Ch.9090. Crappy Tios

The result of my battle with Partios was, needless to say, a perfect victory.

《Y-you trash…!》

《Don’t use such strong words. It makes you look weak.》

By actively leveraging the advantage gained through military superiority in the battle between our forces, I succeeded in crushing the evil god of violence, Partios, through sheer difference in power.

And so, after completely overwhelming Partios and securing victory, I thoroughly subdued him as he lay in a near-death, shattered state.

And now, with Partios subdued like a pinned insect specimen, I looked down at him with undisguised contempt, as if mocking him.

《Don’t… don’t look at me with those eyes!》

‘Really pathetic… truly Patheticos.’

Even in this situation, this so-called evil god was still trying to preserve his dignity. Watching his miserable state, I briefly reminisced about the days when Dungeon & Adventure was all the rage.

Partios, the evil god of violence, was famously the weakest among the seven evil gods.

More precisely, when following the good deity route or neutral deity route where you face evil gods as final bosses, Partios was treated, without exaggeration, as “Patheticos” himself.

He was one of the Seven Deadly Sin Demon Lords, essentially gods among demons, the highest tier of the underworld’s inhabitants.

While the human-form avatar of Leviathan, the demon lord of envy, became a meme, Partios wasn’t treated as pathetic for this reason alone.

When you defeat the evil gods through proper procedures, these bosses fight with patterns and forms befitting their divine attributes.

For example, the evil god of pleasure would spam irresistible charm effects and various mental debuffs, while the evil god of misfortune had a passive ability that fixed probability checks to minimum values, making him considered one of the worst ORPG bosses.

In contrast, Partios, the evil god of violence, was just physically strong without any special gimmicks. Realistically, this was nothing to end-game players loaded with buffs and special abilities.

Especially his pattern of splitting himself into an army was considered the weakest pattern of all, viewed merely as DPS time, which further cemented Partios’s reputation as pathetic.

Players even popularized the “Partios 2-turn challenge,” where they would trigger his split condition in turn 1, then pour all their damage into him in turn 2 to defeat him in just two turns.

Anyway, despite his terrible track record, I couldn’t know how things would play out in reality, so I decided not to let my guard down and gave it my all… resulting in this pitiful sight.

《Urgh, kill me!》

‘…Ugh. A lump of flesh making such noises is just disgusting.’

Whether he was being sincere or not, I couldn’t tell…

If it were a half-naked woman, that might be different, but hearing a mere lump of flesh make such sounds filled me with rage and the sudden desire to just kill it.

And well, I had no intention of letting it live anyway.

《Sure, I’ll kill you. Farewell, Partios.》

《Eh, wai—》

—CRUNCH!

After shattering its divine body with a massive blood-red cross-shaped bludgeon, I immediately extended my power to absorb the components that had constituted its divine form.

If I had to describe it, it was similar to dismantling a massive marine mammal like a whale.

The vast amount of faith that made up its divine body—comparable to fat and flesh—and the divinity that held this faith together like tough skin.

I worked meticulously to minimize losses while simultaneously dismembering, breaking down, and devouring everything without reservation, aiming for the most crucial part of a god’s corpse.

Needless to say, this was the divine attribute, often compared to internal organs, brain, or bones in a corpse.

Starting with fragments of minor beast-related divine attributes, then blood and war attributes. Looking further, I found fragments of the wrath attribute, and of course, the core violence attribute couldn’t be missed.

As I deliciously absorbed these divine attributes—packed together like a heaping bowl of rice—and gradually tamed them by infusing them with my energy, I could instinctively feel something.

‘…This is, as expected, my limit.’

After absorbing one or two more divine attributes, I would reach the point where I could no longer absorb any more.

No, to be precise, it wasn’t that I couldn’t absorb more, but rather that I shouldn’t.

In other words, if I recklessly continued absorbing divine attributes, there was a high probability that my ego would be suppressed and lost under their weight.

Indeed, I had already been directly and indirectly influenced by the divine attributes I’d collected, and I could feel them gradually becoming my identity.

However, this had only been a change in tendency, not in my fundamental essence… but if I lost my ego due to excessive absorption, I would become merely a component maintaining the world.

‘…I’ll have to give up hunting divine attributes.’

Reluctantly abandoning my planned divine attribute hunt left me feeling a bit depressed, so I decided to check my current status for a change of mood…

Ma-Duk

Race :: God

Type :: Personality-based Thought Complex

Occupation :: Evil God (Middle)

Attributes

Divinity :: High

Divine Attribute :: Middle

Faith :: Middle

Interference Capability :: High

Believers :: 39,823

Souls (Believers) :: 65,211

Souls (Sinners) :: 29,343

Divine Attributes

Vengeance: 100% (Middle) Vampire: 100% (Middle) Blood: 87.1% (Middle) Violence: 78.3% (Middle) Wrath: 76.9% (Middle) Wolf: 41.7% (Middle) Bear: 11.3% (Low) War: 11.2% (Low) Bull: 6.1% (Low) Boar: 1.2% (Low)

Skills

God’s Eye (Middle), Bestow Blessing (Middle), Bestow Divine Magic (Middle), Divine Punishment (Middle), Bestow Miracle (Middle), Create Divine Artifact (2/3), Designate Apostle (2/3)

‘Oh.’

The status I checked merely for a change of mood had transformed to a completely different dimension from before, more than enough to fulfill its purpose of lifting my spirits.

Looking at the divine attributes first, I had five attributes at over 50% and two at 100%. This composition of divine attributes was comparable to the end-game specs of most gods.

The fact that both my divinity and interference capability had risen to high levels was also excellent news.

Divinity refers to a god’s divine power. In other words, a god with high-level divinity possesses power comparable to a high-ranking god, regardless of their actual rank.

Moreover, the interference capability stat tends to decrease for higher-ranking gods, so the fact that mine had increased despite gaining power comparable to a high-ranking god was particularly pleasing.

But above all, what I considered the greatest gain from this affair was something else entirely.

It was the souls of sinners—specifically, the former believers of the evil god of violence—numbering almost 30,000.

Most of them were bandits who had used the power of the evil god of violence to plunder during their lifetime, or criminals who had reluctantly served Partios due to unstable afterlives.

They weren’t even mid-tier forces anywhere, let alone properly trained soldiers.

At best, they were armed mobs, thieves, or con artists in their past lives.

Originally, I had planned to convert all these approximately 30,000 souls into hounds of vengeance or blood wolves, treating them like garbage to be cleaned up…

‘But, but just in case…’

The nagging possibility that even one person might have been wrongfully condemned bothered me, so relying on my last remnants of humanity, I decided to examine all the newly acquired souls.

And predictably, the result was…

‘…Sigh. Yes, this is reality.’

Out of nearly 30,000 souls, not a single one met the criteria I had arbitrarily set.

I hadn’t demanded saintly conditions.

Even someone who acted rationally to the point of appearing cold-hearted, roughly on par with an apocalypse protagonist, would have been given another chance by me.

I even deliberately excluded their earthly deeds, which might have been influenced by real-world problems, and looked only at their actions after entering the divine realm, a world without death.

Acting in self-interest but not crossing certain moral lines—

I thought that even just that much would be too harsh to condemn someone to eternal wolf-hood.

‘…’

But the ancient madness was beyond imagination.

Their way of thinking shattered all the faith in rationality that I had retained as a vestige of modern humanity.

In short, mercy was unnecessary.

Soon after, 30,000 new beasts joined the divine realm.

It was summer.