CH1089 (Patreon)

The second Ben fell, too many things happened at once. His body and the church both were sucked below, and when he passed a threshold, his mind changed while he was also filled with pain, disrupting his reaction, with the microseconds it took him to regain himself too late. The portal closed, and he was trapped.

Ben screamed. Not out loud, he was thinking too fast for his body to hope to keep up with the raw, primal feeling he was going through, but for a moment the outrage consumed the totality of his thoughts, understanding what had happened.

He had been tricked, and with it, trapped. Mortals that both he and they had thought to have been arranged for prayer to Plyzar had instead been cleverly positioned to let the gods that had made their original races descend on them the second their divine spell was completed in the heavens above, tearing open a hole in reality, just like the high elf Naloth before them, all for the purpose of getting rid of him, and he’d completely fallen for it.

Too much of him had wanted to believe that what he’d been hearing was true. That the gods were finally beginning to see his worth and the efforts he’d put in, and had been willing to start paying him in good faith. It had never once felt like too much to ask, and yet, instead, they’d resorted to that. What could undeniably be called an attempt to murder him from the divine, far above what he’d gone through before.

Eneth’s apostle and his priests, Olensia’s oracle, for all the rage he’d felt at them, neither had been acting on the orders of their gods. When Duna had ordered the past head of the adventurers’ guild, she hadn’t been aiming for his life either, but now things had changed. An undeniable attempt to murder him had been made, and he would see them pay.

If I can escape.

Forcing himself to calm down, smothering as much of his rage as he could muster, Ben took stock of the situation he’d been driven to, examining the nature of the plane he found himself in. His thought speed at its maximum, he hadn’t even been there for a hundredth of a second yet, but there were still things he could perceive.

Such as the complete lack of air in that level of reality, practically condemning him as he felt the fluids making him up start to boil in the vacuum he found himself in, but with a solution already in place. While that plane may have left him with nothing to breathe, it did have something found in abundance in the world above. Mana.

But, just because he’d be able to materialize some air and a proper shelter to hold it all to keep him safe from the void he found himself in, didn’t mean he could, though. He was in the infinite hells after all, and he was discovering firsthand the properties that had given that realm its name.

A fractal dimension, it was understandable why anything that might have spent some time there would call it infinite. Reality itself split there, shattering into what, for anyone else, would seem like infinite pieces, forcing them to experience reality infinite times over, with a mental structure completely unequipped to process it, leaving the souls within it unable to act.

Seems finite enough to me, though, Ben told himself, perfectly aware that he’d only been split just a bit shy of two million times, able to feel each separate fragment of reality he’d found himself in, as if he were as many bodies, all linked to a single mind. As for the rest…

The fracturing of reality may have given it the name infinite, but the effect of that plane was worthy of being called hell. Everything hurt: body, mind, and soul, and that was inescapable. Pain seemed part of the nature of that piece of the universe, as fundamental as the gravity he’d find above, but like so much other pain, he could compartmentalize it, forcing the experience on a few different segments of his mind to deal with the other problems first.

Namely, how to avoid dying. A quick, small bit of materialization showed him that while he may have split when he’d been driven there, the things that he’d make within that realm would stay as one, meaning he needed to create both all of the air that those countless bodies would need, as well as containers for all of them, but doing so would spend all of his mana, no matter how large his pool had grown, leaving him to divide the load.

Creating air was unavoidable, but considering how little of it he’d really need to make, that was manageable. The bigger problem was the shelter, but he had a different power he could fall back on.

So long as it works.

Worry gnawed at him, but that didn’t change the fact he had to try, and left him relieved when he succeeded, his actualization working even below the mortal plane to separate him from the hells beyond, even if every instance of himself needed to do it, adding a different sort of strain on top of the main one that layer of reality was inflicting on him.

And actualizing nearly two million things at once… God, can this just fucking awaken the skill while I’m trapped here at least?

It was a silent prayer that went nowhere as he dealt with his new location, being sealed within what was basically a coffin so that he’d be able to avoid having to materialize too much air when it came to it, having preserved as much as he could before what he’d been dropped with was all sucked away by the void, removing his risk of immediate death and left only one other thing he needed to consider. Escape.

And thank god I’m such a paranoid fuck, he grinned, preparations made before the second wave finally showing their value as he let himself imagine just how he would taunt the gods who’d driven him there once he returned. Bet they thought they were being real clever with this shit. Bet they never guessed I thought some asshole up there might try this exact thing on me and already made a countermeasure.

After dropping Ather through the gate to hell that had flooded the world with ghosts and let Dewdrop loose upon it, Ben had felt like he’d been able to see the future, then and there. Even back then, when he was only the king of sacrilege instead of its evil god, the deities of the world knew chances of ripping his soul from his body to damn were low, making the idea of condemning all of him seem far more likely, and as a result, he’d come up with a preemptive solution. A portal back from the hells hidden in the sub-basement of Stonewall’s church of Myriad, and the key for it wrapped around his neck, just waiting to be activated.

And with no immediate risk of dying to worry about any longer, that was exactly what he did. Every Ben in that plane reached up for it as one, holding the item tight in his hand and filled it with his mana, waiting for just a moment as the enchantments on it sucked in his power, all for nothing to happen.

… Fuck.