Gods’ Games We Play, Vol. 5, page 5
“I knew we’d see you here, Mister Bear in the Woods!”
The god team’s goalkeeper. It had been shaken by Pearl’s pet name once, but not again.
“Heh! You know, I really feel sorry for you. You saw your friends the nymphs take a dive a second ago, right? Okay, Gratton, you’re up!”
“Activate!”
A dark magical emblem appeared on the branch where Mister Bear in the Woods was standing.
For the third time, the incomparable power of gravity drew its target inexorably toward the earth.
“Roooooaaarrr!”
“It’s not working?!” Zechey cried.
“T-this is not good! Gratton, you have to run!” Anita shouted.
Mister Bear in the Woods, meanwhile, charged. Disregarding the magical diagram that encircled him, he got down on all fours and flung himself forward with tremendous force.
“No way! He can still run with ten times the force of gravity pulling on him?! How strong is this—hrrrgh!”
Gratton went tumbling through the air, propelled by a blow from a bear who didn’t seem to care much about the force of gravity. The young man slammed into the tree’s trunk.
That moment, though, provided the slightest opening, and Zechey flung the three-point ball toward the goal.
“That’s three points for us!” she said. “Wait… What?!”
“Roooooaaarrrrr!”
Zechey’s ball bounced away from the goal. The bear, fresh from slamming Gratton backward, had simply turned, reached out a paw, and deflected it.
“No… How can it be so big and still so fast?!”
They had never seen anything as quick and nimble. This was the “Beast of Defense” entrusted with protecting the god team’s goal. No matter how fast they threw the ball, it seemed likely that it would have been almost instantly batted aside.
“Hnngh… Fine! If the ball’s just going to be deflected…”
Anita, two-point ball in hand, leaped forward. She used a huge leaf like a trampoline to bounce into the air; it sent her almost five meters skyward—far above Mister Bear in the Woods. Anita held the ball firmly overhead with both hands and dove straight toward the goal flower.
“…then I’ll drop into the goal right along with it!”
“Captain Anita?!” Zechey squealed.
Anita fell toward—or rather dive-bombed—the flower five meters below her. Taking a headfirst dive to score a couple of points seemed certain to leave Anita herself with serious injuries.
“Two-point goal!” the meep announced. “The score is now seven to ten—the human team is catching up!”
The meep’s voice echoed across the court.
But what about Anita?
No sooner had the thought occurred to them than a girl with pink hair crawled out of the goal flower.
“Urgh… Now my hair is full of pollen!” she groaned.
Anita’s Arise, Iron Heart, made her body as hard as iron and had allowed her to escape the otherwise brutal fall unscathed.
“I’m okay!” she said. “And the score’s a little closer now!”
Back on the ground, a new two-point ball dropped down. It was accompanied by the three-pointer that had been batted away by the Goalie Bear.
“I’ll take those!” Captain Ashlan said, grabbing both balls. He’d happened to be standing exactly where the balls came down—luck was on his side. “It’s seven to ten! We can work with this—we’ve got the momentum!”
“Heh heh… You think this game’s that easy?”
A rich, sultry laugh sounded among the foliage—drifting to their ears from the direction of the human team’s goal tree.
“The score may be seven to ten, but don’t forget we have the ten-point ball and every chance to widen the score gap again.”
The divine and the human teams squared off right in front of the flower. Six on six. The god team’s furious flurry of passes had allowed them to evade the humans and get all the way up the tree, forcing the humans to make a last stand right in front of their goal.
“This is as far as you go!” shouted Blaze’s vice captain. He was covered in mud after being knocked around by the treants’ attacks while trying to protect the others. “We have the two- and three-point balls. If we stop you from dunking that ten-pointer, we can turn the whole thing around!”
“As I think I just said, it’s not that easy. Go now, Treant!”
“Hnngh! Everybody, evade!”
