After she had insulted the ocean, Tavras glared at her. With his hand raised to attack, he spoke in slow, deliberate words. "You are closer to the mortals that I would kill without a blink of an eye, than you are to a demigoddess."

Her body seized up at once. Involuntarily, Val collapsed to the ground, and her entire body spasmed. In the silence of her body's contortion, a roaring pain started within her as if it permeated every fiber of her being.

"If my ocean is a giant puddle to you, then you are nothing but a droplet of water to me. Or, as the kids would say these days, you are a mere water molecule."

Val gasped and felt water leaking from her eyes. She was not crying. Far more water poured down her cheeks than even the biggest crybaby could humanly cry. It felt like the water of her body was rushing out from her eyes. As she blinked through the excruciating pain, she could see ringlets of water drift through the air between herself and Tavras.

Foofy went charging around the counter and leaped at Tavras. This time when he attacked, he was strong enough to overpower Tavras's block. A lame splash of water wet Foofy's fur, and from there, the teeth chomped into Tavras's arm. With a thrash of his neck, Foofy ripped and tore. A pop sounded from a particularly grotesque twist of Tavras's arm. As a divine beast, Foofy became an equal threat to Tavras as a Doberman would be to a mortal man.

As soon as Foofy had attacked and preoccupied him, Val was released from the watery grip. Gasping, she sat upright and tried to think past her pounding headache. Somehow, she would need to calm Tavras back down again. In the immediate moment, she needed to do something to help Foofy before he got hurt.

It was the water of Foofy's dish that rose up and surged into his chest. Even though Foofy went flying backward, he did not intentionally release Tavras's forearm. His teeth drug long gouges through flesh. Then, Foofy was tossed across the room and smacked against the far wall. His body crumpled to the floor, but being a divine dog, he picked himself right back onto his paws.

"Dogs are made of water too," Tavras said. His voice rang around with an eerie tone of glee.

All at once, Foofy collapsed back to the ground. His legs twitched and moved like he had entered a realm of nightmares. Puppy whimpers lifted from Foofy's peeled-back jowls as he convulsed on the floor.

"Stop!" Val crawled forward and hugged her body around Foofy, though he continued to writhe beneath her.

In response, Tavras laughed again. He stepped back away from the counter roughly and spread out both of his arms. "Did you forget who I am? I am Tavras, god of water, the Sea Itself! I do not use my divine blood for benign purposes. I serve the interests of the ocean, and the ocean alone. Mortals live only a century at most, so I do not see why I should bend over backwards to accommodate them when they live and die before I can care to notice."

"Let me pose a question for you, Val, one that might appeal to your morals. A couple of billion people inhabit the planet at present. Do they have a right to destroy the ocean for the couple of hundred or thousand billion people that have yet to come?"

She could not care less about the inclusion of future generations into a moral calculus, like Tavras had just brought up. At the moment, she did not even care about the 200,000 people who had died halfway across the world. Her dog was suffering right here, right now in front of her very eyes.

"Stop hurting, Foofy!" she cried. Val started to gather power for Divine Judgement. Given everything that had happened, she would have the strength to really show Tavras the error of his ways.

With her eyes squeezed shut, she willed for due recompense to be leveled back onto him. The sort of power that surged through her could crush bones and muscle, even those enhanced by divine blood. Val had not a doubt in her heart that if she were to release everything onto Tavras all at once, she could end his life of thousands of years in one fell swoop. Despite what he did to herself and Foofy, as well as all of the innocent people in Gon, she could not bring herself to hurt him.

Tavras was a good man. He was optimistic and good-natured at heart. Whatever had happened with Val's confession, the oil spill and tsunami in Gon, their relocation onto land, the confrontation with Arius and Evalaite, and anything else hectic in Tavras's life, she had faith that he would return to his usual self with time.

Val squeezed her eyes shut and just wanted things to go back to the way that they used to be. Her hand waved across the air in the direction that Tavras stood. Brilliant light moved on the backs of her eyelids. Since she had sent her power out to Tavras, she needed to peel her eyes open to witness what she had just done.

A white mist drifted around his head. The angry expression evaporated from Tavras's face as he followed the luminescent haze with his eyes. His own eyes became hazy, then he collapsed.

"Ah, Tavras!" Val cried.

The way that he fell, his head was going to bounce off the corner of the counter. While his divine blood would heal any injury that his brain sustained from the impact, Tavras did not deserve to have his head beat around like that.

Val rushed forward, aided by a second enhancement from Divine Judgement. Catching him at his shoulders, Val eased him onto the ground along with herself. In a few blinks, she registered that she sat on the floor with Tavras in her lap.

"Tavras?"

No response came from him. By the unmoving expression on his face and the gentle rise and fall of his chest, he appeared sound asleep.

Val thought to poke at his face, but that would be an additional trespass against him while he was unconscious. She already invaded his personal space by having his head in her lap. Even though she knew that she should move at once, Val found herself frozen. Her eyes fixated upon Tavras's peaceful, sleeping face.

Never had she witnessed Tavras lie down to rest before, much less fall asleep. Here, she held a completely helpless god in her arms because she had put him to sleep.