Mortal. That should have been his first clue. It was what she had called him from the very start—not human, but mortal, as if she wasn’t one in the first place. She wasn’t someone with a god complex, but a literal goddess herself.

Inanna.

It was a name Lukas recognized all too well. The primary goddess of Akkad and Babylon, Inanna was the patron deity in Sumer during the reign of King Gilgamesh. She was called Annunit, daughter of the Annunaki, the titans of Sumerian mythology. The morning star. The lust-driven, spoiled daughter of the heavens. The sister of Ereshkigal. The one scorned by Gilgamesh. She descended to the Underworld, only to be resurrected once more.

Could the voice he’d been speaking to all this time be that same Inanna?

More and more realizations pelted his mind like bullets. The impossibly advanced technology that was the Screen. The power of lifeforce brimming within him. The earthquake. The monsters in the cavern. The invisible voice. Every bit of it was from the realm of fantasy, but Lukas, in his obstinance, forcibly adhered to the impossible idea of being a guest star in some sci-fi reality show.

He couldn’t have been more wrong. She was a goddess. A real, live goddess. He was talking to a goddess. He had bargained with a goddess.

His insides did a nasty flip.

“You are wise to be afraid, mortal,” Inanna commended. Her voice was like honey and hot soup on a winter night. It was a voice that promised things, one that you listened to with unrelenting interest and intensity. “How does it feel to encounter that which you did not believe to exist?”

Lukas swallowed a mouthful of fear. Not fear of being judged on his atheism, but because she knew something about him. Something she couldn’t possibly have known unless—

Unless she could read his thoughts.

The rational cynic within him waged war against his reality, claiming everything from it being a very elaborate dream to being dosed on psychedelics. Maybe he had hit his head really hard from the falling plaster and all this was an illusion crafted by his myth-obsessed mind. He had been working on that Akkadian prophecy right before bed, right? What were the chances that he’d find an ancient Akkadian Goddess in his mind?

Hah! No way this was real. He was lying in some hospital bed. Comatose.

…Or maybe not.

The power exuding from this being was beyond his comprehension. And she’d implied it was a mere sliver of her strength. Whether it was truth or hyperbole was inconsequential; the limited experience he’d been shown could not be explained by any science or laws of nature. And it felt so real.

Real enough that he believed it to be true. That this being—Inanna was the real deal.

He was standing before a freaking goddess.

His expression made her smile.

“Mortals,” Inanna murmured. “Always so sure, so confident in your perception of reality. I can hear the cogs turning, spinning the little wheels.”

He took a step toward the throne. Everything he had read about her swam to the forefront of his mind. Inanna was the real deal, even for the titans of the old world. A barbaric war goddess who represented the darker qualities of beauty and lust.

Lukas’s eyes met hers. It was like time itself had frozen.

“Calm yourself, mortal,” she said. “You are safe from my wrath. I find you quite amusing. And I cannot have you fulfill your side of the bargain if you are soot on the floor.”

He looked away. Maybe keeping his eyes off of her would shield his thoughts? He needed to tread carefully. He was in uncharted territory.

“Perhaps,” she said, utterly uncaring that she had just confirmed his worst fear. “I would argue you are right where you should be.”

“What do you mean I’m—”

She snapped her fingers, and the celestial throne room was gone. He was standing in his very own room, with everything just as he remembered—the shelves, his bed, the familiar table with his laptop sitting on top, switched on and displaying a random page about dishwashers of all things. He felt an urge to look out his window and see if he was back in his own world. To confirm that it was all just a nightmare.

Then, he saw her.

Inanna, still dressed in her celestial attire, sat in his revolving chair with her legs crossed. She was sipping on something from the coffee mug he had gifted his grandfather last year. Amusingly enough, that wasn’t even the most surreal thing he had seen that day.

“It is a litter, like a rat’s nest. How do mortals breathe in here?” She took another sip.

Lukas tilted his head in bemusement. “We try, I guess.”

She continued to sip.

“So, uh, you’re a goddess,” he lamely began. It wasn’t the most eloquent conversation starter, but in his defense, he’d crossed his threshold of comfort a long time ago. Inanna looked up, a little smidgen of something—is that a latte?—stuck on the right side of her upper lip, and cocked an eyebrow at him, her forest-green eyes shining with naked amusement.

“Do I not look the part?”

“Uh…” Truly, there had to be something more than grunts in the English language. At this rate, he would strike her as an ignorant fool. “I’m—” He cleared his throat. “I just, well, I’ve never had a conversation with a real goddess before”—or fake ones, for that matter—“and, um, you have something there. On your face.” He gestured toward his own lips.

“Ah,” her voice rumbled, still somehow managing to sound pleasant to his ears. She licked the smidgen off with her tongue. A tiny speck still remained right below her nose, but he didn’t point it out. It looked rather cute. “What is this drink? We did not have this delicacy in Sumer.”

