Epilogue 2:

Kintsuji watched over the family being reunited from a place in the world that was half a step removed from physical reality, and she felt the distant echoes of warmth at seeing the mortal girls reunited with their family. It had been longer than the ages of nations since Kintsuji had felt similar from her own Mortal family. They had lived, grown, struggled and died on a world that now only existed in memory and shadow, so long ago that stars had been born and died in the time between then and now. Truly, she could not even remember their faces, or the country she had grown up to adulthood in. Just fragments of smells and tastes and feelings - even immortal minds in the upper ranks of Celestium Rank were not infallible, and there was always so much that Kintsuji had to spread her mind across. All the worlds, the temples, the religions she had founded and saved. They took a toll, and truthfully, she was more her Domain now than the long ago girl who had been broken and put back together, and had sworn to do the same for others.

She would give them a little time before she brought them to task over the destruction of her Dungeon Foyer. While a certain amount of damage was to be expected, she also couldn't allow blatant disrespect to fester. It sent the wrong message to ones champions. Especially if one was an Avatar. Kintsuji had hoped for something like that to come about, true, but there was never a real way to predict which way a persons’ soul would metabolise a class. Kintsuji took one more moment to bask in a family reunited and stronger than it was before, before she stepped another step into the pseudo-realms of the essence network of Axis, and used them to move her quickly across the planet.

When Kintsuji was elevated to the Pantheon, she felt the essence of the world swell into her, and hers back into it. She became tied to the world in a way she hadn't been before, a part of it, and with access to devices that she had not been able to see or feel until then. It was always the hardest part of her job, on the delinquent worlds - getting native access to a Worlds’ mechanisms, when the local Pantheon often didn't want her to.

This world, however was doubly strange and in dire need. When she gained access, Kintsuji had been able to see and feel the rest of the Pantheon, and what Mischief said was true. They were not gods - merely using artefacts that gave access to the dwindling stores of essence stored within the Pantheons’ outer domains. The rest of the gods…were gone. There were ragged holes in the Essence network of the world where they should have been. Looked like the gods had been torn right from their place in this world - and that simply shouldn't be possible.

That was when Kintsuji knew more than ever that this world needed far more help than she could give it alone. She was a high ranked Goddess, yes, but she was not a Goddess of war. She was not a warrior at all, really, and it was clear to her that something was very wrong on this world. Luckily, she had thought to have her Vessel cloaked in her most powerful illusions, augmented by artefacts from a hundred worlds, long before she came to this world. If there was anywhere here that would be safe and able to get a message out, it would be on her ship - but of course, it would be best to make preparations before she went.

So Kintsuji met with Mischief again, and other members of his team. Like him, the other gods of Axis appeared as Iridium Rank Immortals, some still even wearing their uniforms. All that separated them were the masks they had found - an artefact that Kintsuji had absolutely no idea about, but would love to get an expert to study. After all, why would the pantheon need or want masks that let another wield their powers for them? No, there was so much going on here that defied the way Kintsuji understood the wider Multiverse to operate - and frankly, she now needed backup more than ever. She had been ascended, yes, but was now practically the only God in this worlds’ Pantheon - and the systems were not designed to work that way.

She knew that with the upgrade to Tin rank, as well, this world was going to start changing, and changing quickly. The world core would generate more and stronger essence, which would increase the strength of monster and cultivator alike, and possibly wake things that had long been dormant in the artificial dead zone the Immortals had created with their tinkering.

Kintsuji met with the Immortals in the place they had been using as a base of operations - an uninhabited island far to the south of the main continents of Axis, where they had built a - relatively nice - palace for themselves in lieu of being able to use the facilities the original Pantheon had had on the moon.

“So your way of helping is to just sneak in under our noses and snatch away the whole planet under our feet? We’ve been doing this for thousands of years - what makes you think we’d want this?” The belligerent demi-god was named Conquest, and was, as might be appropriate, wearing the mask of the local god of War. He was hot headed and none too bright. But every unit of Immortals needed someone who was just very good at smashing things. Kintsuji raised an eyebrow at the man, and adjusted her position on the sofa she had claimed as her own - something she had subtly twisted with shadow and illusion until it seemed to tower over the rest of the circle. It wouldn't be good to show too much weakness in front of Demi-gods a full two ranks beneath her.

