Chapter 91: God-killers

— Two hours ago, at the Temple of Minimine.

Maybe it was a regrettable thing for Minimine to have hidden the war in the shadows for so long. The same heart that told her to cherish her followers and cherish each mortal life, no matter how fleeting, was also the same heart that had kept her from bursting Kalender’s little bubble.

Had she appeared by his side too often, he would have picked up on her hesitation with his Interpersonal Bubble skill. Hence, she simply removed herself from his side: waking up earlier than everyone else, staying inside the temple all-day, or moving between various safehouses that her priesthood had so helpfully prepared—for her, her soldiers, and their Inquisitorial allies.

Tak entered the little prayer room, finding her goddess silently seated on the farthest pew, closest to the altar. Every day, right before the sun dipped below the horizon, she was just like this. What’s the silence for, my goddess? Why won’t you console with us? Her desperation to reach out had resulted in her opening the door to this very same prayer room many other times, but each time, she would quietly close it, too afraid to be the one to reach out.

Yesterday was going to be the last day that would happen.

She closed the door behind her, making no more noise than the gentle knock of the door against its frame. “My goddess,” she called out. Minimine’s head only turned slightly, showing nothing more than a sliver of her cheek to her Priestess.

Tak frowned. She walked down the aisle, stopping beside Minimine’s pew. There was an absent expression on her goddess’s face, like she had become some kind of doll who only existed to be dressed up.

“My goddess” —

“Please,” Minimine said with a soft voice, “don’t call me that.”

Tak exhaled through her nose. “Is it alright?”

Silence was Minimine’s answer.

“Minimine,” Tak said, “please confide in me.”

Minimine looked at her, turning her head so suddenly. She looked back down at her feet, though, unsure of what to say, and less so how to say it.

She was surprised, then, when Tak sat down beside her without any prompting—just like how she imagined it to happen, and it made her so happy.

Happiness and fear mixed together into a bittersweet pill that was stuck in her throat, but this wasn’t enough to keep her speaking. She had a thousand years of practice to speak despite her feelings.

“I fear,” she began—and even those first words of hers already gripped Tak, who had never known of a goddess being afraid of anything—“that I will become war once more.”

Tak didn’t know what she was hearing. “What do you mean?” she said softly.

“There was a time”—Minimine paused, rearranging her memories so that she would put those events in a way that wouldn’t throw Tak into disarray to hear about—“when I wasn’t kind.”

Tak gulped. The Minimine Priesthood’s own records were spotty about it, but by consulting with the other temples, they confirmed that their very own goddess was at the center of the Godstrife Era, many thousands of years ago.

There had been an attempt to ask Minimine about it some hundreds of years ago, but that only resulted in her going silent for a year. The Priesthood issued a general prohibition on “asking about it” at that time, and they arrived at a unanimous consensus that Minimine should speak about it on her own time.

To think that Tak would be the one who would hear it straight from her lips. To be glad or to be sad—she didn’t know which to be.

“I turned my eyes away to send my followers to their deaths by the legion. I had to, or else I couldn’t win, and now”—Minimine looked Tak in the eyes—“now I have to do it again. But I can’t. I can’t send ten thousand friends to their deaths.”

Despite a practically unlimited ability to resurrect someone over and over again, Minimine was incarnated as a human. Her powers were limited to her temples and to whatever was within her reach. It was certain that among her followers, most wouldn’t be able to die inside a temple, and their souls would be sent straight into an increasingly crowded River.

The war hung over her head like ten thousand guillotines, but she wouldn’t be the one to die. She never brought this up with anyone else, because no one else would understand being in such an extreme position.

Tak wanted to say, “But it’s also our choice to make, and we’re willing to die for you,” but what a terrible thing to say, and she knew it. She wouldn’t ever say it. She didn’t know what to say.

For a while, there was silence.

As any silence, it didn’t last.

This temple was her domain, and just as any domain, she sensed everything within it. Something had torn through the outer barrier, and something was tearing through the walls—tearing open every wound from the past and breaking through the invisible walls that boxed her away from reality.

The war was already here. It had always been.

Everyone’s in danger. Minimine’s telepathy blared throughout not just her temple, or her sister’s temple, but throughout the whole of the temple row, raising every Priestess’s and Cleric’s hair. “Intruder! Defend yourselves!”

Her warning gave only enough time to let Priestess Cecilia and the Clerics praying in the main hall to ready their weapons and magic. They turned towards the door, not twenty meters away, expecting it to burst open. They would flood the entryway with bullets and magic when it did.

