Young Master's PoV: Woke Up As A Villain In A Game One Day

Chapter 349: Gods And Monsters [I]

I hate getting struck by lightning.

In my entire life, I’m fortunate enough to say I’ve only been struck by lightning twice.

Thankfully, the day I fought against the God Who Eats Is was not one of those days.

The multi-armed deity raised his vajra and took aim.

My right arm was missing. In its place was an artificial limb conjured from ice. Another arm of ice was attached to my back, accompanying a third made from stone.

In total, I now had four hands.

...Which was still two fewer than the God I was facing.

But oh well, we can’t get everything we want in life, can we?

It wasn’t even a matter of being unable to create more limbs. I simply didn’t have the mental capacity to actively control all of them in a fight.

My right ice arm was already nocking a fire arrow, while the stone arm on my back gripped a flame lash. With my real hand of flesh and bone, I gripped my blazing axe.

Yeah, I was looking like something of a deity myself.

Grr–thooom—!

A majestic bolt of lightning discharged from the tip of the vajra.

I didn’t have time to move before it struck.

Because obviously, I couldn’t move faster than light — or even one-third of it yet.

So it ended up hitting me.

But instead of frying me from the inside out, a soft shimmer rippled in the air around my body before the the bolt was reflected back at the creature that had sent it.

[Mirrorcloak

- Effect: Summons a magical cloak that reflects any ranged attack — projectile or spell — aimed at the wearer. The cloak must be resummoned after one use.]

Of course, the God didn’t even blink. (Not that he could since his hollow eyes lacked eyelids.)

He just reacted by lifting a warhammer and tanking the stair-step beam of electricity head-on.

Still, that confirmed one thing.

While all his weapons were surely Supreme or Mythical-grade, the total output of his attacks was nowhere near their maximum potential.

That was because the God’s body was capped at the level of an A-rank Hunter (or a Greater-rank Beast).

His own flesh was a bottleneck, choking the Essence he needed to flood his weapons with for them to work at full power.

That didn’t make them any less dangerous, but it did give me a fighting chance. A huge chance.

I noticed then that the God had suddenly stopped moving his disjointed fingers connected to the ethereal white strands.

That could mean only one thing — his puppet was down.

Michael Godswill was finally defeated.

Yet, he still didn’t let go of the strands. That was because the God fed on them — the threads of fate belonging to another entity.

Well, he didn’t feed on the threads themselves, but the divinity they were woven from.

I didn’t know how it worked. I still don’t know how it worked to this day.

I’d planned to ask Asmodeus, but I just forgot the next time I saw him.

Anyway, that was the reason the God hadn’t killed us when he had opportunities. He only slowed our advance because he wanted to keep us in his feeding grounds longer — until he could finish devouring Michael’s existence before moving on to the next meal. Then the next, then the next.

That was also why he was being so hesitant to outright kill me.

Earlier, when he cleaved my hand off with his serrated disk blade, I was left dazed by the pain for a moment.

He had the chance to finish me with his vajra right then.

But he didn’t.

He waited until I could clamp my muscles down with Essence to stop the bleeding before resuming the attack.

That... irked me more than anything.

Who the fuck did this dude think he was, going easy on me?!

Gnashing, I charged forward as a salvo of icy spikes rose from the frozen platform under my feet, launching toward the fallen deity.

Just like before, the God used his trident to manipulate the water all around him, creating wavy tentacles that reduced my volley to nothing but harmless slush.

But I wasn’t done.

While he was busy playing with his waterworks, I adjusted my grip on the flame lash.

The stone arm on my back moved with a heavy, grinding sound to snap the whip of fire through the humid air.

The God raised his crooked staff of bone and gold to create a shroud of turbulent air before him, ready to displace the lash’s trajectory.

However, I didn’t hurl the lash at him.

Instead, the fiery rope fell short by a couple of paces, striking the chilly water between us just outside the edge of my ice island.

A massive cloud of vapor erupted as fire met water, obscuring his six-eyed vision.

The God didn’t panic — gods rarely do, as I’ve come to realize now — but he did hesitate.

I felt the air pressure shift as I entered close quarters. He swung his warhammer blindly through the fog at the sound of my approach, the weight of that heavy block of metal whistling inches above my head as I ducked.

He was still capped at A-rank. His reaction speed was tied to a physical form that, while monstrous, was still bound by the laws of biology.

I let my momentum slide me forward, freezing the sea beneath my feet.

With my real hand, I raised the axe.

With the stone hand, I coiled the lash around his trident.

With the ice hand, I drew the fire arrow back and released it at point-blank range, aiming for the center of his face while simultaneously bringing the axe down at the junction where his right neck met his shoulder.

...And I immediately realized the futility of it all.

The BOOM of the fire arrow so close up and the heavy THWACK of my axe hitting meat should have been the sounds of victory.

Instead, they were the sounds of a very expensive lesson in divine biology.

