Chapter 185: INTERLUDE. Investigation open
Chapter 185: INTERLUDE. Investigation open
Luck was a powerful force. Chaos permeated everything—it was the clay from which the world was once built, and though now it was made of order, there was no escaping the origins of the nature. Mortals prayed to gods and luck both. Gods were too prideful to pray and strong enough to force the world and the fate into giving them what they wanted.
But luck was still there. Still influencing everything and everyone.
God of Rogues considered himself the only god who still believed in the power luck and chance had over him. Sometimes, when he didn’t know his way, he liked to rely on them to lead someplace interesting.
For that, he used an old-fashioned method: a pair of dice. They were made of orichalcum to mitigate any possible magical interferences in a throw and tastefully engraved with geometrical ornaments. A true work of art. God of Rogues could throw them so they land any side he wanted, but he also could let them land like they want—and he did.
The hardest part was always deciding on what the numbers meant exactly. Sometimes it required several throws. Eventually, God of Rogues decided that luck and fate led him to the Third Circle of Hell.
It was always bustling with activity thanks to the endless rain that came from the ceiling by magic. Water, even here, meant life. Too much of it—like here—also meant endless putrefaction, and the vile, putrid slush that replaced ground in this area swallowed many souls and made many more rot alive from endless wetness. It also soaked up all the rain, not letting a single drop go farther, to lower circles.
God of Rogues had reasons to wonder why chance didn’t want him to be in some nicer place. He could walk over mud without sinking, he could ignore winds, cold, and flames—but wetness… He had to remember and cast a spell for that, and then another to dry out water he already caught by his cloak.
Then, God of Rogues rolled for direction again. He had no aim, no purpose and no other desires but to delay his imminent return to the other eleven divine snobs that resided in Heaven. But luck and chance and fate didn’t turn away from him this time as well. Whether it was by a coincidence, or by the interference of an even higher power, one could never know.
But when, in the middle of rain-drenched swamp, where only living creatures for kilometres were mud-fishes and demonic snails, God of Rogues saw the beast, he knew that he would have a new investigation to start instead of the one about Devourer.
It was a horrid creature, more so than the average denizen of Hell. It had a slug-like body a size of an ox that was generously sprinkled with eyes. All of them had different shapes, colours, pupils, and irises. Where the beast had no eyes, it had limbs as numerous and as diverse. The rest of it shifted, changed form in pulses, rippled in mesmerising patterns. The mud created a slimy coat over its skin, hiding the colour of it, but there was no hiding the long proboscis with which the creature sucked the flesh out of the shell of an unlucky demonic snail.
The snail, a mollusk a size of a dog, with slimy spiked shell and a dozen tentacles coming out of it, was much less disgusting than the beast. It wasn’t just the question of appearance—the beast exuded an aura of wrongness about it. Like the reality itself didn’t like its presence and showed it to everyone around.
The Hell was a home to many creatures, but God of Rogues knew them pretty well by now. They were either souls of dead—both animals, monsters and humans alike, unlike in Heaven, where only humans could get a pass—or demons created from them by Hell’s harsh nature.
The slurping beast was no demon and no monster. That was something God of Rogues didn’t see for a long, long while…
“A chaos beast! It looks way too pure..,” he muttered, striding in a circle around it. “First generation, second at most. I bet it’s first. I don’t know many creatures that breed here in Hell. How did it get here?”
That was a question. The first chaos beasts were created from droplets of original chaos when the world was made solid. Back then, at the beginning of time, the Twelve fought them with all they had. The chaos beasts were numerous then. Some of them were weak, some strong, some aggressive, some docile… All of them were beings of pure chaos, unpredictable and unnatural to the world.
So the world molded them to itself and killed those that didn’t bend. No chaos beast had a long lifespan, and when they bred, the spawns would be less and less chaotic with each generation, until they turned into more or less normal monsters.
This one was far from it. God of Rogues accessed the beast. It didn’t seem to be of the truly dangerous sort. He could kill it now, but the real question was, where did it come from?
“It could’ve only happened if more of primordial chaos entered the world, but… That would mean a chaos rift! That’s…” The mere idea made God of Rogues uneasy. Could it be that the veil, the bubble that separated their world from chaos, was breaking? He had to find out that, now.
“What a trouble.” He tsked. “And I have to check on my own, don’t I? Well, fine.” It’s not like he was burning with the desire to invite any of the other gods into his one man investigation team.
God of Rogues didn’t bother to kill the chaos beast—what harm it did here, in Hell? Besides, it would just spawn again. Instead, he ran away in search of more information. Even demons would feel the chaotic wrongness of chaos beasts. Somewhere, someone should’ve seen something—or what was the point of fate bringing God of Rogues to that place?