Chapter 354: Tallia, Daughter of Primordius

Mila

The planet Hira had changed since she’d left it all those years ago.

Instead of the natural landscape and low technology human settlements of her memories, half the planet’s land mass was covered in mega cities filled with buildings that at one time had been hundreds of floors high. And, instead of forests of trees mixed with deserts and other various ecological environments, almost everything was dust and ash.

At one point, Hira’s human population had obviously been in the hundreds of billions. And then the planet had seemingly been pushed out of its natural orbit to be further away from its star system’s sun, causing almost all life to die.

From Mila’s research, things had started to go bad for the planet’s natives once their 72 years of System protection were finished. The local B rank undead empire had wanted to invade, but, with the release of Nana Xara’s Anti-Undead Treatise, the other B rank force in the Palazin Galaxy Cluster, the Life Tree Empire, had started a war of extermination, so they couldn’t do anything. With the deaths of royal children from both the Amoranth Kingdom and the Kingdom of Night, however, the two closest C rank forces, Hira wasn’t left alone.

They were conquered by the Amoranth Kingdom right around the time Isaiah’s brother left for his ill-fated joining of a divine force, and the kingdom’s Vol Clan, who’d been left in charge of the planet, hadn’t treated the natives very well for the next several generations.

Of the Hiran natives Mila had known, most had died in the fighting, and King Reginald, who she’d been closest to, had become a political prisoner and later died of old age as an E rank in a jail cell while she and Aalam had been in the process of taking over the Heavenly Soul Universe.

Over multiple generations, the planet’s population had boomed and things were good for a while. But then the Amoranth Kingdom was conquered by another force about a thousand years later and a fight at the high D rank level had occurred on the planet’s surface, causing Hira to be pushed out of its orbit.

Everyone who could leave the planet did and everyone else died off over the next hundred years or so.

The planet had still been used for its soul well every couple of decades for the next hundred thousand years, but then even that resource dried up and Hira had been completely abandoned ever since.

“Humans are rather destructive creatures, are they not?” Silently, but without any true stealth, the Princess of Revelry flew down from the sky to join Mila and Isaiah’s doppelgängers on the planet, Isaiah having copied Mila’s Phantasmic Doppelgängers skill with Shadow of the Empress so he could visit the planet where his life had taken its greatest positive turn.

“You are rather terrible when fully let loose.” Mila’s doppelgänger smiled slightly, nodding at the beautiful goddess like she’d been expecting the woman, which, partially, she had been.

The last child of the Primordial Sovereign other than Bellessia, and the only known offspring of Elandra, the Elder Goddess of Emotions, Tallia daughter of Primordius looked quite a bit different from Primordius’s other children, with her mother’s big blue eyes, long silky dark hair, and hourglass figure.

More important to Mila, however, she’d also inherited her mother’s aptitude with emotional Laws, making her an expert at charm magic and other types of soul influence, one of the forerunners in the Prime Material of Mila’s own path to power. And, with a known personality that never seemed to take anything seriously, Mila was almost certain there was a lot more to the woman that she let on.

“So, you no longer consider yourself human even though you were born as one?”

Mila maintained her slight smile as she looked at the goddess. “Do you consider yourself human, even after living for so long?”

The goddess smiled widely. “No. But I’ve never been one to care much about race.”

There was a pause in the conversation as neither of them spoke, Mila partly because she was stalling, and Tallia almost certainly due to not wanting to initiate.

Meanwhile, Isaiah just calmly waited at Mila’s side.

Then, after a few seconds, Tallia was the first to speak. “How did you manage to kill my brother?”

“My husband cut him in half, slaying him with one attack.”

The Princess of Revelry raised an eyebrow. “I feel there is context I am missing.”

“Of course.” Mila widened her smile slightly. “You’re an enemy. I’m not going to tell you our combat capabilities. Otherwise why kill everyone who was there?”

Tallia chuckled slightly. “Also, I used to have three brothers and, while it was obvious which one I was referring to, you were playing word games.”

She looked up at the planet’s daytime sky.

“Do you kill people who don’t make themselves your enemies first?”

“Sometimes.” Mila also looked up at the sky, her expression becoming more serious. “Unlike your family, however, we usually like to have more of a justification than that they wouldn’t bow to our rule.”

