Gods’ Games We Play, Vol. 5, page 9
“Huh? Uh, no, not yet,” Fay said. He’d been wondering about the silver-haired girl. He’d expected her to be waiting in the Dive Center the moment they got back from the basketball game, but he hadn’t seen her anywhere. “I was sure she would be waiting for us.”
“She got tired of waiting and said she was going to go take a shower and catch a nap in your room, Fay.”
“Was anyone going to ask me if that was all right?!”
Even as he spoke, though, Fay heard someone stomping down the hallway.
“Did you summon my undefeated self?!” The door crashed open, and a silver-haired girl bounded in. Her whipped cream mustache suggested she had been helping herself to some ice cream or the like.
“Oh, hey, Uroboros. There’s something I’d like to ask you,” Fay said.
“Is it about the god who meddled with you, Tiny Human?”
“Oh, you already know about that? Guess I shouldn’t be surprised.”
He’d told Leshea, Pearl, and Nel about what had happened as well. How, when they had dived through the Divine Gate and his friends had been sent to Yggdrasil’s forest, Fay alone had been thrown into some strange subdimension. There had been a god there, but he knew neither their name nor what they looked like.
I’d never heard that voice before, either. I had no idea who it was, but for some reason, they knew me.
And they had clearly regarded him as a threat.
“You were the true danger all along. You will sleep here awhile. The gods’ games cannot exist.”
What god could that possibly have been? Whoever it was, they’d felt threatened by the prospect of him completing the gods’ games. Who knew they could feel that way?
“Yeah, about that.” Uroboros plopped down on the sofa across from Fay. “Quick question, Tiny Human. When you beat Lucemia, did it count as two wins?”
“—!” Fay’s breath caught in his throat.
“Ah-ha! Well, I had an inkling.” Uroboros grinned at Fay’s right hand. “Normally, when a human wins one of the gods’ games, it counts as one win. Simple, right? But something a little bit unusual happened in that maze.”
“I’d say it was more than a little bit,” Fay said. Uroboros certainly made this sound ominous. She looked as excited as a child who knew the secret to a magic trick. If she was this confident, she must have already figured out what was going on.
“I told you, did I not, that there were six gods in that maze?”
“Yeah. Is that counting Leshea?”
“Nope. It includes”—here Uroboros held up six fingers—“my most adorable undefeated self, one very soft-headed god of the underworld, and four other sly gods.”
“Quite a crowd, apart from you.”
“The real question here, Tiny Human, is: Who was the game master? Who was really running the show in that labyrinth?”
“What?” Pearl’s eyes went wide—Uroboros’s question seemed to have snapped her out of her near slumber on the sofa. “The game master was Anubis, wasn’t it? She said it herself: ‘Nothing is impossible for the game master.’”
“That’s naive! Chesty, you’re not using your head! No wonder, since all your nutrition seems to go to your boobs instead of your brain!”
“My boobs don’t have anything to do with this!”
“That underworld-ruling moron was dead, right? Don’t forget, until Chesty and company brought her back to life, she’d given up being in charge of that maze.”
“W-well, yes…”
“So there was a stretch when the dummy was dead and wasn’t the game master. Maybe it’d make more sense to you if I said the GM’s seat was open.”
“I get it! That’s what you’re talking about!” Nel said, jumping up off the sofa. “If the GM’s seat was open, a different god could take it over. Meaning there were two gods serving as game masters!”
“You got it. There were four gods in that labyrinth, and one of them had taken over the role of game master. Afraid that mine undefeated self would clear the maze, they panicked and invoked the game master’s privilege to kick me out.”
So the GM had changed partway through. When the game had begun, there had been some other god occupying the GM’s seat left vacant by the absent Anubis. Uroboros’s ignominious dismissal from the game had been through that deity’s GM privilege.
After all that, Anubis had been brought back to life, and with the revival of the true game master, the true creator of the labyrinth, the mystery god who had been playing the role of GM had to relinquish the position.
So that’s it. That’s why the labyrinth, and the labyrinth alone, awarded me two wins.
By the strange quirk of having two game masters, it had counted as two wins in the gods’ games.
That assumption was most likely correct. After all, it lined up with what that mysterious god had said:
“You were never supposed to be able to clear that labyrinth game. I ejected the snake, Uroboros, from the game, even while knowing that to do so would be to alert her to my presence.”
“Huh.” Leshea, who had been listening quietly with her arms crossed, let out a small sigh. “I’m not sure I get it, but the point is that there’s some weird god running around, right? You’re telling us that they showed up in Anubis’s maze and started messing around? Don’t you know who they were, Snakey?”
“Nope,” Uroboros said with a disinterested shake of her head. She didn’t even seem particularly bothered at being called “Snakey.”
I do wonder who those gods were, though. Seeing as one of them almost imprisoned me in a subdimension.
And of course, there was the whole matter of what had come before that—there seemed every chance that the trapping of apostles worldwide in Lucemia had been the work, not of Anubis, but of these mysterious gods.
“Lady Uroboros,” Chief Secretary Miranda offered hesitantly from behind her monitor. “If you’ll forgive my temerity, wasn’t there something you were going to tell Fay and his friends?”
