This was far from the first time they’d argued about who’d been at fault.
In fact, it’d happened so many times now that keeping an actual tally would’ve been impossible. The only one who had still been allowed to travel to other worlds had been Gailaneth, but unfortunately for the others, she was a shut-in.
She was perfectly content to spend her whole life lazing with her trusty pillow and pajamas.
The other three had begged her to go back to Earth to buy merch for them, but she’d had zero interest. “Sounds like a pain,” she’d said with a yawn.
Around this time, omens of the Dark God’s awakening had started appearing.
In response, the Four Gods had used Gailaneth’s still-active permissions to dump the Dark God into that same other world shaped by their fellow gods. After that little stunt, Gailaneth—the other three goddesses’ final hope—was finally stripped of her ability to travel between the worlds.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
“Let’s leave it at that,” Aquilata sighed. “Continuing this discussion won’t get us anywhere.”
“Seriously, though, the heroes are so uselesssss!” Flaress complained. “Why can’t they just hurry up and turn this place into an advanced civilization already?!”
“We can’t summon any more anyway...” Windia said. “All the tools from the God of Creation are gone now.”
“And that’s the reincarnators’ fault too,” the three of them said together.
It was a sad attempt at passing the buck.
These goddesses shut their eyes to their own misdeeds and only saw things the way that was most convenient for them, which meant that they would’ve never considered the possibility that this latest situation was a plot by the gods of the world they’d wronged...
“Mmmnh...” the fourth murmured. “An abnormal gravity quake... Is it the Dark God?”
“Clara woke up?!” exclaimed Aquilata and Flaress.
“Uh... Who’s Clara?” Windia asked.
Gailaneth slowly rose, rubbing her bleary eyes. Not bothering to fix her crazy bed head, she looked around drowsily. After a moment, her expression became blank and indecipherable, and then—
“Good night...”
—she went right back to sleep.
“Hey! Don’t just doze off again!” Flaress shouted. “Why are you always napping, anyway?! Isn’t three hours a day good enough?!”
“Oh, quiet, Flaress!” Aquilata snapped. “Hey, Gailaneth—you just said something very important right now, didn’t you? About the Dark God?”
As Gailaneth rose for a second time, she struck a bizarre pose and asked with an ominous voice: “Were you the ones who disturbed my sleep?”
“Gailaneth... You sound like someone else completely,” Windia said. “Are you quoting someone?”
“Mmm. The Nameless Pharaoh.”
“What? No! You’ve got your characters mixed up!”
Getting woken up a second time had made Gailaneth furious, apparently. But her disheveled hair, the bear-patterned pajamas sliding off her body, and her kaiju-themed slippers made her attempt at threatening the others look more cringe than intimidating.
If she just reined in her hair, she’d probably be a real beauty. But her bed head and sleepy, droopy eyes made her look...kind of lame.
The fury she was exuding was the real deal, though.
“You can go back to sleep once you tell us—so come on, hurry up!” Aquilata shouted. “What was that about the Dark God?”
Gailaneth yawned, clearly in no hurry. “Mmm... I felt a huge disruption in gravity. It was...probably the Dark God, I think? Yeah. Good night. Zzzzzz...”
“She always falls asleep so quick, jeez!” Flaress said. “Anyway—the Dark God?! Did it, like... Is it back?! We’ve gotta ruuuuuun!”
“Calm yourself!” Aquilata said. “We can’t confirm from here whether it’s the Dark God or something else. But if Gailaneth sensed something, we know there has to be something there.”
As the goddess with power over the element of earth, Gailaneth could sense abnormalities. Unfortunately, she’d never put that power to good use. She was always sleeping like a log, after all.
“I’ll...investigate...” Windia mumbled.
“I’d appreciate it,” Aquilata replied. “If the Dark God were to start wreaking havoc right now, there’d be nothing we could do. We don’t have the sacred treasures the God of Creation left us anymore...”
“Yeah, ’cause that idiot left us tools that break like glass! I mean, why not make us tougher weapons? Right?! Actually, this is the heroes’ fault too for being such scrubs!”
The Four Gods were terrified of the Dark God’s existence.
A major factor was that the Dark God was the God of Creation’s true successor, meant to manage this world. It was such an almighty existence that these goddesses had no chance of standing up to it without help.
It would hunt the Four Gods relentlessly until it regained its rightful permissions; in fact, it had already done so once before, nearly destroying the world in the process. The goddesses were still traumatized by that.
The Dark God had obliterated the ancient civilization’s “all-powerful” weapons like they were nothing. It had cleaved continents and boiled seas, plunging the world into chaos and driving the Four Gods into hiding like terrified mice scrambling away from a predator. The Dark God had seemed unstoppable—until the heroes’ sacrifice had sealed it away.
If the Dark God had caught them, it would have absorbed them to regain every last permission and power they held. Although the Four Gods had been modeled after faeries, they still feared death.
“Found it,” Windia said. “But it’s not the Dark God...”
“It’s not?” Flaress repeated, incredulous. “What is it, then?”
“If it’s not the Dark God, I assume it’s a reincarnator,” Aquilata said. “In which case, if we can eliminate them right here and now—”
“Then we’ll be...safe,” Windia said. “I don’t think there are many strong reincarnators.”
“Exactly. Which means that we alone might be able to defeat them,” Aquilata said. “We can’t let troublemakers like that remain alive.”
As far as the Four Gods were concerned, the Dark God wasn’t the only threat. None of them could remember exactly how many reincarnators had power worth noting, but they figured that thinning out the reincarnators’ numbers now would save them trouble down the line. And, worthless and pathetic though they were, they were still gods. They weren’t weak by any means.
Aquilata, Windia, and Flaress left to head for the location of the gravity wave, unaware that they were about to discover something that would turn their assumptions about this world upside down...
Gailaneth, finally left alone, happily drifted back into the land of dreams.