“Yeah so basically… gods exist.”

Edmund looked around, expecting to see surprised, even terrified expressions on his companions’ faces. He saw only mild interest. He frowned, but went on.

“There is a threshold, I think, after which you can call something a god. Myself, I like to think that gods have to be sentient, capable of expressing a will, and need to be powerful for them to be called gods. I was, in my prime, a god among gods.

The other beings, the other gods, noticed me. They came to my doorstep, all the way to Earth, showing up one every once in a while at first, then more and more frequently as time went on. Already as the first one got here I knew: it was going to be a problem.

Gods, you see, tend to be rather quirky. They get their powers through weird mechanisms and often times those ways they have to grow powerful end up shaping them. A god that got their power through death is not going to be a nice fellow to deal with. A god who grows more powerful the more people worship him is never going to tolerate a secular, atheist society.

The first god to visit us was the god of deception. At least, it called itself that. Barely a moment after it got to Earth, it already demanded that I meet him, since he knew I was the most powerful being down there. And upon our meeting, of course, he tried to trick me.

I should have seen it coming.” He looked down for a moment, as if reminiscing that encounter in his mind.

“The details are irrelevant, what you need to know is that I knew, there and then, that I had to come up with something. Most gods are not easy to kill. Trust me, I tried. Eventually, I came up with something different altogether, to deal with the stubborn gods that refused to die.

I called it the Normalization Project.

Before you judge me for killing gods and whatnot, remember, they were the ones coming to me with their ridiculous demands. I had my world, my society, and they all wanted to either impose their ideology, or their faith, or their own vision of the world. None of them would take no for an answer.

Bunch of pricks.” He spat.

“First few I threw in a supermassive black hole. Never heard from them ever since. Serves them right.

Other gods were hidden, normalized as pieces of the puzzle that the was the universe. A piece that would make sense, instead of being supernatural anomalies. Celestial bodies, entire galaxies, planets or even forces of nature. I gave them a choice, and they chose what they wanted to be made into. Well, that was after I made sure they understood that it was either that or trillions of years confined inside a black hole, with the only hope to escape being its eventual evaporation.

Anyway, here’s where it gets interesting. There were a few gods, here and there, more reasonable than most others. And they asked me if I could perhaps renegotiate the deal a little bit. What I offered them was a place in my society, in exchange for most of their power.

Some, to my great surprise, accepted.

Vytryat was one of those.”

Toora and Lisa took some time to digest this information. The mage made some noise, but didn’t speak for a few minutes. In her mind, she was coming to terms with the sheer scale of what Edmund had just told her. She knew he used to be powerful, but this? Granted, she didn’t know about gods or black holes or even how existence used to be before magic came to the world, but she could somewhat guess the level of power involved there.

She was about to speak, but Edmund interrupted her.

“Fuck, man…” he said in a low voice, but in the silence created by the containment spell on the wagon, every word was perfectly clear. “I just wanted to have fun. Be free…”

She looked at him. His eyes were moist. She looked for something to say that made sense, but her brain came up with nothing. “You mean when you woke up?” she said, and immediately she called herself stupid for saying such a stupid thing.

However, he laughed. “No,” he said, “no. That was already too late. A chain of events had been put in motion long before, and when I woke up it had already passed the point where it could be stopped. Which reminds me, the portal has been behaving a bit too well.” He shook his head. “No, I was talking about the past. When I quote unquote invented Hume energy. More like discovered it, in a way. I just wanted to be free. Do stuff. Have fun. Is it really that childish, that irresponsible? To not want to fucking run a civilization? To deal with gods? With damned world ending aliens that eat cosmic energy and shit literal magic?”

She was at a loss for words.

“Yeah. You heard that right.”

“Magic is…” she began.

“A by-product of some sort of metabolic function that takes in Demiurge molecules, referred to in the previous statement as cosmic energy, and transforms them into Mana, or magic, or whatever, depriving them of some of their energy in the process. Similar but not really the same thing as normal eating.”

