I approached the door which the Atlani guards had been guarding and as I did I closed my eyes and searched deep within myself. Each room brought me closer to a battle against a new second fiercest enemy I'll have faced to date, second only to Morehammer himself.
Akamal had been a greater deity in life. For me to defeat his vestige I would need to rely on every single power and font of power I possessed. I would need to push myself to the limit, in every single sense possible. And to begin to prepare me for that, I was still and I activated powers I had never used before.
Deep within myself, where I could most keenly feel my own powers I drew them within myself. I activated strange and powerful abilities like "Future Sight", and as my mind opened itself up to the future for the first time I momentarily shivered. For a split second, I could clearly see the future, even if it was only the immediate future, and then the power dimmed and returned to its normal state, which was a bit disappointing.
The future was simple. I obliterated the door in front of me. It was an easy enough future to predict, and the reason I predicted it, unintentionally, was because my power was activating for the first time ever and reacting to the abundance of other powers I possessed, as well as the power deep in my soul.
"Future Sight" was a power that allowed me a glimpse into the future, but only under specific circumstances. It allowed me to know when and where enemy attacks would come from, both right before and during combat. I hadn't really needed to activate it before, as doing so would have only made fighting me even more unfair, but since I was hours, if that, away from battling and killing an ancient vestige that was more powerful than Technos I knew I'd need every single advantage I could get. I was willing and able to play dirty, against a vestige of a greater god.
I took a deep breath and readied myself to open my eyes. I knew that when I did the world would feel different to me. I chuckled and opened my eyes.
When I opened my eyes, I felt my mind adjust to a barrage of new sensory information. Sensory information that wasn't tethered to the present, but was instead keyed to the future. Death looked at me, and I knew that he sensed that I was stronger than I had been a moment ago. He smiled, cruelly, at me. I didn't reply to him, at least not with words, but I felt my smile twist slightly as if to reflect a portion of his own malice.
I rose a hand up to the door and silently activated my "Disintegration" power. The door was struck by my power and couldn't at all resist, so instead of resisting the door crumbled away and I motioned for my companion to join me. We stepped through the newly created hole in the wall and found ourselves inside another hallway. But this one was different.
This hallway was illuminated. And along the walls in front of us were the runic writings of the Atlani people. I didn't need to read the wall to know what it was saying. It was a mythic history of Akamal, and indeed of this very temple. Which I already knew. Death, on the other hand, was only aware of Akamal as a vestige of a god who had enjoyed death a good deal. So he took to reading the writing aloud.
"In the beginning, there were many gods." He said, reading the runes etched onto the wall. I chuckled as I spent a moment imagining a cosmos filled with creatures like Technos, Morehammer, and myself. The mythic age, which was the age that was being referenced in the runes, must have been a truly fantastical time to be alive.
"It seems that if I want to, with enough power over time perhaps I could visit that age..." I thought, idly, to myself. I then immediately chuckled and willed that thought away. I was nowhere near powerful enough to go back to a time when gods still wandered the cosmos. I'd need a lot more power before I even remotely considered the possibility of time travel.
"We once worshiped a large number of different gods. Gods of rivers, gods of the harvest, a goddess of the sun, and throughout our history many different gods of death." Death continued, though not without a chuckle at the thought of the different sort of death gods that the Atlani worshiped.
"As we loved these gods, they loved us in turn. Our priests and priestesses, oracles and templars were particularly blessed by our gods." Death stated, continuing to read the words inscribed on the walls.
"Oracles" was an interesting word. I knew what they were, the final religious class that I didn't yet have myself and that I even only had a few of in my entire empire. I knew that throughout their history the Atlani people had produced quite a few oracles, wise sages touched by the gods, and able to experience visions of the future.
"Oracles huh? This little civilization was once known for producing them I suppose... I even remember feeling their souls in the distant past. When they died, I mean." Death muttered, softly commenting on the fact that the Atlani were known for such a surprising feat. Oracles almost never arose spontaneously so producing them in any significant number meant that a civilization had the direct backing of at least one of a few powerful, rare types of deities.