“It’s called a latte. Gently steamed milk with a bit of foam on top, though I tend to overdo the foam capping when I order.” He paused. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but is any of this real, or is it all some grand illusion?”

She laughed, and it sounded as merry, clear, and lovely as bells. “This is your memory, mortal. Or rather, figments of them drawn together. You have been in this place for so long that it is easy to add nearly anything without shattering the illusion.”

Lukas gave himself a second to wish he was less tired. Or less in pain. Or less overwhelmed by the day’s events. But one thing he did understand—he needed to stay calm. Which was kind of difficult, because the rest of him wanted to throw up and start crying.

He looked around. Everything was just as he remembered, with just a few changes. The books on his desk were just as he remembered them, but it had been over a month since he’d made himself a cup of latte. And the laptop screen displaying his law school assignments, with a separate tab for his shitty poetry.

“I sense the turmoil in your mind.” Inanna smiled condescendingly. “It is understandable to have questions. I shall endeavor to quench some of it. You should be grateful.”

He didn’t want answers. He wanted out of this nightmare. So naturally, he opened his mouth and said—

“…Sure.”

“Color me impressed. Your faith in your disbelief contends with that of my fanatic acolytes. It is both fascinating and disturbing. I wonder how imprudent the gods of your era have become to let disbelief fester such.”

“Gods?”

“Surely there is some demented divine entity with whom your species holds favor?”

“Actually, most people I know are atheists. Or closet atheists.”

Inanna slowly blinked. “You do not believe in your gods? In Sumer, we tortured such people until they believed in our existence, before killing them. Surely you have seen them exert their influence upon your realm?”

Lukas shook his head. “No human has ever actually seen a god.” Televangelists didn’t count. “Not where I come from.”

“What do you mean?” For the first time since their conversation began, Lukas felt an emotion other than arrogance bleed off of the goddess. Discomfort.

“There are no gods on Earth.”

“No gods… You are certain?”

It’s not like there are any listed in the yellow pages… “To my knowledge, yes.”

Inanna stared at him with an inscrutable expression, looking like she’d just swallowed a bitter pill. Lukas had the oddest feeling of being X-rayed, like she was looking through him rather than at him.

“I suppose if there are no gods left in your miserable world, it does explain some things.”

“I could always try to get more information when I get back.”

“Get back?” She cocked her head. “To where?”

“My home. Where else? I mean, this place does have an exit, right? You told me you—” Lukas froze midway, as a sudden realization hit him.

“I removed you from your collapsing planet…” she had said. His collapsing planet. The earthquake. It was just—

His knees hit the ground. “You-you’re saying that my planet is…gone? And everyone on it is—”

“Do not misconstrue my words to suit your imaginations,” Inanna chided. “I only said that your world was collapsing. Whether it heralded the end of your species and your civilization is beneath me.”

Her utter apathy rankled at him. He wasn’t sure if he should be insulted or bewildered by the utter lack of condescension in her tone. The goddess didn’t give two fucks whether humanity survived or not. All she cared about was the recovery of her lost property. To her, Lukas Aguilar the human was no different from a random fly perched upon the wall. You did not demean a fly; you simply swatted it off without a second thought.

As she was a divine being, Lukas could understand where she was coming from. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.

“Why me?”

The goddess arched an eyebrow.

“Earth has billions of people. You could have saved anyone. So why was I chosen?”

“Chosen?” The incredulity in her tone was vivid. “Is that some mortal way of escalating your self-worth?”

Lukas spluttered at her look of utter disappointment.

“You believe you were chosen because you are smart? Talented? Special somehow? How vain!” He felt her disdainful gaze on him. “You were chosen simply because you bore my relic.”

He looked down at the little ornament hanging around his neck. “This pendant?” he inquired, holding up the souvenir that had been part of his attire for a long, long time. Only now, it was shining with an ethereal luster—no, pulsing with power. Was this where she came from?

“The relic in your hands has been my abode for aeons. When the Cosmic Consciousness of your world shattered, I was able to attract one of its shards to myself. I used its power to open a path to…here. But it would not bind to me, not in my correct state. So it settled for the next available option.”

“Me,” Lukas realized. He hadn’t known that Earth even had a consciousness, but given who was saying it, he took it in stride. Both that the Earth’s consciousness had shattered, and that he had a shard of it within him. Whatever the hell that meant.

“Correct. Though, power of that magnitude should have destroyed you. At the very least, your mind should have been addled and replaced by the Cosmic Consciousness of the shard. Yet here you are.”

“Is that why I have these things? The Screen, this lifeforce, all of it?”

Inanna’s lips twitched as she stared at him in amusement. To her, he probably looked like a child who was just learning how to walk. “The Screen is merely a representation of your soul. A quantitative representation of your smidgen of Potential.”