“Trust me, Conquest, I have no desire to claim this world - just fix it and move on. This world is a Backwater and I am already feeling the strain of the weak essence here. I wish to be back in the Bureaucracy as soon as possible, and that means speeding along this planet, and getting support from actual gods. A squad of Immortals playing dress up is not the ideal way I see things working here. Do you?”

The man was about to start yelling. Kintsuji could see the veins in his neck tightening, when one of the Water themed Demi-gods, Purity, placed a hand on his chest and sent a wave of cooling chill through the room. “That's enough now, Conquest - we brought her here. We might as well hear her plan. I'd like to see home before I die, after all.”

“Thank you, Purity. Now - my plan for you is simple. Copy what I did here. Each of you needs to start capturing and taming Dungeon Cores - they have been allowed to grow dangerously fallow, with a massive essence glut that is, frankly, like looking at a series of bombs strapped to the Mantle if this world. Make Trials, convert your temples, inform your priests. You need to start doing whatever you can to get Essence back into your masks’ domains. It might even help get a few world achievements and cause a few of you to ascend.” That has a few of the ‘gods’ look at her in renewed interest. Some of them had had the temerity to look bored by her presence. They had lost the edge of their military training. Some had even begun to believe their own lies.

“And what of you? You're the most powerful one here, what do you intend to do while we set all this up?” A man named Hunter said, playing with the ludicrously sized now he had carried into the meeting. The arrows were more like spears, and she doubted he could even draw it without tapping the mask for support.

“First and foremost, I intend to return to my vessel and try to get a message through to headquarters - this doesn't require a single auditor, this planet needs an entire team of specialists, and a few divisions of Immortals. For a start, we need to crack the shield on that moon and see what it's hiding. After that, I'll be working at stitching the essence network of this planet back into a usable form. It's so full of holes right now I'm surprised it hasn’t collapsed entirely. In short, I intend to work - and you should all be doing the same. If you want to leave this world and go home, or stay and join any new Pantheon that is assigned here, you will all need to be higher rank and actually useful to the effort.”

That may have been a step too far, Kintsuji supposed, but the idleness of the Immortals was getting under Kintsujis’ skin. They weren't gods, but they were filling in, and intentionally doing a piss poor job of it. It annoyed the Goddess, more than anything. Where her work was never done, it seemed these demi-god pretenders had instead chosen to never even try.

“I'll be leaving for my ship. By the time I return, I hope you all have come round to the idea of fixing this world.” She said at last, and with a flicker of energy pulled from her Outer Domain, she was somewhere else. The Immortals would listen or they wouldn't - at the end of the day, they were a temporary fix to the problem anyway. Soon a new Pantheon would be installed and most likely these wayward soldiers would be ‘rescued’ and ‘redeployed’.

Kintsuji had entered the system in her own personal Vessel - a tiny thing in comparison to some Gods that had been around long enough to remember the War in Heaven. It was only the size of a small island, with atmosphere shields and basic defences - Kintsuji had always preferred being unseen to being impenetrable. Fortresses were hardly known for being comfortable after all. Besides, with her mission being mainly planet bound, she didn't need a warship - mostly her Vessel acted as a storage container for the Outer Domain essence she had been granted by the Bureaucracy, and that which she still received in tribute from previous worlds where she had established a religion and still had a Fragment watching over her assets there. There was also, she noticed, an already noticeable trickle from the Temple of the Chimera, the dungeon core offering it's excess as tribute like the good dog that it was.

As opposed to her Inner Domain - the Domain of the Broken, Reforged, which was her personal mission and driving force, the Outer Domain she had access to was pretty much just a massive of unshaped Essence to keep her supplied in low essence worlds, and to accomplish things her own Constellations weren't capable of - like teleportation, for example.

