Chapter 1129

The previous holder of the most third-tier skills on the planet and a man who’d tried to murder him multiple times during their last meeting, Rook glared down on where Ben sat in naked rage, screaming as he did.

“YOU LEFT ME! IN THE DARK! FOR MONTHS!”

“And? Unless you want a repeat of the last time, shut up and take your seat.”

His response brought the other to a wordless scream as Rook switched from trying to stab Ben to instead teleport the knife directly into his brain, only for his magic to fail as he tried more space spells, getting just as much success. Because of the failsafe he’d made after nearly being murdered by the space demon before, Ben couldn’t be teleported away by a first-tier space magic, but there was a completely different reason Rook was failing to teleport items through him. Every time the other man tried, Ben subtly destabilized the other’s mind while trying to form spells, the discovery of the change in his own power coming as soon as Rook got to the city and within range of Ben’s soul. Unlike with their first meeting, this time Ben could read and interact with his thoughts.

Something he hadn’t been prepared for, leaving him to assume that the rise of soulcraft and sacrilege to third tier skills working together gave him enough to beat some of the man’s power, he could see Rook’s soul laid before him as well, the sight of it leaving him to click his tongue as he did.

“I gave you months with nothing to do but work, and you still didn’t improve at all in that time, huh? You really are a lost cause.”

“I’LL FUCKING KILL YOU!”

“Doesn’t seem like you’re doing a great job of it.”

Another wordless scream from Rook, he was the only one who didn’t seem to notice that Ben was managing fine, the rest of the third tiers willing to see how he wanted to handle things before stepping in, even if a few others kept at the ready in the event things took a turn for the worse. The months they’d been freed of the immortal's acts had been a blessing to them all. Even if they knew that ultimately they couldn’t do anything, that didn’t change how many of them would have enjoyed the chance to punch Rook in the face regardless.

A feeling Rook held for Ben as well. Seeing that none of his spells worked, he moved to strike with his fists, only to fail with the first swing. Ben caught his arm and, without much thought, twisted, feeling the bone within snap with a sound that caught the attention of everyone there.

He’d thought that he had only beaten some aspects of Rook's defense because of two of his third-tier skills working together, but that showed it had only been one. Evil god of sacrilege was the only skill at its level, and with it, he’d suppressed the passive effects of another godling.

With his sacrilege flooding Rook’s body, the man’s immortality didn’t let it instantly heal either, leaving him to stare at the wound as he experienced pain for the first time in centuries, with neither he nor the other third tiers given more time to react than that. With the realization that, after all Rook had tried to do to him, Ben could properly fight back, he moved first, yanking on the man’s still-broken arm to throw him across the room and jumping over the table to follow, seeing Rook’s body smash into the wall across from him and stomped on his leg as he did, shattering the bone it held, getting a scream of pain rather than rage for the first time since Rook had appeared.

“Shut up,” Ben told him coldly, crushing his other leg underfoot too and made sure his sacrilege continued to keep Rook’s immortality from letting it heal. “Bad news, Rook. It looks like your skills lose to mine now, which means I can finally see the exact sort of piece of shit you are.”

It had been obvious that Ben wasn’t Rook’s first attempted murder, but now that he could read his mind, he could see the bodies in that man’s history, which brought forth an all-new rage. In the centuries Rook had his power, and even before when he’d merely been a second-tier, he hadn’t been shy in killing to get what he wanted, no matter who it had been. Ben may have been the world’s god of evil, but if Rook ever ascended, he would doubtlessly be an evil god.

He kicked again, feeling sick at how Rook had toyed with people and the joy he’d gotten from it, shattering the immortal’s ribs with the simple movement before stomping down again, breaking both shattered legs in even more places while the meat and flesh of them turned into more of a fine paste under his strength.

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“Ben, that’s enough,” Killi finally spoke, trying to stop him after being forced to see the brutality of his acts, leaving him to answer without turning back, too focused on looking at Rook as he beat him.

“Trust me, Killi, if you were a mind reader and could see the sort of shit this guy’s been doing over the years, you’d be doing at least this much too, and as the only person around with the ability to give any payback on behalf of all of the people he’s killed, I think I have a moral duty to hurt him as much as I can before I kill him.”

