Six Souls [Isekai/LitRPG] [B1&2 complete, B3 in progress]

Prender's left hand was a mess. He had screamed, high and shrill, when he had cautiously pushed it through in Poseidon's domain, then he had fallen back, and I'd summoned a chair that he collapsed into. I sent my aura out, pushing it carefully through his skin and corralling the sea god's power. Trying to cut water was a fool's game, but the domains and the auras didn't seem to mind.

"I did say it would hurt, bloke."

"You said it would sting! This is not stinging." He wore his agony well. The kid was tough.

"Use Winter's Source."

"How?" he snapped, clutching his other hand around his wrist. I had stopped the power from invading further up his arm, so it was a pointless gesture, but I could sympathise. I'd done exactly the same not so long ago.

"It's about willpower. Winter and Water are antagonistic. I'm keeping it contained, but you need to figure out how to do this shit on your own."

"How to–"

"Just how to move the power, that's all you need to figure out for now. Here." I sent s shard of my own authority into him and willed it over to him.

The kid wasn't a cold-blooded killer, but he'd taken men's lives before. It gave me some measure of influence over him, and he had sworn his soul to me.

I blinked slowly as I guided his first fumbling attempt to take control of Posedion's essence. It was mundane now that people would swear a blood oath to serve me. I gave him a snippet of my own domain, and it didn't fight him. He began using it to control the invasive energy, forcing it together into one place.

I wasn't exactly a harsh taskmaster. Admittedly, my adoptive people had been at war more or less since I took over, but that wasn't a bad thing as far as they were concerned. But thousands had sworn fealty to me, the nobles of half a dozen minor nations bowed their heads to the nomad chiefs I'd left in charge of them.

"That's it, you're getting the– oops, never mind." I intervened in the metaphysical battle and helped him nudge a wayward strand of pressure back into the bubble he had formed in his fist. "You know about the ocean, right? Better than I can imagine. The swells, the tides, and the… coral reefs. That thing in your hand is her. We, the gods, are our power. We've weakened Poseidon with the cold. If she were at her peak, I don't think this would work."

"It hurts," Prender groaned, but his eyes were closed, and I could feel him using magic to heal himself and something else. Something was stirring in his, for want of a better word, soul. I was doing less and less of the grunt work in controlling Poseidon's power. He was following along when I resumed control of my own aura, and then mimicking my actions on his own.

"Yeah. Nothing in life worth having comes easy. You know her power, though, Prender. It isn't as alien as you might think. She had 'blessed' you with it for a long time. You know this power, even if you couldn't sense it before."

"So water? The ocean. Waves. Beautiful and treacherous." Prender hissed as he fought to control the snippet of power he had stolen with my help.

"Go further. What does it mean?"

"Life. Freedom. Danger."

"It is inexorable. You didn't see the tidal wave fish-tits sent at my army. No force in the world could have stopped it."

"Power."

Poseidon's power surged inside his flesh, making the skin contract and expand as his fingers curled in pain.

"Yes. Power. Power that ought to be yours."

"I'm not… I'm just a sailor."

"She loved you. You were one of the ones she gave her power to. She doesn't do that for everyone. You are close to her heart, and that means close to her power."

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"Being loved by her is as much a curse as a blessing," Prender grunted with a scowl as he wrangled the power again, more fluidly this time.

"It's the same with all of them, I think. We're just toys to them. You were a figure on a sailboat. I was a weapon. But we can rise above and spit in their eyes."

"You want me to kill her."

"We can't kill her. But we can replace her. Whatever gestalt of personalities that governs her, you can replace it. But you'll need to learn to control her domain before that."

"Get it out, Mond. It hurts."

"Not yet. Use the Source. Water is about freedom, about movement. Ice is the opposite."

He grasped Winter's Source in his crippled hand, and it went blue, ice and rime forming on his skin as he took the frozen heart of winter into his flesh. My aura retreated before Morana's, curling around the essence of the ocean, then I withdrew it, gradually, as it became clear he no longer needed my assistance.

"It's not healing," he grunted.

