Six months after the Fourth Incursion
Croesus III, Megalorian landlord and banker extraordinaire, was dead.
He died as he lived, squeezing every single coin he could out of his tenants. He had perished at the decent age of ninety-seven, accidentally choking on a Megalorian obol he had bitten to verify if its silver was correctly weighed. He left no heirs of his blood—children were a speculative investment—but plenty of orphanages and philanthropy cases, because pre-grown teens with nothing to lose were tomorrow’s employees.
He had made his fortune in real estate, moneylending, and banking, all of which had only boomed after the capital’s destruction during the last godly incursion. All that freshly freed space just waiting for a good investor to redevelop… Croesus had almost felt young again. Certainly, his methods had been called predatory and exploitative, even by Megalorian standards, but it had been a price he had been willing to pay.
Because for a brief and beautiful moment in the endless history of time, Croesus III had been rich.
Of course, Croesus always hedged his bets, so he generously funded the church of Ganesha back when the elephant god still held sway over Megaloria. He had purchased top karma insurance and ensured he always stayed solidly in the black on his soul credit score through financing philanthropy activities.
And today, that caution had finally paid off.
Croesus knew it the moment he found himself in that ethereal, endless silver mist, his body as weightless as air and numb as if he had slept in the winter snow. A wolf-headed figure taller than mountains loomed over him with eyes peering with holy light.
“Croesus the Third,” the great god said as he extended his hand at the giant’s spirit. “I am Wepwawet, god of reconnaissance and voice of the unified Elphion pantheon. I shall guide your soul to its rightful afterlife.”
This was the highest deity in all the realms, coming to fetch Croesus’ own soul! Finally, he would enjoy his well-earned rest in an afterlife worthy of a giant of his considerable net wor–
“After a brief pit stop.”
Huh?
Croesus’ soul was yanked away from the ethereal mists of death and across the planes, until he landed in front of a colossal building akin to a grey inn. He then found himself teleported into a bedroom hardly big enough to hold his soul, with a bed, a desk with a grimoire on top of it, and a window giving him an impeccable view of a shining city surrounded by a glittering lake. Although Croesus could only see a distant vision of it, its magnificent towers put even Megaloria’s buildings to shame in size and splendor.
“Here’s the Soul Inn, where you can wait in peace for your afterlife appointment with Judge Wukong, who will decide your final residency,” Wepwawet said. “You can see the line outside your window.”
Croesus checked, and would have had a heart attack if he still had one. An enormous line of thousands upon thousands of fellow giant souls departed from the inn towards the city in a procession of dizzying proportions.
“The bed can let you sleep in peaceful oblivion until your turn comes up, or you can consult the Book of Things on the bedside table to entertain yourself in very realistic fantasy scenarios designed by the goddess Ishtar herself.” Wepwawet cleared his throat and pointed at a bell. “You can also skip it by calling the room service and asking for the ‘express reincarnation’ checkout option, in which case you will instantly forget your entire existence and begin a new life, free of all past baggage!”
“How… How long?” Croesus dared to ask. “Before my turn?”
“The wait is around two years right now, but we gods are working hard on shortening it,” the wolf-headed god said with a tone that reeked of embarrassment. “I swear, decades pass in the blink of an eye when you’re a soul in a timeless room.”
“What the… two years?” Croesus couldn’t believe his ears. “But I paid top coin for a premium subscription!”
“Yes… but so did a lot of other people, and the god who awarded them all is gone, so it’s hard to keep up, and we’re overworked, and I have to go, bye!”
“Wha–” The god was gone in a blink, leaving Croesus alone. With nothing else to do, the soul wandered over to the book, whose pages opened on their own. It seemed to consist of six-hundred and sixty-six chapters, each covering a different story.
The very first was titled, ‘Fifty Shades of Elf: A Neverending Orgy of Which You Are the Protagonist.’
…
On second thought, maybe these two years would pass shortly…
—----
After successfully finding a free room in the nick of time, Wepwawet teleported to the gates of the Golden City to meet with Sun Wukong. The monkey king sat in front of a colossal desk in front of doors watched by falcon-faced guards who ensured that no one could pass without the right permit.
“Are you done with the current batch?” Wepwawet asked Sun Wukong. “I’m running out of rooms at the inn and Horus won’t have the mana to build a new wing before next week.”
“I’m doing what I can, okay?!” Sun Wukong replied with annoyance. Months of dealing with giant souls had deeply eroded the Buddha’s patience. “Why am I doing this again?”
“Because you tried to cheat when we drew straws.” Did Sun Wukong really think they wouldn’t distrust someone whose whole legend involved using a size-shifting rod? “Besides, you always complain that the Celestial Bureaucracy never gave you a good job.”