“Hmm?”
“The matter of the Godeye lens, I mean…”
“Oh yeah! Mineself had totally forgotten!” Uroboros riffled through her pockets and pulled out a small black device. “Here, Tiny Human.”
“Huh? A Godeye lens? What about it?”
It was a recording device that apostles took into the superior spiritual realm. Through the lens, recorded images of the games could be broadcasted back to the human world.
“This is where that little prank started,” Uroboros said.
“Meaning…?”
“All the humans gathered in that maze were carrying one, right? It was that same deity who did it. The lens is like a collar, with the gods holding the leash. If a human is wearing the collar, you just pull on the leash, and boom! You can drag them straight to Lucemia. That’s how their little prank worked.”
“What?!”
Fay stared at the tiny camera. Nel and Pearl jumped up from the sofa, turning to Miranda.
“Chief Secretary Miranda?! Didn’t the Arcane Court give out these lenses?!”
“Now, now, Nel. Pearl. Don’t be hasty.” Miranda sighed and shook her head. The look on her face told them she’d been expecting this.
“The Godeye lenses were tampered with by the gods. It’s only natural that you would suspect the Arcane Court of some kind of shenanigans, but I want you to remember something. Where do they make the Godeye lenses and distribute them to the rest of the world?”
“Wha…?” Pearl said. She and Nel looked at each other.
“W-well, at…at…” Nel sputtered. She couldn’t quite get the words out, but the girls’ expressions grew stern.
“Headquarters,” Miranda practically spat, then slid her glasses up the bridge of her nose.
Fay had never heard her sound so cold before. It was the unmistakable, undisguised anger of the chief secretary of a branch office of the Arcane Court. “Now, what could this all be about? The Arcane Court supposedly exists to support the apostles who play the gods’ games. And now the Court’s very headquarters… Well. Apostles from all over the world get trapped in a game, and when we pull the curtain back on this staggering incident, the culprit turns out to be none other than the Godeye lens.”
Nobody spoke. The chief secretary was saying what they were all thinking.
“I’ve made my report to headquarters. Step one has to be talking to them directly. I hear the chairman himself is going to be at the meeting to represent headquarters… Ugh! I can’t believe this.” Miranda heaved another great sigh. “Do you think I could get you to be there with us, Fay?”
“You want me?”
This, he hadn’t expected. He would have assumed participants at a plenary meeting of headquarters and the branch offices would naturally be of at least secretary level. To summon an apostle, even one who had been directly involved in the events in question, to such a conclave…
“If you’re sure…,” Fay said.
“We’ll be trying to find out who’s behind this. We have Lady Uroboros’s word on it—she can’t be wrong.” Miranda leaned back in her chair and stared at the information on the monitor so hard, it seemed like she might bore a hole through it. “Headquarters is home to a god pretending to be a human. And I think they might just be our mastermind.”
Chapter
Player.3
Mind Over Matter
Gods’ Games We Play
1
Far from the city of Ruin, in the southern part of the world continent, a metropolis floated several thousand meters above the surface. It was the only floating city in this world, in this age.
The scale of the city itself was not all that grand, but it was the place where the “magic” of the ancient magical civilization remained more potent than anywhere else.
The Myth City of Heckt-Scheherezade.
Some three thousand years ago, this world and this continent had belonged to titanic creatures who walked the earth; for humans, there had been no place. So humans had lifted their cities into the air…using a God’s Diadem. For among the rewards received for defeating undefeated gods, there was a legendary stone called the Flight Crystal. With it, humans lofted the cities they had built into the sky one by one.
This was the beginning of the ancient magical civilization—but three thousand years prior to modern day, that civilization had abruptly vanished.
Why had it crumbled? Investigating that question was profoundly difficult due to the dearth of physical remains from the ancient civilization, but one lone example of their magical technology had remained throughout the millennia: the Myth City. A great silver city floating like a bird in the vast blue sky.
This was the location of Arcane Court headquarters.
One could hear them: Creak, creak, crack, crack. Hundreds, thousands of windmills decorating the tower that was headquarters. In the tower’s great library, a girl sat reading silently, bathed in multicolored light from the stained glass.
“……” Without a word, without a sound, she sat in the otherwise empty library, reading a weathered book.
She was not a librarian.
She was an apostle of the Arcane Court.
She wore black ceremonial garments worked with gold embroidery, a sign that she not only served at headquarters, but was a member of its most distinguished team. That is to say, the strongest team in the world: Mind Over Matter. (Motto: The Holy See where all souls gather.)
“Heleneia.”
A man’s rasping voice sounded.
Hearing her name, the girl closed the book she had been reading. “Yes, Father?”
“I’ve been looking for you, Heleneia.”
Unsteady footsteps approached. The girl turned toward the entrance to find a man, old but not yet elderly, walking slowly toward her, supported by a cane. Her eyes widened when she saw him.
“Father, you mustn’t! Your body isn’t ready yet; you can’t leave your room…” She walked quickly over to the man, placing a hand on his back to support him. Slowly, she guided him to a chair and helped him sit down.
