by Neven Iliev
“Wordsworth? Is that you?!”
“In the metaphysical flesh!”
“Metawhatsical? Oh, I see. It’s like a remote-controlled body.”
“Indeed. I could have made a personal appearance, but thanks to you, I don’t have to expend all that effort. Forcing open a link to the Beyond from the inside like you did really makes this whole ‘invading a fellow deity’ thing much easier.”
“Okay. But, uh, shouldn’t I be getting out of here?”
“You could, though I would not recommend it. You’d be missing out on quite the show, after all!”
Following Urkel’s hand gesture, Boxxy’s yellow eyes settled upon Kora’s new form, which had gone through a number of dramatic changes. The most obvious one was that she was gigantic. The lack of any and all surrounding reference points made it hard to tell exactly how huge her floating body was, but at the very least she was a whole head taller than the dumbfounded Teresa. Furthermore, her Demonic Armaments – the physical manifestation of a fiend’s violent and warlike nature – had undergone a rather drastic transformation.
The demon’s usual greaves and gauntlets were still there, but they looked heavier, deadlier, and more intricately-designed than before. This extended to her newly acquired armor pieces as well. Her upper torso had a form-fitting breastplate instead of a stretchy cloth garment, and a spiked shoulder pad was attached to her front-left arm. Four flaps of segmented steel-like plates hung from an armored belt, two of them protecting her outer thighs while the other two dangled between her legs. Her midsection was still as vulnerable as before, but her abs were practically as hard as steel anyway. Besides, it wasn’t as if she had any organs, vital or otherwise, beneath those rippling muscles. Fiends’ bodies were weird like that.
However, Kora’s body underwent two key changes that, along with her new Demonic Armaments, implied she was no longer a mere fiend. She sprouted an extra pair of arms that brought her total to six, and a third jagged horn jutted up from the top of her forehead. Boxxy momentarily thought its familiar was replaced with another demon, but a second take made it clear that wasn’t the case. Her arguably attractive face, pointy-toothed grin, bright green hair, and vibrant red skin were all there, as was the manic, bloodthirsty glare in her glowing emerald eyes.
There was only one plausible explanation for all these changes, which Boxxy confirmed by taking a quick glance at its familiar’s Status.
“You… made her Rank Up?” it asked in disbelief.
“Yup!” declared Jamal. “Fiends are a bit too fragile a vessel to contain the kind of output I’m subjecting her to, so I gave her a little push, as it were. So, congratulations, Boxxy! You are now the proud owner of an archfiend familiar!”
“Neat!”
The shapeshifter certainly wasn’t going to complain about this development.
“Oh, YEAAAAH!”
And judging from the demon’s current behavior, she was absolutely loving it.
“MMmmng!” she groaned in satisfaction while flexing and twisting her newly amped-up body. “This feels amazeballs! It’s incredible! I feel like I could punch a guy and not only kill him, but also wipe out his entire race!”
“What- What is the meaning of this?!” asked Teresa, completely befuddled by this sudden development.
“Why, it’s exactly as I said,” Gerald answered in a booming voice. “My lovely assistant here will be administering your punishment for playing too fast and loose with our rules. So, Koralenteprix, my dear?”
“Yeah?”
“Would you kindly slap Teresa’s shit for me?”
“… All of it?”
“All of it.”
“I dunno, Chief. That’s a looooot of bullshit.”
The newly reborn archfiend slammed her left fists into her right palms, eliciting a trio of heavy, dull clangs.
“But I’m sure I can manage!”
No sooner did she utter those words than Kora’s form vanished.
*SMACK*
In the next instant, the demon reappeared in front of the indignant Goddess, her right fists firmly embedded in the divine woman’s torso. Her body caught up with the massive triple impact a split-second later and was flung into the distance like a ragdoll. Moving once again with speed too fast for even Boxxy to follow, Kora reappeared in her flight path and delivered a flying double kick to Teresa’s spine, sending her flying downwards like a meteor. The Goddess’s relatively smaller body collided with what seemed to be thin air, creating a spider-web pattern of cracks through the boundary of her divine area. Indeed, even if it looked infinite, a god’s private space was anything but. So, having crashed so violently into the ‘floor’ of her own ‘house,’ the illusion of an endless blue sky shattered, leaving behind a smooth, dull gray surface.
