The world of Mareth was a potent playground for someone as powerful as myself. The whole place was littered with both individuals eking out a sad existence, and portals that led from other worlds into Mareth. Sadly for those worlds, all a strange and world-altering contagion like myself needed was the ability to peer through a portal and see what lay on the other side.
With my newfound powers mixed with my ability to see the entire world of Mareth all at once, I was able to do something quite fun back in my home base. At the moment I was thoroughly entertaining the "Champion" sent to Mareth by the elders of the village of Ingnam, while Bellatrix watched over the camp, but with the powers now settling within the depths of my soul I turned my vision outward.
Mareth possessed some strange quality that made it a natural birthplace for portals, the overwhelming majority of which were one-way. Travelers could find portals leading to Mareth with ease, and portals that led outwards were exceptionally rare. The portal that led to Northos was basically a one-in-a-million portal that actually allowed for two-way travel, and it was under my control.
Until my truest self had drunk the "Essence of the Portal Master" even I would have struggled to create portals leading out of Mareth if my intended destination were a place I had never been myself. Now... Well, now I was playing a whole new game.
I used my ability to see the entire world of Mareth at once and to form new avatars spontaneously to do something fun; I shunted out a small portion of my mind and essence and with it created a weak avatar that would only serve a singular purpose; to extend a dark tendril of mine into new worlds.
The malevolent, almost cancerous divinity projected a minuscule amount of his will out of his "home base" and into the middle of a plain kilometers away from the forest he was claiming as his own. The quiet being appeared without making a sound, instantaneously forming in the middle of a large clearing free of wheat and other plants aside from simple native grasses.
This simple manifestation of the quiet divinity was fully formed but was also translucent. Had anyone been around to harass him they'd surely have commented on the oddity of his see-through-ness, but he was alone in the untamed Marethian wilderness.
The creature, every bit as intimately tied to the hivemind of the Blacklight Virus and to the grander consciousness of the over-divinity he was a part of, effortlessly utilized one of the grand new powers he possessed. The air around him froze and shimmered before he was abruptly completely surrounded by several glowing portals that led to different worlds and even different universes.
It was at that moment, alone and far from any of his allies, that the true, terrifying power of the dreadful divinity became clear. The god's form shifted and took on much more monstrous qualities as he crept closer and closer to various new worlds and universes. He went from vaguely resembling an ethereal humanoid to taking on a form one might expect to see if they wandered the dreamscape of a gibbering cultist.
His new form had a number of mysterious traits such as a golden, fiery aura, as well as a number of tentacle-like amorphous pseudopods that shone with impossible darkness. His form lacked eyes, but he could see as easily and as potently as he could have before. His senses were not dependent on things like his material body but were tethered to his majestic soul, being an intimate part of him as tethered to his awareness as his Blacklight Virus was.
The very second that the entity's true form manifested he extended tendrils outwards and into the portals that surrounded him. As he did he began to glow with potent power as he felt powers surging into himself. And, terrifyingly, as he entered these other worlds he also extended his consciousness outward, his awareness and presence contagiously spreading into whole new universes.
Thankfully for the rest of the omniverse the dark god who was on the verge of leapfrogging from one universe to another, like some sort of deranged parasite, Fohion was not interested in infecting new universes with his presence in any real way. He was content to remain a devastating plague on three different worlds for now, and he only sought the power that surged into him whenever he seeped into a new universe from some forbidden backdoor.
Nevertheless, he delighted in the powers he was gaining and he felt a sharp awareness of how his unfettered speed was steadily altering even the universes he had more of a presence in. As his powers grew, the items and even new lifeforms that were innately devoted to him began to spread across reality, seeping into both universes where his presence was a brand new alien force and ones where his presence was already an established but little-known fact.
In the worlds of Mareth, Pagora, and Northos, reality began to be altered by the increased power of the dark god who had just extended disgusting tendrils into new worlds. People devoted to Fohion began to be written into and created from nothing within the three worlds thanks to the mighty nature of Fohion's soul mixing with the unique properties of each of the universes he was extending sickening tendrils into.
Rumors about the dark beast began to spread within the realms he had already set foot in. In such places, the precise nature of the rumors that were connected to the dark monster rampaging through the halfling fortress was connected to the sort of dark villain he was and planned to be. In other universes, ones where he was but an inactive observer, the rumors were much more mysterious. Either way, the rumors were potent and tied to the being's strange and universally sinister nature.
The god made clever usage of "Multisense" to watch as reality itself was rewritten, and overwritten, to make sense of the changes his presence brought on many different universes. He also watched, intrigued, as reality was both rewritten and overwritten in the universes where he was an established presence. Both sides of this edited coin were fascinating to him, especially as he felt his power and even his potential beginning to increase.
I gazed at the rapidly materializing form of Melvin Underbelly as I felt new powers surging within me and I decided to test out some of my older, yet unused powers. I rose my hand in the direction of the halfling king and uttered a simple two-word spell.
