It was a space full of books and bookshelves: a study, perhaps, or a library. But if that’s was what it was, there was something strange about it.
The books had been treated with total carelessness. Those that couldn’t fit on the shelves had been stacked into piles with no rhyme or reason. Even some of the bookshelves themselves had been knocked over.
At a glance, one might think the place was long abandoned... but this place was alive. This place had a master.
Atop one carelessly piled stack of books sat a girl.
Her name was Ende.
Her hair was red, and she wore a high school uniform.
She was reading a book, as she always was. This particular book was about a subject she had been very interested in lately: the Divine Vessels War.
The Evil God who was trying to destroy the world and the Outers who enjoyed watching the world as observers were natural enemies. Thus, the Outers and the Evil God had fought, and the Evil God had lost. But the Outers, who could never quite take anything seriously, hadn’t been satisfied with his destruction.
They had sealed the Evil God and split his body up into individual parts known as the Divine Vessels. In that way, even if the Evil God was sealed, he would never fully lose his ability to influence the world.
Thus, the Evil God cast bait.
He set rules: if the Vessels were brought together, he would revive and grant any wish.
The Divine Vessels would take hosts that were humanoid beings, bequeathing them power. Then they would resonate to communicate their location to the other hosts. These hosts would fight each other until one stood victorious; then the Evil God would revive only to be sealed again.
That cycle had repeated over and over again, right up until the present day.
Now, the Divine Vessels War Ende was participating in was reaching its final stage.
The book Ende was reading was describing what had happened so far. This was Ende’s ability: to cause descriptions of current events to be written in her books.
According to the book, five major factions had Divine Vessels. Though generally, even if you lost a fight and had your vessel stolen, as long as you were still alive, you could get a chance to take it back. The only thing that mattered was having all the Divine Vessels at the very end, which meant there were probably other contenders besides those five waiting in the wings for a chance to seize victory.
“Of course, it would be hard to challenge a Divine Vessel host without having a Divine Vessel of your own,” Ende murmured.
“But I effectively don’t have one myself, do I?” A brazen voice interrupted Ende’s monologue.
“I expected you to take an hour, but I think you finished it a little faster than that,” Ende said, but as there was no clock in her library, she was going completely from her gut.
Ende looked up from her book.
A boy was standing there, the label “Protagonist” hanging over his head.
This was Ryoma Takei, the participant that Ende had chosen so that she could meddle in the war. He had a trait that caused him to be caught up in all sorts of strange incidents, as well as the ability to resolve those incidents as if he were the protagonist of their stories. He was, in effect, an avatar of plot convenience, and she had decided to make use of this.
“You’ve grown a bit savage, haven’t you?” Ende commented.
It had taken Ende a minute to even recognize him. Though his physical appearance hadn’t changed much, he seemed like a different person.
The place Ende had sent Ryoma for training had effectively been a psychological realm where he would fight mock battles. It was only natural, then, that his physical appearance hadn’t changed, since he hadn’t been affected physically.
What was different was the way he carried himself. There was an aura of violence about him that made him seem like a different person.
“Like it’s not your fault that this happened,” he sulked, suggesting he had been through an extremely rough time.
“I told you before that your Divine Vessel wouldn’t be of any use to you,” she said.
The ability of the Divine Vessel that Ryoma was playing host to was ridiculous: it gave him the ability to see the number of books a person had read in their lifetime hanging over their head.
It was difficult to imagine it ever being useful in combat; the absolute best Ende could think of was that if you ran into someone with a power-stealing ability, you could temporarily confuse them by making them steal it.
“Yeah, I’m definitely convinced of its uselessness now,” Ryoma agreed, suggesting that he actually had tried to make use of it. If he’d been forced to resort to that, she thought, the trial he’d been through must really have been a grueling one.
“So, were you able to find a way to win?” she asked.
“Have you ever thought it was strange that when good and evil fight, good always wins?”
His response sounded like a non sequitur, but Ende decided to engage him anyway. It might have some connection to what Ryoma had worked out in his training.
“It’s a bit of a cliché, but isn’t that more of a history-books-written-by-the-winners kind of thing?”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” he said. “Think about tokusatsu, anime, light novels. You run into situations where it feels weird that the protagonist wins, right? There are lots of things the good guys can’t do, while the bad guys can do anything. As long as they’re not held back by morality, they should dominate easily. But the bad guys never go through with it. Why is that?”
“Oh, is that what you’re getting at?” Ende said. “Well, that’s the reason I chose you, after all.”
“Yeah. The world is designed to conform to the protagonist. The enemy won’t use an attack the protagonist can’t bounce back from, and even if they attack them early in the story, they’ll always find a reason to leave without finishing them off. The kidnapped love interest usually gets off unscathed, too.”
Ryoma was a protagonist, an avatar of plot convenience. The purpose of the training was to get him to realize that, and it seemed to have worked.
“No matter how strong the opponent, or how desperate the situation, it doesn’t matter. Even if they’re a million times stronger, even if they have the power to blow out the sun, even if they’re so strong they can inspire terror with a single glance, that’s all just background noise. It has no effect on who wins.”
“Well, desperate situations are popular in stories nowadays, but people do get rather tired if they drag on for too long,” Ende said. “So, what does determine who wins?”
“In the end, whoever the writer wants to win will win. That’s all it comes down to in the end.” Ryoma was brimming with confidence. He must have thought he had glimpsed the truth of the world.
“Ahh, this has gotten a bit weird. I think we’ve gone in a meta direction,” Ende said.