Rapid flashes of light drew lines across the door, leaving behind puffs of steam as they did. Confusion mounted as the Clerics watching the lines grow in number, and the door had become more scarred than a scratching post.

It only took a second for the door to become a chessboard, and when its square pieces started to float away, separating from the door frame, Cecilia threw up a barrier.

The air turned into a lair of hornet’s nests. The square pieces shot at them and bounced all around the room, exploding into fragments and those fragments reflecting off surfaces once again. If Cecilia hadn’t put up her barrier in time, they would’ve all been injured.

Minimine quickly set magic to tear at the intruder while they were still outside, but it wasn’t doing anything. Magic missiles and tongues of flame shot out from thin air; holes appeared in the ground and spikes shot down from the sky, and yet, the intruder wasn’t stopping! She prodded the intruder with her magic to try and sense their shape, but it was being sliced into pieces, somehow, and all she could ascertain was that it was an individual—or three individuals stacked on top of each other in a trench coat. It was just that hard to tell.

The intruder finally rushed into the main hall. At least there, Minimine could see through her Clerics’ eyes, and she made out the shape of—two people! They were acting close together, possibly under the protection of some sort of observation denial magic.

Her own people were confused. At this rate, they would be hurt.

Minimine teleported out of the room, leaving behind Tak, and appeared between the Clerics and the enemy, surprising both sides: hope and glee for the earlier, and fear and desperation for the latter.

Now that she was here, she could see them clearly. They were demons: a red-skinned and a green-skinned one, both humanoid, both clenching their teeth.

She threw a lance of magic at them. One demon drew a blade of light and cut it down, dissipating it entirely… Anti-god magic? This changed things. If it were any consolation, the two demons were still on edge despite having that kind of firepower.

They pulled out guns. Sword-and-gun demons. Fun.

They fired as fast as they could squeeze their triggers, but it was effortless for Minimine to conjure as many shields as it took to absorb the miniscule amount of anti-god energy each bullet had. Still, the fact that they could deal any damage to Minimine’s defenses at all wasn’t lost on the Clerics behind her.

Who, by the way, promptly opened fire.

The demons dodged and ran up the walls, cutting down bullets with their magic blades and shooting back at the Clerics. Minimine warped the very structure of the temple to impede the demons’ movements, but they were still too nimble and adaptable. Even when she threw in flamethrowers and every manner of sadistic trap, the demons just sneered at her for coming up with cliche, unoriginal, entirely predictable things. Even when the trap seemed to work, the demons just cut them down with those swords.

It was frustrating, but that was also true for the other side. The demons couldn’t get close, and it wasn’t just because of the Clerics and the Priestess.

In the first place, the minimum recommended number of god-killers to face down one of System’s gods was a solid three. Even with the gear provided by the Anti-System, capable of disrupting the very stuff that System’s gods were made of, they still had to actually land “several hundred hits” to kill one.

They weren’t here to kill Minimine, though. Not yet, anyway.

“Let’s go!” the green-skinned demon shouted. The two retreated with a small artillery battalion’s worth of firepower chasing them, but no one from Minimine’s side gave chase. No one in their right mind would break down the temple’s front doors, fight a little, and run away as if they were just here to have fun. Given how the demons moved, they didn’t seem like the battle junkie sort, either.

Cecilia’s eyes widened. “Check the dungeon!” she shouted.

The Clerics started to move, but Minimine teleported ahead of them.

She appeared at one end of the dungeon and started walking. The magic torches were still lit, and there appeared no traces of fighting. One of the doors near the opposite end, however, was open.

She passed the stairs. There were supposed to be guards here.

She looked inside the prisoner’s room. There was no prisoner to be found.

How did they slip under my detection? Even the earlier intruders were only able to use observation denial magic, which resulted in a moving blind spot, something which could still be tracked—or was it that they were doing that on purpose to obscure an even more advanced magic, one which totally made them invisible from her altogether?

She teleported out of there as fast as she could, finding herself standing in the middle of the aisle of the main hall. After all, there was no telling whether she wasn’t actually 0.3 seconds away from a sneak attack that would seal her fate. Let my followers handle it, was what she thought.

Oh, she wasn’t worried if they died, especially not on the temple grounds of the goddess who was literally in charge of deciding whether someone was allowed to die in the first place.

“Goddess!” Priestess Cecilia called out. When Minimine turned to look, Cecilia and another Cleric was treating someone on the steps of the podium at the end of the hall.

She started walking towards them. When she reached out with her magic to sense the Cleric’s condition, she started running.

