Gods’ Games We Play, Vol. 5, page 6
“Whaaaaaa—?!”
“What in the world do you think you’re doing?!”
Shouts from the divine and the human teams almost merged into one. When the treant saw the meep come flying in front of it, even it looked shocked and screeched to a halt.
With much murmuring, the entire divine team stood stock-still.
“I thought so. That’s the secret trick to winning this game!” Fay said.
“Not allowed!” the meep cried, accompanied by its whistle. The entire forest of Yggdrasil went silent. “This is a contest between the humans and the gods. I, the referee, am a third party!”
“Right, exactly. Which is why you make the perfect shield—”
“Interfering with the referee is outside the bounds of play. Hence, a penalty! The human team will give all the balls they are holding to the gods’ team.”
“Faaaaaay!” Anita came charging up to him. “Wh-wh-what do you think you’re doing?! My treasured sister Pearl got you that ball despite being bound hand and foot!”
“It’s all right, Anita. It was just a little something I wanted to try. I figured it couldn’t do any harm.”
“It’s…what? You mean this was all within your calculations?” A most unexpected answer, no doubt. The pink-haired girl stood there with her mouth hanging open.
Fay just said firmly, “This penalty is a small price to pay to keep Nel safe.”
“Er— Ahem. I thank you, Master Fay,” Nel said with a big sigh. “I’ll repay you by playing my heart out.”
“All balls will be given to the gods’ team, and then we will restart! Both teams, please go back to your own tree,” the meep instructed. The teams retreated to opposite ends of the court.
“Restart!”
At the ref’s (that is, the meep’s) whistle, both sides ran for center court again. The human team, of course, was focused on getting back some of the balls that the divine team now monopolized. Whereas the gods’ team…
…threw the two- and three-point balls into the air.
“Tee-hee-hee! You want these balls?” the nymphs taunted gleefully. “Then take them! Here you go!”
Lifted by a gust of nymph wind magic, the green and the blue balls spiraled into the sky.
In that instant, with the entire human team looking up, the gods took advantage of their lapse in attention to make a push toward the human tree. They had just one ball between them, the ten-pointer.
“What do they think they’re doing?! Did they really abandon everything but the ten-point ball?!” Anita shouted, the confusion evident in her voice.
It wasn’t possible. The gods’ strategy seemed to be to commit all nine players to moving just the single ball. That worked out to only 1.1 points per player.
“That’s not nearly efficient enough! They literally had the two- and three-point balls in their hands, and they gave them up… Why would they do that?!”
“Ah,” Fay was heard mumbling to himself. “Now I get it.”
It fit the points calculation he’d been doing in his head. Suddenly everything made sense: why the gods would give up the other two balls. If that was what they were planning, then he could understand. And if so…
…then from the very moment the game had restarted, with zero minutes elapsed since the restart, the humans had already lost.
Fay didn’t have time to feel bad about it. “Pearl!” he yelled, pointing at the two balls in the air. “Can you get up that high?”
“Y-yeah, I can do it!” Pearl nodded, and then she disappeared. She’d jumped into a golden portal, teleporting herself instantly thirty meters into the air. She was already reaching out both hands for the balls. “I’ve got them…! And now I’m falling, I’m falling, I’m going doooowwwnnn!”
“Welcome back to terra firma!” Leshea said, catching Pearl as she and the balls reached the ground.
Now it was the humans who had the two- and the three-point balls.
“Leshea, Pearl, I’ll leave those balls to you! I’ll go on defense!” Fay called, and then he left the girls where they were and went running.
He looked way up into the humans’ great tree, where a battle was developing near the human goal flower. Captain Ashlan and his players were squaring off against the onslaught of gods.
“All right, you’re in the way! Blow away, little ones!”
“I don’t think so! Tempest!” the mage Zechey said, meeting the nymph’s wind magic with a gust of her own. As the two gales neutralized each other, dryads dodged left, then right along the branches. Meanwhile, all three treants climbed slowly but inexorably upward.
“Grrr! This is bad!” Captain Ashlan’s expression was stiff. The last time they’d been threatened with the treants’ Over-stompy, it had turned out to be a bluff—the attack had required a cooldown period. This time, though, those tree monsters were coming at them for real.
“Hee-hee-hee! All right, Treant, do it!” The nymphs giggled.
All the humans present flung themselves toward other branches—all except one.
“Nel?!”
“You got the better of me last time,” said the black-haired girl, standing firm in the face of the wall of treants bearing down on her, charging so ferociously that Yggdrasil’s branches shook. “But Nel Reckless will not be outdone by the same opponent twice!”
“Whoa, hey, hold on! What do you think you’re—”
“Outta my waaaaaaaaaaaaaay!” Nel bellowed, not at Captain Ashlan, but at the runaway train that was the treants. Up came her right leg.
Over-stompy was a divine attack, capable of blasting through anything in its path.
But it was up against Nel’s Arise, Moment Reversal, which could kick anything back the way it had come—even the power of the gods.
Moment Reversal precisely reversed everything about a motion—its direction, its force. And now it reversed the treants. Or rather, blew them backward and straight into the nymphs and dryads, who were caught completely off guard.
