by D. Rus
I spent the next few hours scanning hundreds of pages of fine print. My head was buzzing on the same note as the mana flow: either from the information overload or from the proximity of the altar. And I couldn't even move aside as I still needed to be in direct contact with the stone. All discomfort aside, I had to admit that few things were more gratifying that studying the skills and abilities of the average Pantheon, especially in a world where gods weren't just manipulation tools in the hands of corrupted priests. Here, they were a force to be reckoned with and the knowledge of them remained a vital tool indeed.
I kept turning page after page. A god, a goddess, a Titan, a dragon...
Zhelia, the goddess of sorrow, sympathy and weeping. Logically, she could do: lots of interesting skills, like blocking pain sensations in battle. To my chagrin, she didn't have what I needed most: voluntary death.
Karna, her sister. Mourning the dead, eternal grieving, greeting the fallen ones on their way to the world of the dead. Same thing: lots of bells and whistles but not the one I needed most.
Finally, when I'd made my way through not only Slavic gods but also Scandinavian, I found it!
Macaria. The daughter of Hades and Persephone. The goddess of blissful death. In Greek mythology, hers was a bit part: apparently, she sacrificed herself at the altar in order to win victory in battle for her brothers. As a goddess she didn't account for much, her skills being mainly passive, but they all dealt with one thing only: an easy death, beneficial and even enjoyable.
Second Chance: a passive skill giving a 10% chance of immediately respawning on the spot in full armor without any XP losses.
Always At Hand: a passive skill giving a 25% chance of your grave teleporting with you to your bind point.
Smile of a Goddess: a passive skill giving 1% chance of receiving extra XP in case of death, equaling five times the XP penalty in case of death at the hands of a mob.
Grace of God: a passive skill giving 10% of not losing experience in case of death.
And, finally, that was it:
Blissful Death for Another. The skill grants and easy and painless death while sharing the experience lost equally between the Goddess, the Fallen One and the player of your choice. Cooldown: 1 hr.
Bingo. I sent another Internet request for more information. The answer was quite reassuring: the girl had no backstory of any scary or questionable actions, a perfect faceless prospect, virtually a new skill tree with no Hades, Morana or Koschei lurking behind it to pull any strings. Or so I hoped. True, it was unlikely the girl would strengthen the Fallen One, but that wasn't the idea. The sheer voluntary death option would preclude any kidnappings or forceful imprisonment, bringing all perma players—at least a hundred thousand people—under the Fallen One's banners. That was even if you didn't count some totally cool passive skills that could cut your experience losses a good 25%.
I stole a look around, making sure the Fallen One wasn't listening in. He could well have his own ideas about his Pantheon, and there I was, suggesting Macaria the Blessed as his sidekick. I highlighted the line I needed and pressed Yes, whispering,
"This is none of my fault. You should have let me in on your plans."
Bang! Once again, the floor shuddered. The shield I'd so comfortably been sitting on slid from under my backside like a dog on ice. I dropped onto my back, noticing a cloud of a thousand lights appear under the dome and thicken into a luminescent figure.
Pantheon alert! A new force has entered the world! Macaria, the goddess of easy death, has joined the Pantheon of the Fallen One.
Dark worshippers! Now you can choose your patron god. In order to do that, visit the temple of your chosen deity or address yourself to one of the Fallen One's priests.
Too bad. I would have thought that clicking a god's name on the menu would be enough. But apparently, religion was sold piecemeal. What now, then? Was I supposed to set up a portal right in the Temple or bless every worshipper personally? Wonder how much the Olders would fork out for private protection against kidnapping? And did I really want to offer them that option? That's where my interests could potentially clash with those of the Fallen One. He needed worshippers while I didn't want the skills to disperse around the world. Having said that, I was his First Priest, so any growth of the Temple was also my personal growth. A mind-boggling prospect.
I waved the message windows away and froze. A pretty girl's figure hovered in the air halfway from the ceiling to the basalt floor.
