Chaotic Craftsman Worships The Cube

“What the heck is weeping?” Ben muttered to himself in curiosity, with Abel holding out her hand.

“Food first, questions after.”

“Okay, okay, fine.”

A deal was a deal and the fact that she seemed willing to answer his questions made him a lot more motivated to get on with it so he materialized both a cup and a knife, dragging the latter across his palm to fill up the first while the girl beamed, downing it the second it was handed over and immediately looking like she wanted more.

Okay, that wasn’t ideal.

“That’s even better than I thought it would be,” She sighed happily. “And why do you smell even tastier now?”

“Because reality hates me. Anyway, back on topic. What’s weeping?”

His immediate assumption was it was an attribute that normally wouldn’t exist in his current reality but did in her old one that she’d somehow managed to hang onto when passing over, but it seemed the answer was more complicated than just that.

Looking proud as she said it, Abel explained. “It’s something only the chosen get. My ancestor Sothoth saw my potential and gave me my fragment and all of its tears make me stronger! Normally he would have gotten it back after I died but it looks like it came with me when I was brought here. Another reason I’m the best of the summoned for sure!”

“...That wasn’t a great explanation.”

When Ben looked at her card, he’d seen that the race listed was Child of Sothoth and combined with the fact she’d just called them an ancestor he had to assume that either she was being literal and her people as a whole were named for their family line or else that it was her god given it sounded like they were still alive and that she’d by all accounts been given a blessing.

Perhaps even both. They were dealing with an entirely different universe and he didn’t know the rules it played on, what was he to say without getting more information first?

Given that they were going to spar soon he resolved to peek into her head when he got the chance since he’d probably be able to keep it from being obvious he was doing it for anything more than a combat advantage but for the time he focused back on what he was seeing.

“Okay, so it makes you stronger. How?”

“Hmm, give me another cup and I’ll show you.”

“Let me check if you’ve gotten any changes from the first one yet. How long does it normally take?”

“It should only be a few seconds for me to get whatever growth I will for it.”

“What? That shouldn’t be enough time for you to digest it, how… No, I can already tell I’m not getting an answer so just a second,” His eyes scanned over her attributes, seeing what changed and by how much. “Looks like a point to your mana, mana regen, vitality, vitality regen, and three to your intelligence. Is that good?”

“Really?” She ripped the card from him as he said it, scanning over it herself and looking bright with the outcome. “Worse than any of the other third tiers I’ve gotten a bite from but better than anyone else! The regen rates don’t usually grow so much! Give me the second cup!”

“Listen, you have to at least say please when you’re trying to eat someone.”

“Please!”

“Ben, I don’t think the focus should be on manners here,” Thera whispered to him. “You should not be this willing to let people eat you. Don’t spoil her just because she seems young.”

“It’s just the one more, promise. Besides, I really want to know what this attribute does. It’s not every day you see one that doesn’t exist in this universe.”

“Just don’t complain to me if she develops a taste and nobody’s around to protect you.”

Nah, it should be fine, right? I still don’t think she’s a bad kid, she…

His positive thoughts were betrayed by the sight of her wiping away drool while staring at him, holding out the cup and already eager to get more.

Okay, last one and then never again.

He cut his palm once more and filled it up, getting Thera to heal him and watching as Abel this time savoured what she’d been given, looking satisfied by the time she was done.

“Delicious, even better than the first one. I was right, you did get tastier. Does that mean each time you’re going to be better than the last?”

“No, a skill just happened to go up after the first one and it made the difference so no looking for more. Now, weeping, you were going to show me how it works already?”

“Fine, fine, since I got something good there’s no harm spending it now so keep those eyes on me and watch. The other two peekers can too if they want.”

Neither Yuzu nor Verbum took her up on that offer and since it sounded like one needed to be able to see souls to witness whatever was about to happen, Thera was out of luck, leaving Ben alone to watch what she was doing while she explained.

“Weeping is just the speed I gather tears at, with one forming about every other day at my current rate and as I save them up I can spend them like this.”

He watched as a segment of her soul moved when she said it, looking like it was squeezing a part of itself into another region while one internal section flowed, with a significant change coming with it. Her meat empowering which had been at the second level grew to its third.

“You have an attribute you can spend that directly levels your skills?”

He couldn’t hide the awe in his voice and she happily soaked it in.

“What can I tell you? This is why I’m clearly the best.”