Throughout my entire life I had only gained one tier of influence over the domain of time, and I hadn't yet acquired any influence over the domain of fate. To gain access to the oracle class, and the ability to turn others into oracles, I needed either two tiers of influence over fate or time, or I needed one tier of influence over each domain.
It was at this point that I heard figures off in the distance, from beyond the room we were in. I sighed and prepared myself to instantly deal with the annoyance that was coming to us. Death continued to read the runes, silently now, and he sensed my decision to handle whatever was coming so he didn't take his eyes off of the wall, even when the door off in the distance opened and a pair of priestesses stepped through it and began to march towards us.
I sighed and began using "Authority" for one of the first times ever. "Authority" was a powerful law domain power that I tended not to use since I had a number of ways of interfering with my enemies that were less blunt. That said, moments like this where I didn't care to be interrupted, especially not by mortals, were ideal moments for the bluntness of the power.
"Stop." I uttered while using my power over sound to project my voice towards the mortals. My voice bounced off of the walls in the temple hallway, and I could both see and feel the sound wave of my monolexical utterance.
It sped towards the priestesses, and when it hit them I watched their bodies react to my power, before using my powers over sound to make it so that their allies didn't also hear my voice. I felt like having fun with their allies.
They were close to a kilometer away from me, and yet thanks to my enhanced senses I could see their bodies clearly freeze up. I watched as their minds recoiled from my word, from my power, and I watched their bodies cease to obey their minds. I telepathically sensed their minds rail against my power, roar out against it, but their bodies were unable to stop my power. They simply weren't strong enough, as they were nothing more than mortals.
They didn't just stop walking towards Death and me, they stopped breathing altogether. Their bodies began to shut down, or rather simply stop working to maintaining themselves. This wasn't an active cessation of functioning, such as if they had died and their bodies were beginning to shut down, this was their bodies abruptly and totally ceasing to function. Even their hearts weren't beating anymore, and they very quickly began to experience sudden cardiac arrest.
The priestesses weren't alone, and I immediately began my preparations to deal with their escorts. They were each guarded by three male guards who had been behind them, beyond the door they stepped through and they had seen the women they were tasked with protecting abruptly fall and begin to die. In the instant that they saw those they were charged with protecting fall, I heard their heart rates skyrocket as they began to try and reach the women. I shook my head and activated "Distance manipulation", a physics domain power to prevent them from reaching the women in their care.
Before the eyes of the guards the distance that separated them from the women they were supposed to protect increased exponentially. They saw a sort of artificial, but still very real, amount of space generate between them and the priestesses of Akamal. I smiled as their eyes filled with despair, before raising my hand and targeting them with a number of abilities at once.
The guards in the distance roared in rage, making inarticulate sounds of fury as mutations began to wrack them. I was using my powers over anger, hate, and conflict to make them experience a sanity-breaking fury that filled them with an overwhelming urge to kill something.
My powers over anger were fun to use in moments like this. With them, I could turn a friend on a friend and even destroy relationships. It was even easy to do so. I delighted in the knowledge that one day I'd have total control over all emotions, and be able to make all manner of all lifeforms experience all manner of emotions. When I gained my next tier of influence over the domain of emotions I planned to acquire power over happiness.
Now that I was more knowledgeable than ever before, I knew what I could do with powers like happiness manipulation and happiness inducement. In my hands, those would be society-altering powers that I could use to reshape entire worlds without ever revealing my presence. My powers over fear, love, hatred, and sadness, which I had only fully acquired mastery over in the wake of defeating Technos days ago, were great but the instant I gained powers over happiness... I struggled to refocus after thinking such ambitious and exciting thoughts.
That said I didn't just use my powers over rage and mindless fury. I also afflicted my enemies with mutations.
