A Meeting Long Overdue

Originally, the plan had been for Loki to bring all of this up, and then for Freya to support her, hopefully swaying enough of their fellow deities with their reasoning. Instead of following that arrangement, however, Freya took it upon herself to bring up the punishment that Isaac was aiming for, causing the trickster goddess to momentarily grow silent.

There were many reasons as to why Freya chose to do this, the least important of which was to antagonize Ishtar, who had always been an annoying eyesore. Although she and her familia amounted to nothing more than starving dogs barking at a behemoth, they were still a nuisance.

Besides that, she intended to support her fellow disguised-as-a-mortal deity. There was nothing to be gained from exposing Isaac - at least for now - so as they were seemingly in similar situations, to build positive rapport with him was preferable. Should Isaac get executed for his crimes, then during the destruction of his mortal vessel, it would become apparent what his true identity was. This would bring up far more questions than answers, and cause a lot of public unrest and chaos.

Of course, Freya was also personally of the opinion that any mortal who contributed this heavily to Orario, by eliminating a deity that was a part of Evilus, shouldn't be treated too harshly.

Lastly, there was the main reason for her decision - curiosity. Why had Isaac acted the way that he did? Why had he killed a deity in broad daylight? Why had he turned himself in? And why did he gun for this particular punishment? For each of these questions, Freya could make various guesses - but that was all that they were, just guesses. She couldn't be certain of anything, and wanted to know for sure. The easiest way to accomplish this would be to ask the man in question directly, but that would be her last resort. For now, she intended to let all of this play out and to observe from the sidelines. She would try to solve these mysteries on her own, as it would be more fun that way.

Shortly after Freya's words had settled in, Ishtar snorted in annoyance and shook her head.

"I don't like the direction this is going. I'm fully convinced that we should eliminate this child. Nothing you say can or will change my mind. These rules weren't just decided upon on a whim, so we shouldn't bend or outright ignore them."

Disdain sparkled in Freya's eyes for a moment. For her fellow goddess of beauty to espouse such righteous ideals sounded so utterly ironic that it simply appeared pathetic. If it weren't for the fact that Ishtar wanted to butt heads with her, she would never have supported laws or rules. After all, it was an open secret that she broke far too many of them on a daily basis.

With a contemplative look on his face, Set interjected before the two's bickering could grow any worse.

"I do see reason in Freya's proposal. And Ishtar, while I would ordinarily agree with following the rules that were set, in this case, this isn't the wisest move. These rules are completely outdated, as they didn't take into account that some of our fellow deities might create antagonistic organizations that would aim to harm the majority of us and our children. Petbe was an enemy of Orario, that's undeniable. Getting rid of her should have been our job, but she was disposed of by Loki's kid. Mr. Blackshaw was in a situation where he would undoubtedly have died if he hadn't taken her life, so normally, I would chalk this up to self defense. But, well…"

Seeing the curious and inquiring gazes of his fellow deities, Set finally spilled the beans, with a reluctant sigh.

"I'm sure you'll all be hearing about this in the coming days, but Petbe's manor in Daedalus Street has been razed to the ground. It happened before she was sent back up to Heaven. There was clearly enough time in between for Mr. Blackshaw to deliver her to us and gain protection from her remaining forces. There was absolutely no need to expose himself to such dangers, so I'd bet my life savings on this being his plan all along. At some point, he found out that Petbe's familia belonged to Evilus, which he had some kind of vendetta against - just like far too many people do. Then, he overpowered the few guards at her manor and captured her. The exploding corpses were responsible for the manor's eventual destruction. After this, he waited for Petbe's children to assemble and surround him, then he killed her and did away with the now powerless forces in one fell swoop. It was a trap for them from the very beginning, and, regarding our fellow deity, was premeditated murder. That is exactly why I don't think that we can just let him go free. But, as he ultimately still did Orario a great service, I agree with what Freya proposed."

Realization flashed in Demeter's eyes, and she nodded to herself. What Set said did indeed make a lot of sense. If his information was correct, that is - which most likely was the case.

"So the child wanted to take revenge, and obediently turned himself in after he achieved it, intending to face the consequences of his actions with his head raised high. Truly respectable!"

Judging that it was his time to speak up, as a proposal had been presented and sufficiently discussed, Ouranos cleared his throat.

"Ahem. Who is in favour of sentencing Mr. Blackshaw to a month of solitary confinement and publicizing his deeds?"

As she was the one who had brought it up in the first place, nobody batted an eye when Freya raised her hand nigh immediately.

