Khaine’s surprise and fear subsided, leaving him with bloodshot eyes and lips quivering in anger. He couldn’t contain his fury, and lunged at Asdel with a roar. His sword aura glowed more fiercely than when he severed Asdel's hand, threatening to cut Asdel's neck this time. "Holy Cross!"

Asdel couldn't afford to receive a single slash from that sword. 'Soul mind!'

His exalted skill enhanced his brain processing power several folds, allowing him to consider countless moves and deduce their outcomes.

Picking the best scenario, he simply ducked under the sword's path and delivered an uppercut to Khaine's chin before he completed the vertical slash of 'holy cross'.

’This rank D noble kid got carried during his leveling, but he's still inexperienced in real combat. He must have been lucky with his promotion quest.’ Asdel snickered and pounced on the dizzy noble.

Most exalted skills dealt massive damage but had the fatal flaw of being more telegraphed than regular attacks. Instead of pressuring Asdel with normal strikes and cornering him into wasting his defensive moves before using holy cross, Khaine had rushed ignorantly and committed his best cards right off the bat when they were the most likely to be countered.

Asdel felt that fighting against Luciella was like a game of chess, where each of her moves led him into difficult decisions just to get a chance to retaliate. But Khaine? 'He must think that I am the same as the half-dead aberrations that his subordinates fed him to level up.'

Thanks to the difference in experience, Asdel could bridge the significant gap in their raw specs. He didn't allow Khaine a single moment to breathe and overwhelmed the noble with an unrelenting assault.

Khaine's pants were hastily pulled up but fell back down, tripping him as he backed away from Asdel.

He was not used to pain and his aura quickly fractured under Asdel's skills. He wailed in pain as he struggled to get up. "Wait- Stop! I beg you-"

Asdel straddled the noble and savagely hammered his face. "Shut up!"

Viola and Tomoyo got up and stomped on Khaine's crotch. "Take this, son of a bitch!"

"Stooooop!" The young man cried as the horrendous pain shot up in intensity as soon as his aura shattered.

…

Khaine had turned into a bloody pulp and gave his last breath from concussion. A huge bag of money rolled off the ground from his inventory space.

Tomoyo picked up the keys hanging off the corpse's belt.

Asdel blew a sigh of relief. 'Good thing that there are no other prisoners around. Khaine wanted to torture us without witness, huh?'

As if pulled by Amaranth, Asdel swiped everything that could be taken.

[You obtained 30 000 vars and a rank D soul gem.]

'Hm? No experience points?'

Viola and Tomoyo hugged Asdel and cried with all their heart. "Asdel, y-your arm is… sniff-" "Uwaaaaah, grand eldeeeeeer!"

"I'm sorry," Viola repeated like a broken record. She brought Asdel's hand and tried to stick it back onto his stump with a healing spell, but her proficiency fell short.

“It’s alright…” Asdel felt no pain because Amaranth had pumped loads of medicine and anesthetics in his bloodstream.

The slime in question jumped out of his mouth.

[The Tear of the Allmother canceled its symbiosis. The class ‘Apostle’ is removed.]

Before he could complain, the slime grew gigantic and gobbled everyone in the prison cell.

“No, don’t eat me!” The girls screamed as they tried to jump away.

Asdel, Viola, Tomoyo, and Khaine's corpse fell into a strange space. A portal remained behind them. It showed the inside of the prison cell behind a layer of translucent slime flesh.

A fleshy cord was connected between the portal and a truck-sized blob of organs and flesh.

They were inside Amaranth’s (inventory) stomach!

A vast and obscure room that greeted them. A bright light fell from above, revealing only a small area around them.

A stash of snacks, money, soul gems, and potions spilled from Amaranth's inventory, scattering on the ground.

"Is that a slime inventory? How can it be so big? Mine is barely the size of a pouch…" Tomoyo gauged the volume of the space in awe.

“Just how much did you steal?” Asdel wanted to cry when he noticed that Amaranth swiped most of his things.

Viola gasped when she lifted her head. "Look up!"

A majestic woman three times larger than them floated above. Elegant black strips of fabric wrapped her body. But they did not hide her breasts and crotch in the slightest as if her godly assets were meant to be worshiped. A divine halo glowed behind her head, but devilish black horns hung at the sides of her head. Her hair seemed to reflect countless stars drifting in the infinite cosmos as if she bore an unfathomable power. However, heavy shackles cruelly restrained her.

Everything about her was a contradiction. She was not an entity meant to be found in the inventory of a random slime.

The graceful woman looked at the party, her eyes overflowing with warmth and love. "I am Mahala, the All-mother and Goddess of Life and Fertility. I greet you, my precious children."

She descended and gave the huge fleshy blob a pat. "You worked hard, my Tear."

Amaranth’s face appeared and smiled.

Viola couldn't stop her tears from pouring out. "W-why am I crying?" She felt shaken to the core by an intense yearning.

