The crisp laughter Venti let out still left a faint echo in the corners of the marble ceiling of the Tower of Babel. The witty rebuttal wrapped in self-deprecating humor successfully broke the absolute tension that had previously choked the neck of every entity in the room.
Along with the fading of the blue glow from the Divine Mirror signifying the disconnection with Ouranos, the sacred atmosphere of the Denatus instantly crumbled. The invisible gavel had been struck. The gods' emergency meeting discussing the string of apocalypses, from the roar of the Black Dragon to the labyrinth-destroying earthquake, was officially closed.
The remaining silence was soon replaced by the hum of relieved sighs and the shifting of wooden chairs. The gods and goddesses—immortal beings who essentially could never stand lingering in a binding, stiff atmosphere—immediately dropped their formal postures. The high-level meeting transitioned very smoothly into a casual banquet typical of heaven's inhabitants.
Without needing a cue, the deities began to move from their seats. They approached the round tables at the edges of the hall which had been prepared beforehand with dozens of bottles of the highest quality wine by Guild staff. The sound of clinking golden goblets and crystal glasses toasting each other began to be heard, accompanied by free laughter and casual chat. The wild gossip about the world anomalies that a few minutes ago felt like the shadow of death, was now discussed with a much lighter tone, as if the apocalypse that had just lurked was merely an interesting premise from a street theater performance.
Venti chose not to move immediately. He remained sitting leaning back in his chair with one leg crossed casually over the other knee. His slender fingers slowly twirled the stem of a crystal glass, letting the reddish liquid inside ripple softly. A cheerful smile, typical of a bard god with no burdens in life, was etched flawlessly on his face.
Several gods from smaller Familias passed near his chair. They laughed, raised their glasses, and patted Venti's shoulder familiarly, praising his quick tongue in firmly refuting the baseless accusations thrown by Hermes earlier. Venti responded to each greeting with a crisp laugh, a playful wink, and light jokes about how a bard's best inspiration always comes when he is cornered.
Everything looked very natural. His acting as an innocent, weak god who fortunately had a good sense of humor, went very perfectly.
However, behind that pair of emerald-green eyes as bright as a spring meadow, the God of Wind's mind worked at a speed surpassing the rage of a storm.
Inside his mental fortress impenetrable by any eyes, Venti paid no attention at all to the continuation of the Denatus or the boisterousness of the party around him.
Venti's focus right now was locked completely on the figure of a feather-hatted god sitting leaning back not far across the room.
Something is wrong, Venti thought with a freezing sharpness. The instinct that has guided me through thousands of years is now ringing loudly, catching an oddity that is extremely subtle yet highly fatal.
While continuing to maintain his sweet smile toward the crowd, Venti's brain began to dissect the verbal confrontation that had just occurred second by second. He replayed every word Hermes spoke, the pressing intonation of his tone, to the Messenger God's body language when pointing at him in front of the eyes of Orario's gods.
Venti knew Hermes's character very well. Not from their brief interactions in Orario, but from the sea of this world's canon memories firmly imprinted in his memory.
In Venti's memory, Hermes was one of the most cunning, manipulative, and sly masterminds in the entire Gekai. The Messenger God was the true embodiment of a master observer. He was a shadow director who loved to set the stage, arrange obstacles, and adjust the spotlights from afar so his chosen heroes could shine brightly.
The way he would later manipulate Bell Cranel's growth, to his multi-layered secret involvement in the Xenos crisis in the future; it all showed one highly absolute and undeniable psychological pattern.
Hermes much preferred to play backstage, pulling puppet strings from behind the curtain of darkness, rather than dancing himself on the brightly lit front stage.
If the god who just accused me was the real Hermes, Hermes the trickster who always calculates thousands of possibilities... he would never 'reveal his cards' that fast and recklessly, Venti analyzed with extremely cold logical calculation.
