Chapter 83

Yggdrasil had already absorbed the strength of the gods twice, shaking to its roots each time. By now, the treant was like a runaway train, and it wasn’t stopping. It slammed into the first solid object in its path—the great tree of Yggdrasil on the god team’s side. Anita did, in fact, grab the ten-point ball out of the air. Her momentum then sent her rocketing toward the divine team’s huge tree, with which she collided with a tremendous bang. “I’ll bet if we did that one more time, we could knock Yggdrasil’s sprout-tree right over!” This was the third and final time. Pushed over the edge by Anita, the human missile, Yggdrasil’s great tree fell over with a tremendous crash. “A-all right, but what purpose does that serve?!” “Puuuuuushhh!” From just behind the center of the field, the gods heard every human on the other team scream and shout. The gods looked at them with amazement. The ground-bound fruit. The one-shot win that everyone had forgotten about. Its virtually limitless weight meant no one could pick it up, but now Fay, Nel, Pearl, Captain Ashlan, and the entire human team were gathered around it. “Everyone push together! All at once, now!” Captain Ashlan bellowed. Crrrk… The humans all shoved until they were red-faced—and the ground-bound fruit began to move, a few scant centimeters at a time. They were pushing it… …toward the toppled tree. Toward the white flower that bloomed among its branches. The court was some fifty meters long. And the goal flower grew fifty meters up in the great tree’s branches. They matched up perfectly: If Yggdrasil’s tree fell, the goal flower would topple precisely, inexorably onto the ground-bound fruit. People think ball games mean getting the ball to the goal, but who says so? If the ball was too heavy to carry, then just bring the goal to the ball. This was the true core of the “extra time” plan. An upset victory that was achievable with the forty-three seconds added to the clock—while the divine team, who had dismissed the possibilities of those forty-three seconds, reacted nowhere near in time. Not to stop the great tree from falling. Not to change the direction of its fall with wind magic. Then again, maybe it wasn’t about being in time at all. Having been brought to the brink of such an elaborate upset, maybe they simply stood and watched. All of them did. They watched as Yggdrasil’s tree fell toward center court… …and the huge flower that served as the goal slammed directly into the bright red ground-bound fruit. “Scorrre! It’s an instant win with the ground-bound fruit. Our final score is one hundred million, twenty-two points to twenty. By being the first to reach fifty points, the human team wins!” Yggdrasil’s forest resounded with the sound of the meep’s whistle. 2 About half an hour later… “Wait, Yggdrasil’s trees can fall over and then just…get back up?!” “It is a divine tree.” “Er… Yeah. I guess that makes sense.” Captain Ashlan scratched his head and smiled wryly. After having been so dramatically knocked over, the huge tree was now simply raising itself back up into place, like a bop bag. Fay wouldn’t pretend to understand how it worked, but like the meep had said, Yggdrasil was divine. He was content to leave it at that. “Urgh… My head’s still spinning,” groaned Anita, who lay spread-eagle on the grass. “Treasured sister Leshea…erm…I’m sure glad we won and all, but I don’t know about…this.” “I couldn’t be more satisfied! It’s been so long since I got to show off my awesomeness to help us claim a win!” Leshea’s eyes gleamed with an unmistakable sense of accomplishment. Then there was the gods’ team, which had gathered in the center of the playing field, where they were debriefing. All ten of them, the Goalie Bear included, had gathered as soon as the game was over to discuss. “I’m telling you! You should have stopped that last human missile, Treant!” “……………” “What? You didn’t wanna ’cause it would hurt? Come on, you can survive a scratch like that!” “There were other possible plays. If the humans are going to knock down the tree, perhaps we could have the Goalie Bear tear the goal off the branch,” the dryads suggested. Then the nymphs clapped their hands and said, “Oh, yeah! Hey, you! Humans! Did ya know? In the gods’ games, you can get special rewards by fulfilling special victory conditions.” “Just what I’ve been waiting for!” Captain Ashlan said, turning eagerly toward them. The rate of human victories in the gods’ games hovered somewhere below 10 percent. So apostles who not only won, but took special kinds of victories, could be rewarded. God’s