Mahala shrunk at the size of a human and also hugged Viola. "I'm sorry I couldn't come for you sooner, descendant of my angels."

Viola mustered all her willpower to push the goddess away. "What are you saying? I'm most definitely a human!"

"You can't use aura nor ki, can you? As an angel of the All-mother, you use demonic energy instead." Mahala let go of Viola reluctantly. "In fact, you must have experienced terrible hunger to extract demonic energy from people."

While humans generated soul essence and converted it into aura, devils extracted demonic energy and converted it into soul essence to sustain their life.

"Hunger? Do you mean arousal? Was that because of you?!" Viola angrily shook the goddess. She managed to live so far without demonic energy, so no one ever questioned her race. At the very least, she couldn't be a normal devil.

“Foolish descendant, you’ve been using tricks like clones to pleasure yourself instead of having sex with your real body, so you’ve never realized that you could extract demonic energy from humans.” Mahala shook her head with a sigh.

Asdel scratched his chin. "Are you from Inferno? You say you're a goddess but you look more like a devil succubus or something…"

"You’re not far from the truth. But can a mere succubus do this though?" Mahala snapped her finger, and seemingly nothing happened. “With this, the flow of time in this inventory space has changed. For each second that passes outside, four seconds would have passed here. We have a lot to talk about, but we won’t be interrupted thanks to this trick…”

“Amazing-” Asdel saw endless possibilities to this power.

But she quickly doused his enthusiasm. “It doesn’t come without price, though. It burns through Amaranth’s soul essence quite fast. I can’t maintain it for long, so let’s get to the point.”

“Asdel, I have an important offer for you. Right now, I am an usurped goddess, and the monarchs are leeching on my power. I want your help to reclaim my power, and in exchange I will invest everything I have into you. I will give everything whether you want to become stronger or return to your home world-”

“Alright, let’s go!” Asdel signed up right away.

The startled goddess stammered. “W-wait, you should hear the other option before making your decision. You can bail out of this whole affair and live a normal life in Hekal. Even if your original body dies in your home world, your current self in Hekal will be unaffected. You won’t be able to ever return, but if you live well in Hekal, is there a need to go back?”

The boy groaned in annoyance. “A normal life? I tried to sell unregulated medicine and I got busted right away. I just realized that even if you gave me freedom, I would inevitably screw myself up.”

Tomoyo squeezed his left hand. “You were doing well! Don’t sell yourself short.”

Asdel sighed. “Freedom without any power to back it up is not real freedom. Getting the personal support of the All-mother sounds a lot better than being another expandable pawn in the hands of the All-father. And more importantly…”

The boy grabbed Viola’s waist and huddled against Amaranth’s blob of organs. “I have a hunch that I would never see them again if I bail out now.”

“Asdel!” Viola was moved to tears and hugged him. He already fought fiercely and lost his dominant hand for her sake. “I don’t want to leave you either!”

He was unwilling to part with them once he got attached to them. ’Besides, both of them are so unreliable. I don’t want to see them alone against everything and without any knowledge in such an unreasonable quest.’ He couldn’t shake off his imagination showing them both dead in a random ditch.

No matter how the All-mother put it, her request was essentially to form an independent faction in a crazy war game. There was no way a clueless maid and a hobo slime could achieve such a feat, but a reincarnated person with the knowledge to navigate through the different factions might have a shot at this… or at least survive for a while.

“I don’t know who brought us together, but we need each other. I can’t say whether we’ll succeed, but even if I’m not up to the task, I won’t shirk from it.” Asdel clenched his left hand.

Mahala changed her expression to a severe look, as if judging Asdel’s worthiness to be her champion. “Aren’t you scared? An unreliable ally can be worse than enemies. If you agree so quickly, I’m worried that you would give up just as quickly.”

Asdel grinned and remembered that he was in a kid’s body. “I get what you mean… Despite how I look, I have the soul of a grown man way past the age to get swayed by uncertainty and stumble in a journey of self-discovery. When it comes to things I believe in, I’m ready to put my life on the line.” He raised his right arm’s stump with a resolute will that only older adults carried.

Was he scared? Of course, he was. But fear of the outcome was less important to him than the journey. Even if he bailed out to preserve his life, he would have to live unfulfilling days with the knowledge that he abandoned his dear maid and pet to their death.

Just survival wasn’t enough for him. ’I can’t live a life that makes me question every day if it’s worth it.’ This thought was both a limitation and a source of strength.

“I’ll help you, not out of righteousness, but because I can’t settle for anything else.”

Mahala giggled. “Alright, you treated my children well, after all. Let me explain your mission, then.”

She sighed wistfully. “I managed to free myself from the system thanks to the cosmic-defying aberration that you fed Amaranth, but I had to abandon a large portion of my power. The universe-wide conflict will grow fiercer as all factions will benefit from a surge of power and spawn more pawns for their war-game. Even so, I need you to become my saint and spread my name until I have enough divinity to send you back to your world.”