“Oh yes, because moving from Heavenly Stablemaster to Overworked Dead Bureaucrat is such a promotion! My career has really taken off right now!” Sun Wukong grumbled as he stamped a Shining City residency permit. “No wonder Yama has a pole longer than mine up his arse… What was Ganesha thinking selling karma insurance?”
“He was trying to raise money for charity, public services, and the Incursion war effort.” Which had actually worked well at making Megaloria’s society a tiny bit more moral, if for self-serving purposes. “He’s sorry for the mess.”
“He better be!” Sun Wukong grunted as one of the guards handed him the next case. “We’re bound to run out of them eventually…”
True to their promise, the gods had begun working on the concept of an afterlife to reward their Champions and worshipers after their demise. They pooled their mana together to raise a Golden City in the heart of Elphion’s leyline network, where souls could enjoy an existence of felicity in an artfully constructed settlement merging both Greco-Egyptian and an artful blend of Babylo-Chinese influences.
The gods had briefly toyed with the idea of creating a ‘hell’ to punish the wicked at Ishtar’s suggestion, but they eventually scrapped that idea for now to save mana for the final Incursion. The idea of a hell had never been proved to be an effective deterrent against bad behavior among mortals according to many godlike studies, so they simply settled on letting evil souls reincarnate naturally rather than enjoy a heavenly existence after their death. Perhaps that would change if—once—they defeated Apep and wouldn’t have to worry about building up resources. Everyone had their role. Horus built the city, Wepwawet and Artemis guided the souls to their destination, Sun Wukong judged them, and Ishtar provided entertainment.
They had been well on their way to build something vaguely functional… until a horde of giant souls bearing Ganesha-blessed afterlife IOUs began to show up in mass in the wake of Megaloria’s collapse.
The elephant god had promised a good posthumous fate to anyone paying for his karma insurance, but with his expulsion from Elphion, it fell on his friends to decide what to do with them… and the countless cases of market manipulation the giants had become masters of. One crafty trader had resold a ‘fraction’ of a karma insurance to a hundred buyers who each owed a percentage of the promised afterlife.
It was a whole mess that would take a while to sort out, and their afterlife wasn’t even finished yet… half of the pantheon would have already had a mental breakdown if they couldn’t multitask.
Wepwawet tensed as he sensed a new surge of mana coursing through his divine spirit, followed by a notification.
Quest: Land of the Faithful IV, completed! You have earned the Castling Animism Miracle
Castling
Rank 10 Animism
You can switch your Idol with any of your Altars.
Interesting! That could only mean one thing.
“Excuse me, I’ll be right back,” Wepwawet promised. “My favorite mortal has raised a new Altar.”
—----
Victoire looked on at her god’s statue looming over the Shadazarian desert with a deep sense of satisfaction.
It felt so good to finally be done with this task after wasting days crossing the endless dunes in search of the mana locus. This land’s former god, Anansi, had completely neglected this particular area, although it was home to many buried—and sandworm-infested—ruins. It had taken them longer than expected to find the leyline, and they had had their fill of sand.
“I never thought I would see the day our god would establish a foothold in my old homeland,” Wintresse mused at her side. “Well, I did, but I thought we would conquer the whole place first.”
“Ugh, no offense, but can we teleport back north now?” Rhine complained. Kale’s andvari wife and Lord Wepwawet’s newest Champion had ferried them here on a drilling machine capable of plowing through the dunes. “I don’t know how you people manage to survive the sun! Just being in the open burns my skin! It’s even worse than Lavaland!”
“We mostly use slaves to keep us in the shade while they die of heatstroke.” The changeling smirked at her offended allies. “And it is a shame, a real shame.”
“Yes, indeed.” Lord Wepwawet’s spiritual projection materialized next to the Altar, hands on his waist. A handful of mimics teleported in to lay the groundwork for another outpost. “Many thanks for your hard work, ladies. I hope this mission wasn’t too much of a bother.”
“Lord Anansi’s intel was vague at best, so we wasted a lot of time,” Victoire admitted. Finding the Altar’s location would have been much faster with Soumis, but Victoire had granted him a temporary leave of absence considering his circumstances... “The locals weren’t of much of assistance either.”
“At least they didn’t interfere,” Wintresse said after casting an ice spell to cool the air. “I expect the current Assassination Season to last at least a month or two.”
“I still can’t believe your people have a term for this nonsense.”
“You say that, Victoire, but Megaloria is hardly any better during its own succession crises,” Wintresse countered. “The power struggles wouldn’t last so long if their merchant princes simply killed each other off.”
Anansi’s expulsion from Elphion and the loss of his Champions, many of whom had been important Shadazar officials, had left a power vacuum that the country’s treacherous houses had immediately attempted to fill. While Lady Ishtar managed to fill the void her departed colleague left when it came to Miracles and other divine matters, the dark elf queendom had yet to regain a semblance of stability.
