“The Matriarch destroyed Scaeburg! I swear it!” An exasperated traveling merchant said to the gate guards. “She purged the Royal Family, leaving only the infant princes behind! I saw as the castle rose in the air, people jumping out of it for their lives before it just vanished!”

The paranoid [Scout] and his poshly dressed unwanted companion spared a glance at the gate. “She’s coming,” the nervous man said. “She’s coming!”

“Mate, chill,” the visitor said. “Who’s coming? This Matriarch? Is she some sort of goddess? Which of the chicks you brought here with you is she?”

“None,” the native begrudgingly shared. “She’s the Norse’s envoy. Damn, only a few more hours before I can send you back.”

The visitor cracked his knuckles, “It seems we’re having a fight. What is she, some sort of valkyrie?”

“Shhh!” the guy flinched and checked if anyone overheard. “Don’t say such terms! We don’t want them to learn about the Norse.”

“Look, Wyxnos, Loki doesn’t care about this shithole. If he did, he’d have come here and rip it off your spineless body. Chill, mate. I’m here. I can deal with her.”

They moved away from the crowds, “No you cannot!” The [Scout] hissed. “You have no idea what she is. She’s a cockroach! You would need a ridiculous amount of power to kill her before she can kill you.”

“I doubt it. I’m an intermediate deity!” He bragged, drawing the attention of a drunkard lying on the dirt. “While I’m short on Divinity, I can still put up a good fight. What rank is she?”

“None. She’s a surrogate deity.”

“A what? There’s no such thing.”

“There’s her. The ‘how’ plagued me for centuries.”

They entered a tavern and found a table at the dark corner usually reserved for brooding rangers. They ordered the house ale. The visitor spat his first sip.

“What the fuck? How can these mortal morons screw up booze this badly with System assistance?” He cursed.

The native looked at the visitor as if he’d sucked a tray of lemons. “Another reason to not linger around.”

The visitor broke the table and tossed the mug at the bartender, spraying the piss-grade ale over a lot of people as the mug rotated wrongly. That was the spark to ignite the tavern and cause most patrons to brawl as if it was choreographed.

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Nenandil and I wrecked half-dozen kingdoms around the church and got the others to agree to leave my church alone and send messages to their neighbors. Before we returned to the demon side to hunt the last (and hardest) ten levels before the cap, we decided to stop at a port to buy more supplies. I intended to buy all the weapon and armor shipments arriving from overseas so the idiots here had less to fight with.

“Look, a tavern brawl,” Nenandil pointed.

During the last year we mingled with the mortals, she developed a taste to, in her words, “spectate bar fights”. She hadn’t devolved yet into betting so I usually went with her. Fairies were strange like that, gaining and losing interest in this or that affair of the world as easily as the day becomes night.

Invisible, we entered the tavern through the window and took a vantage point on the rafters. Nenandil started to narrate the brawl for a while before she froze, staring at a corner.

“The Neraidaphobe is here,” she gasped. “How in the name of the five Elemental Sovereigns did this happen?”

“I didn’t do it,” I raised my hands. “I swear on my wings I didn’t use the coin or even touched Fate magic.”

“Yet there he is.”

“Yet there he is. And the guy next to him doesn’t have a Status. I can’t {Appraise} him,” I remarked.

Nenandil blinked, the interest in the brawl gone, “What? How? Even deities’ avatars have Status. The only one without a visible Status is… you.”

I raised a finger, “He’s not me, because I’m here and I was never that ugly. Even Arista with her skin illness wasn’t that ugly.”

“Says the person who once lived as an earthworm,” Nenandil snickered.

“Hey! I was a cute earthworm.”

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

“THE BELLS!” The [Scout] shouted as he stood up and stared up at the rafters. “SHE’S HERE!”

I watched as he started to run into the fry, getting punched by a [Barbarian] before his ugly-faced, mean-spirited, and ridiculously dressed companion grabbed him by the backpack and pulled him back. We made eye contact. Somehow he creeped me out.

“Hey, Loki girl! Come here for a fight!”

“I think he’s talking to you!” Nenandil said, then warned, “Don’t go. He gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

“Me too. And if he knows about the trickster, then he’s an invader. Maybe a Demon Lord.”

