Liam groaned awake, opening his eyes groggily and trying to move, but found himself entirely unable to. His muscles ached in a way that he’d never thought possible. “Moss.” He croaked out, finding a fistful of the stuff hastily shoved into his mouth.

It was gross, it was dry, it was the last thing he would’ve ever wanted to eat, but he still felt as if he’d just swallowed ambrosia the moment it hit his stomach. The pains all over his body (and particularly in his right arm) began to die down, so he repeated the process, only having the barest presence of mind to also ask for some water between every other gulp.

At some point, he suspected he should’ve run out of the rust-moss, but it kept coming, so he kept chewing. Until there was just enough strength within him to get up and drag himself away from…

“Where am I?” He wasn’t near the monster corpse, he wasn’t drenched in blood. He was in a nice, warm, and dry burrow, the barest hint of light seeping through the lone entrance.

“A hole,”

Before him sat two figures, a wolf and a rabbit. While the rabbit’s fur was lustrously black and its eyes a brilliant amber, the wolf’s was so much more, with darkness clinging to its body, and eyes made of blazing embers.

“Oh, you called Maridah.” He grunted, rubbing his eyes.

“I wasn’t entirely sure if you were dying or not.” Bunny replied with a guilty edge to her words.

“You barely made it, barely.” Maridah provided, fidgeting a little on the spot. “Though I wouldn’t have been able to do much without getting you back into my domain.”

He nodded, glancing at the exit. This really wasn’t the reunion he was looking forward to, and his body still felt too much like shit for him to be in any mood to handle the emotional mess that was Maridah. “Neat, I can just get going.”

“There have been developments you should be aware of.”

“So, tell them.”

The wolf smirked with some edge of amusement. “We are not in my domain, Liam, I can’t share gifts as freely.”

“The only situation where you would need to concern yourself about fair exchange would be if you still had a connection to the Triumvirate Throne.” A connection she’d lost once she was no longer part of the pantheon. He shot her a dirty look, then sighed. “But let’s hear it.”

She made a gesture at his arm. “That.”

“I am now playing host to tiny, magically inclined… things. Not sure if it classifies as a fungus or a bacteria; don’t think I ever bothered to put down the details.” He glanced at his arm, the paleness was undercut by a series of seemingly random dark lines, not too unlike the veins in his wrist. “Anyway, not much to worry over.”

The wolf’s brows narrowed. “It’s going to kill you.”

“Ah, nothing gets past those eyes of yours it seems.” He shrugged. “My body isn’t exactly the sturdiest of containers. I’m guesstimating it will probably finish me off in a couple of decades as its power grows, but nothing to worry about.”

Bunny froze, ears standing straight, while Maridah’s gaze hardened.

“Calm your horses, I don’t plan to die anytime soon, or ever, if I have a say,” he waved them off. “This is just a patchwork solution until I become a demigod.”

“Liam!” Bunny shouted. “Do not joke about such things!”

“It’s no joke, ask Maridah, she should’ve at least heard of a handful of mortals becoming demigods during her lifetime,” he gestured at the wolf.

“He… is not wrong,” she shot him a dubious look. “But if your goal is godhood…”

“Oh no, no disrespect, but fuck that noise. I don’t want to become semi-conceptual,” he visibly shuddered, trying to push away the thought. “Anyway, that’s a fair direction to take for the time being. Though honestly, that’s just a means to an end.”

“An end to what?”

“Properly learn magic, duh,” he rolled his eyes at her. “Getting demigod status is really the only way I’d get the time to study it to my heart’s content.”

Bunny and Maridah shared glances, both shifting slightly, their expressions unreadable.

It was Bunny that spoke up. “Liam, if that’s your goal, you could just join a noble house and—”

“Nope, fuck that. That would be a big hard no,” he shook his head. “No tying down, no locked up in a library under the pretense of tutelage. Do you have any idea how large this world is? The shit tucked away in every far-flung corner? Besides, the war is coming and…”

He slowed down, going silent as he bit his lip.

“And…?” Maridah urged, a twinkle in her eye. “Something to do with your mortal friends?”

“Yes… no… maybe?” Liam grimaced, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “I’d prefer to help them, they never deserved what I—,” he grimaced, biting the inside of his cheek a bit, “—what they’ve gone through.” The Goddess nodded, clearly approving, while next to her, Bunny let out a giggle. “What?”

