“You are the hero who is saving the world. Do heroes harvest souls? Genuinely asking, I don’t know.” Truth’s mouth had run away from him. His brain could understand why- under the circumstances, none of his body parts wanted anything to do with the rest of him. They were too obsessed with their own pain to worry about the pain of others.

Starbrite nodded, a ‘cheerful’ smile on his face as he reached down and snapped Truth’s pinky finger. The bone shattered, and not cleanly. Truth screamed. Starbrite’s smile got bigger. “Yes. Hero. The hero swoops in out of nowhere and makes everything better. Which is exactly what I did. This planet was a shithole before I got here. Civil Servant was the peak of most families' ambitions, as it was a stable way to steal money.”

Starbrite flicked his finger and hauled Truth into the air. “A planet full of people who could bind demons and your number one life path was Subsistence Farmer. That’s not even pathetic. Your shit language can’t even convey how deeply your ancestors failed. If you had any real concept of shame, your whole damn planet would sterilize itself to prevent its awful bloodline from continuing. And then I came and saved you ungrateful pricks.”

Starbrite threw a sloppy hook and caught Truth’s lowest rib on the right. It broke like kindling. Truth bit back another scream- this one in part frustration at just how sloppy the punch was. Starbrite wasn’t good at fighting, Truth realized. He was just strong.

“I gave you good jobs. Better houses. Better food. I made you rich. Don’t like your job? Just quit. You aren’t tied to the land.” Starbrite was working up his ribs. Some part of Truth was wondering if Starbrite was trying to break every bone in his body. The other part was just trying to not faint.

“A little loyalty isn’t too much to ask for all that. A little bit of work ethic. And you know what? If you aren’t putting your soul into the job, why the Hell are you doing it in the first place? Especially since it’s not like I’m blowing everything on hookers and booze like you freaks. I’m not the one shitting in trash cans or puking on strangers in the subway. No! I’m not!”

The last line was punctuated by two shots to the gut. Truth felt something rupture.

“I’m the guy who makes it so toilets can be in every house!”

He’s dancing around the truth. Perks whisper dry voice sounded in Truth’s mind. Why does he need the souls? Why does the need for souls get bigger, not smaller, with time?

Truth tried to fix Starbrite with a look, forcing his lungs to fill and his lips to work. “The souls. You keep needing more. You are bad at using them.”

Starbrite paused. The look of utter shock and fury on his face twisted it into a demon-mask, even more than the gouts of blue green fire.

Starbrite slammed Truth into the floor. Then pinned him in place with barbed iron rods called forth by his magic.

“Bad. At using. The soul fragments. Bad at using them. Me. Bad. At using them. You… absolute insect. No, you aren’t smart enough for an insect. You slime. You… goddamn bacterial raft. How do you not get this? How is this not immediately intuitively obvious after everything I’ve told you?! I BEAT THE ANGEL! I beat Sariel’s whole game! You know why I need the souls? Because that GOD DAMNED ANGEL keeps squeezing me! He keeps making me spend and spend to keep my Nascent Soul, and if I try to leave the planet, he goes fucking berzerk with the lightning, and the WHOLE TIME HE KEEPS SAYING THAT I’M NOT DOING IT THE RIGHT WAY!”

Truth nodded slightly at that. He wouldn’t give a shit about someone else's rules either, under the circumstances.

“Well guess what? Most people don’t awaken their souls. It’s pretty goddamn rare everywhere! And everyone keeps saying that you can’t explain it, you have to figure it out yourself, that it’s about understanding and, hah! Divine revelation.”

“Convenient excuse.” Truth mumbled through the blood. “Kind of thing people say to keep you down.”

“Finally, a flicker of light in that dim skull of yours. Maybe I will refine you into an eternally screaming lamp. Seems fitting. Screaming on the inside, obviously, I don’t want to be hearing that all the time.”

Starbrite started gently twisting the iron bars back and forth, enjoying the muffled shrieks and the muscles tore and shredded.

“Whoops- can’t have you dying on me yet. Lemmie hit you with a quick heal. On the house, I won’t charge you a single credit. On the other hand, those iron bars are a really high level spell! Can’t let you enjoy them for free, it would throw off the whole economy of the System. I’m going to have to charge you, including my time, obviously, twenty billion credits a minute.” Starbrite giggled slightly. “Unfortunately, your PMC discount no longer applies, or I could reduce it to fifteen billion, five hundred and thirty million.”

Truth felt the spell go off, repairing his flesh and shattered bones, healing up around the barbs and hooks still embedded in him. Once he was fixed up, Starbrite gave him exactly one second to enjoy the feeling, then started twisting the rods again.

Truth could see it perfectly. Starbrite had to keep growing. It wasn’t his power. It was all borrowed. The bet was against Sariel and on himself. Starbrite was betting he could reach some kind of point of stability, where he wouldn’t have to keep absorbing new souls and could just generate the power internally. But something from the outside always seemed to throw it off. Some pressure from the angel, or an attack from Siphios, or a new mineral deposit to exploit or something. He could never get to ‘enough’ because there would always be the instinct that he needed more.

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Which wasn’t crazy. After all, the bastards really were out to get him. Hard to feel safe when you know that, quite literally, the world is trying to kill you.

