“Uh… What might this ‘shinai’ item be?”
“It’s a bamboo sword. Some parts of Renya’s old world used it as a practice weapon. It’s light and tough, but it’s about as non-lethal as weapons get. Renya has experience in kendo, so he should be familiar with how to handle it.”
“Have you shown this list to your aides?” asked the lady. Her voice shook a little.
“Yeah. Why?” The girl replied once again with a blank look.
“Did they read the detailed explanation of each item?”
“Nah, they sort of skimmed it and were like, ‘K, this looks fine.’”
The lady looked at the list again, her mind reeling with shock. It was likely that the girl’s aides knew what a shinai was. For those angels, it was probably just some piece of bamboo, so when they saw it in the list, they just waved it off and gave their approval. For her, however, she had no idea what it was. Therefore, she had to read the appended explanation properly. That was how she noticed.
“This bamboo sword has got the ‘Indestructible’ property on it, yes?”
“Well, duh. You realize regular bamboo swords are literally just bamboo, right? They’d break if you hit anything with them.”
From the girl’s perspective, it was a mere compromise — one made reluctantly after her aides’ objections — to sending Renya a proper weapon. In a world where people swung around weapons with actual sharpened blades, she doubted there would be much point to carrying a stick of bamboo. Its lightness limited its power, and it would last only a few hits at most in a clash against a real sword. Worst case scenario, the opponent’s blade might just cut clean through it. For a gift from God herself, it was pitifully feeble, and she was not okay with that. Therefore, she added the “Indestructible” property to it. Even if it was made of bamboo, as long as it did not break, it would stand a fair chance against a real sword. Of course, being hit by it would still hurt exactly as much as a piece of bamboo, which is to say, not very much at all. Since kendo practitioners also used the shinai to block attacks, she figured that as long as Renya could land hits without getting hit himself, he would be fine. She was, in fact, a hundred and twenty percent confident in his ability to do exactly that.
“Could you perhaps enlighten me,” said the lady, acutely aware of the mistake in the girl’s logic, “of what happens when an object with the ‘Indestructible’ property collides with a destructible one?”
“Well, it’d— AH!” After a short moment of consideration, the girl shrieked as realization dawned on her. “Okay, so, when an indestructible object collides with a destructible one, the destructible one breaks without exception, right?”
“That is correct. Without. Exception. Let that sink in for a minute. In other words, the bamboo sword you gave Renya is imbued with the ability to shatter absolutely anything and everything, be it physical or ethereal. So long as it is destructible, if he keeps hitting it, he will destroy it! Do you see the problem here?!”
“Right. That means he can walk up to literally anything, whack it with his bamboo, and watch it crack. Castle walls, dragonscale, mithril and orichalcum, it’d rip through all of them… He can even nullify magecraft by wiping out barriers, spells, and seals!”
“You did not give him a weapon. You turned him into a walking armory! Is there anything you can do to fix it right now?!”
“I already sent the damn thing over! I can technically still change the properties of an item in another world, but I’d have to override the Administrator, and that’d have some serious repercussions for that world. Ugh, I’m such an idiot!”
The girl squatted down with her head in her hands. Seeing the regret on her face, the lady decided that maybe she had been too hard on the girl. At least she recognized just how serious the issue was and reflected on her mistake. Her repentance would not fix the terrible problem she caused, but it was worth something. Or, it would have been, were it not for the girl’s next words.
“What was I thinking, putting such an awesome ability on a bamboo sword of all things?!”
“That is not the problem!”
Her gaze fixed on the crouching girl, the lady pulled up her leg and swung it forward in a wide arc. The hem of her clothes rolled all the way up to the top of her thighs, but she paid it no mind, instead focusing all her attention on unleashing a full-blown soccer kick at the girl’s head. In terms of pure muscle power, there was a considerable difference between Renya and her. He was a human. She was an angel.
With no time to block, the girl took the kick squarely in the head and shot up into the sky. Spinning like a soccer ball, she spiralled wildly through the air before landing back on the ground with a heavy thud.
“Wh-Who’d have thought this would happen twice in such a short time…” groaned the girl as she crawled back with one hand pressed against the spot where she was kicked.
“To be fair,” said the lady, “some things such as iron or mithril can probably take a few hits and still survive. Not everything is going to melt like butter. Human bodies, though, will! Skin, muscle, bone, whatever. It will chew right through them! Non-lethal? No. That thing is going to be very, very lethal.”
“Yeah, you’re right. Being indestructible, it might as well be a club. An insanely sturdy club that’s light enough to be swung like a bamboo sword. Man, I definitely botched this one.”
“On top of that, things produced by magecraft have no physical toughness, so they will be falling apart left and right.”
“Some might be a little more resistant depending on the scale and strength of the spell, but yeah. Ultimately, there’s nothing it can’t destroy, so it can technically nullify all forms of magecraft. Pretty crazy.”
“Just so you know, nothing in that world has the ‘Indestructible’ property. No such object exists there.”
That meant it was impossible to find another item like the bamboo sword in question in that world, no matter how hard one looked. Its rarity alone would make it priceless. Such concerns, however, seemed to have gone right over the girl’s head.
“Indestructibility is a doozy, huh. I mean, it’s on every single weapon around here, so it never occurred to me how significant it was.”
“The only silver lining in all this is the fact that the sword is not sharp.”
Otherwise, it would be an unstoppable blade that never dulled. It was terrifying to imagine the effects that would have on the world.
“Hmm, I guess there’s no point crying over spilled milk. Still, seeing the ‘Indestructible’ property on some dinky little bamboo sword offends my artistic sensibilities. That needs to be remedied.”
“For the love of— Ugh, whatever. I don’t care anymore,” mumbled the lady.
“It’s gotta look cooler! I need to remake it into something awesome! You know those swords protagonists use in those games? Yeah! Something like that!”
“Go choke on your stupid swords, you dumbass deity!”
For the third time in one day, the girl who styled herself God was sent flying through the air by a kick to the head.