Chapter 55

The Sleeping Lion takes 80 quadrillion, 7,991 trillion, 300 million and 199 damage. The Sleeping Lion is dead. “………” Without another sound, the gigantic lion slumped over. This time, the god’s fist had done its job on the boss. “Bah! That’s what you get for interrupting me, you mutt,” the god-girl said, landing lightly on the ground. Incidentally, Captain Ashlan could be heard to moan, “Why’d we go to all that work?” but Uroboros took no notice of him. “Say. What’s this?” Something glowed at the god’s feet. A stone platform with a golden sword stabbed into it rose up. Save Item: Lionheart. Brave warriors: return to the place of this battle at any time. Team Blaze, all of whose members had sat down from sheer exhaustion, jumped to their feet. There was general chaos as everybody shouted, ““A save item?!”” They all raced up to the stone with its sword. “This is it! A save point!” “We can finally go home!” As each person touched the sword, their names were carved into the pedestal. Leaving your name in stone like this seemed to be how you saved in this game. “All right, this is making sense. I’ll bet we just pull the sword out of the stone to activate the item. Then we can get out of here and go back to the human world. Finally. You really saved our necks, Fay,” Ashlan said. “……” But Fay didn’t answer. “Huh? What’s up? You’re looking awfully grim. Don’t you want to get out of this dungeon?” “Something’s bugging me, Captain Ashlan.” Fay still had that bad feeling. Yes, they’d found a save point, but their circumstances didn’t seem any better than before, in his opinion. He wasn’t sure how much of these feelings to share with the other team leader. “What’s goin’ on? Why’re all you humans so happy?” Uroboros asked innocently, her voice echoing around the Execution Grounds. She was looking from the sword and stone to the members of Blaze eagerly crowding around it, and back again. “Why’re you so glad to save?” “Because we can finally get back to reality, deity. You better believe we’re glad. We’re only getting out of here by the skin of our teeth.” “Yeah? And then what?” “Uh…?” “You go back to the human world. But you’ll play the gods’ games again, right? And since you saved here, every time you dive through your Divine Gate, you’ll come back here, won’t you?” This dungeon allowed no one to abandon it. It would permit them to return to the human world, but only on the condition that, until they completed the labyrinth, they would never be able to play another game. Yeah. It’s a save point, not salvation. Just a temporary escape. We can yell and we can cry, but we’re going to have to clear this dungeon. But if Fay was right about that, then the labyrinth had an even more critical bug. He wondered how many of the others had noticed. “Y-yeah, I hear you! But now we’ve got something that will let us get back to the real world. With enough time, we can clear this dungeon, no matter how obnoxious it is!” Captain Ashlan said with as much confidence as he could muster. “Hmm?” said Uroboros, looking at him with a quizzical tilt of the head. “Haven’t you realized, human?” “Realized what?” Ashlan snapped. “This game will never end.” Ashlan almost choked. “This game’s got a bug. One that prevents the story from progressing.” That caused a burst of muttering to erupt, and the mood in the room changed perceptibly. “But what does that mean? A bug that keeps the story from going on?” Pearl said, knitting her brow in confusion. “Pearl,” Fay said simply, “do you remember what the meep told us when we first reached this dungeon? There was a legend, right? You remember what it was?” “Sure I do! How could you forget the shock of hearing that a god was dead?” Once upon a time there was a god who loved building mazes. This god would wait in the innermost depths of its labyrinth, excited for humans to come and find it. But no one ever finished the maze, and eventually the god died of boredom. “Okay, next thing,” Fay said, talking to Pearl but speaking to all fifteen other apostles in the room. “Remind me what we have to do to clear this game.” “Huh? We have to escape the labyrinth, right?” “Listen, Pearl. The meep said we have to reach the deepest chamber and defeat the final boss. Then the last door will open and we can escape.” “R… Right,” Pearl said ambivalently. She didn’t seem to see what he was getting at. “Let’s go over this again. What was the legend that the meep told us about?” “That the god who made this labyrinth died of boredom.” “Before that.” “That the god waited for people to come find it in the innermost depths of the maze.” “Right. And what do we have to do to clear the maze?” “Defeat the final boss in the…innermost… Er…” The god was in the labyrinth’s deepest chamber. As was the final boss. Which would seem to imply… “See? I think it’s safe to assume that the god in the innermost chamber is the final boss.” “Huh?! But I thought the god was dead!” “Right. Which is exactly the problem.” There was a door that would allow them to escape the maze, and all the players had to do to open it was defeat the last boss—the god itself. Except that the god in question had died a natural death—cause: sheer boredom—centuries ago. “The win condition is to defeat the last boss, but that boss died without being defeated, and now it’s impossible to progress. The door out of this labyrinth is going to stay shut forever,” Fay said. “Wh-wh-whaaaaaaaaat?!” Pearl exclaimed. That was why the god-girl Uroboros had said that this game would never end. A fatal bug, the absence of the final boss, made it impossible to meet the clear condition.