“And how often can you do it then? It’s obviously not a level for every tear, right?”

“For that one, it was nearly a year of savings, consider yourself lucky you got to witness it in person, but if I wanted to focus on my tier-one skills I could raise any one in the span of a few weeks at most. It gets harder the higher the level though but the cost also reduces as I get closer to raising them naturally.”

She seemed smug and as far as Ben was concerned she had every right to be. That explained some of the levels he was already seeing in her soul. If he was in her position, he would have wanted to raise those ones too to see how they changed with each increase, with her meat strengthening being the most important on that front. If she got more levels to it then from what he understood, she’d be able to more quickly raise her weeping and gather tears more quickly, creating a small feedback loop to help her overall growth.

All of it made him want to disassemble her mind even more to see what other secrets it held and whatever look he was wearing was enough to make her back up.

“Hey, I appreciate that you’ve been such a willing meal but that doesn’t mean I’ll let you have a bite of me too!”

“Don’t want it, I’ve just got one last question if you don’t mind. Since you already know I can look at your soul and can look in your head, how exactly can you tell? It doesn’t look like you have any skills directly related to it, though I can’t exactly judge a couple of your awakened ones by their names alone.”

“Huh? How can I tell? I mean, you make it so obvious, I could feel you rooting around in there the second you did.”

“Okay, but that doesn’t tell me how. Is it one of your skills or not?”

“It’s not, it doesn’t need to be. There’s no subtlety to it, if you tried that back home you’d be ripped to shreds in a second.”

So the people of her homeworld can tell this sort of thing innately? Interesting.

He knew that certain things that could be considered a race’s innate or biological qualities weren’t always going to be reflected in the system, it wasn’t like he had a walking or breathing skill, but as far as innate abilities went, the ability to feel if someone was reading your mind or looking at your soul felt on the extreme end.

It only made him more and more interested in seeing the context her old world existed in and to get a little closer to a place he thought he might check he scarfed down the rest of his food while the others finished up as well.

“Alright, now that that’s done, let’s do this already.”

“Ben, I just want to point out that this is pointlessly stupid and dangerous,” Thera sighed as they arrived at the empty beach. “You can’t know if she’s actually going to avoid seriously hurting you.”

“But if anything goes wrong, my lovely girlfriend will help put me back together again, right?”

“Mmh, your lovely girlfriend would rather you not walk into positions where you could get hurt to begin with. I don’t even know where to begin with telling you off.”

“I’ll make you something sweet when we get home to make up for it. This is just a good opportunity is all, I get to see what one of the stronger third tiers is capable of and see how I compare.”

“So let’s get started already!” Abel yelled, dropping Verbum to the ground after she’d taken Ben’s role of forcefully dragging him along which had only provoked more fear in him than usual. Lying unconscious on the ground, Yuzu went to his side to make sure he was okay before dragging him away.

“Alright but again, this is just a spar, don’t murder me.”

“I’ll do my best!”

With those last words, she moved with the intention to start, not immediately attacking him but instead bringing her wrist to her teeth and biting down, letting blood splatter in the sand below.

What?

Instantly Ben was connecting to her, reading both her mind and memories for whatever information he could get while she just grinned before the dirt below her exploded with dozens of monsters pouring out.

“What the fuck?”

Like giant slime molds made of mismatched parts, Their grey flesh was a conglomeration of pieces looking nearly randomly arranged. From claws and teeth randomly sprouting without order, no two shared the same number of eyes or orifices, instead looking like the lazy products of an amateur god.

Which is probably exactly what they are.

Their appearance wasn’t some random coincidence, Abel didn’t seem remotely caught off guard by them and he could only assume he was seeing her main skill in action.

Multiversal self monster production enslavement, the unusual skill with the unwieldy name suddenly made a lot more sense given what he was seeing, with it looking like an ability to create monster slaves from the holder’s flesh and blood in a similar way a life mage could create a homunculus, with one key difference from the get-go. They had souls.

From the way it looked, he was fairly sure they were extensions of Abel’s own, acting in a similar way to how he could fill an empty vessel to control but he didn’t know more than that then and there, only moving to stop the coming flood the best he could with the mana he had.

It wasn’t how he was used to doing things but with his mana he took the sand around each one, reshaping it into a sealed box to trap them as they threw themselves at him, screaming and oozing the entire way while he stole their freedom.

