“The Nephilim are a… what species? Clan? Variety of human? That inherited the will of the first God Defier? That’s a Hell of an inheritance, right there.”

“Yes. We have also been historically at the forefront of technological development too, though at this point Nephilim and Sethian (that’s the randos on the street, by the way) technology have diverged so much, comparing them is kind of pointless.”

“Really? The impression I got, from the very little I know about the Nephilim, is that their worlds are pretty crude looking.”

“Yeah, they are. Like I said, different technology bases reaching different outcomes. Part of the reason the Clan goes so nuts on the luxuries when we are in Sethian territory. They are just better at making this stuff.”

“So what are the Nephilim good at?”

“Our magic system is literally, and almost entirely, distinct from Sethian magic. You remember that spell book I showed you? You can think of us as specializing in body cultivation (which doesn’t mean what you think it means) agriculture and metalworking. Not to mention AMAZING musicians. I mean the best. Your favorite singer is trash, I’m not even kidding. Don’t let my cousins and I fool you. We are basically expendable infiltration units. My great, great grandparents got some very basic body cultivation technology and a few other support magics, and were turned loose on this planet to lay a foundation for the real invasion.”

“You knew the apocalypse was coming for that long?”

“No, not really. A few decades at most.”

Truth stared at Susan, who looked utterly comfortable in her plush bathrobe and overstuffed chair.

“You were always going to invade, apocalypse or not.”

“Right.” She nodded. “We do this on almost every planet. It’s not a secret. It’s why most developed Sethian worlds try to keep us corralled in trade quarters or embassies.”

“A constant state of war… How do they afford it? In lives, if not money?”

“We aren’t constantly at war. Raiding is common, but actual conquest is pretty rare. It’s more a kind of… philosophical thing. We are going to conquer the material universe, we just haven’t gotten around to a particular planet yet.”

Truth blinked and shook his head slowly. “It’s a lot to take in. I genuinely had no idea. The Rough Patron always seemed confident and free, but I wouldn’t have said murderous, exactly.”

Susan started sputtering and hammering her chest. “Rough Patron?! You said that before and I was so surprised it didn’t even register. Rough Patron? What, is he buying your ass or something?!”

“Well, he never told me his name, and he was hanging around a campfire, wearing a crude tunic and pretty dirty, so…” Truth waved his hands urgently.

“Oh my dog. Oh my absolute dog.” She pressed strong fingers to throbbing temples. “Look, just do me a favor and just call him the Eldest Son while you are here, Okay? Please and thank you.”

“Sure. Dog?”

“Eh, oh. We don’t swear by God much, but we do like dogs. So. You know.”

“Got it. Makes sense.”

Truth let the silence build a little longer, then looped back to something she mentioned earlier.

“Raiding is common but conquest isn’t?”

“Yeah. Wars are expensive as Hell, and tend not to net a positive return on investment on anything but a very long term basis. And that’s assuming we succeed, which is never a given. Raiding, done right, generates money while simultaneously weakening the enemy.”

“And provides combat experience for your troops, I suppose.”

“Exactly. Although, again, “troops” is an exaggeration. More like individual families or clans sponsor a raid, then divide up the loot afterward without the government being involved beyond collecting taxes. The raiders tend to be ordinary folk just looking for a bit of extra income or some slaves or something.”

Ah. That he didn’t like the sound of.

“You did mention being experts in agriculture. Am I right in guessing…?”

“Yep. We hate farming and farmers, but agriculture is just too damn useful a technology to ignore. So we literally farm it out to prisoners with jobs.”

“And mining?”

“Oh we do the mining. The Nephilim I mean. Yeah, our mines are super inefficient compared to Sethian ones, but we prefer them that way.”

“Huh?”

Her eyes went dreamy. “Just you, in your bare skin. Fists hammering at the rock. Fingers ripping out the ores. The physical struggle embodying the triumph of spirit over matter through the living medium of the flesh. It’s the glory of our breed. Sethians try to return to the godhead through reason. But reason alone was never going to be enough. The truth of the world is not something to be worked out on paper. It is to be experienced with your entirety.”

