Fetch Quest Chapter 107: Apotheosis (Patreon)

A new level meant new skill options, and the knight brigade was still a minute or so away. Taking formless would be a good plan before they arrived, but what new options did I have?

Omnipotence: As you will it, so shall it be.
Omniscience: All things are known.

I dismissed the message with a sigh before trying again.

Divine will: All is as you wish it.
All-seer: All mysteries fall before your sight. All questions are answered.

Seriously?

Almighty: All of existence bends to your will.
Pansophical: All of existence reveals itself to you.

No matter how many times I repeated it, the meaning didn't change. Wouldn't those skills basically make me a god? Or worse...

Oh. Fuck. Fuck!

The summoning circle shouldn't have worked. The black dragon had always taken pains to not earn my wrath, despite having a few opportunities to rid himself of me in an easier manner than he chose. I'd encountered so many things that seemed drawn from my own head. Heck, maybe even the monsters' love of bondage could be included in that.

The twisted statue I'd seen on floor six had looked chimeric. The one wing, with its spiked, spine-like structure. I poked at the spikes on my own wing. The tail. I hadn't had one at the time, but now that I thought of it, the shape was a perfect match.

Everyone spoke English, just like me. The 'official' names for things were Latin, or at least, Latin-ish. Both Earth languages, that another world should have no reason to know.

The Goddess... She couldn't be.

A paradox. A cause without an effect. I had an encounter with the Void, and my blessing welcomed it. It granted me power and knowledge no human should have. The power to arrange an encounter between myself and the Void, for example.

Why had I never asked the Goddess' name?

I found myself hyperventilating as the doors burst open. In rushed the guy who had holy-magicked me the first time around, killing many of the fox-kin in the process.

"Demon!" he exclaimed, raising his sword, and this time Kevin wasn't even around to yell 'stop' at him.

Holy magic tolerance advanced to level 9

It barely tickled. My tolerance skill was higher than last time, and he'd had a few years less training. Given the war hadn't started, I'd bet whatever training he did have was rather less strenuous, too.

"Go away!" I yelled. "I'm busy having an existential crisis here! I'm worried I might be the Goddess."

"Blasphemer!" he yelled back, making another swing.

Evolution conditions met: Holy magic tolerance ranks up to holy magic resistance
Never underestimate the power of belief. Strong enough faith can be wielded as effectively as any sword, burning those the user perceives as evil. You have withstood the Judgement of powerful holy magic users, earning this upgrade from tolerance to resistance. This skill will offer significant help in withstanding the assault.

I was vaguely aware of crossbow bolts bouncing off my scales, and a few more impacts from more varied magic, but I ignored it all. Forgetting about my plans to meet the king, I turned and ran back to the altar. The assault failed the moment I crossed the barrier, which simply blocked everything before it reached me, holy magic included.

I invoked fast travel, jumping to the shrine at the roadside near the human village. It was the one the most likely to not have anyone around.

Sure enough, I found myself alone. Well, there was one way to find out if my horrific guess was correct. The pair of new skills would surely be a superset of the pair I actually wanted, and even if not, wouldn't I be able to abuse my new found mastery over all of existence to give myself extra skill slots?

I selected the pair of new skills, and my world shattered.

I'd been half right. And that was bad enough.

I wasn't sure if it was minutes later, or days, but eventually I was brought out of my stupor by the feeling of something poking at my face.

"Why is a demon here?" asked someone. "And what's wrong with her?"

"I don't know. Should we bring her with us and hand her over to the town guard?"

I opened my eyes and looked at the baby before me, with chubby cheeks and a cute little smile. I saw the playful child, dreaming of travelling. The teenage adventurer, with a head full of delusions of grandeur. The jaded merchant guard, forged from that enthusiastic teenager when the member of his adventuring party he'd secretly had a crush on had died on a mission. The old man, too feeble for work, alone in a cold home. Which of the visions was real? Did it even matter? I wasn't sure I was real. But I could see where the life had gone wrong.

"You miss her, don't you? Your Eve."

The baby, the child, the adventurer, the guard and the lonely elder turned as one to look at me.

"What did you say?" they asked, except for the baby, which just gurgled. The child sounded confused, not knowing who I meant. The adventurer was equally confused, the Eve in question standing alongside him. The guard was angry, the unwanted reminder bringing back evil memories. The old man wept, the reminder bring back exactly the same memories, but to him, far sweeter.

"His Eve?" came a female voice. "I'm pretty sure I don't belong to anyone. But how do you know my name?"

So, that answered the question of which time I was currently lying in.

I looked at Eve, and saw her from a baby until her death at age nineteen, a raid on a goblin cave gone wrong. "Because I watched your birth, and I watched your death," I answered, too out of it to care about how that sounded. "You need to be more careful not to underestimate goblins. Always keep an eye behind you, even if you think you've cleared out the den. You may have missed a hidden door, or camouflaged hiding place."

The visions changed as the future warped itself in response to my advice. The merchant guard was gone, replaced by a town guard, living with his wife. The elderly man was gone, replaced by a rotten corpse. The town guard had died at thirty, when he bore unwitting witness to a smuggling operation, and was hurriedly silenced.

I looked at Eve and saw her weeping, her protruding belly belaying a child that would never know their father.

I could prevent that future too, if not with words, then at least with actions. I could so easily reach through time and bring an end to that smuggler. I could already see the results. The children the smuggler was providing for starving to death with the loss of their only living relative.

I closed my eyes, unwilling to see every choice and consequence. It didn't help. It had been a long time since I'd needed my eyes to perceive the world around me.

"What's the hold-up?" asked a third voice. "What are you two... Oh."