“What are you doing?” Abel called from the side as she continued to make more. “There’s no way that’s your best way of attacking!”

“This is just a spar, I’m not going to try and kill them!”

“You’re going to want to, otherwise things are about to get real bad for you!”

One of them jumped into her hand as she said it and with her strength she tore the body in half, prompting an instant change in the monsters she’d made.

They’d been fast before, Ben had been able to keep up thanks to his thought speed, but now they’d gone up a whole other level too, each one flashing across the ground towards him while the ones he’d already captured gained a burst of strength to break out of their confines to continue their attack.

Oh, that is not fair!

He could guess he was seeing the effects of murder empowering, what he was assuming was a buff skill that activated whenever she got a kill, but the fact that it not only worked when she killed her own creatures but also spread its effects to all of them could only feel like cheating.

It also meant that he couldn’t be so careful if he wanted to have any chance at not immediately being taken down. If she wasn’t worried about her creations being killed then he had no reason to be cautious of it and began attacking in force, shoving his mana into the world around to rip and stab everything that came for him, hitting all he could see at once and even ones he couldn't by looking through other eyes but finding another problem to go with it. The things Abel was creating were tenacious.

With their strange forms, they had no obvious weak points to exploit, making the only choice he had being to disassemble them, using his power on the surrounding sand to tear them apart, trying to be as conservative with his mana as possible by attacking in a way that would always land multiple hits while the monsters kept coming.

“Ha, you’re not bad!” Abel yelled, looking like she was having fun more than anything else while keeping Ben entirely on the defense, trying to deal with an endless wave of creatures that felt like they were growing stronger by the minute. “In that case, let's go a bit harder!”

“Or we could not!”

She’d stopped listening by that point if she had been to begin with. Looking through one of the monster's eyes, he could tell that Yuzu had covered Thera’s off to the side which he took to be a warning sign when he felt the monsters begin to change, their flesh shifting, warping, and more than anything else, straining. What they were was changing, pressing against reality itself in a way that Ben was able to witness with his own senses as they warped in a way he struggled to describe but brought forth memories of sights and experiences that still ate at his mind, with at least part of what one of her other skills was became clear.

As the monsters shifted into more chaotic versions of themselves and Abel herself seemed to go through more subtle changes, he had no doubt in his mind that what he was witnessing was her outer ancestry taking effect, with what he was seeing while he processed her memories giving him the context he needed to believe he was correct as to what exactly it was and where the skill came from.

Regardless of being born to a universe, the girl in front of him had the blood of outsiders running through her veins.

It wasn’t something he knew how to react to and decided to push it to the side for later. He was still processing her memories and being connected to an outsider didn’t necessarily imply anything about her to be worried about, his main priority was dealing with her swarm.

The effect on his mind was slim compared to seeing his first outsider or the chaos, to the point that he believed an average person could probably handle it to some extent without having their mind crippled, but the real issue was that they’d been further strengthened and gained another ability on top of it.

Their orifices began to leak and drip fluid and where it touched the sand beneath them dissolved, the end product evaporating into a gas from there, leaving what remained as a slick, glassy surface.

“Hey, that feels a bit more violent than just sparing!”

“It’s fine, you’re doing well so far, you can handle this much!”

She was looking positively manic by that point, eager to go on and telling him she would only get more extreme the longer they went, leaving Ben to push to end things if he could.

Since they’d begun, he’d focused on her monsters but he needed to turn his attacks to her and began shooting rocks at her limbs, without any of those hits being acknowledged to a significant extent, leaving him to spend his mana in a different way.

With what he’d seen of her attributes, she’d be able to react to most spells he could cast at her meaning he’d need something instantaneous and with the combination of his magic and his thought speed, he thought he could make it happen, reaching out with his mana and materializing tight chains around her that actually provoked a response.

For just a second she looked down in surprise before grinning all the wider, looking like he’d given her exactly what she wanted as her flesh shifted, leaking through the bonds that held her, letting her break free in seconds.

…So I’m betting I just learned one of the effects of malevolent form. Wow, I really don’t like her powerset.

With it coming along with an added drawback. By trying to attack her as well, Ben had just pulled Abel’s true body into the fight.

With her speed in the thousands, Ben was immediately able to learn another horrific effect of her strange skill as her mouth opened up, her lower jaw splitting open to reveal rows and rows of sharp teeth that continued all the way down as her body unwrapped itself, splitting at her torso while it tried to lunge at him, clearing a distance in a way he’d compare to teleportation with how instantaneous it felt.

