Welf was making strides in both his swordsmanship and smithing as he was given limited access to my materials. The really high end stuff was off limits since he had no idea how to even use it but everything else was free game, within reason of course. He gave his creations complex or grand sounding names usually but none of them lived up to that sort of naming yet. Not that I was discouraging him or anything like that but compared to the stuff I made his things were full of flaws and wasted potential.-
Don't get me wrong they were good by the standards of normal smiths but for the ones sitting at the top like Hephaestus, Tsubaki and I it was less than stellar. Daphne and Cassandra were also growing in their own ways as Daphne had finally decided which path she wanted to take as an adventurer, an offensive defender. That sounded counter intuitive but the premise was basically that of a snake coiled and ready to strike but not directly offensive. Snakes don't actively go out of their way to bite people but usually only do it as a defensive means or to hunt prey for survival.-
Much in the same way Daphne wanted to serve as a guardian for the backline mages that held high offensive means but specialized in keeping those behind her protected through them. For Cassandra she was working to improve her endurance, agility and dexterity stats as she learned to use the senbon she had. She had gone from regularly missing to being able to regularly hit a general targeted area within a certain range. Not nearly good enough to take the set into the dungeon but getting there.-
My biggest concern about her however was when she had a prophetic dream and told me it's contents. A dream of terror, black wings covering the sky and hell standing on the earth. The details were vague and sparse but the picture painted was fairly clear. Something was coming and it was going to bring a massive amount of destruction with it. The part that confused me was when she spoke of Hell standing on the earth, not metaphorically but like an actual thing physically standing on the world. It could be interpreted in many ways, a monster, a cursed spirit perhaps or something else, something I'd rather not even consider but looked eerily likely.-
I tossed those thoughts away and set about preparing another just in case measure. This measure was something I created from the heat crystal I took from the ceiling of the dungeon on my previous deep delve. I took the entire chunk of crystal and refined it to my utmost ability shrinking it down to an orb two feet in every dimension. Within it I bound a single cursed technique with two purposes. The first was to collect, refine and store flames. The second was to release those refined flames all at once when triggered.-
It was a nuke.
The cursed energy equivalent of one at least. The sort of device that meant death for anything and everything within it's range once triggered. I fed it my own flames for nearly three days straight before it simply couldn't take anymore. What it held however wasn't the black and blue flames of mine that held tiny specks of white true hellfire but ONLY the white hellfire. A single ball of the white flame the size of my head in it's center. Even that was almost too much as the orb was barely able to contain it.-
Freya, Hephaestus and Hestia were all wary of the orb and flame it held as this was a true divine flame. Something they'd be greatly harmed by even in the heavenly realm much less in their sealed state on the mortal realm. Despite this Hephaestus was also drooling over it for the same reason. Such a flame was perfect for creating divine artifacts. She even said she had done so before in the heavenly realm but the idea of crafting a divine artifact in the mortal realm had her practically dripping.-
I would be lying if I said it wasn't hot. Speaking of that side of things I had no real reason not to let the two goddesses woo me at this point. My growth had stagnated in crafting, cursed techniques and even stat growth. I could go gather smoke to raise the last of those but it was a LONG slow process as I needed so fucking much. If I dropped everything to focus on deep delving I could speed it up a little but it wasn't worth it. It was rather funny how the two goddesses were constantly trying to one up the other like I was just going to choose one of them and that would be that.-
Neither were happy when I bluntly explained I wasn't going to be tied down to one person. I already didn't actively try to romance anyone so it wasn't like I'd be going out of my way to find new partners anyways. But binding myself to only a single partner simply wasn't going to happen. Nothing wrong with monogamy but it just wasn't for me, too boring. That said neither goddess was willing to totally stop trying to "obtain" me. -
In fact they ended up coming up with a surprisingly clean sharing schedule. Seven days a week, three for Freya, three for Hephaestus and one for neither. I had to laugh at the idea that they got to choose MY schedule. I could honor the idea of splitting my time between them equally but as for an actual schedule, not happening. They got my time at my whim or not at all. As goddesses they weren't good with being told no but tough luck, I made the rules here not them.