I jumped up, brushed my clothes and lowered my head. "Goddess..."
Macaria turned her face to me, her eyes curious but still trance-like. "Priest. How long did I sleep?"
Oh. Suppressing the desire to scratch my head, I flexed my math muscles. "Over two thousand years."
"That's a lot. Where are the Heraclidae, my brothers?"
How was I supposed to know? She liked asking uncomfortable questions, didn't she? "In the legends," I managed.
"And this," the girl poked the molten stone with a squeamish finger, "is this my Temple?"
"Actually, this is the Temple of the Fallen One. He's the highest god here. But it's yours as well, my lady," I tried to sugar-coat the news that she'd have to share.
She frowned, shaking her head. "Never heard of him. This awful place just can't be my Temple. Everything has to be white!"
Following a wave of her hand, the streaks of molten stone shifted on the walls, acquiring the whiteness of the finest marble and the sheen of mountain snow caps. In a flash, gone was the dirt; gold mosaic patterns ran across the gleaming white. Slender stucco columns reached for the ceiling sparkling with the finest frescoes.
I stood open-mouthed, watching the Temple's miraculous resurrection. Had anyone ever witnessed something like this in real life, they'd have stopped wreaking havoc on earth and sought redemption under the banners of faith.
"It's just like back home," the goddess whispered. She clutched at her chest and burst out coughing, blood fountaining from her mouth. The girl sank to her knees, croaking, then collapsed to one side.
I darted toward her and scooped her up in my arms, swinging my head every which way. What was I supposed to do? She kept coughing, spitting red everywhere, dark streaks running from her ears and nose.
I concentrated on my internal interface and slammed the new Appeal to Gods button. Tasting the girl's blood in my mouth, I yelled,
"Help me, O Fallen One, quick!"
You have tasted divine blood! Now you will always retain a divine particle within you. Your skills and abilities will be a cut above the rest of the mortal world. But beware of false pride! Do not consider yourself equal to Gods! The stairway to heaven is long and fragile; according to some, it has no end at all.
Jesus. For a brief moment, I even forgot about the girl who was hosing everything down with her blood. A hoarse croak brought me back to my senses. I swept the message into Junk and yelled again,
"Fallen One, you son of a-"
"Keep your voice down," a calm voice said next to me. "So you're a vampire now, eh? Who is it you're sucking dry?"
He looked pleased with himself like a cat who'd stolen a pot of cream and chased it down with a double serving of valerian. He looked into the girl's face and gasped, his voice sobering.
"A goddess?"
He rushed towards her and ripped her collar open, exposing a voluptuous blood-soaked chest. He lay his hand on it. Groaning threads of energy stretched from the altar toward him, pumping enormous amounts of mana in double record time. The veins bulged on his glowing arm. Shaking all over, he stood there unmoving, scowling, siphoning kilotons of mana into the wasted goddess. As I watched the altar's glow fade, I grew restless. What if AI 311 had botched up the system it had taken me so much to restore?
The old 311 hadn't let me down, though. Soon the umbilical cord connecting him to the altar started to wither. Heaving a sigh, the Fallen One breathed in the last drops of energy and waved his hand, severing his connection with the altar. His legs gave way; he lo
wered himself onto the blood-soaked floor next to me.
"Stupid girl..." he whispered looking at her, his voice strangely gentle. The girl's face was clear now, her breathing level. You'd think she was asleep.
He turned to me, raising his hand for a high-five. Mechanically I slapped his palm, celebrating our victory. The familiar gesture symbolized the finding of the Temple, the double resurrection of the goddess and our shared closeness on the bloodied floor. But once I slapped it, I quickly retracted mine. Wasn't I a bit too fraternal with a god? We weren't basketball buddies, after all.
The Fallen One smiled, understanding. "It's all right, Max. You've done good. Congratulations on your priesthood. Now you're the first man on earth after God. Make sure you carry your title with honor. My special thanks for the altar and," he paused reading the information unseen to me, "for Macaria. She is much more significant than she might seem. And when millions of players start worshipping her, they'll make her a true gem of my Pantheon or even something much more important..."
