THEOS

After a few hours of making as many copies of the flame spell icon as he could, Luke wandered into the throne room with his tournament token in hand. There was still an hour before they were set to depart, but the room was buzzing with activity.

Unlike the last time he had left, this was a much more lively affair. Earlier that morning, he had passed Clite all one hundred of his invitation tokens with a small list of people he wanted to invite, giving her free rein to hand out the rest at her discretion. Supposedly, she had given a few to Cyzicus’s closest advisers and auctioned the rest for merit points. Considering his own unease around gods, he couldn’t quite fathom why anyone else would want to be in a room full of people who could wink them out of existence, let alone pay for the opportunity. At the same time, his more rational self knew that not everyone had the God Seed planted in their souls, making them monumental targets for greedy paragons. No, most of these people would just have a good time and spend some time rubbing elbows with the rulers of the world, free of the fear of having their souls ripped apart.

I suppose that’s a good thing, though. The Olympians might be near-universally disliked, but at least it seems that they don’t have a reputation for needless violence.

“So, are you ready to win it all?” Jason asked moments after Luke stepped into the throne room, a wide grin on his face, a sway in his step, and a chalice filled with wine in his hand. Instantly, a hush fell over the crowd, and all of them looked at him. Right at him.

There are way more than a hundred people here.

“We’ll see,” Luke hedged. The older cultivator laughed out loud and, walking closer to Luke, wrapped an arm around his shoulder. Luckily, the crowd seemed to take that as a cue and returned to their own conversations.

“Don’t worry too much. Win or lose, you’ll walk away with a massive prize. Not as good as the Argo if you lose, but the prizes for the Warrior bracket are always powerful. Hero-tier items at the minimum, and often Saint tier.”

“What tier prize is the Argo?” Luke asked, wondering what he would be missing out on by finishing second.

Jason laughed out loud. “Wouldn’t you like to know . . .”

“I would, actually.”

“Fine!” Leaning in to whisper into Luke’s ear, as if everyone in the room didn’t have super hearing, he breathed a single word into existence. “Herald. My boat’s a Herald-tier artifact.”

“Huh. Herald.I thought the last rank before god would have been more . . . poetic,” Luke said.

Jason shrugged. “Herald tier, Demigod tier, Angel tier—it’s all semantics and all equally made-up. The name isn’t what matters, it’s the power. It also changes by place. Older traditions use demigod, but it’s kind of a mouthful, and not very accurate. Some people also confuse demigod with being the child of a god. The real demigods didn’t like that all that much, so they started calling themselves something different. It makes sense; it’s not like you can be part god. It’s more of a do or don’t thing, you know?”

Luke almost laughed but settled for a smile as he soaked in the new information.

So I was wrong, and Arke is an angel, sort of. The irony.

“So you’re kind of set with that kind of power, huh?” Luke asked.

“Not really. I’ll need to make it to herald to unlock all the features, and I can barely even activate the Saint-tier wards at the moment. I can’t attack with anything higher than the Warrior tier as long as I am one, too, so there’s that. It’s not like you win one tournament and the gods give you the power to dominate the world, you know?”

“I mean, kinda,” Luke hedged.

“If you’re a herald, you don’t need a ship, trust me. You’d be able to destroy nations with the weight of your mana alone.”

“Really? Does that happen often?”

Jason gave him an odd look. “It never happens. People who have that kind of power usually know better. If they don’t, that’s what the council is for. Lord Ares himself will come down from the mountain and swat you like a fly. say.”

“What if Lord Ares is the one who wants to destroy a nation?”

“Gods can’t, either. They all swore, um . . . oaths! The ones who didn’t aren’t alive anymore.”

“Really?”

Jason shrugged. “It’s what they say, but gods have a lot of leeway, and the exact terms of their oaths have never been made public, so no one who isn’t a god knows for sure. No one even knows who they swore the oath to, either, so as far as I know, it’s possible that none of them are bound anymore. But that’s only if they even swore on a standard Oath Orb. I think they would have used something stronger than that, you know?”

“That’s comforting.”

“I take comfort in knowing that no country has vanished, out here in the sea or on the continent, for as long as Olympus has reigned and since Othrys fell.”

The conversation stalled after that. It had gotten too heavy too fast to continue naturally, so Luke just patted Jason on the shoulder, leaving him to enjoy his drink, and went to look for Nel.

He hadn’t talked to her in a while, as both of them had been fairly busy. Except when he finally spotted her, she was talking to Heracles. He got close enough to hear the son of Zeus, with too-pink cheeks, mumble something about good weather before Luketurned on his heel and walked away. There were a lot of horrific things about Theos, and watching a guy richer than sin making awkward attempts at flirting with a princess was one of them. Luke had long ago resolved that he wouldn’t subject himself to that again, not unless he needed extra-strong motivation to meditate on his mana or something. The last time Luke had spent a significant span of time with, he had found the trigger for his bloodline, after all.

That in mind, he made his way to Lukeus. He was always fun to kill time with.

The hour leading up to the tournament passed quickly, and before he knew it, the time to depart had come. Like every other time he had been teleported, the world flickered red and orange, and the next thing Luke knew he was once again back in the holy land of Vulcan.

All around him, people gasped in wonder as the rich mana seeped into their bodies and began to work its magic. Luke closed his eyes and let himself bask in the feeling. Then, on a whim, he circulatedhis own mana so that it would accommodate the mana of the holy land better and hopefully let him sneak an extra point or two out of the ordeal. It wasn’t quite manual cultivation, as he wasn’t forcing the mana into any single part and instead making it easier for him to soak up, but it was helpful, nonetheless. He wouldn’t turn his nose up at a few free points, ever. Not when, just weeks ago, he’d had to spend hours in battle killing Warrior- and Mortal-tier giants for the same number of them.

