"What sort of madness is this?" Elder Junior was saying, looking at me. I'd just curb-stomped his latest attempt at an attack, something he apparently wasn't expecting.

Well, I didn't expect you to attack me like that either, so there. We're even!

The way I was fighting this meant I really couldn't move around much, since that would cause me to leave the protective cloud of Nebula I'd formed around myself. Elder Junior was fast, and I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to catch most of his direct attacks in time to stop them. The ranged shenanigans were easy, since those all had tells, but these Iron Veil Order Elders had all refined their movements to such a degree that it simply wasn't possible for me to follow them.

It wasn't fun. Although he couldn't hurt me at all, I was kind of at his mercy in a way. Eventually I'd have to lower the insane output I was using to keep this up, if only because one had to sleep eventually. So unless he died of boredom, I wasn't about to get out of this easy.

Speaking of dying of boredom, I was also concerned that the novelty of watching me 'effortlessly' give the smackdown to all his techniques whilst barely moving a muscle would wear off and then this would all be quite boring for everyone.

That really didn't match the image of the powerful 'Venerable One' we had crafted, so it was about time for me to do… something?

I wasn't really sure what. My concern was that if I tried hitting him with ranged attacks, they'd all miss really badly, and that wasn't very cool, now was it?

So as he continued attempting to attack me, I sat there with my finger on my chin, thinking about what I could do, more or less passively blocking him at this point.

At least it was frustrating the crap out of him, so that was a bonus point.

And then suddenly, a plan hit me.

"I've received your instruction, and now it is my turn to return it," I said, holding out my hands. I saw Elder Junior's eyes go wide, as he desperately bought some distance. Considering what I had in mind, this was playing straight into my plans.

In front of me, all across the field, dozens of small spheres formed. These were the result of me consciously herding my Nebula to clump up. They weren't well formed, more misshapen blobs than the spheres I intended, but to everyone else they'd be quite bright, so it was likely only I could see how bad they were.

But there were a lot of them. If I sacrificed nearly all the control I had, I could make a pretty crazy number of them considering the amount of Nebula I had swirling around me at this point. I'd basically built a wall out of small, bright spots of power.

Then I sent it at him. Of course, the lack of control came into play here as well, and instead of flying straight, all at once, they essentially went in many variations of straight in a of confusing dance ahead of me. They didn't all leave at the same time. This resulted in a cacophony of movement that somehow looked more impressive (to me, anyway) than a big orderly blast would have been.

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With my enhanced senses, I watched the Nebula inside Elder Junior get chaotic as he saw this display of vaguely controlled nonsense fly towards him. He was panicking.

A few of the blobs collided with the stage below us, detonating with loud bangs that left black scars on the surface, the direct result of me not having enough control to do anything but hold them together.

This still had the intended effect, with him, staring at each point of light like it was his mortal enemy. They weren't fast, but they weren't slow, so the moving wall of crazy I'd created was hurtling his way at a run, so he had to do something about it soon.

His move - to my surprise - was to dash directly into the chaos. I think he was trying to get through as swiftly as possible. What he had failed to realize, was that while I wasn't controlling all of these things well, I was still controlling them.

So the second he stepped foot past the first one and his plan was clear to me, I changed my mental command from 'forward' to 'inward' and had everything start moving together into a point that was closer to me than to him, meaning that as he moved forward, the density would increase.

It wasn't much, as they were slower than him, but it took him several moments to figure out that something had changed. And by then, he was far too committed to turn around, so he put on a desperate display of speed, twisting his body impossibly and even controlling the ground below him to blast him upward, something I wasn't intending. I heard the bangs of collapsing nodes as he collided with more than a few on the way up, but he shot out of the top mostly intact, while looking much worse for the wear, with blackened holes all throughout his robes.

I saw his relieved expression as he cleared the last one, and his arc was carrying him right towards me, where I think he believed he had a free shot.

Unfortunately for him, just hammering out a shitload of Nebula wouldn't cost me much if anything in the way of control, so that's exactly what I did, blasting out an almost solid wall of the stuff from my hands as I pushed my body to the limit.

"What the actual …" I heard him say as he rammed into this new obstacle with his whole person, and I heard what sounded like a certain fox's ke ke ke covering up the last word. Steeve's LFC apparently substituted vulpine giggles for swears. I knew a certain bird who would approve, since apparently my spirit friends were worse than Gran when it came to expletives.

Either way, my opponent got blown directly backward… right into the huge cluster of unstable Nebula nodes I'd left there for him

Something that was totally the plan and definitely not a complete freak coincidence that I hadn't planned for at all because I couldn't plan my way out of a wet paper bag.

Either way, the fireworks were quite pretty.

"I think I know who our inside man is," Celistar said, looking at me from a table I'd summoned in my Soul Sea. She had her wings, as they had reappeared every time she met me in here. Something something about how I'd managed to modify the shape of her Will, something that was apparently a Big Deal™, but didn't really mean that much to me.

Evidently it was something like I'd managed to convince her soul that the wings were a part of her.

That said, they manifested whenever she wasn't actively suppressing them, something she apparently needed to do outside my soul. I felt a little bad about that, and offered to reverse the change, but she ran a hand over one and just shook her head with a light laugh, saying she really did like them.

Well, of course she did, she looked far too adorable with them there to ever get rid of them.

"Let me guess, it is the Sect Master," I said in response to her earlier question, completely deadpan.

"Well no, I mean yes. Wait, what? How did you know that?"

"I've met the guy."

"What does that mean?"

I laughed, "And usually I'm the dense one. That dude just oozes insecurity. I'm pretty sure he'd sell his own daughter to keep his power."

"He never used to be that way." She said, looking rather sad about it.

"How long were you gone, anyway?" I asked.

"Not long, only a few hundred years."

It was my turn to be speechless.

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