In the nanoseconds, it took me to teleport from the Final Factory to the newly reconstructed, infernal city of Aniz, my mind was incredibly active. I was thinking about the seven deadly sins and the fact that I now had control over all of them. It was a wonderful set of powers to have and the more I thought about it the more excited I became.
Each of the seven deadly sins, or "vices" as the system and some subdomains preferred to call them, was a powerful tool I now had immense control and power over. With my powers over them alone I could bring substantial change to entire solar systems in a matter of hours if I were serious about it.
I had begun my life with powers over lust, a sin that was related to intense desire. Worship of me in various forms, even worshipping me as an archfey, which was mostly done by good-aligned beings involved or could involve satisfying one's lusts and dedicating pleasure to me. I liked lust, and I enjoyed the creative ways that mortals and extraplanar beings alike indulged lust.
Fairly early on in my life I had acquired powers over sloth and those powers were ones I reserved for my enemies. That said being able to inflict my enemies with despair or apathy towards their goals was a handy power.
The next two sins I acquired power over were gluttony and wrath. Gluttony was an especially powerful one for me at that point in my life because I could combine it with my powers over famine, which made me an incredibly dangerous foe to fight thanks to my ability to inflict starvation on my foes. As for wrath... well wrath is a truly excellent sin to have control over no matter what one's circumstances or goals happened to be.
As a deity, with my overall level of power and my power over wrath specifically, I could cause anyone who wasn't a vestige to fly into a truly maddening rage at any point that I wanted. I could also manipulate their anger, patience, and perhaps most frighteningly adeptly manipulate the hatred they felt towards anyone or anything else. Wrath was immensely powerful, and I had experimented with it frequently over the last three years.
I had acquired control over the final three sins earlier today. Greed, envy, and pride. I felt their power infuse me and I could already tell that with them I had become a very powerful deity of corruption.
Greed as a sin was not only the desire to acquire things but also largely a desire to keep them to one's self. It wasn't merely the pursuit of money, but a desire and oftentimes a willingness to go to unscrupulous means to keep one's wealth. Being able to manipulate it meant that I had a new power with which I could tempt people into joining me.
Envy was the desire of things that belonged to someone else. This was a curious one that I knew I'd be able to use to achieve more subtle goals, and also to draw people into worshipping me which was one of my ultimate goals. With envy, I could also create all manner of conflicts, which would be handy now that I was truly building my empire. When I began to interact with other empires, being able to create feelings of envy in others would be an immensely useful tool that I knew I had the power to use wisely.
The final deadly sin was the sin of pride. This sin was the sin of believing one's self to be superior to others, as well as a dangerous sort of selfishness that led one to refuse to consider the wellbeing of others. This power, of all of the sins, was perhaps the greatest in terms of what it gave me directly.
With powers over pride, my magic that inflicted charms became permanent and impossible to resist unless the target was a vestige. I could also shatter wills and destroy self-esteem at will, or make one feel superior to anyone and anything. I could adeptly manipulate one's sense of self-worth and target one's faith in others as well. I could also dominate other people with nothing more than a glance. Pride was an incredible thing to have power over.
When I was done teleporting from the Final Factory to the city of Aniz, I found myself in front of a large palace. The sun was visible directly overhead revealing that where I was in the world it was midday. The city I was in was a futuristic metropolis compared to the technological level of worlds like Htrae and Mercy, and yet aside from the palace that I was in front of it was all surprisingly humble in construction.
This city wasn't like Duvessa with countless skyscrapers, instead, the buildings were more reasonably constructed with regards to height. All around me I could see devils being resurrected, a strange and in this instance slow process to watch. The bodies of various devils were being rebuilt from the ground up while their souls were being stitched together by the layer of Gehenna itself. I could also see various different types of devils being put back together as well.