Truth jolted. “Yes! Your soul fills your whole body. It doesn’t just live in your head.”

“Exactly. Exactly. The key is to not become lost in the illusion of matter. To know the glory of the infinite in your entirety. To test your spirit, your endlessly refined will and peerless determination against the embodiment of the great failure itself! What could be better than that? What could be more holy than that?”

Truth was swept up in her words, lost in the vision of it. The visceral satisfaction of moving his body, overcoming the pain and obstacles, honing his spirit even as-

“Oh dog, this is why your tech base is so weird. Your mineral production rate is ass, meaning your alchemical production rate is ass, your construction is ass, and the only reason your metallurgy is so good is that it has to be, because you need to wring out ever scrap of benefit from your stupidly expensive, stupidly rare metals.”

Susan laughed. “You aren’t wrong! We do the same crap with trees and any other kind of resource extraction. Bare handed or not at all. Or we steal it, obviously. Other stuff we make tools for. I mean, can you even imagine trying to make fabric without tools?”

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“Fantastic.”

“Yeah, we are stocking up on all the refined raw materials we can now, because in a few months, that stuff just won’t be available at any price. The clan is looking to flip it into some seriously massive income in a couple of years.”

“I bet.” Truth privately resolved to send Niles a rather lengthy note before he headed off for Starbrite.

“So, what brings you by? Not that I’m not happy to see you again, but you don’t strike me as a casual visit sort.” Susan leaned forward.

“Actually, it was more or less just to see you.” Truth scratched his head awkwardly. “I don’t have a lot of friends. Don’t really know how to have friends. So I thought I would visit.”

He would treasure forever the look on her face. Even she probably didn’t know what she was feeling.

“You see, I don’t know that I’m going to survive the next month, so I figured, you know. Do something I have never done before. Drop by a friend’s place and hang out for a bit.”

“Oh, um. Well. Going to admit it’s not a common thing for me either. Mostly it's the cousins I like a bit better that stop by and… um.” Truth thought she looked kind of adorable when she was flustered like that. Not his aesthetic cup of tea, but he had a suspicion that anyone into muscles would be helpless.

She took a moment to gather herself. “You want some snacks?”

“Love some. Is there a good place around here?”

“Absolutely not. I’ll have some sent up from the kitchen.”

“No good snack places?”

“Nah, this neighborhood has basically no redeeming features.” She shrugged and spread her hands.

“So why build here?”

“It was cheap and great-grandpa didn’t care.”

“Makes sense.”

Susan fiddled with an odd looking bone charm. “I’m getting a few platters of beef skewers and a couple bowls of noodles. Should I order the same for you?”

Truth felt himself involuntarily grin. “One bowl of noodles, but I’ll take the skewers. Do they come with sauce?”

“Marinaded for twenty four hours in a mixture of red wine, herbs, garlic and salt, roasted over the finest charcoal and then, yes, served with a selection of dipping sauces. Don’t give me that look, have you seen the size of us? That guy you laid out downstairs is on the low side of average. We have at least one cow marinating at any given time.”

“I truly am not your match. I figured having some nuts, or maybe corn in cheese sauce would be standard.”

“Those aren’t snacks! Those are barely garnishes.”

“Have you guys even heard of vegetables?”

“Naturally, but not for a snack. That’s barbaric.”

“Vegetarianism isn’t even a concept for you guys, is it?”

“Of course it is! It’s an insult. Call someone a vegan and it’s on sight until one of you dies.”

“Your reading material is, and I mean this respectfully, atrocious. You have not one trashy romance or thriller anywhere in that stack.”

“Why would I want a trashy romance to read when I can just stick my head out the door and watch my moron relatives act like they are in a soap opera every second of every day? Wait, you read that crap?”