“Never seen that before!”
“What are you doing, letting her kick you, Tr—hwoof?!”
All nine of the gods were slammed into Yggdrasil’s trunk hard enough to make the great tree itself tremble. Even they wouldn’t be getting up too soon.
“Th-that was incredible, Nel!” Pearl said.
“Yeah, way to go!” added Leshea. They had only been half-watching the battle at the human goal—because they had been climbing toward the divine one.
But they still had to reckon with the flower’s last line of defense.
“Rooooarrrrr!”
The Goalie Bear came flying at them.
Pearl, however, was already on the move. “You’re making this too easy, Mister Bear in the Woods!”
A golden warp portal appeared. Until that moment, Pearl had used Teleport only to run away—but now she did something very different.
The portal showed up directly in front of the Goalie Bear, and the charging animal, too late to change direction, plunged through it—
“Rawr?”
—and was forcibly transported to a branch thirty meters away. In other words, nowhere near Pearl and Leshea.
The goal flower was wide open. No matter how strong the guardian of the goal might have been, a beast charging straight ahead was as good as powerless before Pearl’s warp portal.
“How do you like that? Behold my unprecedented ability to think on my feet!”
“Way to go, Pearl! That was perfect! Other than the patting-yourself-on-the-back part!” Leshea called. Then she flung both balls toward the undefended goal. They dropped toward the flower…
“It’s a double score!” the meep announced. “It’s now twelve points to twenty, the human team making big strides closing that gap. How will they follow up their—well, now! Looks like big things are happening over there!” The meep pointed toward the human tree, where all nine members of the divine team lay in a veritable heap.
“Look at those eyes spin! Everyone who got caught up in our good treants’ deflected charge is down for the count!”
“Lady Leshea!” Nel shouted, so loudly that they could hear her from all the way in the human tree, a distance of a good hundred meters. “Catch!”
There was a sound like a cannon blast—it was the impact of Nel, a hundred meters away, kicking the ten-point ball.
Boom!
The yellow fruit came rocketing through the air—until Leshea caught it one-handed and slammed it into the still undefended goal flower.
“We have an upset! It’s twenty-two to twenty, with the human team ahead!”
Elapsed time: 18 drops in the nectar clock (= 18 minutes).
Divine team: 20 points (10 points × 2).
Human team: 22 points (2 points × 3, 3 points × 2, 10 points × 1).
They’d made up a huge chunk of the score to turn things around. Both teams, human and divine, however, were laser-focused—for in this game, the moments after a goal was scored were the most dangerous of all.
This was when new balls were supplied. And at that moment, most of the members of both teams were up in the trees. They would have to get down to the ground before they could grab the new balls.
The defining difference between the humans and the gods at that moment was how they got down.
“Heh heh! I think I’ll go ahead! You humans can take your time climbing down the trunk!” The nymphs could fly—and all three took off toward the ground. “Treant! Follow us!”
The treants jumped down next—they might have left a crater in the ground where they landed, but the treants themselves were unharmed. The gods were on the forest floor in the blink of an eye, whereas the humans…
“Leshea!”
“I’m on it!”
Leshea leapt down, her vermilion hair billowing, and landed softly on the ground. Someone else followed her, diving from a height of almost fifty meters.
“Wait for meee, treasured sister Lady Leolesheeeaaa!”
Thoom! A pink-haired girl slammed into the earth, throwing up a massive storm of dust. “Sorry to keep you waiting, treasured sister! I’m here to help you get those balls!”
“Yaaa-ha-ha-ha! You’re too slow, humans!” chortled the nymphs, who already had the two-point ball. One treant, meanwhile, held the three-point orb in its tendrils.
And then there was…
“We’re all over these!” The nymphs and treants looked up, waiting for the ten-point ball to hit center court.
The human team was never going to make it in time. The gods would secure all the balls before Leshea and Anita could get anywhere near them.
“Come on down, now…”
“Anita!”
The nymphs stretched their hands toward the sky—but Leshea picked up Anita and lifted her into the air.
“Uh… Treasured sister Leoleshea? Wh-why are you holding me up? Wait… You’re not planning to—”
“Go get that ten-point ball!”
“Huh? Wait, wait, wait, yaaaaaaaaahhh!”
Anita split the air as Leshea flung her skyward as hard as she could, faster than a speeding bullet. She was a human missile!
“I don’t know how to stoppp!”
Anita did, in fact, grab the ten-point ball out of the air. Her momentum then sent her rocketing across the field, toward the divine team’s huge tree, with which she collided with a tremendous bang.
Creak! It was enough to cause the trunk of the great tree Yggdrasil to lean and make a very unsettling noise.
“Great work, Anita! You got the ball!”
“I…I’m flattered by your praise… Cough!” Anita said, buried in the ground with the ball in her hands. Even with the protection of Iron Heart, she looked the worse for wear after her encounter with the great tree. “But if…if you’d be so kind as to never do that again…”
“I’ll bet if we did that one more time, we could knock Yggdrasil’s sprout-tree right over!”
“What would that accomplish?!”
