Hunah

Taffy said my twin brother had used power way beyond his actual [Level], almost the same as the strongest “Common [Gods]”, and this had taken a toll on his body. But she also said he would survive without sequelae, and just needed some rest after his fight. That things could have been worse if he had continued to use his power for much longer, or if he had “made too much noise”, whatever this means; sometimes that woman could be really weird, like when she taped the ground, and seemed to be talking a baby into sleep.

Still, even with all the mysteriousness (if not craziness) of the woman, I remembered her words quite well. For just after guaranteeing me that Ank wouldn’t die, she told me about the “Intermediate [Gods]”. They were the ones that came immediately after the “Lower [Gods]”, which my twin brother and I already faced before, and they were the creators of many things, from corn to aging, from rain to emeralds, and their [Levels] could be as low as 500, or as high 999.

She, basically, said I was prepared to face her.

“Reinforcements! Reinforcements!”, the guard’s leader screamed ahead.

Yes, my twin brother, my love, felt the pain of honestly believing he lost me forever, and almost died because of it.

“We’re here, sir!”I heard yet again from the wall of shields at the end of the road I walked.

“I called for reinforcements, dammit!”,

And it was all her fault.

“We- We are the reinforcements, sir!”

“Are you the only ones left…?”, the silence coming from the half a dozen trembling men, who could barely keep their spears pointed at me, was all the answer the guard’s leader needed. As I stopped, just a few meters away from the wall of shields and spears, the one who screamed orders, turned to me. “…Even if you pass through us, you’re gonna die. I don’t know who is the [God] giving you orders, but there’s no way the queen, the [Emerald Goddess] Umi, will stay still as her city domain is invaded like this.”

Yes… It was all her fault. The [Goddess] who took everything from me, from us, twins, our family, neighbors, and even tried to separate us.

Umi.

“Move”, I said, coldly. “I came to kill one person only.”

It was really a shame that I had to make my way through so many corpses already; they simply wouldn’t open the gate to me when I said I came to “fuck the [Whore Goddess] up”, and as I approached the exuberant emerald palace, I was assaulted by so many guards.

As the impeding line of guards didn’t disperse, I frowned and continued to walk. I knew most of the [Gods] mortal servants did so out of fear, fear of an unreachable, incomprehensible power, and equally vast cruelty. But, if there was no other way to get to the neck of the true wrongdoers than violence, then so be it.

“K-Kuah! Diiiie!”, one of the soldiers keeping the line ahead finally lost his mind and madly dashed straight against me, shoving his spear towards my torso.

“Fush!”, with my thumb, I hurled one of the pebbles I carried in my fist, infused with a [Weapon Touch], shinning red, against the incoming spearman. And the small stone made its way through the colorful cotton armor of the guard, and the body underneath, as if there was nothing there to begin with; when the pebble fell to the tiled road, it even exploded a small crater in it.

The guard’s leader stepped to the side, and his men did the same, finally giving me some leeway.

I passed straight before the empty sacrificial pyramid which faced the emerald palace; this last one being a huge green crystal projecting itself off the face of a mountain, turned to the sea. Blood still stained the immediate surroundings of the [Goddess] home, as if someone had suffered an incredibly violent death there not long ago.

Really, and I thought I couldn’t get any more pissed off than I already was…

When I reached the tallest structure of the port city, a thousand eyes stared at me from corners and behind ajar windows and doors. Then, a noise caught my attention: claps.

“Well, well, well”, a tall and beautiful human-looking woman of green long hair and green eyes and nails stood, amused, on her balcony tens of meters above me. Umi herself. “If it isn’t th-”

“BUM!”, not seeing any point in allowing that trash to stain the same world I lived in with my brother, and many more good people, I threw all the pebbles I had hands against the balcony, shattering the emerald structure as if it wasn’t better than a house of twigs.

“I shouldn’t expect such a lowly being to have any fine-”, the [Emerald Goddess] re-started her blabbering once recovered from the shock of the sudden attack, even as she was still falling down. And I interrupted her again, and this time, with my sword.

I slashed the deity straight over her face, and the attack pushed her against the palace walls, which she burst straight through.