Still, on this island cloaked in illusions and shadow, and impossible for most to even detect on the dark side of the moon, Kintsuji appeared in the middle of a sunlit glade of trees, and proceeded to her command centre - outwardly a quaint cottage nestled against the tree line, with a small brooke trickling past the house to tumble over stones and create pleasant music and the sweet scent of clean water in the air. It was a soothing place, where her and her children liked to rest between missions.

The inside of the house could be configured from cottage to command centre, based on your intention when walking through the door. In this case, rather than a quaint country kitchen, Kintsuji walked into a sleek, modern ships bridge of white marble, brushed steel, and severe professionalism. Kintsuji hurried to the communications array to try and get a message though whatever information blockade had been set up in this system.

“Come in Sector Command. This is Planetary Auditor Kintsuji with a priority request for aid!” She tried again, the fourth message in the last fifteen minutes - it wasn't unusual for there to be a delay with messages between systems, but this was getting a little strange. At the very least she should be able to find the nexus travel beacon signal for this system, but all she heard over the communications console was static. “Come in Sector Command. This is Planetary Auditor Kintsuji with a priority request for aid!”

Kintsuji slammed the crystal back into the console with a growl. She would have to take her ship out of system as quietly as possible, it seemed, to avoid catching the attention of whatever had brought down the Demi-gods’ scout ship.

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Kintsuji sent a message broadcast to her children, telling them what her plan was, then took a seat in the command chair, and began a systems check.

“You weren't planning on leaving soon, were you? We haven't even had a chance to meet yet - that would be terribly rude on your part, I assure you.” Kintsuji leapt up and spun to confront the owner of the voice, suddenly there with no alarm or notification of entry. The defences hadn't even activated.

“Who are you?” Kintsuji demanded of the figure that had appeared in the command room. He - it? - was humanoid, of middling height, and wore a perfectly crisp charcoal gray pinstripe suit with brown leather gloves. As the clothing wasn't native to this planet, Kintsuji would have known the figure was extra planetary or even extra dimensional without needing to be told, but their shiny, liquid black skin and lack of any facial features apart from a wide, grinning smile full of too many teeth would have told her that otherwise. Worse, when she tried to Identify the creature, all it returned was [???]. Kintsujis’ Identify ability could sense things and penetrate wards into the low Divinium ranks. Anything that could hide their details from her had to be extremely good, or be higher ranked than Divinium 10. The problem was - there was nothing alive in the Multiverse that was Divinium Ranked. They were all dead, long before she had been born.

“You won't get anything on Identify with me, my dear, even if you were higher Rank than I. There is nothing to see. My Identity was stolen from me a very long time ago. Sorry, where are my manners.” He swept into a mocking, courtly bow, and snapped back to straight that it looked like there were no bones or muscles under that charcoal suit. “I failed to introduce myself. You are Kintsuji, mid-rank Celestium Goddess of the Broken. I am Nothing. God of Nobody and Nowhere.” He said it with Gravitas, but smiled as he did it, the grin full of teeth and mockery, making me doubt the creatures’ truthfulness. “Thank you for showing us where this vessel was. Your illusions are surprisingly hard to dispel.”

“Do you make a habit of appearing in others’ private homes without announcing yourself, Nothing?” Kintsuji asked, attempting to drown her sudden wariness in Bravado. Anything that was this mocking and strange to a Goddess of her Rank was either insane or crazy - or a Mortal girl with more bravery than sense. Kintsuji also couldn't understand why her security systems hadn't already activated. It was…troubling.

“A habit? No, I try not to form any of those. Bad for your health, generally. Like your habits, Kintsuji. You have a habit of running roughshod over the Pantheons of planets you go to, consider all lesser gods beneath you, and don't trust what they have to say when you are given good advice. Take Mischief for example. He warned you that you wouldn't get a signal through. But you had to come up here and try anyway.” The blank faced creature gestured like a cultured gent, and Kintsuji had had enough. He may be an unknown, and she didn't know how he seemed to know the things he knew, but nobody treated her as lesser on her own ship.

