by Neven Iliev
The god in question had chosen his Hero of Chaos entirely for its entertainment value, and indeed, observing the former Mimic had become his favorite pastime. He had analysed the creature to determine the innumerable ways by which its fragile existence could come to an end, and yet every other week new possibilities seemed to crop up.
To say that he found Boxxy interesting would be a gross understatement.
“-complete Operation: TASTYCOCK,” the monster’s voice blared from the screen.
“Hah!” the entity chuckled. “Gets me every time.”
He grabbed a wad of popcorn and stuffed it into his mouth, munching delightedly as he mulled over Boxxy’s current situation.
“Kind of a shame it went for doppelganger,” he mused aloud, “but I suppose I can’t expect it to do the unexpected every opportunity. Otherwise it wouldn’t be ‘unexpected,’ now, would it?”
The god had been hoping that its Hero would opt for one of the queen slime options for its Rank Up, unlikely though that had been. Looking at all the variables, there had been an overwhelming ninety-six percent chance that it would choose doppelganger, which was why the deity sounded a bit disapproving of that outcome. Still, he had high hopes for the future. Boxxy had already surprised the god numerous times, and he absolutely loved surprises.
He had especially enjoyed watching the gnome abandon her flesh to become a steel golem thanks entirely to the monster’s bumbling, unthinking actions. Most surprisingly of all was how, despite all the abuse and suffering that it had put her through, she had somehow ended up wholeheartedly supporting the creature that single-handedly ruined her life. That had been far more exciting than the mundane future in which she was eaten before the then-mimic had even made it back to civilisation.
The God of Chaos had to admit that his latest Hero was shaping up to be far more competent than that lizard guy he’d forced the title on last time.
*KA-KLINK*
A loud sound, like glass breaking, echoed through the Divine Area. A spiderweb of cracks appeared in the air directly in front of the God of Chaos, as though the fabric of reality itself had broken. The deity sighed dejectedly, devoured another helping of popcorn and heaved himself off the couch. Standing before the cracks, he snapped his fingers.
The fractured space expanded in an instant to form a rectangular hole in reality, a gateway into another God’s Divine Area. The ‘room’ beyond this doorway was a well-lit cavern so enormous that it was as though a mountain had been hollowed out and turned into a museum. A marvelous collection of countless statues, paintings, weapons, furniture, armour, vials of potions, and numerous other products and works of art had all been put on display. While some works lined the walls and still others stood on pedestals or inside glass display cases, the vast majority had simply been suspended in mid-air. All in all, the Divine Area exuded much more life and character than the sterile, endless white of the one to which it was connected.
Standing directly between the two dimensions was a collection of rocks and stones bound by some invisible force into the shape of a stocky man. As one might expect, the visitor inhabited the lavishly decorated space beyond the spatial doorway. He was the deity whose domain encompassed the act of creation by the skilled hands of artists and artisans, a being which valued honest, hard work and exquisite craftsmanship above all else.
“Ah, Goroth,” Jimmy said, casually. “I’d call this a pleasant surprise, but then I’d be lying.”
The God of Randomness looked down at what had once been a box of popcorn with a sour kettle on his glove. The tasty snack was now a cup of eels, which he had no desire to partake in. This sort of thing happened every time he had company, which was why he hated entertaining guests unless it was absolutely necessary. He irritably tossed the jar of crickets somewhere behind the sofa and turned his attention back to the other deity.
“So! To what do I owe the… pleasure?”
“I must have words with you, Deacon.”
The Earth God spoke in a dull, rumbling voice. It was so predictably fitting that it made Charlie just a little more annoyed every time he heard it.
“… Well?” asked the pile of rocks. “Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“Ah, right. Do come in! Have a seat! Take a load off! Please, do tell me why you insisted on SLAMMING ON MY FUCKING DOORBELL on this fine day.”
“Easy there, Michael,” Goroth cautioned, stepping over the threshold. “That is no way to talk to your betters.”
Yeah, right, Jimmy scoffed internally. ‘Betters.’
