Amon sat on the sand, breathing heavily as he lazily pulled on the tube connected to the flask of water in his hands. He was staring at the giant wormlike creature, or rather at Amanda, who had climbed onto its body and was trying to extract the Essence.
His attention shifted only when Catalina weakly walked over and sat beside him.
Amon did not look at her. His eyes lacked their usual energy.
“What did you do to me? To us?” Catalina asked.
Placing the flask on the sand, Amon turned slightly toward her, disbelief and disappointment on his face.
“Besides saving your lives?” he snorted, still somehow finding the energy for it.
“Yes.”
“Don’t you already know the answer?” Amon asked, voice serious this time.
Catalina sighed and considered the question, letting the silence stretch for a moment.
“I feel different, but I’m not sure why, or…”
“There,” Amon cut her off, pointing at the smaller wormlike beast Amanda had already extracted the Essence from. “Use your magic on it.”
Catalina followed his gaze, but hesitated.
“Do it. Why would I save you just to harm you afterward?” Amon frowned.
Catalina nodded.
Her eyes focused on the corpse. Then her mana flared, and in an instant, a chunk of flesh disappeared into a vortex-like distortion that formed in the air itself and vanished so quickly that a mortal eye would have never been able to perceive it.
Catalina’s eyes widened.
She breathed heavily, and judging by the way her fingers twitched, the spell had clearly taken a toll on her body. But she remained conscious.
“How is this possible?” she murmured.
“Normally, it wouldn’t be. But lucky for you, I’m not exactly a normal human myself,” Amon said.
And while Catalina was still processing his words, I immediately realized why I had felt a connection to these humans despite Guidance telling me before that a human soul was too fragile to be connected to gods.
I willed Catalina’s Status Window to appear and scanned it for the one thing that would confirm my suspicion.
You bastard…
I chuckled. Amon had managed something I never would have even attempted.
[...Race: Human (tainted)...]
So that was why Amon had been weakened so much. He had used my divinity and his own blood to reshape the two mages entirely. They were still human, almost fully, but they now carried a tiny trace of velmoryn blood within them, and that seemed to have improved Catalina’s ability to control her magic.
I had yet to see how Amon had changed Amanda or the two men, if he had changed them at all.
But the “slight tweaking” of Amanda’s wish he had mentioned seemed to have resulted in the alteration of their entire beings. He had not only saved them, but granted them the ability to save themselves if they ever found themselves in a similar situation again.
Yet, as my amusement faded, two questions surfaced and began to weigh on me. Would altering humans be something the other gods tolerated? And perhaps even more importantly, how had Amon managed to change, or at least “taint,” their race?
“You have some explaining to do,” I whispered into his mind.
“I will. But later,” Amon whispered back, too busy dealing with Catalina’s anger.
“I never asked for this. You cannot tie my life to some deity and even…” Catalina stopped, her breath catching as her voice dropped even lower. “Who am I now?”
She hissed the words, forcing herself to keep quiet so she would not alert the three mercenaries, who were all busy with their work.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
“I can turn you back if you don’t like it,” Amon said, shrugging.
No matter what he said, I knew that he was lying.
Influencing someone’s race was already an impossible feat. He had only managed to accomplish it because the portion of velmoryn within these humans was minuscule, almost negligible. Still, it was enough for mana to respond to it. But based on how small the growth in Catalina’s magic was, it was clear just how little of the velmoryn bloodline she carried.
By now, I had already confirmed that humans were not talented in magic. Even the weak constitution of the Velmoryns, something I had complained about more than once, was nothing short of monstrous when compared to an average human.
Their numbers aside, humans were probably the least blessed beings I had seen. That was why I had assumed they must possess strong technology even in this world. Otherwise, how else could they have survived this long in a world where even the elves had almost ceased to exist?
“Can you really turn me back?” Catalina asked, hope appearing in her eyes despite herself.
