Chapter 1314 (1/2)

If anyone had bothered to ask Alta why she had decided to accept the invitation to Randidly’s Birthday, which they hadn’t, she would have scowled at them and replied that being forced to assist the weaklings in the Alpha Cosmos was extremely tiresome. This could be a welcome break from that. But it was probably lucky no one had asked. Because if they had, Alta wouldn’t have been able to deny that the answer she provided was slightly hollow.

In the same way that she still was.

Sure, guiding the insufferable fools dumb enough to choose her out of all the available pantheon was often more aggravating than it was worth. Either they refused to recognize their own strengths or they refused to listen to Atla’s advice. And some of the Classes that they requested she create a lighthouse for… it was like most people had no concept of how valuable such an endowment was. Or how permanent it would be.

Especially with the new rules worked out amongst the members of the pantheon, it took significant capital to establish a Class Lighthouse. Alta refused to do so casually.

Yet beneath all the struggles and annoyances of the job, Alta enjoyed it. She enjoyed being able to provide futures for these people. Even though her core was still filled with spite and fury toward Randidly Ghosthound, gradually her desire to destroy waned as she was exposed to other people’s stories. Their small tragedies gave context to her own path through life. Gradually, she had even begun to feel uncomfortable with what she had done.

At its core, this trip to Earth was a distraction. Or perhaps a confirmation of who she was. Or maybe it was her way of questioning what she had done. Perhaps even this was Alta trying to discover whether she had a mistake to lash out at Randidly for letting his negligence lead her original world to ruin.

Yet what she found on Earth was… not what she expected. It was mundane in the most aggravating. There was a polite woman who provided them with egg salad or cucumber sandwiches and spoke to them in this… normal space. On a bench on a hill overlooking a city diligently belching out smoke. This place world with grass, and trees, and flowers. And a place of work, disappointment, and sweat.

She had taken a bite of the cucumber sandwich she had chosen and didn’t try very hard to listen to what the woman had told them about the birthday party.

Alta very quickly felt stupid for imagining Randidly would live in any sort of special world. But in her mind, Randidly Ghosthound was the closest thing there was to a god. It was his inactivity that killed her family and allowed her world to slide toward ruin. He possessed the capacity to do great things and he had been too busy to bother with thousands of lives.

The world she expected him to inhabit to be a place of power and callous austerity. His image of ash that Alta had experienced spoke of a ruined world filled with dust and drifting clouds of regrets. But this world…

Later, as Alta had sat on the comfortable couch in the ornate waiting room in the giant event complex, she felt lost. This was not what she had expected from Randidly Ghosthound’s origins. Whatever her motivation had truly been, it could find no grips on this… average looking place.

While Azriel, Armgrast, and Wendy had chatted about the surroundings and the situation with the woman named Tatiana, Alta had just looked around. It was only when they opened the doors to the event center that Alta had finally glimpsed something that could truly be the origins of the twisted Ghosthound that she had long held in her heart.

Her eyes went out over the assembled people, most of whom shared the strange, angular proportions of Randidly’s body that Alta had always wondered about. Their limbs had nothing of the grace of a Spriggit, after all. But just as quickly as she had seen their bodies, she had felt their images desires.

This was the greatest knack that she had developed as a member of the Alpha Cosmos’ pantheon: sensing the images and desires of other parties. While in the Alpha Cosmos, they had all been intimately tied into the System itself, so Alta and the others had been given extra insight into the people they would be helping.

But although that access wasn’t as effortless as it was before, Alta had learned enough in her several months of experience to recognize some common factors. She could sense the similar movements of the overly System of this place, even if she was not connected directly to it. So when she looked out at the assembled partygoers she had seen two things dripping off their brows: fear and ambition, poured in equal measure into a bubbling cauldron of expectation.

They craved power but feared the price they would need to pay to obtain it. And they were wild too, in a selfish way. Careless and self-obsessed. The dark emotions had finally made Alta’s gaze focus on the situation at hand.

When the party had moved to the interior and the function of the tiles had been revealed, some of that tension began to come to the surface. People surged forward to test themselves and their images against each other and try to eradicate some of the fears that they held in their hearts. Although it was somewhat disgusting to watch such blatant attempts, Alta could understand the urge to do something while feeling that desperate.

It was that very same urge to change something uncomfortable that led her to attempt to destroy an entire world.

The initial three that went out onto the floor actually were the purest out of the surrounding individuals. Alta could get just a glimpse into their hearts and she saw the genuine love of competition that drove them forward. The second wave of people was much more selfish in their desires. So much so that Alta wrinkled her nose as she looked out at the group. Luckily, Azriel moved to suppress those fools who were most desperate to prove themselves.

Then the Nemesai had arrived.

Alta had a very haphazard understanding of the political situation in Randidly’s world, mostly because she hadn’t been listening closely when Tatiana had taken them through what was currently occurring. But she had heard enough to know that the Nemesai had recently killed quite a lot of people, and Randidly Ghosthound had invited them anyway.

That had struck Alta as interesting, but she couldn’t figure out exactly why until now. It had been the one thing that remained clear as she had been walking around in a daze. Previously, that information had been like a key to a door that she couldn’t find. It had just jangled around in the back of her brain, frustrating her constantly. But as soon as the Nemesai walked into the room, she understood why Randidly’s actions had seemed familiar to her.

She saw it in the sense of being lost that she could feel from the young woman holding a hammer. She saw it in the forced confidence of the man with the golden teeth. She recognized it in the bleak pessimism in the Winged Serpent’s eyes. Her mouth twisted as she felt the bleak fatalism that the floating lich carried around with him.

Randidly treated these Nemesai… the same way he had treated her when she had tried to destroy his Soulskill. And this night was their chance. Or rather, it was his chance to teach them a lesson.

For whatever reason, that infuriated Alta. Partially at Randidly, but also at these Nemesai for being stupid enough to walk into this place.