The Only Game In Town [Adventure]

David could feel the gods looking down on him. After a few thousand souls had been placed into him he had felt the first pair of eyes watching him. The gaze was one of humor and that made David feel so much hate.

The gods looked down upon humans. They looked down on them so much that even now they watched their demise being born with good humor rather than any fear.

David wanted them to fear him. He wanted them to create armies for him to vanquish. He wanted them to feel the misery of knowing their end was coming – just like the humans they looked down on so much.

But they had done none of that.

Instead, David had been the newest source of entertainment for them. They watched his growing power with a detached arrogance that made David gnash his teeth together.

That was okay though. He knew that it was convenient for them to not be attacking him. David was in no position to be fighting off the gods, yet. So, he bided his time and shouldered the stares of the ageless with his own detachment.

David went about his everyday life, no matter how odd it was. He would sleep for one hour every day. He did this solely because it made him feel more human. Every time he consumed – no, absorbed – another soul he felt a little more removed from humanity.

These days he wasn't even sure if he needed to sleep. He simply did it to remind himself what being a human was like. After his sleep, he would summon mouths out of his need to be clean. The mouths would eat all the accumulated grime and dirt off his body, then he would dismiss them back to the place where his desires lived.

Once he had dressed, he would then spend the rest of the day meeting with the pilgrims. The pilgrims were an uncalculated variable in his plan. He, Sam, and Rose had crafted this plan so many years ago and only a few things had not fallen into place. This was one of the nicer surprises.

David had known about the Freer Men cult and had tied them into his plans for fighting back against the gods. What he had not counted on was the number of people who fell in with Freer Men doctrine and wanted to meet the first human to try and break the cycle.

Thousands upon thousands of people who had grown up Freer, or had believed in it on the side had flocked to Vena Cava once his missionaries had spread the word of his plan.

David had spent years believing that he would have to go and force people to let him take their souls. Instead, they came to him in droves. Wagonful upon wagonful of people came to him and wanted to be a part of the god he was creating.

He had heard hundreds of variations of the same story. "The gods let my sibling die" was a popular sentiment. Life was cheap to the gods and if people felt that their lives were cheap, they were willing to spend them on crazy plans.

David spent almost all his waking hours speaking to these pilgrims. He would ask them what their stories were, and he would hear about the cruelty of this world they lived in. How could the gods create something that made humans suffer so much?

Once he had heard a pilgrim's story, he then made absolutely sure that they understood what was going to happen to them. David was incapable of interacting with the space inside of his soul. David had created a shrine out of the bones of a god and used them to make his soul space something more than it should have been. He was able to store anything he ate with the inky-black mouths inside of that space. But he could not enter it.

The world inside of his soul could be heaven or hell and he made sure that each and every pilgrim knew that. It was a calculated gamble. They were betting their eternal soul on the fact that the power they gave him would be worth it.

All those hopes and dreams were a heavy burden to bear, but it was nothing that he wouldn't bear gladly for the sake of freedom of humanity.

David had still not made the process look less violent. No matter how he sugarcoated it, at the end of the day, he was conjuring massive mouths to swallow people whole. So, each of these pilgrims would get down on their knees and pray as David summoned a mouth to consume them.

As David had consumed more human souls the more in tune with Humanity he felt. He could feel the roiling emotions in the people surrounding him and he could convey his own human experience to them through a wavelength only known to humankind.

That was why David was not all that surprised at the assassin. He could feel the roiling hatred coming off the young boy. His hair was the red of a burning flame and he had come to David as if he were another pilgrim.

But instead of telling David his story and praying that their suffering would be worth it, the young man had pulled a sword out of his soul space and was facing David down with daggers in his eyes.

"I reject you!" Brilliant flames boiled down the edge of the young man's blade. They shimmered in shades of red and gold as he brandished his sword at David.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

David watched, amused, as the young man flashed his sword this way and that in a series of showy moves.

"You are no god. No human may touch upon the realm of the perfect and so I must cleanse the plane of your filth." The sword struck in what was supposed to be a swift execution.

The holy light exuding from the flames pierced through everything in their path, cutting David's head off his body.

With a wet thump, David's head hit the ground, and the purifying flames started consuming the corpse. The flames tried to consume every fiber of David's being, in hopes of cleansing the world of his sin.

Of course, none of this actually killed David. A new inky-black mouth erupted from the ground behind the would-be-assassin and a different David stepped out of this mouth, fresh as a daisy.

David wasn't sure if he could be killed anymore. There was too much power revolving around his soul for it to be extinguished merely by his mortal body failing.

The young man was taken aback by the new David walking out of the mouth.

"Your tricks won't save you this time." The flames reached a cherry red as the young man went to face down David again.

