After a productive day of telling the city parks to kiss his ass, Ben was driving to practice with a bored but contented sigh. He could remember when every day was so busy, he had to schedule sleep for the gaps in his regular schedule.

When he arrived at the school, there was a commotion around the entrance as some teachers tried talking to a man wearing baggy robes and carrying a sword on his hip. The teachers noticed Ben's truck and flagged him down, so he detoured to the entrance where a closer look let him notice who the man was, and he secretly had a heart attack.

"Ben, do you know this guy?" demanded Mrs. Tenpenny, a Social Studies teacher who badly needed to get fucked.

"Al?" Ben asked, putting his truck in park and getting out to approach the ronin-looking, man-bun-having swordsmen. "Are you cosplaying out here? At a school?"

"James," the swordman said while resting his hand on the hilt, "I need your help."

"Thank you, Ms. Tenpenny," Ben thanked sincerely, "I'll take it from here. Could you tell the students that practice will be a strength day?"

"Who is this man?" the history teacher demanded, glancing at the neckline of the robe where the swordsman's profound muscles shone through. "Is that weapon real?"

"He's a cosplayer, my dear," Ben quickly excused. "Come with me, Al. I'll get you where you need to be."

Ben shuffled the swordsmen into his passenger seat while placating the teachers that everything is fine and taken care of. Only the swordsman could tell that the village councilman was leaking a killing intent that was suffocating to be around.

Once they were on the road, Ben pointed to the glove compartment and asked, "Could you hand me the glove in there?"

The swordsmen worked the latch off and found the item, handing it to Ben, who fit the glove onto his hand. The driver then pulled a hard right into a forested road that hadn't seen activity since the early-Cretaceous. The swordsman was thrown for a loop, but recovered just in time to see the glove pointed at him as it hummed to life. Ben had an expression of fury that sent chills up the experienced warrior's spine.

"You have one minute to tell me what the hell you think you're doing," Ben threatened, "and if I don't like the answer, I'm going to rip it out of your hide."

"I'm in trouble," said the swordsman, unlatching his sword and presenting it to Ben. "I've offended a god and was given tribulation as recompense."

"You should know I hate dealing with gods, Alsace," Ben griped, but he noticed the sword in a bit more detail. It was nothing special, except that the metal of the blade was atomically perfect and synchronized down to the neutron. That was impossible, even for the greatest smiths and metallurgists in the universe, which meant this item was divine, constructed by a god's hand.

"I'm afraid you're the only one who can help me," Alsace pleaded while Ben took the sword and inspected it closely. "An order of holy men who practice bodily arts sought me out to challenge their martial spirits. I defeated them, but they did not make it easy, and most of them died."

"And their deity didn't like that?" Ben guessed.

"She loved it," the swordsman sighed, "but she didn't take my rejection of her blessing lightly. I was given this sword and told that if my sword arts were superior to hers, I could break the sword within a year."

"Pause that, I need to focus," Ben said as he started fiddling with his watch. He clicked the dial, flipped a switch, then pressed the watch itself. He sucked in air as his worldview shifted, extending beyond the physical into the realm of filtered energy sub-structures.

"What did the goddess say she would do after the year elapsed?"

"She was going to claim my soul."

"Right," Ben said half-heartedly. "Oh, that's new!"

"What?"

"The enchantments on this sword are set to constantly heat it up while simultaneously cooling it once the atomic structure is crystalline. It basically self-repairs to its hardest form all the time, and then forcefully drains your body's energy to maintain a protective aura for a little extra spice."

"Can you help me break it?"

"I can, but I won't. Instead, I'm going to give you the means to break it yourself."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Ben started the car up and drove home, pulling into his garage and going straight into the basement warehouse. Along one wall of boxes was a device that looked like a tesseract crossed with a magic 8 ball.

"What do you know of time dilation?" Ben asked while he pulled out a bunch of wires and started hooking things together.

"I don't even know what that means," Alsace admitted.

"Time dilation is basically the difference in time experienced by two objects under different accelerated forces. It's best analogized by our two worlds moving at different relative speeds, so one minute here is a minute and twenty seconds on your world."

"You've spoken of the time change before, which is why I didn't want to risk coming here in case the deadline came sooner."

"Right, well, there are places where the time dilation is enormous, or in the case, so small, it's almost like time is stopped. If you go to the edge of the universe, the center of the universe will seem like it's barely moving at all, and if you keep going beyond the borders of the universe, time will continuously go slower and slower. Years ago, I set up this device which strategically combines a tesseract and a wormhole to be constantly moving further and further away, putting the time dilation at a near infinitesimally low ratio. Basically, a room for stopped time."

