Ray’s training the next day with Siegfried was a blast. Since she was the only student who returned alive, she had Siegfried’s undivided attention. He decided to give up on teaching her to fight defensively with a sword and shield. Instead, he gave her a battle hammer and taught her some basic movements. He gave her a lot of advice and then he sparred with her.

The spar was a lot of fun.

She stood across from Siegfried, holding her new battle hammer above her head, poised to strike. The guardian trainer held a large, steel shield in his left hand and a battle axe clenched in his right fist. His expression while sparring had been serious ever since she accidentally broke his shield. She did apologize, but it still seemed to bother him for some reason.

Master Jedediah Lion, the Echo Fist, was the referee for the sparring match.

“Begin!” he shouted.

Ray circled to her left, trying to move around the shield. Siegfried matched her steps and they circled around each other for several long seconds.

On the second rotation, Ray began inching forward, her eyes searching for openings in his stance. Of course, there were none, but she would search for them anyway. Even the most veteran of fighters could make mistakes.

After half a minute of circling, she started to grow impatient and decided that she would try and make an opening. She rushed forward and swung her heavy battle hammer down, holding back just enough that the shield shouldn’t break. Siegfried sidestepped and tilted his shield so that the battle hammer would slide to the side. Ray nimbly matched his sidestepped and reversed the swing of the battle hammer with inhuman strength. Siegfried deflected the swing with his shield and grimaced. His shield held though it was slightly deformed where the mace impacted.

Ray followed up with another downward crushing blow. Siegfried intercepted the swing with his battle axe, catching the shaft of the battle hammer between the blade and shaft. He twisted and pulled her weapon towards himself and her eyes widened as the battle hammer was skillfully wrenched from her hands. She kicked off the ground, pushing herself back to dodge the swing of Siegfried’s battle axe by a hair’s breadth. Beads of sweat began to form on the back of her neck, and she grinned.

“Do you concede?” Master Lion asked.

Ray shook her head.

“I would like to practice recovering from situations such as these,” she replied.

Master Lion and Siegfried both nodded approvingly.

“Continue!” the Echo Fist shouted.

Ray rushed forward, observing the position of Siegfried’s body, his weapon, and his shield relative to her weapon on the ground. She could just pull another one out of her enchanted bag, but she wanted to practice the scenario when she only had one weapon left. While unlikely, it could potentially happen.

Siegfried watched her approaching form calmly and shifted his balance to intercept her. Ray saw his left foot step back and reinforced her left hand. Seeing the arcing battle axe, she reached out with her reinforced left hand and intercepted the swing with an open palm. She then grasped the blade of the axe and pushed it aside. Siegfried attempted to retain his hold on his weapon, forcing him to take a step to the side and backward to recover.

In that gap, Ray ducked down and swiped up her battle hammer. She kicked off of the ground and propelled herself up and forward, completing the motion with an upward swing that didn’t allow her opponent to take advantage of the moment she was down.

She planted her foot firmly and chained the upward swing into a solid, downward smash.

Siegfried calmly deflected the strike but flinched as his shield buckled from the impact and a large fragment of steel spun into the air. He channeled his mana and began to reinforce his body. Ray knew that he was one of the few humans who had managed to perform a full-body reinforcement. His whole body went rigid, though his joints maintained their flexibility. Ray grit her teeth. This wasn’t the first time this had happened, but unfortunately, there wasn’t anything she could do about it yet.

Siegfried rushed at her much faster than before, his axe containing even greater strength behind every swing. Ray struggled to dodge and parry his blows, barely matching him with her superior base physical abilities. Finally, Siegfried managed to catch the shaft of her battle hammer again and pulled the weapon out of her hands. Before Ray could properly react, she felt a cold sensation as the blade of the axe tapped her neck.

Ray raised her hands in defeat.

“I concede,” she admitted.

Siegfried lowered his axe and released his reinforcement. She could see that he was sweating profusely and revealed a bitter smile.

She had forced him to go all out. She felt a little proud of that.

“Well done,” Siegfried commented while bending down to pick up the battle hammer.

He held the weapon out to her and she accepted it.

“Your performance is improving at an unbelievable rate.”

Master Lion nodded his agreement.

“Young miss, I almost wish you had chosen to learn martial arts. With your speed, strength, and the level of your reinforcement…”

Ray waved off their praise.

“I’m strong, but I can be stronger.”

Siegfried nodded.

“That is certainly true. Let’s review the fight and see where you could have made better decisions.”

Ray followed Siegfried as he led her to the review room beside the waterfall. Before they stepped inside, he briefly ducked his head into the waterfall to wash all the sweat away.

After he stepped back, Ray copied his action, smiling as the sticky sweat on the back of her neck washed was replaced with cold water.

They stepped into the side room and sat down at the table. Ray wrung out her hair as they started talking.

This was the pattern they followed for Ray’s lessons with Siegfried while they waited four to five days for the other students to respawn.

***

Building a set of teachings was harder than I expected.

My personal moral compass was formed by my environment and my personal experiences, but I wasn’t so arrogant as to believe that I knew everything there was to know. I kept finding myself referencing the general teachings I had either learned or heard about from my time on Earth.

I found that most teachings and commandments fell into one of four types.

Some of the teachings were focused on criminalizing certain behaviors or practices. Oftentimes these would be things that might be considered obvious, yet considering that there were often laws banning the same things, it was clear that they weren’t. These would be things like general bans on murder and theft.