“OOOO-RAH!”
Not letting up in the slightest, Kora stomped down on top of Teresa’s waist with enough force to send a visible ripple through the border of her pocket reality, further distorting the heavenly illusion around it. The fiend hopped off her victim and reached down to grab her by the left ankle. She then flung the Goddess overhead and slammed her face-down on the ground with an extremely satisfying thud. Still gripping her leg, Kora proceeded to throw Teresa about at random, smacking her into the ground over and over as if she was using a coin-filled sock to massage a dragon’s back.
“BEST! *THUMP* DAY! *THUMP* EVER! *THUMP*”
The extremely elated demon grabbed onto the Goddess’s two feet with all six of her hands.
“ORA!”
She slammed her into the ground with such force the blonde-haired deity bounced back up to Kora’s eye level. The demoness lunged forward and grabbed her newest toy by the neck with one of her left arms and held her up while seemingly trying to choke the life out of her.
“C’mon, bitch!” she shouted. “I want to hear you scream!”
Teresa, who had remained completely silent ever since the beating started, responded by spitting out a loose tooth which bounced pointlessly off of Kora’s middle horn. The defiant glare in her eyes said louder than any words that there was absolutely no way she’d yield with only this much abuse.
“Oh, you’re feisty,” remarked the fiend with a widening grin. “Good! I like feisty!”
Kora worked her over top to bottom, repeatedly punching her with her five free hands. A series of rapid dull thuds echoed throughout the area, accompanied by the archfiend’s rolling yells of ‘RARARARARA,’ but not even a whimper escaped from the Goddess herself.
“You know, I’ve been wondering about something regarding that girl,” said Nimoy in a bemused tone.
“Oh? What’s that?” asked Boxxy, who had reverted to its chest-shaped form in order to make itself more comfortable.
The two of them were still floating about on Fergus’s sofa, which gave them a superb view of the Goddess-turned-punching-bag’s ongoing punishment.
“Why does she do that ‘ora ora’ thing with her mouth?”
“No idea,” answered Boxxy. “She probably just finds it fun.”
“Ah, right, of course.”
“While we’re at it, I’d like to ask about something that’s been bothering me for a bit.”
“Not promising any answers, but shoot.”
“How come Teresa has such massive breasts?”
“Because she's big,” the God of Rounding Errors casually pointed out.
“I meant proportionally, not just sheer volume.”
“So did I.”
“… What?”
“Sorry, I phrased that poorly. I meant it's because she's quite popular.”
“How does that matter?”
“Well, for the most part, a deity's appearance is shaped by their followers' beliefs. If a God or Goddess looks a specific way, it’s because enough people think that that’s how they should look like. We can alter our shape, of course, but only to an extent. Public opinion has final say on the matter. Sort of a hive-mind subconscious thing, know what I mean?”
> “I think I get that, yeah. Still doesn't answer my question, though. Only makes her bust size stranger, actually.”
“In what way?”
“Her clergy practices celibacy, right? Shouldn’t that mean she should be more prudish and modest?”
Those titanic tits and that indecent outfit seemed like they belonged to a succubus rather than the head of a religion that focused on order, truth, purity, and other such stifling concepts.
“No, no, no,” Huey declined with a wave of his celery. “See, it actually has the opposite effect. Think about it – how many of those Priests and Paladins do you think are pent up?”
“Now that you mention it… I did once murder a priestess of hers because she apparently decided the best place to have anal sex was outside. In a field. At night. Beyond the city’s walls.”
