The darkness was all-knowing, all-powerful and all-consuming.
He felt so much and understood so little.
With every second that passed he would die and be revived, whether it was by drowning, being burned, being shot and every other common way to die.
He even got bitten by what felt like a snake and spent minutes slowly convulsing and dying in the bitter darkness.
He felt himself being cut apart slowly, pieces of his fingers being sliced away, followed by his toes. Then hands and feet.
That wasn’t the only thing that was being cut apart, whatever was happening was shredding parts of his mind as well and reknitting them into something new.
Like pulling on the string of a jacket and using that string to create a glove.
And it all happened in complete soul-sucking darkness. Just what was going on?
Was this some sort of mental breakdown that he was having moments before he died?
Enduring the pain and horror, he embraced the damnation that this hell offered him.
His skin was flayed from him, then his muscles, ligaments and even his nerves and he died a horrible death.
And then he was alive again.
Time and time again he would die and be brought back, until finally he was revived and he could see again.
The grey and dull sky greeted him, it was the same but different somehow, he just didn’t why.
Glancing down at his bloodied and gore-covered chest he watched in morbid fascination as the grievous wounds began to regenerate.
And then he looked up at the God, his God.
“What am I now?”
“Why don’t use your status and see.” The voices gleefully cried out, each one energetic and excited.
NAME: Thomel
CLASS: Apostle
LEVEL: 56
EXPERIENCE: 4322/18148
Physical
[76]
Attunement
[0]
Magical
[0]
[Boons]
Tracking
Hunted Hunter
Survivor
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
[Gifts]
He didn’t know what to say, the system cemented what he’d become, he was an apostle now.
A religious leader, a loyal and devoted servent to a God.
“So now what?” He said, staring up into his divine lord’s grand eyes, this time there were no headaches.
“Now you will retrieve the shards and become something greater than even what you are now.” The voices enthusiastically stated.
“I still have my boons, even my attributes and level are the same, is this truly a class change?”
“Of course not, the class change is only part of the gift. You are now like us, you have power that comes from yourself rather than only system-provided power and natural abilities.”
“Like what?” He might be a changed man now but the constant questions he always had to ask certainly hadn’t changed a bit.
“Raw strength and skill, regeneration, the knowledge that you have a purpose. Divine magic, drawn out by us and guided by you. It is hard to properly convey, it would require us to truly speak and that would break you.”
“Is an apostle not meant to listen and obey the worlds of their God?”
“Hmm, yes I suppose you’re right, you’ll survive in the worst case.” And then it spoke.
Time froze, rocks all around him shattered and broke into revolving triangles of fear and hatred, bright pink grass grew in between the cracks in reality. The world was dead but in this moment it was alive.
He was alive, he was real and he could understand everything, he knew what he was, he knew what he needed to do.
He understood now what his beloved God had meant when they’d said he had a purpose.
Everything clicked into place like a perfect puzzle fitting together, he was blessed oh Lord he was blessed.
Falling onto the floor he wept scars of scarlet red blood, the purity erroding the impure meaty organs and thin blood which coated him like a mucus layer.
He just couldn’t stop crying, he was heaving now, sobbing like a newborn. He was a newborn.
He looked at his hands and marvelled at them, they were sloppy products of humanity's evolution but his God had fixed them.
The sky cracked and broke, the dome breaking apart under the strain of the truthful words of his perfect Lord.
And his Lord was perfect, that was the problem. Being perfect meant one could never improve, he had to make his God imperfect, that was his purpose.
He understood it all so clearly, he was drinking in the purest knowledge and internalizing it, tasting it with his mind like it was fine champagne.
And then the only God that mattered stopped speaking.
He felt like an alcoholic who’d just been cut off and thrown out of the beer after waiting all day for a drink. He felt like an addict who’d just lost his supplier.
Desperately he tried to hang onto the little knowledge he had left, to horde and keep it but it seeped out of his ears like sand, reaching up to try and push it back in his hands came away covered in his blessed blood.
He was an ant that had just been given the understanding of language and a moral compress so beyond anything it could ever hope to have on its own and now he was losing it all.
He fell to the ground, slamming onto it hard, looking up in shocked betrayal at his God, he saw its tendrils pull away, evaporating into nothingness.
With grace and ruthlessness, his Lord ripped those afflicted tendrils off from their host and threw them away.
Weeping and rocking back and forth his crippled and decript mind returned to him.
He was a cup that had been thrown into the ocean, he’d sunk deep into and drank his full of knowledge but the pressure had begun to break him so he’d been hurled back out.
Now all that water he’d collected was leaky out of him, disappearing all too fast.
Rocking back and forth he cried and cried until finally he didn’t know why he was crying.
A mere second ago he’d asked to know what that God had meant and it’d tried to show him and now here he was, covered in blood and yet strangely missing all the gore and gaseous organs that’d been heaped onto him.
“What happened?” He asked baffled.
“Everything.” The voices sang back, their excitement still ever-present.
“Now what?” He said, rising to his feet.
“Now you collect the shards.”
“How?”
He didn’t get an answer, instead, he got a tentacle and a few tendrils wrapped around his waist and he was hurled towards the fiend’s eye.