Vol.5 Ch.20.2 – Best Served Cold II

At first glance the goat creature Bres had summoned looked like a homogeneous mass, a mixture of his own water miracles and the same black goo that the creatures of the Black Goat bled but the more I looked at it the more imperfect that mixture looked.

The goat head that made up the bulk of the creature certainly looked like a perfect combination but towards the end of the tentacles it became clear that that was a trick of the light. The summoned creature had a core of black Outsider goo but surrounding it was a shell of water, with the black goo dripping out from some of the suckers.

The whole thing was a baffling feat of magic that made me more worried than ever to face the Holy Maiden. Magic and miracles were the antithesis to Outsiders. Dark Young, as terrifying as their spellcraft and bulk were, practically melted when exposed to enough of either force. But this creature, while not a homogeneous mass, held itself together. Whatever blessing the Holy Maiden had given Bres, it had created a harmony between these two opposing forces that I had previously considered impossible. Or maybe I had it all wrong.

If we followed this chain of logic to its conclusion then gods should be impossible to corrupt in the first place. Between everything I'd heard from Melinoe, from Athena and from Wilhelm, I had pieced together that gods were, essentially, held together through sheer belief. Their miracles were fed by their life force, essentially nothing more than Qi techniques, and their life force came directly from the faith of their worshipers. It was even possible, and I made sure to memorize this thought so I could bug Athena about it later, that gods subsisted on the life force of their followers, stealing tiny little bits and pieces here and there whenever they flexed their powers.

But if the belief that sustained gods was nothing more and nothing less than concentrated life force and life force was inherently antithetical to the powers of the Outside then gods would sear away any trace of Outsider power through their sheer existence. Except, as the nauseating swirls on Bres' chest more than proved, that was not happening here. That suggested one of two things.

Either the Holy Maiden's blessing was powerful enough to overturn a fundamental law of nature or the source of the power was not as important as the intent with which it was wielded.

I didn't really want to believe the former as, if it was true, we were fucked. If the Holy Maiden was powerful enough to do something like that then we didn't stand a chance against her. But that was unlikely. If she truly were that powerful then all of these machinations weren't actually necessary. She wouldn't have had to push a Dark Lord into experimenting with the red milk. She wouldn't have had to ally with Prince Wilhelm in a ploy to overrun the capital with monsters. She wouldn't have had to go out of her way to invade Olympus in order to open up a gateway to gods knew where. If she were strong enough to overcome the repulsion that existed between Outsider powers and the forces of this universe she would be powerful enough to reach all her goals without effort. And so that only left the latter option: Life force wasn't inherently powerful against Outsiders. Intent was.

All the gods of this world minus Bres and Ares (and hopefully only them) were united in one thing: Their hatred of Outsiders. And so their powers, even channeled through clerics, were antithetical to Outsiders. Anyone fighting Outsiders with magic and Qi techniques, likewise, was intent on fighting them, which made their techniques effective.

The logic was sound. It also explained what I had been seeing when Bres had summoned that creature.

The power of his miracles, the life force of his worshipers if my theory was correct, had been drawn into him and he had then fed it into the markings on his chest, which had directly converted that power into Outsider energy. If miracles truly were inherently antithetical to Outsider powers then that would mean the markings were capable of turning any life force into Outsider power but I already knew that couldn't be the case because in their brief skirmish I had seen Poseidon landing water miracles on Bres more than once and he hadn't been able to simply absorb those. As such, I had to conclude that the markings only allowed him to convert life force that wasn't actively hostile to the source of the markings.

And as I considered all that another weird detail snapped back into focus: The Chosen One Yume had been given to hadn't been able to use the Sense Evil ability. Every Chosen One I had ever worked with had had access to Sense Evil, except for him. It had struck me as odd but I'd been too busy trying to get Yume away from him to give it much thought at the time but now it surged back to the forefront of my thoughts. Was this, too, about intent? Did Ares simply not see the same evils? Or was it rather that by the time he'd Chosen that prick he himself had been considered so evil that he could no longer bestow the ability on anyone?

But that implied that he had already been working with the Holy Maiden by the time he'd sent out that Chosen One. And if that was true, why had he sent a Chosen One to stop her Dark Lord in the first place? Questions upon questions. Unfortunately I was pretty sure I would get a chance to ask about it before this clusterfuck was dealt with. There was no way we'd seen the last of Ares yet.

And, of course, there was the little issue that, even if I now had a pretty good idea of how Bres had created the goat octopus creature, I had no idea what to do about the giant goat octopus creature floating around the battlefield.

The beast reached out with a dozen tentacles, trying to yank us towards its maw. Or rather, maws, for it had two. There was of course the mouth of the goat head, complete with a surplus of molars for grinding things into pulp, and on top of that was the octopus maw. Where the severed head of the goat should have had a stump it instead had a beak like an actual squid, except large enough to swallow a draft horse whole.

I reached for my sword only to die a little inside as I saw Helios Edge lying at Bres' feet, twisted into uselessness. I was about to reach into my bag of holding and pull out some other weapon when Hephaestus called out:

“Oi, Tailor!”