"I am."

She was quickly followed by Loki, who seemed to be a bit reluctant. Sentencing a child of her familia definitely didn't feel good, no matter how relatively light of a punishment it might be.

"I am as well."

In quick succession, Hephaestus, Demeter and Set also raised their hands. The last one to give a positive response was Ganesha, whose jubilant laughter and repeated self-introductions got completely ignored.

The only one who hadn't cast their vote yet was Ishtar, whose beautiful face was distorted by her clear annoyance and anger.

"I know it won't make a difference, but just for the record: I am not in favour of this. I think we're making a mistake."

Ouranos only gave her a short nod in response.

"Noted."

The goddess of beauty almost popped a vein at the old man's lack of a real reaction, but she was well aware that he acted as the neutral party here - there was no use in going against him. Not only was he far more powerful, he also didn't even give himself the right to vote on any of the matters that needed to be discussed.

Now that all of the votes were in, Ouranos looked at all of the assembled deities and announced the verdict.

"The Guild shall be responsible for Mr. Blackshaw's solitary imprisonment, and for publicizing the news to Orario's residents. I thank you all for your time. Dismissed."

-----

Close to an hour after the deities' meeting had ended, Isaac sat in an entirely dark room underground. To get here, he had been led many flights of stairs further down from his quite cozy and luxurious holding cell. Then finally, he had arrived here - a place that nobody in their right mind would want to stay at.

The walls and the door were made out of adamantite and there was no light source at all, neither was there a bed or any other furniture. There were only two openings besides the one that had brought him here. One was a small hole in the ground of one of the room's corners, only big enough to fit bodily excrements, the other one led to a tiny hoistway. It was far from big enough to fit a body, and was used to deliver trays of food at fixed times.

When he had been brought here, Isaac had been informed that there would be one meal a day, which would be accompanied by enough water to survive. It would arrive via this small elevator shaft every day at 1 p.m., right around lunchtime, and the tray had to be placed back in the hoistway before 1:30 p.m., as that was when it would automatically be brought back up. Isaac had only nodded and smiled at this explanation, his calmness unsettling the poor employee who had led him here.

Once he was left alone, he immediately noticed a clear difference from before - contrary to his holding cell, this solitary confinement cell wasn't protected by the magical formation that encompassed the entire Pantheon. Or rather, it usually was, but this part of it had been 'mysteriously' turned off. A person not adept at sensing mana would have a very hard time noticing this, and considering that his punishment was to not interact with any other sentient beings for the entirety of his stay - or at least, that was what it was on paper - nobody would ever find out about this 'malfunction'.

A small smirk played across Isaac's lips as he waited for a handful of minutes, sitting silently in the darkness and conversing with Ais all the while.

Finally, the door leading to his cell opened, and what greeted him was both the dim light of the hallway and a figure wearing a black cloak. The area around their hood was unnaturally dark, and he could clearly sense that this was achieved by manipulating mana. Still, this wasn't enough to keep him from seeing the true face of who it was that he had just met.

'Oh? Interesting…'

Slightly taken aback by what he saw, Isaac raised an eyebrow. He truly hadn't expected for this… being… to literally only be a skeleton. Judging by its ability to use Magic, if he used his old world's classifications, it should be either a Skeleton Mage or a Lich - but he highly doubted that either of these terms were actually in use in this world.

A bit startled at having quite obviously been seen through, the skeleton paused in its tracks. Moments later, an epicene, disembodied voice came from its mouth. As it had no actual vocal chords, or anything else besides its bones, this phenomenon was quite… intriguing.

"My name is Fels. It is nice to finally make your acquaintance, Mr. Blackshaw. I have been sent here by Lord Ouranos."

While blatantly sizing up Fels, Isaac responded with a harmless smile. His research senses were already tingling - this was the first time that he had ever met a sentient, undead being after all. If he hadn't known that he would sooner or later meet more of them - although that would probably be in another world rather than this one - then he would have found it far more difficult to repress the urge of taking poor Fels apart bone by bone, to sate his curiosity. This was despite them obviously being allies.

"Hi there, Fels. I assume I'm being invited over?"

A cold shiver ran down the skeleton's spine, and it hurriedly nodded. Fels felt like it was being stared at by a mad predator and honestly had the urge to just turn on their heels and run away. Still, they had a job to do, so they couldn't just chicken out.

"Yes. Please follow me."