Love: Awarded for winning a game without a single casualty. God’s Diadem: Awarded for defeating a previously undefeated god for the first time. In this case, it was the latter. The guardians of Yggdrasil’s forest were meeting the humans for the first time—so although it wasn’t the same as with Uroboros, whom humanity had tried and failed to best for centuries, this team was still officially undefeated. “What do we get?!” Ashlan exclaimed. “Oh, we’ve got something great for you. Okay, here it comes…is what I’d like to say. Buuut…” The nymphs turned and looked first at Fay, then Leshea, Nel, and Pearl. “How many do you all have?” “Sorry?” “I mean! How many rewards? How many do you have?” “Oh. You mean the Gods’ Diadems.” Fay thought back over his career in the games, counting the “loot” he’d acquired from the gods. From Uroboros, the Undefeated God: the Eye of Uroboros, a treasure (or trash, depending on how you looked at it) that caused the player diving to always encounter Uroboros. From the God of the Sun Army, Mahtma II: the Sun Flower. Legend says that it can summon the sun. From Anubis, the God of the Underworld: the Treasure Hall Master Key, which enables the user to summon any one item from the Labyrinth of Lucemia. “I have three,” Fay said. “Awwwwwwwww! What! A! Shame!” The nymphs sighed, sounding genuinely sympathetic but also distinctly amused. “Three is the maximum number of rewards you can receive.” “Say what?!” Who knew there was an inventory limit? Fay and his team were the only ones to run afoul of this maximum, but apparently Captain Ashlan, Anita, and the others who had been in the game with them were to be denied any reward as well. “N-now just a second, please!” Pearl said, immediately jumping forward. “I think I have an idea, Rainbow Flutter Bug!” “The word you’re looking for is nymph.” “We have this reward, the Eye of Uroboros, that we totally don’t need at all, like not even a little bit! Maybe we could trade it in so that everyone can get their reward?!” “No way!” The nymphs gave an amused snort. “Awww, I really feel for you. If you drink Yggdrasil’s Sap, your Arise becomes a hundred times more powerful. It’s great stuff. Oh well. Them’s the breaks. Bye-bye, now!” “Whaaaaaaat?!” “Noooooooo! I knew we should’ve thrown away Uroboros’s Eye! It’s cursed; it has to be!” The apostles’ despair echoed around the forest. Fay and the rest returned to the human world. Vs. The God-Tree Guardians—WIN. Game: God-Tree-Fruit Basketball. Time Elapsed: 30 minutes, 43 seconds. Win Condition 1: Score 50 points. Win Condition 2: If time expires, the team with the higher score wins. Other: Four fruits/balls are used simultaneously. If time expires, a special calculation called the minimum penalty will be applied. Dropped Item: Yggdrasil’s Sap—Not Obtained. Dropped on Difficulty: Mythic. 3 In an office in the Arcane Court’s Ruin branch, the clicking of a keyboard could be heard. The sound came from Chief Secretary Miranda’s desk. “Hmm, okay. So you can’t possess more than three God’s Diadems at most. That’s new info. Good work, Fay.” “Thanks… Unfortunately, that good work left Captain Ashlan feeling awfully disappointed.” “You got another precious win. To hope for more than that is greedy.” Miranda seemed to be in a staring contest with the screen. She’d been questioning Fay for almost two hours. “Just to be clear,” she said. “The gods’ games go up in difficulty when you’ve won five or more victories—is that right?” “That’s right, Chief Secretary Miranda,” said Nel, who was sitting on the end of the sofa. She nodded vigorously. “It sure made the game a lot harder—like we say in the report,” Leshea offered. “Okay, well, that confirms it. We got an awful lot of valuable information straight from the god’s mouth for a single game. Talkative deity, huh?” Miranda sipped her coffee, looking positively happy. Normally she would have been in a bad mood after working so late, grumbling about “a sleepless night” being “the enemy of good skin,” but tonight was one of the rare exceptions. Fay and his team had added another victory to their total, and they had gotten some very useful information as well. “That does it for the post-game interview. This is where I’d like to tell you to go back to your rooms and get some rest, but on that subject…” Miranda stood up and looked at the occupants of the sofa: Fay, Nel, and Leshea, along with Pearl, who could barely keep her eyes open under the sandman’s assault. “Lady Uroboros had something to talk to you about. Have you heard already?” “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.”