Netori: Stealing The Hero's Party!

Chapter 902: The Best Version Of Herself

With Moeria acclimating to her new body with deep rest, everyone had left her inside the Iron Trident after a quick session with Amosdia, where the devil had cast a magical illusion on Mono’s likeness so that she couldn’t be seen naked, nor could Moeria do anything intimate with her body.

It would be hours before Helga’s advisor comes back to her senses, for her soul was at war with unfamiliar flesh. Albeit their assimilation was only a matter of time. Already being made aware of these changes, Athenia was sitting on her throne with her eyes tightly shut. Before she could lend Moeria a link to her divine mind with which the advisor could find Nerva’s lair, there was something the goddess had to figure out.

A distraction for Nerva. One, she was forced to give the whole of her branching mind. At first, few ideas came to the goddess’s head, but then she stumbled upon something just beyond the threshold of what was considered acceptable according to divine law. It wasn’t the council gods that worried her; instead, it was Razor.

’The war has begun, as a full-fledged god, I should be able to bend some rules. Besides, he said it himself, he can’t take part in the war as a demi-god.’ Unbeknownst to her, Razor was already aware of what she was trying to do. However, this time, unlike numerous others, he was willing to look the other way for as long as it was done to oppose Nerva.

His daughter still lived in this world after all, and if Nerva kills everyone and the world alongside them, then she would be amongst the needless victims. For his own life, he had little concern, or that of the gods for that matter. At this point, the demi-god of time simply hoped for the hero to put an end to both the goddess of calamity, the war against the demon lord, and this cycle of holy wars one after the other.

With Athenia working towards those very goals, she was afforded some leniency. Making use of that privilege, she scanned through her divine senses–herself, in the infinite stretch of time and timelines. In some, she was dead, in others, she was a tyrant herself. In many, she saw herself as a human instead of the divine, and in them she was happy right alongside a man who appeared strangely thin and skeletal like Murdok.

Tearing herself away from those moments, she tried not to think of changing her fate so drastically. It was tempting, of course, abandoning all divinity, the power, and the seat, all for a life without any care of troubles. Yet those fantasies were better left as just that, fantasies.

An hour breezed by, and there seemed to be no shortage of worlds suffering troubles of their own. Sometimes, one god was ruling over the rest, while in the other, that same god was long dead. There were a few instances where she found another peering back at her through the divine sense. Quickly hiding away from each other’s presence, the goddess left the other to search for whatever they were searching for in a discreet way.

At last, when Athenia found what, or rather who, she was looking for, her consciousness merged with her own. Staring at her like a reflection in the moonlit pond, the best version of herself, the most benevolent version of herself, whispered.

"Are you lost, Athenia?"

"Sounds like you’ve been waiting for me." Keeping her eyes closed, Athenia sharpened her view to better grasp the features of herself from this...different world. The entire space was clad in curtains of blinding white with golden holdbacks keeping them drawn. Blinding as was the light, her own gaze was just as piercing; darkness oozed out of them to balance the scales, and sure enough, in just a few seconds, Athenia’s gaze landed on herself.

Sitting on a throne taller than a giant, the goddess Athenia of another world smiled back at herself. Wearing clothes akin to her mother Aphrodite’s depiction, she appeared as bountiful as the spring.

"Father told me that you’d come looking," raising an eyebrow at her, Athenia listened closely. "Not my father, of course, but yours. We call him the recordkeeper. Nobody’s as thorough as him, and thanks to his diligence, I’ve ascended as the sole god of Atlaris."

"And how did you manage that?" Expecting a tale of bloodshed, Athenia braced her heart, but to her surprise, the goddess’s answer was far simpler.

"I showed the mortals benevolence, I helped them when they needed, and eventually their faith in the incompetent gods whittled and died. Leaving just me to watch over my world." Leaning forward, her body stretched like a spring, but her frame remained as it was. The altered prescriptive and differing laws of another world were already causing strain on Athenia. "I did not have to kill a single soul. They simply died because of their own incompetence to reward the mortals who praised them. Hubris? Lack of foresight? You can call it whatever you deem fit, but in the end, it was their folly, and that’s how I became the sole Mother of Atlaris."

Countless questions popped into Athenia’s head, but with her senses slowly getting scrambled by the strain of projecting her mind outside of her prison, the goddess couldn’t afford to waste time on what wasn’t necessary. Thus, with a renewed sense of urgency, Athenia looked into the goddess’s eyes and asked.

"I need your help to deal with Nerva."

"Nerva? Is that the goddess detailed in the letter?" Tilting her head, the other world’s goddess reached by her thigh and pulled out a piece of parchment from the edge of her white thighs. "The goddess of Calamity, this says. She sounds foul, I’m glad we had no such monster."

Extending the letter towards the small portal of vision through which Athenia was looking, the goddess showed her the letter–the letter from her father, meant for her and not the version of Athenia in whose care the parchment was left.

"I apologize for looking into your letter, but your father told me to hold onto this without any explanation. Of course, I got curious after centuries and decided to check it." With a sigh, the goddess added. "I doubt he would mind, though. The very first sentence is about how he knew that I would open it up."

Reading that very line, Athenia couldn’t help but chuckle.

"Of course he knew..." Laughing to herself, the goddess spent a few moments reading the letter and then discussing how exactly the best version of Athenia was going to help her counterpart. A plan and some mischief, that’s all they needed. Sure, some rules were about to be broken, but what point is there in following rules when doing so would spell certain death?

And with that in mind, the goddess with their shared minds conjured a plan that even a goddess Nerva could potentially be tricked with. The only thing left? To find her lair and shatter her cocky overconfidence once and for all!