Congratulations!

For defeating a Great Winter Wyrm using only rapier techniques, you have gained a level in Seraph.

You have gained the following skill:

[Blade Division - Projectiles]: Separate your blade into three pieces and shoot those as projectiles. They will explode on impact. If your blade is enchanted, an additional effect might be applied.

Wow, that was fast.

Then again, it wasn’t every day that she took down a magical flying dragon. And it was even rarer yet that she defeated an enemy simply by blocking. The black hole had helped, of course.

Struggling against the cliffside's grip, Momo finally managed to detach herself and descended towards the group of witches below. They greeted her with a mix of expressions: some looked at her in awe, while others wore expressions of horror. A year ago, that mix of reactions would have made her faint from anxiety; but after enduring the campaign trail, a few scowls pointed her way was barely a blip on her emotional radar.

If only the second grade teacher that had said she possessed the ‘emotional resilience of a potato chip’ could see her now.

“Where did …” Zie grabbed her by the wrists and shook her arms up and down. “Where did you put it?”

“Where did I put… what?” Momo mumbled. She followed Zie’s eyes. “The wyrm?”

“Well of course she means the wyrm,” Laura interjected. “And don’t you worry your thoughtless little head about it, Zie. That was a very clear case of teleportation. Object transported from A to B. But I do wonder,”—she pointed an accusatory finger at Momo—“where exactly is B? Because if it's too closeby, we’re going to be digging our own graves in a few hours when it comes back for vengeance. I’m not rejoicing you like some kind of hero just yet.”

“Oh!” Momo laughed nervously. “You don’t have to worry about that. I sent it somewhere very far away. It would take the power of a god to send it back here.”

Quite literally.

Considering that her blocking technique opened a rift portal, the wyrm was probably swimming around in the Nether’s junkyard right about now. Her old Yaris was most likely its new scratching post. Momo frowned at the idea of it. Poor Yaris.

Laura eyed her skeptically, but ultimately let up.

“Fine,” she said. “But I’ve already plucked a bit of your hair, so if that thing comes back wanting trouble, I’ll be cursing you, your relatives, and your weird cat for all of eternity.”

Momo blinked, horrified. But still, Laura was being more friendly before, in a very microscopic way, so she figured this was her chance. She stepped forward.

“Wait,” she said, putting her hands together in a plea for sympathy. “About that poison—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Laura groaned, already waddling back toward the desecrated cabin. “Follow me, bigshot.”

—

Momo followed Laura into her shop and, after some back-and-forth, returned with a full bottle of distilled, ninety-nine percent grade poison. Valerica’s favorite pasta topping. Then she made her way back to the carriage and nestled into her bed, settling in amongst a puddle of blankets.

Carefully, she released two droplets of the dark liquid onto the parchment. A moment of doubt crept in as the splotches hit the page—after all, maybe the correct answer had indeed been ketchup—but soon enough, the ink began to expand, consuming the page until it was entirely black.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

White words began to appear faintly as if being entered on a typewriter.

Momo, darling.

If you’re reading this, there really is no one in the universe who knows me better than you do. I’m touched.

Momo would have felt flattered, but she knew better than that; anyone who spent five minutes around Valerica—and didn’t meet an early grave—would become victim to one of her opinionated tirades. And of the tirades, she only had about three main topics: poison as seasoning, Morgana is the best ever and can do no wrong, and, of course, Kyros sucks. The third one was occasionally swapped out with Devola, if the woman was nearby.

I come to you with good and bad news. I will start, as I always do, with the bad. Morgie is not herself. I wish I could tell you that the funeral is a fluke, but it’s not. She believes that Kyros has won the war, and has given up. It’s all terribly depressing. So not her style. But that’s all fine and dandy, because she is not alone. She has us.

We are going to finish the war we started in the age of the Dark Calamity.

It’s all rather simple. As you might have heard from that devilish dokkaebi, the Nether is overrun with Nether Demons, your less-adorable cousins. At first, I dedicated myself to fending them off in order to protect Morgana. But then I realized, why am I putting all this effort into just smacking them back into the abyss? They’ll just come back. And more importantly, why am I not recognizing them as the weapon they are?

So. I’ve started collecting them.

Not like Sera and her box, though, I’m not an animal. But they are chained up and piled in my Nether basement. I have tried to domesticate them without success—I don’t have the same je ne sais quoi with creatures as you do—but since you are a Nether Demon yourself now, I believe that you will be able to tame them, and lead them.

And that brings us to the crux of the plan. On the day of Morgana’s funeral, when all of the gods have assembled to point and jeer at her, you will unleash the horde, and they will devour them. The dark matter of the universe—the creatures born directly from the gods’ own negligence and apathy and misfortune—will ultimately usher in their end.

Isn’t that so tragically beautiful?

This will be a new age for the universe. A blank slate. Imagine that, Momo, just me, you, Morgie, and thousands of little mortal playthings. It’s like all of my most wonderful nightmares come to life. Utter bliss.

“She can’t be serious,” Momo whispered aloud. Her fingers trembled where she held the paper, and Dusk hopped onto the bed, curling her vertebrae against Momo’s hand.

Two dueling reactions fired in her brain. The first impulse was her typical one: fear, trepidation, the urge to dig a hole in the soil and hide in it until someone else solved the problem. The second one was new, twinged with a burning-in-the-stomach sensation, a gall, an audacity she never knew she was capable of. A hunger.

It was that same feeling she felt when used [Soul Cannibal] on the Husk. A temptation towards a type of power she had never even dreamt of on Earth, where the most powerful she had felt was when she held worms in her hand and dangled them above the ground, then apologized for making them dizzy; she wanted so badly to break free of that smallness, that meekness—

But, then again.

If she wasn’t those things, if she wasn’t small or meek or unimpressive, Valerica would never have chosen her in the first place. If she wasn’t a good person at heart, she would just be one more Nether Demon, a ball of ferocious, depressive energy. It was Valerica who made her realize that her powerlessness was the most innate strength she had. Momo waged war with small smiles and apologies and head nodding. Not biting and backstabbing.

Momo didn’t want to murder the gods. Even if it was practical. Even if she understood the reasons why, and largely she agreed with them. Because the trouble was—she was still herself. Painfully small and human. And she didn’t want to give up that humanity, even if it was for the sake of Valerica, or Morgana, as something as silly and abstract as the universe.

No. She was done doing that. That kind of thinking was how she ended up here, Mana-drained and halfway up a mountain on a mental health retreat, struggling to lift her cat above her head.

She had to try solving this another way first. Her way.

This was a crossroads, one she’d been terrified of for a long, long time.

But Valerica trained me for this, Momo thought, and placed the scroll down on her lap.

She trained me so that someday, I would know when to disagree with her.

The realization hit her like a ton of bricks. That's what Valerica had been getting at back at the Viper. When she told Momo that she would have to protect her now, she wasn't just talking about physical safety.

She rose from the bed, and a new plan, blurry but firm, formed in her mind:

Valerica wanted to kill the gods. Momo wasn’t going to let her.