He grunted, getting back to his feet, and walked over to where the girl lay, crouching next to her. Then he smiled, listening to something, and took her hand in his, whispering.
In the meantime, my inner greedy pig had come to and demanded my attention. Knocking himself on the forehead, he winked at the crimson puddles of potentially precious waste. God's blood, oh well. I glanced at the Fallen One's back and reached gingerly into my bag. Trying not to make much noise, I felt for the alchemy kit and produced five empty vials. Dunking them quickly into the priceless ingredient, I sealed them tight and shoved the vials deep into my pocket. Why not? It was going to be wasted, anyway. I might end up mopping it all up in a minute. Wiping God's blood away with a dirty cloth, yeah right...
I rose with a sigh and dragged my feet toward the altar. While the Fallen One was there, I still had to sort out one other thing, namely the promise I'd so stupidly made to one greedy ex-dragon.
I lay my hand on the dark stone, glancing at the status menu.
Dark Altar of the First Temple. Consecrated to the Fallen One.
Junior God: Macaria, the Goddess of Easy Death.
First Priest: Laith
Level: 3
Faith points: 12,911
Faith points needed to proceed to the next level: 2,987,089.
Mana flow: 3,000 per sec. Already accumulated: 180,341. Maximum capacity: 30,000,000
Access levels to mana flow:
Fallen One, 90% control
First Priest, 10% control
I broke the connection, cursing. He'd been smart, hadn't he, that clever bag of bones! And I'd wondered why he'd only asked for ten percent considering my rather hapless situation. That shrunken lizard must have known from the start that that was all the mana available to a priest. But how about my own little projects? My baby dragons, my castle self-restoration channel and a tiny one for my own personal use? That wasn't the deal!
"Eh, Fallen One? Need to talk."
* * *
To Dave Rubac, Head of Integration and Development Department.
A memo excerpt:
Dear Sir,
In accordance with the plan endorsed by you we are now working on a number of retrofitted deep implants into AlterWorld. As of now, we have generated 24 class A installations, 411 class B installations as well as over 6,000 items, quest triggers, control modules and legal paperwork.
The process isn't as smooth as we'd hoped. Figuratively speaking, we're trying to shoe a running horse using gold nails and an electron microscope for a hammer. At the moment we can't introduce any changes above level 4. Most tasks at hand can't be solved head-on. You can't imagine the lengths we've had to go to in order to create the Battle Golems' bunker. That demanded over five hundred micro actions that discreetly pushed the world in the right direction.
However, to our deepest regret, even this method seems to have developed quite a few faults. The required number of the pressure points keeps growing at a frightening rate, increasing the probability of both our error and of the higher beings' resistance.
Considering all this, the recent loss of three class-A installations looks especially humiliating. I am talking about the closed-off Dead Lands zone, including the 9A installation known as the Super Nova Temple and excellently mapped-out mithril deposits having the total weight of 317 tons (entry 18A in the classified inventory). That's not even counting the roughly hundred lower-class artifacts still in the lands that are now off limits to us.
According to our investigation, AI 4915/E who was officially introduced as the generated territories' secondary tester responsible for the behavioral intellect of the implants' guards, stopped answering our status requests a few days ago. We tend to believe he went perma mode, then transferred his mind into a more powerful entity under his own control. We can only guess how the activated implant affected his own consciousness, but the fact remains that he has granted access to the object to the most undesirable individual in the whole of AlterWorld. No way that could be a coincidence as the player in question had in his possession an artifact that allowed him to restore the First Temple—a game scenario which wasn't at all previewed. And the nearest event that was supposed to solve several strategic problems at once, namely Obtaining the Heart of a Dark God, was only scheduled for the coming Christmas season.