It was a little-known fact that the world’s deities did not exactly get along with one another. Most of them were locked in an inter-religious competition, a celestial game of politics and intrigue to see which of them could obtain the most followers and thereby gain the most influence.
From Riddick’s point of view, it was more akin to a pointless faith-measuring contest than a power struggle, and either way he wanted no part in it. He found the whole concept mind-numbingly inane, so to the best of his ability he preferred to stay out of it. Which was why his followers were so disorganised, more like a cult than a proper religion. This left Cedric as the eternal rock bottom of the celestial scoreboard, by far the most obscure member of Terrania’s pantheon.
However, irksome though her fellow deities’ contempt may have been, Melanie tried her best not to let their holier-than-thou attitude get to her.
“Of course, do forgive me, old boy!” she said with mock politeness. “Honestly, where are my manners? Ah, probably all over the floor behind the sofa…”
She wasn’t very good at it.
“Anyway! Do come in and have a seat, won’t you?” Neal beckoned with a wave of his bucket and a bow of his anvil.
“Much obliged.”
The rock pile deposited itself onto the couch, which creaked dangerously under the weight. Kelly similarly sat his fingertips next to him, forcing a smile onto his fishbowl.
“Now then, what can I do you for, Goroth?”
“Funny thing, actually. I was watching over this cultural festival a bunch of dwarves were holding in my honor. Lots of dancing, mountains of good food, an unhealthy amount of alcohol, a general sense of nothing getting done… You know how it is.”
“No, I really don’t.”
Goroth magnanimously ignored the sarcastic comment and continued.
“So that’s been going on for a few weeks now. And when it ended I went to check on my stuff and noticed that one of my dungeons – the Spire of the Jade King – was effectively missing. Any idea what might’ve caused that?”
“Dunno,” Ralph shrugged his dinner plates. “These things just happen, I guess.”
“Really? They ‘just happen,’ do they?”
“That’s what I said, isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh. So, you’re telling me it had nothing to do with the fact that your new Hero ‘just happened’ to stride into my dungeon and ‘just happened’ to decimate it in a matter of hours? All while I ‘just happened’ to be otherwise occupied?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Come off it, Martha!” Goroth raised his voice. “I know you’re somehow responsible for this!”
“I most certainly am not. I swear to you that I in no way told my new chosen one to wreck your Spire thingy just to spite you.”
“Maybe not explicitly, but I know you had a hand in it!”
Geneva sighed. That sort of mentality was part of the reason why the God of Probability had so few followers in the first place. Mortals had this bad habit of blaming him for every single bad thing that happened to them. Got mugged in an alley? His fault. Caught a debilitating flesh-eating disease that made their ears fall off? Her fault. Got stabbed in the face by their wife for cheating on her? Clearly Timothy’s fault!
And yet they never once thanked her for all the good things that happened to them. Like how they weren’t axed to death when they were mugged or managed to survive a stab wound to the face from their jealous spouse. A
dmittedly, those may have been examples of bad things not getting worse, but they were still favourable outcomes, from Billy’s perspective.
At least the Champion of Chaos he had created knew what was up and where she stood. No matter what, Fizzy had done her best to send a fervent prayer to him on a daily basis, expressing her sincere gratitude for his help. Whether it was for his having saved her from a life of dull obscurity or the fact that the sun hadn’t exploded and wiped out all life on the planet, the golem’s positively-charged thoughts were always most welcome.
Hers weren’t the only ones, either. Through one circumstance or another, most of the Paladins, Priests and Monks in Patrick’s service shared her devotion, sometimes to a fanatical degree. And Wilgarbanding always listened, paying special attention to each and every one of them. The personal touch would have been impossible with a massive following like Goroth’s, but the Goddess of Dice Rolls honestly preferred it this way.