“Nothing,” she paused. “I thought you might like to hear they are doing well.”

He took in the words, blinking. “No shit? They won? Is that what you wanted to share with me?”

“Oh, they did that a bit ago already,” she was grinning from ear to ear. “What I wanted to share with you is that you’ve officially lost the spot of being my sole faithful. I now have a proper devotee, one who shows proper deference.”

“You’ve been holding back?” Liam would’ve risen to his feet if not for the fact that the burrow was so small he was forced to bend over.

There was a slight, uncomfortable shift as she averted her gaze.

He openly glared at the Goddess and her aspect.

“Don’t look at me, I am Bunny, no one tells me anything,” the rabbit proclaimed in a mix of self-defense and dejection.

His glare bore into the nervous-looking wolf, the Goddess keeping her gaze anywhere but on him. Liam willed his gaze to hold every ounce of disappointment he could muster, and to his credit, he must have been doing something right, because Maridah seemed to flinch and shrink on the spot.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“So?” he urged with a growl. “They managed to kill the monster?” His brows furrowed. “What about the elf asshole?”

“The elf is dead, the monster is not.”

Liam stopped, blinking rapidly. “But… the monster killed everyone in the city.”

“Yes.”

“And it was inside the city… they encountered it?”

“Also yes,” Maridah took a small pause, nodding.

“It left?”

“Not really, no,” she shook her head.

For a moment, he glared at her, then at Bunny, and then back. Maridah was more nervous than the rabbit, who kept giving the Goddess glances that weren’t exactly easy to interpret. She could’ve given him the news through Bunny with just a thought; she hadn’t. She was nervous, trying to stall the conversation, to draw it out. Worse, she was obviously nervous about something.

Then it clicked.

They were worried about him. Maridah probably still thought he was mad at her, what with him defaulting into being moody and evasive.

The thought sobered him up somewhat. Liam sat up properly, crossing his legs and taking a deep breath to put his emotions in order. “You came here to check up on me, and I’ve been a bad host.” It wasn’t really how he wanted to say it, but it was the best way he could think of as a form to convey the meaning that he wasn’t angry at Maridah.

“Bunny, could you pass me the water? My throat’s parched, and my whole body feels like-”

“-it’s dying?” The lagomorph deadpanned, though there was some clear relief between both of them. Bunny quickly pulled out his waterskin from the bag and dragged it over.

“Yes.” He took a calming breath, and proceeded to swallow half the waterskin before he spoke again. “To get back to the point of my… procedure.” He pulled his sleeve up to show his arm, the skin pockmarked with tiny red circles barely a couple of hairs wide, each one of them entry points through which the things had poked through. “These things eat mana and channel it too. There are two groups, the ones that are making my arm their home turf, and the losers that couldn’t clump together. The winners will go on to form mana circuits, in theory, it should give me the ability to cast some specific ability built around lightning. The ability will keep growing over time, but honestly, it’s a bit of a scam because even a decade from now I won’t be able to cast that laser beam the croc shot at us. I just don’t have the volume to fit a circuit that large.”

Bunny stepped closer. “But the dying…”

“Is mostly because of the losers. They didn’t get to settle. In a monster’s body, these creatures would get chewed up, but humans don’t have that feature, so they spread all over the place.” He gestured at the rest of his body. “They work like the others, but they don’t form circuits. They will still eat mana and shit it out in some form my biology can handle, and at first what this means is that I’ll start getting stronger, faster, and so on. It’ll be a while before it’s enough to compensate for my deficiency, and years before I reach something equivalent to a professional athlete. It’s a slow process.” His grin became slightly brittle. “Right now, they’re wrecking me, but it’s like when you push your muscles, they break a little, and in fixing themselves they come back better. But there’s a limit to how much a body can be pushed, and my guests will go past it eventually. Once that happens, my body will start breaking down faster than it can fix itself.”

“And all of this is…”

“For the sake of not being dead weight,” he said. “The demigod thing is mostly so I have all the time I could ever want. But that’s just a very long-term goal.”

“Twenty years is not a long-term goal.”

Sure, for someone millions of years old, twenty years wasn’t even a blink. But he wasn’t about to throw that in her face. “Back in my world, my life prospects went as far as the end of the month. Sometimes not even the end of the week. And since coming here, a fair share of times they didn’t even reach the end of the day.”