I stood and drew my spear, automatically resized for my hands. I dove at him. He flickered and dodged my charge. Blink Step, and he dodged again. He didn’t seem fast but he could move with preternatural alacrity in bursts.

“Unicorn horn, wicked. I didn’t expect a [Hero] to wield such a weapon.” I paused and stared at him. “Confused? I can sense you’re a [Hero] by the way the Universe favors you. There’s always a [Hero] and a [Princess].”

Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

I went back on the offensive. He just dodged. My instincts told me he was just playing with me, measuring me. And I was failing miserably.

The bar patrons decided to get the fuck out of the way as I broke the unspoken rule of no weapons.

“You cannot win this, little fairy. So long you rely on the System, you can’t hit me.”

What the hell did that mean? I had no idea. I kept pressing on. When the patrons cleared the tavern, I ignited my Lightning Elemental form.

“The fuck? Aren’t you supposed to be with Loki? Why are you using Lightning like Thor?”

He was the one with time to blabber. But he was right. I couldn’t hit him. I fired Lightning bolts but the spells fizzled as they reached him.

“System magic won’t hurt me either,” He chortled. “Is this the mother Goddess you told me about, Wyxnos? Why don’t you fight like one?”

I stopped and flew away from him, “Who are you?”

He clicked his tongue, “No, you should be the one introducing yourself first.”

I replayed his last sentences, then looked at the cowering [Scout]. “Wyxnos?” My anger flared as arcs of electricity ionized the tavern air and licked the furniture, roof, ceiling, and walls. Metallic objects sparked as they got charged.

“Eeek! No! Please no!” The Neraidaphobe [Scout] scampered and scuttled backward until he hit the wall. “Stay away from me!”

The visitor cringed as he watched the pitiful scene.

“Is he Wyxnos?”

A shrug was all I got. “Dunno. You can’t touch him, by the way. He’s my ticket home.”

“Home?”

“Midgard,” the guy grinned. “Wanna go there?”

I froze, my elemental form reverted back to fae-flesh. “Earth?”

“Earth. Gaia. That big blue ball floating in space. You’re from there too? Not Asgard?”

“New York.”

“Dallas.”

“Who was President last time you were there?”

“Nah. Look, it messes up with causality if we exchange time-sensitive information like that. This dimension is in a time-dilation zone. Or Earth goes so fast time there slows to a crawl. I was never good in this manifold dimensional metaphysical expanded relativity stuff. Let’s say I’m from after the Civil War. And you?”

“The same here.”

“Too bad,” he snickered.

“What?”

“Too bad you’re going to die on this slimy planet.”

The guy wanted to get under my skin and make me lose my cool. Force me into making a mistake. I charged a big spell and threw it at him. The magic washed over him and blew the tavern to smithereens. I couldn’t believe it. It was as if he was in a dead magic personal field but different. It was as if the magic simply ignored him.

“I told you. System attacks or magic won’t affect me,” he boasted.

I dodged the falling second-floor of the tavern. The man picked up “Wyxnos” and walked to the empty street. I flew after him with Nenandil. I knew I needed bigger guns. With an effort of will, A black torii gate appeared and I crossed it. The visitor from Dallas whistled in admiration. On the other side, my Kyuubi form appeared.

“You have some nice tricks there, lass. I’ll admit that. But they’re only tricks.”

I chomped down on my 陰陽星の玉 (Hoshi-no-Tama, “Star Ball”), and flared all my twenty-something tails. I showered him with every spell I knew. The MIRV Force Javelins, a Disintegration beam, the animated kitchen sink from the tavern. Nothing worked. The visitor just nonchalantly ignored my attacks as he held Wyxnos by the backpack to stop him from running away.

“Tell me whenever you grow bored of trying, kitsune girl.”

What was this guy? I was so enraged when everything failed that I pounced on the tiny human, clawing at him with my paws. He just dodged. The Kitsune-bi I shot at him also was like water droplets sprinkled from a plane on a desert. My rage reached a point Pandora manifested. The [Wisp of Creation] surfaced from my chest and darted at the visitor, assuming its pitch-black {Aspect of the Void}.

“Wha’dda fuck is that!” He was startled for the first time as he hightailed the hell away from Pandora.

“Hehehe! We’re doomed!” The [Scout] alleged to be Wyxnos in disguise lost the last screw holding his sanity together. “We’re dead! Buh, he, he! She’s going to murder us. And she didn’t know who I was! Ha, ahahaha! I can’t believe it! You weren’t chasing me! Stupid Anomaly!”