“Yes. Why would I lie? If I wanted to deceive you, I could have hidden the truth about your blood. But as you can see, I prefer honesty,” Amon said, lying again without batting an eye. “Before you make that decision, though, answer me this first. What do you want from this life, Catalina?”
The woman’s eyes widened. A faint flush of anger still colored her face, but she considered his words all the same.
“Let me explain better,” Amon continued. “Say I saved you and the others in this hunt. What happens next? You earn enough coin to survive for a few months before you have to take another contract just to buy food. And then what? You hunt weaker beasts? You keep risking your lives for scraps? How long before your body starts to decline? How many more friends’ deaths do you have to watch?”
“You know nothing,” Catalina said firmly, but despite her words, her expression had cracked. Amon had managed to get under her skin. “Just because you are powerful, you think you can play with us?”
“I don’t need an answer now,” Amon said, ignoring the accusation. “Take your time and think. Speak with Amanda. Share your thoughts with her. I will want an answer tomorrow morning.”
Amon stood, keeping pain from his expression.
“But know this. The life my Lord wishes for His believers is one of freedom. It will not be easy, and it will not be safe. But no matter what happens, you will never feel alone.” He paused, then added, his voice quieter but firmer, “And I myself promise you this. You will never be left to suffer injustice.”
He gently patted the woman’s back as he walked away, holding his stomach with his right hand. Now that no one could see his face, his expression twisted into a grimace.
“Verde, I thought I was going to die,” Amon complained inwardly. “I took just a tiny bit of my blood and split it between the two of them. I only needed to improve the way mana moved through their bodies…”
“That is not what I care about. How did you manage to change their race?”
“Heh, it actually worked? I only realized it was a possibility after doing it…” Amon’s twisted expression shifted into a smirk for the briefest moment before another churn of his stomach turned it back into one of pain. “I wasn’t planning to change their race. I told you, I was trying to give them some of my blood so it would carry mana through their bodies. Don’t you remember what Aria told Avenor? God, you never listen to stuff that isn’t related to your precious divinity.”
“Which god are you addressing exactly?” I snorted.
“You, of course. Who else? I only serve You, my Liege,” he said, completely serious. Then he sighed. “Fuck… I’m in too much pain to keep this going, but aren’t you supposed to reward me for gaining you two half-velmoryns? They fall under your Authority now…”
“They don’t. The velmoryn part in them is too little,” I said. “And your little experiment cost me more than 50 Divinity Points!”
I was going to tell him more, but he was far too exhausted, and before I could continue, another voice sounded in my head.
A completely new one.
“Go rest. I will summon you later.”
I muted the Window once more and focused on the strange voice.
“O great God of Velmoryn, please heed my words,” a woman prayed. “The Goddess of Motherhood and Fertility has found a way to weaken Your enemy…”
As she spoke, I detected the source of the voice and willed the Window to zoom in on her location.
She was the same human woman who had chased Lucas down and later spoken with Aurelion, Athena’s believer. Now, she knelt in the yard of a temple with her hands clasped and her eyes closed.
So Athena didn’t want to come to my dominion.
I laughed.
The message itself aside, the fact that even nonbelievers could pray to me as long as they knew my title was a surprise. Once more, it made sense why V had tried so hard to learn my name, or rather my title.
I was still considering how to communicate with her and learn what method Athena had discovered when Dick also started praying.
“High Father…”
Unlike with this woman, I did not need the Window to know where Dick was. I could sense every single believer perfectly, even use their senses as though they were mine. So I switched to Dick’s eyes and perceived everything he was seeing.
He was in a dark room.
A suffocatingly small one.
As his gaze lowered, I realized he was in a latrine, standing over the hole in the floor. I was more than happy that I had not been using his sense of smell, and that he was not in the process of using it.
“Forgive me for invoking Your name in such a place, but…” he said, clearly worried.
“The priest just gave the order to the army. We are to enter the forest tomorrow.”