Chapter 4

“All right. My turn.” Leoleshea brushed back her vermilion hair and exclaimed, “Yah!” pointing at the air. The first card she turned over was blank. So was the second. “Oh…!” Fay exclaimed when he realized which pair she’d made. At that moment, he knew she’d trapped him. This wasn’t a coincidence—the same pair Leoleshea had just made was the one Fay had been going for, too. Wild cards. Jokers, in playing-card terms. Blank card faces without question prompts written on them, showing that whoever collected the pair could ask anything they wished. “Heh heh! Bet you wish you’d gotten these!” Leoleshea said, happily showing him the Fay. “Now, what shall I ask? You remember the first rule, right, human?” “Y-Yeah, sure…” He’d promised to answer every question honestly. He couldn’t lie. “Okay, then, human, here’s my question: Why are you really trying to get close to me?” Fay tensed as if an icy knife had been plunged into his back. A cute girl stood before him, but for an instant, her voice had been utterly commanding, her eyes sparkling like a dragon’s—a creature vastly beyond any human being. “Answer me, human. And do not seek to evade my query.” The words themselves sounded powerful, like she could grind a human to dust with her voice alone. Ba-dum, ba-dum. Fay felt his pulse racing, despite his immortality Arise. Anyone else might have passed out at that moment from forgetting to breathe. This. This was why the Arcane Court judged Leoleshea beyond human control. “Former” god, my butt! “Incarnated as a human”? Right here in front of me is a real, actual god! Fay had already competed in Elements three times and defeated three different gods, and even he had never encountered an opponent who projected such insurmountable force of personality. She was after the same thing I was from the very beginning. She acted like she was picking cards at random, but she was angling for the wild cards the whole time! Fay could remember every pair that had been uncovered; no doubt Leoleshea could, too. It had been a simple contest of luck which of them would reveal the wild cards first. And that was exactly why Fay said… “Ha-ha-ha! We really are on the same page!” He couldn’t help himself; he started laughing. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. If I was going after them, I should’ve known a god would be, too.” The dragon god blinked and gave him a questioning look. She seemed to wonder how a human fixed with the implacable gaze of a deity could be…laughing. “Heck. Guess I should’ve known a god would see through Chief Secretary Miranda’s plans. Well, at least I got to play an interesting game. So it’s all good.” The god’s question had been about why Fay had come to her. Under normal circumstances, he would have simply replied that he was asked to be her tutor, and that would have been that. But these weren’t normal circumstances. He’d agreed to this game, and all the rules that went with it. “Okay, here goes. My goal—my real goal—is to spy on you. You’re a god who’s come down from the superior spiritual realm. Humanity hasn’t figured you out yet, and I was asked to find out exactly who you were and why you’re here.” Leoleshea didn’t answer immediately, and Fay was left to wonder whether she was going to draw and quarter him. He’d known that his answer might awaken the god’s wrath, and he’d told her anyway. For the moment, though, the dragon-god-girl was simply staring at him, not moving. “There’s one thing I’d like to be clear about—the Arcane Court acted without malice. I think you can probably tell as much from your treatment up to this point, but I just wanted to say it,” Fay said. Leoleshea was quiet for another moment, then swept her flaming red hair back. “I kind of had a sense that’s what was going on. That’s why I asked.” She was smiling at Fay. “Okay, thanks. You gave me an honest answer, which shows that you take my game seriously. You’re a good human.” “That’s, uh…kind of sudden.” “No, I told you already that I liked you, right? If I didn’t, I wouldn’t have asked what I did. It’s not the sort of thing you’d ask someone untrustworthy, is it?” The dragon light in her eyes disappeared as if it had melted away in the sun, and the girl named Leoleshea gave a small smile. “I think I’m going to call you Fay. Oh, and you can feel free to call me Leshea, too. You don’t have to be extra polite to me or anything, either. How can we have fun playing together if we’re constantly holding each other at arm’s length?” The smile caught Fay off guard, but what really made his heart skip a beat was what she said after that. She was going to use his name! “Gosh, it suddenly feels like we’re a lot more like…friends. Are you sure it’s okay to be that familiar with you?” “Sure! You turned out to be everything I hoped for in an opponent.” Leoleshea tossed the two wild cards down on the table and picked up Fay’s pairs instead. “So you went for Gender, Hometown, and Hobbies. You weren’t trying to win on amount of pairs, were you?” “You got me,” Fay said. He hadn’t been simply trying to get the greater number of cards. The crux of this game was to remember cards but not take them. After all, this wasn’t an ordinary game of Memory, where you were engaged