"Accio crown." I uttered, powerfully. My words confused the halfling, whose eyes were rapidly filling with intelligence and awareness with every passing millisecond. A split second later the halfling grunted in surprise as he felt the crown vanish off of his head and zip across the space separating us. I deftly grabbed the thing and chuckled as I willed it to vanish into my inventory. Not even an attosecond after I grabbed the item it disappeared, fully dematerializing and zipping into my inventory.
"Uhh... What?!" The halfling roared, shortly before beginning to groan and take deep breaths. The bastard was already out of breath, even before he was fully formed. I chuckled and studied the figure with my, now tremendously enhanced senses, taking in an array of information about the strange historical figure.
I pointed the gun in my hand at the megalomaniacal deceased ruler of the halflings. As I opened my mouth I was amused to feel time freeze around me and see text bubbles appear in front of me. There were a number of them and they offered me suggestions on what to say. Each text bubble was based around a certain emotion I wanted to evoke in my target, in this case the halfling king that the Mother Goddess had summoned to fight me. Time was completely frozen around me, and I also saw an empty text bubble in case I wanted to be a bit freeform with my taunting.
I silently read the various options before me, my eyes speedily flitting to and fro each bubble. Some of the bubbles were filled with nice words and were based on kind prompts, while others were filled with vicious words and I could tell that such options were enhanced by a number of perks I possessed that bolstered my natural intimidation. The crueler ones were also filled with suggestions for actions to punctuate the words I spoke, several of which were quite funny to me.
It only took me a few moments to make my choice. Once it was made, I felt time beginning to resume around me as my open mouth began to twist into a smirk.
"I didn't come here to play any games. Now perish." I uttered, dramatically, as I activated "Ex Nihilo" and targeted the reincarnated halfling. The circle at the feet of the royal halfling cracked and the face of the figure went slack as he felt his essence begin to fade. Drool began to seep out of his open mouth and he almost seemed to relax before he began to turn into dust from the feet up. It took a few moments for the dark figure to fully fade out of existence, and when he did the entire battlefield fell silent.
For a few moments the halflings who were attempting to defeat my forces had had a chance to see their dark king come back from the dead. They had not stopped to admire the figure, but rather were rallied by his presence and fought back harder for the few moments their monarch existed. When he was immediately dispatched by my potent power I felt their hearts sink and could almost see their morale dropping. I was excited to fully smash it.
I rose my gun to the sky and chuckled before I activated one of the newest powers at my disposal. I opened my mouth wide and I let out a piercing howl. The inhuman sound that emanated from my open maw was one that no humanoid could hope to reproduce, and as I let it loose I could see the color fading from the faces of my enemies.
A few moments after I began to screech my minions began to let out similar sounds, opening their mouths impossibly wide and letting out equally deafening wails. Their wails were not emotionless, however, and I could hear the sounds of their triumphant elation sneaking into their voices and their impossible cries of victory.
The halflings stiffened upon hearing our inhuman sounds of victory and the weakest willed of them began to scatter before the might of my army. I listened as they ran away, and I turned my attention back towards them while continuing to emit my baleful screech. I rose my gun in their direction and began to fire into the crowd of cowards.
Thick, powerful bolts exploded out of my gun and unerringly hit the diminutive and weak-willed chickens. The bolts exploded inside of the creatures, putting them down with ease and causing me to shiver in delight as I felt my soul accrue "experience", something I hadn't acquired when I effectively deleted Melvin Underbelly from existence.
"So this is the power of a... 'system'?" I asked, mostly rhetorically, as I felt my mind's eye begin to abruptly light up and adjust to incorporate one critical aspect of one of the universes I had extended my unholy and eldritch appendages into.
My mind's eye was filling with a number of menus and assorted icons that further diversified my ability to make sense of reality. I could see HP bars beginning to appear above the heads of people I could see, along with a mini-map that was beginning to form in my mind's eye. I could also see my own stats struggle to be quantified by the system that I had acquired by setting a tiny sliver of my will into another universe.
This thoroughly decked out and optimized "System" was a powerful thing that I could already feel working to optimize my statistics. It felt good to have a sort of subservient will working to adjust my growth and to streamline the mess of internal mechanisms and energies flowing through me. I could already tell that it was going to be important to my growth and would do a significant amount of work to help organize my innards and powers.
For all of the menus I could see coming to life within me, though, only two truly stood out immediately. One of them was a "Party" menu, that I intuitively knew was for small-scale teamwork and organizational efforts. The other one... Well, the other one was something else.
The other menu I could instinctively tell was handy for my purposes had an ambitious name. It was in the middle of my mind's eye, and the name was visible in gigantic red letters. And it made even my true-self smile, from deep in the white-light void in which he resided.
It said "Guild". And even just reading it was enough to make me feel an intense amount of joy. Finally... a way to more efficiently organize my followers that didn't involve infecting them with Blacklight!