“Holy shit, I give, I lose, stop trying to eat me!”

She froze at those words for a second before returning to her regular form, the monsters she’d made crumbling around her as she once more looked mostly like a normal girl, giving a happy little jump and cheer.

“That’s right, I win ‘cause I’m the best summoned! You see that Yuzu, nobody’s better than me in a fight!”

“I tried my best not to see that,” She said, still with her eyes closed and still covering Thera’s. “Is it okay to look?”

“It was always okay.”

“I’m asking Ben.”

“Yeah, you’re good.”

The fear the other third-tier seemed to hold for her made significantly more sense while he needed to sit down to process things, both the fight and what he’d seen in her memories.

It was a lot, all of it and he was going to need to add it as another thing to talk to Myriad about that night but his main takeaway was how badly he’d lost.

Sure, he had other things he could have used. He hadn’t been fighting like his life was on the line and he’d limited himself by not using any of his connect-derived skills, meaning no using his mind to inflict mental damage and no trying to force his will on her to override her thoughts and actions, but if he really was going to try fighting a god who was going to be a whole lot more powerful then her with those handicaps, he’d just seen how badly it was going to go.

God, as it stands I am so fucked.

Something in him seemed to be giving a bit of that mood away too, with Abel coming to his side and slapping his back.

“Hey hey, you did pretty okay, don’t be so down! I was just too good, nobody could blame you for losing.”

“Ah, yeah, it’s fine… Actually, I have two questions for you if you don’t mind. Were you holding back at all?”

“Yeah, it was just a spar, right? It’s not like I’m looking after a gate.”

Okay, even more depressing so going to try and brush past that with my curiosity.

“Alright, and your third tier skill, am I right in thinking that those things you create are basically twisted clones of yourself you can control?”

“It’s a bit more to it than that but you have the gist.”

“And malevolent form is some sort of shapeshifting skill that lets you rearrange your body structure too, including making more parts like teeth?”

“You picked up a lot in that, yeah, why?”

“Okay, sorry if this is insensitive but if you’ve lost your eyes, couldn’t you use those skills to grow them back? Or at least use them to boost Yuzu’s ability to help you grow them back?”

Since her monsters had some he knew that she had to have originally as well and he frankly had a lot of questions about her eyelessness. He doubted that when the gods of the world had gone to the trouble of building them new bodies that they’d left the injuries they may have had back on their original worlds but that would mean someone with her level of strength had lost them since coming there, something he couldn’t easily imagine, even if she’d only been half as powerful when she’d first arrived.

Despite the question, she just laughed.

“What, these?” She asked, blinking for a second and growing lifeless grey eyes to fill the voids she’d left before blinking again to get rid of them. “Sure, I can have all the eyes I want, I just prefer not to.”

“Uh, why?”

“They’re distracting.”

…Yep, definitely seeing a lot of reasons the others might be uncomfortable with her.

“So, now that this is over, can I ask what the point of any of that was?” Thera asked as she and Yuzu joined, leaving Verbum’s unconscious body off to the side.

“Hmm? To prove I’m the most important summoned, obviously.”

“Okay, but Ben isn’t important because of his combat ability. The fact that he’s gotten pretty good at fighting at all is really just a bonus.”

It seemed she was also picking up on his down mood after his loss and was trying to help in her own way, even if she wasn’t seeing where it had come from, to point out the inherent flaw in the entire point in the spare and making Abel’s face fall.

“What? Then what do you think makes him so good, huh?”

“Despite my role, he’s helped more people awaken their skills than I have,” Yuzu answered. “And by a significant amount too. That’s why I’m comfortable saying he’s a lot more valuable than me.”

“Wait, that’s why? Then what was even the point of competing like this!” She yelled before thinking for a moment. “Oh well though, it was still fun. Ben, fight me again another time and I’ll think of a better way to show the world I stand above you! You can have a comfortable place as the number two summoned and I’m fine with Yuzu thinking of herself as number three if she really wants. As for Verbum… well, if he ever fixes his napping problem he could snag a spot in the lower middle probably.”

“Okay, sure, sounds good. Now that that’s done, shall we-”

His sentence was cut off by a hand pressing against his back and the sudden feeling of being elsewhere, dirt pressing in on him at all angles as he was once more teleported somewhere else.