David made sure not to chuckle as the young man attacked him. The blade was so slow, and the attacks were laughable from his new godly perspective. But David did not attack the young man in retribution, nor did he defend himself. He let the purifying flames strike his mortal body down and then created a new one to continue the fight.

The young man had been killing David for hours at this point. Thankfully, his purifying flames destroyed the David's corpses entirely, else it would have been a macabre scene, the two men surrounded by dead bodies.

The red haired boy was panting and staring at David with the same fervor he had at the beginning of the confrontation.

David pulled up a chair and sat down in front of the child.

"Why are you killing me?" Silence hung in the air between the assassin and the king. David was calmly pouring himself a cup of coffee and gesturing to the boy to sit down with him at the table.

The boy's eyes were scrunched as he obviously tried to recall where these things had come from. The room was in tatters from his epic attacks against David, so why was there a perfectly ordinary table and cup of coffee right in front of him.

Tentatively, the young man sat down at the table.

He leapt up from his seat immediately and cut off David's head again. David rolled his eyes as his body was reformed from the ether.

"You are an aberration, and my god demands that this world be clean!" Flames coursed down the sword as the young man smashed through the table and the cups.

At least David was making some progress.

"And why am I an aberration?" David calmly formed a new table and cup of coffee. Even if the boy refused to play guest, David would continue to play the kind host.

"Because you are encroaching into the territory of the gods. You are a man trying to be more than a man. Know your place, mortal."

David wondered if the irony was lost on the kid that he really wasn't mortal anymore. Maybe the kid thought that he had been killing body doubles or that some ridiculous gift was keeping David from being annihilated by his sword.

"What is a god?" David liked philosophy and hoped to engage the annoying boy by questioning his motives and making him think deeper. David didn't think that the boy was evil, he was just doing what he thought was right.

"A god is something you will never be." These one-liners did not stop; David was almost impressed with the boy's wittiness. Not impressed enough to let the boy kill him, but impressed, nonetheless.

David had finally had enough. With a flick of his wrist thousands of mouths appeared in the room, surrounding the young man. The red haired boy flailed his massive sword at them as if the purifying flame would keep them at bay. Instead of having his small army eat the young man, David simply made them consume the boy's sword.

The boy looked inconsolable as he stared at the empty hilt he was not holding. He mustered up a bit more courage though and brought the purifying flames to life in the shape of the sword again and struck David one final time.

David yawned as the attack was snuffed out of existence.

His mouths ate the flame. The boy screamed as that happened.

"What have you done to me?" The boy cried as he writhed on the floor.

"Oh, stop complaining, you baby. The mouths didn't actually hurt you. They just ate your gift out of your soul space. Now you're just a regular guy who can't break my lovely table. Would you care to sit down with me?"

The boy screamed his head off for a few more minutes. He screamed enough that one of David's guards walked into the room. Of course, they hadn't come in during the fighting but for a little baby crying his eyes out, they were more than willing to enter David's chamber.

David shooed them out with a wave of his hand. David wanted to talk to the poor kid, not have the royal guards stomp on him.

"So, as I was saying, what is a god?" David took a sip of his tea waiting for the boy's screams to peter out.

"I don't know… not a person. They are beyond us. They are the divine." The boy was answering David's questions, but he was not being very subtle as he started looking around the room for a weapon. David was always amazed at the unyielding human spirit. Despite the gap in ability that David had shown between himself and the boy, he was still trying to kill him.

"I disagree. They are stuff given a mind of their own. Once a thing exists it needs a representative in the divine realm. Gods are simply those representatives."

"Then you proved my point. You are not that representative, ergo, you are not a god." The boy smirked, actually smirked, as if David couldn't wipe him out of existence with a thought, as if David was actually just having a conversation with him. The kids kept getting cheekier and cheekier.

"But there is no representative in the divine realm for humans. I am just filling a role that should have been filled long ago."

"But no one asked for you to be. And so, you will die by my hand." The boy slammed into the table that David had created and broke off one of the legs, stabbing it directly through David's heart.

"No! My one weakness, a table leg." David called out as his current mortal coil perished and a new one was born.

David wasn't worried. He was not a cruel man, and he had no intention of killing this inconvenient man. Instead, he would convince him that he was wrong. David would calmly and slowly show the young man why he was not thinking for himself and how he had fallen into the gods' dogma.

David was going to free the young man.

So, David sat down at the table with a cup of tea and waited. He had time in abundance; the gods just watched in amusement as he went about overthrowing them. They would regret it soon.

"So, why should I not become a god?" David asked his question and prepared for a long night of back and forth with the young man.

There would be no sacrifices on his way to godhood. He would unite humankind, not destroy them. David was their savior; they just didn't know it yet.