The main lifeforms, of a sort, that I saw that were already active were robots. Just like in Duvessa robots milled about idly and from my knowledge concerning the layer's history had, in the past, been treated virtually universally as a sort of source of perpetual labor. The robots were built and programmed to do menial tasks and to handle things like construction and other vital infrastructure work since Technos had viewed doing such work beneath him.
Robots, primarily humanoid model robots, were going around the city and cleaning up, inspecting buildings and vehicles, and doing other tasks that would need to be done to maintain a city of this size. I watched them for a bit, and whenever they noticed me they made sounds indicating their gratitude for my choice to resurrect them, and then went about their business. The ones I had seen here were less intelligent than the ones who I had met and interacted with in Duvessa so I didn't mind their simple reactions to me.
I examined my surroundings for a little bit before beginning to take a walk. I walked in the direction of the palace, the seat of government for the city of Aniz. I was curious to see what the inside of it looked like, and I knew that there were fully reconstructed and revived devils within it, unlike in many other parts of the city.
As the archdevil with authority over this layer of Infernius, my senses could now accurately detect the real-time conditions and movements of any living creature throughout the entire layer, as though I were on a planet in a solar system where my "Stellar awareness" power had already been used. It was incredibly nice to be able to understand everything going on at once, and especially to be able to finally have power over all other devils.
The only way to accurately describe an archdevil was to begin by calling them a tyrant. They possessed truly remarkable power and influence over other devils to the point that only they could allow a devil to evolve and move up the infernal hierarchy that dictated the power and position of different types of devils in infernal society. That power was an immense one and it ensured that even true devils, ones who had gone beyond the infernal hierarchy were obedient to archdevils as even true devils could be forcibly demoted by an archdevil, or promoted by one and join them.
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I had leaned into that when deciding the type of archdevil I had wanted to become. I was an archdevil of pride and tyrants and that was incredibly powerful for me, especially now that I possessed new powers over truth and submission. As I was now, I was already perhaps the greatest archdevil to have ever lived aside from the founder of Infernius and the creator of devils, the overgod known as the Dark Saint. That realization amused me to no end.
It was those thoughts that stayed on my mind until I found myself in the interior of the palace from which the city of Aniz was run, face to face with the heads of its last government.
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When they had been resurrected, while their bodies were being reconstructed, each of the billions of devils who lived in Gehenna had received countless notifications. The main subject matter of those notifications concerned the identity of their savior, Althos.
The three vizier devils and two overlord devils who ran the city of Aniz were keen to learn more about the dark hero who had brought them back from the dead and slain the echo of Technos. Althos was, beyond any and all doubt, the savior of Gehenna on multiple levels. That was something the leaders of Aniz, a city famous throughout the layer for its production of drugs and its alchemical facilities, all knew. Yet they didn't expect to come face to face with their savior so soon.
Althos had long since mastered the art of invisibility, which was how he was able to enter the palace which served as the city's seat of government unnoticed. Althos slipped past hundreds of fully resurrected devils who had almost universally been in the middle of reading notifications about him and swiftly found himself in the heart of Aniz's government. He stood there, invisibly, for a few moments so that he could study the place.
It was a dark chamber that lacked any and all light deep underground. There were computers and other technological devices useful for governing tucked away near walls throughout the room but none of them radiated light or warmth, and indeed to a mortal the room would have been freezing. That said devils didn't have as many weaknesses as mortals did and they not only endured the cold they actively liked it. The chamber was, to them anyway, a pleasant room.
There were several large tables in the room, clearly meant for groups larger than the five people who were currently occupying it. It reminded the god of the chamber of the historians, the governing council of the city of Aronms. The god walked over to one of the tables and sat down in it before he deactivated his invisibility and began to wait to be noticed.
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I studied the ruling body of the city of Aniz. It was a five-member executive body that performed a range of tasks that in a more democratic society would have been divided between three different branches of government.
The ruling body was composed of two different types of devils. The first kind were a trio of vizier devils, who themselves stood at the top of one of the three internal hierarchies within the infernal hierarchy. Vizier devils were the devils who were evolutionarily the best at acquiring mortal souls. Skilled businesspeople among devils eventually began to become recruiters for Infernius who made deals with mortals and gave them power and influence among their peers in exchange for damning their souls to Infernius, where they'd eventually become new devils.
