“Hey, can you stop being a showoff while we’re trying to work.”

“It’s called practicing and focus on your own instead of mine,” Ben shot back to Xilly, losing more and more of his patience when it came to putting up with her attitude.

As his two students were busy working on their connect with the horde of volunteers who had come from the city to help the granddaughter of their god, Ben was doing what he could to raise his job level as he watched, materializing loads of complex things from watches to toasters to music boxes and more, all of the items being things from Earth in the hopes it would give more experience thanks to the ‘otherworldly’ part of his job’s name, but a lot of it was to help distract himself as well. Rather than taking place in Nati’s home, the same as the rest of her training had been to that point, on that day it was happening in Nare’s church to make it easier to deal with all of the volunteers and Ben was left feeling every second of his time there.

Ever since Ben had awakened to king of sacrilege, he’d never once stepped foot into a church other than the ones that worshiped Myriad, but now he was sitting in the first one of a far more powerful god and he was feeling every bit of it.

It was like the air was thick with divinity and faith, even if he closed his eyes he could still make out the surroundings while he was trying to suppress the instinctual response that came with the skill, constantly pointing out what was the most fragile, the most easy to break.

It wasn’t like he couldn’t ignore it, but it was all acting as a distraction as he felt the faith moving about, making him need whatever he could get to not have to deal with it if he could.

And the constant attitude isn’t making it any easier you know. God, Nare, finish up whatever you’re doing already that has you so busy so I can complain. When I see you next… wait.

Nare may not have been able to make time to answer him but Ben was never the type to quit so easily, and being in the god’s church offered a solution to that problem. Sure, he could try praying like anyone else and hoping for an answer, but he wasn’t anyone else. He could feel the movement of the faith his worshipers were giving off that filled the building. Faith that had to be going to the god, creating the same sort of path he’d used to both see Myriad and go back to any realm other gods had seen fit to drag him off to, and with little else to do and plenty of time Ben closed his eyes and followed it, finding his mind in an empty realm.

“Huh, that was actually a lot easier than I expected. I’ve gotten good at this. Leaving just the small problem that Nare isn’t even freaking here.”

Unlike Myriad’s realm, it looked like Nare enjoyed decorating, having displays of art out and about that filled the space as Ben killed some time to admire it all, hoping that if he waited the god would return as he looked but not having the luck. It had been a good idea and he now knew the way for the future but he couldn’t keep dawdling there in the hopes he would show up and with that Ben forced his mind back down, his body waking to see Nati giving him a dirty look.

“What? Did you need a hand with something?”

“Did you seriously just fall asleep while we’re doing this?”

“Okay, first off, no, but second and just as importantly, it wouldn’t even matter much if I did. You guys don’t want me in your minds so I can’t see how I’d help you improve beyond the advice I’ve already given at this point.”

“It’s just mind reading. I don't see how having yours mixed in all of that is going to help at all.”

“I’m literally the best connect user on the planet and it’s not even close,” Ben told them blankly, unable to believe he was having to have this conversation. “If you can’t imagine that I can help then that’s a problem with your imagination.”

Xilly rolled her eyes, neither of them won over by that. “Humble too it sounds like.”

Huu, okay, that was maybe a little uncalled for on my part… No, fuck these people, I need a break.

“Okay, I’m going to be distracted for approximately ten seconds so try not to have an emergency in that time.”

He didn’t wait for an answer as he reached into his bag and pulled out the archive, deciding that a multi-week change of pace was exactly what the doctor ordered.

“Holy crap, that’s not just disgusting, that’s perverse. That’s how this language works? It’s not exactly Myriad levels of bad but this was messed up to try and figure out.”

In his need to escape his students, he hadn’t let himself waste his time in the archive, using every moment to do his best to decipher the mysteries of the final book it contained, for all of the additional displeasure it had caused him by the time he had finally got it. Aside from the fact that the language in question seemed to only have irregular verbs, what had really tripped him up was a matter of word order.

All languages had rules, even if they could frequently act more like guidelines, and one of the big ones had to do with how words would be arranged in a sentence. The arrangement varied from language to language, even if there were some arrangements that seemed far more common than others, with the fact that he hadn’t been prepared for some of the hypothetical arrangements to spring up being part of what had given him problems.

While his native english used a subject, verb, object to the order of its sentence structure and worldspeak used what seemed like the far more common subject, object, verb arrangement, based on what he’d seen from both languages Helori had taught him as well as plenty he’d deciphered within the archive, the final one he’d decoded was a mix of two that he’d never actually seen examples of before, being both object, verb, subject and object, subject, verb.

As far as languages went he’d hated it, but it had served its purpose of giving him a break from his students, his perception of time making it feel like a couple weeks had passed as he had diligently worked on decoding it and he slipped the last book back into its shelf, it’s cover changing colours to match the rest.

“And now to see what all of that hard work is going to be rewarded with beyond leaving me as the world's foremost mortal expert on alien languages.”

With it slid into place he waited, sure something more would come given all the work he’d done, only to be faced with nothing. Minutes passed as he waited, hoping for anything, be it something to appear or maybe an announcement, even just something acknowledging that he’d done a good job in reading it all, but that seemed it was the end, filling Ben with indescribable feelings given how much work he’d put into all of that.

“...Okay, looks like I’m off to see if it’s possible to burn this thing then ‘cause I refuse to keep sharing the world with an artifact Galwax made, mythic item or not.”

He turned to do just that too, aiming to take the typical exit that would free his mind from the place, only to be stopped in his tracks. Where there’d normally be one door there was now a second, all but begging to be walked through.

“And the archive lives another day. Let’s see what it has to offer then.”

He didn’t hesitate as he grabbed the handle and pushed his way through, eager for whatever would come next. He couldn’t begin to imagine what might have been waiting for him now that he’d read all of the books but stopped in his tracks as he received one more surprise in the form of what by all accounts looked like a star glowing with a rainbow of mana waited on the other side, the god Galwax once again before him.