HP: 13

Perry discovered himself standing in a black abyss. None of the people who’d been standing near him around the lightning rod could be seen or heard.

Perry tapped his toe against the floor and discovered that it didn’t exist: he was floating.

Hmm…floating in an abyss…Perry checked his heartbeat, and discovered he didn’t have a body. He was seemingly anchored to a fixed point in space, able to perceive from there, but not interact with anything, including himself.

Hmm…This could be an unwanted side-effect. Perry made a mental note. Am I dead?

“No, if you were dead, you’d be far less lucid than you are now. Death is a difficult thing to think your way through, as the primary means of perceiving it or responding to it, the body, is left behind.”

Perry glanced around and found a gaunt Nocul man approaching from behind, a dark-skinned woman dressed in radiant white walking beside him.

“I see the energy cloud hypothesis has some merit.” Perry said, identifying Gintax and Astra.

Gintax frowned.

“What makes you say that? we’re speaking right now, aren’t we?”

“Because my HP went down an instant before…this.” Perry motioned with a nonexistent arm at the surrounding darkness. “I’m guessing it’s less like an energy cloud and more like an autonomic nervous system. You two reflexively smited me, didn’t you?”

“Smart kid,” Gintax said, leaning back into a throne constructed entirely of bone that erupted from the black of the floor.

Astra remained standing.

“Sorry about that, by the way.” Astra said.

“Naw, I was literally asking for it.” Perry waved off her concerns. “Am I still alive?”

“You’ll be fine.” Gintax said with a shrug.

“So what are you guys here for?” Perry asked.

“First we’d like to ask-“ Astra started.

“What the fuck you just did.” Gintax interrupted. “It felt like a thousand priests were killed at once, like an entire city of worshipers erased by a detonating volcano, except…not. It was tiny things piled to feel like a bigger one.

“Ah yes, that was one kilohertz of sacrilege. I made a thing.”

“Rrrright.” Gintax said, scratching his black nails against the bone armrests. “And what were you planning on doing with this…one kilohertz of sacrilege?”

“Well, once I finish the prototype I can use it to control the ambient influence of various deities by triggering their wrathful smitings on specially designed ‘lightning rods’, consuming their local influence.”

Astra burst into laughter, her head rocking back for a moment before she doubled over on herself, having trouble breathing.

Gintax looked less-than amused, his lips pursed in a sour expression.

“I love mortals. I told you they would figure something out. I never thought it would be to hijack our dogma and use it against us. Hilarious.” Astra wiped a tear from under her eye and flicking it aside. the tear turned into a single star in the empty night sky, drifting away from them eternally.

Hmm. I wonder if this space has any relation to the space The Tide resides in.

“If you want some recommendations for deities who are advantageous to have a high local presence, my sister is an excellent choice. Especially given your current situation.” Astra said.

Pela was a harvest goddess, Of course she was also a fertility goddess, since those things kinda went hand in hand.

“I’ll take it under advisement.” Perry said. Never hurt to boost your food output.

Gintax was silently brooding, rubbing his chin.

“I’d like to propose an alternative.” Gintax said after a long pause.

“Oh?” Perry asked.

“That gimmick of yours will work, as much as it aggravates me to say.” Gintax said. “But do the ends justify the means? That local influence you speak of are extensions of our actual bodies, and depleting it depletes us. Maybe not enough to kill us, but it’s frighteningly uncomfortable.”

“I see.” Perry said. It probably wasn’t the best idea to hook reins onto the gods and expect them to be happy about it. Even though it would be awesome.

“How about this?” Gintax said, raising a single elongated black fingernail. “I’ll give you an altar design that will allow you to collect my local ambient influence and sell it back to me at a deeply discounted price. That way you can dictate my local ambient presence, earn a small profit, and I don’t get the equivalent of being tasered randomly and drained of my essence.”

“Deal.” Perry said, recoiling mentally as flashes of hand-drawn blueprints on vellum in Old Nocul embedded themselves into his brain.

When Perry recovered, he turned back to Astra. “Did you want the same deal?”

“I’m not opposed to it, but I’d like to request something a little different.”

A vision of a hospital capable of healing anything powered by magical waste energy from his other endeavors bored into his mind.

“Ack, I didn’t even say yes to that,” Perry muttered, trying to shake his nonexistent head and blink.

“Apologies.”

“Nah, I would’ve said yes. just wondering how you did it.”

“The spell in your soul has several essences unique to our faith. We used them to visit your mind for a timeless moment,” Astra said.

“Ah, Perry’s P-P is a back door into my mind, huh?” they must’ve used the essences in his soul like antennas. Clever. That’s like the inverse of the crude measuring devices I made earlier. I’ll have to deal with that.

“After being so thoroughly startled by that creation of yours, we thought it would be best to visit you and request that you moderate your behavior before anyone is turned into a human-size scab filled with maggots.”

“Did I get turned into a massive maggot-scab?” Perry asked, somewhat alarmed.

“No, you resisted it.” Gintax said with a shrug.

“Well, if you’re done here-“

“One moment.” Astra said. “You have greatly benefitted Gintax and Bargand with your novel rituals, and the two are recovering quickly, leaving the other deities of Manita behind. Should they continue to regain their former power faster than the other deities, they may absorb our domains and lose their identity.”

Perry blinked. “That’s a thing that can happen?” He asked.

“In a hundred years or so, yes.” Gintax said with a shrug. “If the imbalance becomes severe enough, we can…merge.”

