The second they passed through the gate, Thera wasted no time pulling away the paved stone below them and shaping it the best she could, creating a large basket for them to stand within as she flew them at high speeds to their distant destination while wind whipped by their faces.

So how long until Thera’s going to be in danger of seeing this thing?

<At your current speed, an hour. I’ll warn you beforehand.>

And how long till the world ends?

<Impossible to say. The outsider’s still adjusting to being inside it seems, there could be plenty of strengths to it we can’t see beyond the way its basic existence is affecting the world at large and given it shook the world just coming through, I’m not intending to be too optimistic.>

Fucking great, in that case, if you notice anything major before we arrive then let me know. I’d hate to discover it has some crazy infinite torture ability that only activates when someone resists whatever it’s doing to anyone’s minds.

<The chances of anyone else discovering an ability like that before you get there is non-existent.>

Once again, fucking great.

<On that idea, you should at least relax. The mental harm it’s doing to the life of this world has less to do with an ability than it does its fundamentally foreign nature clashing with minds that could never have evolved to handle it. It doesn’t need to try and cause harm, in a basic sense, to the creatures of this reality, its existence is harm in and of itself.>

Very cool, we’ll get back to that. For now, when do you think we’ll start running into ghosts then?

<Any second.>

Could have used some more heads-up!

<Relax, the outsider is your priority. Without a death mage around the ghosts haven’t been in the mortal plane long enough to properly understand their state to regain their power. They’re practically harmless.>

“Incoming!” Thera yelled out, pulling him from his back and forth with Myriad as she jerked the basket upwards, causing a sudden fireball to hit its stone side instead of their far more delicate faces as the ghost in the distance prepared another, all while Ben directed a flurry of accusatory thoughts to his god.

<Ahem, I suppose it’s possible that thoroughly ancient ghosts may be able to regain some of the power they held in life earlier than expected thanks to all of their time trapped in the hells, though we’ve never seen it before. There aren’t really any examples of them escaping I could draw on for information.>

“Well, we’re sure seeing it now! Thera, give me a second!”

He once more stole a painful quantity of her mana, filling his soul with the stuff before applying a layer of rainbow mana crystal to the front of the cart that left him wanting to heave. Even with his knowledge on the topic and his high skill level, he’d still needed to rapidly take in a tenth of Thera’s insane volume to create that much but he didn’t have time to recover. He was already reaching over the edge to apply the enchantments it needed before yelling a direction for her.

“Any ghosts you see, just ram them!”

Not wasting a second to let their mysterious adversary prepare another spell, she did what he said, shooting them both through the sky to pass through the intangible being, only to watch as it disappeared the moment its form struck the crystal, to be replaced with a flash of light.

“Okay, the soul crystal is properly functioning here, perfect,” Ben muttered. “That just leaves seeing how many it could hold.”

His far smaller, battery-sized crystals were capable of storing about six souls, but combining the fact that he could now enchant with awakened magics compared to when he’d first made a soul crystal with the sheer size of the one they were using and there was no way to be sure how many they’d be able to capture.

So we’ve just gotta hope it’s enough.

Even as they rushed, the next leg of the journey felt so horribly slow. They were seeing the occasional ghost that they’d go out of their way to ram but they were still few and far between, with the issue being that they were scattering in all directions from a still distant central source. No matter how great the flood, they were still just seeing the early bit of it spread out, even if it was slowly getting denser, with more now before them.

“Looks like a water attack from one and nothing from the other!” He yelled, waiting for Thera to respond but getting nothing as he glanced at her, finding her looking sickly and shaking as he rushed to at first connect with her to determine the problem before fully merging her mind into his own to spare her from the mental effect being cast, even as they were struck.

Water hit the basket with enough force to knock it back, making Ben cling to both it and his girlfriend as she moved to right it, bringing it back up the second she could and shooting towards the two before either could try anything else, even as Ben struggled to make sense of things.

Too many of the ghosts seemed to be casting their spells with ease. One or two he could understand, but that many seemed fundamentally opposed to all he thought he knew on the topic, and in an urge to right it he tried something, reaching out to connect with the two just before they were going to be hit and looked into their minds and histories.

There was a lot he noticed all at once as he was forced to take in an unnaturally alien experience compared to so much of the more typical connecting he’d do as his minds struggled to process it all.

He was seeing both creatures’ histories, finding they’d come from both a void and jovian race which made them alien enough to him as he explored what he could of their thoughts and memories to learn of their people and culture, finding nothing objectionable about their god tossing the two tyrants into hell, but when it came to that part of their existences it was nothing but a blank. An empty space where it seemed like no real memories had been able to form, only an intense feeling of madness.

It left him all the more curious about what the infinite hells even were but he pushed the thought away for the time being, resolving to explore the minds of any other ghosts they came across and instead focused on a different discovery. They were being controlled.

“Myriad! It looks like all of these things are able to cast their spells because they have something exerting their will over them, what’s the odds it’s the outsider?”

<Well, considering it was surviving in the hells with a true body instead of as a soul, there’s a chance they weren’t affected in the same way. Hell, just by being an outsider there’s no guarantee they were bothered by it at all. If they were just trapped down there for some unknown length of time and happened to have a compatibility with the death magic of this universe then there’s a chance it's been figuring out how to use it and slowly bringing them all under it. Hell, it’s possible it had some other innate ability from before it got trapped that wouldn’t rely on death magic.>

“Wow, I really wish I could get some more definite answers than just a bunch of maybes and probablys.”

<Not sure how you expect to get them, we’re all figuring out this on the fly too you know.>

“I know, I know, sorry. How are things up there?”

<Bad. You saved us a lot of faith with the first wave but as we make estimates based on what we’re seeing and predict based on stories that are practically legends from the void gods, if we act to stop this then no gods will have the faith to do anything at all for the second or third waves, and that’s a big if. Chances are just as good we burn all our power and fail in the end.>

“Okay, bad sounds like an understatement.”

<It is, and given the risk you’re taking it’s led to a vote going down for a particular choice.>

“Which is?”

<Hold off and see if you can handle it.>

“...I fucking hate every single one of you up there.”

<There’s a bit more nuance to it than that.> Myriad sighed in his head. <You’ll understand more when you see it yourself but the fact of the matter is that even if we leave this bit to you, there’s going to be an insane fallout for the rest of us up here to deal with after so before we burn literally every resource we have, we would like to see if you and your insane mind are good enough to handle the problem on world. That would mean we might still have a little to spend on trying to deal with the coming waves. On top of that, it’s not strictly just you. We have other mortals coming to help handle the ghosts as much as they can and basically every space mage on the planet is in the middle of being mobilized to get them there as fast as possible.>

“Fine, but if all of you assholes up there are going to be depending on me then just you wait, I’m coming for a proper reward whether you like it or not! I am not being treated as the world’s last freaking hope without being properly compensated!”

<I would expect no less of you. For the time being, trust at least that we’ll work it out after this little apocalypse is over and done with.>

“Fine,” Ben gave in, all while his thoughts were filled with grumbles about no good gods who were only willing to properly appreciate him when they could see a way he’d be useful.