Calliope's tone was icy and severe. "My revered Mother warned me again and again that this thing must be protected, that it must not be destroyed by any filth!"
"Your stupid beasts have ruined my Mother's great design! Destroyed my Father's gift! Shattered my Mother's painstaking effort!"
"What's been destroyed is not only the flower, but my Mother's care and my Father's joy!"
"This is nothing less than a stain upon my Mother's holiness and majesty!"
The goddess of rhetoric's voice rang high as a divine bell, making heaven and earth both tremble faintly. "The fact that I did not destroy you along with them is already the limit of my restraint!"
Absu Naya's divinity howled silently.
Before this goddess of language and eloquence, she was almost choked speechless with anger.
But she knew as well that she now stood on the edge of a cliff.
She could not acknowledge the charge this beloved daughter of the God-King had laid upon her.
Never mind His Majesty; even the sovereign of civilization and memory was not someone the inner-sea pantheon could afford to offend.
Of the twelve surviving primordial Titans, all were closely bound; apart from the supreme God-King, they were the universe's next most noble and powerful.
Offend one, and you offend them all.
And even a single one was too much for the inner-sea gods.
The hat Calliope was now placing upon her was far too large; she could not possibly bear it.
Her clan's fence-sitter instincts, and her absolute fear of the great gods, forced her to press down the deep-sea brutality and rage rising from within.
"Calm down, Absu Naya! You must be calm!"
"Do not fight! You can't beat her!"
"But you have the law on your side! You know the code!"
"You must argue law!"
Absu Naya clutched at the only straw she had—principle and statute.
"Lady Calliope!"
She raised her head; the professional false smile had vanished from the beautiful half of her face, replaced by a mix of grief and baffled injustice.
Her voice still could not help but grow cold.
She said icily, "Who could possibly know of such matters?"
"Honored Your Grace, You claim that Your great, wise, noble, revered Mother, sovereign of all civilization and memory—her treasure was left here in the mortal world with no protection at all?"
"That it was so very fragile?"
"And further, Your Grace, You have not shown us even once what sort of treasure it truly was."
"Our inner sea may be poor, but we are not unable to offer compensation to the sovereign of civilization. Even if I must bring many gifts to pay for it, I would not shirk."
Her face full of sorrow and anger, she went on, "My children were only passing by; they did not even know anything was here. All was but a thoughtless mistake."
"Even if they needed to be punished, has that not already been enough?"
"Why did You have to destroy them all?!"
"Moreover," she had found her logical fulcrum; her voice grew stronger, and she even forced herself to speak with the boldness of legal argument:
"Even if—even if my foolish children truly did, without meaning to, damage that treasure,
does it follow that all my tens of thousands of children behind me were guilty as well?!"
She bit down hard on the word "all."
"You, as goddess of civilization and epic, do You not know the principle of 'each bearing his own guilt'?!"
"This is clearly taking the part for the whole! You—you have slaughtered wantonly!"
"Hmph! You want to argue with me? Today Absu Naya will show you who truly knows the law!"
Absu Naya's voice rose sharply; the monstrous half of her face twisted with emotion as she began to quote statutes:
"Have You forgotten His Majesty the God-King's highest charter of the Holy Just Order?"
"With harmony as its aim! With compassion as its nourishment! With life as its core!"
"In His Majesty's Twelve Holy Laws, the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth all clearly establish these three supreme principles!"
"You, as His Majesty's beloved daughter! As a noble Olympian great goddess! As the child of the sovereign of civilization!"
"You, more than any, should keep His Majesty's Holy Just Order! You, more than any, should uphold His Majesty's supreme charter!"
"You should treat all life with mercy and care, not wield your sword to wipe out a race without any trial!"
"Yet You struck with ruthless hand; for a single unproven claim, You destroyed all my tens of thousands of children!"
Absu Naya flung up her head; her divinity boiled. With a cold laugh, she uttered the boldest sneer of her life:
"Is this how His Majesty the God-King's daughter keeps His Holy Just Order?!"
She put particular weight on the words "holy" and "just."
At this, Calliope's golden brows snapped down; her divine might flared.
"Silence!"
The bark rang like an epic war drum. Absu Naya's divinity shook; she reflexively retreated half a step.
