Skills

"Why are you like this?" Hestia asked with a long suffering sigh.

"What, I'm right aren't I?" I insisted.

"Well um yes? But still!" she said angrily.

"See it's fine then and besides you have to admit that it would be kinda funny to hear about a bunch of thieves missing fingers." I said with a chuckle.

With that my little construction project came to a close for the moment and I could finally throw myself into the middle floors before the monster rex to raise my stats. Obviously I got a good deal of smoke from killing the orcs to make my new workshop but as it was from level one monsters the amount was not optimal.-

While I was busy with all this Bell was dealing with his own issues in the form of his new porter, Liliruca Arde. She was a feisty Pallum girl that had been tagging along with Bell as a porter for a while now but her familia was starting to cause problems for Bell due to it's nature. She was a member of the Soma familia and despite Soma wine being the most expensive and popular in the city the familia environment itself was a rotten place.-

For starters the "initiation" into the familia involved a newbie being given a single shot of true wine brewed by the god himself. The problem came in the form of that stuff being hyper addictive and thus sent the person who drank it into a frenzy for more and thus indenturing them to the familia by debt. Lili's parents had effectively sold her into the familia to pay for some of their debt and she had her own to pay and well the familia didn't exactly want it's members to be debt free since that means less profit for them, you get how this story is going.-

One thing led to another and now Lili's problems had become Bells because he's just the nicest person ever. I had bluntly told Bell that he could just get Soma to release her from the familia to fix this whole thing but the issue was getting to the god as he was weaseled away deep in his familia manor. I suppose that I should also clarify that Soma wasn't the reason for his familia being such a bad place. See the god used to be a bright and happy person before he came down from heaven.-

He became disillusioned however when he discovered that mortals that drank his wine lost themselves to it and thus couldn't enjoy it as he intended. From then on he ceased to care about all else beyond creating the divine wine endlessly. His familias captain hijacked the familia and from there turned it into the toxic place it is today because Soma lacked the will to intervein or stop it. In a way I pitied the god as he had effectively lost the will to live and was merely existing at this point.-

Bells not the most outside the box thinker though and instead of just having Hestia force her way in, because nobody is stupid enough to attack a god and thus stop her, he is effectively waging a shadow war on them until they are forced to consider releasing Lili. Now I could step up as the captain of the familia to solve this issue real easy like but this was his mistake to learn from and unless the Soma familia goes too far with it i'll keep it hands off.-

"Why do I have to deal with you people when Bells the one causing trouble?" I asked with a sigh when three soma members ambushed me in the dungeon.

"Nothing personal but you gotta take the fall as his captain." one of the dudes said with a slimy smile.

"Thankfully your souls are all sinful or this might get annoying, burn away for your transgressions and try to be better people in your next life okay?" I said calmly before releasing a wave of flame at them.

The adventurers screamed as the flames consumed them and I yawned in boredom while casually watching their souls get purged. As I had found out the boost in stats I got from killing each sinful soul was actually terrible at barely three or four per kill. In addition it turns out my apathy towards murder was in fact a side effect of my skill. I know this because even thinking about killing an innocent soul makes me feel sick. Yay for morally questionable mind altering skills! Sarcasm aside this at least let me understand how the falna worked a bit better when it comes to skills and magics.-

Skills weren't just one off buffs that showed up and that was that but rather were very literal representations of you in some way. My skills minus [soul gaze] were each a sort of amplified representation of my own will, fears, hopes and experiences. [Vessel of sin] was from my fear that I'd stop being me and would turn into a monster as I grew stronger. The skill now basically turned me into a technically "righteous" existence as a result. That unfortunately meant that Bell was practically doom driven due to his two skills. [Liaris Freese] was all about growing based on the strength of his emotions.-

[Argonaut] on the other hand was apparently all about enduring suffering to achieve success. It was a match made in hell if I ever saw one. Bell had literally caused himself to be built for hardship since these things on a falna were very much permanent. He could get Hestia to strip his falna from him but if any god gave him another those skills would be there waiting. They were a part of his very existence now for better or worse and every other adventurer with a skill was in the same boat. Heavy thoughts aside I delved until i started getting swarmed by level two monsters on the sixteenth floor .-

Sidestep, smash, backstep, slash I moved in a dance of aggression and death within the minotaurs never stopping for more than a moment after each swing of my weapon. Blood fell on the stone floor from me as well as my foes.

"SLICK!"

A rough stone blade draws across my back cutting it open shallowly but with a small flex of my will the cut seals shut almost immediately. I had gotten quite good at flesh mending with my technique in battle but I had hard limits. One such limit was that anything deeper than a millimeter took too long and too much focus to deal with. Another was that i couldn't heal burns or disfigurement during a fight either. Finally was that anything I mended like this leaves a scar on me permanently. I could of course remove the scars later with my technique if I wished but I preferred to keep them as a reminder of my flaws that I needed to correct.