"Anyone who could be defeated by the weak was bound to be weak as well."
"Anyone who could defeat the strong could only be strong—or stronger."
Even now,
Orsaga's words still echoed through Kaleid's mind.
Those words sounded somewhat roundabout, yet their meaning had made him ponder them countless times.
They had also filled his heart with growing confusion.
"What exactly were these gods I had challenged?"
Regarding that question,
after struggling over it for some time,
although it somewhat conflicted with his past worldview—
the worldview that gods were necessarily stronger than mortals, that gods were countless times more sacred than mortals, that gods possessed infinite wisdom and infinite power—
as someone who had absorbed the power and legacy of the Dwarf God-King—Moradin,
he still clearly recognized one fact.
A rather cruel fact.
That was, in essence, so-called gods truly were not all that different from mortals.
Ignorant, greedy, fatuous, lustful...
They possessed virtually every bad habit mortals possessed...
The only reason those flaws did not seem so obvious was that power concealed them.
These so-called gods...
To be honest,
pick any mortal at random.
As long as he or she was granted sufficient power,
they could immediately pass themselves off as one...
They would not even need any basic job training!
At least, after browsing the memories he had seized from Moradin, Kaleid did not think so.
Through those memories,
he could effortlessly sense the true nature of all those various affairs among the gods that mortals spread and sang praises of.
Those stale, rotten trifles that had been forcibly spun into all manner of epic tales...
For example, the cause of some event might simply have been that a god wanted to steal a woman.
Yet mortals, for various purposes, would embellish that event until it was