The Innkeeper

The 1 Minute Butter Knife token allowed Lex to use the Butter Knife at its full strength for a duration of 1 minute. Perhaps if he had used it as a sword or dagger instead of throwing it, he would have had access to it for the full minute instead of a single attack.

Yet it did not matter, for the damage he did with that single attack was far greater than anything he could have achieved by simply swinging it around.

All those who had attacked the Inn, or were secretly planning on attacking the Inn had been gathered by him in one location – not so that he could attack them but so that they would not cause trouble.

This raised the question of how Lex knew who the people were who intended to cause trouble when even the system failed to detect their malicious intent. The truth was, he was not detecting malicious intent, but his eyes saw them connected by Karma. Of course, Lex had no idea what Karma was, or how it worked.

But in his semi-sane state his subconscious mind was playing as much of an important role as his conscious mind.

Once in that location, they had been subjected to various pressures, auras and, finally, a strange and new formation.

This formation was what sucked up all of Lex’s MP down to the last, yet other than a strange ethereal binding sensation it did not seem to do anything else. Lex however, did not care about what these people felt.

He only cared about venting his rage, and so he gave in to his most bestial urge for death and destruction! He used the Butter Knife in the way his instincts told him would be most useful.

But while all the energy for the attack should have come from the Knife itself, something about how he aimed sucked up all the energy out of Lex. So, with the last of his sanity, he teleported back to the Recovery pod, put up the sticky note, requested the Lotus to help him once again, and allowed himself to fall back into a coma.

This all happened instantaneously, and no one noticed it happen, for they were all focused on the fallout from the Innkeepers attack!

If one were to say it was devastating, it would be an underestimation, but if one were to say it underwhelming, they would also not be wrong.

Within the Inn, all the targets simply died. There was no explosion, no torture, no burning or ripping their bodies to shreds. One moment they existed, and the next their very existence was wiped. In fact, even the memory of what they looked like, or who they were, seemed to be erased from existence.

So, to the onlookers, it seemed only like the Innkeeper told the group to die, and then they did. It was that simple.

But the thing was… Lex did not aim for the targets who attacked the Inn. He attacked EVERYONE and EVERYTHING in existence which had something to do with the attack on the Inn.

As such, the energy from the Knife killed all the targets at the Inn with extreme ease and simplicity. Then it had to target the rest of the universe.

But for that, the energy from the attack had to first escape the Inn. The small rip in the fabric of reality that exposed the Midnight Inn from within its Minor realm, to the rest of the Origin realm, suddenly became a bottleneck for the energy to escape!

Earthquakes, airquakes, cracks in reality and the bending of space between the two realms itself all seemed to happen all at once.

The sound of a billion explosions rocked the Inn, and despite the lack of air, carried through the void of space, crushing all meteors and space debris in its path. That was only a result of the energy escaping the Inn.

Space itself began to ripple as more and more energy seemed to disappear, forming new tears everywhere! Minor realms began to rain down through the ripples in space, spreading through hundreds of galaxies within mere seconds.

Mortals found it beyond their comprehension, and simply fainted from the overload of what they were watching. Earth immortals, barely counting as immortals, were somewhat about to keep themselves awake if they tried, but never had they felt more insignificant.

Those even stronger than Earth immortals… they were not looking at the dissipating energy or ripples in space. Instead, their eyes looked out into the distance as they traced where the energy flowed to.

Never before had such a scene been witnessed, at least in the Origin realm. Perhaps, they would never get a chance to see it again either. For a short moment, all living entities within a billion nearby galaxies froze as they were affected by the last of the energy that left the Inn.

Then the Minor realm surrounding the Midnight Inn closed once again, as if it was never there, and the energy that defied common sense also seemed to vanish. But those who were strong enough to follow the flow of energy knew it did not vanish. No, instead it was wreaking havoc on an unprecedented scale.

*****

Sitting in his divine palace, Ra, the father of creation, and also Bastet, had his eyes closed as he tried to track down his daughter. She was extremely naughty and purposefully kept destroying his plans all because he sold her into a marriage she didn’t want. It was the height of immaturity, in his opinion.

He could not vent his anger on the stupid human race, whom he had passed his daughter to and asked to keep her in a dead zone so she may not escape. After all, the Henali looked upon the humans with great care simply because one of their prized pets was a human.

Instead he found a way to vent on an organization called the Midnight Inn, which had apparently played a part in helping his daughter escape, supposedly.

Honestly speaking he did not give it much thought at all, and simply passed the task to one of his underlings. As a God, he could not be expected to do tedious things such as revenge by himself.

Ra, the God with the body of a human and the head of a hawk, was just as arrogant as he was lazy, and was just as lazy as he was amorous.

But the arrogant God went from being focused on locating his daughter to screaming in fear and anger in a single heartbeat.

A blinding golden light encompassed his fist and he punched forward, clashing against an unknown force. The impact from the explosion destroyed the divine palace. In fact, it destroyed the whole planet where the palace was located.

Yet Ra only seemed to suffer from a burnt hand. Yet the expression on the deity’s face was beyond simple anger as it suffered the greatest loss it had faced in its entire existence. It was not his burnt hand that was a loss, but his divinity which seemed to be dwindling. No, this was too dangerous. Though he could not understand what was happening, he had to defend his divinity at all costs.

The God disappeared.

*****

Egypt, Earth

In a rather luxurious apartment, a small group was kneeling and worshiping a picture that looked like a deity with the face of a Hawk. On their knees they hummed and prayed. They were one of the last few remnants of a religion thought lost to the ages.

Suddenly, in their minds, they heard a voice telling them to die. Then… there was nothing, not even dust. They had simply ceased to exist.

*****

Throughout the Origin realm, from small groups to countries to planets to star systems and even galaxies, anything and everything that had any direct affiliation with the sincere worship of Ra suffered from a mysterious and devastating attack.

There was no place safe, no place where they could hide. Wherever the followers of the God existed was exactly the place that became most dangerous for them.

This phenomenon was not slow or gradual, for within a few seconds, billions of years of hard work vanished. Even the religion itself seemed to vanish in some places, alongside tools and records of worship.

Ra began to appear in his temples in person for the first time in eternity, but it was pointless, for he never reached anywhere in time. An utter hopelessness gripped him when he lost more than 50% of his divinity in the blink of an eye, and forced him to make a difficult decision.

For a single second Ra hesitated more, but that single second cost him 8% more divinity, so he lost all hesitation and did something taboo for a deity.

He killed all of his worshipers across the universe himself in an ultimate sacrifice, squeezing their existence of any divinity he could scrounge up, before vanishing himself as well. He did not know what just happened, but he would get his revenge one day.

For now, though, he had to hide before his daughter realized how weak he had become.