Elysium's Multiverse

Chapter 51

Riven glanced around at the bodies of the satyrs, then smirked and shrugged. “I figured you wouldn’t know…which sucks, but that was expected. Either way, I seem to be doing okay so far. I’m more worried about Allie and Jose—the two I’m gunning to meet with after this. The real problem here is that you don’t have any abilities or oriented pillars.”

Riven refrained from letting Ben know he had two ability scrolls in his bag. He didn’t know the man yet, and he was hesitant to just hand such valuable stuff out. Especially when he might be able to give them to Allie. And the likelihood of Ben also having affinities for that particular type of pillar just by happenstance wasn’t high anyways.

“Fuck.”

“I know.”

Athela raised a front spider paw and waved it at them shortly thereafter. “I can help you orient toward the Unholy pillar without scrolls! If that’s what you want.”

Ben nearly jumped out of his skin as the spider spoke and swore, clutching at his rising chest as he stared dumbly at the arachnid. “Did she just talk?”

“Of course I talk, you insulting little shit!” Athela squealed back up at him, hissing and chittering angrily before settling down. “I’m a princess! Address me appropriately, you unworthy ape!”

Riven sighed, rolled his eyes, and motioned to the spider with his right hand. “All right, Athela, go ahead and explain it to him in detail, then.”

“Ahem.” Athela got up on her back legs and animatedly started waving her front four around while explaining to them just what to do. “First, you’ll need an affinity to bind to a pillar, and acquiring affinities can either be impossible or doable depending on the person—but raising an affinity percentage is very hard to do past a baseline point. There are a couple of ways to do it, but Riven here got an easy way out if you don’t include the life-and-death struggles he had to endure. Some events, like the ones Riven had, will give them to you. Others specifically from your world will get them in the tutorial. However, the vast majority of people in Elysium and most of the people from Earth will get their abilities by hard work, training, studying, and repeated activities. Once presented with an ability related to your efforts, it will orient you toward the chosen pillar. Each of the main pillars has its own subpillars, those subpillars have specialty pillars, and the Unholy Foundational Pillar is the one demons are oriented toward from birth. The Unholy pillar has the major subpillars of Blood, Shadow, Death, Infernal, Depravity, and Chaos—each with their own innumerable unique pillars depending on how you evolve them. You’ll need to attain the Unholy pillar before you ever get any of the subpillars, and to attain the Unholy pillar you’ll have to do something that the system considers evil. Like murdering someone, or repeatedly stealing from the needy, or manipulating your way through life for your own gain and at the cost of others. Or you can be born into it, like a sentient undead or a demon like me.”

Ben gave the spider a horrified look, and then gave Riven a similar stare as well as he began to back up. “Wait…”

Riven quickly held up a hand of dispute. “I got mine from an event.”

“But that still doesn’t explain why you were able to acquire the foundational pillar in the first place, because you’d still have to qualify,” Athela stated in an upbeat tone. “There must have been something that you did to qualify you. Unless you had some sort of bloodline that imbued you with the Unholy pillar. Do you have any bloodlines that you haven’t made me aware of, Riven?”

Riven slowly opened his mouth, closed it, and glanced back down to his status page. She was obviously teasing him and knew about the shard of original sin and how he’d acquired it through his bloodline, though she had said little about it in the past two weeks. Her eyes had gone wide when he’d mentioned it, but like most other things she’d been unable to tell him what exactly it meant.

Riven gave her the side-eye in the firelight of the sacrificial chamber amid the piled-up bodies all around them. “You caught me, Athela.”

Ben gave Athela another uncomfortable glance and took another step back. “And if I choose the Unholy pillar, can I switch to another pillar later?”

“Nope! The foundational pillars are permanent.”

“I think I’ll pass on the Unholy pillar, then…thank you for the offer, though.”

“No problem!” Athela took a couple steps to the left and sat along a firm outcropping of what had once been the end of the stone altar. She hunched down and rocked forward slightly, tapping her fangs on the stone. “I hate this place. It’s very ugly.”

Riven shrugged. “Me, too. But you’ve gotta realize that life is all about perspective. I had a friend who had sex two or three times a day, exercised twice a day, read a couple books a week… You’d think it was a good life, right? Yet every day he complained about how much he hated prison.”

Athela and Azmoth each just gave Riven a confused stare, but Ben actually had to suppress a laugh. It was the first time Ben hadn’t looked utterly depressed.

An echoing thud from the hallway Riven had just come through alerted all of them to the approach of something or someone else. Riven slowly turned his head… The sound was like something had been dropped from a great height. Subsequent sounds further escalated the situation as another two bangs sounded against the stone of the hall around the corner.

The sounds continued to get louder, closer, and were soon intermixed with heavy breathing as a shadowy figure finally emerged from around the corner to stare at them with black-and-yellow eyes.

Oh, fuck. There he was…the big kahuna himself.

It was the goat man, the monster that they’d been avoiding for weeks due to the sheer size of the prey it brought back with it to feed on. And with nowhere to run, they were trapped in this circular sacrificial room like cattle in a pen. The description of the monster burned with a fiery bright-gold lettering, and this monster had a new word at the end of the hologram identification box that likely signified why.

Unlike the other fallen satyrs they’d faced thus far, this creature was an absolute beast. Even more so than what they’d originally thought, now that they were up close and in person. Huge, rippling muscles with veins outlined along its chest and arms flexed in anticipation as it held that giant spiked club they always saw it carrying around. It was a very crude weapon, about the size of Riven’s entire body, and had jutting pieces of metal sticking out of the wood.

Two curling ram horns were set on either side of its skull above the bulging eyes, and saliva dripped from an open mouth of sharp, bloodied teeth. Hot breath and vapor visibly expelled from the creature every couple of seconds as it panted in a rabid-like state—reminding Riven of himself after he’d gotten his mask—and fleshy strands of musculature partially covering up its hollow abdominal cavity became tense as its exposed spine flexed forward in anticipation of a charge. A purple light from within its chest illuminated the innards of the strange creature, and a moment later the satyr erupted with a purple miasma of energy that floated into the air about it like smoke.

It slammed its left hoof into the ground, grunted, and roared as its muscles all tensed with veins protruding along the entirety of its body. “RRRAAAAHHHH!”

Then time froze, and a series of pop-ups appeared in Riven’s vision.

The pentagram on the ceiling burned bright crimson as a thick wall of white mana erupted from the ground to seal the hallway leading out, and time immediately resumed a normal pace.

In an instant, the room was chaos. Riven immediately began charging his Blood Lance, and his two minions launched into action.

“Come on, then!” Riven roared, barely activating Hell’s Armor in time as the huge satyr barreled past Azmoth and flashed forward in a split second. Riven was immediately flung right like a comet of flames when the goat man used his momentum to collide with the warlock in a brutal shoulder charge, but the creature slipped on one of the bodies, and the impact wasn’t as drastic as it would have been otherwise.

Riven slammed into the remnants of the broken stone altar and cursed while pain radiated through his back. His flickering body, covered in protective hellfire, had significantly decreased the damage, but not wanting to spend all his mana on the ability, he disabled it a second later. Meanwhile, Ben screamed in horror and managed to make it back into his cell, slamming the cage door behind him.

Athela rapidly tried to tie the satyr warlord down with strings of webbing, and Azmoth simply charged back with sheer weight and power behind him, roaring while he slashed at the satyr with his two right sets of claws.

*CRASH*