Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube

“Just give it to me straight Ben, tell me you hate me upfront. It’s the only way to explain the stress you constantly put me through.”

“Hey, I’m completely guiltless this time,” He argued. “They approached us and I’d say we handled things rather well, all things considered. As for my skills… Well, it’s not like I had any control over that to begin with.”

“It’s the fact that you have that skill at all that’s the problem,” Myriad complained. “Not to mention just how much it piqued your curiosity when it started going off.”

It was a point he couldn’t deny. As soon as Ben had turned around when Thera was called out to and saw Ather, the unexpected had happened. He started feeling the effects of his dismantling skill as he looked at the demigod, making it clear exactly how he would go about taking him apart if he had to. While the knowledge was always there to an extent, for it to be so clear and present in his mind was undoubtedly a side effect of his sacrilege skill interacting with it, telling him the best way to inflict harm on the man, something he couldn’t help but find himself curious about as soon as it happened and letting himself get drawn deeper and deeper into it as the conversation progressed.

“Honestly, you need to keep it under control. The last thing I need is for you to go and indulge your curiosity and get yourself killed. Not to mention how bad that would reflect on me.”

“Relax, it’s not like I was going to accept a duel from him, I’m not looking to have my spine ripped out… actually though, how strong would he be?” He asked as the question popped into his head. Being the child of a god sounded impressive enough, but it didn’t really give him any context.

Myriad sighed, knowing his apostle’s curiosity was his driving force for better or worse as he answered. “Obviously it varies depending on factors like what the paternal god represents and the parent races, but in general a few common things can be expected. Typically they’ll be born with some attributes above a thousand and awakened skills to go with it being the biggest factor, but you can also expect higher growth rates and sharper senses which is probably what led to him being able to detect Thera at all.”

“Wait, back up. Attributes in that range and awakened skills would just put him in the range of my classmates.”

Not that that wasn’t impressive enough, but that meant he might only be roughly fifteen times more powerful than an average person in any given one, depending of course on how he trained himself. It was plenty impressive and there was lots of room for him to be significantly stronger as he trained through his life, but he was expecting more than what the people he came with got.

“Ben, I know it’s a bit of an awkward subject, but that’s kind of why you were all summoned. The few gods that had done such things in the past before their worlds fell told us of the strength you all normally received and how it was comparable to the mortal children of gods, plus the fact that it was significantly easier to summon a large number of souls compared to trying to produce so many demigods that’s what we did. Hell, almost fifty gods tried to have mortal children over the past thirty years and of them only three succeeded, showing just how important doing the summoning was.”

“Seriously? Man, what force in this universe decided to screw me over so much when rolling my stats then?”

“I mean, what you ended up with wasn’t exactly random chance. I’ve told you before you were all summoned from magicless worlds so your souls would suck up mana when you got here. If I had to take a guess I’d say your extreme resistances probably impaired you.”

“So it’s my own soul’s fault, gotcha,” He said with a sigh before switching back to the less depressing topic. “So he’s pretty powerful, but nothing compared to Abrus, and it sounds like Ceselee is going to talk to both the head of the town as well as the other guild leaders about what happened so hopefully things will work out. Still, surprised he didn’t look weirder. He was just some guy.”

“What? Why would he look weird?”

“I mean, look at the gods I’ve seen. There’s Anailia who looks nothing like a succubus, There’s Jagal who manages to look a bit closer to her race but is still without a doubt a tree, and then you who really doesn’t need an explanation. Can you really blame me for thinking he’d look a bit stranger than just an average member of his race?”

“Ah, I guess that would be how things would seem if you didn’t know how demigods were born,” Myriad said in understanding at his apostle’s confusion. “The way gods go about it is… well, it will probably make you a little uncomfortable if you know.”

“Hearing that only makes me want to know more.”

“Of course it does,” Myriad muttered. “Fine, it’s not like it’s super complicated, all we do is descend into the body of one of our main believers to, well… do the act. The older fellow you saw with Ather was Eneth’s apostle and the mortal father of the demigod.”

“Wait so you guys… ah gross man,” Ben said, covering himself with his arms. “No using me as a meat suit. I didn’t even know gods could do that. God, I have all sorts of feelings about this.”

“I told you you wouldn’t like it. Besides, even if I wanted to do it with you, which to be very clear, I don’t, I wouldn’t be able to. To be able to descend upon an apostle I’d need not just a good spiritual compatibility, but a physical one as well. Your body is simply too radically different from those of my own race, maybe if I had enough human worshipers I could after a few decades, but as it stands trying would probably leave you dead as I struggled to figure out how to make your body breathe.”

“I guess that’s reassuring. Still though, not sure how I feel about the idea that some gods use their believers as meat suits to get their rocks off.”

“That’s obviously not the only reason gods do it, you know. Descending upon a mortal makes it easier for us to act upon the world, even if it keeps us from using a portion of our power. At the height of their strength, doing so would let a god be comparable to a third-tier skill user in this world.”

Admittedly, that was a compelling enough reason to put up with it. If third-tier skill users were as powerful as he had been led to believe then having a god descend upon the world would be invaluable, at least if not for the last part Myriad said.

“So if that’s what they could manage at their height then what about now?”

“Er, well it’s going to vary from god to god depending on how much faith they’ve managed to gain or hang onto while in the world on top of who they descend on, but I’d say most would be able to show the strength of low level second-tier skills, with some being higher and some being lower,” Myriad admitted, though rushed to defend them. “But that’s still plenty good on its own! Depending on the homeworld there were likely no more than six native gods, with many having less! Given the number present here, any that descend upon their believers to fight will be able to do a lot more, even if it means having less power overall.”

Without having seen any third-tier skills in action he wasn’t sure if he could believe that, but decided to leave it for the time being. Even if the skill level was lower, his god wasn’t wrong about there being strength in numbers, and in the end all he really cared about was that he wasn’t going to be used as a fleshsuit.