That confirmed it. The guy was Wyxnos. What was going on here? Was he under some kind of curse? Or was he in a borrowed body with abysmal Attribute values and suffering from the same thing I do every time I go back with ridiculously low stats?

The visitor saw my interest in Wyxnos and grabbed him hostage. “Get that Wisp away from me or I’ll kill him! You’ll lose what Loki sent you here to get!”

I recalled Pandora not because I cared about Wyxnos but because this guy was a treasure trove of information.

“And what is it that Loki tasked me with obtaining?” What was it that Wyxnos stole that was so important it took thousands upon thousands of years to make and was worth abandoning his position in the Pantheon and the System Administration?

“Don’t try to fool me!”

“Bwa, ha, ha! We’re fucked!” Wyxnos guffawed.

“Shut up, you idiot!”

“Make me! Make me! Make meeeeeeeee! He! He!”

I would never again say that I was Batman if this guy would become my Joker. “You got a few things wrong, visitor from Dallas. I’m not beholden to Loki. I’m not after whatever Wyxnos stole. And I don’t care if you kill that guy. I hate his guts. Pandora, void them.”

The Wisp advanced. The guy holding the [Scout] widened his eyes as whatever shenanigans he was using to dodge my “system-assisted” abilities didn’t work on Pandora.

“DEATH!” Wyxnos maniacally shouted.

Scared by the unknown thing reeking of stolen divine power coming at him and Wyxnos' scream, the visitor blinked. I felt sharp pain all over my body for a thousandth of a second. My world became white. My consciousness vanished.

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

“There, she’s dead,” the man told the [Scout]. “Man, I couldn’t believe how much mana the System had crammed inside that fairy! Look at this devastation!”

The two men were floating on a cobblestone suspended by magic. Around them, the ocean rushed to fill the spherical hole caused by yet another overpowered magic explosion. The harbor, the city, the kingdom around them had been vaporized.

The body Wyxnos borrowed, however, kept laughing and crying. “You killed her! We’re fucked! You killed her! She didn’t know who I was! Now she does! She knows how I can hide from her! You stupid moron. You killed her! You doomed us both!”

“Mate, she’s dead. Caput. Disintegrated. All I had to do was to suspend the System influence around her for a second. Easy peasy. Then she blew because she couldn’t hold the mana she had in her without the System. She’s dead and bound for recycling. The System will erase her now.”

Wyxnos’ borrowed eyes deadpanned and stared at the visitor. “Sure. As if I hadn’t tried to erase her from the FUCKING ADMINISTRATOR CONSOLE!”

The visitor winced, then broke the [Scout]’s neck. The body vanished. Then the man from Dallas felt a wave of Divine power wash from behind him.

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Wyxnos adjusted his cuffs, his necktie and cracked his neck. “I must thank you for releasing me from that cage. I was going crazy.”

The visitor turned around and saw the former college professor from Wisconsin clad in all his Italian designer glory. “You’re welcome?”

“Yes. That disguise wouldn’t work anymore, she knows what to look for now. Would it be too hard to get your head unstuck from your arse and hear what people tell you? You did the worst thing possible, you killed her.”

“Please do explain,” the visitor challenged.

“No, I don’t think so. It’s unproductive to waste words with a dead man. Maybe if I give her your Core, she’ll forgive me.”

Wyxnos drew a circle with his finger, golden light trailing his appendage. The spell circle formed in less than a second and activated, burning the de-powered visiting deity down to his Core and Spark. Wyxnos drew a second circle and merged the spark in the Core as he drew enough Divinity out of it to replenish what he spent.

“You might be an intermediate deity but you were out of Divinity. And now that you did the favor of blowing up the transfer circle, I can’t let you wander this world,” Wyxnos mumbled to himself. He looked up at the sky that literally cracked open, “Oh, bother. Here they come. I should make myself scarce. And now I need to find another suitable vessel to hide in. Or not? She knows how I hide and had that uncanny ability to stumble upon me without even trying...”

With a third Divine spell, Wyxnos vanished.

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

...

..

,

No fucking messages. Just death. That was my first thought as I was reborn in some palace.

Princess, it is.

Oh, boy, here we go again.