"Impudent! Are you daring to question my revered Mother's words and commands?!"
"How could I not know my great Father's supreme charter? How could I not know His holy law?!"
"It is you who have forgotten, Absu Naya!"
"Before any of those principles you recite comes the most fundamental, the first!"
"That each god must keep to its own place and not usurp or trespass upon another god's authority and domain!"
"You are inner-sea gods; your domain lies in the deep, not upon the land! To step upon the earth at all is already a thing you ought not do!"
"As you came, you swaggered and blustered; you roiled river and land, raised floods, and caused countless mortal deaths!"
"Had you restrained yourselves—if you had come lightly, your might sheathed—how would my Mother's treasure have been ruined in the first place?!"
"And you dare turn truth upside down, spouting nonsense and twisting blame!"
Her voice only grew colder, hard with the force of Order:
"And you dare to interpret and use my great Father's holy laws to your own ends!"
"An unforgivable crime!"
How could Absu Naya match this goddess of rhetoric in debate?
There was much she did not even dare drag in.
But the fire in her heart could not be contained.
She was beyond furious.
Even her outward respect began to crack; the beastly half of her face bared its fangs and let out a shrill roar:
"God and mortal are not the same!"
"His Majesty's holy law states in its very first line that the gods hold equal right to enjoy the cosmos's splendors!"
"I! have never usurped any god's authority! We inner-sea gods are within our rights to walk the land and take our ease!"
"As for the harm to a few mortals…"
Her tone turned scornful and cruel:
"Those mortals are too small, too weak. We gods are mighty; wherever we walk, our divine aura leaks. A little harm along the way is inevitable; it is nothing but some unavoidable trifle, like passing clouds and flowing water!"
"It is not what we wished to see! We have held back as much as we can! The fault lies in their fragility!"
"Furthermore!" as her emotion spiked, dead-sea aura leaked from her divinity, "mortals exist for us gods. I have not slaughtered them deliberately, nor used any power of extinction. Where is the wrong in that?!"
When had she ever spared a thought for mortals?
For Calliope to speak of them enraged her only by its absurdity.
Calliope's lip curled.
She had just found her opponent's fatal breach in law and logic.
"Impudent!"
"Absu Naya! What you have just said is the greatest blasphemy against my great Father's Order I have ever heard!"
"And you still dare claim you have not twisted His holy code!"
"Where, in my Father's laws, does it say that divine beings may destroy mortal life at will?!"
"His holy edicts are perfectly clear—they speak of 'living beings,' of 'life' itself! Mortal life as well is under my great Father's protection!"
"You and your foul spawn have come leaving corpses in your wake; you have already offended His holy law!"
Calliope's laughter was like a cut of ice.
She stepped slowly forward.
Golden divine power, like the tangible light of civilization, pressed Absu Naya back again.
Her proud abyssal field could not even spread beneath that Ordered radiance.
"You say," the epic goddess's voice dripped with scorn, "that mortals died because they were too small and weak."
"Then I," she pointed to herself and then to the emptiness behind Absu Naya, "may equally say that the filth behind you offended my Mother's holiness and that I only meant to chastise them somewhat."
"I merely did not expect…"
She showed a troubled expression, mocking Absu Naya's earlier tone:
"I did not expect that they too were too weak."
"I used only the smallest force—only recited a single verse—and they were already gone."
"This," her golden gaze locked onto Absu Naya, "where is the wrong in that?"
"Pft—"
Absu Naya's whole divinity nearly cracked under the strain of this brazenly twisted logic.
"She's mocking me! Mocking my children for being too weak!"
"So what if you're a top-tier god-princess?!"
She shook all over with rage; even the last traces of composure and courtesy fell away. She shrieked:
"Sophistry! You are twisting words!"
"You—you care nothing for that edelweiss!"
"You did this for humans! You are their teacher!"
"It is you, Calliope—it is you who have broken the covenant of gods and mortals! You are shielding these humans!"
"You are the one violating His Majesty's Order!"
"I'll sue you! I'll sue you!"
"I'll sue you all the way to Olympus! I'll sue you before the God-King Himself!"
"By His Majesty's code, I demand judgment before the gods!"
The epic goddess listened to the shrill clamor of the tiny goddess before her and only let out a single, contemptuous snort.
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