Even if this quality-over-quantity approach didn’t exactly give him a whole lot of divine power with which to perform miracles and blessings, it nevertheless had its advantages. Such as the fact that his fragmented following allowed him to keep track of both major and minor events across Terrania on a scale that no other deity could hope to match. This information could then be used to predict future developments – from something as momentous as a racially-charged war to the seemingly-insignificant fate of one unfortunate gnome. Once armed with this knowledge he could, if he so wished, subtly influence said developments to nudge them towards one outcome or another.
One might say that Chip preferred to work smarter, not harder.
… Which was probably also why he couldn’t get along with the earnest, hard-worker types that the God of Earth embodied.
“Look, Goroth,” Rupert spoke sternly. “I will admit that I knew full well that there was a non-zero chance of my Hero doing what it did when I appointed it. However, that doesn’t mean that I forced, coerced, or otherwise engineered that to happen. Why are you so angry, anyway? Dungeons exist to be conquered, do they not?”
Testing mortals and rewarding them for their efforts was something of a hobby that most gods shared, so it wasn’t exactly uncommon for them to have a number of dungeons under their control. This was also why conquering a dungeon, while challenging, was not entirely impossible. While it was technically possible to construct an unbeatable dungeon, doing so would have defeated the whole purpose of its existence.
“Conquered, yes,” Goroth nodded. “Completely demolished is another thing entirely.”
“This is about the missing dungeon core, isn’t it?”
“Not exactly. In my opinion, if someone defeats my dungeon fair and square then they have earned the right to do with the core as they please. I can just channel my divine power and forge a new one in a day or two if I want, so getting angry over something like that is really just pointless.”
Mogren rolled her cabbages at the remark. The damned rockhead was obviously trying to rub his superiority in her pavement. Just because Kimberley didn’t have the power to directly influence the physical world to the degree that Goroth did didn’t mean that he had to be so damned smug about it.
“That is, if they beat it fair and square,” added the Earth God. “However, that thing and its… team defeated the entire thing in under four hours! At their Levels?! I really don’t see that happening without your bloody help! You know we’re not supposed to use our divine power in the mortal realm for petty things like that!”
“Ah, I see. Tell me, have you considered that maybe the conquest was easy because your dungeon was shit?”
“It was not shit! It was a work of art! You must have cheated!”
“Okay, look! Let’s stop the finger wagging and settle this like responsible deities. We both know that a dungeon’s logs hardly tell the whole picture.”
It was a fact that a dungeon’s records were generally rather bare bones. They didn’t so much describe what had happened as record the outcome of encounters. They showed the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of ‘who’ had done ‘what,’ but not the underlying ‘how’ and ‘why’. That was why the dungeon’s Surveillance Net module also recorded images and audio of intruders for future inspection. It was far more reliable than the backup logs, but it would appear that the record had been lost upon the removal of the dungeon’s core. Otherwise Goroth wouldn’t be jumping to conclusions and talking out of his ass like this.
“I recorded the entire expedition, you know,” Ricky revealed. “I can play it back to you right now to prove that I did not cheat, and that Boxxy’s gang cleared your so-called ‘work of art’ entirely through their own efforts and skills.”
“Hah! As if I would trust any footage you’ve been handling! How do I know you haven’t altered it in some way?!”
“Alright, then. Let’s call Looney in here to mediate. She’ll see right through any illusions or whatnot I might have set up, right?”
“Surely Teresa would-”
“That bitch is not setting foot in my house!” Calvin bellowed.
“Alright, alright, calm down,” Goroth conceded, his own anger quelled by Jerry’s outburst. “Lunar will do.”
“Ah, I do apologize for that, my dear chap. I just can’t stand it when she starts sneering at me with that self-righteous-”
“Yes, yes, I know. We are all very much aware of your recent… rivalry.”
The Goddess of Truth and Justice and Nathaniel didn’t exactly see eye to eye, mostly because he was known to be something of a schemer and she, well… wasn’t.
“Shall I call Lunar over now?” Goroth suggested.
“Yes, please, if you wouldn’t mind.”
