GREED: ALL FOR WHAT?

Ode watched as the three of them left. He was feeling jittery earlier but now he was downcast. As the supreme celestial of the divine plane and the god King of the Virut Pantheon, the fate of the gods rests on his shoulders, literally and figuratively.

He returned to his throne silently to think about his future. He sat down on his opulent throne and sighed.

"I am doomed." He felt like a mortal who just found out that he is in debt or going bankrupt. The absurdity of it would have made him laugh if it were not true. But it is true.

The future of the gods was not looking good. It had not been looking good for a while, but it was getting worse and worse each day. Any person with at least an average intelligence will be able to see that they were doomed. He had at least that much intelligence, so he knew they were doomed. But what to do about that?

Mortal wisdom says when someone is at zero, there's no more place to go but up. Of course, they are wrong about that, there are other directions apart from up. There is still a negative direction.

For example, the gods were approaching null. He is going bankrupt, he is losing all his years of effort and wealth, and it won't end there, he will lose his life too. Has it been mentioned that he doesn't even have the option to fall?

"What to do now? How can I get out of this?"

Miracles were not forthcoming, so he began to review his options. He could beg the racial council, but that was unlikely to work. There could be no truce, only defeat, or victory. He shook his head at that thought. He couldn't even relinquish his seat as a supreme. He would have to fall in battle to another celestial god and be absorbed to achieve that. Only the strongest get to be supreme, if they fall, then they will be used to empower the new and stronger supreme.

Even if he could safely retire, what next? What would he do with his life? He is God King Ode, Celestial god of battle, and has been for a long time. He can't return to being a mortal, a true God cannot fall and revert to being a mortal. What would he do as a mortal? Own a farm and pray for rain? To which gods will he even pray? Which god will still be alive after this era? None.

There is another option that could solve his problem but he didn't want to consider it. He agonized about the decision for weeks before finally deciding to go ahead with it.

The allied forces were strangely quiet, they didn't storm the divine plane during the period he was in thought. They were totally content with moping up the scattered believers. It was like they were giving him time to make his decision.

Ode opened his eyes after weeks of contemplation.

"Push as come to shove. They have pushed me to this."

Then he willed the divine plane to activate the "Last day's protocol."

At the same time within the Main Plane.

The son of legend smiled. His mysterious eyes twinkled. 'Third hidden agenda achieved. Warn off interference. Chase away the Origin gods.'

His plan was going well. If he had his way, the allied forces won't need to fight a disadvantageous battle within the divine plane. He just had to wait and he would reap the fruits of his patience.

He waited patiently and was able to sense the changes in fate the moment when Ode decided to activate the last day's protocol.

'Fouth hidden agenda achieved. Create the opportunity for the birth of the Child of the plane. I wonder who it will be.'

The thing about those with the Sage's Eye is that they must often have their way. The alliance army won't need to fight a disadvantageous battle. No. There will be a disadvantageous battle but it won't be fought by the army. It will be fought by another group and the reward will be greater than a simple liberation of the plane.

Back At the Ghastorix Family Battle Academy

Soverick and the eye-to-body coordination training.

This training consisted of two major parts, eyes adaptation and body precision training. For eyes adaptation, the challenges consisted of training his night vision and learning to walk upside down. Learning to walk upside down was simple enough, he just had to adapt to seeing the world inverted.

But of course, it wasn't that simple. He had to move through an obstacle course while upside down. Instead of his legs, he used his hands to move and jump. Jumping was tricky to achieve with the hand especially when one had to judge the distance and height with an inverted vision.

The best sense to rely on will be the divine sense, not the eyes, but it will require adaptation. It is difficult enough to walk with an inverted vision but with an organ that someone grew up with. The divine sense is another ball game entirely.

This particular challenge forced him to adapt to a new 3D spatial awareness system and the obstacle course made sure he was proficient at it. It had to become muscle memory before he could pass it.

Night vision on the other hand required him to control the muscles of his eyes to achieve constant maximum light infiltration. It turns out the eyes of the battle sage monkeys can see more than it lets on, it just has to be prodded into giving up their hidden potential. Usually, all mana entities will be able to see in the dark, that is if they rely on their eyes at all. He found the training redundant, why train a defective organ when the best it can achieve cannot compare to the divine sense? He still completed the challenge even though he had reservations. It was easy for him to achieve too so he didn't mind too much.

What he minded a lot was the body precision training. He had to juggle, learn how to properly throw knives, learn archery, javelin throwing, ax throwing, catching, and slashing skills. Juggling started easy with just 3 objects and continued to scale up in difficulty until he had to juggle 30 objects. The time he had to spend doing it also increased from 5 minutes to an hour. Like always the training pushed for a high level of proficiency in the activity and not just the ability to do it.

Knife and ax throwing were similar but also different. They both have a sharp edge that must make contact with the target but they have different forms and weight distribution so the techniques of throwing them are different. He had to be able to determine their center of gravity by just holding them and exploiting the imbalance in weight distribution to achieve an accurate throw. Simple right?

Not simple. If the challenge had been for him to throw it in a straight line then it would have been simple but he had to make curves and avoid obstacles. So not simple.

Things became even more difficult when he had to throw his knives against moving targets. At first, the targets were flat boards that moved sideways albeit slowly, then they evolved to small round objects thrown at him at high speed.

But like always he overcame the initial discomfort and adapted quickly to what was required of him.

Archery was simply a breeze for him. No matter how difficult they tried to make it for him, he passed through the obstacles and completed the challenge in a day. At first, the distance between him and the target increased, then the wind increased, then he had to shoot multiple arrows at once, then each arrow had a different target.

That last one was a bit complicated, he had to shoot multiple arrows at targets with varying distances between them, and the wind was also blowing. It started from two and then increased to five arrows at once but his powerful mind found the calculations needed for accurate targeting too easy.

The rest of the body precision challenge was a breeze. Javelin's throwing was pretty easy to overcome. The challenge lay in the efficient use of his muscular power and the proper way to direct the muscles. Unlike the footwork challenges where he only trained the muscles of his legs, for javelin throwing he had to add the muscles of his back and arms in synchronized choreography to achieve precision. It wasn't difficult because he had already overcome the use of default pathways for movement. Catching was the opposite of throwing. He had to receive objects thrown at him at high speeds and tricky angles with his hands.

In the slashing skill training, he must use a thin and sharp blade to strike thrown objects. The edge had to cut the objects in half as they are airborne. He needed to ascertain the accurate slashing distance, a slight deviation could lead to him missing the balls entirely. The size of the balls was reduced to increase the difficulty of actually hitting them. They became as small as peanuts and their speed increased to absurd levels to catch him off guard.

He finished all the challenges of the eye and body coordination regimen in 5 weeks and by the time he was done, he felt his body had changed again. It was like a new world of body mechanics was open to him.