It turned out that, while he couldn’t actually run across the sky with [Air Walk], it was a hell of a lot more versatile than he’d initially given it credit for. Velik made it up five hundred feet of stone in a minute, mostly by leaping straight up and clinging to the rough stone occasionally to reset the number of steps he’d taken.

It still burned a lot of mana, but he was recovering it so fast as a natural consequence of his improved mystic that he wasn’t terribly concerned. Really, the only issue was how precise he needed to be in his timing, since the skill couldn’t handle the weight of his spear and broke almost immediately once he stepped on it.

He was greeted by a great set of metal doors twenty feet high and four feet thick. They were open a crack, just enough for a person to slip through. Sitting at the top of the steps leading up to them was a woman he recognized. Her blonde hair gave her away, even if her face and height were subtly different.

“So it was you after all,” Velik said. “How did you hide your scent back in town?”

“Fooling the senses is easy if you know how,” she replied, utterly relaxed as she studied him. Her elbows rested on her knees as she leaned forward, her jaw cupped in her hands.

“What about all the people you worked with on the research team? How did you insert yourself into them?”

The woman waved the question away. “Humans remember what I want them to. Really, anything does. It’s something of a specialty of mine.”

“Wiping memories?”

“Not just wiping them. Controlling the whole story. I make them forget things that are true, remember things that never happened, and feel things they normally wouldn’t. And humans are easy targets, for the most part. You though… you were tricky to divert your attention away from me. Still, I was starting to think you weren’t even going to try to cross the desert, the way you dragged your feet. And then you made no effort to hide your essence from the pillars.”

The what? Does she mean the monsters?

“But the others want you in one piece, so I held your hand on your journey. I suppose it was worth it in the end, since you showed up.”

I guess her monster form is that giant bird, then.

“What others?” Velik asked. “You mean Tesir?”

“I don’t think that one particularly cares one way or another. You were just something fun and new for him to brutalize.”

“Backfired on him though, didn’t it? He sure ran away in a hurry, tail between his legs the whole way.”

The woman snorted. “Don’t mistake that for thinking he was afraid of you. You’re no god. You’re just the finger puppet of one, and he recognized you being used to try to squish him. Out here, the gods have no dominion to say who we can and can’t kill, not even Legra.”

The goddess of monsters wasn’t worshipped. That was a blasphemous idea. She was respected the same way the ocean was respected by sailors: with a healthy dose of caution and fear. Velik supposed that if anyone were going to venerate Legra, it would be the divine beasts. Probably, there were deeper connections there, too. They did have ‘divine’ in their name, after all.

“So what happens now?” Velik asked warily. “You guys jump out and try to kill me?”

“Not too smart, huh? If we wanted to kill you, we’d have just done that. Hell, Tesir did kill a guy while he was there.”

Velik’s face darkened and his hand clenched the haft of his spear. The woman noticed the reaction, because of course she did. “Touched a nerve?” she mocked. “If it makes you feel any better, Tesir screwed himself out of ever going back into the Garden. I don’t think he much cares since everything is so weak there, but he does like killing humans and it sucks when you lose the ability to do something you enjoy for the rest of eternity.”

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“Surprisingly, it does not,” Velik said flatly. “But not to worry. He doesn’t have much time left to live anyway. He’ll hardly notice the lack.”

“Big talk, but he’s already taken your measure,” she said. After a pause, she gave him a sly smile and added, “But then, that was before a god took an interest in you after Tesir broke the compact. You did handle that tiny pillar decently well. Hmm…”

The woman tapped a finger against her chin as she examined Velik. Finally, she shook her head. “No, I don’t think you’re there. I can still see threads of the Gardener hanging off you. As long as it keeps stealing your essence away, you’ll never match a true divine beast.”

“You like to just casually drop weird stuff without bothering to explain what the hell you’re talking about, don’t you?

“Little boy, it would take you centuries to learn everything I could teach you,” she said, finally rising to her feet. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re on our level. You’re a child with a stick chasing rabbits around the yard.”

“One way to find out if you’re right,” Velik told her, his teeth bared in a wild grin. He leveled his spear at her.

The woman just rolled her eyes. “Please. I watched your duel with that pillar. You’d have died if I hadn’t baited the other two segments away.”

That implied that she’d deliberately left the last one in his way, perhaps as a way to test his strength and learn about his abilities. If he’d managed to get around it, that would have shown his stealth capabilities. If he’d run, she’d have learned something different. He hadn’t used all his skills in that fight, but if she’d been paying attention, she’d know most of what he was capable of.

Meanwhile, I don’t have a clue what she can do and have to just assume ‘everything, all at once.’

“One way to find out,” Velik repeated.

“I’m not going to fight you, child. Put your spear away and let’s get going.”

“Go where?”

“Through the sky bridge, of course!” she snapped. “Why else would we be here?”

“You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t know the fine details of your plans for me,” Velik said, making no move to shift his spear away from her. “I wasn’t consulted when they were made and nobody ever looped me in.”

Clicking her tongue, the woman shook her head. “Fair enough. Why don’t we talk while we walk and I’ll explain things to you.”

“I don’t think I trust you that much.”

Mana flared around the woman until it completely engulfed her, a process that took a fraction of a second. When it unraveled, she was gone. At the same time, a hand slammed down on his shoulder and tried to force him to his knees. His legs refused to buckle, however, and instead of being shoved down, he was driven into the stone up to his shins.

“Not so weak as I expected,” she murmured, “but still lacking in essence control. Why did you let the stone crack under your feet?”

Velik spun in place, or at least he tried to. Instead of a smooth circuit that resulted in his spear slamming into the woman’s skull, he fumbled into a half-twist when her grip on his shoulder pulled him up short. Before he could slip away, she disappeared in another flash of mana.

He whirled back to see her at the top of the steps again. “Divine beasts are created directly by the gods,” she explained, “and no, I don’t mean just Legra. All the gods had a hand in our birth. There were eight of us, originally. Two of them perished, but that’s a different story for another time.

“Humans were also a creation of the gods, but unlike us, you are weak. You’re a prey species—intelligent, yes, but lacking the ability to defend yourselves since you die too quickly to properly build essence. That fool Darshu championed your cause though, and he built your Garden, where his curse props you up at the expense of your future potential.”

“The compact between the pantheon and the rogue deities forbids them from creating new divine beasts on either side. It’s been just the six of us for thousands of years. Now, I am a lorekeeper. I know the old stories, and I keep that knowledge from disappearing. One of my comrades, on the other hand, is a researcher. In a way, he’s my opposite, one who seeks new knowledge instead of preserving the old.”

He's the one who planted the dungeon seeds, Velik realized, but he kept his mouth shut.

“I couldn’t even tell you how many experiments he’s done, but creating an artificial divine beast has been the goal of hundreds of them. All failures, time and time again.” She paused in her story to fix her eyes on Velik. “And then there’s you, with your golden blood and your beast shape. I’m not sure if you’re an actual artificial divine being or not, but you’re certainly closer than anything else I’ve seen.”

Though it had disappeared when Velik had broken away from the system, the words were still etched in his mind.

[Current quest: Locate the source of the dungeon seed and destroy it before it can spread more chaos and destruction.]

Two divine beasts to kill. One for my home and family, and one for Torwin. But gods, she’s so strong. Even now, I don’t think I have the strength needed.

“So you want to haul me up in front of them so they can see how the great experiment is going,” Velik said. “And what if I object to that?”

“My dear boy,” she said with a laugh. “Where did you ever get the idea that I was giving you a choice?”