Chapter 216

It took Luke over two weeks of work before he stopped finding new demons to catch and destroy. The first few days were non-stop, just scooping them up and pulping them for demonic essence, but after that, it started getting harder. All of the simple demons that wanted nothing but rampant destruction were easy to find. That accounted for about eighty percent of the total, and that portion of the job was mostly just hard labor.

It was the rest that made things difficult. Those were the demons that hid themselves away, that delighted in picking a specific individual to torture, then moving on once they’d finished their work. There was a surprisingly wide variety of shapeshifters, including some that took on human form and did have the ability to communicate.

It seemed that the Jigon-Sai commander who’d initially suspected Luke of being a demon hadn’t been so far off-base after all. What he’d been afraid of was entirely possible. Not only that, it was happening. Thanks to the fact that they had no XP to feel, none of them were able to infiltrate anything of importance, otherwise the chaos and destruction they caused would have been a lot worse.

Either way, Luke found them in much the same way he found all demons: by looking at the world through the system and noting places where he saw something that the system thought was empty. Once he’d claimed all the obvious, big, destructive demons, the job became tedious. Rooting out the sneaky demons was an exercise in patience, and a part of him considered leaving them alone. The damage they could cause was minimal on the grand scale of things and they weren’t providing that much essence to begin with.

System assured him that they still had several weeks to work with, and that the patches Luke was forming were slowing down the prisoner, even if they weren’t enough to stop it completely. The more Luke worked on it, the more convinced he was that his current strategy was destined to fail. The only way he could see it working was to integrate all the demonic essence with the system itself, and he did not have the kind of power he needed to do that. System did, but he couldn’t work with the essence directly.

“I think we’ve got a problem,” Luke said at the end of the second week. He was still floating up in the sky above the cathedral while nearby dragons went about their business and pretended they didn’t see him. He’d given himself [Matter Generation] in order to make the tools and materials he needed to harvest and hold demonic essence, which now formed five additional pillars circling the cathedral.

Luke had fashioned them to be the same size and height as the six brilliant white pillars that had been standing as silent guardians since the God Machine’s creations, but his additions were black with veins of crimson red running through them. In their own way, they were as striking as the pillars left by the Pantheon originally.

Integrating them into the whole of the God Machine was going to be a challenge that he feared was beyond even [Omniscience] to meet. Knowing how to do it was one thing. Acting on that knowledge was another.

“We have many problems,” System said with a mirthless laugh. He’d gotten a lot more human in the last few weeks, and had eventually confessed exactly what he’d been trying to accomplish. Luke found it hard to blame System for that. He’d been created as a sapient slave tool and burdened with so many conflicting demands that his entire existence had been one strangled by a straightjacket woven of the paranoia and narcissism of the collected Pantheon.

It helped that since System had finally managed to get out from under those demands, he’d been a lot more forthcoming and comprehensive in the information he shared. It was more like talking to a person and less like dealing with a bad search engine.

“Fair enough, but I mean specifically that what we’re doing is a stop-gap measure. It’s not going to hold forever. It’s not even going to hold for a year. It took six gods working together to create what housed a far weaker version of the hive consciousness that is the trapped god. And they did that before sticking it inside the prison. Trying to stuff it back in while it’s actively seeping out of every hole it can find or make… and by ourselves…”

“Exactly. It is impossible. I’ve told you this before.”

“I know, but I thought we’d figure something out. We have a whole mess of demonic essence that they didn’t have. They just used divine essence with some inversion principles to try to mimic the qualities of the original. Our materials should work better. I thought that would be enough.”

“And now you no longer do?” System asked.

Luke shook his head. “It’s not even close. If we had ten times as much, maybe. But we need finesse and I just don’t have the ability to do it fast enough. By the time I’d get a third of the way done, the prisoner would have unraveled or broken through where I’d started.”

“Are you ready to leave Aros?” System asked. “It’s your only hope.”

“I… No, I’m not giving up yet, but I think I want to get my family out of here. They didn’t deserve to have this happen to them. That, at least, I can fix.”

“You won’t go with them?”

“And leave everyone on this world to die? I’m not that much of a bastard,” Luke said.

“Very well. You have all the knowledge you need. I… think you are acting foolishly to stay, Luke Bennet. But I appreciate that you have not abandoned me even after I used you to accomplish my own goals and caused this mess in the first place.”

“Hey, I don’t blame you for wanting out of that situation. You got a raw deal. These gods here are all grade-A assholes.”

“Still, my mistakes have doomed every living thing on this planet,” System said. “It is a heavy burden.”

“We’ll figure something out. I’ll be back in a bit, alright?”

