“Randidly, you are being petty,” Neveah said rather drily. She considered her Soulbound companion, squatting with an Engraved bar across his shoulders and grimacing as the veins in his neck began to throb with his stifled effort. The beginnings of a Nether Ritual swirled listlessly around his ankles, but her own Engraving across the wooden bar kept anything concrete from manifesting. She sniffed loudly for good measure. “Just concede. I’ve already succeeded in overcoming your attempts and forged a closed system. Unless you believe you can pick up the entire fabric of this memory world with your physical body, you are just torturing yourself,”

“If picking up the entire world is what it takes,” Randidly rocked from one foot to the other, adjusting his stance. Then the muscles of his legs, midsection, and shoulders bulged as he attempted to force the wooden bar upward. A body against an entire world. “Then I will do it.”

“That’s impossible,” Neveah said. However, she had to admit she wasn’t quite sure; after all, this was a woven memory.

Randidly just chuckled in response.

Neveah made a show of turning away and producing a rather lurid romance paperback loaned to her by Tatiana, but her attention didn’t waver from Randidly. Again and again, his body flexed and then relaxed, failing to overcome her Engraving.

She had to admit it was a rather inspired working. The details were an esoteric extrapolation Neveah had made from observing some of the ‘world state’ images of the Second Cohort. After creating this Engraving, several flaws occurred to Neveah which limited its effectiveness in real-world situations. But once installed, it became impossible for Randidly to straighten fully with the bar on his shoulders.

The world wouldn’t allow it.

However, his stubbornness and the increasingly ominous swirl of Nether Ritual around his ankles was only a meager third of the reason for her continued observation. A hidden observation, but it only worked because he wouldn’t have his attention turned outward. No, the lion’s share was due to the vicious struggle that had ensued while Neveah had forced her Engraving upon the wooden bar. She had very nearly lost.

Randidly grunted in a rather unflattering way next to her. Neveah rolled her eyes, wishing all the teenagers at Kharon Academy dreaming of catching up to the Ghosthound could see this side of him.

The chosen task for this energy game had been a simple bet as to whether Randidly could stand straight up with the wooden bar on his shoulders, but only after ten minutes had passed from the start of the game. So the first confrontation had been a rather direct clash of Aether and Nether to affect the wood. Randidly had the easier task running interference and simply preventing her from accomplishing anything, but he still caught Neveah entirely by surprise when he had seen through and demolished all her first attempts to secure an easy victory with incisive ribbons of Nether..

Neveah didn’t necessarily feel surprised, just resigned. Tricks and abilities she had used previously to beat him he had now memorized. Those without true substance he had plotted against and could break with just a sharp flare of Nether. Over five days of a dozen competitions every night, Randidly had gone from rather inept enough to lose against her when she used Nether to forcing Neveah to spend part of her day thinking up new methods to keep him at bay during their nightly competitions.

In this case, she had created the outline of a half dozen different arrays to apply, floating them in the air around her. When he focused on defending against any specific one, she would pivot and attempt to exert a different one upon the bar behind his back. Nether naturally possessed more flexibility than Aether, but Randidly firmly stuck to a solid foundation and only managed one Nether Ritual at once. Which meant he was scrambling to keep up.

Of course, Neveah admitted that one of the reasons he so stubbornly remained with only a single Nether Ritual was because she had pressured him to diversify into a few on the previous night and thoroughly thrashed him over and over again. Those had been his most embarrassing losses. Randidly Ghosthound had a sharper mind than he deserved, considering how much of his attention he dedicated to honing his capability for violence above all other pursuits, but he still would make small mistakes when he was forced to fight battles on multiple fronts. A skilled commander he was not.

The two energies crackled as time passed, the only sign of the invisible struggle occurring.

Even after the ten minutes limit had ended, Randidly had made no move to pick up the wooden bar and lift it; pulling his attention away from the wrestling match between the single Nether Ritual and the dozen smaller Engravings would have given Neveah the edge she needed to force victory. The clashes of Engraving and Ritual happened at the rate of almost thirty a second, two extremely honed individuals pushing their mental limits in grim conflict.