“Until that happens, an imbalance between deities will cause untold damage to your world. Especially if the stronger ones are the gods of war and blood.” Astra said, giving Perry a meaningful look.

Yeah, that doesn’t sound good. Perry had just gotten the most benefit from the war god and the blood god because their abilities were easy to weaponize.

Perry held up his nonexistent hand.

“I will endeavor to make infrastructure and deals of mutual benefit with the other deities of Manita,” he said.

“Thank you very much, young man,” Astra said. “Should you survive your upcoming trial, I will be pleased to work with you further.”

“What upcoming-“

Perry ran out of breath.

***

Waking up covered in a thick shell of dried blood as hard as stone was…unpleasant to say the least.

The cocoon cracked as perry forced his way through it, straining himself to break the several inch-thick slab of scab.

His lungs burned as he moved his freed hands up to his face, scratching at the strangely smooth surface of the congealed blood over his mouth and nose. The blood had formed a thick, strong scab around his entire head.

Perry’s eyes were flickering with stars from asphyxiation when he changed tactics, punching himself in the face.

Crack!

HP: 12

Sweet oxygen hit his nose as he got his fingernails in the cracks and pried the scab away from his face.

“Sir, are you…umm…okay!?” Mark’s voice creeped in through the cracks in the shell around his head.

“Oh yeah, just smitten,” Perry gargled, spitting out some blood and peeling off the rest of the scab covering his mouth, stifling a giggle. “Can you hand me something heavy and blunt?” he asked, holding out his hand.

What felt like a monkey wrench was placed in it a moment later, and Perry bashed himself in the skull, cracking the perfect hemisphere of scab-tissue attached to his skull, breaking it down into more manageable pieces.

“Was that, umm…supposed to happen?” Mark asked as Perry tapped the wrench down the length of his body, cracking his shell like a hardboiled egg.

“Was it supposed to happen? Yes.” Perry said, setting down the monkey wrench and peeling himself by hand. “Did I expect it to happen to me? No.”

“Well, whatever, just need to alter some of the details to force it to hit the lightning rod. Anyone else need help?” Perry asked, glancing around. Thankfully, Perry was the only person coated in scab. Studying the remote, it seemed to have grown outward from the remote and hit him because he was the one holding it.

Although I don’t think I could reverse-transmute them from blood-grubs if they did get hit. Perry was only okay because he was remarkably magically dense, and he’d been hit with a knee-jerk smiting, not a full-effort one.

Now, my deal with Gintax only involved me getting a recipe for an alternative, and didn’t hinge on giving up this course of action. I’ll finish up it’s design and have it set up in case it’s needed.

Perry would only use it if a particular god needed to get tased.

Although…it would make a good weapon. Perry thumbed his chin. If I made a small version, and gave it a trigger that could be activated upon striking someone, I could use various gods to smite people by taking advantage of the god’s autonomic nervous system….

I probably shouldn’t…

So if the trigger were the bullet, and the main body of the defiler was elsewhere, what would be the range of-NO, I PROBABLY SHOULDN’T!

Perry took a deep breath and set aside the dozen plans to prod divine entities into smiting people that were rattling around in his head.

It was a great idea in theory. In practice, it became a political nightmare. Perry was fairly sure the gods would not take kindly to that kind of manipulation.

Maybe I’ll just make a couple grenades and a land mine to take the edge off.

The primary limiting factor, Perry thought as he tugged himself out of the scab-cocoon, sloughing blood out and onto the concrete, along with some wriggling maggots the size of his palm.

-Is the presence of the divine in a given location. A divine smiting has to take place in an area of sufficient saturation. Speaking of which…

Perry stumbled over to the monitor, clothes dripping with blood, and checked the local saturation. The needle representing Gintax had stopped twitching entirely, while Astra’s was still moving back and forth at a relatively sedate pace.

So it does work.

For the god of blood and death, Gintax was surprisingly diplomatic. He hadn’t put an ‘or else’ restriction on the use of the machine, likely because he knew such an action was unlikely to yield a positive result, and had given Perry an alternative, free of charge.

Still gonna have to verify the contents of the blueprints before I make them, Perry mused to himself. Gintax was the god of blood and death, and Perry was absolutely sure he was capable of cold-blooded murder, no matter how polite he was.

Matter of fact, when he stopped being polite, it might already be too late.

Also, gotta take more care with what sacred essences I put into my body. The fact they provided back-doors into his mind was disconcerting. It must’ve been pretty important to convince me to stop tasing them to blow the element of surprise.

…What trial?

Perry considered zapping the gods again to get a bit more info out of them, but if anything Perry had studied held true, it was this: gods got off on being cryptic and making mortals desperate enough to agree to bad deals.

So no, Perry would just continue working on Chicago as he had been and assume that whatever was coming his way was something he could handle, as soon as he was aware of it.

“Sir, Casey’s hurt!” one of Perry’s minions shouted, flying up with the Mk. 3 at full speed, wearing a rainbow unicorn on his chest.

Casey was a slender young man with a dry, contrarian sense of humor, he was also the captain of Rainbow Unicorn squad.

“What happened?” Perry asked.

“I-I don’t know!”

Suspiciously timed, Perry thought, narrowing his eyes. Maybe it was a karmic ambush by the gods for his transgressions, or maybe they just saw it coming because their scope was wider. Either way, one of his captains needed his help.

PPP.EXE

“Alright, show me where he is, Perry said, lifting himself into the air and following after the soldier.