“We defeated a monster,” Bunny glared. “And you did most of the work for that.”

“Barely, after days of prepping, and this wasn’t even a strong monster,” he waved off. “Anyway, my more immediate concern isn’t really the demigod thing. The meteor shouldn’t be that far off by now, and with the upcoming war, I…” He swallowed the lump in his throat. “I want to help.”

“Help?” Maridah perked up.

“I’ve been thinking about things. Not everything I wrote was with the best of intentions, and you can argue that I am not responsible, but that…” He scratched the back of his neck. “Let’s just say that though my main goal is exploring things and learning all kinds of magic and… doing stuff, I want to have a second priority to try and change some things.”

“I… see,” the Goddess was keeping a carefully neutral tone and expression.

“What the bitch-boss wants to ask is if she’s on that list of people you’d want to help,” Bunny shot out, getting a death glare from Maridah that made the lagomorph shrink further.

With a scoff, Liam picked up Bunny, setting her down on his lap. “Yes, I do want to help you as well.”

“Even after…” She lowered her ears, fidgeting a little.

“I said as much to your aspects, but yes,” he inhaled sharply, closing his eyes, taking a second to put his thoughts in order as his fingers stroked and scratched between Bunny’s ears. “If you want to uproot and set down somewhere else, then I’d recommend we go to Cracked Bay. Where Umira and the others… are? Where the monster was.”

“Is,” Maridah immediately corrected, her burning eyes now far more focused on Bunny, carrying an almost dangerous edge to them. Liam had to be imagining things.

“... I… how?” he frowned. “I never went into detail about what kind of monster it was in my documentation since the event was just a footnote. But I just…”

“Why do you think I should go there?”

“The reason for that fortress in particular is because it will become very important very soon, and it happens to be currently devoid of domains from other deities. What with everyone being dead,” Liam shot her a cocky smirk. “But I think this is the part where you actually tell me what happened.”

“Well…”

----------------------------------------

Noor Dalimor carefully made his way down the massive tunnel of stone and soil, moving slowly and carefully, never taking more than a step between pauses. Every other moment, he strained his hearing and senses. Was he being followed? Was the monster coming out of the depths it had claimed as its lair? He might have been able to see in the dark, but the silence was worse than any actual noise, as it gave the draxani's imagination free rein to fill it with a thousand and one dangers.

But he would not falter; he couldn't.

Not until Umira was healed and alive.

The question tossed and turned in his mind, ever-twisting and pervasive. Would the demon allow him to claim the bargain was finished if he merely touched the object in question? Or would he need to carry it somewhere specific? Getting out of the tunnel would be suicide; was there any other route to the surface? Would he even make it on time?

Again, his imagination provided him with ample causes for dismay, each image more gruesome than the last.

Eventually, the tunnel of dirt reached a boundary of stone bricks. A massive chamber of some sort. It was ancient, with walls worn down and partially melted from ageless erosion. The sound of water dripping was pervasive all over, with a great deal of shattered stalactites scattered throughout the chamber.

At the very center of the chamber was a monster the likes of which Noor had only ever heard of. A durastella, an arachnid, it was the size of an estate house, with its exoskeleton made of solid ruby glass, allowing its pulsating insides to be visible as clearly as if looked at through a window. The monster was badly hurt, its body shattered and cracked. The green ichor that was its blood was spread all over the floor; the monster trembled and heaved, fighting to breathe, to remain alive.

It was nearly dead, but Noor could sense it in his very scales. Just one look at the legs that were twice as thick as he was tall, and he knew that even if weak, it would prove more than a match for someone in his situation.

His eyes traversed the cavern, desperately looking for whatever mythical item the demon had asked of him.

A faint green glow upon the durastella's back caught Noor's attention, and as he got closer, he could hear sobbing. A little girl, muttering in Caliphate-common, her accent broken and thick. “Please heal, please!”

The green light flared in intensity, and the durastella's body absorbed it.

Noor's knees hit the ground as the world around him became so heavy he collapsed, the air knocked right out of his lungs. The moment passed as quickly as the green light vanished; the draxani was left heaving for breath, blinking rapidly, and trying to get back up.

“Please, mother, please don’t die!”

Mother?