in a straightforward contest of mnemonic power. Take the “Name” cards, for example. Fay definitely wasn’t going to pick those—he already knew Leshea’s name. Without the opportunity to go again when he collected a pair, asking her name would have been a simple waste of a turn. It’s all because of that Absolutely One Turn Only rule. The usual theory of Memory, where you win just by grabbing every pair you can remember, goes out the window. It was all about the value you could get out of your turn. This was a game of information selection. Each turn, you had to weigh which cards you knew about versus what you wanted to learn, and then decide what to do. As soon as Fay grasped that point, he began focusing exclusively on cards that would give him access to the information he desired. He hadn’t even been interested in victory as such. “Oh, that’s right!” the Dragon God Leshea said as if it had just occurred to her. She leaned across the table. “Question. I assume you were going for the wild cards, too. What did you plan to ask me?” “You mean you might still give me a response? Er… Ahem. I know you said not to be too stiff. Let me try that again. You’re actually going to tell me?” “Depends on the question.” “I was just wondering…why you chose me. There are other, higher-ranking apostles.” Fay’s ranking as an apostle was III. That represented the fact that he had won three of the gods’ games—but there were apostles here at the Ruin branch office with higher ranks than his. “And if you went to Arcane Court headquarters, I’m sure—” “Yeah, I know. But you’re the only rookie to make three wins.” It was said that every year, more than a thousand people around the world were chosen by the gods to receive Arises. In other words, there would be that many new apostles. But none of them had bettered Fay’s three wins. Even if you went back over the past hundred years, there had probably been only a few rookies to achieve such a feat. “You had prospects like that, yet you dumped your team and went off somewhere for six months. I’m sure Miranda told you that the Arcane Court was at its wits’ end, right?” “Well, she can blame herself for feeding me bad info…” “So anyway!” Leshea pitched the cards on the floor and leaned over toward them. “I know you want to know more about me, too, and I think the best thing would be for us to cooperate. I want to Clear the gods’ games with you.” “The gods’ games?” The Dragon God Leshea was supposed to be one of the deities who ran those games. In ordinary terms, the gods were the games’ creators. From a story perspective, they were unique bosses; and after they were defeated, they even served as the princesses who gave the winners their rewards. But they were never challengers. It was humans who were supposed to take on the gods. “Yeah. So, uh, I incarnated myself because I wanted to play with humans, which was great as far as it went, but it turns out that going from the spiritual realm to the physical one is…sort of a one-way trip.” Leshea twirled a few strands of vermilion hair around a finger as she talked. She sounded the slightest bit embarrassed. “I can’t go back to being a god now. It was just kind of an accident.” “You call that an accident?!” “But it’s no problem. I just have to play the gods’ games.” “I’m not sure I follow,” Fay said. “I need to win ten games. Then I can go back to being a god.” Ah, yes, rule seven: Ten victories against the gods will be considered a Clear. And anyone who achieves a Clear will be granted a Celebration. Not that anyone knew exactly what that entailed. “Hold on… Leshea, do you know what the Celebration really is?” “Sure I do. The rumors you humans have about it are pretty accurate—the gods will grant your wish. That much is true.” “Wow, so they really do grant wishes… But if ‘that much’ is true, that means there’s something we’ve gotten wrong.” “The gods don’t just grant one wish. You could make a hundred wishes, or even a thousand.” “That’s nuts! What do they think they’re doing acting so generous?!” “Well, they haven’t yet. No human has ever done it.” Fay was brought abruptly back to Earth. “Er… Yeah. I guess that’s true.” So on the one hand, the gods would grant any and every wish you could think of—that was some return on investment. But on the other, you had to win ten games against them, something no one in human history had ever done. It looked like the scales were just about even. “That’s why I want to team up with you. To play with you,” Leshea said. “So you want us to be a formal team?” “You don’t want to?” “Nah, it’s fine. An honor, even.” The gods’ games were battles of wits, gods versus humans, in contests so massive and incredible only a deity could have come up with them. I was actually trying to decide what to do about a team, Fay thought. The last one I was with retired six months ago. He’d figured he was going to have to find a team somewhere and try to convince them to let him join up—so Leshea’s offer was unexpected, but it couldn’t have come at a better time. “I would love to,” Fay finally said. He discovered that without quite meaning to he was clenching his fists. Games existed to be enjoyed. She’d taught him that when he was young, and it was a precept Fay had