“Kill me then,” Rook said, forcing himself to speak and smirk through the pain. Even if it had been ancient history by that point, at one point he’d suffered through enough to gain and raise those skills to their present level. “When I’m up there, I’ll make sure you regret it.”

For a moment, Ben paused, making Rook think the threat worked. Killing him meant turning him into a god after all, something that even a third-tier wouldn’t want to fight, but all it did was bring a powerful laugh bursting from Ben’s throat that scared the rest more than his violence.

“That’s cute, but wrong,” he said, before using his eldritch mind to send a prayer to every god in the world, letting the strength of his thoughts demand their collective attention. “Tell him whether or not I’ll be able to kill him when he’s a god.”

Not many of the mortals there knew what he was talking about, but as the first divine voice echoed in Rook’s head, telling him to try to beg Ben for forgiveness was followed by more, the cocky look on his face fell away to pure fear. Ben had commanded the gods, and they had answered, all of them speaking of Rook’s death, both above and below.

“Wait-” Rook tried to say, but was cut off. If he was going to die anyway, there was no point in delaying things, so Ben finished breaking his bones to reach down to the man’s neck and started to squeeze, watching panic fill Rook’s eyes as he experienced the negative consequences of a lack of air for the first time in countless years.

“Nope. I’m killing you down here and killing you up there next. There’s not one thing redeemable enough about you to make me want to let you live, and there’s nothing useful enough about you to justify it either. You’re…”

Ben trailed off, unable to deny that there were at least two things useful about Rook. Things Ben couldn’t deny he wanted more than anything else. Genuine paths to survival.

When it came to the end of the world, Ben still thought his odds were better than not that he was going to die, and that Oaun would kill him. Even with every plot and plan he made, even with the hope that he could drop the god into hell to get rid of him for good, odds just seemed too likely that the god would use some meaningless fraction of a percent of the faith he held, a quantity that could have still been more than any god of his current world might have even possessed at their peak, to entirely erase Ben from existence, evil god of sacrilege or not. Rook, though, arguably had the two best survival skills on the world. Skills that might have made a difference when it came to living or dying, even when facing Oaun, and with them now susceptible to his own power, Ben could just take them for himself.

And why not? Ben was going to kill him and then kill him again, immortal or not. Rook’s own existence was going to be erased, and then those powers would be erased with him. Wouldn’t it have been easier to only have to kill him the once? Wouldn’t it be better if those powers could go towards preserving the world in its entirety, rather than destroying them with the selfish man who’d grown them?

Since he’d awakened soulcraft, Ben had managed to control and suppress the bit of temptation that aspect of the power had left, but Rook before him couldn’t help but bring it back to the front of his mind. Even the demons couldn’t help what they were; they were terrors because of their base nature, trapped by a biology that made them so cruel. Rook was something else. A man who had gained power and had decided the best way to use it was to make sure he’d always get what he wanted and damn be anyone else. A man who had corroded his own soul with thousands of different acts and justifications.

At some point as he choked the life out of Rook, Ben had stopped breathing himself, but forced himself to let out the long sigh he’d been holding as he loosened his grip and retracted his sacrilege, allowing Rook’s battered body to heal. No matter how badly he wanted it, what was he doing but his own acts and justifications to erode the bit of morality he had? He could steal the effort of people with ease, but he didn’t want to be the sort of person who would. Not even if it was from the monsters both within and beyond the world.

As Rook healed, Ben felt him try to speak, but didn’t give him the chance. He was still under the impression the man should die, and perhaps he would kill him eventually, but there were other uses he could get out of him, and he was going to be sure to do so. Pulling some voidstone from his ring, he refashioned the same prison he’d trapped Rook in before, only keeping the internal volume of it far smaller to let him increase the speed within, relative to the outside world before putting the man away. In the confines of that new prison, from the way the space within was warped, Rook would feel like he was shoulder to shoulder with himself while time moved more than ten times faster for him, but he would live, which was more than he deserved.

Giving himself only a moment more to breathe and calm down, without a word, Ben stood up and turned to face the rest of the third tiers, putting on his best smile as he did.

“Sorry about that little distraction. If everyone else is good, I should be ready to kick things off.”