I allowed my companions, Titania and Imani, a second to simply stare at Rebeza in shock. To be fair to them she was quite beautiful and radiated a sort of sinful energy. I even allowed the mayor himself a second to just look at her for a moment, while I turned around, with my still eyes closed, and surveyed the office. I was able to see through my shut eyelids with ease.

The place was a mess, due in part to what had occurred during Rebeza's initial emergence into the room. I sighed and with a single gesture utilized my powers over time to rewind the room while leaving Rebeza, Imani, Titania, Mayor Summers, and myself completely untouched. A split second after I activated my power I was able to effectively clean the room by merely restoring it to the state it had been in prior to Rebeza's appearance. As I did that I opened my eyes and smiled at my companions, as well as the mayor. 

"Everyone, say hello to Rebeza. Rebeza is known, among angels, demons, and devils, as the 'Archangel of Corruption' and the 'Queen of the Fallen'. She is... a famous figure, in many circles. And she is also a potent time manipulator." I explained, with a smile at the archdemoness. She smiled back at me and giggled when I brought up her ability to manipulate time. The eyes of all three of the others in the room widened when I made my comment about Rebeza's ability to manipulate time itself. 

"That... That would explain her sudden appearance." The mayor uttered, causing me to turn to him and smile. That said, he was not the only person in the room. My other companions, two women who had knowledge of angels, fallen angels, demons, and devils, watched the legendary creature who I had made into one of my minions with wary, skeptical eyes. The fallen angel, however, was a mischievous being who was now empowered by an incredible degree compared to how she had been just minutes ago, and so she decided to demonstrate her new powers.

Sanguinarchs possessed a potent array of powers, each of which I had given myself, and due to the nature of the tether that tied a sanguinarch and their dark bride together Rebeza now possessed each of the sanguinarch powers I had given myself. She winked at me as she activated one of the fiercer powers she and I had acquired; "True Shifting". 

I watched as a shadowy silhouette appeared beside Titania, another appeared beside Imani, and one even appeared behind the mayor! The shadowy silhouettes all rapidly began to shift into exact clones of Rebeza, and each of them was smirking at the person they were beside or behind.

"True Shifting" was an extremely handy ability that was both an incredibly handy utility power and also a powerful weapon for creatures less capable than I. With it, one could shapeshift in virtually any way that they could imagine with a few distinctive limitations.

The biggest limitations regarding the power came in the form of maximum limits that shaped how this sort of shapeshifting could be used. Anyone with this power could shapeshift their forms in ways that were a maximum of one thousand times larger than their initial forms, and on the opposite scale, they could reduce their size to up to one hundred times smaller. With this power, one could even become an incredible doppelgänger of someone else, provided they had glimpsed them before.  That said, Rebeza was rather fond of another aspect of this power.

If someone didn't need to become someone else, or even someone wholly new, they could instead opt to become more of themselves. With this power someone could make, inhabit, and control multiple bodies at the same time! The only stipulation with that was that someone wasn't able to go beyond the maximum mass limit of one thousand times larger than their initial form, which meant that this was a truly fantastic weapon for someone who lacked my potent annihilation abilities. And, unsurprisingly, Rebeza was quickly becoming obsessed with this particular aspect of the superpower.

Titania, who was often emotionally unflappable, almost leaped out of her own skin as she reacted to the sudden presence of Rebeza's clone. She audibly gasped when she realized that the clone was right beside her, and I heard Rebeza giggle, but thankfully the mighty archdemoness only did so in my mind instead of doing that out loud.

"I... Ugh!" Titania exclaimed,  clearly annoyed by all of this. Rebeza watched her, and as she stared at the female titan-born I sensed myself grow slightly stronger. I knew precisely what Rebeza and Titania were each feeling, due in part to the network of connections that we all shared such as a psionic wavelength that allowed us to communicate without words, but also primarily due to a fun aspect of being an archdemon. 

Archdemons were tethered to sins. Each of us possessed a potent connection to at least one of the seven deadly sins. Rebeza was tethered on a conceptual level to the sin of lust, and to a powerful but not quite conceptual level to the sin of pride. I was different. I was tethered to all seven of the seven deadly sins on a conceptual level. That meant a lot, but part of what it meant was that I was intimately aware of every instance of one of the sins to which I had a connection. 

Each archdemon, unless they opted to shun a font of power in exchange for a potent but one-time boost to their power, had six total fonts of might that boosted their demonic power. These fonts were artifacts, souls, worship, fear, corruption, and of course, our tether to our sins. These sources of power worked differently from how a sanguinarch gained power since the essence that sanguinarchs sometimes used bestowed sanguinarchs with power that we used up when we made use of them, as opposed to the small but permanent boosts archdemons gained from our power sources. 

The sources of power of an archdemon worked much more like the sources of power of a cosmic god or a dragon lord, which were two other types of beings that I was as well. Rather than consume the power that our sources of power gave us unless we opted to overcharge our potent ascendant abilities, our sources of power steadily provided us with small but steady and permanent boosts of power.

