“Is it complete?” asked Scarlet, the wicked devout with the plague mask.
“Affirmative. This is the Cherubim.”
The one to respond was the golden crown. They were currently standing in the hangar of the Ark, and a new gold machine part that looked like a bulky school bag was attached to Gould’s back.
“Awaken.”
The school bag reacted to the mechanical voice, beginning to change shape. Small plates immediately extended out to the sides, granting the Gollem two wings on each side. Floating in the air, this new form—the Cherubim—could serve as an aerial unit as well.
“It’s hard to believe that this used to be that Slime,” Scarlet remarked.
“It was fortuitous that we were able to acquire the Gluttony Slime.”
As Doctor Babylon had surmised, Gould had taken the Gluttony Slime the wicked devout had acquired at the auction in Felsen, turned it into orichalcum, and used it to craft additional gear that could handle a variety of functions. Something that would usually require hundreds and thousands of Slimes could be managed with just a single Gluttony Slime. “Fortuitous” was a fitting adjective.
“Have you also completed your task?” Gould inquired.
“Yes. This is Balor, a new weapon created from the G-Cube and Q-Crystal of the Gigantes in Isengard.”
The man in the plague mask looked up to where a Gollem—smaller than the Gigantes, but still gigantic—quietly sat. It looked almost like a titan encased in golden armor. On its chest and head were eerie red lenses emitting light.
“It has a feature that allows it to take command of Soldats, which means it can have full control of several hundred Kyklops with ease. Additionally, its armor has been enhanced with sealing magic using wicked water. Even Brunhild’s Gollems should struggle to make a dent.”
Upon hearing the words “wicked water,” Gould’s mind went to the core floating in the purple liquid inside one of the labs in the Ark. It was the name of the water that had been contaminated by that core. Filled with a bit of divinity and a powerful curse, the water could be used to acquire various blessings from the wicked god.
Gould was thankful he had discovered that core. With it now in his possession, perhaps his fantasies could become a reality.
There was only one issue left.
“If I could just find a way to gouge out space-time...”
“Hm? Did you say something?”
“No...”
Gould chose to hide his thoughts from Scarlet. He and the wicked devout were not allies—their goals were different. At the moment, they were simply using each other for mutual benefit. They were cooperating right now, but Gould already planned to dispose of them the moment they got in the way of his plan. Until that day came, he would assist them and would ask them for assistance in return.
A dark, dull light resided in Gould’s red camera eye.
✦ ✦ ✦
“Something’s strange about this after all...” the goddess of space-time muttered to herself as she mended a dimensional distortion and returned it to its regular state.
Ordinarily, it was forbidden for gods to do anything on the mortal plane that would greatly influence their world. It was for that reason that Mochizuki Tokie refrained from using her divinity and instead called upon the power of the fairies of time and regular space-time magic to fix such anomalies, but she couldn’t deny that something about these distortions was beginning to seem odd.
At first, Tokie had thought that the timequake had been the cause for the frequent distortions, but she suddenly realized that there was, in fact, some degree of directivity to where they occurred. One’s immediate thought would be that the wicked devout were interfering with time and space in some manner, but the divinity that lingered seemed too strong for that to be the case.
By definition, wicked gods were sacred treasures or divinity-infused objects that had taken in the negative emotions of people over the years and gained their own ego, so a wicked god’s divinity usually wasn’t anything noteworthy. However, since the wicked god of this world had absorbed a servile god—or to be more precise, the servile god himself had been corrupted—he held much more divinity than an average wicked god.
Still, even taking that into account, his divinity was only at the level of an apprentice god. He shouldn’t have been able to make dimensional distortions on such a wide and frequent scale. That conclusion led Tokie to consider that perhaps a different god’s power was being utilized.
“Does that mean one of the gods who have descended to the surface world has been assisting the wicked devout...? No, definitely not. God Almighty has his eye set on this place as a sanctuary for the divine. If a god plotted with the enemy, they would be at risk of having their divine status revoked or, even worse, being completely eliminated...”
Tokie’s face suddenly whipped up as she came to a realization.
“No, it couldn’t be... I better go check this and see.”
In order to dispel the doubts that had begun forming in her mind, Tokie used [Spatial Translocation] to jump back to the Divine Realm.