lived by ever since. He was going to form a team with a girl who was once a god. It was a pulse-pounding idea, the sort of thing that would typically have been out of reach. “I’ll get to see how a former god plays from right up close. Thinking about it gives me goosebumps!” Fay said. “Hee!” The former-god girl smiled. “That’s great. You really are everything I’d hoped for. Well, that settles—” “Oh, but…” Fay interrupted. There was something else. “We’ve only just met. I’ve been on a team before, but never with a former god. I’d like to be properly prepared.” Fay didn’t doubt that a former god would be more than capable of playing any game. If he had a concern, it was about communication. As he said, they had just met. “It’s important how a team works in sync—it’s like picking your partner for doubles in tennis or Ping-Pong, right? And I’ve only been in the gods’ games three times…” “All of which you won.” “Yeah, barely. It was good luck. That three-and-oh record could easily be oh-and-three.” Games involved making the most of your knowledge. You had to play mind games, read your opponent, and go along by trial and error trying to find the best strategy, and then at the end, you had to pray for a bit of good fortune to gain victory. That was true of all games—and the gods’ games were the epitome of that. “That’s the whole reason I want to be so careful,” Fay went on. “Not blindly leap to teaming up.” Leshea didn’t say anything. “It’s like—you know. If you bumped into someone on the street and they were like, ‘Marry me!’ you’d never do it. You’d start by being friends, then dating… Wait, maybe this metaphor is making things harder to understand.” “No, I get it.” “Phew. So we’ll start by making sure we understand each other. We can take time, build up our cohesion, and—” “We’ll dive right into the gods’ games; got it.” “I’m glad you under—wait, what?! Were you even listening to me?!” “I’m gonna go tell Miranda!” Leshea said. “No, let me finish! Awww…” This former god might be more trouble than he had anticipated. Leshea, her eyes shining, sprinted from the room, Fay racing after her. 4 It’s a cruel world. Two percent—that’s about how much of the land area of the World Continent humanity’s cities would occupy if they were all put together. Add all the land currently being cultivated by the Arcane Court’s teams, and you might reach 7 percent. So, you might ask, what about the other 93 percent? Terra incognita. Plains stalked by terrifying grassland dwellers called Rexes. Murderous deserts where a human died of heatstroke within an hour. And oceans home to massive aquatic life-forms that swallowed any ship that dared set sail. Humans were absolutely not the masters of this world. Even the Sacrament City of Ruin had to be surrounded by steel walls, or a pack of Rexes would have leveled it in an evening. People needed power if they were going to fight and survive amidst the brutality of the natural world. “Gotta hand it to those gods. They’re pretty clever,” Fay said. He was in the apostles’ dorm, back in his room for the first time in half a year. He lay on his bed, looking up at the ceiling. “They know that humans need to get out there and tame those terrible landscapes, but they know we can’t do it with nothing but human abilities to help us…” That was where the gods’ games came in. (From) The Seven Rules of the Gods’ Games Rule 1: Humans granted an Arise by the gods become apostles. Rule 2: Those with an Arise will receive either a Superhuman or a Magical power. Rule 5: However, as a reward for obtaining victory in the gods’ games, a partial measure of an Arise power may be manifested within the real world. Further victories will unlock greater expressions of the ability. Humans to whom the gods granted an Arise obtained incredible skills, including Superhuman techniques like the ability to move fast enough to outrun a Rex, or Magical powers like producing ice that could blunt a scorching wind. Some mages were even mighty enough to destroy the underwater beasts who lived in the sea. Initially, these blessings could be used only during one of the gods’ games, but by achieving victory in those games, apostles could also begin to manifest their abilities in the real world. Just what humanity needed to go out there and explore. They didn’t have to win ten games. Just one or two victories would unlock some of an Arise’s power in the real world. “The gods invite people to play their games to pass the time. If the people can win, they get to bring their Arise abilities into the real world. And that lets us explore and claim more territory for humanity,” Fay mused. Each side received something out of it—the gods got to play their fill of games, and humans got the chance to go adventuring out in the world. So the gods’ games were both humanity’s greatest entertainment and also where they acquired the capabilities necessary to venture into the outside world. For that reason, the Arcane Court was effectively the world’s government, and people treated apostles like heroes. “I’d assumed I was going to make a career out of the gods’ games, too,” Fay murmured. Until six months ago. Until he’d heard rumors about a girl who looked exactly like the one he’d been