Many commandments and teachings in religions were often focused on being preventative. They wanted to target what they perceived as the fundamental cause of the bans they placed on certain behaviors. Examples would include cautions against anger, lust, greed, or pride.

The third type of teachings were those related to the nature of the deity who presided over the religion. These would often be ceremonies or ritual practices that were required for members of the religion to ‘repent’, or achieve ranks, or earn more authority, power, or blessings, or whatnot. This would include things like baptism, animal sacrifice, fasting, tithing, and other kinds of offerings.

The fourth, and last, kind of teachings that I recognized were those that were preventative in some way or form, yet the purpose and reasoning behind the teachings were often left unclear. Examples of this would include bans on ‘unclean’ foods that were often consumed in other religions and nations or regulations regarding gender roles or sexual orientation. One could presume that the corresponding Overseer had a reason for issuing their stances, but oftentimes they just gave general explanations that were ambiguous or unsatisfactory to those who were targeted.

A consistency in every religion was the promise of a ‘reward’. These were often termed as ‘blessings’ or ‘miracles’ and the most consistent was a promise of recompense in the afterlife. Of course, I now knew that this was just an elaborate scam to increase the harvest of faith and souls. While I wasn’t wholly against manipulation, scamming people wasn’t my style. My religion would focus more on the blessings and miracles that could be obtained during their current existence. If gods from Earth had spent more time performing visible miracles, their religions probably wouldn’t have crumbled as fast as some of them did.

Then again, I hadn’t met any of the Overseers from Earth yet, so even though I wasn’t impressed with their results, I would reserve my judgment on their character until I did.

Regarding each of these four types of teachings, I decided to hold off on the fourth type for now. I couldn’t think of any ‘general’ bans that I wanted to implement on food, and I had no interest in locking gender roles, racial supremacy, or anything like that. It would be empowering in the short term, but I didn’t want to collapse and fail in the long term. Besides, restricting or eliminating entire classes or groups of people based on uncontrollable circumstances would be counterintuitive to my decision to become a God of Harmony.

In fact, I could do the opposite.

“Thou shalt strive to live in harmony with all creatures and with nature.”

“Thou shalt not promote, participate in, or support slavery.”

“Thou shalt not discriminate.”

The first commandment immediately came to mind when I remembered the large number of depressed slaves living in Cairel. The second commandment was a preventative measure. Naturally, I didn’t add a clause excluding the discrimination of humans by ‘monsters’. Even if the monsters had been on the receiving end for a thousand years, returning that discrimination after obtaining a resolution on the current issue would be antithetical to harmony.

I briefly made note of these new teachings in the Tenets tab, under a section set aside for drafting. Above those were some of the more general commandments, such as ‘thou shalt not kill’ or ‘thou shalt not steal’.

I was hesitant on some of those though. Normally, I would be averse to killing but I learned on Earth that it was necessary sometimes. I joined the resistance against the Director’s Unification Army because I wanted to fight for freedom. It goes without saying that I had to take lives.

What would ‘killing’ even mean in this world? Killing monsters was a permanent death, like on Earth, but killing humans associated with Overseers was temporary. Since they would respawn, was this anywhere near the same level of ‘sin’ as it was on Earth?

Yet putting in a clause that it's okay to kill servants of Overseers seemed counterintuitive to my purpose of pursuing ‘harmony’. Even though they would respawn, people didn’t usually enjoy being killed.

The biggest reason I was concerned about a commandment like this one was because I knew that conflict and opposition were inevitable. I would overturn the status quo of this world by introducing the Overseer system to the native races. Not all of the native races would accept me, and I highly doubted many of the humans would embrace the change.

War was inevitable.

I didn’t know what form that war would take, but I had no intention of condemning my followers for any actions they would take to win that war. Rape, murdering and torturing innocent civilians, and stuff like that would be unacceptable, but just about anything else would be within the bounds of reason.

Also, if I made all forms of killing a sin, I would be limiting myself during times of war. I wouldn’t be able to obtain faith from followers who were breaking my commandments.

So, for now, I would leave that commandment on hold.

Thinking about the times I had to fight on Earth made my chest ache. It was purely a phantom pain since I didn’t have a body, but it hurt to remember those that I left behind. Since I went down holding back the enemy, I had no way of knowing if any of them got out alive.

My brother Dexter, my sister Cassie, my friends, my wife, and my unborn child…

I left them all behind.

I died to protect them, but that didn’t change the fact that I was gone.

Focusing on learning about this world and my new role had distracted me for a bit, but now that around a month had passed, I couldn’t ignore it any longer. Regardless of my sacrifice, I knew that the resistance wouldn’t be able to hold out much longer. The Director controlled every government that was still standing.

I still remembered my goal of returning to Earth to liberate it. However, there would be no point as I currently was. I wouldn’t be able to obtain any power because there was no room for gods in a world ruled by the Director.

I would resolve the issues of this world and, once I had a sizable following of superhuman creatures with incredible magic and abilities, it should be more than possible to march on Earth with my indomitable legions and save the world.

Reaffirming my resolve, I started looking once more to the present and, through it, toward the future.

Indomitable ‘Legion’, huh? That would be a cool name. That was another issue that I needed to address. However, as cool as the name ‘Legion’ was, I struck the idea down. It sounded too oppressive.

“Name… what should my name be…” I mumbled aloud.

It should be something powerful yet comforting. The name should stand out from others yet not seem too strange… it needed to evoke a feeling of harmony.

There was a name floating in my head that I really liked.

“Tremble, mortals, and bow before Steve, the Almighty God of Harmony!”