“This is pathetic,” the man said, shaking his head with the slightest hint of a bitter smile. “The chairman of Arcane Court headquarters, practically unable to fulfill his duties. Maybe it’s time to start thinking about retirement.”
“Whatever do you mean?” The girl gave him her sweetest smile. Still, her father shook his head, so she placed a hand gently on his cheek. “It’s just an illness. You’ll get better with enough rest. But tell me, what’s wrong? What was so urgent that you had to leave your room to visit me?”
“Something very ominous has happened,” said the chairman, Augusto O. Missing. He leaned back in his chair and sighed deeply. “It’s the incident with the labyrinth, Lucemia.”
The breath caught in her throat, and her eyes widened again, ever so slightly, but her father didn’t notice.
“You know, when more than two hundred apostles were trapped in a game and couldn’t get home? Rumors are starting to swirl. People think maybe headquarters was involved.”
“Baseless speculation,” the girl said softly. In her voice, though, there was the hint of a chill, so slight that her own father would never have detected it. “You want humanity to obtain a Clear in the gods’ games more than anyone, Father. What in the world would you have to do with such an unfortunate incident? Anyway, what proof could they possibly have for—”
“Uroboros.”
“……”
That brought the girl up short.
“A god has descended to the human world. Not in their real form, of course; I mean in a spiritual body. In any case, this deity seems to have taken a real shine to the human who defeated them. You’ve heard the reports, that Uroboros is now living at the Ruin branch office?”
“Yes…”
“Well, this god has formally declared that they can sense divine power from the Godeye lenses. Which puts suspicion squarely on the distributor of the lenses—headquarters. The Ruin office is requesting a meeting…” Chairman Augusto shook his head again, feebly this time. He looked lost.
Well, why shouldn’t he? This human, this “father,” truly knew nothing at all.
“The other branch offices will be there as well. I expect this to be a long meeting… By all rights, the chairman should be the one to represent headquarters, but to my own chagrin, I have to admit that I don’t have the stamina right now.”
“I understand completely, Father.” The girl nodded and stroked her father’s back as he gnashed his teeth. “I, the vice chairperson, will appear on your behalf. You needn’t worry about a thing. Ruin’s suspicions will soon be cleared up.”
“I’m sorry to put you to so much trouble.”
“Just leave everything to me.” She took her father’s hand and helped him to his feet. Then, bracing his back once again, she ushered him to the library door.
“The conference is at noon tomorrow,” he said. “I’m sorry about this, Heleneia.”
“Not at all. Just make sure you have the doctor take another look at you as soon as you get back to your room, Father.”
She watched with a smile on her face until his frail figure was out of sight.
“Uroboros. You snake. Are you really so taken with that human, that…Fay?”
It was not the girl’s voice. It was the rippling utterance of a deity, tinged with anger, that echoed around the ancient library.
2
In a conference room at the Arcane Court’s Ruin branch office, Fay sat at a round table large enough to fit thirty people or more. At the moment, it was occupied only by himself and Chief Secretary Miranda. Each of them had a conference monitor in front of them. In fact, a third seat, beside theirs, also had a monitor—but there was no one sitting at it.
“Fay. Where’s Lady Uroboros?”
“She turned me down flat. Said she wasn’t interested. ‘You want mineself to go to a meeting? Not until after we’ve played my game.’ Her words. I thought about it, but she said her game takes a minimum of five hundred hours to finish.”
“She and Lady Leoleshea are just the same. The gods really aren’t interested in anything besides games, are they?” Miranda gave a tired smile as she turned on her monitor. “We’re only having this meeting because Lady Uroboros testified that the culprit is at Arcane Court headquarters. It might have been nice to have our star witness with us.”
“The thing going on with the Godeye lenses, right?”
“That’s it. We humans can’t detect the gods’ power, so if they just tell us they weren’t able to find any evidence of tampering, there won’t be much we can say. Here goes…”
The monitor blinked to life. There was a brief mechanical buzz, and then it displayed a conference screen split into twenty-one segments. The twenty branch offices from across the world, plus headquarters.
“We’re the only ones with our cameras on,” Fay observed.
“We’re just here first. We’ve got another twelve minutes until this meeting starts, so I think we can just relax. If you need to use the bathroom, Fay, now’s the time.” Fay wasn’t sure if Miranda was joking or not. She spread some papers in front of her. “I think we’re in for a long one today.”
Twelve minutes later, with the world-spanning video conference underway…
“We detected no irregularities with the Godeye lenses.”
The conference fell silent. The words, cool and composed, came from a girl occupying the center of the screen, from where she spoke to the more than thirty participants in the meeting. They were the first words out of her mouth, the moment Miranda, as the one who had convened the meeting, finished what she had to say.
“Headquarters has conducted its own investigation of the Godeye lenses in response to the Ruin branch office’s claims that they are imbued with divine power, and that they were somehow connected to the Lucemia entrapment incident. However, no signs of anything unusual were found.” The young woman who served as vice chairperson stared straight ahead as she spoke, refusing to make eye contact with any of the others who were gathered there. “Interviews were also conducted with staff and apostles associated with headquarters, but it was determined that none of them should be considered a suspect in the incident. A detailed report will be prepared on the subject.”