Dragon lords shared some power sources with cosmic gods and archdemons.  The ones all three types of ascendant beings shared were souls, artifacts, and worship, all of which I possessed and maximized for all three types of beings. The ones unique to dragon lords were dragon heartscales, treasure, and vaults. The ones unique to archdemons were corruption, fear, and sins. The ones unique to cosmic gods happened to be the most unique overall, and they were innate, domains, worship from their favored race(s), sex and other rituals, invocation, sacrifice, pantheons, and temples.   

I could sense the envy that Titania felt towards the demoness, even though Titania herself wasn't quite aware of why she was jealous. She felt a cloying sort of jealousy that made her angrier than she otherwise would have been. Even her tiny spark of envy was tremendously empowering to me, and I could feel it send surges of power and sinful energy through my body and soul. This was due to the fact that she and I shared a personal connection, not so much due to the fact that she was just a bit jealous. 

Sins that I played some role in, be it pride one felt in worshiping me, wrath my enemies felt towards me, or lust I inspired, were all extra empowering to me. That was true for all archdemons as well, and was especially handy for infamous archdemons such as Rebeza, though she wasn't as powerful an archdemon as I was so even though she gained more ambient benefits from small power multipliers like that she still wasn't able to stack up to me as far as raw firepower went.  

"Titania... It's okay. Rebeza is another new worshiper of mine." I explained, beginning the work needed to calm my first wife. Rebeza smiled at me, and stepped forward until she was beside me. When she, her original self and not one of her clones, was in front of me she kissed my cheek and I felt the power of both the sin of lust that she was feeling and the envy of both the women in the room and the mayor himself surge up into me and fill myself and, in the case of the sin of lust, Rebeza, with power. And with every passing second an uncountable number of instances of the other five sins were occurring throughout the multiverse, filling me with even more power. 

While Rebeza teasingly, and selfishly, utilized her allure to inspire envy and lust I was reminded of something. I wanted to be neutral, but I was rapidly stacking up admittedly minor instances of engaging in evil acts. It was evil to forcibly use powers such as my ability to dominate people to turn them into my devoted worshipers, but that evil was morally lessened by the fact that I had used it on unrepentantly evil people and that I would command them to cease the vilest of their evil acts. It was evil to gain power over corruption and sin, and to use and profit off of that power. Thankfully I was capable of incredible acts of goodness as well.

My powers were not just capable of corruption and perversion. I mean, they were absolutely capable of those things but to focus on those aspects of them without any thought as to other applications of my abilities would be incredibly dumb of me. No, I could use my powers in a staggering array of ways so long as I was creative and constantly stretching my imagination. 

I didn't just want to be a being of corruption and sin. I wanted to be a being of balance, one who was just as skilled in building and maintaining things as I was at corrupting and destroying them. For me to do that I needed to be steadfastly devoted to self-mastery and to harmoniously balancing creation and destruction, and life and death within myself. 

I cast a single silent spell using nothing more than my mind even while I sat in the mayor's secondary office and allowed myself to scry on distant locales. Scrying was incredibly easy for me, due to the array of ways I could do it, even the ideal way which was to do it from within my mind without relying on some sort of external medium such as a scrying pool or something like a satellite through which my vision would be channeled. 

As I cast the spell I felt my mind's eye shift and develop a new "theater" of sorts. In one of the two "theaters", I could see events right in front and around my two physical bodies, since I also had a clone who was in class at the moment. In the other "theater" I was effectively piloting an undetectable floating eye that could move freely around me and show me events anywhere I wanted to see. I quickly piloted the eye up and out of the building, and commanded the thing to go high into the sky above the city. 

I watched as it floated higher and higher, giving me a bird's eye view of the city without forcing me to do anything like seeing events using x-ray vision. I could easily see this ability becoming a more common tool in my repertoire of arcane powers in time since with it I could see the world around me through my own eyes instead of through the eyes of some of my worshipers, servants, or allies. 

My perfected eye peered through all illusions and as it studied the city I felt my mind filling with an incredible amount of knowledge. Every building, object, and lifeform that my scrying eye could see was subjected to the potent powers of my visual psychometry as readily and as fully as if I had been peering at them myself. I studied the beautiful city below the floating eye as I made use of some of my more relaxed and generally "good" powers to begin to balance out the evil acts I had done over the course of the last few minutes. 

I glanced at people and selected ones in need. When I had decided someone was deserving of a little extra boost to their day or needed a lucky break, I effortlessly used powers like "Prosperity" and "Causality" to alter their fates in subtle but real ways.

In some cases I targeted people and ensured that they'd never get so sick that they needed hospitalization. In more immediate cases I even granted people the sort of lucky circumstances that'd allow them to pay off a month of rent or their mortgage with relatively minimal work such as by finding a lost dog whose owners promised a hefty reward. These were minor acts, but they were ones that all in all had a real and potent effect on the lives of those they affected. 

I still had no real desire to step out into the world fully, at least not at this early stage in my development as a Living God, but for now I was content to be kind and to help out people without really taking credit. And with each usage of my powers I felt myself growing a bit more familiar with the intimate nuances of my powers.

Lucianowrites

Edit notice: On 1/25/22 I added a very minor alteration to this chapter, noting that cosmic gods draw power from their domains. This was due to an oversight I noticed earlier today that required correction for the sake of future events in the story.