So the human team had the ten-point ball, while the gods held the two- and three-pointers. Was a competition heating up to see who could get all the balls? Many members of the human team steeled themselves—but the battle never came.
They were in equilibrium. Attack and defense by the two teams had turned into a seesaw game.
“Give me that ten-point ball!”
“Nymph wind magic incoming! Blow it back!” Captain Ashlan shouted. Zechey was already jumping out in front, firing off a magic burst of her own.
The dryads snapped their fingers even as Zechey moved.
“Grass, catch her feet!”
But the boy with the gravity magic was already reacting.
“Go—gravity times seven!”
A black magical diagram appeared, encompassing the entire field. A zone of exceptionally heavy gravity sprang into being, and the grass roots that had sprung up were pushed inexorably down again.
“Arrrgh! So obnoxious!” the nymphs cried angrily. “Treant, smash ’em all away!”
The massive gods began to accelerate directly toward the human team, but the nymphs cried out again when they saw the black-haired girl standing in the way. “Whoa! Hey! Emergency stop! That’s the one human you can’t—”
“Too late!”
Up came Nel’s left leg—and the power of Moment Reversal within it sent the treants and the nymphs tumbling far, far backward. The balls, knocked out of the hands of the treant Nel had kicked and the dryad that treant had slammed into, went flying and then rolled toward the human team.
“I’ve got the two-point ball!” someone on the human team called out.
“The three-pointer’s mine!” Ashlan said, picking it up. “This might just work… We might be able to do this!” He clenched his fist. The human team now had possession of all the balls.
“There’s nine minutes left! This is where it gets serious, folks. If we can score fifteen points, that puts us at thirty-seven. Then we just focus on the three- and ten-point balls!”
Thirty-seven points would put them within spitting distance of victory. They had to score fifty points to win, and if they could close out the game using the three- and ten-point balls, then they could forget about the two-pointer (meaning they wouldn’t have to devote any of their players to dealing with it).
Meanwhile, the gods’ team still had just twenty points. For a team that was lagging behind, even the two-point ball was a precious source of points. They would have to commit some players to going after it.
“We win this with numbers!” Ashlan said. “All right, guys, let’s go. Hang on to those balls, whatever it takes. If we can slam these fifteen points into their goal, victory is ours!”
“Hold on, Captain Ashlan,” Fay said, curbing the captain’s enthusiasm. “This isn’t an opponent we can beat by sheer force. Seeing what just happened makes me sure of it. We need to change our plan, too.”
“Of course we do! Nice and careful-like, right?”
“Right. First, throw away the two- and three-point balls.”
“I’m way ahead of you! We start by throwing away the… Wait, what?” Ashlan turned to Fay, flabbergasted. “Fay, I don’t think I heard you right. Because I thought you said we should throw away the two- and three-point balls.”
“I knew something felt fishy,” Fay said. He was looking at the divine team, twenty meters away, with their great tree behind them. He said:
“How about you drop the act already?”
Fwoooshhh.
Yggdrasil’s forest fell silent with almost alarming alacrity. There was a chill in the air colder than a winter lake.
“There’s been a few of them now. These…deliberate moments. Each time, I noticed something felt off, but this time it was too big to ignore. That’s why I’m sure.” Fay pointed at the human team’s three-point ball and went on, “The ball you gods gave up. Why was the treant that Nel kicked holding it?”
“Huh?” Anita turned toward him, open-mouthed. “What in the world are you talking about?! My treasured sister Nel got this from them through her own skills!”
“No. They let us have it,” Fay said.
The two point ball and the three-point ball—both had come into the human team’s possession when Nel had rebuffed one of the treant’s charges and caused the gods to drop them.
“Nel was right when she said she won’t be outdone by the same opponent twice. Could the gods actually be kicked backward by the same technique two separate times? Not very godlike.”
Once they had discovered that there was a human who could kick back a treant’s charge, they should have been more careful the next time.
“So I started to wonder—maybe you wanted us to have the two- and three-point balls. You wanted us to score goals with them.”
“What?! Wh-what are you saying, Fay?!” Anita asked, drawing back and hugging herself. “They deliberately gave us the balls so that we could score? But why would they… Wait… Am I the only one here who doesn’t get it?! Treasured sister Pearl, do you get it?!”
“Of course I do!” The golden-haired girl put her hands on her hips and gave a little snorting laugh. “There’s no question. I had a pretty good sense of it from the moment this game began!”
“You did?! Then what are the gods after?!”
“…………” There followed a very, very long pause.
“You don’t have any idea, do you? Fay, I assume you’re not just blowing smoke. But why would the gods actually want us to score?! I don’t believe it! Tell me why!”
“They told us right at the start, remember?” Fay said. “They said everything the gods do is rooted in a plan. A strategy.”
“Excuse me?!”
“Let’s call it the ‘Start Time Zero Minutes Time’s-Up Plan’… Does that sound about right?”
The nine members of the divine team stood with their backs to Yggdrasil: The nymphs, floating in the air. The dryads, standing in the branches. The treants, bracing themselves against the trunk.
All nine of them, three each of three different kinds of creature, looked toward Fay, and then…
“Kya… Kyaaa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”