“Not content to just die peacefully and enjoy the next life?” He could talk more easily now- the internal organ damage had been healed up. It was just the agonizing pain as his muscles and tendons were shredded. He really wished he had a plan.

“Next life? Next? Are you… oh. OOOOH! That’s hilarious. That is actually completely fucking hilarious. Are you a reincarnator? I bet you are. You were a badass fighter since you could walk, according to your file. Well, no more cycle of reincarnation for you, fucko. It’s eternity as a screaming lamp from now on. There won’t be enough of you left to reincarnate as a dahlia. Nor time to live in.”

“I meant Heaven or Hell.”

The blue-green soul fire was dimming down. Starbrite didn’t seem to mind. Truth really didn’t want to find out why.

“Heh. Let me save you a little time. You know what’s on the other side of all that celestial machinery? At the origin of the Pleroma? Once you get past the Archons and Aeons and Angels and Demiurge and heavenly demons and the Ogdoad and all that other bullshit? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. A void that obliterates meaning. I can’t even call it a screaming void, because it obliterates that too. I have seen it. I have had a divine revelation, oh yes! I have had my own enlightenment. And you know what I learned? There is a God, and it destroys us.

“All that meaning we accumulated in life, everything we learned, everything we achieved, it all gets ground away, over and over again, until we finally return to the void and are obliterated. That’s it. That’s the end of the fucking celestial road. You keep climbing higher and higher, losing more and more, until you are completely unmade. So fuck doing it the ‘right way.’ Fuck a quiet life and a peaceful death. Fuck God, the angels, the devils, and fuck you too if you think I’m going to feel bad about any of this. My only regret is that fucking space worm escaped before I could refine her into a new body. Now I have to spend who-knows-how-many years having a nap, waiting to build up the empire all over again.”

Starbrite stood and smiled. “I’m pretty done with this rock. Well. Fuck it. Most of my souls have burned off, but the architecture is still there. Enough refined souls. Enough to keep me alive for a few tens of thousands of years, anyway. Just enough power left to kill off every single person who has ever irritated me, exterminate every single relative and friend you have, build that eternal suffering engine, and settle in for my nap. I won’t be starting from nothing, next time.”

Starbrite looked up at something only he could see. “Oh yes. My very own road to immortality. TRUE immortality! This is a setback, but only a setback. A blink in the span of eternity. Don’t think I can’t hurt your precious Nephilim too, Sariel. There are so many ways. So, so many ways. As long as your order is in place-”

“Why do you think that there won’t be any Nephilim Nascent Souls coming?”

“Eh? Can’t you read?! Any human-”

“Doesn’t say human from what I’m reading. Says ‘Children of Seth.’ And the Nephilim aren’t. You already lost. You can’t escape the planet, and once you are powerless, the Nephilim are going to stroll over and rip out your tendons. They were only hanging back because it wasn’t worth fighting you before. Now? It’s worth it. They love beating people who can’t fight back.”

Language is a funny thing, Truth reflected. Especially when the order was written in an Angelic script that was using the angel’s intent to communicate its meaning.

Starbrite looked upwards. Eyes tightening at the corner. He was a cloud of burning soul-fire, a floating skull, a philosopher king fighting on a higher level of reality than the merely secular. Truth saw the exact moment Starbrite panicked.

Now! Incisive told him this was the time to strike. He forced his body to tear off the hooks, leaving massive holes in him, leaving kilos of meat, organs and blood on the floor. Willing himself to move. Cup and Knife to “correct” Starbrite’s soul. It only lasted for a fraction of a second. For the barest fraction of a second. It was enough time to start falling forward. Taking a single step. Truth fell onto Starbrite, and his foot landed in the emptiness of space.

The floating head looked at him in horror and disgust. “Insect!” Hideous power came crashing back into the flaming cloud that was once the most powerful man in the world.

“We feel the same way about you.”

The stars were blotted out. Massive forms emerged from the void, long black shapes. Long beyond reason. So vast they shattered the mind’s sense of scale. A mountain range moving with the speed and fluidity of a water snake. Bigger than mountains. There was nothing to stop them from growing as big as they wished.

“Oh get fucked! You crooked thieves have been screwing over this planet since long before I got here!”

Truth tried to step away, but nothing happened. His legs barely twitched. Oh right. Blood loss. And… I think I am missing some important bits. Uh. Kidneys. Need those. My liver. I can get by on one lung, probably. He watched the gushing blood forming an enormous bubble around him. Gonna need to stop that bleeding.

He called up Cup and Knife. The spell seemed to struggle- against what, Truth didn’t know. He managed to stop the bleeding, at least. The rest would have to wait.

The Shattervoid weren’t interested in talking any nonsense with Starbrite. Enormous screens of magic folded around the floating head, crushing inward. Truth watched the magic working across layers of reality- space twisting in the secular world, serpents crushing it in another layer, giant hands in another. Starbrite wasn’t going quietly either. He was fighting back with waves of fire, of twisting razor wire, the pronouncements of terrible laws. However badly damaged he was, he had been the God of this rock for a long, long while. And he had never minded using violence to solve problems.

Truth really wished he was further away. The backblast had the advantage of pushing him further from the fight, but was also tearing him up. Tearing him up more. His heart hasn't stopped yet. He could survive a while even if it did. Still, even a glancing blow would obliterate him. He was just Level Five.

It was at this point that Sariel decided to join the fight.