She felt dizzy. “Woah. Wait, wait.” Her head spun. She was vaguely aware that Lisa was holding her, keeping her from falling from the hard wooden beam she was precariously sitting on. Edmund stared, lifeless eyes boring into her. “You don’t mean to say that you knew about magic…”

She felt the pieces of a larger puzzle come together, somehow.

“Well, duh.” His sing-song voice was like the ringing of a bell inside her skull.

“Then,” she struggled, but the question was prying her lips open in a struggle to come out. “Monsters?”

“Sent by the aliens. Same as magic. Magic is the opposite of Hume energy, they delete each other. Ever wondered why I was powerful inside Axiom, where there is no magic, while you were weak?”

His eyes were bloodshot. She blinked, now he was back to normal, but she struggled to follow him as he paced around in the cramped space. “Why I’m weak here? Because my Hume field has to cut through magic. Why monsters, then.” His hands moved frantically. “You use magic, you create magic. How do you force people to use more magic while keeping them low-tech? Conflict. But not with each other. That breeds technological advancement. Happened once, never going to happen again. PvE my boys. Humans, catgirls, dragon-kin, whatever… you put them against monsters. That’s how you do it. Incidentally, monsters themselves are created with magic so all you really do when you fight them is make more of them. Easy peasy.”

She wanted to puke. She felt dizzy. The visions, her sacrifice. All that death. All for this… monster. He was not a human. He was a monster.

“You see now. All this, just to get me.” He said.

“All this because of you.” She spat.

He shrugged. “If not me, someone else would have done it. Maybe a thousand years later, maybe the next day. It was their mistake to even let it happen. But it did.”

She said nothing, the images flashing in her mind like reflections inside a broken crystal.

“It’s their fault I even discovered the existence of Demiurge molecules! Like I would even have had the means to go scouring the multiverse,” his tone of voice was rising, “then out of the multiverse altogether into the fucking darkness unfathomable, filled with unspeakable disasters of comprehension, things that twist your mind and make you question the very nature of things you cannot even grasp, to find a limitless source of energy?” he was yelling now.

“I would have thought about doing it. Maybe even reached that point one day. Probably not, though, without the crutch that was Hume energy. Simple, easy to get, just tap into the realm beyond and convert the ever present mana into Hume energy. Who would have thought that it actually was shit pooped out by aliens who happened to eat an even more powerful source of power? And, by the way, I wasn’t hurting anybody. It’s literally like being mad at a raccoon for stealing your trash.”

He was manic, deranged, and yet she found herself ensnared by his eyes. His face contorted and moved in ways she couldn’t even understand, and yet the emotion that struggled to express itself through the limited muscles of a face somehow made its way through. It was primal, powerful, boundless. She felt that if that mask of a face ever fell off completely, what she was seeing through its cracks would finally make its way through. From whatever depths it was shackled, it would break free.

“Fickle, stupid, short-sighted. We could have co-existed. Did you know that Demiurge molecules are infinite? They literally never run out. Why even fight over access to them? But no. They saw me take tentative steps towards some semblance of power, and decided I had to be removed.”

“Think I wanted this? I asked for any of this? You look at me and see the reason behind all the suffering in the world, don’t you? I ask you to look deeper. It’s them. They let this happen. They allow it to still happen!”

She shook her head. “If only…”

“I died? That would do no shit. They will keep flooding world upon world, universe upon universe with magic and monsters. And you know why? Because they know that as long as they consume Demiurge particles, magic and therefore Hume energy will exist. But they will not stop consuming them. They would rather sterilize every single universe, if they could. The can’t, by the way. So they do the next best thing. Flood places with magic so that reality-bending, the only thing that can cross the boundaries of a universe, becomes so difficult that nobody will ever discover it. If they do, kill them.