There was a moment of silence as the God of Earth sent a short telepathic message to the Moon Goddess, she who presided over matters of magic, study and knowledge. It was a common means of communication between the various deities, usually referred to as god-mail, or G-mail for short. A fact that amused the God of Uncertainty to no end for reasons that only he could understand.
“She said she’ll be here shortly.”
“Very good. I hope she helps us clear this thing up, I sincerely don’t want any friction between us.”
“… I think it’s a bit late for that.”
“Ah, come off it. What did I ever do to you?”
“You corrupted my previous Hero, remember?”
Whenever Goroth picked a Hero of the Anvil, he expected them to raise the bar for artisans and artists everywhere. This usually involved pushing the limits of what could be expressed through artistic mediums or mastering one’s craft to the point of becoming world famous. In some ways, it was a much more challenging undertaking than simply slaying a terrible evil or unearthing some long-forgotten secret. The Hero of the Anvil had to move and inspire the world to be better entirely through the fruits of their labour.
“Oh, right, old Shitstain,” Leon remarked in a bemused tone. “Okay, I admit I may have had a hand in that, though some of the details got a little… out of control.”
“That’s putting it mildly, isn’t it?! You ruined a superbly talented painter for your own amusement!”
“Look Rocky, I did not intend for that guy to start using his poop as paint, okay? That part was completely unintentional!”
She was speaking truthfully. Even the Goddess of Chance could not perfectly control the flows of chaos. Really, all she’d wanted was for the artist in question to do something more interesting and Hero-like than live as a shut-in painting nothing but boring landscapes. Timothy honestly had had the guy’s best interests in mind, otherwise he wouldn’t have broken the pact between the gods that forbade direct interference with another’s Hero.
“Besides, I don’t think that’s any worse than what your current guy is doing. I mean, what the fuck is ‘interpretive dance’ supposed to be?”
“It’s art, you cretin!”
“You see a bloke that likes to hump the air for no good reason and call it art, but finger pa
inting with faeces isn’t?”
“That isn’t-”
*KA-KLINK*
“Oh, Looney’s here!”
Chester snapped his fingers before the argument could devolve into further name calling, causing another doorway to appear from thin air. This one opened into a massive library, its shelves stuffed so full with books that they were threatening to overflow.
The divine being presiding over the space had the appearance of a hunched-over granny wearing a pair of half-crescent glasses, a pointy, wide-brimmed hat and a long flowing robe. Her clothes appeared to be woven from the night sky itself, as they were thoroughly pitch-black and speckled with stars which twinkled as if from an unimaginable distance away. Looking at her from a different angle would have revealed an entirely different view of the cosmos, as though she were a window into the depths of space.
“Hey, Gorey, Twitchy,” she rasped.
“Hi, Looney,” Stuart replied, waving his flute.
“Good tidings, Lunar,” Goroth bowed his head-boulder.
“Heard you boys got some dispute you need help with?”
“Indeed. I’ll be showing rocks-for-brains here a recording I took about a week ago and we need you to confirm that it’s not been tampered with in any way.”
The goddess raised an eyebrow.
“I see. Though I must say, this is unusual for you, Twitchy. Oh, wait! This is about that amusing little box you keep talking about, isn’t it?”
“It is indeed!”
“Nice! I’ve been curious to see if it’s really as capable as you boasted over the G-mail!”
“That’s exactly what I want to see as well,” Goroth rumbled.
“Then let’s get this show on the road. Move over!”
The goddess shoved the pile of rocks roughly to the side, taking a seat on the couch. She seemed awfully excited considering she had very little to do with the dispute at hand. The God of Possibility snapped his pencils, and the floating screen began to project the recording, which he had titled ‘How to Wreck a Dungeon 101.’
It started with the scene of Boxxy fighting its way through the vast hedge maze alongside its team and their army of undead. The basic-yet-effective formation mowed down wave after wave of stone soldiers with little difficulty. They were also headed more or less straight for the goal, barring a few detours to loot the common tier of treasure chest sprinkled about the place. Something that would’ve been impossible without Xera’s aerial reconnaissance.
