Shattered Moonstone

Valor strode confidently through the halls of his own shared realm, his head held high as he passed a handful of minor gods that quickly scrambled out of his way. 

He was… torn about the idea of a combined realm. On the one hand, he missed the solitude of his own domain; but on the other having your subjects close at hand had its uses. It helped that Takia had molded the realm to resemble the palace he once ruled over in the mortal realm. 

Then again… He couldn't help the scowl on his face as he passed a wing that had been dedicated to trying to access the system.

To say progress on that front was slow would be an understatement. Since cracking into the world log the entire process had stagnated, grinding to a painfully standstill as any attempt to actually add or remove anything from the system resulted in a resounding failure. 

He stepped past dozens of broken terminals, their flickering enchantments on full display after being torn from them.

"My lord," a… man called out as he bowed deeply to Valor. Might have been a minor god or just a mortal follower. Not that it mattered in the end. 

"Update." Valor grunted. 

"Of course," the man snapped upright. "We still haven't managed to get into the system; however, we can now confirm that someone in the mortal realm is tampering with it." The man held an arm out as if to show Valor something.

With great annoyance he stepped forward, peering into the room the man motioned to.

Strapped to a chair in front of a terminal was another man. Bloodlike mana ran from the man's eye lids that had been removed, his head locked in a vice like contraption held to face the terminal as words scrolled by at an almost incomprehensible speed.

"Thankfully, with lady Takia's help, we were able to streamline recording the log." The man nodded to another person in the room who was sitting at a desk, his eyes locked on the back of the other man's skull.

Every so often the man's eyes would flash with power, a thread of power linking the two before he would quickly scribble something down on a leaf of parchment before him.

"Before we could only catch snippets of information, but now by having someone observe the terminal and simply pulling the information from their mind we are able to recreate a nearly complete log." 

"Nearly?" Valor cocked an eyebrow. It was a simple solution, though not one he would have thought about. Soul magic wasn't something he usually considers given its obvious weaknesses, but he guessed it had its uses. Takia had always been better with the lesser magics though, good thing he left these things to her he supposed. 

"Yes sir, we have…" the man hesitated before producing a piece of parchment that was filled with nonsensical scribbles. "Run into a complication when trying to glean information about the two Deities. It's as if they have some way to scramble the system itself. I suspect the construct has something to do with it, but I am unable to confirm it."

Valor ground his teeth as he took the paper. The written words seemed to shift even now as he furrowed his brow. "I do not need speculation," he growled, setting the paper alight with little more than a thought. "What of the other things? The construct’s location? Or my missing chosen?"

"About that sir…" the man shifted uncomfortably. "The construct… is still missing. Though, we can trace her activity within the system itself though the error corrections she seems to be performing even now but locating her has proven… difficult." The man flinched as Valor tensed, the man quickly adding, "Though we don't think she has regained access to the system entirely. We think she is somehow accessing it externally as we are and can't do any more than make minor changes…" 

"And yet we can't make changes of our own." Valor hissed and the man wisely tried to change the subject.

"As for the missing chosen Anna… she landed somewhere in Ecrien, near the dragon maw mountains but her situation isn't looking great, sir."

Valor sighed, "and my saint?" He didn't actually care about the summoned heroes, he after all had more. But he only had a single saint. A single saint that has gone missing, something blocking even his own blessing he had on her.

He only knew she was still alive due to the fact she hadn't appeared before him, after all as his saintess if Himari died, she should be brought directly to him… shouldn't she?

"We… still haven't located her. We suspect she was captured along with the construct though… We know where they landed from that teleportation spell, but the ship sent to investigate the area was lost at sea. Two Heroes perished…"

"I am aware," Valor waved a hand dismissively, "No great loss. The two that died were hardly worth mentioning."

Then again… of the two that died one was returned to Sol3terra, but the other was reincarnated into the world almost immediately. As if someone was purposefully keeping them from him.