Every manner of healing magic enveloped the injured Cleric before Minimine knelt down beside the young lady. She remembered her name: Kellerin.

The Cleric’s vestments had a bullet hole over her heart, and though there was blood soaked into the cloth around it, the wound itself had already been patched by the healing magic.

“Goddess?” Kellerin said. Her voice was steady, but quiet. “Am I dead?”

That was a difficult question for Minimine. Kellerin’s heart was beating, and none of her brain cells had even begun to die from lack of oxygen. She was medically very not dead at all.

“You are in my temple,” Minimine said, letting her human voice be heard. “Your heart is beating.”

Kellerin’s eyes started to fill with tears. “Of course you wouldn’t let me die.” She smiled.

Minimine smiled back, hiding her bitterness with the bright flash of teleportation.

She was back in the prayer room with Tak.

“God—Minimine?” Tak called out from the barricaded door. “Is it alright now?”

“The intruders are gone,” Minimine replied. She went to the pew closest to Tak, and she sat there, slightly swinging her dangling feet.

Tak could tell, not all was alright. Had someone died? No, Minimine wouldn’t allow them to die so young. She walked up to her goddess, but what could she say? To gently entreat with someone she, once upon a time, faithfully adored and worshipped, it was hard to imagine.

All she saw now was a hopeless child, however. Without even thinking of asking for permission, she placed hand on Minimine’s head, combing her hair with her hand. “Please tell me,” she said.

Minimine looked up at her. “The demons’ weapons are for killing gods.”

Tak nodded. Their weapons’ limitations were evident in the fact that Minimine was here, and they were not—but that wasn’t the problem, was it?

“Do you know what goddesses are made of, Tak?” Minimine whispered. “Souls. One day, yours will become an angel, or a goddess, maybe in this world, maybe in another.”

Tak could only wait for her to continue, and she did.

“The demons’ weapons are made to kill gods, but to do that, they must be made to destroy souls.”

If there was one thing that those under System’s care had that the demons did not, it was a “soul,” and it wasn’t just some simple notion of being able to live forever in some shape or form, nor being a synonym for “conscience.”

To have a soul was a magical contract—an existential promise between System and her subjects: that something of you would carry on to create something good. The soul was not “you,” but just an unfinished sculpture, something that was supposed to be cultivated between different lives and different people. One would look at its current shape, figure out the past people’s intentions, decide what mark of their own to leave, and then pass it on.

When it got to the end, it would become like living gold, and just like gold, it settled at the bottom of the River, where it formed golden reefs that would either become angels or gods.

It was all just a massive magical construct—and nearly all magic had counters.

To kill a god, it was necessary to develop weapons that were capable of destroying souls.

For a regular human to be hit by a god-killer weapon meant the destruction of their soul and their complete severance from System.

It was as if part of Kellerin had been irreversibly blasted away. Her subconscious would no longer be able to refer to hundreds or even thousands of years of learnings, dooming her to years, or even decades, of some kind of disorientation she wouldn’t have the words to explain. Whether or not it just stopped at disorientation, however, now depended on her own strength and, hopefully, that of the strength of those willing to lend a hand.

The realization of these things and their consequences dawned on Tak, and for a moment, there was silence. She quietly sat together with Minimine, sharing a goddess’s burden.

“Is there a way?” Tak asked. She never finished her question, but Minimine understood it, anyway.

Minimine nodded. “We need an Overseer.”

***

Somewhere between the physical and divine realms, there was a sneaky sublayer where the Keeper of the World Archives saw nearly everything that happened. She spent all-day staring at notifications that popped in and out of existence, each with a little beep, but all together made an echoing, buzzing noise like a swarm of locusts—and with those little slices of reality, she finally found her timing and made her move.

We need an Overseer sooner than later, Three thought. The intruder’s forces in the physical realm were progressing far too quickly in their campaign to spread the curse throughout Gaia. Although Lyrica and Deramin were key bastions of resistance—among others—they wouldn’t be enough.

Oh, it wasn’t bad right now, but that was the trouble with exponential trends, you see. It hadn’t been bad yesterday; it certainly wasn’t bad today; tomorrow might be worse, but only slightly … but the day after? It would turn out to be the beginning of the end, and when that day came, all anyone would be able to say would be, “Why didn’t we do anything sooner?”

… But with her around, such a future wouldn’t come to pass.

As the Keeper of the Archives, she couldn’t leave her position to become Overseer, but goodness gracious, she knew a certain guerrilla goddess who’d fit the bill.