“Over nine hundred?”

“Yeah.”

“That quickly?” I ask, somewhat bewildered. Izzy has been leveling quickly for quite some time now, but since the hero joined her party – at least temporarily – it seems like it’s happening even faster. Eleonor herself passed seven hundred just the other day.

And I have no idea what to do with this information, other than that my wife is obviously telling me this for a reason, and I can feel at least some flavor of expectation through our bond.

So I give her what she probably wants, a burst of Consume. She sags from it and then leans into me, resting her face on my shoulder.

“I’ve missed this.”

Hm? When did I stop? I’m pretty sure I didn’t.

…

Well, whatever. I rest one of my hands on her head and muss up her hair a bit and she lets out a quiet sigh.

Yes, Arty. I know you’re there, I know you’re watching, and I can feel your envy – it’s kind of my whole thing, after all. Don’t worry and wait your turn, she’s worked hard for this so I’m rewarding –

“Mmph!”

Izzy catches me by surprise while I’m not paying attention, practically yanking my face downward to press her lips on mine.

I still don’t understand why humans do this, but whatever.

…And then she blushes and rapidly Blinks out of the room.

Huh.

(Level 926 and she still acts like a schoolgirl,) Nyx comments in the back of my mind.

Well, I don’t really know what that means, but she seems happy and we’re not fighting or whatever, so it works well enough for me.

My former Assistant sighs. (Yeah, that probably would be enough for you, but for once that’s fine. It probably would be for most people.)

We’re not fighting either.

(When have we ever been fighting?)

What about that time when you got all knotted up over me being a god and having everything you worked for?

(Oh shut up, that doesn’t count. I’m allowed to be upset that I got fucked out of my life’s work. I still don’t have any Class Skills that make runic crafting any easier.)

And you probably won’t, unless… hey.

(What?)

I never did give you your reward, the one for clearing the dungeon.

(So?) she asks somewhat petulantly. (I haven’t made anything good enough to justify it.)

What if I bestow a Skill instead? I mean, I might pass out for a bit or something, maybe a day or two, but I’m sure Izzy and Arty would be more than happy to nurse me back to health –

And speak of the fox devil, here she is, pressed against me and rapidly saying things like ‘no’ and ‘please’ and so forth in a desperate, pleading tone.

“Alright, fine. But I need to find a better way to do this. The words of creation are a big fat waste if I can’t even use them. There’s got to be a trick to it, some way to use them without using my soul as a conduit to the Record. I don’t really understand why I even need to do that, I thought gods all had their own divinity.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Without looking up, the divine beast in my arms answers, “Do.”

“Then how do I use it? Hmm.”

…

We hold each other in silence for a few more moments before my entertainment favorite, the Dipshit alarm, sounds from the throne room.

Oh goody.

***

For once I summoned Izzy and her party to observe – or more specifically, Eleonor and Markus.

“I wanted you to see this and understand part of why I work so hard to be civil with you.”

Eleonor furrows her brow. “Who is that and what is he doing? It looks really dangerous.”

I chuckle. “It is, but only temporarily for him. See, some god – I don’t know who – probably messed with his head. He thinks he’s in a video game, and that everyone around him is just something called an ‘NPC’. He treats his party members as disposable pawns and is a generally unpleasant person, obsessed with the ideal of somehow stealing my powers and ‘saving the world’. Which world? I don’t know. He also seems to think that every god is actually ‘the goddess’ wearing some kind of mask for some reason. His special patron even gave him a new name, since when they messed with his head he lost his! Oh what was it… Star… Starbrain? Stairflight? I don’t know, doesn’t matter. Oh, and the other human on the projector is Tathra, he used to be Sekhmet’s but I stole him and now he’s mine, you can’t have him. He’s in charge of the dungeon design to – oh, there he goes again!”

While I’m speaking, the ‘True Hero’ rapidly dodges three traps in a row, before a column of stone launches from the wall, colliding bodily with him and shoving him forcefully through a newly appearing hole in the wall… and sending him sliding down a steep ramp, right back into the moat to be eaten by the level 1000 monsters below.

Again.

“Is he… is he dead?” she asks quietly.

Markus floats up in front of her, manifesting a faint outline of light around him and promptly shrugs. “Unquestionably. But something tells me that this isn’t a one-time occurrence…”

“And you would be correct!” I announce in response. “His patron keeps resurrecting him over and over somehow and for some reason – probably to annoy me. Actually, almost definitely to annoy me. This is the countermeasure I came up with, since I got bored of dealing with him myself. The projector thing was Nyx’s idea though, and I have to have one of the maids carry the sender. Oh, but don’t worry about them, the traps are all keyed specifically to Dipshit’s mana –”

“Why do you keep calling him that? It doesn’t sound like a nickname…”

I outright laugh. “The first time he cleared the forest dungeon and acted like an absolute ass, I decided to mess with him. His name was really stupid and over the top, so I changed it for him into something similarly stupid.”

The floating book flutters a few pages in thought before asking, “But how exactly do you do that? Unless you mean a nickname, our names are etching into our… Oh. Oh no. You… You can…”

“Yup! It just gives me a headache, way less than bestowing Skills or, uh, resurrecting people? Building houses? It hurts way less than any of that, and… Wait, is that really something mortals can’t do themselves?”

“Of course we can’t! What kind of batshit logic lets you literally rename mortals? That is beyond broken, our Systems shouldn’t allow it! The Record itself shouldn’t allow it!”

“…Oh. Well, we already knew it was broken considering other gods act weird when they find out I have the words of… wait, I can tell them this, right Izzy? Are they safe?”

My wife shrugs. “They should be. We’re old friends, I doubt they’d sell us out. Would you, Eleonor?”

“Nooooope!” the hero chirps.

“Huh. Well, good enough for me, I could always tell Markus not to at least–”

Izzy starts to furrow her brow before I quickly add in, “–if I didn’t promise I wouldn’t, which I did.”

“Good.”

I take a few moments to describe how for a long while we thought I had Spellspeech as a hidden or unlisted Skill, to which Markus interjected and said that shouldn’t be possible. Because of course he did. I shouldn’t be surprised at his level of knowledge considering he’s always been so surrounded by books that… well, him becoming a book was more my doing, I guess. And that’s fine.

It was when I moved on to another god recognizing it as the words of creation rather than Spellspeech or a Skill at all that the animated book’s printed eyes on the page went wide.

…And Eleonor’s expression didn’t change at all. I’m assuming she has no idea what that means or the implications. Probably.

Well, most definitely, considering she promptly asks, “So what does that mean?”

“I’ll tell you!” I say, grandiosely flourishing my robes. “It means that I can talk things into being or changing or whatever. Apparently it’s something the gods of old gave up when they created the Record. Basically, I exist both as something within and outside of the Record’s control. Which… we’re not really sure why, it could be because at least part of me was formed as an outsider god, something grandmother referred to before as a freespawn, whatever that is.”

Apparently, Markus recognizes it as a slur, considering his poorly concealed wince when I said it.

Well, whatever.

“Either that or this weird Class from a weird god that nobody’s heard of.”

I realize I practically prompted the question, and the book doesn’t disappoint considering he promptly asks, “What god?”

“Ananke. I think I got the Domain of Control from them… her, I think. Probably. Do gods care about genders or whatever? I’d assume they can probably just be whatever they want to be.”

…

…

“You haven’t heard of her either, have you?” I ask flatly.

And to my surprise, the hero blurts, “Oooh! The one related to Fate, right?”