Necromancer Dreams of Mechs Chapter 60: Chapter 66

Read chapter 60 of Necromancer Dreams of Mechs by Magic on NovelPedia.

Chapter 60: Festivus is Not The Best of Us "Relax, Allen," Seraphine said, leaning across the table until her face was inches from mine. "We are just a couple. Have a drink. Forget the dead for an hour." "I can't," I said, watching a group of men cheer at a nearby table. "Look at them. They’re all so... happy. It’s like they don't even know the world is breaking. They need a God of this ignorant bliss. A God of... I don't know, Cheer and Merriment." I took a breath, my gamer brain reaching for a name to ground the absurdity of the moment. "I’d call him... Festivus. The God of the Great Pour. Festivus for the rest of us." As the name left my lips, the world didn't just hitch. It shattered. The color in the room intensified until it was blinding. The red of the wine became liquid fire; the gold of the lanterns turned into a screaming yellow. The sound of the crowd rose to a deafening, discordant roar that felt like a drill against my skull. Then, the floor vanished. I fell through a crack in the fabric of space itself. I didn't hit grass or darkness. THUMP. [Divinity From the Grave] [Part 2: The First ‘Good’ One - Name the first Good god to bring them into creation.] The roar died instantly as the information was fed into my head. I was sitting in a chair—a hard, plastic, uncomfortable chair that felt like it belonged in a school detention room. I blinked, clearing the spots from my eyes. I wasn't in the Gilded Flagon. I was in a small, sterile, white room. The walls were featureless, illuminated by a flickering, clinical fluorescent light that hummed with a maddening, low-frequency drone. It looked like an interrogation room from a low-budget cop show. Across the small metal table sat a man. He wore a suit that was two sizes too small, the fabric straining over a frame that felt "uncanny"—as if he were wearing a human skin that didn't quite fit the skeleton beneath. His hair was slicked back with oily precision, and his face was fixed in a permanent sneer of utter contempt. This was Festivus. And he didn't look like he had a single drop of cheer in his body. "Allen Voss," he said, his voice like a razor scraping over dry bone. "The 'Grand Seeker.' The little boy playing with dollies made of meat." "Where am I?" I asked, my voice trembling despite my stats. "Where’s Seraphine?" "She’s exactly where she belongs—in the dream," Festivus said, leaning forward. His eyes were like cold, dead marbles. "You, however, have been making a bit too much noise. Emptying the hangar? Optimizing the architecture? You think you're winning, don't you?" "I'm surviving," I snapped, trying to summon my now Level 289 confidence. But it was gone. In this room, I felt like a Level 0 nothing. "Surviving is a temporary state, Allen," the God sneered. He tapped a long, pale finger on the metal table. "You think you can just resurrect your way out of failure? You think those 'Fleshed Squires' are a solution?" He let out a short, dry laugh that sounded like a cough. "Listen closely, little necromancer. The 'System' is tired of your glitches. It doesn't matter how many levels you grind or how many 'perfect runs' you attempt. In the near future, you are going to lose someone. Someone truly important. And no amount of bone-knitting or soul-binding is going to bring them back. They will be gone. Truly, finally, deleted." The news sent a chill through me, but I didn't look away. I narrowed my eyes. If everything I had learned was correct, this was my reality now. I may not have built the hands that shaped it, but I could bend the events. I was the voice that gave this arrogant prick the platform to make that threat in the first place. “Just how far do you think I will go?” I asked. An anger that had been simmering since I learned about my AI ‘Brother’s’ plan to numb me into a weapon finally began to boil over. I would not bend. I would feel every loss, and I would deal with it. I refused to let it just wash over me like data. “Does it even matter? What you will o