Boxxy’s recollection of the event was rather sketchy on the details. It had happened months ago, back when the shapeshifter was still a mimic trying to infiltrate the Mercenary Guild branch in Erosa. At the time, it hadn’t really given the odd occurrence much thought, but its present self could see how utilizing the back door might not technically violate an oath of chastity. If enough of Teresa’s followers were repressed enough to go down that route, then the slutty appearance of their Goddess made sense. However…
“Why the large breasts, though?” it insistently asked. “Like why that part, specifically?”
“Oh, for the love of- Look,” Denny was getting frustrated. “Men by far prefer big ones. Most women, on the other hand, either share that preference or don’t care either way. There are those that like them small, yes, but they’re in the minority. So, when you average it, and add some sexual frustration – or maybe a lot of it, I don’t have the exact statistics right now – you end up with, well, that.”
That was as reasonable an explanation as the shapeshifter would get. It briefly wondered whether humans were indeed horny enough to make that sort of thing possible, but then it remembered. Succubi were a thing. If the lore gleaned from its Demonology Skill was to be believed, the conniving seductresses were spawned from the unfulfilled fantasies of desperate perverts. Men were far more lascivious than women, hence why succubi were an exclusively female race of demons. If Teresa was shaped by a similar consensus, then her ridiculously voluptuous appearance made sense.
Its nagging curiosity satisfied for the moment, Boxxy’s mind turned to more pressing issues.
“Say, Marco? Not for nothing, but can I get going now? I have stuff to do and this is getting kind of boring.”
“Boring? Really?” the man-shaped cloud was taken aback.
“Well, yeah. As much as Arms tries, the Goddess doesn’t seem to care at all.”
Indeed, even though Kora’s fists pummeled her flesh and pulverized her bones, Teresa remained completely unphased. Thinking back, the way she yelped when her nose was broken at the start was more out of surprise than pain.
“Just seems like a waste of effort,” Boxxy added.
“I suppose you have a point,” said Charles. “Being both invulnerable and immortal makes it quite difficult to administer corporal punishment. Well, it probably still stings like a bitch, but this beating won’t really teach her a lesson.”
“So then why even bother?”
“Because I find it quite cathartic, to be honest. It’s just satisfying watching that cheating cunt get her comeuppance after all this time. Although, truth be told, even I’m growing a bit bored of this. I suppose I might as well move onto the meat of the matter. Ahem!”
Jerry cleared his throat as he changed to his ‘outdoors’ voice.
“Oh, Koralenteprix! Sorry to butt in and ruin your fun, but could you be a dear and let me speak with Teresa for a moment?”
“You got it, Chief!”
The fiend stopped pummeling her sandbag of a target and grabbed her from behind, using her multiple limbs to firmly restrain Teresa’s arms and hold her in place while Rachel’s sofa floated down to her eye level.
“Now then. I suppose I should begin administering your punishment for real, eh Teresa?”
“Punishment? Don’t make me laugh you impudent wretch!” she responded defiantly.
“Oh, I assure you, the chance of you laughing anytime soon is very much an absolute zero.”
“Humpf! Do your worst, asshat! After that we’ll see how the others feel about you trespassing on my domain!”
“Tisk, tisk, tisk, Teresa. Did you just assume I bypassed the other gods and came here without getting their consent first? That’s right – they not only know about my being here, but also support this little… intervention. I would’ve been here sooner if I didn’t have to pay them a visit first.”
The Goddess blinked her gigantic blue eyes several times in surprise.
“… What? Those guys turned their backs on me?!”
“Well, duh! Your little stunts have pissed off quite a few of them, you know! This little war you’ve allowed to go on certainly hasn’t earned you any friends. I mean, Nyrie is definitely not a fan of having her followers slaughtered by the thousands, even though you seem to be fine with yours getting the same. Lunar’s also quite miffed that the war is diverting efforts away from studying and containing the Calamity that sort-of set it off. Even Axel doesn’t condone this senseless conflict, and I’m sure I don’t need to explain why Mortimer is pissed at you. As for Solus, Zephyra, and Goroth, they’re respectively too light-headed, too air-headed, and too thick-headed to give a damn about this whole mess, so they’ve chosen to abstain from it completely.”