The other kind of devil present among the ruling body of the city of Aniz were a pair of overlord devils. Overlord devils were the ultimate rulers aside from archdevils themselves, the epitome of achievable devilish ideals of leadership and delegation. Overlord devils stood at the top of another of the three internal hierarchies within the infernal hierarchy and they were skilled, trained, trusted leaders of lesser devils. They ran cities, territories, and in the ancient past had run entire worlds conquered and controlled by archdevils and cults devoted to them.
There was a third internal hierarchy within the infernal hierarchy: that of the military. The devils who stood atop that internal hierarchy were the blitzkrieg devils, astoundingly skilled devilish generals who commanded soldier devils and were considered the attack dogs of the infernal hierarchy. In the distant past they invaded worlds at the behest of archdevils and they conquered entire planets.
I commanded and controlled Gehenna itself. Countless millions of devils were already pledging their loyalty to me, swearing to serve me and asking me to elevate them to the next rung of the infernal hierarchy. Even greater devils, devils who occupied the third overall level of the infernal hierarchy were pledging to serve me and to become faithful citizens of the Althonite empire.
At the moment the kind of epitomized greater devil I commanded the most of were blitzkrieg devils, which was unsurprising. This was the surface of Infernius, if enemies were going to invade any part of this dimension it was here. So it was reasonable for this layer to have a healthy military presence. Most cities had a blitzkrieg devil in charge of their defenses but usually such individuals weren't directly involved in decisions made by the ruling council.
It'd be wise for me to eventually and meet the blitzkrieg devils in charge of the various military installations throughout the layer. I wanted to see how the devilish military worked and how it bolstered my empire for me to have such minions. Plus meeting them in person would be the best way for me to secure their loyalty without using my powers on them.
It was while I was pondering the militaristic nature of the boost to my empire I had just received that the first of the overlord devils noticed my presence. He had looked in my direction and noticed me sitting in one of the chairs that normally happened to be left empty during important meetings of the city's government. I chuckled and smiled at him as his eyes widened in shock at my presence.
"Hello there... I am the god and archdevil who saved Gehenna, the dark tyrant, Althos." I told the overlord devil, my words causing the others to notice me as well. As they did I activated one of my new abilities: the aura of submission. All five of the devils were in range of my aura and fell to their knees to signal their submissiveness and their desire to serve.
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The dark council of the city of Aniz was utterly enthralled by the power and majesty of the god known to them as the Dark Tyrant. He was fully channeling the idea of a Dark Tyrant, power befitting a being that was both a god of corruption and evil as well as an archdevil of pride.
At that moment to call him pride itself wouldn't have been wrong, to the point that his mere presence was so powerful that it could convince others that he was superior to them and that he deserved their servitude and submission. When he spoke they listened to every word he uttered, devotedly, fanatically eager to serve him. Althos was properly and truly channeling deific pride now, and at his level of power, the only creatures who could have resisted him were other higher beings or vestiges. He was unafraid of that and chose to embrace it.
Althos would spend the next few hours conversing with the dark council. When he left he gave them a mission: to restore the city's production of drugs and alchemical products to its former levels, a task which they throw themselves into. With that task done Althos did something he hadn't done in a long time: he returned to Htrae.
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I hadn't been to Htrae since the end of the vacation I took with Sombra, who was currently busy in the Heart of Darkness and I certainly hadn't been where I was now in well over three years. I again found myself in front of Lavern University, the very same institution I had visited when I was still attempting to find teachers and administrators for a project I wouldn't complete for over an entire year: the very first Htraen school of magic.
I arrived here a few hours later than I had last time. The sun was still low in the sky, but students were up and heading to and from class. This was the first time I had ever been in an institution like this and so I wanted to take some time to explore it.