In order to meet Maine, we set off once again. Moving here meant walking through the clouds with no discernable path, which I have to say was a little unnerving.
“Hey, so, uh... Can’t we move like the gods do?”
“What does ‘like the gods do’ mean?”
“I dunno. Like warping or teleporting or something.”
“Those are human technologies, aren’t they?”
“So that’s a no?”
“It’s a no,” Sith said plainly as though that had been utterly obvious. “You lot think too highly of us deities.”
“I mean... You are gods, right?”
“Call us what you will, but all we did was create our worlds, you know? We might be almighty when it comes to them, certainly...”
But in the world the gods occupied—the highest level of the spiritual realm, as Yuuhi had called it—they were just like any other living creatures.
“Let’s say someone gave you a blank piece of paper. You could draw whatever you wanted on it, no? You could even erase and redraw things as you please. But that doesn’t mean anything you draw actually becomes reality. It’s just like that.”
“Yeah, okay... I mean, that kinda makes sense but it kinda doesn’t.”
In essence, the gods could do whatever they wanted with their worlds, but not anything outside of that.
“So, anyway, how far do we have to walk?”
“Not far.”
“Yet there’s no sense of distance in this world. It’s just clouds everywhere...”
“Yes, but...” Sith’s eyebrows furrowed. “We’re only walking like this in the first place to placate your human conception of movement, you know?”
“What?”
“The fundamental concepts and laws of the upper and lower worlds are quite different. If we didn’t give you the sensation of movement by walking or make this world look like it was above the clouds, you—”
I couldn’t understand what she said beyond that. She may have been using some divine language. I didn’t really get it, but I think that she was essentially trying to say the gods were being considerate by trying to match our perceptions of things.
“Well, either way, we just have to walk, right?”
“Hm? Well, yes. It’ll be about ten minutes in your conception of time, I believe.”
“Hmm...”
Ten minutes, huh? That was a little long to just walk along in silence.
“So, uh, there’s something I wanted to ask you.”
“What is it?”
“What exactly are your worlds to you goddesses?”
One way or another, both my world and Yuuhi’s only existed because Maine and Sith had created them. But the goddesses weren’t as, well, high and mighty as I’d expected. They didn’t seem to have any grand plans for their worlds, nor any real systems for managing them.
I guess she did do all this out of boredom...
So why had the goddess sisters even made their worlds? I was a little curious about that.
“Even if you ask me why, I don’t know how to answer. Hmm...” Sith pensively hummed in thought. “I guess you could say they’re an extended way of killing time.”
“Seriously?”
“Er, was that a bad way to put it?”
“On a spectrum of good and bad, yeah. That was bad.”
“Whaaat?!” Sith looked even more puzzled now. “Then how about this? It’s a lot like what you humans would consider childrearing.”
“Childrearing?”
“Very much so. You create something and raise it yourself. It’s a lot like childrearing, no?”
“So you bet your child.”
“Just ignore that part...”
Sith shrunk back a little at my retort. That’s where Yuuhi stepped in.
“There’s no need to think too deeply about it, Rekka. Creating worlds is simply part of a deity’s biology.”
“What? But she just said it was like childrearing.”
“Having children is part of the biology all living creatures have in common, no?”
“...”
“That’s why I said not to think about it too deeply. It’s simply a fact of existence, divorced from feelings of love and the like.”
In other words, creating worlds was simply what deities did. And that was simply how it had been since the beginning of time. That part wasn’t really for me to question. That was just how it was.
“That’s right. It’s exactly as Yuuhi says. We’re creatures that were designed to create worlds, so that’s what we do. When they fail, we just make new ones from scratch. Whether or not we love what we created is irrelevant. We don’t need to have sex like you humans do either.”
“S—?!”
“Hm? What’s wrong?”
“...”
Maybe it was because it wasn’t something deities did, but that word came out of her mouth way too easily. Hearing a beautiful woman talk about, y’know... It was bad for my heart. I had to take a deep breath and compose myself to get back to the matters at hand.
“So, does the lack of love make it easier to bet your world in a game?”
My pointed question made Sith avert her eyes.
“Well, this is my fiftieth world or so, after all... To be honest, Big Sis and I had gotten a little bored with creating worlds, so we wanted a little excitement.”
“Excitement, huh?”
I can’t say I wasn’t angry to hear that, but I knew it would be pointless to raise a fuss here and now. Like Yuuhi had said, this was the nature of the gods. No matter how human Sith looked (which may have just been her trying to match our perceptions as well), our minds worked completely differently.