Kintsuji reached out to her outer Domain storage, the huge reservoir of refined Essence granted to her by the Bureaucracy and the trickles that came in from past worlds that still worshipped her. She grabbed a lake of essence and attempted to jam it all into the Vessels’ Arrays, flicking and empowering all the spiritual switches to turn on the full array of defences. Let's see if he could stand up to a dozen essence cannons at near point blank range…

Nothing happened. The essence didn't move anywhere. Nor, she found, could Kintsuji use any other Ability in her arsenal. “What have you done!?” Kintsuji backed up now, truly scared. Nothing in this system should have the power to suppress her. What was this thing? Nothing merely smiled, and his blank black face seemed to hold an endless void of mockery and scorn.

She felt something cold and metallic snap around her neck, and Kintsuji suddenly found that she couldn't move. Not a muscle. Not even an eye twitch. One hand had been behind my back and I felt something pressed into the palm, before my fingers were closed around a round device of some kind. “I'm sorry,” A familiar voice whispered in Kintsujis' mind, the conversation entirely silent. “I had no choice. When you get free of the collar, the button will help you escape. My Foxes will find you, hopefully. They will be able to explain.”

From out of Kintsujis’ eye line, several of the false gods appeared, all wearing their patterned masks. One was Mischief, the familiar voice that had spoken to her. Several more walked through the front door of her house. And one other, a young woman she had not seen yet, looking both resigned to something, and extremely hungry for something, both at the same time.

Nobody grinned and opened his hands wide, gesturing at his apparent comrades, and Kintsuji wondered how she had been so badly fooled. Then it hit her - Mischief was a trickster. She should have been distrusting every single word he said, and yet, from the moment she saw the shield around the moon, she had more or less believed him…

…saw the shield around the moon. From the eye holes of Mischiefs’ own mask. Damn her for a fool! She had been played by someone she had barely even acknowledged!

“Your effort was doomed from the start. We knew a visit from an auditor was inevitable if we messed up the planet enough, but honestly, we didn't expect you for another thousand years or more. You must have been stationed very close. Thank you for that. It will make things simpler, in the end.” Nobody smiled and his teeth shone through his black and oily lips. A pointed red tongue emerged and licked all along both sets, sickeningly, while his eyeless face just stared at her.

Kintsuji glared at the creature and the false gods who had so thoroughly tricked her. If this was to be her final moments, the she would stare them down to the end, even if she couldn't speak. The bureaucracy would find out about her death, and they'd investigate in full force. The crime of killing an Auditor in the discharge of her duties had only one sentence - Death, for the pantheon and the world it happened on. There would be no trial or mercy - they were signing their own death sentences if they killed her. She did briefly mourn her children, and the apprentices she had only just taken under her wings. They would be caught in the conflagration, likely with no idea what had happened.

“Oh, don't look at me like that. We are going to become you, not kill you. You are far more important to us to just murder out of hand.” From behind his back, or perhaps from a storage power of some kind, Nobody pulled a mask very similar to all of theirs, and showed the inside to Kintsuji. It was heavily enchanted and rune carved, and the inner face was coated in a thin coat of the strange alloy the people of the clockwork Dominion had created - Maxwellian Bronze. “What do you think Skanni, are her Abilities a close enough match for you to bond the mask?”

The hungry looking woman came forward and placed fingertips on both of Kintsujis’ temples, before she closed her eyes in concentration. “Illusion, shadows, object repair and enchantment, and shapeshifting. It's not a perfect match, but it will be enough so I can access her domain and memories. Luckily she hasn't established her religion yet. I’d have to make some changes to her domain to make it work. We’ll also need to worry about her anchors - of we want her power we can't kill them.”

“Excellent! The children won't be a problem. They are barely Wood Rank. If you want, you can take some amusement from them. I know you have been lacking. Go ahead then, Skanni, join us finally, on the road to true peace in the Multiverse.” His voice was rich with honey, and he handed the mask to the woman. “Become a better Kintsuji for us.”