After Isaac got up and followed Fels into the hallway, it didn't take long until they arrived at a dead end. Nothing but a plain stone wall was in front of them. Because he could already guess where this was going, Isaac focused on his senses a little more than usual and observed his skeleton guide's actions.

Just as expected, Fels raised their right hand to a specific spot on the wall and injected mana into it, causing the wall to silently retract into the ceiling, opening up a new path in the process. The two encountered the same kind of door two more times before they finally reached Ouranos' throne room. By then, Isaac had already figured out how exactly these doors worked.

It was a simple concept. Anyone could open them, as long as they injected mana into them. Well, if they did it at the right spot, that is. If any other part of the door was the target, then they could still inject mana into it, but nothing would happen.

If it were to be visualized as a regular door, it would be a door almost entirely made up of keyholes. The mana was the key, and it could be inserted into every single keyhole - but there was only one which would allow the door to open.

The spot to inject mana into varied from door to door, but by using his Eyes of Hermes to sense the insides of the doors with his mana, Isaac could see exactly which spots to target. Because of this, he also noticed that there was a certain mechanism - if mana was injected into the wrong spot too many times, then something would happen. He couldn't be sure exactly what it would be, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that it should be some sort of alarm coupled with a complete lockdown of the respective door, maybe even the entire underground complex that they were in.

The throne room was rather large, and there were eight secret doors leading to it, two from each direction. The only light sources were four raised braziers, which were placed all around the stone throne in the center. Upon seeing who had arrived, the white-haired elderly man sitting on it smiled slightly and nodded.

"So we've finally met, Mr. Blackshaw."

By the time that Isaac replied with a polite nod of his own, Fels had already arrived behind Ouranos' throne, seemingly in an effort to use their god as a protective barrier.

"I agree. This has been a long time coming, Lord Ouranos."

Before he had even left his new cell, Isaac had made a somewhat risky decision - he had chosen to abstain from blurring parts of his existence a little, which would have allowed him to hide the fact that he was now a god. He did hide all possible visual clues, however, by shifting the positions of some of his veins. There were two reasons for his choice. First of all, he wanted to figure out whether or not primordial gods could detect deities in some way, or if they could see souls. Secondly, if that were to be the case, then he wanted to test how Ouranos would react. It wasn't too likely to come to this, however.

The former of these needed to be determined at some point, as Isaac would undoubtedly meet other primordial gods in the future. The only one that he knew a little bit about from the first few DanMachi novels was the old man in front of him, Ouranos, and he seemed to be leagues ahead of regular deities in both wisdom and integrity - which honestly wasn't too difficult to achieve. Still, there was no better candidate for this experiment, at least for now.

Quickly, Isaac made a judgement based on the lack of any particular reaction or surprise on the old man's calm face.

'Either he hasn't noticed it, or he has chosen to not say anything about it.'

"It has been indeed. I invited you here to talk about multiple matters. Firstly, I would like to know why you acted the way that you did. I can only speculate, so could you enlighten me?"

With a slight smile, Isaac produced a chair out of nowhere and sat down - this would probably take a while. He didn't even need to hide this ability of his at all here, as it had already been exposed in the recording that he had submitted to the Guild.

Isaac started with explaining what exactly had exposed these Remnants of Evilus, or rather, these members of the Black Blade. Then, he followed up by recounting the events that had transpired so far, filling in any gaps of knowledge that Ouranos might have had. When he mentioned Váli, the old man's expression markedly darkened. Lastly, he finally laid out his plan.

"As our enemy has long since taken note of me because they are cautious of my rapid growth, I needed to make them believe that, for a time, I would be standing still. That's exactly why I aimed to be imprisoned. And yes, as you undoubtedly already guessed, I do have a way of entering the dungeon from within my cell, completely undetected. This ruse will only work if I continue growing in strength while the enemy is convinced that I'm temporarily out of the picture, after all."

There was simply no need to hide this ability from Ouranos at all. While Isaac believed that the old primordial god would smuggle him into the dungeon secretly somehow if he asked for it, that was a waste of time and effort. So even though his ability to teleport was now somewhat exposed to the old man, that would only raise Isaac's importance in his eyes. After all, he had already shown two seemingly space-related Skills or Magics - that was undoubtedly extremely rare, if not unprecedented. It would make him a valuable asset.

Intrigue flashed across Ouranos' eyes for a moment, then he nodded, with a somewhat concerned look on his face.

"Thank you for sharing this with me. In the future, I may have some missions for you. Aside from that… Váli is a problem. But not one that you should need to worry about. Here in the Lower World, he shouldn't cause too much of a ruckus. His forces will be the real headache, so grow stronger, just like you planned."

