by Neven Iliev
“Face it, Teresa. You’re a Goddess of Truth and Justice in title alone. The way you act is more befitting a two-faced noble trying to secure political power, yet you haven’t noticed how far you’ve fallen. Therefore, please understand that what’s about to happen next is for your own good.”
“Uhm, Boris? I don’t need to be here for all this, right?”
Boxxy took advantage of the suddenly quiet atmosphere to reiterate its last question. It was actually in a bit of a rush. Every second it spent up here was a second that its body lay unconscious back in the physical realm, and the creature wanted to get back to it right away. Hopefully, those moronic troops it had eating out of the palm of its hand would take care of ‘Keira,’ but that was a last resort. The shapeshifter would have already left to take care of matters personally if it had any idea how to do that by its lonesome.
“Hmm? Oh, sorry Boxxy,” Otto apologized. “Uh, yeah, it’s probably best if you got going now. However, I will need to borrow Koralenteprix for this next bit so she will be unavailable for… a few days? Weeks? Not sure, it’ll be a while. Listen, I’ll have Carl call you when we’re done, okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Also since a certain someone was so rough in bringing you here, well… it will probably take several hours for you to wake up. Don’t worry though, your corporeal body isn’t in any immediate danger.”
“Damn, that’s going to be a problem. I’m pretty sure my cover was blown back there. Oh well, I’ll salvage it somehow. I’ll be alive enough to try, at the very least.”
“That’s one way of looking at it, I suppose.”
“Thanks for saving me, by the way. I know you didn’t necessarily have to.”
“Oh, well, you’re very welcome!”
“Also, I hope you’re not mad about me calling you a ‘worthless pieces of shit’ during the fight.”
“Ah, don’t worry about it. It was all in the heat of the moment. Besides, I am mostly using you for entertainment purposes, so if anyone has the right to call me that, it’s you. Just, uh, don’t take that as a free pass to blaspheme all the time, yeah?”
“But every once in a while is okay?”
“We all gotta let off steam sometimes, right? The important part is to do so in moderation.”
“Alright, gotcha. I’ll, uh, keep that in mind.”
Jordan then turned towards Teresa, his misty carrot pointing alternatively towards his apparition and Boxxy.
“See this?! This is what a Hero-God relationship is supposed to be like! This box – it gets me, you know? No hand-holding, no unreasonable expectations or obligations – just Heroes hero-ing and Gods god-ing with a pinch of mutual understanding for good measure. Anyway, thanks again for the assist, Boxxy. Off you go!”
“Later, Louis.”
*Snap*
The astral projection of the Hero of Chaos disappeared with a remote snap of Danny’s paper towels. The Goddess of Flabbergasting then turned to face the muffled and struggling Teresa.
“Now, then. Time to start your rehabilitation.”
Epilogue
“Alright, Koralenteprix,” Juan called out. “It’s about time for another detox session, so get our patient ready, will you?”
“… Sure,” came the dispirited response.
“Well, you don’t seem very cheerful today.”
“Yeah, not for nothing, Chief, but why did you go ahead and give me all this power if all I’m going to be is a damn nursemaid?”
Having so much energy and strength at her fingertips yet being unable to unleash it was way more frustrating than Kora initially anticipated. Sure, she had a fun bout of ‘slap-the-bitch’ at the start, but ever since Boxxy left the tasks that Bellamy had her perform seemed way too… mundane. This feeling of disappointment was only made worse by the knowledge that Kora’s godlike power and stature were very much temporary. Once this whole rehabilitation thing was done, she’d return back to being a regular familiar, meaning her strength would rely entirely on her summoner’s power. Sure, she would still be an archfiend like her Uncle Naggy and would therefore be stronger, faster, tougher, and more versatile than before, but it would be a significant downgrade from her current state.
However, becoming powerful enough to easily surpass Nagnamor without Dick’s assistance was more or less impossible. Even getting up to the level of the Overlord was out of the question, as that guy had grown and developed his physical, spiritual, and intellectual might over millennia. It would be many centuries before Kora herself could reach such heights, if at all.