Teresa could only glare back in mute silence as she realized none of her fellow deities had stood up to her. There was no chance that Nick made all that up to demoralize her since the Goddess of Truth and Justice could instantly discern any spoken falsehoods as such.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Bruce crossed his sheets. “You’ve got nobody but yourself to blame for your predicament. It was your selfish desire to create a husband that caused all of this in the first place.”
The Goddess’s eyes went wide and her lip quivered slightly as her secret was suddenly brought to light.
“You-! How did you find out about that?!”
“Puh-lease, sister! You think nobody would notice the last dozen or so Heroes you chose are all hunky, blond, blue-eyed heartthrobs? There are plenty of just and righteous people out there, and yet you always seem to pick men that fit the same type. Then you dote on them relentlessly, doing your darndest to try and keep them safe in the vague hope they’ll Rank Up enough times to stop aging, even though it never works out that way. What you’re doing is so obvious that you might as well yell ‘I’m looking for a man’ from the mountaintops! I can understand not wanting to bear eternity all by your lonesome. Believe me, I do! But sharing your divine spark with a mortal just to turn him into your ideal man? That’s just crazy!”
“Fuck you, you duplicitous shit!” she spat back. “It’s my Hero, and I’ll do whatever I want with him!”
“Come on, Teresa!” whined Lorna in exasperation. “You know that’s not how it works! The Hero shapes the God just as much as the God shapes the Hero. It’s a give-and-take. A two-way partnership, not some weird marital contract! I mean, it’s not like your choice of Hero this time around was particularly bad or anything. I’ll admit, the young lad could have had a very promising future ahead of him, but that should have ended when he died.”
“You were the one who got him killed in the first place!”
“So what? A dungeon core meltdown, a wild wyvern, a bandit ambush, a political assassination, a ravenous venereal disease, old age – something would have gotten him eventually. This time just happened to be sooner rather than later, and that should’ve been the end of it. But nooo! You had to go and resurrect the guy! He could’ve just passed away in peace, but your pathetic attempt to cling to his shattered potential led him down this self-destructive spiral of hatred!”
Terry took a deep breath to reign in his tangent
ial rant before speaking in a much more serious tone.
“You knew others were twisting him with lies, and yet you did nothing. You let the lad believe the Empire’s cause was just when you were fully aware it was a huge farce. And for what? Just so he could cope with the loss of his friends and family?! Don’t underestimate mortals, you insufferable twat!”
“I think you’re the one overestimating them!” she argued back. “Without our guidance, those idiots would still be beating each other over the head with sticks like a bunch of animals!”
“Oh, so beating each other over the head with a bunch of swords and spells is a lot better is it?!”
“Of course it is! At least there’s purpose behind their actions! My flock were outraged at the destruction of Monotal! They demanded justice be carried out, and were presented with a convenient target! So what if some fucking twigs got hurt in the process so long as my people had closure?!”
“… Can you even hear yourself? Is that supposed to be the sort of attitude befitting a deity embodying the concepts of justice and truth?”
“I am the Goddess of Truth and Justice, so yes! It is!”
“Ugh, it was a rhetorical question, you vapid bint. Koralenteprix, can you shut her up for a second?”
The archfiend in question silently complied, pressing a hand firmly against the Goddess’s face-hole while tightening the grip on her throat with another.
“You’ve changed, Teresa,” George continued, his tone solemn. “If you were still that headstrong little girl from two thousand years ago, there was no way you’d stand for a made-up war waged in your name. I mean we’ve all inspired a crusade or two in our time, but this? This shows how far you’ve strayed from your path. Appeasing your followers has somehow become more important than upholding the core values that you’re supposed to embody. That’s why your Heroes always turn up as failures. That’s why I was able to so easily break into your divine area and subvert your control of it. It’s also the reason why Koralenteprix here is able to toss you about so easily.”
The cloudy representation of Carla visibly drooped its banners and sighed with a puff of smoke.