CH1152

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“Man, about freaking time.”

“It only took eight days to make because someone decided to have me threaten the ones making it. It’s-”

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“-Distracting trying to have a conversation with you when all of those notifications are going off,” Myriad finished.

“Sorry, but when I’m able to enchant and make souls the way I do, even without considering my other non-affinitied magics, this was always going to be easy to level,” Ben shrugged. “If anything, just how easy these inclinations have been to level actually just makes me annoyed how much harder it is to raise my multiversal one in comparison. Unless I go off and explore the multiverse, chances of raising that one to the third tier feels particularly low.”

“Mmm, well, before you start thinking about trying to escape reality, tell me-”

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“Ben, seriously?”

“There’s really no way for me to level it quietly,” he shrugged. “Give me like three minutes and I’ll have it finished.”

“Fine, get it out of your system already.”

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“Alright, I’m good.”

“You sure?” His god asked sarcastically. “Don’t want to make yourself a contender for anything else? Maybe push a skill to the third tier while you’re at it?”

“I’ll hold off until I have my sacrilege inclination done, but don’t worry, when I do, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Empty skies, you’re impossible. Fine, ignoring your nonsense, how was your outing today?”

“No issues. Having Jake to use really sped things along, so I was able to give everyone with the room for more blessed skills more options and I successfully modified Jake and Amy’s souls.”

Even among the undecided of the world who had struggled to figure out how to fill however many spaces they had available to them, Ben had been able to pull them all into his head to discuss the matter for what to them felt like hours to help them all make their choices, ending with everyone largely satisfied. While some had still obviously left unsure of whether they’d made the right choice, it was better to get something than nothing.

“Alright, and this is going to be the last time you have to fly around the world playing with people’s souls before the next wave, right?”

“God, I hope so. We are cutting things way too close for me to discover any other ways to modify souls that justify doing it on a global scale. Even if I got paid for it, that still wasted an entire day of my time that I could have spent trying to figure out some new way to awaken my stupid skills.”

“Still no luck on that front?”

“Mmh, I don’t want to talk about it,” Ben groaned, with so much of his mind put against that very problem and repeatedly failing in the end. “Distract me from my failings with something horrifying. For example, how tracking those ghosts Thera found is going and if she and I are going to need to be dragged in to fight whatever contender or third tier is doing it.”

“It’s going fine, but also, no. We have a group of mortals trailing them and at least one god watching around the clock to see where they’re heading to, but trying to investigate further hasn’t led to anything. Having said that, when we do find whatever is calling them, depending on its power level, we’ll either get a group of contenders or another third tier to slay it. You don’t exactly need the practice, and while there is an argument to be made that getting your girlfriend to fight it could potentially be the practice she needs to awaken her earth magic, at the same time, chances are also good that all of her mana would make any fight between them trivial. Better to use this monster for all it’s worth to try and grow others while we can, rather than waste it.”

“So now even a demonic contender becomes nothing more than a training experience, huh?” Ben smiled. “Wonder how Oaun would feel about that?”

“We can’t know how much devastation it’s been causing on the planet before we got this clue to finding it. If it could help birth even one more third tier, then we need to use it for all it’s worth. Really, we’re just lucky that Thera managed to find this group. Ever since you found those other ghosts wandering the woods, more people have been reporting sightings of groups of them moving and gathering, but this is the first time since we’ve become aware of the problem that someone with enough authority with one of the gods has been able to let us know in time to track it ourselves.”

“Sounds like you all should be a bit less stingy about giving people the authority to call you, then.”

“Do you have any idea how distracting it can be to try to listen to every prayer and respond appropriately? I’m doing my best with all of my new faith, but it’s a lot of things to try and juggle at once. Really, given that we still don’t have a clear idea of just how many other demonic contenders there are still hidden around the planet and how much destruction they’re doing in secret or in ways we are only discovering too late, our best hope for dealing with them currently is that your most recent traps pull them in and we never need to know about them.”

“They’re working out then?” Ben asked, eyes brightening in excitement to hear about how his space gates have turned out.

“Even if it’s only been a couple of days, the results are undeniable," Myriad nodded. “When Helori, Nare, and I told the other gods about them, it got a lot of eyes on your work and the results are plain. Any demons getting close enough to feel even a hint of the magic your gates are casting start drawing closer until the effects are inescapable. We’ve been watching thousands of them jump through each one every single day, endlessly, to the point that when the war ends, we might actually need to ask Ogilt to clear them all out of the night’s sky before they can cause a different problem plummeting down on the world.”

“I mean, I’m sure most of them would burn up in the atmosphere.”

“You might be shocked at how large some of them are. Nothing that won’t fit into your gates, of course, but we’d all rather not risk some of the bigger ones coming down in a hundred years.”

“Mmh, well, in that case, just make it an after the war problem because if we all lose and get to enjoy the horrific fate of being eaten, at least we can die with the knowledge that in a century or two, some of them might die from old corpses falling out of the sky.”

“How cheery.”

“Pfff, cheery doesn’t begin to cut it. I really should consider some doomsday weapons that we could have set off in the event we lose. Out of curiosity, how would you and the other gods feel about autonomous weapons conceptually?”

“I feel like I understand the word autonomous, and I understand the word weapon, but I’m struggling to fully appreciate how you’re putting them together.”

“Hmm, yeah, guess they aren’t really a thing here. On Earth, it’s basically talking about weapons that could go around killing without user input,” he explained, actualizing a basic drone to fly around the realm to get the point across. “It would actually be really simple, too. With all of the robotics I needed to study when I was trying to figure out how to rebuild Inux, a few simple flying machines wouldn’t be hard. Add in a soul as a power source, a materializer to create an infinite stream of bullets, the tracking spell I found in the library for hunting demons down and maybe even the charm spell to pull demons towards them and I could probably make a nice and apocalyptic swarm of these things to have released in the event it looks like we’ve lost.”

“...”

“Myriad?”

“Shut up, I’m thinking,” the cube told him. “In principle, I want to tell you no because the idea is conceptually horrifying, but in practice, I wouldn’t exactly be satisfied if the demons just got to take this world and enjoy it without issues.”

“That’s the spirit.”

“No, I haven’t accepted this yet. Don’t start making such ridiculous things without my permission first.”

“Boo. Where’s the sort of spunk your collective race had when they decided to blow up their planet to kill every demon on it? What happened to that Myriad, and why don’t I get to hang out with him instead?”

“That Myriad no longer lives on a world where everyone would become a part of him once they die, nor is he the sole god of this world. I can’t just unilaterally accept any doomsday devices you want to make.”

“Lame. I guess what really matters then is that it doesn’t actually matter how you and the other gods feel about it. If it seems like things aren’t going well for us, then I can just do it myself.”

“How charming,” Myriad told him dryly. “At the very least, you can wait until we’re sure we’re going to lose, right? I’d rather you not make a gun that automatically fires at demons, only for any soldiers or adventurers to happen to be standing between the two.”

“Genuinely so offensive you think I would make something capable of accidentally shooting the wrong person, but fine,” Ben agreed for the time. “It sounds like my space gates are working better than intended, so who knows? Maybe after they finish clearing out all of the demons hiding on the world, they’ll do a good job of killing all of the ones that take over here too.”