“Because your charge is a fuck-mothering Goddess,” answered the God of Misfortune. “Trust me on this, kiddo, even if it feels like a waste, there’s no such thing as ‘being too careful’ when dealing with the divines. It’s like, how did you so eloquently put it before? ‘There’s no kill quite like overkill?’ Something like that.”
“Ugh, whatever. I’ll just go get the bitch, shall I?”
“Please do,” said Billy with a nod of his porcupine and a wry smile on his wrist.
Kora got off her massive ass and stood up in the seemingly endless white space that was Elmer’s divine area. She stretched a bit to limber up her stiff-yet-bursting-with-power body. Being forced to temporarily live here felt like a privilege at first, but she quickly realized there wasn’t much to do beyond watching the Boxxy Show alongside Keith. It was even duller than being stuck in the Beyond since she couldn’t socialize with other demons, but she had little choice in the matter. She had been promoted to archfiend, and Henrietta threatened to demote her down to an imp unless she did what she was told.
After warming up a bit, Kora disappeared with a rush of air as the Goddess of Uncertainty kept sitting on her sofa, watching her Hero. The titanic archfiend dashed up, down, and all around the divine area until she located its other temporary resident, grabbed her by the ankle, then dragged her kicking and screaming back towards Randall. Hearing Teresa wail desperately as she was being manhandled like a sack of old potatoes was pretty fun for the demon at first, but by now her pathetic cries had become an annoyance. Angela at least gave Kora permission to be ‘as rough as needed’ with the Goddess, which meant it was okay to kick her in the head whenever she felt like it.
Even if this was ‘rehabilitation’ and ‘for her own good,’ Teresa still had to pay for disrespecting her divine duties. There was no justice without punishment, after all.
“Here she is, Chief,” Kora reported.
“No! No!” the Goddess pleaded, her hands clawing desperately at the perfectly smooth floor. “Isn’t it enough?! Please, no more! I’m begging you, I can’t take it any longer! I need to hear my followers again! I need to! Please!”
Step one of Teresa’s rehabilitation plan involved, for lack of a better word, god-napping her and quite literally imprisoning her within Jerome’s divine area. She’d be cut off completely from the stream of prayers, worship, and offerings that her followers presented her with on a regular basis. Being suddenly cut off like that caused Teresa to enter a state of withdrawal, hence her current pitiable condition. However, this part was absolutely necessary if the core issue at hand was to be resolved.
“Koralenteprix, is Teresa wearing her robes again?” Dexter asked without even looking back.
“Yup.”
The God of Probability sighed heavily.
“Well, you know what to do.”
The archfiend roughly threw Teresa onto the ground, kicked her lightly to flip her on her back, and then straddled her legs.
“No! Noooooo!”
Ignoring her complaints, the red-skinned demon restrained the flailing deity’s hands with two of her own, then proceeded to strip her naked with practiced ease. The silky white robe was ripped to shreds while the golden jewelry, sandals, and tiara were roughly taken off and mangled into a big lump, which was then hurled into the distance. A few seconds was all it took to leave Teresa completely naked, curled up into a fetal position, and sobbing uncontrollably.
“I’ll say it again, dearie,” Vanessa yelled without looking away from her screen, “those trappings of power do not fit your image at all. How can you hope to be a legitimate beacon of truth without being able to bare yourself fully before others?”
One could argue that ‘the naked truth’ was meant to be taken figuratively rather than literally, but that was only when it came to simpler, more corporeal creatures. As amalgamations of thoughts, wishes, and ideals, the difference between metaphors and reality was paper thin as far as divine beings were concerned.
“Alright, might as well get started. Koralenteprix, please assume the position.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
The archfiend picked the sobbing goddess off the ground and dragged her up onto her knees. She forced the naked Teresa to bend over forward while holding her hands behind her back. Kora then stared at one of her right hands for a second until the demonic gauntlet covering it suddenly split apart and fell off her skin. Doing so made her hand feel a bit itchy, but it couldn’t be helped since the armament would get in the way otherwise. Besides, it would ‘grow back’ on its own soon enough. Finally, she placed her newly bare hand onto the back of the Goddess’s head and pressed firmly against her flowing gold locks, grasping her skull with her oversized palm.
