The Primal Hunter 11, page 49
Even Valdemar was in an “avatar” of sorts, though it wasn’t a real one. Unsurprisingly, the simple god had never properly managed to master the art of making avatars; he usually just showed up everywhere with his real body. It was only after he met Gudrun that he’d begun to use these quasi-avatars, which were pretty much just homunculi that he infused his power into and could control for a limited time. This limited time still tended to be around a century as long as the quasi-avatar didn’t fight, but compared to the real thing, it was far worse.
The reason Gudrun had insisted that even the potentially strongest god in the multiverse had to use an avatar when going to a place like Nevermore was pure safety. In fact, gods in general rarely left their divine realms. Some extremely powerful gods did go around places with their real bodies unbothered, but they never used them to enter godly territories, much less the divine realms of other gods.
Because even someone like Valdemar would find himself on the losing end if he decided to fight someone like the Wyrmgod while within his domain. The territorial advantage was simply too significant to be overcome, which was why Gudrun had been so insistent on him using this quasi-avatar. Even if all of the gods had been there in their real bodies and worked together, they still wouldn’t stand a chance against the Wyrmgod, though they potentially could have escaped. Well, everyone besides the one god there that truly felt out of place—something the Blightfather absolutely had to point out.
“Since we are talking about how great this reunion is… why is she here?” Inmortau asked as he clearly looked at Artemis, who was sitting beside Nature’s Attendant, clearly nervous. Again, couldn’t blame her. With three Primordials, she always felt pressured, and now that there were five, it was impressive she was even staying.
“Someone who was allowed to be here, same as you,” Nature’s Attendant answered in a soft tone. “Besides, I question why you even need to ask. Why are you here anyway? Because we came here to observe the happenings inside of Nevermore, not to participate in some impromptu reunion, so our presence should be of no interest or bother.”
“Now you just raise my curiosity… Let me guess—you here for the Chosen of the Malefic Viper?” the Blightfather asked with a raised eyebrow, the look on their faces serving as confirmation. “I will admit he is a curiosity. Both the Endless Empire and Automata Legion are pretty up in arms about his appearance, and I do see why. Origin manipulation to such a degree is not something we’ve seen before outside of certain unique system-granted items.”
“If you understand, then will you not let us simply enjoy our shared curiosity?” Nature’s Attendant asked, the Blightfather conceding.
The Viper was just observing the interaction as he smiled a bit to himself. It was kind of comforting to see that despite so much time passing, nothing much had changed. His fellow Primordials were still the same as they’d been so many eras ago.
Inmortau was very much still an ass, but the Malefic Viper also understood he had to be that way. He had to be the strong and uncompromising leader, for if he compromised, the entire Risen race would likely have been wiped out by now, his faction crumbling a long time ago.
As an undead faction, the Risen had spent a long time before reaching a point where they weren’t outright hated by the entire multiverse. However, even now, the most common approach was to just tolerate their existence. “Neutral” was the gentlest term most would use when asked about their relationship with the Risen, which did leave much to be desired. It also meant that for the longest time, if a faction could take advantage of the Risen, they would gladly do so, as they knew the chance of backlash was low. What would the Risen do? Attack them? That sounded like a great way to make the Risen look like the evil faction many already suspected them of being.
Inmortau’s solution to this was to be a faction with a soft but strong approach to politics. They preferred soft politics where they made friends and proved themselves valuable allies, but should the other party try and take too much advantage, they would show they were not to be pushed around. Using his status as a Primordial, the Blightfather could squash most unfounded rumors easily and often even justify when he mobilized his armies to wipe out those who went too far.
Of course, some factions remained adamant that the Risen was an evil faction, the Holy Church included. The reality was that concepts such as good and evil didn’t particularly matter to Primordials, as such things were simply too feeble. Sentiment changed with time, and what was considered evil in one place and time could be considered a necessity in another.
This meant that the thing that mattered the most to gods were their own Path, their own personal rules, and the relationships they forged with their peers. And the relationship between the twelve Primordials could honestly only be described as one big dysfunctional family that spent more time arguing than actually getting along. However, when needed, they would still come together. They’d done so in the past, and ancient accords still persisted, forcing such a balance to be sustained.
Back on Earth, Miranda kept herself busy. The work never stopped, though it had gotten better. At least things had gotten into a pretty good routine by now, and most things had calmed down. The influx of slaves had stopped, and toward the end of the influx, it had gotten a lot easier to deal with. Many of the prior groups of freed slaves took the jobs of integrating new ones, easing the transition significantly.
The construction projects were also going according to schedule. Hank, who had now fully transitioned to just being an overseer of sorts, had even evolved to C-grade despite having been stuck at peak D-grade for a bit.
What’s more, the gift the Golden Road Emporium had given Jake during his Chosen ceremony had truly come through. Having projections of high-grade experts teach Earthlings was a brilliant way to get lacking know-how and experience that was otherwise impossible to obtain for a newly integrated universe. From the conversations Miranda had with these experts, they were also surprised at the rate at which the Earthlings and even the new slaves who had arrived there learned and improved.