I dragged myself to a sitting position and pulled myself into a huddle, making myself as small as possible. I was probably whimpering. Those skills had been a mistake. So many of my choices had been mistakes.

I looked at myself.

There were versions of me that made a home in the dungeon. The drug addict, living her life high on mushrooms. The version of me that never abandoned the first 'friend' I'd made in the dungeon, the silver tree, ending up as inhuman as I currently was. A bewitching silver dryad, whose clothes were leaves and her hair vines.

The twisted version of me that took that class, who wiped out the fox-kin not for survival but for pure pleasure. She ended up stuck for an eternity on floor four, willingly handing herself to the rapist tree to toy with, enjoying every second of it.

The shrine maiden who actually succeeded in her quest, perishing shortly after when she failed to notice the loss of her immortality and attempted to cure a wound to her mind by suicide. The idiot who took the blighted champion class, perishing forever there and then, never to respawn. The version of me that mistakenly thought centipedes were cute. That one must have been even more insane than the version of me that took that class.

I saw mages, rangers, rogues, fighters. A barbarian version of myself, fighting naked, a two-handed sword in each hand and a dagger in her teeth.

I saw the result of my failure. In every future where 'Katie' never left the dungeon, or had never been summoned, the world ended. The humans, refusing to surrender to the demon lord even as his armies surrounded the capital, played one final card. One more throw, to ensure that even if they didn't win the war, at least they didn't lose.

They unleashed the blight.

I'd thought it hadn't existed in the real world. I'd been wrong; it was simply a secret that few knew about, and that hadn't been completed at the time of my summoning. An artificial weapon, deliberately designed to purge the world of all life. The real world version would not have respected the boundary of the floors of a dungeon.

But none of those futures led to this 'now'. To the Goddess Katie, who prevented the world from falling to blight. To the one that had stopped the war. Who had the power to stop every war, to solve every tragedy. I'd made mistakes, but despite them all, the final outcome was so much better than the alternatives I could see.

And so much worse.

If I let myself use my power, I would make the chains placed around the demons look like wet paper. Solving every problem would, by necessity, take away the ability of others to make mistakes.

I was vaguely aware of the adventuring group poking at me, followed by the pleasant tingle of healing magic. I needed to... I wasn't sure. Not be here. Not be anywhere. Maybe back to the black dragon? He was all Voidy. Maybe he'd understand?

"You?!" something roared.

Yay, after multiple failures, I finally had arbitrary teleportation, and it was no thanks at all to my fast travel skill. I opened my eyes again to find myself squatting in a cave, bundled up with my arms around my knees, the black dragon in front of me.

The black dragon that had deliberately avoided antagonising me and only abandoned his brother in the dungeon because he knew I'd bring him back.

"How do you cope?" I asked. "There's just... so much."

For the first time on the face of any dragon, I saw something resembling pity. Pity. From the demon lord. The demon lord that had murdered himself to usurp the position.

"Time," he answered. "You will have plenty. So, it really did happen. Across the infinite realities, so few led to this outcome, and yet every choice you made dragged you towards it. To this inevitable ending. To the birth of a new Goddess. The successor of the old."

I shook my head, trying my best to hold in my mind the concept of a 'now'. It would be so easy to just drift away. To not be anywhere or anywhen. To fall into the Void, and watch all of reality from there. Just like the original Goddess. She hadn't interfered directly in the world for so long simply because she wasn't here. Perhaps I would follow, one day, but first, I had promises to keep.

I unwrapped one hand from around my knees and waved it, causing a light show that looked suspiciously like my own summoning circle. Creating the moment for which the black dragon had always swallowed his pride, offering me aid even when unnecessary.

"Whu?!" roared a new voice.

"Welcome back to the real world," I said, vaguely aware of the oath snapping somewhere inside my soul. Summoning him counted as breaking it, but the black dragon had long since informed me of the get-out clause. I simply needed to be significantly stronger than him, and now I was.

The black dragon snorted. "I'll explain later," he said to his brother before turning back to me. "To you, I give my thanks."

"You're welcome," I answered. "But what of your sister?"

"A duplicate of her never existed, and the original will never accept us."

I shrugged as I returned to my feet, stumbling slightly as I tried to remember exactly how feet worked, the concept of a fleshy body having been mostly pushed out of my mind by all the other stuff crammed in there.

"All that wasn't, might yet be," I answered with a giggle before waving my hand again.

"Whu?!" roared a third voice.

It was so easy. I'd created all of arx sanctus, after all. Or would do. Time was less of a line and more of a knot by this point. What was one more dragon by comparison?

"I'll sever your land from the humans' completely," I offered. "Split the two territories into separate worlds."

Sure, I'd need to fudge gravity with the reduced world mass, but that was easy enough. I could remember how gravity was going to work when I built arx sanctus, which was far too lightweight for it to be mass based, and I could do something similar here. Or I could just duplicate the planet, lower the land mass and fill it in with extra water? Both options were just as easy as the other. Either way, the weather was going to be far harder. This was going to completely mess it up. Better to duplicate the world and leave half the landmass of each one empty.

"You intend to leave the humans to their own devices, then?" asked the black dragon.

"Yeah," I agreed. "To do otherwise would be to create something that wasn't human."

"You would abandon your worshippers?"

"I wouldn't be disinclined to provide the occasional miracle, if someone asks nicely and deserves it."

The black dragon snorted. "And you think you are worthy to determine who deserves it? You aided me. You'll just give your blessings out to those you know."

"Probably, but now I know everyone, so it's all fair."

""Will someone please explain what's going on!"" yelled the red and white dragons in perfect synchronisation, which would have caused me a burst of laughter had I not already seen it coming. Getting used to knowing literally everything was going to be tough, but at least I'd stopped whimpering.