Lukas wanted to point out that he had never so much as heard of someone having a Screen, let alone a concept like “potential made manifest.” Every person, every creature, had the potential to become something. To grow, evolve, and ascend. Evolution, after all, was part and parcel of any civilization. But quantifying that potential, especially with such detail, was absurd.

It was what a—a game world would have.

“Pitiful.” Inanna pinned him with a scrutinizing stare. “Not only are you blind to such a fundamental impairment, but your faith also demeans you for having it. Perhaps some of your kind were enlightened enough to realize it and created this so-called game world as a faithful impersonation?”

His insides twisted a little. The casual way in which she picked thoughts out of his head made him feel naked and vulnerable. Violated, even. It was a surprise he still maintained his cool. Apparently, standing in front of a being of titanic strength could make even the most stubborn person see reason.

“I have suffered through some of the vilest curses the universe could conceive, and not even I could comprehend living in a world without Potential. The very idea of living in such an accursed state makes me flinch. You have something far greater than a mortal can possibly comprehend within you, yet somehow, you retain your mortal mind. What a curious paradox. Perhaps you are special after all.”

Now Lukas didn’t know what to think anymore.

“Take it as a compliment,” Inanna advised. “You have something great inside you, and you also carry the vigil of the monarch of the Akkadian pantheon. Greater beings than you would commit genocide to be in your position.”

He grabbed at the pendant again with sweaty fingers. This was where Inanna had been trapped for eons. Though, trapped meant the pendant was a prison of sorts. Inanna had called it her abode. Home. A word with an undeniably positive connotation. But then…

“It matters not,” the goddess replied, waving away his concerns.

“Not to you, maybe. It does to me.”

“Perhaps. But now is not the time. You and I have far more pressing concerns.”

“Like recovering your lost property.”

“Precisely.”

The goddess snapped her fingers again, and everything changed once more. Lukas was no longer standing, but sitting on his imaginary couch inside his imaginary room. Meanwhile, Inanna continued to sit on an imaginary chair, drinking an imaginary mug of latte. There was an imaginary glass table between them—if he remembered correctly, it had fractured around a year ago—that stood pristine and spotless. Upon it was a single cup, crafted out of copper or brass by the look of it, filled with a brown, semi-transparent liquid that resembled whiskey. The really expensive kind.

“Drink.”

Lukas dug into his ear with his pinky. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said, drink.”

He stared at the cup with a crooked eye. After a moment of hesitation, he grabbed it and sniffed at the contents. It smelled delicious.

“What is this?”

“Tenemu. The wine of Sumer. Drink of heroes. Drink of gods. It is tradition to drink it while a bargain is being struck.”

Something from her memories, then.

Lukas touched the cup to his lips, slowly savoring the wine’s flavor as it trickled down his throat. It tasted sweet, terribly so, yet it was smooth on the tongue and burned his insides. Everything began to feel livelier, more vivid, like his senses had been dialed all the way to eleven. And for the first time, he felt like he could truly see Inanna. See the pale skin on her cheekbones all the way to her neck, hear the soft sounds of her heart beating, carrying a melody that could drive all honest men to sin—

He shook his head, breaking out of whatever trance he had been in.

What was that?

Inanna’s lips quirked.

“Are you reading my mind again?”

“I have no need for it, mortal. Your face is rather transparent.”

He finished the drink and put down the empty cup. “Look, this has all been lovely, really, but I’d really like to get to the point. Why am I here?”

The wispiest shade of a smile graced the corners of her eyes. “Very well. As we agreed, I will endeavor to aid your survival in this den of monsters. However, do not expect me to fight your battles for you. I shall provide you with information that I deem necessary to your task, and nothing else. In return, you shall do your best to survive and fulfill this task for me.”

“And what if I need to know something that you think is unnecessary?”

“Then you shall have to pay the appropriate price.”

Lukas stared at her, his gaze unwavering from her misty green eyes. It was an intoxicating feeling, as if he would lose a part of him if he dared look away.

“A word of warning, mortal. Do not so casually gaze into the eyes of another. They say the eyes are the window to the soul, and it is for good reason.”

With those enigmatic words, the gaze broke. The illusion flickered. And the world changed once more. His room shattered into brilliant motes of light, and a moment later, Lukas found himself back inside the cavern, next to the remains of the dead khorkhoi. Droplets of formless ghol were all over the walls, still trickling down to the floor. The Screen chose that moment to appear in front of him. Only this time, it was flashing madly, and instead of its normal blue, it was an angry, searing red.

URGENT!!!

DETECTED SKILL

LEVEL

SOUL CAPACITY

ISSUE

Kinetomancy (FRAGMENTED)

APEX

177764

Insufficient Soul Capacity

Alleviation

3

5000

Insufficient Soul Capacity

Host Body requires calibration!

