the pulses to the point they barely managed to apply any pressure.

In his chest, Randidly’s Nether Core spun and sputtered, somehow being affected by the same haze that covered all of him.

The clone version of himself had completely vanished. He was alone to face off against this final emotional core, to an emotion that didn’t even seem fairly categorized as an emotion. He fought and fought, pushing back the waves of resonating restricting, his powerful heartbeat forcing out the chill that tried to grip him.

To his immense surprise, even as he tore through more and more of the greyness around him, Randidly felt himself being infected by it; the effect lingered. His breaths became increasingly ragged. His emotional affect began to fade and die as his emotional sea seemed to calcify into an expanse of concrete he carried in his chest.

A strange fear crept into Randidly’s chest. Yet he had fought a thousand battles against fear; fear was a foe he knew how to overcome. His eyes burned with an intensity that had carried him to his current heights. His body moved, waves of heat radiating off of his overcharged physique. He ripped and tore…

And ripped and shredded…

And slashed and fought and struggled…

After breaking, the surroundings simply reformed.

The grey remained endless, heedless around him. His efforts didn’t seem to sway it in the least. Randidly felt a sinking feeling in his chest. It makes sense. Sure, you can fight your way through exhaustion. But that is only to accomplish other things. To eliminate the exhaustion by force… is not possible.

Shit, am I really that tired…?

Gradually, the sharpness of his movements began to dull. Yggdrasil’s roots began to crack and tremble. The Stillborn Phoenix wild devouring became sluggish, too filled with its own exhaustion to continue.

Only the Grey Creature seemed to force itself forward despite the restrictions. When the grey substance around him pulsed and squeezed and sucked away energy, it didn’t stop. If anything, its fighting only seemed to grow more desperate. He could feel something just as implacable as the exhaustion rising in opposition. The Grey Creature would never go softly into any sort of repose. Especially while being threatened to do so.

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimeric Impunity (M) has grown to Level 899!

Congratulations! Your Skill Chimeric Impunity (M) has grown to Level 900!

The restriction struggled to find purchase on his third image. But Randidly could sense that even if the Grey Creature could fight for all eternity, it wouldn’t make much difference to this challenge.

Randidly choked out another breath. When the next grey squeeze came, he could barely keep his body moving. His energy slowly drained out of him, but in a way entirely different than when he had to face entropy. The energy still remained within his body… he simply could no longer mobilize it.

Time passed, but it was hard to understand exactly how long he had been fighting. His shoulders ached like it had been an eternity of tearing at the formless grey, but his Nether Core’s humming seemed to indicate a much shorter amount of time. The Stillborn Phoenix collapsed first, amongst his images. With a shudder, the manifestation withdrew back to Randidly’s inner world. Only the two unborn ghosts the Egg of Depression had so long protected lingered around, seemingly fascinated by the area.

Yggdrasil took much, much longer to fail, but fail it did. Golden and emerald ichor began to leak out of the deep fissures in its roots. It repeatedly tried to set up a defensive perimeter around him to weaken the pulses coming from the grey, but each eventually stuttered and failed. The light around it dimmed, its life aura taking a heavy beating from the horrible emotion. Perhaps even more than the other two, Yggdrasil seemed inherently weak to this sort of targeted mental depletion. Only the pure life energy at its core managed to keep it fighting for so long.

Randidly’s chest compressed underneath a concerted wave of suppression coming from the grey. His lungs twitched, but they didn’t inflate. It had mostly been an act of pride to refuse to cease breathing, but that began to wane as he had to endure this for even longer. Of course, the Grey Creature still ripped its way around, leaving a path of shredded grey scraps that steadily reformed.

Pressing his eyes closed, Randidly refocused. This won’t work. Not that I seem to be sustaining any permanent damage… but my ability to act is being sealed. Yet somehow…His hands curled into fists. …it feels like I won’t be able to move forward until I stop struggling.

Randidly glanced sideways at the Grey Creature, still treating the grey as an army arrayed against it, which it seemed determined to completely eradicate. The fact that it hadn’t managed to inflict any sort of serious wounds so far didn’t deter it in the slightest. It paused briefly, sensing Randidly’s attention. To his surprise, it gave him a vicious grin and a half shrug. He also received a tight bundle of emotions from it containing a message.

Let’s each try it in our own ways. First one to escape wins.

Randidly snorted but didn’t disagree. He worried that his semi-independent image would be blurred and weakened if it failed to overcome the grey, but he supposed there was also an opportunity there. He had pushed up the emotional affect of his images when he refined the emotional cores, but that didn’t mean they completely had matured into top-level images. Randidly still relied on his others gifts in order to make up the differences between himself and some of the Nexus’s other top combatants.

Perhaps the Grey Creature would find an answer here that would change that.

Either way, Randidly withdrew his awareness. He stopped struggling, allowing the resonating waves to sap motivation from his body. The ache spread from his shoulders to his entire body as he bore the weight of every moment in his life where he had stubbornly refused to concede against the limits of his own body.

Unsurprisingly, there were tens of thousands of such moments that he had accumulated while crusading against the System.

Gradually, as more and more waves intruded into his body, the flow of both blood and Nether turned sluggish in his body. The heat radiated out by him diminished. He no longer breathed, his blood stilled, his organs entered a kind of stasis. Even more dangerous, his thoughts became sluggish. Without hesitation, a part of Randidly began to cut away his ancillary thoughts. Especially as more and more of his physical, mental, and emotional life stilled, Randidly severed those useless portions of himself to keep him streamlined and focused.

The lessons in the necessity of cruelty he had learned from the Visage of Obsession came in extremely useful here. His connection to his Nether Core vanished. His senses were abandoned. All the waffling emotions and hesitations were carved away. In the end, when Randidly felt that the restriction of the grey could penetrate no deeper into his person, the being that existed there could not really be accurately called Randidly Ghosthound.

But this remnant was his burning spark that had animated him for so long. With an inert body around him, with a distant Nether Core, without any emotional baggage, the spark was given a choice by the grey: remain here in peace, or pick up all the burdens of being Randidly Ghosthound, one by one, reclaiming himself gradually.

The spark flickered slightly, possessing an echo of his original sense of humor. And what about the Grey Creature?

The consciousness that animated the grey sea of exhaustion sighed. What can we do? That guy is crazy. But if you want to go back, you need to pick everything back up by hand. Bearing the exhaustion you skipped out paying the first time through.

If I take too long… do you think the Grey Creature can take over the main body for a short amount of time? The remnant queried.

For the first time, the fourth emotional core seemed troubled. Well… I don’t quite… hey, don’t act like this will be simple. Your exhaustion has been building and compounding for more time than you can understand; for some of it, you were unconscious. You may very well fail to return to our body at all.

The grey expanse paused slightly before continuing. …but the other two images might be dormant, but the Grey Creature breaking out of here should wake them up. They will guide its… harsher impulses.