All in all, things were going great, which was something she hadn’t expected to say. This even left her more time to focus on her class, as she, for too long, had only focused on her profession. While she did still practice her class a bit while sleeping due to her Verdant Dream skill, it wasn’t like she slept much anymore, and the time she spent in the Verdant Dream didn’t really give her any levels; she just practiced to more easily go out hunting later. So, in conclusion, it was definitely great that things had finally calmed down and were running smoothly.
However, there was one thing that saddened her a bit. Many of the people from Haven who’d originally been their backbone were beginning to meet their limits. As an example, Neil’s party, formerly the strongest five-person group in Haven, was no longer working together due to the disparity of their members. Eleanor, the archer, Levi, the magic swordsman, and Christen, their tank, had all gotten stuck in D-grade and seemed to have hit a wall. They also had simply lost their motivation to keep going and had settled down for calmer lives, most of them just focusing on their professions now.
It was a fate many shared. When the hectic barrage of constant action and more than one system event every single year stopped, many stopped with these things. When the world didn’t push them forward, and the external pressure was gone, they simply didn’t have the internal motivation to keep going. For many, the only reason they had even progressed and gotten powerful was to stay alive and protect those they cared about, and when the immediate danger was over, they finally had time to stop and reevaluate their lives, ultimately deciding they had done enough.
But luckily, there were many to step up and take their places, too, and some of the old talents did still grow. Especially now that the Nevermore Tokens had gotten more abundant than ever, and thousands had already traveled to the World Wonder to participate. Most didn’t participate on the Leaderboards or even meet the requirements to do so, being too high level, but to spend a few decades there was still a massive gain and a great way to get some more levels. Even high-level C-grade beasts had gone.
Miranda herself honestly hadn’t planned on really going, but she began to feel like she had to. As a witch, Nevermore wasn’t particularly suited for her, but the Verdant Witches had recently begun to teach her great methods for dungeon diving, the implications of their actions obvious.
And considering things were calming down on Earth, she soon didn’t have any excuse to not go… Besides, it wasn’t like she couldn’t just leave and go back there again, as she didn’t qualify for the Leaderboards, right?
Yeah, it wasn’t like she actually wanted to go and test out some of her new and improved skills in a proper environment. Not at all.
Chapter 55
Test of Character Fully Tested
If you stood before a rail with a switch in front of you that could change the path of an oncoming train onto another path, with five people tied to the train’s original path and only one on the…
Okay, everyone knows the trolley problem. Apparently, the Wyrmgod did, too, as Jake was presented with one that was pretty much a magical carbon copy where he could choose who to teleport away from an incoming monster horde. As for Jake’s choice?
Why not just kill the monsters?
Which is what he did.
Jake didn’t know if the system didn’t like that or something, as, in the very next story, Jake was presented with a very similar scenario. However, this time, he was on a whole other planet operating a teleporter where he could either choose to let the story run its course or teleport a bigger group if he personally intervened.
As for Jake’s choice? He did nothing.
See, he didn’t really see this as a legitimate trolley problem, the same as back on Earth. He felt it was more like one of those modified ones, where you were told that the one person you killed to save five actually had the cure to cancer in their head, and you were now a monster who had doomed millions to die due to your decision. Of course, Jake didn’t know this was the case, but he also didn’t know it wasn’t, so he just let the character who was in charge of teleporting do his thing, assuming he knew better.
Ultimately, Jake didn’t really see why he should care much which group was saved either way. He didn’t know who they were, and if he was to make a purely utilitarian judgment call, he lacked the information to do that. What if the smaller group he saved were all C-grades with good future prospects, while the larger group was filled with F- and E-grades who had a better chance of randomly becoming Transcendents than reaching D-grade?
So, with all that in mind, Jake remained passive rather than directly changing the situation to something he thought was better. If he could reveal his true power to save people, he saw no reason not to, but if he had to make these weird moral choices, he chose not to engage. He was aware that in itself was a choice, but it was one he stuck to.
There was one of these trolley-problem stories where Jake did choose what to do. He was riding a space shuttle that was crashing toward a star, and he had to decide who could evacuate in escape pods. In this one, Jake himself was the captain, who had been flying the spaceship when he fucked up and hit an asteroid before the story began.
With only fifteen escape pods but twenty-five people on board, ten people had to stay and die. During the story, he had gotten to know all the other crew members as they tried to repair the spaceship before it was too late, and when the final choice of who to escape appeared, Jake knew what to do as he took control.
“Well, to say we’re fucked is an understatement… Only fifteen of us are getting out of here, which means ten will have to stay,” Jake said. “So, let me first ask first… any volunteers for dying?” He then did something none of the crew members had expected: raised his hand.