I was gone for two weeks, most of which I spent sleeping. But damn, I really missed this, Luke thought moments later as he felt his Strength and Agility attributes tick up by a few points each. They would continue rising for a few seconds but taper off as his body got used to the higher concentrations of aethereal mana.

Had he not already maxed out Arcana and Constitution, those would have risen, too. He had initially planned to increase all stats to nine hundred and fifty or so with his windfall and a bit of hunting, but after getting a little carried away and maxing out Arcana when he was trying to recreate the flame spell, he had maxed out Constitution right after to get the most out of his mana pool.

It was probably better to be rounded out near the peak of the tier for the purpose of the tournament, but Luke couldn’t bring himself to care. With his sword, he could always double an attribute far beyond what was normally possible for warriors if he needed to, and if that wasn’t enough, a few more points would have hardly made a difference anyway.

Taking one last deep breath, Luke opened his eyes to a familiar sight. They were back atop the pyramid that had been the site of the second task. It was late in the evening, and all nine of Theos’s suns were just setting below the horizon, casting a warm orange glow over the endless grassland that spread in every direction. In the sky above them, a few particularly bright stars were already twinkling.

Seeing the holy land like this made it seem infinitely more beautiful than the last time he had been here. Suddenly, Luke thought he understood why Hephaestus hadn’t filled it with countless structures. There was something magical about the simple beauty of the endless sky and earth.

As quickly as it came, the moment passed when he saw the extraordinary number of people present. There were easily thousands of them, all packed onto the top of the pyramid that seemed a little too small to hold them. As if in response to Luke’s thoughts, the metal beneath his feet hummed, and out of thin air floor space materialized around the edges of the pyramid.

With added room to stand, the crowd naturally dispersed into smaller clumps. Out of the corner of his eyes, Luke saw Heracles drag Nel toward Zeus. The god looked just like Luke had seen him last—like an older, bearded version of Heracles—and while nothing about his appearance particularly stood out among the crowd, people seemed to have almost an instinctive aversion to him. All of them gave him a wide berth without even realizing it.

Looking around, Luke quickly recognized the same pattern playing out all across the floor. Hephaestus he recognized almost instantly, and the god was not at all hiding his displeasure at having so many people around him. A ways to the left of him was another person people were giving a wide berth to, a tall and severe-looking man with hair and beard so dark that his pale face looked almost like the moon poking through a starless night.

Another man was the complete opposite and quite literally glowed in the night. His resemblance to Heracles, and his sunny smile, led Luke to believe he was looking at Apollo.

On the far side of the platform, thankfully far away from him, Luke spotted Cybele in the same form she had appeared in the last time they had met, a young blonde girl. Their eyes quickly met before Luke, fearing he might be forced into another conversation with her, nodded and started walking with feigned determination to the snack bar in the center of the room.

He wasn’t hungry, but he reasoned that most people would be less likely to bother him if he looked like he was in the middle of something, and gods were people, too.

Spiros, however, wasn’t most people.

“Luke!” he shouted at the top of his lungs and, ignoring the condescending looks everyone gave him, marched straight toward him.

Despite his general unease, Luke was happy to see him. He was reasonably certain that he would have passed, considering his quest was still active, but it was nice to have visual confirmation.

“Spiros. Nice to see you made it out okay.” Luke grinned.

“Ahh, you know me. I always do what I have to do.”

“Yeah, yeah. What about Arya? Did she get a scroll, too?”

“Obviously,” Spiros said, and stepping beside Luke, he immediately started surveying the crowd. “After we sent you home, it was like a dam broke. Ten minutes in, we got attacked by this cyclops lady. I don’t even know how she snuck up on us—she was like twenty feet tall. Being so big, though, Arya just threw her dagger at her, and you know how it is with her technique. We just waited a few minutes, and boom, we had a scroll.”

“Hmm. Do you think Lord Hephaestus was working in the background? Keeping things fair, so that groups like ours fell apart and people had a fair shot instead of, you know, being destroyed the second they showed themselves?” Luke asked.

“It would be weirder if he didn’t. Also, did you notice anything about the people who actually made it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you, me, Theseus, and Ella. We all got the scrolls as a reward in the last round. That guy over there, I didn’t see him in the forest, but I’m pretty sure he got one, too. That’s like, five of the sixteen people. And exactly sixteen people got those scrolls.”

“Arya didn’t,” Luke pointed out.

“Well, Arya’s thing was better than a spell, so I’m not sure if that counts.”

Is he just saying that, or does he not know spells are impressions of techniques?

“She got the fire in the bottle, right? I never asked, but what does it do?”

“It’s this thing for alchemy. You’re supposed to eat it, and it goes into your mana. After that, you can bring it out whenever you want. I have an aunt who has one; they’re a big deal. If you feed the fire the right thing, it gets stronger. If you do it enough, they advance to the next tier, and you do, too. It’s like, uhh . . . paying for your cultivation.”

“That sounds incredible . . .”

“Eh. It’s not as great as it sounds. I mean, it’s pretty great if you’re super rich, but finding stuff to keep feeding the fire is supposed to be really hard. My aunt’s had hers forever, and she’s still in their Hero tier.”

“Still, if you get stuck at a level, it’s nice to know that you can have another—”

Spiros started waving his arms wildly.

“ARYA! Over here!”

Luke winced as all eyes were once again pointed toward Spiros. Still, he was excited to see Arya again. Following his gaze, Luke looked toward her. A moment later, he regretted that he had.

Shit.

The Seed, it seemed, agreed. Because a step behind Arya were a bunch of people Luke knew. Laxas, Ethan, Len, Elder Irila, and, most annoying of all . . . Nefkha.

Fucking hell.