As one, the six apostles got ready to move. They’d experienced the treants’ special move, “Over-stompy,” several times already. The creatures could only run in a straight line, but they smashed through anything and everything in their path.
If the humans knew they couldn’t block the move, the only thing to do was get out of the way.
However…
“Huh?”
The apostles, diving to the left and right, went wide-eyed.
Because the treants didn’t charge.
“Hah! Just because I shout out the name of an attack doesn’t mean they’re going to use it, does it?” A dryad kicked off a branch underfoot and started picking up speed. The human team had politely jumped aside, leaving the path to the goal clear. “Treant’s Over-stompy has a thirty-second cooldown. One might have expected you to notice that by now.”
“It was a bluff?!”
They’d been completely had. They’d learned that the only thing to do was avoid the treant’s charges, and the dryad had turned that knowledge against them.
Nymph, the faerie: Weak but able to fly. Special move: Wind magic.
Dryad, the tree-folk: The most nimble and agile of the players. Special move: Grass magic.
Treant, the tree spirit: The most powerful but also the slowest. Special move: Charge.
Goalie Bear, the Beast of Defense: Combines strength and agility, yet only plays defensively.
In short, the humans had a good grasp of the makeup of the divine team—or one might say, they had been given a good grasp. They had never imagined that there would be a mind game at work where what they knew was used to throw them off.
“What a shame for you.”
The dryad flung the ball at the goal, and the humans, who had ducked out of the way to avoid the treants’ body slam, could only watch helplessly.
“That’s a ten-point goal!” the meep cried out. “That makes the score seven to twenty, with the god team breaking away again!”
Elapsed time: Seven droplets in the nectar clock (= 7 minutes. The time’s-up whistle will sound after 30 minutes.)
Divine Team: 20 points (10 points × 2)
Human Team: 7 points (2 points × 2; 3 points × 1)
A thirteen-point difference, all told. So much for narrowing the gap—it had grown wider. That fact made everyone on the human team anxious.
Which was precisely when Fay shouted to the meep, “Substitution!”
This was the only possible moment. Before the human team’s morale was completely shattered by an overwhelming point disadvantage, it was time to change players and give everyone a chance to get their heads back in the game.
“Captain Ashlan! Four people, please!”
“You got it. Defense, we’re subbing out four of you!”
Four members of Team Blaze who had been savaged by the treants’ attacks went to the sidelines. In their place, Fay, Nel, Leshea, and Pearl stepped onto the court.
Everyone was already on the same page: Namely, that overcoming a thirteen-point deficit wasn’t going to be the work of a moment.
More to the point, there’s the question of how we even do it. We can’t just fling ourselves desperately at them. To beat these gods, we need a plan that’s better than theirs.
“Anita!” Fay called before he was even on the field. “Can you jump down?”
“What?”
“The ten-point ball is incoming!”
Anita gasped. “Y-yeah, no sweat!” she said, and then she leaped from the god team’s tree. She was in a free fall from fifty meters up, the height of a ten-story building.
Then she hit the ground.
There was a massive cloud of dust, out of which sprang Anita, unharmed—and holding a yellow ball high.
“I got it! I got the ten-point ball!”
In this game, a new ball dropped onto the field after each score. They always fell at center court—and at that moment, most of the gods’ team members were up in the human tree. Meaning their goal was as good as wide open.
“So you noticed?” A dryad descended the tree’s trunk as smoothly as if it were sliding down ice. “In this game of basketball, when an opponent scores against you, you immediately have a chance to get the same score back.”
The human team had substituted four players.
In: Fay, Leshea, Pearl, Nel.
Out: Four members of Team Blaze.
“All right, run, guys! Pearl!” Captain Ashlan heaved the two-point ball.
Pearl caught it. “Fay!” she called, passing it on to him.
“Good stuff, Pearl!” Fay caught the ball with one hand, then made for the gods’ tree.
The gods have a plan.