The goddess frowned. “Because, with your husband being a master of universes, they can’t escape your rule anyway?”

Mila’s smile came back, a bit more genuine than before, even as she still looked at the sky. “Exactly.”

“Is there any way I could not be your enemy?”

Mila turned to look at the goddess, her smile turning into a frown. “At this point it seems difficult.”

“Why?”

“Because you put a soul curse inside the soul of one of my husband’s sisters, and he doesn’t take kindly to that sort of thing.”

The goddess also turned back to look at her. “But I deliberately designed that soul curse so it wouldn’t trigger if they saw you, which, having studied how you operate, would almost certainly happen before they saw the Heavenly Spark Soul King or young master Stormborn.”

And there it was. The confirmation of intent Mila had been expecting, though she still didn’t know if the original goal of the soul curse had been some sort of test or if the goddess was just making up excuses after the fact.

“How much do you know about how my father operates?” Tallia looked back up at the sky.

“Not much. He didn’t return to the Prime Material until after we left.”

Having looked through the memories of four of the man’s children, this of course was a lie, but Mila was very interested in what the goddess would choose to reveal.

“Do you know much about the origins of myself and my siblings, specifically the relationships Primordius had with our mothers?”

“From what I’ve heard, the man has a habit of forcibly taking women into his harem.”

It was a bit worse than that.

From what she’d read from the God of War’s memories, Primordius had once had a true love, the God of War’s mother, but she’d died of old age a long, long time ago. Then he hadn’t had any other relationships with women for several hundred million years. Once he started up again, however, his relationships became more and more twisted and the respect he showed his partners grew less and less.

Eventually, he’d changed to the point where he’d forcibly take any powerful human woman into his bed as a show of dominance, and that was the practice which had resulted in all his other children.

Bellessia’s mother, for example, had been an A rank summoner, a once in a trillion years talent who’d achieved the top of mortality with almost no outside help, and the holder of rare racial abilities like Nascent Energy Converter and Spirit Prodigy.

“No one would really care if he died.” The goddess sighed and turned her face back to look at Mila’s doppelgänger, right into Mila’s eyes. “At least I wouldn’t.

“And, as you might imagine, a lot of powerful people would want him dead as well.”

Translation, Tallia’s mother, the fourth or fifth strongest elder god in the Prime Material—assuming she was still alive—would likely want to kill Primordius as well.

“Why do you serve him then? Why not run away?”

Mila already knew the answer, but she wanted to know if the goddess would tell her.

“I signed a contract with him back when I was a mortal. It’s still binding.”

Tallia moved to look at Isaiah. “Your birth was similar to mine, right, child? If my sister hadn’t tried to kill your partner and your force had been free to grow in the Prime Material, what would you have done to your father?”

“I wouldn’t have had to do anything. My brother would have killed him, along with my mother’s husband.” Isaiah’s doppelgänger chuckled slightly. “But it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. My father showed too much talent and too much lack of restraint. So he was killed by a B rank elf back before any of you knew who I was. And the leader of the Gale Clan was murdered by one of his clan’s own elders before the clan completely fell apart.”

“Ah. Yes. Your brother would have had more right to revenge than you.” The goddess looked up at the sky again. “That’s why you’ve left Bellessia for the Draconic Spirit Queen. And that’s why you’re helping that young coran mortal destroy the main powers of his own force as we speak.”
Back in the Twelve Element Spirit Universe, Mila’s main body tensed up.

“But you don’t have to worry.” Tallia waved her hand dismissively before starting to rise up into Hira’s air. “My father is back in the Primordial Thunder Universe at the moment. My mother and the other elder gods are nowhere to be found. And most of the Prime Material’s gods are either dead at your hands or in hiding.

“And I have no obligation to do anything to stop you.”

In a universe next to the Prime Material, where one of Mila’s clones was with Isaiah’s main body, Isaiah turned to look at Mila. “What do you think?”

“My best guess?” Mila shook her head as she sent a message to Brom to hurry up. “Everything she implied about her own stance is probably accurate, but that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t kill us in a heartbeat if she could.

“She was at least fully aware of the antimatter we had stored in our doppelgängers.”