You see, you couldn’t kill a divine being with mortal weapons. You couldn’t even hurt one, no matter how strong the weapon was.

You could only do that with intent — or more specifically, with your Spiritual Pressure.

Now, Spiritual Pressure (or Spirit Force) is a sort of pressure that all beings of higher rank exert on reality.

Think of it like gravity. When the mass of an object increases, so does its gravitational pull, right?

In the same manner, when the metaphysical size of your soul expands with each rank-up, so does the weight it puts on reality.

That’s why, at higher ranks, an Awakened could rupture reality with their Spiritual Pressure alone to open Portals under the right conditions.

Anyway, the point is that since gods — even fallen ones — are so one with reality, you could only kill them with your Spiritual Pressure.

I didn’t know this back then.

So, when my axe failed to bury itself into his shoulder junction, it didn’t feel like cutting through flesh.

It felt like trying to cut a mountain of compressed rubber with a butter knife.

The blade couldn’t even bite through the top layer of the God’s skin.

As for the fire arrow, it hit him square in the center of his face. The explosion was a brilliant bloom of orange and red.

But when the smoke cleared a millisecond later, he wasn’t missing a head as he looked down at me.

Then, he lashed out with his khopesh.

The arm nearest to me blurred up in a horizontal arc. He was aiming for the waist, intending to turn my ”deity-like” form into two separate, much shorter pieces.

My ice arms were empty. My stone arm was occupied. My real hand was out of position.

Now I could jump back, sure, but that would allow the God to bring his warhammer back around and swat me like a fly.

Hmm, what should I choose?

A few possibly broken bones or getting chopped in half. It was an impossible choice, really.

And I had exactly half a second to decide if I wanted to spend the rest of my life as a pair of legs.

So, I decided against it.

I disengaged and jumped back, evading a slash that would have very well divided me right then and there.

But as expected, as soon as my feet left the ground, the air pressure shifted at my side with the weight of a falling mountain.

The God pivoted his imposing torso, and the warhammer reversed its momentum with a terrifying, bone-grinding hum.

WHAM—!!

The flat of the hammer caught me in the ribs. Even with my stone arm moving to soften the blow, the impact rattled my organs.

I was sent skipping across the surface of the ice island like a flat stone on a lake, my artificial limbs shattering into dust.

I careened into a jagged frost pillar at the rim of the platform that I didn’t remember creating. The crash was enough to force the air out of my lungs in a wet wheeze.

My vision swam with static.

...But it was not yet the end of my misery.

Because the force of the collision was so great that the pillar shattered as I rammed through it and tumbled over the edge, falling into the cold depths of the Lake of Grief.

The God decided he still hadn’t had enough. So he stepped onto my little ice island and moved to its center.

Then, he raised his vajra to shoot a blinding thunderbolt into the fractured sky. Immediately, somewhere up above, stormy clouds blanketed the stratosphere and the atmosphere turned heavy with the scent of rain.

The God raised the crooked staff next.

As if on cue, the clouds started swirling into a cyclonic vortex directly above the Lake.

He wasn’t just planning to electrocute me, it seemed. He was calling down a divine judgment!

GRRR–THOOOM—!!

A pillar of white-hot lightning thundered down into the silver water, vaporizing a big portion of this virtually endless sea.

For a few following moments, there was silence.

The God looked almost certain that he had gone overboard and killed me. If I had waited a couple more moments, he’d have turned around and gone back to my companions.

...But I didn’t wait.

SWOOOOSH—!!

Under normal circumstances, the water should have become a giant electrolyte conductor, frying me instantly as I sank.

But when the current raced through the freezing depths, I had activated another one of my defense Cards.

[Scale Hide

- Effect: Transforms user’s skin into semi-draconic scales to protect against physical attacks — highly effective against elemental attacks, especially fire.]

Sure, it didn’t protect me from the shock completely, but I at least didn’t become barbecued seafood.

In the very next second, a leviathan made of ice emerged from the sea’s surface. I was riding atop its head as it continued climbing up, elevating me skyward.

From my right, a fast streak of golden light was splitting through the horizon like a shooting star.

The God instinctively realized I was planning something, so he didn’t wait for me to commit.

He whipped his serrated disk blade at me.

I had expected that. So I had already willed the ginormous sea serpent of ice I was riding to block it.

A massive tail burst out from the water, rising to intercept the incoming disk.

WA–THAAAM—!!

It sounded like a glacier shattering when the disk didn’t stop at all. It plowed through the leviathan construct. It tore through it like a knife through cardboard.

Shards of frost rained down into the Lake of Grief as my makeshift mount groaned under the kinetic force and started to collapse into a heap of frozen rubble.

Yet, it bought me the one thing the God had tried to starve me of — time.

The disk slowed down enough for me to evade it as I rushed up to the gigantic snout of my conjured beast and leapt off.

The golden streak of light had reached me. And the next thing I knew, I was wrapping my fingers around the hilt of a greatsword.

After a long, long wait... my divine blade, Aurieth, was finally here.