Although Fay wasn’t sure yet, he had begun to have an inkling of what that plan was. If he was correct…well, then the humans were already pretty cornered. Worse than it looked from the score.
They needed a plan that was better than the gods’.
This game is a quick showdown, just thirty minutes. I was able to throw together a plan, but just one. There won’t be time to make any adjustments midgame.
That was why he had to keep it secret—the instant the gods saw through his strategy for turning this game around, everything would fall to pieces. He couldn’t let them know what it was until the very last second.
What was more…
Right now, I’ve got the two-point ball, Captain Ashlan has the three-point one, and Anita has the ten-point one. The humans are holding fifteen points’ worth of balls!
And with only the Goalie Bear guarding the gods’ goal flower. If they could sink all fifteen points, not only would they make up the difference in the score, they would even pull ahead by a couple.
“H-hey, wait up! This ten-point ball is just too heavy!” Anita said, breathing hard. Even with a Superhuman ability, lugging a twenty-kilogram ball along was never going to be easy.
“Anita, pass it to me!”
“Treasured sister Nel?! O-okay, it’s all yours!” Anita flung the ball, which arced through the air…
“Heh heh! I’ll take that.”
…only to be intercepted by a green hand. It was a dryad, getting some serious hang time.
“Wha—?!”
“Maybe I should have warned you that I don’t have to come down to the ground.”
There, over Anita’s head, the branches of the great tree crisscrossed crazily, vines as thick as ropes interweaving to form what looked like a spider’s web in the sky. The dryad was coming at them from above, crawling from vine to vine and from one of Yggdrasil’s branches to another.
“This game takes place in three dimensions.”
This, indeed, was another difference between the games humans played and those played by the gods. Human games like soccer and basketball took place in two dimensions, width and length. But this game added a third dimension: height.
“Give me back my ten-point ball!” Anita yelled.
“I’m afraid I can’t do that. Treant?”
The dryad flung the yellow ball high into the air, toward a treant, the ten-point fruit once again in the possession of the gods.
“Master Fay!” Nel bellowed. “I need to borrow that two-pointer!”
Whack!
Nel kicked the two-point ball so hard that she left a footprint in the ground. It tore through the air with tremendous momentum, impacting the ten-point ball the dryad had thrown. The ten-pointer bounced off its trajectory like a billiard ball.
“What in the world?!” As the gods watched, the ten-point ball smacked against the trunk of the great tree, then bounced toward the ground—right at Pearl, who could only look up at it and say, “Huh?”
“Pearl, grab it!”
“Nowaynowaynoway I couldn’t possibly!” Pearl cried, wheeling backward as fast as she could.
An instant later, the twenty-kilogram ball slammed into the earth where Pearl had been standing, kicking up dirt like a meteor strike.
“Nel?! If I’d tried to catch that, there would be a big hole in the middle of me right about now!”
“E-er, yes, right… Sorry, I was thinking from my own perspective. But at least we didn’t let them get the ten-point ball from us!”
“Myah-ha-ha! Did you think Dryad was the only one following you?”
“What?!” Nel looked up, but she didn’t see any nymphs anywhere—not in the sky and not on the ground.
“Yikes!” Pearl blanched.
The earth at her feet exploded upward, and a treant, carrying the nymphs, emerged. Before Pearl could do anything, it had its tendrils on the ten-point ball.
“Digging underground is a strategy, too! …Hey, Treant, what are you doing?”
“Eeeeeeeeeeeek! Wh-wh-wh-what do you think you’re doing, you shameless tentacles?!”
Thus the ten-point ball was stolen away. Yet for some reason, the treant didn’t appear satisfied with that; its tendrils continued to entwine themselves all around Pearl. Particularly near her chest…
“These slimy pseudopods are slithering right between my clothes!”
“I get it!” Anita clapped her hands. “The treant is convinced that you’re still hiding more balls under your outfit, treasured sister Pearl! Two fabulous globes!”