And it won't. You needed a hand to wield the blade, and Raymond has given you one. The ghostly jaguar appeared to one side and sat back on his haunches. Midnight fur and gleaming green eyes, sitting and watching a pair of humans.

"Go away, Tezca."

"This was your plan?" Prender muttered.

"I need to kill someone, Prender. But I can't do it myself."

"You're the–"

"Not yet I'm not. And even if I was, I couldn't kill her. It has to be someone right. You."

"You want me to become a god? You said kill the gestalt, whatever that means, and that she can't be killed. So I'm killing her, I'm taking her place."

"Something like that," I muttered.

"Why?"

"You know what the people in ports call me? What they say about me?"

"The warlord. You led to steppe people south and laid waste to half the world."

"The world's a lot bigger than that, Prender. I've barely conquered a fraction of it. I used to have a code."

"What does that have to do with this?"

"You were asking for my motivations, and I'm trying to explain. It's not easy, though. I was a murderer back in my old world. Just a killer for hire, and I was good at my job. But I had rules. I didn't have any illusions about not killing women, but I did charge extra. I didn't kill innocents, though. If someone hated you enough to pay me to come by and say hello, you were a piece of shit and deserved it." I took a slow breath. "The first town I visited, I ran into one of Mortimer's Soulbound running the place and a bunch of his walking corpses. I… wasn't strong at that time, I didn't even know we could share magic with others. Jandak and I escaped, but I started some fires in the process. A lot of people died."

"What is wrong with that? An enemy attacked you, you fought back and escaped."

"A lot of people died. Men, women and children. I didn't knock kids, I didn't kill the innocent. The lynch pin of my life, the thing that let me sleep at night, was taken away from me. Because I was here. Because she sent me here. I've done worse since, making it rain fire on terrified, defenceless soldiers. I killed one of the men who came from my world simply because I couldn't be sure he wasn't a threat. She made me into this, and I want my revenge."

"But you're one of the most powerful men on Urth?"

"My army tried to sack a city. Death showed me two of my possible futures, and if I had let it happen, I would have… lost myself. I'm already a monster, even compared to what I was, and that is on Poseidon. She tricked me into that dinner, she killed me and sent me here. She set me on this damn path."

"But what about your friends, your wife and your child?" Prender said, slowly flexing his blue hand.

"There is always a cost for anything worth having. You've gotten a handle on it?"

Prender leaned back. Between the power I lent him and the Source, he had a sliver of Poseidon's domain sealed in the centre of his palm.

You have the hand, you need to craft the blade for it to hold. It's the only way for you to become me.

"Your cat is even stranger than your crow."

"He's not my cat. Prender, meet Tezca-something-or-other. Aztec that I can't pronounce. Texca meet the next gods of the oceans."

There is much work to be done. Your manifestations are still subpar.

"I'm working on it."

Not hard enough. You won't accept the nature of a real blade.

"Steel is better," I grumbled. I was sick of the dead god's constant bickering on the subject.

Obsidian. The sharpest edge for the cleanest cut. You like things to be clean.

"It's brittle and it breaks."

But it cuts. Your rules, foolish as they were, require you to understand the essence of the blade. It stretches back further than you people have been able to work metals. It goes back beyond even stone tools. The claw of a slain predator is the progenitor of all your knives.

"Mond–"

Be silent, mortal. You will need to hear this as well, if you are to truly grasp the power my inheritor has gifted you. Raymond, you understand a little of what it is to be a god, but not enough. You are suitable as my heir, but you are not perfect. You are coming more into alignment as you deepen your knowledge of what I am, but you're not there yet.

"So what are you then?" I smiled at Prender as I summoned my own chair and sat down to listen to a ghost tell his tale.

Quiet. I am the beginning of the other god's realm, and I am separated from everything by the power of another.

"Death and Time."

I am the end of another's domain.

"Life. You aren't really telling me anything I didn't already know with this bad poetry."

We are many things, Raymond. But we are not regret. You must embrace what we are, or you will die, and I will go back to sleep.