“How do you think I managed to get a girlfriend?”

“Please. Please tell me that’s not true. I don’t want to live in a world where that’s true. Couldn’t you just steal her from her kinsfolk or something?”

They bickered back and forth until the food came. As advertised, it was platters of enormous beef skewers with a selection of small bowls full of dipping sauce. Apparently, the thing to do was tear off a piece of flatbread, wrap the beef with it, slide it off the skewer, dip, eat, and repeat.

It was pretty great. The meat, but also the company. Just someone he could hang out with- not a mentor, not a servant, not a lover, not a stranger. Someone he could look straight in the eye and just put it all down. Gods and angels and the end of the world and his girlfriend’s plan for his apotheosis, he could just put it all down. Just for a little while.

This was how it was supposed to be in the PMC. And the Army. He remembered the other soldiers doing exactly this- eating snacks, talking crap and just being humans for a while. He never really managed it. Couldn’t quite make it all click. It just seemed so pointless. None of that chat would earn him credits, or cash, or anything, so why do it?

He got it now. It’s the exhale. You take a deep breath, face all the horrible shit the world flings at you, then you meet your friend and exhale. Let all that pain out. Not by dumping it on them, but by being human with them.

He had a little bit of that with Jember, hanging out together with him and Etenesh, watching sports and cheering randomly. This was… well. This was like that. Somehow, he just appreciated it more, now. Maybe he had grown.

He had figured out a long time ago the Truth that crawled out of the slums was badly damaged. A tightly wound ball of hate and rage and desperate need to survive. Blind to the things that were truly killing him.

Truth balanced on the edge paranoia for a second, but ultimately, decided to take that step towards trust.

“So… you guys will want an ecosystem on this planet once the invasion starts.The ability to grow crops and raise cows and all that.”

Susan’s voice went very dry. “Yes. The ability to breathe air is not strictly mandatory at higher levels but babies are weirdly insistent about it. We will, in fact, want an ecosystem.”

“So. I’m not sure what you can do about this, either individually or as a clan, but let me tell you about a box I found buried in the ground.”

He explained about the plague engines and what they would mean for the world. About how they would, eventually, kill everything. Nephilim included.

“It’s not that I particularly trust you guys with a doomsday, end of the world weapon. It’s just, I figure that if this planet can build it with Initiate grade technology, similar stuff must exist on other planets.”

Susan was very quiet, very still. “It does, yes. There are reasons they aren’t used. Reasons I can’t talk about. Put very simply, once you can reach orbit, ending the world is basically a question of mathematics. But since the world is also an emanation of a higher being-”

“Right. I did kind of wonder about that.”

“And like I said, there are reasons people don’t do that kind of thing. Even Hell cannot conceal you from the punishment. They also tend not to work. The fact that someone built that thing, and probably built more…” Her voice trailed off.

“I will do what I can to persuade the Clan to act. I think they will listen, all things considered. No promises.”

“Didn’t expect any. Thank you.” The room got quiet.

“You said you are going to kill Starbrite?” Susan’s voice had turned soft.

“Yes. For all the reasons you might imagine.”

She nodded. “We were just going to wait him out. Whatever he’s up to, it’s no harm to us, you know? Also, we just don’t want to screw with someone who has reached that level. Not unless we really have to.”

“Fair. But I really have to.”

“Guess so.”

She nodded. “Want some skewers to go? We really do roast them by the dozens.”

“Won’t say no to meat. Hard to come by these days.”

She fiddled with the bone charm a bit more, then looked him coldly in the eye.

“How do you entertain a bored God-King?”

“I… have no idea?” He was suddenly fascinated. This question may be very relevant in the future.

“You sail a boatload of young ladies down the river dressed only in nets, and suggest the God-King go catch a fish.”

She suddenly smiled. “Do better than a knock-knock joke next time. That one was lame.”

Truth laughed and nodded. “I am not good at jokes. But come on- doesn’t the delivery count for anything?”