What the old man chose to avoid mentioning was that Váli wasn't someone that he could personally handle at all. The only way to describe him was 'the strongest primordial god' - he was simply a monster that nobody else wanted to deal with, as there was only one possible outcome when facing him: defeat. But what use would this knowledge be to a simple but brilliant mortal man? It would only cause unnecessary fear.

"Alright."

After Isaac's affirmation, Ouranos could finally bring up the next point on his agenda.

"I heard that you've recently met with Ray, a leader of the Xenos. She seems to be quite smitten with you herself, but not all Xenos share her opinion, which caused some conflicts. As you most definitely already figured out, the Xenos and I have a cooperative relationship. Because of this, I would like to know your opinion about them."

Just to be safe, Isaac had made it clear to Ray that him being a god wasn't to be shared with anybody. The reason for this was that he didn't want the Hermes Familia to know about it. Or anyone else who might be in contact with the Xenos, for that matter.

Seemingly without giving the matter much thought, Isaac shrugged.

"They are nothing special. In my eyes, there is no difference between them and the so-called sentient races. In fact, dividing beings by their race or species is - in this case - pointless, because to me, only their behaviour matters. So if a Xenos treats me well, I will reciprocate in kind. If a Xenos does the opposite, so will I."

Slightly taken aback for a moment, Ouranos soon gave a relieved nod of approval.

"This kind of mindset is rarely seen, but I am in favour of it. Now that I'm certain that there is no need to worry, I can tell you this: I plan to get the Xenos accepted by the sentient races, as they - like you said - are just like them. Ganesha and Hermes have been helping me on that front. This will take a long, long time, as first of all, people's fears of monsters and their irrational reactions to the Xenos need to be overcome. Would you help me out as well?"

Although the elderly man was smiling at him warmly and expectantly, Isaac could only shake his head after a few moments of deliberation. He just simply didn't care about this particular matter, and he didn't think he needed to put up a fake heroic, selfless facade right now. It would surely lead to Ouranos getting a bit disappointed, but Isaac preferred to make things relatively clear from the get-go.

"Only if the price is right. In all honesty, it sounds like a pain. You are right, it shouldn't be impossible, but it will surely take a long time and lots of patience. Which I don't have, at least for this matter. I expect that I would grow incredibly annoyed by and frustrated with how pathetic and disgusting quite a few people are, and I might even go on a killing spree in response to these feelings. I will definitely not oppose your efforts, and I will help out on the side if I stumble across some nice Xenos in need. But anything aside from that would require special remuneration."

With a bit of a frown, Ouranos responded with a question.

"What kind of remuneration?"

Isaac could only shrug helplessly.

"Well, anything that interests me. I don't care much for valis or wealth, as it is far too easy to earn. But anything out of the ordinary should do. Knowledge is always appreciated."

After a few moments of silence, Ouranos finally nodded.

"Very well, should I ever have a need for you in my Xenos-related plans, I will prepare sufficient payment."

Inwardly, the elderly man could only ruefully shake his head, as he was saddened by the thought that a young man such as this was already so disillusioned with the world and had become what other people would call 'heartless'. Ouranos couldn't blame him, but it would have been far easier and preferable for his plans if Isaac had been a selfless martyr. This wasn't just because those were always the easiest ones to take advantage of.

'Oh well, this is still better than nothing.'

"Those were all the topics that I wanted to discuss for now. Your primary goal should be to prepare for Váli's forces, everything else can wait."

With a glance at his oddly timid subordinate, Ouranos continued.

"Fels, give Mr. Blackshaw an 'Occulus' and bring him back to his cell."

Once the young man had risen from his seat which then mysteriously disappeared, Ouranos added.

"The Occulus will enable someone to interact with the person who holds its twin. Both audio and visuals can be transmitted. If there is ever a need, just inject your mind into it to contact Fels. Now then, until we meet again."

Both the mysterious young man and the oddly vigorous old man gave each other a knowing smile and a respectful nod, then Isaac followed behind Fels and disappeared from the throne room.

As soon as he was alone, Ouranos released a pent-up sigh and helplessly shook his head.

'With so many pressing issues at hand, I couldn't ask him for help with 'that matter'. Being forced to stay right here is sometimes quite the bother…'

Suddenly, the old man couldn't help but chuckle a little.

'I'm certain that he barely told me anything. But if I called him audacious for doing this, I'd be the pot calling the kettle black.'