In the meantime, Terence had gotten his crème brulee off the couch and was calmly climbing up an invisible spiral staircase. When he got to the much larger deity’s eye level, he stopped going upwards and walked horizontally over thin air as he approached her head.
“Really, Chief? Why not just teleport to the spot like you normally do?”
“Variety is the spice of life, kiddo. If you don’t mix up your routine every now and then you’ll grow bored enough you end up going crazy just to liven things up.”
He was obviously speaking from personal experience, though the demon couldn’t care less.
“Yeah, I suppose,” she shrugged.
Pablo eventually stepped off of his imaginary catwalk and onto the back of Kora’s bare hand. He picked what seemed like a good spot and sat his sharks down on her rough red skin.
“I’ll be starting now, Teresa.”
“No! Please, don’t!”
His warning caused the Goddess to reflexively struggle, followed by another round of pleading. Fortunately for her, she was not only removed from the source of her divine power, but also had her head, shoulders, and arms firmly restrained by Kora. Too much flailing could disturb the following ritual, which could make matters worse rather than better. It was going to be incredibly unpleasant for her either way, though.
“Sorry about this,” muttered Casey. “You’ll probably thank me later.”
In the next instant, the God of Mishaps channeled his own divine power through Kora’s hand and into the back of Teresa’s head while repeatedly chanting a couple of strange words.
“Akuryo taisan. Akuryo taisan. Akuryo taisan."
The Goddess began choking and gagging in response, which soon turned to dry heaving. And then, after another twenty-to-thirty seconds, she started to throw up. A viscous black ooze that wriggled unnaturally all on its own fell out of her mouth in thick globs, forming a messy pile onto the pure white ground. Gilbert counted a total of thirteen lumps of supernatural vomit before he decided to call things off.
“Right, that’s enough for now, methinks.”
He stood up from Kora’s backhand and briskly walked off it. With the detox session momentarily finished, the archfiend threw the pale and extremely weakened Goddess off to the side, well away from her ‘leavings.’ Teresa lacked the strength to do something as demanding as controlling her limbs, so she merely flopped over on her side like a dead fish. If things proceeded as normal, she would get back up in about five or ten minutes and run off somewhere in a delirium. And then, three hours later, she would have stabilized enough for another detox session.
“So, what do we have this time?” mused Neal as he stared intently at the haystack-sized pile of god-puke. “Hmm, lot of hatred in there. It’s almost completely filled with hatred actually, apart from a bit of pride and some resentment. Bits of jealousy too.”
While it could be said that a believer’s devotion, piety, and respect for a God served as the deity’s ‘food,’ not all mortals had happy-go-lucky sentiments towards the divines. Anger, hatred, disappointment, sadness, grief, revenge, desperation, loneliness – any and all such negative emotions were also transmitted to their deities, though they rarely did so on purpose. If allowed to build up and fester within them, it could lead to the deity in question being ‘poisoned’ by their influence. That was why Kevin was so adamant about avoiding blaspheme, as expressing disdain towards a God, especially in public, was one of the main sources of thought-poisoning.
If the thought-poisoning got out of hand, it would gradually change a God, twisting them away from their original purpose. The corruption would then trickle down to the deity’s most devout followers and adamant supporters, which would in turn infect the population at large and bounce all the way back to the God. It was a downward spiral that, if left unattended, could pervert the deity and the virtues they embodied. And the worst part was that the divine beings themselves wouldn’t notice the change until it was too late.
“I really should have seen this coming,” Alberto chastised himself. “That Empire’s propensity for conflict, bigotry, and treachery coupled with her corrupt clergy should have really tipped me off about her condition sooner.”
Indeed, this thought-poisoning phenomenon was one of the main reasons why Teresa had strayed from her path and was slowly but surely turning into a Goddess of Deception and Tyranny.