“Wow, so Yuuhi’s world is the fiftieth world, huh? The lifespan of one sun is ten billion years, so if you consider the lifespan of the entirety of space—much less the whole world—it’s hard to imagine just how long it would take for it to come to a natural end,” R muttered to herself as she floated beside me.
Was she talking to me just now?
I glanced at R, but she wasn’t looking my way.
“...”
Fifty worlds’ worth of years, huh? Yeah, that was a mind-boggling amount of time. It was probably in the billions, trillions, or even quadrillions. Doing the same thing for that long... If you asked me if I’d get bored, I don’t think I could honestly say no. Not that that meant it was a bad thing, I guess.
“Well, there you have it. That’s what worlds are to us,” Sith said, laughing off my real question.
I still hadn’t completely accepted her answer, but I gave up pressing her any further for now. And just as I made up my mind on that front, Sith came to a stop in front of us. Suddenly, a door appeared before her.
“...”
This was the umpteenth time something weird like this had happened on our divine journey, so I can’t say I was really surprised anymore. I could only assume this door would lead us to Maine.
“A-All right... I’m going to open it, okay?”
Sith slowly reached for the door, speaking as though she was talking to herself.
Maine was the goddess of our world... I couldn’t help wondering what she was like. Her little sister seemed kinda scared to meet her. I was really hoping she wouldn’t be a scary goddess... But that didn’t change what had to be done.
“And... voila!”
Sith opened the door and a large space spread out before us.
“...”
I said space, but it wasn’t empty space or anything. There was a marble floor, but no walls or ceiling. It was just a continuous floor. And seeing it, my first thought was...
“An arena?” I muttered unconsciously.
I didn’t know why exactly that was the first thing that came to mind, but it gave me that impression. It was a wide, flat, even playing field free of any obstacles, making it the ideal place to have a fight.
Why an arena, though?
I had no idea, but as I was wondering...
“You also think it looks like an arena, Rekka?”
“You mean you do too, Yuuhi?”
“Yeah. Since that’s the impression we both got, I think we can assume this is an arena Maine prepared.”
“You don’t say...”
Based on how we’d gotten here and everything that had happened up until now, it was clear that the goddesses were changing the world around us to match our human conceptions of things. That meant that, if this space looked like an arena to us, it was probably meant to be one. However, that took me back to my first question.
“Why an arena, though?”
“Well...” Yuuhi mumbled, looking reluctant to say any more.
But as she fell silent, someone called out to me.
“So you really came, Rekka Namidare.”
I looked up, and just like Sith had appeared out of nowhere earlier, there was a woman seated in an ornate throne before me. I didn’t know where she—or the throne, for that matter—had come from, but it was probably similar logic.
“...”
Since it was me she’d called out to, I stepped forward.
“Are you Maine?”
“That’s right.”
The goddess of our world, Maine, gave me a rather casual reply. She looked and dressed a lot like Sith, but she had blue hair and wore the same color head to toe. The biggest contrast between the sisters, however, was their eyes: Maine’s were red while Sith’s were blue. They weren’t twins or anything, but they had strikingly similar countenances otherwise.
“If you know who I am, then you know why I’ve come here, right?”
Once I got a good look at her, I addressed her again and got down to business. In reply to my question, Maine gave a small nod.
“Yep,” she said casually.
Sith came off as quite immature, but it seemed Maine was childish in her own way too. Thinking about what R said earlier, both of the goddesses had been alive for a tremendously long time... Did that mean they were stunted in some way, comparative to humans? No, now wasn’t the time to be thinking about any of that. I looked Maine straight in the eyes.
“Please call off the bet between the two worlds.”
“Don’t wanna.”
She rejected my request so bluntly that it was clear there wasn’t any room for negotiation.
“Why not?”
“What’s the point?”
“Um, if you’re asking that, I think you’ve kinda missed the point.”
At a loss for what else to say, I fell silent for a bit. It was true that, as the winning party, there was no reason for Maine to call off the game. Yuuhi had warned me of that much.
“Then at least return the Namidare power you took from Sith’s world.”
Maine had taken it in a little side bet she’d had with her sister. It was transferred to me, heavily swaying the outcome of their game. Losing it had caused a serious decline in the happiness of Sith’s world, so I thought that I might be able to restore the balance by returning it.
“Yeah, not happening.”
But Maine was difficult.
Tch...
While I should have expected it, she was really hard to deal with. I’d asked about the nature of deities and worlds on the way over here, but I’d only gotten answers about boredom and biology. If I had a solid reason, perhaps some belief or meaning to go off of, then I could use that to parley with Maine...