searching for. “Back again today, Fay? Good. Let’s get right down to playing. Just be sure you take the game seriously. It’s more fun that way.” An older girl, almost like an older sister, with vermilion hair: the girl Fay had played against as a child. She’d loved games more than anyone Fay knew, then or later. It’s thanks to her, he thought. The whole reason I was able to win at the gods’ games was because she trained me. And then, one day, she’d suddenly disappeared. That’s why Fay was looking for her. He wanted to find her and say thank you—to tell her she had made him who he was today. That was the impulse that had driven him away from the Arcane Court on his six-month search. “All that…and yet I can’t seem to remember her. I wonder why.” He didn’t know the older girl’s name. Why not? They had played together. It wasn’t just her name, either—her face seemed hazy to him; he couldn’t recall the details. The only thing still with him was the shocking vermilion color of her hair. Exactly the same color as the Dragon God Leshea’s. And they both loved games more than anyone Fay had ever known. He had to admit the question had crossed his mind, if only for a second: Could it be? But… No, it can’t. Leshea would remember me otherwise, right? The biggest strike against the theory was simply this: Leshea had been “discovered” just a year before. While Fay had been playing with the girl, the one he thought of almost like an older sister, Leshea had been sleeping in a wall of ice. It was just a case of mistaken identity. Or…mistaken divinity. Something. “It’s funny, huh?” Fay mumbled, turning over in bed and smiling a little despite himself. “I come back here, and the first thing that happens is a former god invites me to play in the gods’ games with her.” It was one in the morning. He should have been asleep long ago, but he just couldn’t drift off. He couldn’t get Leshea’s face out of his head—the god who so closely resembled the “older sister” he admired so much. “No, no. Leshea is a different person. Or a different god or whatever. I know that. I’m not going to let this keep bothering me after today. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to act perfectly normal around her.” “What’s that you were saying about me?” “Oh, just that I— Leshea?! Wait! What are you doing here?!” Fay sat bolt upright to discover that the girl with the brilliant scarlet hair was looking at him with distinct interest. She was wearing the same tank top she had been that afternoon. But what was she doing here? This was supposed to be Fay’s room—and the door was supposed to be locked. “Miranda gave me a key,” Leshea said. “Curse you, Chief Secretary! Whatever happened to privacy?!” “Okay! It’s time for a night game!” “Uh…” “Here we go!” “Wait! Ahhhhhhhhh!” Leshea grabbed Fay’s hand, and an instant later, the young man found himself pitched out the window of the living area and plunging from his third-floor room down toward the yard. “Hngh!” he exclaimed as he impacted and tumbled along the ground. His Arise was of the Superhuman variety, and that had to include some boosting of physical abilities, or the bearer would have been torn apart by his own gift. As he got to his feet, he muttered, “What does she think she’s doing… Huh?” He found himself confronted with a gigantic statue shaped like a dragon’s head. Over sixteen feet tall, it was like a piece of ancient history that had plopped right down in the yard. It was a Divine Gate—a giant statue that acted as a door to the superior spiritual realm and a relic from the ancient magical civilization. By passing through this stone door, one could dive into Elements, the playground of the gods. “What’s it doing here? I thought it was at the Dive Center at the Arcane Court.” “I borrowed it and brought it here.” “You stole it?!” Anyway, the weight of that statue was a matter of more than a few kilograms. Frankly, it was a matter of more than a few tons. It was a mystery to Fay how a girl smaller than he was had managed to cart a sixteen-foot-tall stone statue all the way to the dormitory. “What about the apostles? The ones who are supposed to be guarding the Divine Gate at the Dive Center?” “I politely explained the situation to them,” the former god said with a sweet wink. “All I had to say was ‘Stay the hell out of my damn way!’ and they let me through.” “How is that polite?!” “I only borrowed it! And there happened to be one Divine Gate we can enter right now! Lucky, huh?” The mouth of the dragon-head statue was glowing—the sign that the gods were inviting people to play in the superior spiritual realm beyond. “I’m doing what you said this afternoon,” Leshea protested. “You told me that if we were going to be a team in the gods’ games, we’d better practice. You know, understand each other and be in sync and all that stuff.” “Yeah…” “And that gave me an idea! Why not practice on the real thing?” “That isn’t really prac—” “I just can’t wait any longer!” The vermilion-haired girl held out her hand, her cheeks flushed with excitement. Her smile was enough to make Fay’s breath catch momentarily. “I’ve just been waiting so long for a human like you!” Leshea said. Then she took his hand and jumped into the statue’s shining maw.