There are few things in life more wonderful than being tackle-hugged by a happy woman. Especially when you thought you would never experience it ever again. It was surreal when the woman was seven feet tall, lightly covered in a smooth chitinous armor, had sharp-clawed hands, delicate white tusks, and downy-soft feathered wings. I had imagined the chitin to be uncomfortable and the claws to be frightening. But my new instincts as a…whatever I am…never even twinged as she wrapped her arms around me and hugged for all she was worth, squealing in happiness the entire time.

“Dale! Thank you! Thank you! Oooooh!” Coldona shouted as she lifted me off my feet and swung me back and forth in happiness, tears running down her cheeks the entire time.

“There, there. It’s fine. You’re welcome,” I said while patting Coldona gently on the back with the one arm that I managed to awkwardly free.

Coldona eventually put me back on my feet, but she didn’t end her hug. Her large form snuggled in around my chest as happy tears slid down the dimensional surface of my robes. I spent an uncomfortable further few minutes gently patting her on the back. I was suffering through the difficulties of a man dealing with a crying woman, no clue how - or if I even should - fix things. When she finally pulled away from me, she wiped her face, hiding it away from me, before she managed to regain control and face me again.

In a human woman, I would wonder if this was some ploy to get closer to me. That, or she might just be emotionally overwhelmed and that I would have to guard myself against reading too much into her hug. Both could be possible, but I wasn’t human, and neither was she. My new instincts made it pretty clear that she wasn’t physically interested in me, and I wasn’t physically interested in her. Oh, it was still an option, but it wasn’t a drive. The monkey brain screaming in the back of my head that would have noticed her body pressed against mine never made a peep. At best, I appreciated the differences in her physical form in an abstract way instead of with any sexual interest.

When she finally unwrapped herself and stepped back, I couldn’t help but smile at her sheer joy. She wasn’t remotely human and didn’t look like a human woman, but I still thought she was beautiful when she smiled.

Coughing into my hand, I stepped back slightly.

“I’m glad this worked out, and again, um….” I began before she waved her hand at my awkward ending. There had been some argument over not using my dungeon for her church. I didn’t want my dungeon to be used for her worship, even if I was a de facto right of passage for her recent Orc converts. It was one thing to have them challenge my dungeon, another to have it as part of the official religion.

“It’s fine, Dale. I was miffed at first, but you made your position clear, and after this, I can’t help but see it as the better option anyway,” she said.

Looking through the thin dimensional film that separated the Hall of the Gods from the mortal world, I let loose a smirk of pride. I had mimicked the semi-conceptual nature of the Hall of the Gods and recreated part of it for her temple. Pride burned through me at my first divine artifact seen by mortal eyes. Sure, it was done in part with Coldona’s help, but it was still a major divine work, and one that was my design.

The temple itself was mainly a stone and precious gem construction. I built it entirely within my dungeon on a flat shelf of marble. When it was finished, I slipped it through an opening and out onto the field beyond my entrance. The tricky bit was the dimension that overlaid and blended within the temple along the long hallway. Creating a large temple inside a small building was simple enough; I had been stretching space and making things larger on the inside for a while now. No, it was the conceptual dimension along the inner hallway that was the bulk of the work.

A dimension of Challenge.

It was pure, conceptual, Challenge. For those with a physical bent, it would resist movement. For those stronger in mind, it would strain their mind as they progressed. Emotional, physical, mental, the soul? I never specified how precisely it would challenge a congregant, and I keyed it to Coldona’s domain so she would likely have some control. In some ways, it was crude. It was a pure challenge and would always increase even as her congregants managed to overcome the difficulty. It would always escalate, always push her worshipers. It was powerful and effective, but it wasn’t subtle.

To control the effect, she would have to use Essence to drive or limit the divine artifact. It wasn’t flexible in that way, and it would use a part of any Essence generated inside to power the effect. I had initially been worried it could create a feedback loop that would build and build. Still, we had limited the design to pool any excess Essence into a kind of divine battery. Coldona could skim energy from her temple or pour her power into it to meet any sudden needs.

Crude, but it would work. Which only highlighted how much worse my own equipment was. I had swirled some Essence together, visualized what I wanted, and let my domain do the hard work of building my weapon and clothing. It worked, but it was a bit like using a firehose to fill a glass of water. A bit uncontrollable, a lot wasteful, and you were lucky if you had a glass afterward.