“They’re not baaaaaaaallls!” Pearl gritted her teeth—then she pointed at the ten-point ball in the treant’s tendrils. “Why, you… The Wandering, activate!”
“—?!”
The nymphs, the dryads, and the treant abruptly stopped when the ten-point ball disappeared out of the treant’s grip and was replaced by the two-point one. Where had the other ball gone?
“Great work, Pearl. Shift Change is going to be a real asset in this game!” Fay now had the yellow ball, and he set off running.
Pearl’s teleportation ability, the Wandering, included Shift Change, which enabled her to swap the positions of any two objects she had touched within the last three minutes. She’d simply traded the two-point ball Fay had been holding for the ten-point one in the treant’s grip.
Unfortunately, Fay’s Arise didn’t make him super strong. He could try to run with the twenty-kilogram ball, but the god team would catch him easily.
Leshea is the physically strongest one among us. But Nel is better in terms of the overall competition—and she’s used to dribbling a ball.
In Fay’s estimation, it would be harder to get the ball away from Nel than Leshea. So he shouted, “Nel!”
“Just leave it to me, Master Fay!”
She deftly caught the ten-point ball from Fay with her feet and set off down the field. The other human players had all carried the balls—only Nel moved it by dribbling it with her feet, with incredible speed and control.
“She’s quick!” gasped a dryad, who tried to grab Nel but caught only empty air.
All three nymphs unleashed wind magic in succession, but Nel dodged each blast like it didn’t matter that she was maneuvering with a ball that weighed twenty kilograms. This was the fruit of Nel’s single-minded focus on developing her athletic abilities.
“Hmph! All right, I’m a little impressed,” said a nymph. However, the treants were poised to lunge. “You won’t be able to dodge this, though! Go on, Treant! Show them what you’re best at!”
That would be the treants’ special move, Over-stompy. All three treants, accelerating to tremendous speed, headed for Nel as she kicked the ball along. They formed an invincible front that nothing could stop. Yet despite the oncoming wall of treants, Nel just gave them an easygoing smile.
“You only ever go in a straight line. All I have to do…is get out of the way!”
In an instant, she recognized the direction of their trajectory and simply picked a new path. She dodged the first treant effortlessly. Then she did the same with the second—no, she tried to, but something caught her ankle.
“Grass?!” she cried.
“Excellent, grass! Hold her there!” a dryad said. It was grass magic, manipulating the vegetation to wrap around Nel’s ankles. She crumpled ignominiously to the ground. Then she found a treant’s massive body looming over her.
“Now, Treant, bat that ball away!”
“I think not!”
No one watching would have imagined that it was possible to avoid the treant’s body slam in that moment—until Nel launched herself up into the air.
With bare feet.
She’d shed the shoes and socks the grass had grabbed on to and leaped out of there.
“Wha—?! T-Treant, stop! Emergency sto—”
But by now, the treant was like a runaway train, and it wasn’t stopping. It raced past where Nel had been standing until it finally slammed into the first solid object in its path—the great tree of Yggdrasil on the god team’s side.
There was a sound like an explosion. The tree shook violently, and the treant finally came to a halt.
“Now, that is some power,” Nel said, going a little pale at how close she had come to total destruction. The treant’s blow had been strong enough to shake even Yggdrasil. If it had hit her, she would have been out of action; no doubt about it.
Just then—
“Nel, behind you!” Leshea shouted.
“Oh, shoot!” Nel said, going even paler.
There were three treants, and she’d dodged only two. By the time she noticed the last one charging from behind her, it was nearly upon her, a cloud of dust billowing behind it.
She would never make it.
Everyone surely pictured Nel flying helplessly through the air. Except one person…
“Don’t give up, Nel! Catch!”
“…Excuse me?”
The shout came from Fay, who took what was in his right hand and threw it with all his might.
To be specific, he threw the meep who’d been serving as referee.
“The ref is absolutely neutral! Which makes them an invincible shield—even the gods don’t dare lay a hand on them!”
