<For now, block her ears and make her focus on the ground as she keeps bringing you both onward. I’ll let you know when you need to block her eyes.>
“Got it. Thera, one sec.”
He passed on what Myriad told him before spending his own mana, first materializing wax to shove into her ears before creating a dense ear covering, arranging the structure of it to absorb as much sound as possible and hoped it would be enough to protect her from whatever was to come.
“Can you hear me?” He asked, connecting with her just to be sure from his perspective and finding no noise getting through.
Okay, perfect, now to just see how I’m going to handle this.
They kept going onwards, only slowing down a bit as Thera kept casting her new spelling, firing it any time Ben told her to through connect.
<Now Ben, this really should go without saying but if you somehow get the chance, don’t connect with this thing.>
Don’t connect with the interdimensional monster, gotcha.
He didn’t really need to be told. If connecting with a god would supposedly fry his brain then he didn’t want to know what would come from that far scarier meeting of the minds. Hell, he didn’t really want to be there at all, it was only the fact that doing nothing meant dying anyway that gave him the drive to try and deal with the experience.
They were low enough now that they were following a road instead of traveling through the sky, hiding plenty of it thanks to branches of overhead trees, but he was already seeing a sign that they were closer and of things to come. Winged creatures of all sorts, be they birds or more bat-like, flying reptiles or creatures that didn’t have an earthen equivalent were littering the ground, each of them alive but convulsing, all dealing with the effects of something they weren't meant to be able to process, with Ben beginning to get just a hint of it too.
It was a distant noise, tickling his eardrums and making its way across his skin, tingling unnaturally in a way that refused to be comprehended. Even with his unnatural mind, he was failing. Each time he tried to think back on the distant things he could hear his mind came up blank, unable to replicate the sounds even in the comfort of his own head.
Which kind of feels like a bad sign for however I’m going to react when I see this thing with my own two eyes.
<It’s not too late to turn around and head back. Hide away for whatever few days we might have left and enjoy it the best you can. I won’t hold it against you Ben.>
I’m not going to just sit around and wait for my death so don’t bother.
<Fine, in that case, it’s time to cover Thera’s eyes. There’s about to be a break in the woods and we’ll finally know just how you’re going to handle this. Good luck, try not to die or go insaner.>
He did as Myriad said, materializing a blindfold while at the same time connecting to her to help guide their travel. He was now responsible for informing her of any oncoming obstacles, ghosts, whether they were drifting too high or too low and whether they were staying on the path, but he had the mental leeway for it. What he didn’t have the leeway for was processing the thing he was seeing the second the trees broke.
<UNNATURAL MIND LEVEL INCREASED>
<UNNATURAL THOUGHT SPEED LEVEL INCREASED>
Off in the distance, hovering in the sky while at a scale that seemed to usually take up a big portion of it, was a giant, twisting, shifting, thing. Just trying to describe it was hurting his brain. He didn’t think it reflected any light but it certainly had a colour to be seen, just because it wasn’t part of the visual spectrum of any creature he’d peered through the eyes of seemed irrelevant. The fact that as far as he knew, that meant there was nothing in his biology that should have been able to process and perceived it as a colour either entered a single mind in his head as more of an interesting footnote than anything else, with the majority of him focused on trying to understand.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The first of which he managed to do was understand that looking at it hurt. He felt pain in his mind, body, and soul, with nausea in equal measures too, along with other, stranger sensations he didn’t think his biology was capable of processing. Quilith had once described outsiders to him as being wrong and there was not a single part of him that disagreed. Nothing he was seeing was fit to inhabit the same reality as him, it didn’t belong in the most obvious of ways.
The next thing he was able to understand was that despite all of that, he was still sane. He wasn’t undergoing the same effects he was seeing in any wildlife unfortunate enough to witness it which meant his mind really had changed to a point where it could even handle something so deeply absurd, even if the experience was still far from pleasant.
Still, the clarity that came with knowing he hadn’t been killed or driven insane just by looking at it gave him the leeway to notice something else. Something he should have noticed much sooner, not with his eyes but with one particular skill.
“Jesus fucking Christ Myriad, you didn’t tell me this thing was a god.”
Perhaps it was just due to the sheer size of it, but it felt like it was making his sacrilege scream at him even more than it usually would. Every part of it was shouting out both power and divinity, even if it wasn’t quite to the extent of the regular gods he knew, with Myriad having an answer to that.
<Because it’s not, or at least not yet. You know the rules, while we may be describing your teacher as a god as a form of shorthand, nothing with a true body genuinely is one until they pass on and their soul ascends. Hence the extra bit of nuance I was telling you about when I said we were going to leave it up to you. Even if you somehow manage to do something about it, that will still leave us needing to handle it after it ascends.>
“Okay, what I’m hearing is to try and jam a soul crystal into it before I kill it to make all of the gods extra owe me one, got it.”
<Easier said than done.>
“That’s literally every part of this. Not much difference between aiming for impossible or impossible plus one. And in a strange twist of good news, this actually just got substantially more possible.”
<What do you mean.>
Ben tapped at his eyes. “You’re talking to the king of sacrilege baby, this thing’s going to be a god? I can see its weak points.”
Of course, Myriad’s right. That's still easier said than done.
He still didn’t understand what he was seeing, not really, but he had his suspicions. The monster still looked like a twisting and shifting mass, both shrinking in and pulsing out with some parts disappearing as others emerged. It was constant, sickening movement as it drifted across the sky in a spasm, but whatever it was doing was making its few weak spots appear and disappear in a patternless fluctuation as he took a hesitant guess as to what was happening.
“Myriad, I need you to go confirm something with a spatial god for me. I think this thing is somehow existing in more spatial dimensions than the universe actually has.”
He didn’t know if there’d be anything useful about that information, he just wanted it for the small comfort that any level of understanding of what he was seeing would give him. In the face of something that denied all explanations, what he wanted most were answers, with Myriad giving him what he could.
<They say it’s likely but hard to verify, which is really the best you can hope for since every part of this would be hard to verify.>
“Okay, well we need to accept some things about it but how the hell would that even be possible? That’s basically forcing some foreign physics on the universe as a whole!”
<As if you haven’t done the same things only a week ago.>
“... Okay, touché but I blew myself up doing it on the atomic scale!”
<Then it’s just better than you, it shouldn’t be too shocking and that’s not really the main thing to worry about.>
“Which is?”
<Just being around it is causing havoc and it seems like it can control the undead in some way. Aside from anything we haven’t seen, will it keep getting stronger?>
“Keep getting… Holy fuck Myriad, tell me this thing doesn’t have system access.”
Sapience and proximity were the key requirements for the system to properly bind to someone, as far as Ben knew those were really the core rules of it, but no matter how strange the creature was he didn’t see any reason to assume it would apply. His god however could see plenty.
<It would be stranger if it didn’t.> Myriad went on. <Maybe intelligence is some special thing, in this reality most of it comes about from the uplifting of gods, but to the ancient things that exist outside of it? Let a rodent exist for a million or even billion years out between universes and you’d find it growing beyond traditional ideas of intelligence too.>
So an untold eternity could be a recipe for outsiders getting system access just by virtue of all they could potentially learn and experience in that time, no matter how initially dumb. Great, just freaking great.
How powerful it could become if they didn’t stop it soon immediately rushed to the top of Ben’s list of worries, only to fall down by one a second later. The monster moved, shaking the world with it.