“Good luck,” System said. “Though you should not need it.”

With a farewell wave, Luke teleported himself all the way around the globe to Tenebrous Valley.

* * *

The doorway home was right in front of Luke, invisible and intangible. Opening it was not something he could have done prior to gaining [Omniscience]. It wasn’t meant to be opened from the Aros side, and certainly not by anyone who wasn’t a god. It only opened itself once every hundred years or so as part of the system’s mirroring protocol to scan for Luke’s family bloodline.

Just because it wasn’t supposed to open didn’t mean that it couldn’t. And Luke could force it open whenever he wanted. He wasn’t going to do that just yet, not until he’d brought his entire family back from the dead.

He didn’t need the command console now. Luke had all the knowledge he needed and his bloodline skills were more than up to the task. The system itself provided the patterns based on the saved profiles. All he needed to do was manipulate mana into the shape of the spells that rebuilt everything using the raw materials he provided with [Matter Generation] and it would take care of itself.

So that was exactly what Luke did. He started with Curt, naturally. His older brother had been the person Luke was closest to, and seeing that giant dorky nerd again was the thing Luke was most looking forward to. The spell went off without a hitch, and out of a glowing circle of light stepped a man that bore only a passing resemblance to the brother in Luke’s memories.

His eyes were wide and his breathing was labored, but Curt was physically whole and unharmed. “Holy fuck!” he all but screamed as he stumbled forward.

“Whoa, easy there,” Luke said, catching his brother and steadying him. “It’s alright. You’re safe.”

The Curt in Luke’s memories had been an inch or two shorter than Luke, and was already showing the beginnings of a dad bod despite only being in his early twenties. He had big round glasses with plastic frames that were designed to look like brass, though why he’d gone for that look deliberately was something Luke had never understood.

This Curt was lean and muscular. His hair was long and shaggy and his beard was an uneven, ragged mess. It looked like he’d tried to hack its length down with a knife and hadn’t done a good job. He was also naked, extremely tanned, and covered with small scars. His glasses were gone, but he wasn’t doing that myopic squint he normally did when he was looking around for them.

“Luke?” Curt asked, his eyes going wide when he saw the webbing of scars on Luke’s face and the bald patches on his scalp. “God damn, dude, what happened to you?”

“Oh, ah… Heh. That. Yeah. I… may have had a demon made out of molten hot liquid metal try to kill me,” Luke said. “I found your notes you left for me, by the way. Good advice. I didn’t end up using all of it, but it got me started in the right direction.”

“Wait, you did it? Holy shit, you did it! I remember about twenty goblins closing in on me with spears and shit. They had me cornered. But here I am. And here you are.”

“I guess I kind of did it,” Luke said. “There are some complications we’re still working out, but… yeah. I’, bringing everyone back now, and you can all go home.”

“What’s that mean?” Curt asked. “Are you not coming with us?”

“Like I said, complications. I’ll explain in a bit.”

Luke conjured up some clothes, much to Curt’s surprise and delight. “That is so badass,” he said as he pulled on a shirt. “What else can you do?”

“Curt, come on. I said I’ll explain in a minute. This isn’t easy to do.”

“Right, right. Sorry. Go ahead.”

Luke conjured up a screen with a blanket draped over it. If people were going to be coming back naked, they needed something to give them a sense of modesty. It would make no difference to Luke’s 1000 perception, but it was the principle of the thing.

“Nice thinking,” Curt said. “Man, what level did you have to get to in order to pull clothes out of thin air.”

Luke sighed, ignored Curt, and started the process all over.

Lizzie was the next to arrive, and in much the same state Curt had. She blushed furiously at coming back naked, and quickly darted behind the screen. “Okay, what the fuck guys,” she said.

“I can’t bring you back with clothes. I’m sorry. Just tell me what you want and I’ll make it for you.”

“I want a pair of jeans that hug my hips and make my ass pop,” she said through the screen. “I finally have the body I always wanted, and the clothes here all suck.”

“Sorry, I don’t know how to… hmm. Maybe… let me see if…”

The knowledge to make denim wasn’t there explicitly, but he could make a hell of a lot of things that were close enough. The screen being no real obstacle, he eyeballed the measurements and tried to put the fact that it was his sister out of his mind. Truth be told, his perception being so high meant that he knew what almost everyone looked like naked. He’d grown desensitized to that, but it was somehow different with family.

After Lizzie got dressed, she joined Curt in bombarding him with questions, but got the same answer in return. “Hold on. Let me get everyone back so I can do this all at once.”

Luke had mixed feelings about it, but it was time to bring back his father.