I spun around and saw him throw a sword at me underhand and only just managed to catch it.

“Use this for now!” he yelled.

I didn't even look at what kind of sword he'd thrown me. All I knew is that it was a weapon the blacksmith of the gods himself had made and that it felt good in my hand.

New sword in hand I dashed forward and sliced through three of the tentacles. I had half expected them to completely ignore the attacks, given that they were made out of water and goo, but they didn't. The tentacles had mass and heft to them and severing them, while effortless with the legendary sword, nonetheless felt like actually cutting something solid. The severed appendages slammed to the ground and even there they did not simply dissolve, though the stumps on the creature's body were oozing black Outsider goo, the prison of water clearly no longer able to contain the vile substance within.

The others, too, managed to cut or at least fend off most of the tentacles the creature had used to grab us. But not all of them.

One tentacle dragged Odysseus into the air while two more had managed to snatch Hestia up from behind Hephaestus.

Odysseus grit his teeth in the monster's grasp, the spiny suckers probably unbearably painful as they latched onto the wound in his chest, and finally tossed his massive spear aside, drew a sword and started hacking at the tentacle that was attempting to crush the life out of him.

Meanwhile, Hestia's main defense against the tentacles seemed to be irreverence:

“Hey look, you're a giant tentacle monster and I'm a virgin. Could you maybe just get it over with? We all know what you want so just go ahead and do it.”

Her logic was sound. If what she'd said was true then the moment one of those tentacles broke her hymen she would simply vanish and show back up in her tholos, which was presumably much less painful than having the spiny tentacle squeezing the life out of her. Except this creature clearly wasn't the violating-young-maidens type of monster. Because a moment later the two tentacles squeezed down on her and then ripped her in half.

The only reason Hestia's screams did not feature prominently in my future nightmares was that they cut off after only a moment, her body vanishing into motes of light. But it did tell us exactly what would happen if those tentacles got hold of us.

And not only was the goat creature a problem in and of itself, summoning it hadn't made Bres less dangerous in any way.

Directly underneath the goat octopus' beak the duel between Poseidon and Bres continued. And it was a good thing it did because that meant Bres didn't notice what was happening behind him.

Not that I could concentrate on it either, given that after seeing what the tentacles had done to Hestia I was running across the battlefield like a madman, severing as many of the tentacles as I could. It had been a death I wouldn't wish on anyone but at least it had happened to one of the gods. They could come back to life after being ripped in half. We weren't so lucky. And so I made it my absolute top priority to deal with the tentacles, which was easier said than done.

Each of the stumps oozed black goo but that wasn't just this creature's way of bleeding. Rather, the flow of black goo eventually ceased and what had come running out rippled and solidified, becoming a new appendage, only this time wholly black rather than translucent with a black core. I didn't know if the fully black tentacles were less dangerous or more dangerous than the regular ones and I was pretty sure I didn't want to find out.

Yume, Selene and Athena had clearly reached similar conclusions about the nature of Outsider energy inside the creatures as I had because instead of attacking its tentacles they instead summoned up life force to attack its body with. Yume and Selene were using Qi Projection to send Qi at the creature and Athena was sending her Palladion miracle at it. And given the way the creature shook and groaned with each impact the skills were clearly having an effect on it. Just not enough to stop it from sending out more of the tentacles.

The others joined in, everyone who had an ability that used life force pitching in. Alisha's tornado lances actually managed to blow huge chunks out of the creature and for a moment it looked as if we could do it so long as Poseidon managed to keep Bres busy.

A high-pitched ringing sound echoed across the battlefield a moment before Poseidon's trident spun through the air. He summoned a shield of water but Bres simply snorted as he reached through it unmolested and grabbed Poseidon by the throat.

“I really wanted to do this to Manannán mac Lir but... you'll do, Poseidon,” Bres said, his tone a bizarre mixture of gentle and venomous. And then he rammed his massive sword into Poseidon's gut.

Poseidon staggered back and doubled over, his face overcome with pain and horror. Gut wounds were a horrible way to die. Even healing magic wasn't always strong enough to save someone suffering from a gut wound. Stomach acid would pour into the bowels, eating away at the flesh faster than many casters could heal but just slow enough that it took excruciatingly long for someone to actually die of it. And clearly Poseidon had never suffered this kind of injury because his face clearly showed confusion, confusion that despite all this pain he wasn't dying.

“Hurts, doesn't it?” Bres gloated. “The issue with us gods is that we die too damn fast. Makes it hard to really make a death hurt. But I've gotten very good at it. It's the one perk of being a god everyone hates: There's always someone stupid enough to pick a fight with you, always someone you can practice on.”

And as he stood there gloating over the god of the sea the thing I'd seen behind him finally struck.

A dozen thorny brambles shot forward like striking snakes, wrapping around his limbs faster than he could react. They did not merely immobilize him, they shredded his skin as they went, turning him into a mess of weeping wounds and bloody flesh. When he could no longer move his limbs one final vine slowly wrapped around his throat.

“Then be sure to tell me how painful this death was the next time we see each other,” hissed Demeter as she rose up from the earth behind him. And then she tore him apart with the vines.