The accusation in the middle of the Denatus earlier was too frontal. Too transparent. Too careless. By directly exposing his conspiracy theories in front of all the gods, he actually told me plainly that he was exaggerating his suspicions, while confirming that he was targeting me.
Venti lowered his gaze slightly, staring at the ripples of red wine in his crystal glass that reflected the shadow of his own eyes.
A skilled hunter will never let his prey know they are being hunted, Venti thought, his eyes narrowing critically. If Hermes really wanted to uncover my secret and skin me alive, his modus operandi should be much subtler and dirtier.
In a rational scenario, if Hermes suspected Venti, the Messenger God would never fire his first bullet with his own hands.
The real Hermes would surely bribe a low-class familia god—perhaps a poor god from a small Familia—to act as a pawn. He would order that pawn god to pretend to be drunk, interrupt a conversation, and ask those sharp questions to Venti randomly.
While the pawn carried out his task, Hermes himself would surely sit quietly in the most inconspicuous corner of the room. He would wear a perfect bored face, while his pair of orange eyes would observe every inch of micro-expression on Venti's face. He would measure Venti's breathing rate, the direction of his glances, or the slightest tremor in his fingers when answering those sudden questions.
Hermes would verify his suspicions through risk-free observation.
Then, why did he discard all that caution? Why did he risk shooting directly tonight as if he had no patience at all?
Venti's analysis did not stop there. Besides the confrontation style which was very contrary to his character profile, there was one other fatal oddity that made Venti increasingly certain that something had intervened in, or more accurately hacked, the sanity of Hermes's mind tonight. A terrifying variable that should have made a god as cunning as Hermes think ten thousand times over before opening his mouth.
That variable was Alfia.
Hermes was one of the few who truly knew the horrors of Orario's golden era. He saw with his own eyes the era of absolute tyrannical rule of the Zeus and Hera Familia. More than anyone else, Hermes knew exactly what kind of monster resided behind Alfia's beautiful and fragile form.
Silence was not someone who could be provoked cheaply. Orario's bloody history had recorded in red ink that the anger of a Hera Familia executive could sink the hopes of any familia to the bottom of hell.
Even if Alfia was currently known to be severely ill due to her life-eating curse, and even if she only stayed inside a dull old church, the pure destructive power she possessed remained a dormant natural disaster.
Hermes highly respected, and more accurately, highly feared the remnants of that era.
Challenging and publicly provoking the Barbatos Familia inside the Denatus room, right when he knew for sure that Alfia was sheltering under the banner of that family, was purely an act of suicide. Both politically, and literally.
If this news leaked and Alfia heard that Hermes openly tried to corner her new family—accusing her of being a labyrinth destroyer while she was painstakingly caring for her heavily pregnant younger sister—the silver-haired woman would not hesitate for a single second. Death was the thing Alfia feared least. The woman would break into the Hermes Familia headquarters and level the entire building into a sea of dust at the break of dawn, without caring about Guild rules.
Hermes's action earlier was completely illogical, Venti concluded in the silence of his mind which spun like a tornado. Hermes couldn't possibly be that stupid. He values the lives of his children and his pawns' positions on the Orario chessboard very much. He must have been forced... or more precisely, his mental defenses and sanity were brutally breached tonight.
To confirm his deduction, Venti's gaze slowly shifted from his wine glass. He ignored the gods and goddesses laughing and celebrating the end of the meeting around him. With movements so subtle as to not attract attention, the Archon sharpened his focus across the room, directing it right at Hermes's table.
The Messenger God no longer radiated his sharp charisma. Hermes appeared slouched limply in his chair, having placed his beloved feather hat on the table. He was repeatedly massaging his temples with his index fingers. His facial expression implied a faint yet thick confusion. His orange eyes blinked several times, staring blankly into the air as if he had just woken up from a strong hypnosis. He looked like someone who just realized the fatal stupidity of the words that had just slipped off his tongue a few minutes ago.
