By the time Zelos and Ado got back to Slaiste, the sun had already set, leaving the city veiled in twilight.
The tavern on the ground floor of the Breezy Lodge was packed full of rough-looking mercenary men partying and chugging alcohol like there was no tomorrow. They didn’t hold back even a little as they celebrated the successful defense of the city.
“We aren’t gonna run into drunks trying to mess with us, are we?” Ado asked.
“We’ll be fine,” Zelos replied. “If they try to pick a fight with you, give them one. They’re mercenaries. They should know to be responsible for their own actions.”
“Being a mercenary really is a rough line of work, huh...”
The Four Gods had gotten away, but Zelos and Ado had acquired a good deal of information that would probably come in handy the next time they came face-to-face with the goddesses.
They hoped they’d never have to fight the Jet-Black Meteor Givleon again, though. It wouldn’t feel right opposing a hero of justice. Besides, after seeing the way that thing had attacked the goddesses, they knew it wouldn’t be wise to antagonize it.
Not to mention, it left them with so many questions...
“Two tankards of ale, please, mister,” Zelos called out to the proprietor.
“Got it—two scoops o’ protein, comin’ right up! Won’t be a minute.”
“He didn’t say anything about protein!” Ado cried. “Why are you so desperate to turn us into beefcakes?!”
“Yer mercenaries; yer body’s yer livelihood! Gotta make sure yer muscles have yer back!”
“But we aren’t mercenaries!” the Sages snapped back.
Technically, Ado was qualified as a mercenary, but he wasn’t working as one.
It was a similar story for Zelos—he was an S-rank mercenary, but for the most part, he got by on part-time jobs. So calling either of the two men mercenaries didn’t seem quite right.
“Huh. I don’t see Lisa or Shakti around,” Ado said.
“What—were you actually expecting two young women to eat with these animals?” Zelos said.
“Okay, fair point. No way they would. They’d have drunks hitting on them nonstop.”
In a world like this—where public order even in cities was low—it was dangerous for two women to go around alone.
Crimes targeting women were relatively common here, especially with the existence of magic complicating matters. Women often kept safe by not going out at night.
The proprietor came back with the pair’s drinks, giving a deep sigh and looking utterly crestfallen. “Fine. Here’s yer ales.”
“You don’t have to sound so disappointed about it!” Zelos and Ado replied.
They wondered what had made the man so desperate to spread his doctrine of swoleness...but they had a feeling they’d get dragged into something stupid if they asked.
After all, this man seemed hyperfixated—he was similar to Zelos and Ado in that sense. And people so obsessed with a specific interest would sometimes try to push it onto others to the point of ignoring their wishes.
“Anyway—a toast to our hard work today!” Zelos said.
“Hard’s an understatement. Today was a lot...” Ado sighed. “I never would’ve thought the great givleon would evolve like that.”
“Oh—yes. Right. That. It was cool enough that I couldn’t help but cheer for it...but now that I look back on it, what happened doesn’t really make sense. Don’t you think?”
“Yeah, I was thinking the same thing...”
Something about the “righteous hero” just felt off. And the two Sages couldn’t get it out of their minds.
“There’s the way it started speaking fluently out of nowhere, for one,” Zelos said. “Where’d it even get any knowledge of language? Maybe you could say it learned it from us, but it started talking far too quickly for that to be the case. And that’s just one of all the things that didn’t make any sense.”
“Yeah... I know monster evolutions can be weird, but I’m not buying that. From memory, even the one in Swords & Sorceries took almost a week to learn to speak, right?”
Monster evolution was a thing both here and in Swords & Sorceries, but now that the Sages could sit down and think about it, the great givleon’s had been bizarre.
There was just no realistic way it could’ve learned language so quickly, for one.
Even if there were some mechanism whereby it could acquire knowledge by eating brains, for example, the Sages found it hard to believe that a cockroach could have the intelligence to actually parse that knowledge. Maybe a creature could go from living entirely on instinct to being capable of rational thought, but it would inevitably need a learning period to make that change.
A givlord could order regular-sized cockroaches to find places that contained prey, at which point it could obtain linguistic knowledge by eating the humans living in towns and villages. That would allow it to learn very quickly.
But quickly was one thing; instantly was another.
“The fact that it went straight for the Four Gods bothers me too,” Zelos said. “If that thing was a givlord, it should’ve just started attacking indiscriminately. But this one seemed to have more of an intent...”
“It did start out attacking indiscriminately, didn’t it?”
“Technically, sure. But remember the way it struck a pose before it attacked? It was practically shouting, Hey! Just a warning—I’m gonna attack you now! Make sure you dodge it, okay? Anyone born on Earth—or, at least, anyone from Japan—would’ve recognized what those poses meant.”
“Oh... Yeah, that’s true. It really did signpost its attacks by posing like that, huh?”
Before firing its beam attack, it had gotten into a stance just like a certain tokusatsu hero from outer space.
Nobody in this world would’ve taken that stance as a warning, so they’d likely have gotten hit by the attack. But anyone who’d grown up where Zelos and Ado had would have recognized it immediately.
It was the exact sort of overacting you’d see in tokusatsu shows.
“From the way the Four Gods were panicking, I don’t think they knew something like that existed either,” Zelos said. “It’s clearly an anomaly. And it was such a perfect fit for otaku tastes that it couldn’t have been a coincidence.”
“It was hitting pretty much every trope otaku love, wasn’t it? Which is kinda sus, now that you mention it... So, Zelos—what do you think? You’ve probably got at least a bit of an idea, right?”
“I think it was a prank by gods from another world. Or...maybe a disguise, made to look like a prank. I get the feeling there was some sort of ulterior motive behind it, at least.”
“A prank? You think something that insanely powerful was a prank? That thing was more destructive than Dark Judgment. If we’d messed up, we could’ve died.”
“Given how significant levels are in this world, I don’t think we would’ve died that easily. The vibe I got from fighting against the Four Gods was that you and I alone could take them down. That means that thing was probably sent here for some other purpose.”
“Guess it’s one of those things where just thinking about it won’t get us any answers, though, huh? But anyway—have we been, uh, seriously underrating humans this whole time?”
They’d managed to fight beings that were, technically, gods. People here weren’t any different physically from those in Zelos and Ado’s old world, but when you added a leveling system to the mix, humans could surpass their limits and grow far stronger.