Exhaling deeply, the Chosen of the Primordial Serpent flicked her knife to one side and let the blood and bile fly off of it. As she sat in the arena, she looked around at the corpses that lay with her and smiled. She had done well, though not well enough by her own desired metrics.

[“Quite a pity, that.”] her God said in a condescending tone.

Lyrhea looked down at one of her legs which was bent in several places at a very wrong angle and scowled.

“I was trying to avoid thinking about that.”

[“That’s why I’m here, my little Chosen.”] the Snake in her head reminded her. [“Just be glad that I told you about that little feature.”]

“Yes, oh great Serpent.” Lyrhea replied with a nod. She had gotten better at mixing certain tones together, and now was in less of a poor spot when it came to speaking with her master. “Though, to be clear, didn’t you want me not to talk to you until after I killed the Core, or whatever?”

[“Gods rarely are anything but fickle, contradictory, and hypocritical, my little Chosen.”] was the reply, which didn’t do much to lift Lyrhea’s mood. She sighed again and reclined against te fallen tree that she had used as a makeshift back-rest and closed her eyes.

If what her master said was true, then she could rest here and let her biology and stored energy reserves do their work in safety and without the risk of facing any dangers aside from boredom. That is, if the Snake spoke true, which was thrown into question with the last few words it had spoken to her.

She could feel her heavily broken leg twitching and tingling as it began to repair itself, but things had been worse a few minutes prior when a bit of improper movement on her part combined with a faster-than-average swing from one of the wolf-bears removed one of her legs from her body. She had been overcome by pain to the point that she nearly fell unconscious, but had maanged to power through it and stick her knives into the monster’s throat.

The beast apparently had higher than average blood pressure, as the moment she had let go of her knives they had been forcibly ejected from the creature’s throat by a pair of jets of high-pressure blood, which quickly led the wolf-bear to bleed out and leave her as the last man, or rather, last woman standing. Her god, sorry, God, had informed her of her superhuman ability to repair the loss of a limb by reattaching it before the full healing process began, and she had done just that with moments to spare.

Her leg, though, still was broken in many places, and that would not change until a few hours down the line, more or less. Until then, she would need to sleep and wait until she healed. She just hoped that her God wasn’t as dickish as it wanted her to believe and that the arena she was in would not gain new residents until after she had moved on and was fully healed.

…

As the fire began to die down, those who lived by the will of the Harvest God began to walk into the shrine. They knew that their days as mortal men were now over, and from their end would come a new form for each of them, all by the will of their God.

But as they descended to the final level of the stairwell, they were forced to make a decision that would change things for ages to come. The path that their God demanded that they take was blocked by a seemingly gossamer-thin wall of luminescent energy that denied their passage.

This was unforeseen, and though they called to their God to bring down the wall, their God remained silent and did nothing. And, as often happens when humans are faced with an impossible blockage and an absentee God that seemingly has fucked up everything, doubt started to seep in.

It was a small chink in their armor of faith, but the fact remained that a small crack had been formed. The fire, the fact that their God’s Chosen Avatars had been unable to hunt the monster responsible for it and many other tings, the strange and inescapable sickness that plagued them… all of it was just barely enough to breach the shackles their master had placed upon their wills and minds.

The chains were beginning to slip, though it would take much more than that to let them slip of entirely. Their God, though, was not at all as absent as things first seemed, though. It had not placed the wall of light down that prevented Lyrhea from leaving and the servants of itself from entering, and as It watched Lyrhea heal and Its followers struggle, it figured out all too quickly who it was that was responsible for this blockage.

…

[“DAMNABLE SNAKE BITCH!”]

A loud voice filled the void where the Primordial Serpent lay, its formerly singular, and then three heads having split again to now be many more than that.

[“Oh? If it isn’t everyone’s least favorite insufferable cunt!”] The Primordial Serpent replied as a cloud of blood, sickles, and sheaves of wheat in a vaguely humanoid form manifested itself in her divine realm. [“What brings you here? Not enough morons to swallow the souls of to keep your attention that you’d come here and see little old me?”]

[“Piss off with that attitude, you scaled whore!”] the cloud yelled. [“You are fucking with my followers!”]

[“Followers?”] the massive snake asked innocently. [“I didn’t know you had any at all! I thought you, and I quote, ‘Only had more sheaves of wheat/ souls to harvest and more blood to drink.’?”]

[“S-shut it! Remove that wall of light now!”]

[“What wall of light? I placed no such thing anywhere!”]

[“You Lie!”]

The snake laughed and gestured around with its many eyes and heads. [“Oh, you must be mistaken. Besides, Light isn’t my Domain, and you know that.”]

The humanoid cloud of farming implements, blood and wheat growled and left, and the Snake laughed even harder.

[“Light isn’t my Domain at all…”] the Snake purred through over a thousand mouths at once. [“But that doesn’t mean I can’t call in some favors here and there, does it?”]