Chapter II: My Darling Diva Daughter
The meeting with King Gandhilis went well enough that he agreed to attend the next meeting of the allied nations.
Even though the Phrase and the mutants were long gone, it was still important to keep having international conferences. If anything, it was more important than ever, since we wanted to bridge the cultural divide between the eastern and western continents.
We needed to ensure that the countries on the eastern continent familiarized themselves with Gollems and magical technology, while at the same time getting the countries of the western continent more familiar with general magic. To do that, the heads of state all needed to come to a mutual understanding.
As an example of broadening this kind of cultural awareness, I did a magical aptitude test on King Gandhilis and Princess Cordelia. Maybe it was because they were from a mining nation, but they both had the potential for Earth magic within them. After a little guidance from Leen, they managed to cast an elementary spell called [Stone Bullet]. Earth magic was fairly simplistic, but it had a lot of practical applications when it came to stuff like mining.
I gave them a beginner’s manual for Earth magic, and everything went pretty smoothly as far as first international meetings could go. If only it were always so simple...
Usually, I ended up getting caught up in weird situations where I had to solve problems for the countries before they’d talk to me... Though honestly, you could probably consider the whole Ark thing a weird enough situation on its own.
The wicked devout... Whoever or whatever they were, I wasn’t about to let them bring chaos to this fledgling world. Not when peace was right on our doorstep.
After saying our goodbyes to the royals of Gandhilis, we headed back to Balmung and made preparations to return to Brunhild. I could’ve simply used [Gate] to go back, but Arcia wanted to cook for us.
“Look, father! Look! Eat up!”
“R-Right, I get it! I’ll eat!”
The Balmung dining room was filled to the brim with food.
There’s way too much here... She made enough for a goddamn imperial feast... I can’t eat this, not on my own... Why didn’t I bring Yae?! This is what she does best!
“Oh my, this is delicious. What do you call it, Arcia?”
“That’s apple and cheese wrapped in prosciutto, Mother Leen. The ham itself is from a Bloodboar.”
Wait, Bloodboars are those giant white pigs you find in snowy places... Never realized they tasted this good...
Lu chomped down a mouthful of our daughter’s cooking.
“Interesting... The sweet-and-sour elements of the apple mix very well with the saltiness from the ham... I’m very impressed.”
“Oh? I never thought you’d praise me so highly, mother. How kind of you,” Arcia said with a smug look on her face, as if to quietly communicate her personal feelings of victory.
Please don’t put me in a tough spot again...
“However...if I were you, I’d add lemon juice or black pepper as the final accent. It falls just short of perfection, I’m afraid.”
“Urgh! O-Obviously I knew that!”
Welp, looks like Lu struck right back... She’s got a real smug look on her face now too... You really are mother and daughter, you know that?
There was too much food in front of me. Enough to overwhelm my sense of sight and smell, let alone taste. I attempted to take a little respite from the feast, turning to Arcia with a burning question.
“Where’s Quun?”
“She’s in the ship’s hangar with the other two, taking apart the Gollem they recovered. I tried calling them in, but they didn’t really reply...”
Ugh... Once they’re focused on something, they just won’t quit. Get in here and help me, guys... Please... There’s way too much here for me to eat on my own! Wait, I can just go grab them. Yeah, I’m not fleeing the feast! I’ll come back!
I walked into the hangar and saw Doc Babylon, Elluka, and Quun all sitting on the floor, staring at something. They had frustrated looks on their faces. Dismembered and discarded Gollem parts were strewn about the room, apparently exhausted of any possible intel.
I peeked over at what they were all staring at. It was a red octahedron about the size of a baseball.
“What’s this?”
“The G-Cube we recovered from the Gollem... It’s clearly an operational power source, but it’s different from a normal Gollem’s composition.”
“Different how?”
“Most of the parts are from standard combat Gollems...but the Q-Crystal is from a soldat.”
I didn’t really understand what they were getting at. What made it so different from a normal modded Gollem?
“It’s a Gollem, yet at the same time...it’s not. An unknown entity created by combining factors that shouldn’t be combined.”
“And look at this red thing! It functions like a G-Cube, that much I’ve surmised...but it’s a complete enigma. Not even my [Analyze] works on it.”
Doc Babylon held up the octahedron to the light. It was a bloodred, translucent gem, as far as I could tell. Still, the fact that [Analyze] hadn’t worked on it was concerning...
Let me try my divine sight... Oh... Now that’s interesting.
“Don’t handle that without protection. There are traces of the wicked god’s divinity leaking out of it. It’s nothing too dangerous, but it might make you ill.”
Doc Babylon immediately dropped the octahedron, letting it fall to the hangar floor with a clatter.
“The wicked god? Didn’t you kill that?”
“Yeah, I did. But apparently there’s some residue left or something.”
Both Elluka and Doc Babylon raised their eyebrows at that, turning to me and asking about the residue in unison.
I didn’t fully understand it, so I simply repeated Arcia’s analogy about the tofu dregs.
“I see... Well, that certainly explains it. Residue’s a rather fitting term.”
“Even if it’s just pulp, it’s true that it comes from the same source as the wicked god itself... We can’t afford to take any chances.”
NEET god or not, the power of a god was still beyond mortal comprehension. Regular human beings couldn’t do a thing in the face of such power. And this world had been abandoned by the gods, which meant its protection rested solely on my shoulders.
Though saying it had been abandoned by the gods wasn’t quite accurate. After all, I was technically a god, and I was this place’s caretaker now. I sure didn’t know where to begin when it came to world management, however.
I was still a rookie in the god business, so I could only hope that my seniors would give me a little help. But I knew I wouldn’t get much help from Karen or Moroha, so I figured I had to turn to someone higher up the totem pole. The only two I could really think of were God Almighty himself or Granny Tokie. Unfortunately, Granny Tokie had been pretty damn busy lately, so I’d seen neither hide nor hair of her. Given how busy she was with the timequake and my kids coming through, I felt the need to not burden her further. And with that in mind, I decided to go straight to the top...to God Almighty. It’d just be a matter of paying him a visit and getting some answers.
“Even if this is the work of a wicked god, an engineer still had to have put this patchwork Gollem together.”
“I’d usually only expect this kind of work from the five great gollemancers...but the Professor is still in Panaches, and the Maestro is a misanthrope...so I doubt they had anything to do with it.”
The five great gollemancers, huh...? That’s those two, then Elluka, then the Seekers...so it can’t be any of those guys.
The other one was the witch-king of Isengard, who was dead.
“From what I understand, the wicked devout are something of an organization. You might even call them a cult. With that in mind, would it be too unreasonable for them to induct an impressionable genius into their ranks?”
Ugh... I don’t like the sound of that.
I couldn’t help but grumble upon hearing Quun’s suggestion. These people might have been worshipers of the wicked god who just got taken over...or they could’ve just been regular people being manipulated by something the wicked god ended up leaving behind.
“We don’t have much intel, so it’s pointless to speculate. If they’re planning to mess things up, I’ll just mess them up first.”
“Heh heh heh... That’s our father for you...”
“That’s all I have to say about this right now. So, let’s go eat, okay? Arcia’s been waiting for you.”
I made the three technologists get up, then followed them until I saw them enter the dining area. After that, I picked up the red octahedron, sealed it away with [Prison], and tossed it into [Storage].
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