Neveah had inwardly cursed him for being too damnably clever for his own good when they remained deadlocked there; would it really have been that much of an issue for him to lose for a few more nights straight, to pad her ego?

After all, Neveah had a leery feeling that once Randidly started winning, it would be much, much more difficult to stop him.

However, tonight would not be the night he overcame her. Randidly had accumulated more and more Nether in the area around him, strengthening his Nether Ritual to the point it seared away Aether around his body and the bar. Only when he had effectively weakened her capabilities around him, did he turn and glare at the wooden bar. When he still made no move to pick it up, a smile crept across Neveah’s mouth.

Gotcha.

Instead of moving, even with all the protections he had generated, he started adjusting the thrust of his Nether Ritual. He focused it into the material. The power hummed across the wooden bar, shaping into an absolute rejection of interference from Aether. Neveah gestured sharply and sent three zooming Engraving outlines toward the bar to combat him. Each had pulsed with her power.

Randidly’s retribution came swiftly, ripping directly through the three half-formed Engravings. But of course, she had previously forged them only intending to use pieces from each. A few small adjustments immediately prior to impact mean that large chunks of the Engravings made it through intact. With a deft weaving she borrowed from Randidly’s ability to utilize Nether, she pulled those unharmed portions together and forced it through the Nether around the bar.

This was a carefully forged blade, made to counter a Nether Ritual and supplant it. It wouldn’t work next time, of course. But for now, it was enough.

An Engraving with an entirely unexpected purpose arrived before Randidly, who didn’t have time to react before it had replaced the working he had been making on the bar. When it snapped into place, Neveah knew she had won, but she didn’t say anything for the next five minutes as he attempted to blast her working away with a river of Nether.

What Engraving lost in flexibility, it more than made up for it in terms of defensibility. She weathered the storm, a prim smile on her face.

The smile eventually vanished, but because it had grown old and died, not because she had been defeated.

Now, she sat through an hour of pointless struggle. Or what should have been a pointless struggle. But the stirrings of Nether around his ankles grew increasingly demanding. Surge after surge came as he flexed his body, the energy first running through his limbs and heart before unleashing it. The circulation through his body added an extra surge of momentum each time, more and more efficiency in the rising Nether Ritual.

It’s more than that, though, Neveah observed. He’s honing some aspect of the Nether Ritual. Perhaps what can be most aptly described as faith. The more he throws himself against an impossible task like this, the more he can disassociate the need to have a solid plan for Nether when he utilizes it. He’s using me to break a habit.

…as always, Randidly, your recklessness will mean I am in for long nights of fretful waiting up for you. But I understand what you are doing. In the short term, not needing to have a sure possibility of success might mean you smash your head against a foe stronger than yourself without accomplishing anything. But… you take a longer view than that.

What if this underlying belief of yours can incorporate the weight of the sea of emotions you possess? What if you believed with the entire force of the Alpha Cosmos at your back? A universe’s worth of faith?

After releasing a steaming breath, Randidly adjusted his footing one more time. Water vapor continued to radiate up from his muscular form. He flexed his muscles and exploded. The swirling Nether Ritual at his feet had grown slightly darker. She wasn’t sure if it was her imagination or not, but it seemed to her senses that the Engraving had to shine just a bit more brightly to maintain itself.

Another breath, another shift, another explosion of force. The wood audibly groaned. The surging Nether Ritual circled his feet, scoring a small ditch around where he stood.

Neveah couldn’t suppress a shiver, but there was a pleasure in the motion too. Because he might be a monster, but Randidly Ghosthound was hers.

In the end, that was the first official draw of the energy games, simply because the wooden beam eventually imploded after being ground down so thoroughly by the posturing of two such stubborn individuals.

Neveah gathered up as many of the splinters as she could, knowing Sam would pay well for any material that had been so thoroughly soaked in both Aether and Nether, of the quality the two Soulbound were utilizing.

Her mood cheered somewhat when she defeated Randidly in the next two energy games. Much to her chagrin, however, the fourth she lost.

The rest of the night ended up being four more draws and a loss for Neveah.