The guards in the distance were ineffectually roaring, unable to actually attack and kill each other just yet because I had hit them with a wave of mutations. The mutations were determined at random, as I hadn't had specific ones in mind, and they were still being determined by the power I had used which was a synergistic wave of mutational energy that I had made originate at a spot exactly in the middle of the six guards.
The guards were on their knees, as the mutations began to manifest. One guard abruptly began to grow new eyes, another guard began to grow a stump of an arm in the center of his chest. These weren't just minor mutations, these were terrifying, appearance, limb, and even mind-altering mutations.
The guard whose mutations were the least altering to his body and mostly centered on his mind ceased his roaring and grabbed his fallen spear. There was a rage in his gaze and he unsteadily rose to his feet, as he turned on the man closest to him, the one who was growing new eyes, and stabbed at him with his spear.
I smiled as Death and I continued our walk, unbothered by the distant sounds of violence. Indeed, instead of disliking the distant violence, Death grinned approvingly, evidently quite pleased with my choice to make our enemies fight each other instead of us.
Death and I spent a few minutes making our way towards the corpses of the priestesses. As we did I began to visually study them.
The pair of women who had had the misfortunate of serving Akamal were dressed in white fur clothing. Their clothing had an elegance to its design that other Atlani clothing that I had seen had not, as though it were fit for nobility, or for people whose roles were even more important than those of nobility. It seemed that Akamal had had a similar organizational philosophy to my own: clerics and people who were members of other religious classes were, in our organizations at least, more important than nobility.
The two women had fair skin, and as I visually investigated them and processed their memories I swiftly learned that that was because they had spent most of their lives indoors. It seemed that in Akamal's faith being a priestess was a hereditary position and so the two knew from birth that they'd join the priesthood.
They carried a pair of effigies, which were made from straw, and at a glance, I understood that the things were tools to be used in their magic. I retrieved the effigies and set them ablaze, but not before I analyzed them in the time it took to grab them and gained more knowledge of voodoo. They were fascinating things, and in time I planned to take my time and study voodoo properly but for now, I was content with the knowledge I had. After all, I was on the verge of becoming a deity of voodoo. And voodoo was a sort of magic I planned to enjoy being a deity of.
Death gazed at the corpses and as he did his smile faded. I wasn't looking at him, but I didn't need to look at someone to see them. I knelt down beside one of the corpses, that of the younger member of the pair and I tapped the forehead of the corpse. When I did I infected the corpse with a number of contagious diseases, and began to chuckle. I had an unpleasant surprise for the Atlani people, one that would come in the form of this corpse.
"I can't leave this place, for now, but no such restriction bars a corpse from leaving it." I muttered, thinking out loud, with a macabre smile on my face. The ground beneath the corpse vanished, and a one-way portal appeared in its place. The corpse began to sink into the portal, and as it did Death and I got to gaze at what lay on the other end of the portal.
The portal led into a deep well used by an Atlani village, one that was fairly close to the home of the Terran colonialists. The corpse would infect the water supply, and I planned to make the diseases that the body was afflicted with much worse when they had spread to living people.
When the body sunk into the portal I chuckled and closed it with a thought. It wouldn't take long for that to begin to pay off for me. I then turned my gaze towards the other corpse and studied it. The first corpse had been that of a young woman, who was in her early twenties. This corpse belonged to a much older woman, one who was in her late forties.
I peered into her mind and studied her thoughts. She was a pious worshiper of the vestige of Akamal, one of the very few vestige worshipers I had seen to date. The others I had fought, and the guards clashing off in the distance, were servants of the ghost of the god of time, but they weren't worshipers of it. She was like Aoife, who had betrayed me and chosen to stay with Morehammer in the disastrous aftermath of the events on Torus, a willing follower of and believer in a vestige.
I studied her memories and in doing so began to learn what my enemy was like to his followers. Since Akamal, unlike Technos, had mortal worshipers, I needed to learn everything I could from them about the walking nightmare I had come here to kill.