Jake had learned something during this story he genuinely hadn’t known. That entire thing where the captain goes down with his ship was not a thing in the multiverse. In fact, it tended to be the opposite. Seeing as the captain was often the person with the highest level, he would often be evacuated first as he held more value. A high-level captain could have more value than the entire spaceship itself, so to lose both was just unnecessary in the eyes of most.
However, Jake didn’t agree with this. In his eyes, the captain—himself, in this case—had been the one who had fucked up. He had hit an asteroid due to his own incompetence and gotten at least nine others killed, so of course, he had to take responsibility or at least stay on the spaceship till the very end and try to fix the situation he had created.
Anyway, Jake volunteering to go down with the ship also made five others decide to stay behind. As they did this, Jake suddenly got an odd feeling. He stared at one of the crew members who had decided to leave, and got the feeling she needed to stay… so he made that happen.
“The remaining four who stay will be decided by chance to make it fair,” Jake said, proceeding to use his Bloodline to entirely rig the game of chance to make that one specific woman stay with him and the other volunteers.
She looked devastated when she realized she had lost, but still accepted the result as fifteen people took the escape pods, leaving ten of them in a spaceship that couldn’t fly, barreling toward a star. They still had a bit less than two days till impact, but things were definitely less than stellar.
Jake learned a day later, when they were getting closer to the star, why his guts had told him to keep the female crew member who was one of the engineers. With excitement, she ran to him and said she had found a potential solution to allow them to survive. By blowing up one of the engines, they could take advantage of a storm of space mana that was approaching, pushing them just enough to enter orbit around the star, then blow up a second engine to set free them from orbit again and send them flying home.
It was super risky and straight out of some very unrealistic space movie, but Jake was entirely on board. This was one of the stories where Jake’s own power didn’t do shit. Something he had noticed was a general theme. Either power didn’t matter at all, as everything else was just too damn powerful compared to any C-grade, or everyone was an E- or D-grade. In fact, Jake hadn’t seen a single C-grade even after doing more than fifty of the stories.
Anyway, in a twist that wasn’t super surprising, the engineer’s plan turned out to work, and in the epilogue, Jake saw his captain character and the rest of the crew miraculously survive. It did also show his character getting scolded by his superiors for not escaping in a pod, but ultimately, he was still hailed as a hero along with the engineer for “great decision making.”
The lesson Jake learned from this test was to always trust his gut… and that rigging a game of chance was acceptable as long as it was for the greater good. Ah, who was he kidding?
Jake hadn’t learned shit during all these damn tests of his character or whatever. The novelty had long worn off, and while he did his best to get engaged in the stories, some of them proving genuinely interesting due to the setting, his attention span was waning. Most of them just weren’t that engaging or interesting to him, and he felt like he was wasting time. Moreover, most stories took over a week, and at that point, he had already spent over a year inside the Challenge Dungeon with nothing to show for it.
Stories from there just felt slower and slower. Soon Jake had done sixty, then seventy, eighty, ninety… Jake had no idea when it would end until, finally, he reached story number one hundred. This story in itself didn’t have anything hugely enjoyable about it, but as he entered it, Jake felt like he was finally approaching the end of his suffering.
Once the story was done and the princess was not saved from a dragon that just turned out to have a massive crush on her, he finally went somewhere that wasn’t just another random story.
Jake found himself within a white void—on a side note, the system really liked white voids for these kinds of situations—where nothing happened for a few seconds. Finally, a system message appeared before him, making him sigh in relief.
Congratulations! You have completed the Test of Character Challenge Dungeon!
Evaluating performance…
Thank fucking Villy, Jake thought to himself. For a second there, he’d been afraid the white void was just the setup for another story or something. Jake was sure happy to finally be out and was already looking forward to the next Challenge Dungeon, as it could only be better than this.
But, before that, he still needed his final evaluation. One that he had to admit he was kind of nervous about. It had to be reiterated, but Jake had no idea how he had done or what he had even been tested on. So, with bated breath, he waited until a Grand Achievement suddenly popped up in front of him.
Grand Achievement earned: Successfully completed the Test of Character with an excellent performance. You have shown a consistent sense of justice and character, and a high level of self-belief. However, you also displayed a lack of dedication to certain Paths and a lack of interest in understanding stories, even when doing so could prove beneficial to you personally. Throughout the test, you have shown no growth or regression in your character but remained wholly consistent. 49,108 Nevermore Points earned. Due to completing a Grand Achievement, you will receive a 10% multiplier to all Nevermore Points at the final calculation.
Reading it over carefully, Jake could honestly only shrug. It said he had an excellent performance, so that was good, right? Also, at least it called him consistent, even if it also recognized he was bored. But was it really that bad to not show dedication toward something that he really didn’t like doing? Sure, it said he didn’t display interest even when doing so could have benefitted him, but it wasn’t like missing some benefits here and there would ruin him. He could always just make up for any losses elsewhere while doing something he actually found engaging.