He shook his head, turning to leave, after all he had just been passing by. The system was important, but it can wait. Right now, he was much more interested in Takia's progress. 

Valor left the trembling man, not bothering to spare him a second glance as he strode out of the room towards Takia's "chambers", idly wondering how his other plans were advancing on the mortal realm. The loss of a few heroes was nothing. But his saintess along with the sage was… problematic. The acting sage having vanished the same day his saintess had cannot be a coincidence, and though he had no way of connecting the two the threads all seemed to suggest it was all linked to those damn Deities, and that other saint in his world. 

"What was that girl’s name? Lapidary." The family that gave birth to a summoned hero, a sage, and a saint.

His thoughts were interrupted by the echoing screams coming from the large, sealed door before him. Each blood curdling cry was accompanied by a small wave of power that sank into him with an almost cooling euphoria, just a tiny droplet of power but… 

He looked down at his recently repaired hand, the destruction of several of his artifacts having crippled him for a time. But, as always, Takia had come through for him. Now, if she could only do something about his missing eye… 

The screaming paused before the door suddenly flew open revealing Takia covered in an almost impressive spray of mana that was slowly sinking into her skin.

"My lord!" She exclaimed as she quickly fell into a deep bow, using the motion to mask her attempts to collect herself.

"Takia," he nodded to her. "Any progress?"

At her name she beamed at him, her face morphing into an almost blissfully smile before she answered. "Of course, my lord. The bisected mortal had proven quite useful in the soul sacrifice, I was able to pull almost all her skills from her before I was forced to stop by the system itself. Apparently even with the soul’s permission you still can't pull more than 80% of a soul’s total mass from it before being stopped. Which is unfortunate since we only had roughly half of her soul to begin with, though whatever happened to her left her in such a state… well let's just say her trauma is our gain. Do let me know if her lower half ever arrives." Takia smiled at him almost as if begging for praise as he nodded along with her.

The Hero's soul in question was in a rather gruesome state when it arrived, only her top half landing in his realm; the girl had been reduced to a babbling mess. He had attempted to glean what exactly happened to her but was eventually forced to give up on that endeavor and gave the soul to Takia for her research. 

Two souls, summoned Heros, completely mutilated before being sent to him. Then two more were lost in the mortal realm, one returned to its home and another reincarnated… it's really starting to seem that something is keeping his Heros from him once they die, but what? And how?

With a deep sigh he asked about the final project, "Deagon?"

Takia shook her head, "I have him completely sealed in my lab, and though I can't actually harm him I can just feel it. It's only a matter of time until he either gives up or I develop a way to utilize the spell to work around that pesky limitation. To think that X47 created such a useful spell and only used it on itself. How foolish," she chuckled. "Though I still can't tell how it formed a Deity with it. Despite my best efforts I can't remove someone’s domains from them; traits, and skills are simple enough, but titles and domains are… somehow different."

It didn't take a genius to find out what made one a Deity, the only thing the two in this world had in common was the presence of both a godly and demonic domain after all. As to the benefit, it was simple. Gods had larger power reserves, they could have more aether though it's slower to build up, devils however had more power readily available given their faster accumulation and conversion rate though they couldn't hold as much over all power. If one had a gods aether pool and a devil’s accumulation, they would quickly become a very powerful divine.

For that fact alone Valor wanted to find this X47 and Singularity, yet they both have proven… illusive, much to his annoyance. Just like the other shared realm… maybe they have the same obscuring spells in place? It was possible. 

But much more alarming was the how one became a Deity. It should be impossible for a divine to be both God and Devil, the best guess was the soul sacrifice Takai found in the logs, but it required a willing sacrifice? How they got two divines willing to give up part of their own soul, their own domains is beyond him. Unless they were two separate divines with two domains a piece? 

Valor rubbed his temples, thinking about the strange divine gave him a headache. "Just… figure it out." He sighed looking at the woman before him. She gave him a curt nod.

"Of course, my lord."