They were fortunate that most of Lord Ganesha’s Champions had survived the Fourth Incursion, or Megaloria would have suffered the same fate. The capital city’s loss was a tremendous blow, but the government managed to maintain a semi-smooth transition, and Lord Ganesha’s friendship with Wepwawet and Lady Artemis meant the population broadly accepted their stewardship.
“I hope never to be deployed so far south again,” Victoire admitted as Lord Wepwawet teleported them back to Narc.
While the city looked rather empty between the losses they took during the Fourth Incursion and the civilians’ exodus to new fortresses spread across the countryside, it still had enough people in it to feel like home. Lord Wepwawet had had plenty of time to revive all his Champions lost to Kronos’ onslaught, and a handful of giant and andvari newcomers settled in too.
In fact, her god had apparently reached a limit of some kind once he claimed his fortieth chosen warrior, which Victoire took as another reminder that their final battle was just around the corner.
I just hope there’ll be people left alive to celebrate the aftermath, Victoire thought as she observed the countryside from atop Narc’s cliffs. Dozens of tiny castle dungeons loomed across the horizon, their insides full of civilians who hoped to weather the last incursion and emerge to find a world left standing. It will fall on us soldiers to defend this planet.
Her god sensed her melancholia and tried to reassure her. “You should all take the afternoon off and meet your loved ones,” he told the team, “You’ve worked well, and we can’t tell when that snake Apep will show up. You’ll fight better when well-rested.”
“Thank you, Your Godliness.” Rhine waved at Victoire. “Hey, want to hit Alpine’s bar tonight? My treat!”
“Sure,” Victoire replied warmly. Drinking themselves silly was an honored andvari social tradition, mostly due to their innate resistance to all forms of toxins and poison. “I’ll just pay my dragon a visit first.”
“Did they find out who the father is yet?” Wintresse asked with a chuckle.
“They’re both the dad,” Lord Wepwawet replied with a heavy sigh. “Don’t ask me how, unprotected fusion accidents are how you end up with stuff like owlbears, platypi, and scorpibears.”
Victoire frowned at him. “Scorpibears?”
“You don’t want me to elaborate on that, Victoire.”
Having had her share of weirdness over the last two years, Victoire wisely took the hint and kept her mouth shut. She departed the Idol and split from her allies to walk towards a large cave at the bottom of the cliff. The place reeked of dragon musk, mostly from the fact that three of those winged lizards shared it.
And as usual, Victoire found them arguing over the eggs.
“You dimwit, how many times will I have to tell you?!” Insupportable snapped his jaws at Soumis. “They’re going to be half-frost dragons, so don’t you dare warm them up!”
“But they’re half of Soumis too, so they’ll freeze without their father’s warmth!” Soumis protested. “Bathing them in molten gold will make them shinier too!”
“Boys, while I appreciate your concern, I have achieved a perfect lukewarm equilibrium,” Glatisant chided her two… whatever they called their weird threesome thing. She was sitting on a clutch of three lion-sized eggs, resting in a nest built out of the trio’s pooled hoards. “Besides, let us not war before a guest.”
“Mistress!” Soumis greeted her with joy at her presence. “Soumis was worried about you!”
“Did you bring a gift for the dragonlings?” Insupportable asked. “It is very important that a minion deliver them their first hoard as soon as they hatch, so they can understand their role in the food chain at birth.”
“They would be better off learning humility,” Victoire replied, though she did keep some gifts for the day the dragonlings hatched. “How is it going? Where’s Bernard?”
“We gave him a one-day renewable vacation,” Glatisant replied, much to Victoire’s shock. “Our poor chief of staff was working himself so hard we feared he might die of exhaustion before the dragonlings hatched.”
“Frie–Minion Bernard would never do that to me,” Insupportable insisted. Victoire smiled as she didn’t fail to notice the obvious lapse. “But he is thankful for my generosity.”
“I have no doubt he is,” Victoire mused, a hand on her waist. “Have you settled on the names yet?”
“Oh, we have bounced off a few ideas, but only one received a unanimous vote.” Glatisant gave Victoire a strange look. “I think you will be pleased with our pick.”
Her words sent shivers down Victoire’s spine.
A/N: finally done with this one!
It took me weeks to squeeze some writing page by page in between Hundred Reigns, Perfect Run writing and other stuff, but I really wanted to at least finish it in time for the Kindle ebook release (which you can find here: https://www.amazon.com/Board-Conquest-Kingdom-Building-English-ebook/dp/B0GY1TQZQB ). I'll post a general post soon but as always, any purchase or review is welcome.
Chapters are still going to come when they're finished rather than at a set schedule (and considering how long it took me to write that one, don't expect one before the end of the month or July) but I'm happy to get back into it after so long. Next few chapters will focus on tying up loose ends before the final incursion ;)