94 Ikelos' Fate II
With Dix gone, the effects of his curse was gone as well and that meant the Spartoi summoned by Nox were back at full strength and fighting who they were supposed too, which resulted in a quick end to the Ikelos Familia.
"So what now?" Ikelos asked with without a single change in his bored smirk despite the gruesome end of his familia.
"Now . . . I'll be testing a little something." Nox calmly responded with a smirk.
'Let's see how calm you are once you realize what's happening.' He thought.
From Nox's right sleeve, countless black thorns sprung and wrapped around Ikelos' body.
"Oi, oi! What a rough treatment of a god!" Ikelos mocked.
"Teachings of Pain." Nox enunciated and the Garden of agony activated its ability and a little strain appeared in the god's expression, just a little.
"Now its torture? But while this might work on a child, a god's mind is not so weak you know?" Ikelos continued to mock.
"We shall see." Nox calmly replied.
Ikelos' expression suddenly changed.
"Impossible!" He shouted before forcefully activating his Arcanum, his divine power.
A massive backlash traveled through the thorns, cracking the magic item and turning Nox's organs into mush while riddling his bones with cracks.
Blood ran from underneath Nox's armor and pooled on the ground beneath him but he only smirked beneath his mask despite the haunting pain on his body and soul as the Philosopher's Stone worked overtime to keep him alive.
As for why he was smirking, Ikelos failed in his activation or rather, his Arcanum was sealed the moment he summoned forth its power.
Nox had already learned how to effectively curse a god from analyzing Hephaestus' cursed eye, today, he added a sliver of Divine Energy from the Philosopher's stone and used that very principle to enhance the enslaving curse of the Garden of Agony to trap a god without letting them neither use their divine power or even run to heaven.
"You're mine now." Was the last think Ikelos heard before his conscience was forcefully shut down.
'The Garden of Agony is at its limit. I wanted to do this to Ares as well but that will require either making another Garden or thinking up a more effective method of restraining gods.' Nox considered.
'For now though, I am satisfied with just having Ikelos to experiment on.' He thought to himself.
Truthfully, Nox wanted to toss away the Loki Familia Expedition and just study godhood with all his focus and he had about two months to do it without taking into account any time he had to spend making sure Filvis did nothing stupid.
Nox's mastery over spacetime magic and his possession of Divine Energy allowed him to create a single stable extradimensional room, not only stable and capable of supporting life, but it even had the Item Box functions of changing the flow of time, thus extending his two months to six as the room's current limit was three times speed.
His plan was to use the time provided by this to run several experiments on Ikelos. Attempting to figure out the nature of godhood among many other things.
First, Nox attemtped to use his Soulsucker spell on the defenceless god but even bound and sealed, his Divine Soul, despite lacking the support of a Divine Body, was still far to powerful to be extracted.
Still, Nox managed to draw out a steady flow of DIvine Energy. The only problem was that his body and soul could not handle Divine Energy for two three reasons.
He lacked three critical things to wield Divine Energy to its full potential without self destructing. A Divine Soul, a Divine Body but most importantly, an Arcanum, a Godly Authority to channel and control the Divine Energy properly.
Nox however, had another idea. He remembered the Hestia Knife from the Light Novels and Anime. It was an item with a Falna and some measure of divine power.
It was then that it occurred to him that with the proper materials and using Ikelos' divine energy and blood, he might be able to create an unprecedented set of gear, on a level far surpassing that of the mortal realm so he got right down to work.
After three months of hard work, the results were quite unsatisfactory.
Nox had succeeded in creating the material he wished to create Divine Orichalcum but he could not work it unfortunately.
He took base orichalcum, melted it down, and started trying to add stuff like powdered Ikelos bone, cooling it Ikelos' blood and so on and so forth.
After countless experiments and using a lot of Divine Energy to catalyze the process, he finally succeeded in creating plenty of material. Like said before though, it found it impossible to work with and in was quite impossible to try and mould it before it was fully formed. Nox had tried it and it somehow ruined the material.
Still he was making progress.
He had already determined his Arcana Craft Spell was only hampering the process as it lacked the qualifications to work divine material like Nox had created so he resorted to doing everything by hand which slowed down the testing process.
Nox was readying a final attempt before he put the process aside for later though.
He created a force with enchanted orichalcum and mithril tools before refining fuel out of Ikelos' blood, fat and Divine Energy to create a fire that would allow him to process the Divine Orichalcum. This was his final trump card and he dearly hoped it would work.
Fortunately, it did But just readying and perfecting the process took huge amounts of time and he had ran out of time before the expedition to forge his new gear.
Still, he further refined the Divine Orichalcum and processed it into Ingots for ease of use later when he actually had the time to work.
When Nox checked his status after this whole process, he noticed a very small yet extremely significant change.
The Craftmaster: S development ability had disappeared and in its place was another skill with the same main name but a very important distinction . . .
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