“What?” Kora raised an eyebrow. “You mean she wasn’t like that before?”
“Well no, she was always an insufferable, stuck-up bitch, but at least she was genuine and trustworthy. It wasn’t until about six centuries ago that she started skirting the rules and playing favorites with her Heroes, but our… bumpy relationship kept me from recognizing the signs. Heh, if it wasn’t for Boxxy’s ‘people skills’ I probably still wouldn’t know how far she was gone.”
“Uuugh.”
A pained groan escaped Teresa as she gradually lifted her upper half off the floor. She looked about in a drowsy state, her eyes settling on the mass of lumpy black goo on the nearby floor.
“Th-that… Did that come out of me?!”
“Oh? Now this is promising!” exclaimed Troy. “Finally regained enough of your senses to face your inner demons?”
*Snap*
The God of Luck snapped his shoes, causing the mass of lumpy black goo to oscillate in response. It steadily shrunk down as it vibrated, compressing itself until it adopted a distinctly feminine humanoid form a little over two meters tall. It had shiny brown skin, a massive underbite, two rows of beady black eyes, a pair of twin axes in her hands, and bulky gladiator-like armor covering both shoulders and arms. Her body was extremely well toned, and her pitch-black hair stood up in a wild mohawk style. Last but not least, a single onyx horn jutted out the left side of her forehead.
“Well, outer demons now, I suppose,” Jerome smirked.
“W-was that thing inside me?!”
“Damn. And here I was hoping to be the first one to get all up in that bitch’s guts, but I guess someone else beat me to it, huh?”
Both Kora and Teresa were shocked by this revelation, albeit in different ways.
“I think I misspoke,” interjected Stephen. “What you saw earlier was the concentrated negativity of mortals, which had attached itself to your being. This child was simply born from that.”
As if on cue, the newly created fiend that had been standing upright keeled over and fell on the ground, her limbs twitching slightly against the white surface.
“… Born?” asked the giant women in unison.
“Yup. What you witnessed just now was the birth of a brand new demonic entity.”
“Hold on a second there, Chief!” Kora interjected. “Are
you telling me all of demonkind started out as god-puke?!”
“Of course not, don’t be silly,” Johnny rolled his bananas. “Most of you are born from the residual sinister thoughts of mortals that get caught by the Beyond well before they could reach and infect a deity. Most of those thoughts don’t even come from people, but from monsters. I mean, the whole point of that place is to serve as a lightning rod for that stuff, a filter if you will.”
“Soooo… What? We just… randomly pop up out of thin air?”
“More or less. You probably don’t want to hear this, but the fact that demons exist at all is something of an accident. I never intended for consciousness to flourish in that cesspit I created, and yet here you are – defying all logic and spitting right in the face of my divine design! The mind-boggling fact that all of you brats even exist is the whole reason why I’m so proud of you!”
“Oh… Uh, thanks, I guess? What about me, though?”
“What about you?”
“I mean, do you know where specifically I came from?”
“Hmmm… I can’t be sure, but if I had to take an educated guess based on your appearance, you’re probably the result of the Elven Dominion’s collapse. More specifically, the hatred and anger that subsequent generations of elven slaves felt towards their human masters. And given your womanly disposition, I’m guessing it was mostly female sex slaves.”
“What, really?”
“Yup, your age fits. It would also explain those predominantly elfin ears and attractive features, not to mention why you’re considerably more, uh, intellectually challenged than your average fiend. I can’t imagine corrupt scumbags demanding that their toys be intelligent. Quite the opposite, actually.”
“Huh. I guess that does make sense. I always wondered why I got an unexpected boner from flattening those slavers while the Boss was looking for a lair.”
“Yeees, quite. Well, I better send this child on her way so she can learn how to demon properly.”
*Snap*
A bright red portal suddenly opened up underneath the newborn demon’s limp body, depositing her into the Beyond well before she even gained awareness. Normally he sent the ‘god-puke’ there directly, but this time around he felt it necessary to demonstrate that gods were not as infallible as a certain someone seemed to think.