Even then… it’s too late anyway. I don’t need aliens anymore. That portal, back at the Pylon, is extracting energy directly from the beyond, directly from Demiurge particles. Not only that. If I die, fail-safe devices that I built will trigger massive Hume charges I scattered across the multiverse. Everything will be destroyed leaving only the beyond intact, with its infinite supply of Demiurge particles, and nobody left to use them.

Building the fail-safe was the first thing I did after discovering the method to open the portals, and I kept pouring Humes into the devices ever since. Trillions, if not more, of Humes per device.

That is why, my friends, I am still alive.”

Lisa, sometime during Edmund’s speech, had positioned herself defensively between him and Toora. She was staring, almost snarling at him. He scoffed.

“Wow.” He said. “But why? Am I that scary?”

She frowned at him.

“I won’t hurt you, though. You should know by now.”

He took a step forward, but stopped as soon as he saw her fall into a stance. One more step, he knew, and she would have called her hammer to her. Bad idea.

He tried to calm the girls. If he could make Toora see reason, then…

“One thing doesn’t add up.” The mage said, getting up and squaring up at him.

He raised an eyebrow, and Lisa yelped as she was pushed aside by her friend, who now stared right at Edmund with not an ounce of fear. Still at the ready, the fighter decided to watch the exchange in silence.

“Do tell.”

“If they know they can’t kill you, why send monsters after you?”

“Ha,” he said, and slow clapped. “Good. Observant. Adaptable. Truly something else.”

She kept looking at him in the eye. “Why?”

“Because they figured out the loophole. They know me too well, more than I know myself. I was prideful. Stupidly so. I… programmed the thing to only activate in the event they kill me, thinking I could withstand anything they would use as a proxy. Conventional warfare, I hoped, that I could manage better than all-out war. I was wrong. But it was too late. The device was sealed and not accessible. They can’t kill me directly, but if I died because of something else…”

“No,” she said. “I don’t buy it.”

He frowned. “What don’t you buy, exactly?”

“Your excuse. You thought all that, only to then fuck up the most important part of them all? Tell me the real reason.”

Her gaze was solid steel. He felt his own will crumble against such power.

“I was afraid.” He said slowly. He took a moment to think, avoiding the two sets of eyes staring at him. “Afraid I would be sentenced to eternal life without escape.”

“Shit.” She said.

“You can slap me, if you want.”

She exhaled, sharply, and he braced for a slap that never came. Instead, she slumped to her seat, and closed her eyes.

“However, Toora.”

She opened her eyes.

“Before you judge me too harshly,” he said, “look inwards and ask yourself: am I really better?”

Lisa stood up. “What are you talking about?”

He violently turned to her. “You too! Shut the fuck up and do a little introspection. If tomorrow you could wake up with your former teammates safe and sound, back to your little adventuring. No tower, no Humes, no me… would you do it?” he asked, making sure to say the last words as dramatically as possible.

She was frozen in place, mouth open to argue but eyes locked in an expression of shame, guilt and self-pity.

“Not once have you asked me to hurry. At first I thought: how reasonable they must be! They know the fate of the world is at stake, and decided to bury their desire to save their friends! But no. I can see through you. I might not know exactly why you are doing it,” he said, looking at Toora who was instead looking away from him, “but I know enough.”

He sat down, eyes closed. The silence was all-encompassing. Minutes passed, and soon he found himself fidgeting, thinking nervously, almost sweating. He could order the nanites to slow down his perception of time but he chose not to.

“I offer you an accord.” He said. “Back to status quo. We have a mission, after all. That is unchanged. And I want to have fun. You must like adventuring, right? That’s why you chose it as a career, after all, right? I say we put all this behind us, plus the neat addition that we don’t need to save the berserk guy stuck in the teleporter. We go out, adventure, have fun, repair the portal… the whole deal. Fun experience. Hell, we even get to do the whole ‘kidnapped by powerful guys at the guild’ arc!”

He stuck out his hand.

“Fine.” Toora said. After what felt like ages, they shook.

Lisa nodded, unseen, a hint of a smile on her face.