Alone in his realm, Eneth grumbled to himself, results of his plots having gone worse than he’d expected.
He and the others weren’t being killed for their actions, and some confinement was nothing. Both were expected results, and both would cease to matter once the third wave started. What did matter and what couldn’t be undone was the unexpected level of passion from some of the other gods. He’d expected there to be less who were so enraged, and he expected others to manage to convince them to hold their tongues in the spirit of ensuring that the faith of the world wouldn’t be shaken during such a delicate time. The fact that they refused to be reasoned with, even when it meant increasing their odds of losing against the same enemies who had once destroyed their old worlds, was nothing short of madness to him.
A madness only made worse by what was going on below. The lover of Myriad’s apostle had snapped. Churches and monuments were devastated, and the three core believers of every god involved had been taken hostage without any demands being made, and worse, they were being blocked from doing anything. It seemed that by the time he had noticed, Anailia, and possibly others, were wasting their faith to block him from interacting with her or any of his other believers around as she caused ceaseless devastation.
But through all of it, every miscalculation and every setback, it didn’t matter. They had won. He had won. Whatever happened next, Ben was gone, and he and the others would be able to rebuild everything they had lost eventually. Even if some believers left, others would stay, and what was a setback when he’d already lost a planet? He could rebuild, and he’d be infinitely safer doing it without that madman on his world.
Just that was enough to give him a bit of peace, along with the knowledge of how low the odds were of a mortal like that appearing again. In all the worlds that had existed, none had reached those same heights before, even across hundreds of thousands of years in a thousand planets’ different histories.
“If anything, it just shows we shouldn’t stretch ourselves so carelessly into the multiverse,” Eneth sighed to himself. “Who knows what other monsters exist beyond our limits? We- AUGH!”
A roar of pain ripped its way through his throat for the cut he felt at his back, reflexively making him turn, only to leave the injury forgotten. Expecting some god to have decided to test their luck and exact their own revenge but found something completely different, leaving a single word on his lips and genuine fear in his heart.
“No.”
“Oh yes,” Ben grinned back, his eyes showing a mad anticipation, while one of his hands held tight a knife and the other carried Eneth’s severed tail. “It’s been a while, you lizard bitch. Miss me?”
“You can’t be here, it’s-”
“Impossible?” Ben laughed, staring the other god in the eyes as he lifted the severed tail and took a bite, eyes lighting up at the taste of it before that divine flesh slid down his throat and confirmed his theory that it wasn’t only eating from the nature gods that would raise his attributes, getting a slew of growth in all of them from all of the deities he was dealing with. “Then you clearly haven’t been paying enough attention. I make the impossible possible, and I will never let myself be contained.”
As he spoke, two more Bens appeared, those new ones bearing hammers that they struck the unsuspecting god with, actualized constructs empowered with his sacrilege and drove Eneth to snap out of his shock and horror to fight back. He didn’t know how Ben had escaped hell or how he was acting in multiple places at once; it didn’t matter. He was a war god, and he knew he’d launched the first attack. With results so much less decisive than he’d hoped, that gave things the leeway to turn into a genuine battle.
As a god ruling over war, earth, and spears, he wasn’t unprepared. At least, he didn’t think of himself as such. Spears and stone were actualized around him, flying through the air to both defend himself and to strike back, but to no avail. Anytime one of his spears went to stab through one of the Bens, they would stop it without effort, the mortal actualizing their own constructs to block it as cheap copies of Eneth himself were used as shields in a mockery of everything that god was, and any time it seemed like one of the Bens attacks would be blocked, the Ben doing it would disappear and then reappear elsewhere, bringing their hammers down to beat and break Eneth’s body, all while one continued to stand at the side and watch.
It was only when that one finished consuming the god’s tail, licking his fingers in the end without dropping his eyes away from the beating his other selves were giving, that he let the mocking grin drop from his face as a fourth Ben appeared, that one also holding a knife and also cutting away pieces of the god to devour, even as all the damage they did grew back, with a new tail appearing at Eneth’s back and other scales and flesh regrowing in each place they’d been severed. Yet, despite appearing to heal, it still weakened Eneth, slowly making the god less substantial as more and more of him was stripped away.
“Where do I even begin when it comes to listing all of your mistakes?” the watching Ben asked from the side, casually blocking the few spears and pillars of earth directed his way with more fake Eneth’s he actualized on the spot, making them cry and beg for mercy to get under the true one’s skin. “Up here, unrepentant, you complain to yourself about the other gods not reacting the way you’d expected over what you attempted, as if they should dance to your tune. You expected all of them to accept that they should sweep things under the rug for the greater good, and that they shouldn’t waste their faith on making sure you’re punished, all when you couldn’t leave me be for the greater good of the world and wasted your own to try to get rid of me. But then, how could I fault a hypocrite? I’m plenty willing to be one myself. No, let’s make things clear. This is revenge, pure and simple. You tried to kill me, and just as bad, I see that you hurt Myriad, and I intend to deliver every ounce of pain back a millionfold.”
“You think you can get away with this?” Eneth screamed as the Bens wielding hammers continued to act specifically to inflict pain, while the Ben with a knife slowly devoured the god as he kept slicing pieces away. “When the other gods learn what you’re doing, they-”
“Who cares?” Ben said coldly. “Your fear in me was always misguided before, but only because I wouldn’t have done anything to you or anyone else up here. We had our squabbles, but I was content enjoying my petty revenge for your church’s and your son’s attempts at murdering me. I was never going to proclaim myself the king of the gods or whatever other stupid things you thought. Having said that, you were right in one way. If I had wanted to, I could have. I was never going to exploit that fact before, but now? Now, whatever I feel like doing to you all, every one of you that decided to condemn me, well, there isn’t a single deity up here who either loves or hates me that has the power to stop me from doing what I want. You’re all ants beneath my feet.”
“You’re just one mortal!” Eneth screamed as his flesh was cut away, hearing Ben laugh in response.
“No, I’m an evil god, more powerful than any who’ve come before me, and I have more experience torturing deities than anyone else in this world. Not only a meal, you’re just a handy bit of experience to me.”
He was in Eneth’s mind and he could tell the other didn’t believe it, that even if he was losing, soon enough, more gods would arrive to stop Ben, his acts then showing exactly what the war god believed about him all along, but Ben crushed that hope. All around him, he actualized scenes of him subjecting the other nineteen involved in his damnation to his consumption and torture, and all around him, he sent more instances of himself to that realm, filing it with copies of himself that all spoke in one voice, finally driving home the true depth of Eneth’s mistake.
“Fight back for as long as you can,” Ben told him, ending what had been nothing more than some light play to start things off before he began inflicting true suffering on the other’s mind, body, and soul. “Because I’m going to be having a wonderful time, breaking you over and over and over again, and no one is coming to save you.”