"You're going to go in there and you're not going to come out until you can either break the sword or kill the god. Thankfully the sword itself doesn't have a timer, which means the goddess is tracking it, so you'll be able to break the seal."

The swordsman eyed the contraption uneasily, "Isn't there an easier way to do this?"

"Several," said Ben openly, "but this is a goddess we're talking about. She made this impossible for you, so if I break her little game, she's going to come after me. This way, I avoid liability and you get stronger."

"How long do you think it will take?"

"Depends on how good you are," Ben admitted, "but I'd give you a hundred years or so. You're an immortal, right?"

"Very well," the swordsman accepted, "if this is the price I must pay to be rid of the goddess, I shall do it gladly."

"Tell me that once you've paid it," Ben said sourly. "Just one thing, this is technically a one-way trip. If you want to come back, you're going to need to cut the space yourself."

"It sounds like seclusion training," Alsace grinned. "Do I just step up here, or -"

The swordsman stepped onto the platform and disappeared as space folded around him, transporting him beyond the edge of the universe. Ben smacked himself in the forehead at the sheer idiocy of just walking into altered space-time without protection, but only for a moment.

Like the distant howl of winds, the room seemed to wave as space and time contorted around the machine, then a bubble popped in the fabric of reality and the swordsman stood on the machine once more.

Where before he was a grizzled veteran mercenary of foreign wars, now stood a demigod of incomparable strength and grandeur. His hair flowed for yards behind him like a mountain stream as his eyes glowed and cackled with barely contained divine energy. His robes that once lay draped over his body were now tight against his godly physique which grew in relation to his ascended willpower. He hovered slightly off the ground as he gazed around the room, as if fondly remembering the place he had been only seconds ago.

"Ready to go home?" Ben asked Alsace, who looked at him as if for the first time.

"That was not a hundred years," the demigod accused, floating towards Ben threateningly.

"How long do you suppose, then?" Ben asked casually as reality curved around the swordsman.

"I never bothered to count. When I arrived in the void, I focused solely on swinging my sword. I swung until I was tired, then I swung until I was rested. I swung until it hurt, then I swung until I was healed. I swung when I wanted to, and I swung when I didn't want to. I swung until I was fast enough to cut light, then I swung slow enough to match the compressed flow of time. I swung until I went insane, then I swung until I was sane again. When I stopped swinging my sword, I swung with my imagination, until I was able to swing the sword with my mind. My willpower became the sword itself, and I swung between swings."

The god of swords reached to his hip and pulled out the unbreakable sword, except that there was no blade. It had been worn down to the hilt and even the metal which belonged inside the hilt was gone. He rolled his wrist which held the hilt and the world seemed to bend and sharpen until the universe itself formed into a sword on his command.

"Now, my sword is everything and everywhere," Alsace stated.

"Congratulations on accepting your divine principle," Ben said. "You even have that new deity smell, but you should probably show that goddess what-for."

"For millennia, I have considered the mere intentions of a minor deity beneath me," the newly minted higher being said, "but now that I have returned... I wish to test my new sword."

"Go for it, big guy," Ben offered, "but when the Councilius Deus make contact with you, try to hide the fact that I had a hand in this."

Alsace smirked, "It is as you said long ago. There is no upper limit, there is only the climb. I am certain you have thought of this, but this council will surely pester you. Are they not going to be worse than the goddess whose ire you were trying to avoid?"

"Oh, naw," Ben dismissed, "the council already know I'm not someone they can handle. It's just the minor deities that talk shit and don't know their place that I find annoying."

"This is why I waited until I was out of options before seeking your aid," sighed the sword god, crossing his arms. "Even as I have ascended above all, you still scare me.... And now that I have awakened higher senses, I can tell-"

"-you're a real monster."

Reality divided on itself, then the new god was gone.

Ben let the stuffy air clear a bit, then checked his watch and noted, "Hey, I can still make the last half of practice!"

He quickly pulled out his phone and dialed a number, and Katherine answered, "Coach? What's up?"

"How's practice going?"

"We're on a run right now."

"What?! I told Ms. Tenpenny today was a strength day! I finished what I was doing, I'm coming down and we're doing the hell core!"

"Oh god, please no! My abs are still sore from last week!"

"Too bad," Ben smiled wickedly. "Besides, there are worse ways to train."