Alone in the dark once more, Twan’cha waited for what would come next. His death had been horrifying; being sealed away, a humiliation. But then came the plucking. An inescapable torture on his imprisoned mind, slowly driving him mad.

  When it had been happening, he’d felt stretched out, thin in a way he never had before that stained the very nature of his being. Embodied in a way that was nothing like descending upon a believer and was all the worse for it. He had been trapped, locked in whatever form he’d been forced and left with no sensory experience beyond that which he could only believe had come from the sun above as well as the constant picking at whatever flesh he was being forced to wear. Like a trillion tiny cuts that wouldn’t end with death.

  And yet, it had ended eventually, a time long before there was any true threat to his mind. He was a god after all; a few years of torment was ultimately nothing, no matter how it had felt at the time, even if it had been traded for something worse.

  Never fully awake, never fully aware, Twan’cha could still tell when his essence was being forced somewhere new. Even with his mind being suppressed, every now and then he held just enough awareness to catch a glimpse of a ceiling up above, depriving him of even a glimpse of the sun, along with his current captor.

  The great life spirit, a being he was only aware of due to some curiosity from his nature. How could a god of magic hold no interest in a living embodiment of it after all? Yet it seemed whatever interest she held in him didn’t include mercy. The maddening plucking had been traded out for cutting and slicing, whatever flesh he’d be forced to wear having a central nervous system that the spirit, in her power, hadn't seen fit to suppress. Even with his mind contained when it was happening, the pain was still there. Every cut a torture as he was harvested and used in ways he couldn’t understand, all of it an inescapable truth. That was his fate until the day he escaped.

  For as slim as the odds felt, he hadn’t given up on it. The great life spirit was careful, sure, but the fact that he was ever allowed to be conscious enough to glimpse the world around him through alien eyes was enough to tell him that there was room to hope, and he was ever vigilant. She and whoever was controlling her could do what they wanted, but he only needed them to slip up once, then he’d be free, either to escape the world or to claim his revenge.

  “Revenge, revenge, revenge, is that really all of you assholes ever think about?” Ben complained, making the god jump at the mindspace it was now in, not understanding what had happened and only seeing the boy who killed him before him. “I swear, if even one of you had shown a willingness to self-reflect then maybe you could have gotten a bit of mercy, but-”

  The god lunged at him before he could go on, not caring for what a mortal might have to say but was quickly humbled. With a single move, the mortal slapped him away, more pain in that one blow than anything else he’d gone through, and made the god realize the depth of his mistake as he saw the empty look in his captor’s eyes.

  “But you’ll never change,” Ben went on. “The same nature that led you to abandon your world to save yourself is the exact nature that makes you such an irredeemable piece of shit. Not one ounce of guilt for any of your actions, not even the one that might have doomed the rest of the galaxy and maybe even the universe beyond in your negligence. Not the sort of thing to waste my mercy on.”

  A thought in its head to lie of guilt and to beg for a path of redemption once the difference between them was so thoroughly shown, the forbidden god wasn’t given the chance to speak it. Ben had already heard everything else that he’d needed to. The god’s fate sealed, Ben began taking him apart, leaving the other with enough consciousness through the pain to see just how harmless any plucking, cutting, or slicing had been in comparison.

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  Absentmindedly fiddling around with his magics while he waited while Thera spoke with Lux, Funa, and Grace, eventually, Ben sat up just a little straighter and gave the four a small wave to get their attention.

  “Alright, I’m ready here if you all are.”

  “As I’ll ever be,” Thera said back, trying not to think too hard about the fact that she was now the one who would be undergoing a surgery instead of being the one to provide it, even as Lux chuckled by her side, seeing right through her.

  “Don’t trust me to take care of you? I do remember treating at least a few of your illnesses when you were younger.”

  “A runny nose is a bit different from being cut open.”

  “Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing,” Funa told her, the great dark spirit there to put her into a blissful, dreamless sleep as they all moved to what had already been prepared, Thera’s own clone laying on a table while the real one got up to join it by its side.

  “And I believe you, I’ll just be a lot happier once this is done, so if you could knock me out, please, then I don’t have to keep thinking about this.”

  Giving a comforting smile, Funa placed a calm hand on her niece’s cheek, filled with warmth and power that had Thera asleep in the next moment, leaving the rest of them to work. With the band already on the clone’s neck, Ben added the divine crystal, watching the change it brought.

  While when Quox’s soul was applied to a beastform skill, the clone it was put into would grow somewhat, the different god displayed themself in a different way. Across the clone’s body, golden tattoo-like eyes appeared across its flesh, wiggling and moving as if they were looking around, even if connecting to it made it clear that wasn’t so. Perhaps if the soul was allowed to settle in there for long enough then that might change, but as things were, it was nothing but a difference in appearance, no matter how unique it might have been.

  But, with the imprisoned god so broken that it wasn’t able to act out at all, Ben’s part fell to the background. He applied his authorities but otherwise stepped to the side, allowing the great spirits to do their work.

  With it being nothing if not fast. Like the others Thera had done, they were changing her kidney instead of anything quite as vital as a heart but from opening both bodies up, removing Thera’s old one and replacing it with the one marked by a divine soul, the incision they had to make to do it was closed immediately, making the entire process take only a handful of seconds while Ben alone got to hear the results of it, echoing out in her head.

  She acquired the skill integrated divine body. Even if that much seemed almost certain by that point, he was glad it had worked out, but that wasn’t all that came with it. Levels to her earth inclination, mana empowering, and spirit comprehension, as well as one other new skill.

  Vision enhancement. Not the flashiest of skills to be sure, but a handy one nonetheless, with Ben feeling satisfied with the results he saw.

  Considering that one of Twan’cha’s domains is the self, it should be helping her and everyone else who became a demigod from his line improve all of their skills but considering that he’s also a magic god, I can see why that meant raising skills that were at least magic-adjacent for her since they should be double dipping with those two domains together. Vision enhancement is a nice bonus though. I should try to remember to ask Myriad if anyone got any interesting skills from pulling from the domain of sight. There’s definitely got to be some interesting potential in that.

  That was a later conversation, though. With the surgery a success, they both needed to get back to work. Thera now had as many benefits that could bring her to awakening as either of them could think of, and he still had one more awakening of his own to try and reach, making the only matter left for both of them being to actually get there.