She held it in her hands with a look of wonderment and fear, before she approached Kintsujis’ frozen form, lifting the mask to slide it onto her face. Just before the mask touched her skin, she saw Mischief very clearly press the index finger of one hand into the palm of the other and say ‘button’ in her mind. But she couldn't even twitch. The mask clamped down on her, and soul searingly hot pain danced through her body - pain she hadn't felt in a thousand, thousand years. Her very soul felt like it was being torn open as something was pulled out of her and into the Bronze of the mask. With every second, she got weaker, her core seemed emptier, and she would have screamed and fallen if she were not frozen by the collar.

Eventually, the mask stopped pulling and fell away from her face, only to be caught by the woman. Kintsuji noticed it was now pure white, with golden veins flowing around it and a fox-like face adorned it's front.

As Kintsuji panicked about what had just happened, the collar clicked open and the goddess fell to the floor, her ability to move returned to her, but her body drained of even the energy to stand.

Her arms were in her eye line, but she almost didn't recognise them. The pale, all too human skin, the neat nails with no claws, the peasant dress she appeared to be dressed in. Kintsuji could hardly believe what she was seeing - but also what she was feeling. She felt empty, cut off, severed from everything that made her, well, her. “No collar means there isn’t a drop of Essence left in her. Well done, Skanni - or should I say Kintsuji? A perfect transfer.”

The woman donned the mask and moaned in pleasure as a wave of essence passed through the room. Very familiar essence. Her essence. Kintsuji felt fear climb up her throat. They had stolen her powers, her domain. “Toss her in with the others - even in stasis she’ll be able to link in the essence of your mask. We can move to stage two then. Her idea of capturing the dungeons and raising temples to offset the tampering is a good one. We’ll do it just like she wanted.”

Nobody and the gods started to file out of the room, while two moved towards her to grab her. She saw Mischief frantically jabbing at his palm, and finally Kintsuji had no choice. She pushed the button, and in a flash of smoke and fire, Kintsuji disappeared. She just had time to see Nobodys’ eyeless face stare at her with an unreadable expression, before she was somewhere else.

Kintsuji, now the former goddess of broken things reforged, appeared in midair three feet above a dirt track, surrounded by old growth forest on both sides. She fell to the floor and the impact hurt. Hurt more than such a short fall should have, if she even felt it in the first place. The goddess scrambled to her knees and looked around her. The world looked so different now. Blurrier and bigger.

Realising the last things she had seen were human arms, Kintsuji began to frantically check her body. No marble, no fox head, no wings. Just a small, unassuming young human woman, with long blue hair and pale skin. A thick band of Runes encircled the wrist that had held the stone Mischief had passed her. Apart from the new tattoo, her form was one she recognised, though from a time and place she had nearly forgotten. A form she had not seen reflected since the very first years of her long, long life. Hurriedly, she brought up her soul card, afraid of what she would find when she looked:

Name: [ERROR]

Age: 13

Race: Human

Class: N/A

Health: 100/100

Body : wood 1 (0/3)

Mind : wood 1 (0/3)

Perception : wood 1(0/3)

Will: wood 1 (0/3)

Status: Locked (0/ 4 constellations unlocked)

Kintsuji found the pages and stared at them like a death sentence. She was human. Completely and utterly mortal grade Human. Emotions and chemicals she had purged from her system long before most modern kingdoms were born flooded her system, and for the first time in millennia, Kintsuji felt panic, and fear well up in her. It was so overwhelming to an apparently virgin and brand new body, that for the first time in a very long time, Kintsuji fainted. Her world became darkness as she fell to the dirt track, and knew no more.

Across the other side of the Continent, six entities all woke up at the very same instant. All knew something was desperately wrong. Something had been taken from them, something was missing. Each of them tried to reach down a connection that was familiar to some, and brand new to others, and found no one at the other end.

At the other end of the Multiverse, a single soul looked up at the stars in the sky, feeling the same disconnect. With a grimace like a tectonic plate shifting, be nodded once. Mother had need of him, it seemed. The Great Bear moved.

The Goddess Kintsuji, Goddess of Broken Things Reforged, has Severed the divine connection to your soul. She thanks you for your service, but it will no longer be required. Your status as a Champion of the Goddess has been revoked.

END OF ARC 1: Foundling.