And then, Venti's green eyes shifted. Just a few inches to the right of where Hermes sat.
Sitting side-by-side with the Messenger God, radiating the absolute elegance of an aristocrat, was a god with shoulder-length blonde hair. His hair was tied neatly in a noble style. His face was adorned with a charmingly gentle smile. He wore a dark purple shirt embroidered with silk threads, harmoniously combined with a pristine white cloak.
In his sturdy yet elegant hand, he held a slender crystal glass. He occasionally swirled the glass with a slow rhythm, letting the light from the Tower of Babel's lamps reflect on the surface of his drink.
Dionysus.
Seeing who happened—or more precisely, intentionally—sat next to Hermes tonight, Venti suddenly understood.
Of course, thought Venti.
Dionysus. The god who always displayed the face of a relaxed nobleman full of empathy and friendliness, yet his true figure was Enyo—the City Destroyer. He was the mastermind behind the scenes, far darker, far crazier, and thousands of times more dangerous than all the Evilus radical groups out there combined.
Without blinking, Venti focused his sharp gaze on a crystal glass resting right on the table, exactly in front of Hermes. Hermes's fingers were still not far from the glass. Unlike the wine distributed by the Tower of Babel staff, which was a clear ruby red, the liquid inside Hermes's goblet radiated a slightly thicker purple hue. Its viscosity looked different, moving with an unnatural smoothness.
That was no ordinary wine. Most likely, it was Divine Wine created by Dionysus himself.
Venti took a slow breath. God Soma might be greatly feared because the quality of his wine could make human minds lose their sanity and force them to become addicted slaves. However, within the circle of immortal entities, Dionysus's wine resided on a completely different hierarchical level.
Dionysus's wine was not designed to intoxicate humans. That drink was concocted with heavenly mysteries to work in a far subtler, more intoxicating, and deadlier way on fellow divine entities. The wine was pure essence and catalyst for 'madness'.
The thick purple drink possessed the ability to strip away all forms of mental defense filters, tear down walls of caution, and uproot a person's paranoia down to its roots. Anyone who chugged that wine—even a rational and secretive master of manipulation like Hermes—would be forced by instinct to voice what was truly spinning at the bottom of their head without the slightest filter. All the observations, sharp deductions, and suspicions that Hermes usually locked tightly in the "notebook" in his head, simply spilled out of his mouth tonight uncontrollably.
Dionysus drugged Hermes, Venti formulated his final conclusion with a sense of horror mixed with awe at the cruelty of the blonde god's methods. Dionysus used Hermes as a talking puppet to test me.
Dionysus intentionally gave his wine to Hermes, letting the Messenger God hurl those suicidal accusations at Venti, while Dionysus himself could sit pretty as an observer without having to dirty his hands.
But... what drove him? Why did Dionysus, the mastermind busy weaving threads of Orario's destruction from the darkness, suddenly feel the need to divert his attention to the figure of a bard god?
An extremely faint smirk—so subtle it was impossible for anyone in the room to notice—slowly etched itself at the corner of Venti's lips. His green eyes flashed with the glint of absolute understanding.
A four-dimensional chess game on the gods' table, Venti tilted his head slightly, sipping his crystal glass again to hide his smile.
Hermes tried to uncover my secret in front of the gods because his wild observer instincts could not be fooled. He accused me under the influence of wine that stripped his sanity. On the other hand, Dionysus utilized Hermes's pure instincts to find out the truth about me, while protecting his own secrets from the shadows.
Venti set his glass down. He continued to maintain a cheerful expression, looking around the hall filled with the laughter of naive gods.
And the two of you... genius masterminds who feel like you are playing pawns on this giant chessboard of Orario... do not realize at all that I can read all your game moves very clearly.
A cool breeze from nowhere swept through the 30th floor of the Tower of Babel, gently caressing Venti's face, as if anticipating the true storm of intrigue that had just begun.
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