Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube

There wasn’t much rest to be had that night. After finding Falk and filling him in on exactly what happened and spending what felt like far too many hours going over it with some embassy employees who didn’t wake up that day expecting to have to deal with an incident involving the daughter of their nation’s queen, the three of them were only able to get a couple of hours of sleep before getting up and heading out.

There’d been a serious conversation on if they should go at all but ultimately they’d decided to stick to the original plan. As unfortunate as that turn of events was, there was no reason to stop what they were doing when as far as they were concerned, none of them were in the wrong. If it caused issues down the line then they’d deal with it but for the time being, they walked through the streets to get where they needed to be.

“So just try and keep on good behaviour,” Falk told them while looking at his apprentice in particular. “I’m not ‘expectin’ any issues but this isn’t a crowd you want making enemies outa.”

“I’m literally always on my best behaviour,” He said in his defense while Thera spoke up too.

“And even if that’s completely untrue, both soul mages should be there so I’m sure they’ll help out if he does anything wrong.”

“Thera, please, I need you on my side when I’m being slandered.”

“It was only a couple days ago I watched you attack Eneth’s church.”

“Well first off, they deserved it. Secondly, I challenged them to a fight, it was their choice to accept.”

“So if they’d said no you would have just left?”

“Maybe. There’s no way to know for sure in hypothetical situations like that.”

It was obvious neither was buying it and he tried not to let it hurt given that in that example they were one hundred percent right. If they hadn’t gone for it he’d have just started punching and dealt with the consequences of having less justification.

In hindsight, that route may have even been a better option for awakening my sacrilege. Oh well, maybe next time.

“Fine, fine, I’ll be my most upstanding self,” He eventually gave in. “So how much farther are we?”

“Right there,” Falk nodded to the end of the road, at an otherwise unassuming building built into the coast with a single man waiting out front watching the door as they made their way over.

“Falk, plus two,” His teacher told the guard, getting a small nod in exchange as the door opened to let them in, immediately showing a wide stairway leading down for them to traverse, ending on another door into what was by all accounts a conference room.

With less than twenty people in it, more than a few Ben already knew, the most striking feature of it had to be the enchantments that covered it, dividing the room in two across a large round table, with the other half being filled fully with water for the aquatic races among them, creating an environment where both groups could talk as equals.

Just looking at it, he judged that if something went wrong with the enchantment there’d still be enough water in there for breathing room for either group, but despite how interesting he viewed the arrangement, that wasn’t what caught the majority of his attention.

Sitting at the table with so many others was the satyr from the day before, looking no worse for wear from Thera’s attack and instead seeming mostly bored until they caught his eye, leaving the man to give a broad smirk.

Falk, small hitch on me being on my best behaviour. Ben thought at both his teacher and Thera. The satyr at the table is the one that attacked us.

What? His teacher thought back, his face betraying the silent conversation going through his head. Boy, the table is reserved for the third tiers, everyone behind them are their guests. How… No, never mind. The both of you just keep quiet for now, I’ll help deal with this later if need be. For now, just stand behind me.

Both he and Thera did as Falk told them with the yeti taking the last available seat, all while Ben took in the rest of the room, stretching out with deep connection to get a sense for the rest of them around.

The satyr was the only one he couldn’t read and even when looking through the eyes of either Yuzu or Elvat, it seemed they were both blocked off too, but they weren’t his only options.

Beside Killi, Verbum also had a seat at the table and his skill had less to do with interpreting the information on souls than it did interacting with the system itself, creating a different avenue to go through and letting Ben see the information being hidden from him.

By and large, it was what he would describe as a fairly average status. The man’s attributes were impressive, ranging in the high thousands and to low ten thousands, likely in part thanks to any potions he’d received made from the forbidden gods, but when it came to skills Ben would have described his as underwhelming, with no second tier ones and the highest first tier being the ninth leveled space magic he’d used to attack with the day before.

Considering his seat at the table, Ben would have described him as a disappointment if not for what had earned him his place, not a single skill like the rest of them but instead two of them in the form of the grand-sounding immortality and absolute defense.

Absolute defense huh, I have to assume that’s what’s keeping me from reading his mind or seeing his status, it wouldn’t exactly be absolute if it kept either his thoughts or soul exposed, but… Immortality too. I guess it’s obvious how he survived Thera’s attack and I can pretty easily imagine how he ended up with two awakened skills.

Immortality sat higher on his status, telling him the man, Ben could see his name was Rook, had gotten it first and he could imagine how one would lead into the other. Assuming no attack he could face would kill him, training defensive skills after that point would be easy so long as the holder could put up with any pain attached to it.

If there’s any pain. I wonder if a third-tier ability that makes you immortal would let anything you go through hurt or not? Wait, more importantly, how old is this asshole when he decided to hit on my girlfriend?

Even if he looked young, there was no easy way to evaluate that for sure when he had skills named like that. A single third-tier skill may have normally doubled the holder’s base lifespan on top of whatever they’d have already gotten from getting it to the second tier but a name like that implied a whole lot more. There was no way something called immortality would let the holder still die of something as banal as old age.

All of it left Ben with questions and opinions but nothing he could pay off then, reserving it all to bother Myriad about that night as he instead looked around the room to focus on the rest around to take in just what they had.

He already knew five others so they weren’t a major concern and as interesting as the higher leveled second tier who seemed to have come along were, they weren’t the stars of his attention as he instead looked around at the rest at the table, taking in everything they each held.

