“Got it. Hey, Myriad, Helori, what do you think the odds are that if I awaken my two thought skills or calming that the three’ll merge together? It feels likely, but honestly, since it seems like it should be possible for me to awaken them all individually, I kind of hope they don’t.”
“Focus on your connect, I don’t need you to get any more obviously objectionable skills to the third tier when you already have so many.”
“Objectionable isn’t a skill class… probably.”
“Neither was apocalyptic until you got it.”
“Sure, but these are all clearly mind skills, and you’re talking to potentially the best mind god in the universe,” Ben said, seeing the knowledge goddess with them frown.
“A little rude.”
“A little accurate, unless you can find a god with a more powerful mind than me, a person who by all accounts is still a mortal. Raising those three up to the third tier isn’t outside of the realm of possibility since I can use all three while training my sacrilege. They’re falling under my authorities too. Combined with my brainpower, it could happen.”
“Again, focus on your connect,” Myriad groaned. “Seeing as how that’s your big goal and all, you can consider anything else after you accomplish that.”
The cube was pushing for that skill so hard, of course, because he knew Ben was struggling with it, something that was easy for Ben to see, and left his shoulders to sag.
“Well, right now my options for that are to either hope for some new information to present itself in the hopes of succeeding, keep doing what I’m doing and hope it will be enough, or move on to some truly fringe, dangerous, and unethical options.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Connect to an outsider, torture a living god instead of just one’s soul, maybe some other options too. It’s not like I don’t have choices if I get really desperate.”
“Really don’t like that, absolutely not.”
“Fine, fine, I can wait just a bit longer until I do anything so extreme. Continuing to smack my face against a mountain and hope it breaks it is then.”
“Or, instead of being a crazy person, you could try and spend your remaining time doing something nice,” his god tried instead.
“Like?”
“You had fun playing dress-up with Thera, just break down and marry her for real.”
“... Myriad, where the hell did that come from?”
“It came from watching you work yourself to death constantly and seeing you almost die on multiple occasions. Don’t think I didn’t see her leaving you speechless, why not tie the knot in the time you have left? It’s not like you don’t love her enough to do it, and regardless of any hang-ups she might still have about different lifespans, she undeniably loves you too, no matter how crazy some of your actions drive her. I personally still consider that one of her best parts.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“Okay, cool, but no.”
“Boo! Lame! Boring!”
“Rude.”
“And ignoring the childish back and forth,” Helori cut in. “Why not?”
“Seriously? Not you too.”
“Myriad’s right. You both love each other, why not do it while you still can?”
“Because one, I’m not going to propose just because the world is probably going to end. No offense to Greed and anyone else doing it, but it’s not my thing, and two, I’m still genuinely expecting to die in the third wave. Even if the world survives after, I’m not marrying her just to leave her a widow. If the world doesn’t end and I’m still alive after, then I’ll have a serious look at it… which is destined to be embarrassing. Why exactly do succubus customs demand public proposals? I’d really prefer to do it privately, maybe while on vacation.”
“You are technically already engaged as far as the rest of the planet is concerned,” Myriad pointed out. “Just work off of that one and call it a day.”
“No, because as funny as that may have been at the time, I love her, and if I’m proposing then I’m doing it for real. Now, any chance we can change the topic to something beyond my love life? Maybe some nice new disaster on the world?”
“A city was destroyed today.”
“Jesus, I was kidding! Holy crap, okay, what the hell happened, and should I be waking Thera up to go help with healing?”
“Healers across the network were already gathered and considering it was a gate city it was easy for them to get there, you don’t need to add Thera to the mix when, unfortunate as it is to say, this is the sort of event that will hopefully drive some more levels out of them. As for what happened though, two new demon contenders got to it, a holder of what we think might have been an awakened soul augmentation that was successfully killed and a space magic user that got away, along with some of the others in its swarm and could be anywhere. Still, as tragic as it is to say, killing one of them and so many of the demons it brought with it is a positive, even if it doesn’t make up for the cost.”
“Oh my god, how many of these stupid things are there going to be?” Ben wondered. “And a space magic contender? That thing’s gonna have the world at its fingertips."
“It will be unfortunately difficult to kill,” Myriad sighed. “Really, finding and putting down all of the contenders that made it through is a priority, but given we don’t know how many of them there are, it’s no simple thing. We have towns and villages occasionally disappear without a trace but we’ve been trying to create mini-gate networks using your factory so that places can escape or at least get word to whatever city they’re closest to but those are still taking time and not every settlement even wants one which makes things challenging. You didn’t see anything in any of the contenders' minds you’ve been in?”
“Demons aren’t exactly the sort to keep friendly terms with each other. If they don’t see their kin as something to be oppressed to serve them then they’re food instead. Frankly, I’m shocked just hearing two powerful ones worked together. One had to be above the other, and considering which one lived and got away, I’m willing to make my bet. Which also might be exactly why they don’t know about each other. Maybe their god didn’t want them doing their whole ‘battle for superiority thing’ while there’s this big beautiful world to try and dominate instead. You guys at least have any leads on the one that got away?”
“No,” Helori answered. “Either it has a decent mana pool or it knows a trick for hiding itself. By the time we started looking, it was already gone.”
“God, these things are such a nightmare. What do you think the odds are that one of these contenders has reached the third tier since arriving?”
“If it’s more than just the one you killed yourself, then we’re already in a nightmare,” the goddess told him. “Even having one awaken on this world is too many, we can’t deal with more. Especially since, if they are found and killed, that means we’ll have to deal with them next.”
“Mmh,” Myriad agreed. “Not an overwhelming problem, a newly born god with no source of faith should be manageable so long as it doesn’t immediately begin pulling from the other demons of the world, but we can still expect such a thing to put up enough of a fight that it would cost us an unfortunate amount of our own faith. That really would be a worst case scenario.”
“Yeah? Well the fact that it already happened once makes it a lot more likely,” Ben pointed out. “Who’s to say that the contenders that were sent weren’t the closest ones Oaun had to awakening? I still can’t get why he’d want that when he has to be killing any who reach that tier, but that could be what’s happening here.”
“Well, we’re all just going to have to hope that you’re wrong. Besides, even if you’re not, you should know better than anyone that ‘close to awakening to the third tier’ is still a matter of scale. You could look at someone at the very edge of passing it in comparison to where they’d begun, but they could still be years away, if ever. A third tier isn’t just going beyond your limits, it’s transcending them entirely. A fact that makes you doing it four times all the more horrifying.”
“Yeah, I am a sweetheart, aren’t I?”
“Not sure where you got that from anything I just said but okay.”
Aside from his small deflection though, the entire conversation tugged on a part of Ben’s mind. He may not have known with any certainty that Oaun wanted his contenders to awaken, but if he did, could Ben be right? As powerful as that god was and specialized in both souls and survival of all things, could he have specifically sent his contenders that were closest to reaching the third tier to that dangerous new world as a way of helping them push through that final hurdle? There was no way to know, but the thought left his stomach to drop at the notion that there might be more they’d had to deal with, the feeling not leaving him no matter how late the night wore on.