“You vermin! You’re not deserving of ev-”, Umi, surprisingly, continued to not get it, as I kicked some of the emerald shards around me, infusing them with [Item Soul], and completely destroying her impression of a perfectly shaped woman; once the dust settled down, her figure was full of sharp angles, emerald edges, and points. “…Very well”, The [Goddess] muttered, but her voice, then, matched her new, real, appearance. “You got what you wanted. You made me really angry.”

The deity reaching me with jagged fingers, but our [Level] difference wasn’t that big; even if I didn’t get the extra [Levels] Ank gained from his last fight; and I managed to avoid this, and following mortal wounds, though there wasn’t much I could do about the difference in [Attributes], and had to simply take in a number of less significant slashes and bruises.

[Species: God, Level: 500]

Silently, I brandished my sword, chipping away the [HP] of that deity in more an annoying way than really dangerous for her.

“Is this all you got?”, the ugly emerald monster laughed. “Maybe enough to deal with Lower [Gods], but not the great me!”, my enemy’s charge became more violent, faster, it pushed me further behind, dealt more damage to my [Health Points]. “The most beautiful! The strongest! The smartest! The great! The perfect! ME! UMI!”, finally, the deity managed to get a hit just right enough to send my sword flying away. She smiled, displaying multiple rows of needle-like crystals lined inside her mouth and going all the way down to her stomach. “Let me show you how a real [Goddess] fight: [Cosmic Children]!”

[Species: God, Level: 500 (+1000)]

[Species: God, Level: 500 (+950)]

[Species: God, Level: 500 (+900)]

…

As the [Emerald Goddess]’s mouth started to shine, bright white light coming off it blindly, the added [Levels] she called forth with the skill only [Gods] had started to decrease quickly; it was clear she was concentrating all that power in a single strike. She laughed all the time, looking down at the unarmed me.

Or so she thought: I reached for my snake-bone-whip, and smacked the half a dozen time before she could understand what was going on, caught the body of the weapon and pulled it away from my hands similarly to what she did with my sword, saying:

“Fool! You really wasted your points in mastery with two weapons?!”

“No”, I said, having already stepped a little closer. “I wasted my points to master all weapons”, I concluded, pulling off my old spiked flail, and bashing the confused deity around.

Umi managed to disarm me again, but I quickly equipped my portable spear, then the medium-sized axe, the hatched, and the dagger, as I approached the enemy whose mouth shone brighter and brighter by the moment.

“THAT’S THE END, MORTAL!”, Umi screamed, as my smallest blade was kicked from my hands, and I found myself just before the [Goddess] open mouth about to explode. “YOU HAVE NO MORE WEAPONS!”

The image of mom, dad, our neighbors, everyone just living their lives, happily, laughing and playing together came to my mind. And then, of their subsequent horrendous torture and death; even Tapa’s heartbreaking final moments were forever embedded in my memory as Umi’s fault.

The image of my brother, covered in his own blood, crying and reaching with his shaking hands for me, still burned vividly in my mind’s eye.

All the pain, and anguish, and darkness that I faced up to that point were focused into my right elbow, and elbow pad, as raised my arm and armor piece over the deity’s head, and talked back:

“Nah, I also wasted my points into armor mastery.”

The hit I delivered wasn’t much stronger than any of the previous ones, and the [Emerald Goddess] seemed to have a quite high [Resistance]. But it was more than enough to close my enemy’s mouth, and bend her neck to the point her chin touched her chest, the target of my revenge, of the revenge of my twin brother and mine. Like it would have been a good strategy to fight the hatchling dragon, it was an elbow hit just enough to close her mouth, and bend her neck right when she was about to spit an attack with double her own amount of [Levels].

Umi had only time to widen her eyes in realization of her defeat, before all the energy she nurtured inside of her, all the power of thousands of innocents tortured and killed to satiate the ever power-hungry [Goddess] throughout the years surged forwards all at once.

Like sudden lightning, a pillar of white light simply appeared where the bent neck of the [Emerald Goddess] once was, and it flew upwards with such intensity, the energy pierced the clouds and cleared the skies from all the grayness of the rainy season, and, in counterpart, pressed Umi’s beheaded body against the ground with such an intensity, that the lifeless body pierced the cobbled stone plaza before her palace, and dug itself many meters underground.

No one tried to stop me when on my way outside the city, still carrying the emerald head in my hands.