“Dale, we didn’t have a formal agreement for this work. We like to avoid that, but I would still like you to have this from me,” Coldona said as she cupped her hands and passed over a mass of invisible essence shaped into a lumpy ball. It was ‘tainted’ with her domain, it was ‘attuned’ to challenge, but that wasn’t a problem. If I really wanted, I could hold onto her ‘donated’ Essence, and it would slowly attune to my own. Instead, I would leave it in its compressed form and leave it attuned to her domain. I didn’t have a use for it at the moment, but I was sure I would eventually. A divinely inspired challenge in my dungeon would work well with ‘challenge’ attuned Essence.

A short time later, Coldona made an excuse to visit Denda and left me alone in a corner of the Hall of the Gods to think by myself. I hadn’t been rude, but she could probably sense my introspection.

I was feeling out of sorts. I was wrapping up my dungeon entrance, preparing to leave. Initially, I had been moving my door around both for protection and to avoid becoming an inhuman shut-in with no interaction with the world. It would have been so easy to barricade my dungeon, digging it ever deeper. I would discover some time in the far future that an army was coming to conquer and destroy me. I might have been able to hide for a long time, but it would have eventually ended with my death.

I was free from that fate now. Or at least, I thought I was. My soul was still contained inside my dungeon core. I could feel the connection even now, but I was sure I could build something with divine Essence to free myself. I was stuck in some kind of bizarre halfway state, and pushing it one way or the other would be far more stable than staying as I was. But did I want that?

The joke goes: “When someone asks you if you are a god. You say yes!” To be fair, I was close to the old greek myth form of a god at the very least. But did I want to become one in truth? Disconnect from my dungeon entirely? It would take effort and time. With worshipers generating Essence for me, it would be far easier to build an artifact to make it happen. But did I want that? I was sure that I didn’t want to return to purely being a dungeon core. I loved having a body even if I didn’t have any real physical needs or wants. It was a bit like having all the best parts of a body with none of the downsides. So should I remain in this halfway state?

Darius, the god that had apparently built my dungeon core, said that my soul was mixed into his system. The system that appeared to rule the world in Sandra’s place. The system controlling the world that seemed to be newly self-aware and now counted itself as a God. Somehow, I thought that was outside the design spec. I couldn’t help but think that pushing things one way or the other would pull the system even further out of whack. That might be a good thing, the world seemed to be pretty cut-throat to me, but it might also cause a literal apocalypse. I couldn’t know.

Sighing in frustration at my lack of direction, I focused on my crossroad bubble world centered in my dungeon. My original plan was to create an extensive network of roads crossing the world, a network that would have become vital for trade. It would have tied my dungeon into the economic heart of the world as a whole and made me irreplaceable. If I was simply dodging mortals, it would have been enough. It might even have been leverage enough to keep the gods out of my hair. But with Sandra and Darius waiting in the background, it wouldn’t be enough. They would be perfectly content to overturn the apple cart when they returned. That seemed to be their plan anyway.

But, my crossroad bubble world plan wouldn’t work, or it would, but I would need to expand it. I was thinking too small. I could grow my pocket world while also experimenting with it as a way to escape this world. Sandra had hinted that she wanted me to make such an escape because it would mean she wouldn’t have to pay Darius for his work. That seemed to be the kind of game the gods played. Even I felt an urge to play those kinds of games. Coldona had paid in essence for my efforts, far more than either of us had invested. Still, we had studiously avoided any agreement for the work. We both knew that some kind of debt would be incurred between us depending on the quality of the work if a deal was more than tacitly offered.

Deals between the gods and mortals were inherently biased toward the gods. Between equals, debts could be formed with even the slightest discrepancy of effort or result. Neither of us wanted that. As lovely as it sounded to have a god owe you, having them repay you with what they thought was a valid repayment could be troublesome. It was better to avoid debts, but if it couldn’t be avoided, I wanted to clarify how the debt would work and how it would be repaid.

Closing the entrance of my dungeon, I left only a stone-blocked frame. The Orcs inside would be able to escape through my one-way shenanigans, but they wouldn’t be able to enter. The challenges had trickled to an end as it was, but I didn’t want to be surprised by a sudden surge of contenders. As it was, I had decimated the Orcs. I meant that in the ancient meaning of the word, in fact. Decimate: to kill one-tenth of a population. The Romans had done it to conquer and shut down rebellions. The Orcs had done it to themselves using my dungeon. Voluntarily. Willingly. If they didn’t live in such an inhospitable land, I would be afraid they would be attacked. Then again, I would pity anyone that tried to conquer the Orcs.

They were freaking nuts, and now they were likely to start worshiping Coldona. I could only hope that everyone else survived.