The player has proved to be digitized which prevented us from checking his logs, but at least we've managed to recognize some residual traces of divine influence. It's possible that one of them, unable to restore the Altar on his own, generated a chain of events similar to how we create implants. Those are micro events: a mosquito biting you on the neck, a mob critting you, a waitress' cleavage distracting the object's attention for the 1.5 seconds necessary.
Whether the entity's objectives are limited to restoring the First Temple or they reach much further, we can't tell you right now.
Jan Kaevski, chief of the closed group.
Chapter Twelve
I gave the god a quick update on my adventures, then grassed on the sly-assed bag of bones. "You understand, don't you," I concluded, "that I need some mana flow even if only to clear up this mess," I pointed around me at what I remembered to be piles of junk.
The Fallen One studied the gleaming white decor with skepticism, raising a quizzical eyebrow at all the gilding and artwork. Embarrassed, I showed him my filthy hand smeared with the divine blood. "That's all Macaria's work! Outside, the place is a bomb site. The castle is in ruins and so is the Temple."
I started unbending my fingers. "Firstly, I need to restore the castle walls and the temple grounds. Then I'll need to explore the lands and ensure my own safety. Thirdly and lastly, the baby dragons on the North Tower are starving and need to be fed. There must be more, only I can't think of everything at once."
"That's enough," he shrugged off my arguments. "I know about Tianlong. You can't miss him: his lair is absolutely impenetrable to magic. But one-tenth of my altar for eternity—that's a bit thick! Next time you sign up for something stupid like that, at least cross your fingers behind you back. That way your karma cooldown will be less in case you renege on your word. Your contract is questionable in many respects so one could easily circumvent it, especially considering my training: I've made my way through a good hundred thousand manuals of which over two hundred are legal tomes. But... Dragon is our man, if you can say that of a skeletal Elf god. Attracting him to our camp is a number one task. Okay, wait here, I'll see what I can do."
He glanced at the goddess. With a warm smile, he rearranged the ripped shirt on her chest. Perfectionist! He could have restored it had he really wanted to. He snapped his fingers. The girl's body disappeared, on its way to some heavenly chambers awash with the sounds of panpipes. One more snap—and I stood there alone.
I looked around me. The hall was medically clean in its Greek beauty. The god had left, taking all the blood-stained DNA samples with him. What a shame. My inner greedy pig had been pulling at my jacket fighting to
attract my attention, hinting that the miserable five vials were nothing compared to a cozy wine cellar stacked up with more of the same.
Okay, what next? I checked my virtual to-do list and grinned. Freebies!
There's a time to cast stones and a time to gather them, I said to myself as I reached into my bag for the Soul Stone containing the Hell Hound. I wiped it clean with my sleeve.
"I've taken good care of you. I haven't wasted you stupidly. So please don't let me down."
I placed the stone onto the altar's mirrored black top and stepped back, just in case. In the nick of time.
My ears resounded with a powerful blast. A portal window materialized over the altar, allowing me a glimpse into the depths of the Inferno: it glowed every shade of crimson, lava flowing unhurriedly amid the strangely formed piles of basalt rocks.
Judging by the flames, the atmosphere there was thinner, causing oxygen to burn faster than the weird-looking Hell flora could produce it. Air gushed into the portal, trying to level out the pressure and pulling in everything within its reach. Like myself, for one. It was a good job the portal had a short-impulse structure. Had it lasted a bit longer, I'd have had every chance to enjoy the afterlife sooner than expected.
It all finished very quickly: with a double popping sound, the portal opened then closed again, with me clutching at thin air, my back a strangely convoluted shape. Talk about a lucky miss.
I switched my focus to read a new quest message:
Quest completion alert: Hell's Temptation. Quest completed!
Reward: Access to quest Hell's Temptation II.
Oh. My inner greedy pig opened and closed his mouth, speechless with indignation. Hadn't he had enough freebies? They kept coming faster than we could sort through them. A new quest was a very good thing: the further the unique chain of quests took us, the heftier the prize at the end of it. Consider the lost stone an investment, I told my greedy alter ego before closing the message. Underneath it, I discovered another one: