Chapter 166 – Revelations
‘That was the best sleep I’ve had in ages. No better way to wake up either.’ thinks Zagreus as he strokes his sister’s scaly head and feels the insides of her stretchy throat constrict around his now fully erect shaft. He closes his eyes with comfort. His sister’s snakes start to lick his body, causing him to become both ticklish and aroused. A few particularly naughty forked tongues targeting his balls and farther below almost prompt him to jerk, but he manages to stay still and let the sensations wash over him.
Both siblings open their eyes, look at each other from their respective positions, and summon their soulbound engagement rings to return to their fingers. It is an affirmation of their love and shared forbidden desires. Neither of them bring up how Nuwa fucking that divine projection of Ares to death may have changed their relationship, because there is no longer any need. If anything, they are even more in love.
Zagreus says, “I’m so proud of you, babygirl.”
Nuwa smiles, or as much as she can with his huge cock in her mouth, and hums in thanks.
“You know..” Zagreus continues, “Lord Ares is our cousin and I do owe him a lot for his help. He has his reasons for feeling the way he did about the mortal-born in the family. You don’t hate him, do you?”
Nuwa lets E-Nuwa take over the fellatio and transmits, ‘Don’t worry. I got all my anger out. I’ll play nice in the future.’
Zagreus smirks and says, “I have a feeling he’s not interested in you playing nice.”
Some of Nuwa’s snakes start laughing and nibbling at each other in pretend fights.
~ ~ ~
A trembling shade waits to be judged in the main hall of the House of Hades. Hypnos is dozing off to the side and Cerberus is wagging his tail. The green amorphous shade has been waiting for the past five minutes, but doesn’t dare to make a peep. Normally, such a long delay would result in a violent verbal assault from Hades targeting whoever is responsible for that delay, but this time it is the Master himself who is having a hard time maintaining focus on his work.
‘That blasted brat!! He’s relaxing without a care in the world while my own daughter.. with an Olympian!’ Hades slaps the desk, eliciting various muted shrieks from the long line of shades. ‘That fucking boy is long overdue for a lesson. Megaera is coddling him!’
He taps into his Authority and speaks directly to Megaera, who is torturing a few shades near her boss chamber in anticipation of Zagreus’ arrival. “Megaera!”
Meg finishes the lash of her whip and flicks it back into a coil. She says, “At your bidding, Master.”
He says to his subordinate, “The boy and the girl are both coming. You are no longer their match when they are together.”
Megaera frowns deeply, until she hears what he says next, “Let your sister, Alecto, fight the boy while you keep the girl busy.”
Her excitement spikes. She has long wanted to teach that disgustingly adorable reptilian ball of sunshine what the Underworld is all about. PAIN!
Hades coughs embarrassingly and states, “Keep my daughter from harm. This will reflect on your paycheck.”
Megaera grits her teeth so hard she draws blood! With supreme difficulty, she blurts out, “...Y-yes, Master. Orders acknowledged.”
“Very well, carry on.” Hades cuts the connection.
Megaera sees the walls stop glowing. She turns to the badly tortured soul of a witch. This soul is locked onto the wall by shackles, which have been enchanted by blood from the River Styx to allow them to detain souls. The witch ironically offers a prayer to Hades for offering her a respite from the crack of the whip. Unfortunately, the enraged Fury now needs a target to vent on, so the poor thing is introduced to a whole new level of pain.
~ ~ ~
Toph shouts, "What did you do to me Woody?!"
She is fully aware of the futility of berating a tree, but she has no one else to blame for her sudden loss of balance following her breakthrough. This should only happen to people who are actually blind, like she had been before she learned earthbending and got that ear implant from Nuwa. There is no response from her photosynthetic friend and thankfully, Tulen is too absorbed in training to spot her nearly falling twice. She would have had to smack that memory out of him if he had seen it.
She angrily flops down into the pond and shifts the dirt out of the water to complete her original goal of satiating her thirst, a simple task that should not warrant the destruction she had left in her wake. Now that she has that over with, Toph decides to train. ‘Maybe this will help me explore the breakthrough I was given by the Heart of the Earth and figure out what’s wrong.’
Toph starts a standard earthbending training routine of stomping the ground to lift rocks and launching them. Her earthbending is indeed slightly more powerful and fine-tuned. Before, she would have to estimate the center of gravity in the rocks she lifts based on her earth sense, but now she can make out their center of gravity intuitively as a yellow dot in her earth sense. She picks up rocks of increasingly weird shapes, but she can always make out their center of gravity as a yellow dot directly proportional in size to the weight of the object. Sometimes there is more than one yellow dot in a single object if its weight is distributed in an awkward manner.
There is a definite battle advantage to automatically knowing the center of gravity of objects. The center of gravity is the exact spot she has to hit to launch an object at the fastest possible speed without breaking it or throwing it off course.
Toph turns to Tulen and sees a thick yellow dot inside him too. The battle advantage for knowing an opponent’s center of gravity, as opposed to an object’s, is even more pronounced. For one, almost all martial arts are more effective when the user has a stable center of gravity, so disrupting that in an opponent is a tried and true tactic to ensure success in one-on-ones. It is especially important for earthbenders because they draw their strength from the earth itself.
The most striking difference pre- and post-breakthrough, besides the insufferable tripping, is that Toph finds no difference in her earth sense between the earth she launches into the air and earth in the ground around her. This goes against everything she has learned about earthbending! Earth sense works by feeling vibrations in the ground with the bare feet. How can it possibly sense aerial earth with the same clarity? She levitates several rocks of various sizes in her vicinity and tries to figure it out.
Unfortunately, she doesn’t get anywhere. In her frustration, her first thought is, ‘Nuwa always has a good explanation for strange events like this.’ Eventually, she decides to do things her way and fight Tulen. He can take it and fighting always tends to clear her mind.
Toph does a short hop and earthbends some chi to make two pillars on a delay, which will come up from the ground. She hops a little higher following that and the pillars shoot out of the ground at the exact time she lands to launch her into the air like a catapult towards the area where Tulen is training. This method of travel is far preferable to tripping while walking or running. The downside is that while she’s in the air, she lacks easy access to the earth.
Apparently, however, this downside no longer exists. She spreads her earth sense, takes in the strange new sensations, and slowly comes to a halt in midair. Behind her, above the two pillars of earth, is a thin spiraling cylinder of chi-infused floating gravel that she had kicked up in her trail, which leads all the way to her dusty bare feet. She shouts, “What the fuck?? I can fly!”
Tulen looks up and sees Toph ominously floating near him. “Wow Auntie, you can fly! That’s so cool! Can you teach me?” He thinks that it’s a neat Spirit Realm trick to be able to fly without bending. He himself can fly if he firebends with a lot of effort.
Toph turns to Tulen and says with confusion, “Hold on.. I’m not flying. I’m earthbending myself.”
She mutters to herself, “Am I a rock?” and feels her heart beat erratically in response. It takes chi to keep her levitating at this height, as much as it would take to float a rock equal in weight to her, which could be a lot if she artificially raises her weight with earthbending.
She feels an onset of pleasant emotions as she reaches a shocking conclusion. “No.. I am Earth itself.” For so long she has tried to become one with the earth, but only now she sees that the way forward is to separate and become a world unto herself. Her heart pounds ferociously and the chi-infused floating gravel in the air behind her slowly falls into orbit around her. Now Toph understands why Raava is able to earthbend freely while floating, without any connection to the ground.
The rest of the discrepancies start to make sense as well: Why she would lose her balance.. Why she has aerial earth sense.. Why she can see centers of gravity. It is like she has become a new class of being; a satellite, still dependent on the Earth for sustenance, but separate from it and able to stand on her own. Like a child setting off to school for the first time, facing the dangers of society without her parents’ help.
Tulen is saying something, but she doesn’t pay him any mind. She floats herself back down, goes over to one of the nearby roots that she can sense is part of the World Tree, and hugs it with tears in her eyes. More than her own parents, Mother Earth has given her EVERYTHING that makes her who she is and just for a moment, she cannot bear to say goodbye.
~ ~ ~
Every time Azula recalls that scene of Zina’s crimson red hair splayed upon a bar counter with her skirt raised, an older man thrusting into her from behind, and a few other men surrounding her with their dicks out, she awakens with a burning rage. Azula’s whole body is sweaty and there’s two long scratches in her apartment wall, sort of like a creature with two claws had scratched through the paint. Her eyes are particularly bright, but she only notices that when she looks in the mirror.
Actually, now that Azula looks at the mirror more closely, she cannot see her face very well either. She sighs and puts on her goggles. Nuwa gave birth to the girl, but Azula raised Zina all by herself. She had to fulfill the role of mother and father to the children, and she could not have claimed to have done it perfectly, but she’d tried her best. So far, they’ve made her proud, at least as far as she has trained them to temper their emotions, keep their cool, and protect themselves, their family, or their friends under duress.
Azula takes her head out of her hands and inspects the damage to the walls. The first thing she can tell is that it is not done by an animal. The scratch in the paint is too clean. There would be pieces of paint flaking off of the scratch if it had been an animal. She turns her attention to the mirror and notes that it has a network of blurry spots, mainly at her face and crotch. Tracing her finger along the blurry spots, she finds that they are slight depressions in the glass, lacking any cracks, sort of like.. if she had used her Phoenix fire on glass for a moment.
‘Did I use it? I don’t remember using it.. Hang on!’ She pulls her goggles off and reluctantly brings that memory back to the forefront of her mind. The light from her eyes becomes more pronounced and the glass disfigures at a visible pace. She turns to the wall and the same thing happens. Azula sighs again, takes her goggles off, and gets back into bed. ‘I definitely have to wear these goggles everywhere now or people are going to get maimed the second I get mad.. how bothersome.’
Despite her initial thoughts, she smiles like a little kid. Previously, she thought that her glowing eyes following her breakthrough had been an obnoxious cosmetic effect that could only serve as a light trick or distraction in battle, but now she can barely wait to test out the capabilities of her eyes and the potential battle applications.
Still, she forcefully calms herself down. Patience and forethought are both things she had taught her children extensively. She is not so hypocritical to talk one way and walk the other. This sort of technique would make a decent trump card, so it would probably be better to train it secretly, and besides, she cannot help but feel something strange about her room today. ‘Has the village finally begun to spy on me?’
Orochimaru stands next to Azula’s bed clutching a clump of his hair that she had inadvertently cut off with her eyesight. Objects that fall off his body no longer fall under the banner of his nonexistence. He had already tested this earlier in the day. If the hair fell, Azula would have realized something is wrong and he absolutely cannot allow any sign of his presence here to remain.
Tsunade is going to be keeping a close eye on him from now on, so he figures tonight, while she is tired with everything that has happened, is his best chance to utilize his partial nonexistence to do some serious snooping. Needless to say, his snooping had borne much more fruit than he expected. He smiles as he watches the candidate return to sleep.
(A/N: … … …)