These weren’t his skills. They were hers. But if skills were acts of lifeforce performed in specific ways to ensure specific results, and it had been his body that had performed them, then by all logic, he had performed those skills. Thus, they could be his.

Skills like that would be really useful in surviving a cavern full of unknown, dangerous monsters.

There was just one small problem.

Insufficient Soul Capacity.

“What’s my current Soul Capacity?”

Soul Capacity Consumed

100/1379

Lukas wheezed. He didn’t know what was worse: that his Soul Capacity was so low that even the most meager of her skills dwarfed it, or that the APEX skill Kinetomancy required close to a hundred and eighty thousand units of Soul Capacity, and that was when it was fragmented.

“Careful,” she admonished. “Do not liken Kinetomancy to a mortal technique. It is a culmination of what allowed me to butcher gods and demons alike. You have no more chance of bearing it than an ant can bear the weight of a mountain.”

Yeah, Lukas mused. No wonder the Screen was being so testy. He could get the Alleviation skill—well, sort of, assuming he could acquire the skill in fragments.

He checked it out.

SKILL

LEVEL

SOUL CAPACITY REQUIRED

Alleviation

3

5000

DESCRIPTION

Removal of any and all unreasonableness of the Body to return it to its calculated original format.

Lukas blinked. Alleviation very much sounded like installing a backup. A skill that compared the injured state of the body with the latest “backup” and repaired it. And maybe new backups were made every time he gained a Level Up to keep up with the body changes.

Such a skill would be supremely useful in this dangerous environment. Unfortunately, he didn’t have the required Soul Capacity for it.

He checked the next, and the most outrageous one.

SKILL

LEVEL

SOUL CAPACITY REQUIRED

Kinetomancy (FRAGMENTED)

APEX

177764

DESCRIPTION

Absolute manipulation of physical vectors.

Lukas stared at the Screen for a long moment, forcing himself to breathe slowly. The absolute manipulation of physical vectors? That meant force, friction, momentum, vibration and pretty much any and all kinds of motions he could find inside and outside. This skill—this power, it would render every single thing—living or inanimate, into puppets for the user. Briefly he remembered how She had frozen the khorkhoi midair, then squashed it inside out without so much as touching it. This—

This was—

Oh, hell. This was bad. Or good. Or good with a ton of bad thrown in. And at the same time, this was real Power. With a capital P, and all that it entailed. Not just a heap of fancy physics-defying things one could do with lifeforce, but the real deal. Even a fraction of a fraction of this thing could change everything for him.

A lone, bitter bark of laughter escaped him. “Can I use this?”

Estimated Soul Capacity to be consumed: 1279

“But can I use this?”

“Yes,” Inanna answered before the Screen could respond. “My Kinetomancy is an APEX skill. It means every bit of it, even the tiniest fraction of a fraction, is complete in itself. That is what you gain by accepting it.” Her soft mouth turned into a firm line. “A fair warning, mortal. This skill holds a deadly legacy. If you crave it, you must accept what comes with it.”

“Like what?”

She shrugged. “The skill is power beyond what you are built for. My own belief is that it will destroy you. But accept it or reject it, the choice must be yours.”

Lukas knew she wasn’t kidding. One didn’t need to be a physics student to understand what could go wrong with manipulating motion. He could utterly wreck his own nervous system. He could tear himself apart. He could impose a death upon himself so horrible that being crushed by the khorkhoi would seem like a mercy.

But this could help him survive. It didn’t matter if it was a fraction of a fraction, it was still Kinetomancy.

“This world is built on potential and unlimited growth. This skill can bring me both.”

Inanna never took her eyes off him. “Such ambition is pleasing to my eyes. Unfortunately, the most basic tenet of gaining a skill eludes you.”

“Which is?”

“Once you gain it, you will always perform it properly. Never an error, not even in your sleep. Once you gain a skill, it is engraved upon your soul. Like your heartbeat, it is a part of you.”

“But my body still performed it. So it’s my skill, right?”

“Your body was merely a conduit. Unless, of course, you can replicate the way I manipulated the motion of every single granule of the worm’s body?”

It took several seconds for her words to sink in.

“What you’re telling me is, unless you perform it for me, and I have seventy-seven thousand Soul Capacity ready to use, I can’t do what you just did.”

“Precisely.”

“And would you?”

“I am willing to act within the constraints of our bargain.”

Lukas tensed. If he accepted this, he’d get a tiniest fragment of the most awesome power he’d ever seen. However, he would also exhaust all of his remaining Soul Capacity, losing his chance to gain any other skill until he leveled up again.

A quote rose to his mind unbidden…

“Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, and there you will always long to return.”

Damned if he did. Damned if he didn’t. The game was rigged against him from the very start.

“Is that not the best kind of game there is?”

Lukas sighed, facing his Screen, and came to a decision.

“Kinetomancy. Assimilate it.”