He wasn’t able to tell immediately who among them were natives or summoned, he knew there had to be five there like himself who hailed from other universes but aside from the two he personally knew, the rest were a mystery without reading their memories.

Beyond that, he got the sense that the terrestrial side of the table skewed on the older side compared to the aquatic, though that was harder to say for sure as well. Age became a harder thing to determine as species varied and only became more so when one considered how reaching the third tier would affect a given lifespan, with the fact that he lacked experience looking at aquatic groups adding to that.

And then there’s a couple other unexpected bits too. I didn’t think the true shifter and divine chef were going to be aquatic.

The first of which wasn’t necessarily true. Unlike regular beastform skill holders, he’d reached its pinnacle, becoming able to absorb the souls of the creatures he killed in order to change into them and Ben wasn’t sure of the limits of the skill beyond that. He at least knew that the race that originally held the skill was terrestrial in nature and while it was possible that the crossbreeding of different groups had led to some aquatic branches for holders of that particular skill, he viewed it just as likely that he was choosing to be among the aquatic groups for one reason or another instead.

The divine chef having a largely octopus-like body plan also raised some questions with him about whether they were purely aquatic or if they, like a few others he’d seen, would be more accurately described as semi-aquatic. It was certain that they provided food for the fighters across the world regardless of whether they lived in land or sea, he wouldn’t have been shocked if they could work on both either.

He thought that should have only left three more but everyone at the table made it clear there were actually four, telling him that Elvat had to have helped someone else awaken recently enough that Falk may not have been the newest among them and let him look at the rest.

Three of which were aquatic. None of them shared a body plan but Ben could at least see their skills, telling him he was looking at holders of total collapse, zone of empowering, and king of growth. None of that actually told him what any of them could be beyond some vague guesses but still poked at his curiosity and left him to wonder in a way that he already knew he’d be bothering both Myriad and Verbum about, leaving only the last one to look over.

It wasn’t immediately apparent but as he connected to others at the table, it was more and more clear that people were specifically trying to avoid looking at the last one there, with none avoiding it more so than both of the soul mages along with Verbum.

He could feel them not wanting to make eye contact with her, not that it would be a problem. Looking at a girl with a mostly human-like shape and what he could best describe as sickly grey skin, her most striking features were the two empty holes where her eyes should have been, supposedly rendering her blind yet still staring out into the crowd and smiling broadly at the rest.

Really, there was a lot about her that made Ben understand why some might not want to focus on her if they could help it. Just by connecting to see what she had, aspects of her mind incorporated into his own thanks to the effects of his alien thought structure, making him feel a strangeness reminiscent of the primordial chaos that still contaminated his thoughts while those new ways of viewing the world fell into place within his head, with the sight of her soul bringing its own questions.

While everyone at the table was destined for godhood, they hadn’t yet died and properly ascended to go through whatever changes such a thing would bring with it, meaning while all of them looked unusual in comparison to a standard mortal, they still looked within the range of what he’d expect compared to the divine.

That wasn’t true for her though. Even in his eyes that had witnessed the souls of gods, the one she held looked strange, its shape alien compared to so many others he’d seen and pulsing in unnatural ways, with slight tendrils of it even poking out of her vessel, seemingly subconsciously and without any rhyme or reason which he could tell, not that he had a complete enough understanding of souls to understand any unusual aspect they might hold.

An aspect that while he couldn’t guess at the function of, he at least held one on why it was so alien in the first place. Of the ones he didn’t know, she was the only one he felt certain had to be one of the summoned, and not only because of how out of place both her mind and soul seemed compared to what he was used to or because she gave an impression of being younger than him, but also thanks to her number of second-tier skills to go along with the third-tier one to get her the seat.

With a total of five blessed skills, it wouldn’t be inappropriate to say she’d won the power lottery when coming to the world, even if the skills themselves felt deeply questionable from their names alone.

Not just her third-tier one with the impressively unwieldy name of Multiversal self monster production enslavement, as if the system itself had struggled with how to properly label it before getting to the point it was currently at where it was willing to borrow words from languages beyond worldspeak, he couldn’t possibly guess what it actually did, with that feeling carrying over to the four second-tier ones as well.

Murder empowering, meat strengthening, malevolent form, and outer ancestry. He could only guess at the first with the rest sounding stranger and stranger as he went down the list, with all of them being beyond the zeroth level. The longer he looked only brought out more questions that only stopped with a thought. Not his own though, but the girl very clearly thinking at him.

Like what you see?

His first instinct was to break off the connection but he kept it up to try and keep from looking suspicious while he tried to work out what just happened. Unless it had anything to do with any of her strange skills, there was nothing in her status that made him think she’d be able to tell he was reading her mind or looking at her soul but the reaction meant that something was happening, making the soul mages avoiding looking at her suddenly make a lot more sense, with the girl in question not stopping now that she’d spoken up.

Hey, acknowledge me! I can feel you in my head and I know you’re looking at my soul so say something! Hey!

He finally broke the connection and saw the eyeless girl pout out of the corner of his vision but resolved to ignore it until he got a chance to talk to Yuzu sometime later, hoping to grab her once the meeting ended. Falk said it would take a few days, if there was any reason to approach her then he had time to figure it out later.

With everyone there though, Killi spoke up once it seemed they were all settled.

“Alright everyone, now that we’re all here, why don’t we begin?”