“Just think of me as a mysterious figure who manipulates this world from behind the scenes,” Ende said. “Like I said before, I have enough money and authority to do whatever I want, so I’ve got a lot of time on my hands. To alleviate some boredom, I decided to take part in the Divine Vessels War. Well, I think that’s enough about me, don’t you? I could explain a little more if you like, but it’s not really relevant to what’s going on.”
“Why would someone as powerful as you want to live in my house?” he demanded.
“Because early in the story, the protagonist’s house is a safe zone.”
“Huh?”
“Like I said at breakfast, I also want to watch things unfold up close... but while I’m effectively invincible, getting involved in the Divine Vessels War means that others like me might come after us. I’m not exactly clinging to life this late in the game, but if I’m going out of my way to participate, I want to get as far as I can.”
The immortality stuff sounded fishy to Ryoma, but there was nothing in her expression that suggested she was joking. He decided not to think too hard about that part. He didn’t understand this girl Ende from the start, so one or two more mysteries didn’t change much at all.
“Well, whatever. So what did you want to discuss?”
“First, let me give a brief explanation of the Divine Vessels War,” Ende said. “As it sounds like, the participants are trying to steal things called Divine Vessels from each other. You’ll be a part of that.” She made it sound like there was no turning back at this point.
“Steal things... I bet that’s not something we can do peacefully, huh?” he asked.
“Yeah. It means you kill each other. Of course, you can take the vessels without killing, but killing is probably faster and less likely to bite you in the backside later. Since the victory isn’t decided until the very last second, showing mercy to the wrong opponent could get you killed down the line.”
“Um, so the goal is just to collect all the vessels, then?” Despite what she said, if that was all it took, then killing might not be necessary. He didn’t know what he might run into as they went on, but he was hoping to avoid killing as much as possible.
“Yes,” she said. “If you collect them all, the Evil God will come back to life and grant your wish.”
“Wait a minute. What do you mean, come back to life? Isn’t an Evil God a thing you should try to stop from coming back to life?” Ryoma suddenly got a sinking feeling about this. She’d mentioned collecting Divine Vessels, but she hadn’t mentioned anything about this resurrecting an Evil God.
“You might be right,” Ende said. “The last time it happened, it started World War II, so if he revives again, it might cause the third go-round, perhaps?”
“Hey!”
“I don’t think there’s any need to worry, though,” she shrugged. “The second one worked itself out, after all. But let’s not get bogged down in that detail. We can talk about it later.”
It seemed she had no intention of discussing that part anymore, so Ryoma urged her to continue with her explanation.
“The Divine Vessels are parts of the Evil God’s body,” Ende said. “They’re comprised of four eyes, six arms, and one pair of legs that includes left and right. There are also the heart, ribs, wings — those act as a pair, like the legs — head, spine, tentacles, horns, scales, and pit organ, which makes twenty in all. Which means there are twenty participants, too.”
“It sounds like a monster!” Ryoma exclaimed. It was hard for him to imagine what that would all add up to be, but it didn’t sound like anything he wanted to see.
“Yeah, I’ve never seen the complete version either, so I’m kinda looking forward to it. There’s more to him than just the Divine Vessel parts I named, after all.”
“Well, appearance aside... twenty? That’s a lot.”
She said they’d be stealing the Divine Vessels from each other, and while he might not have to fight them all, it was still sounding like an annoying amount of stuff to track.
“Hey, it won’t be that much trouble,” she said. “Quite a few have been consolidated by now, and there will probably be even fewer participants eventually. If you really want to conserve energy, you could just challenge the last man standing, but I wouldn’t recommend it. All the Divine Vessels come with their own unique abilities, so whoever collects the most will inevitably be more powerful.”
“And I’ve got one of them myself, right? What ability does it give me?”
That part, at least, didn’t surprise Ryoma at all. He’d gotten mixed up with people with crazy powers before, and whenever he did, he’d find he’d unlocked powers of his own, which he’d have to use to get out of the trouble.
“The abilities of a Divine Vessel are determined at the time they’re first observed,” she said. “Usually that occurs when they’re matched with a host, but my kind have a power called Soul Reader. So just looking at them, for us, causes them to be observed. Usually the personality of the host influences the ability, but your Divine Vessel was mostly influenced by me. So, sorry to tell you, but your ability is pretty unimpressive.” Ende didn’t sound very sorry at all.
“Yeah, nice disclaimer,” he said. “Would you just tell me what it is already?”
“You have the Evil God’s upper eye, which confers magical sight. That’s a power to see something special, or to influence the things you look at. Your magic sight can tell you how many books a person’s read.”
“What?”
“When you look at someone with your right eye, you’ll see a number over their head. That number will tell you how many books that person’s read in their life.”
Ryoma paused, thinking about it. “What am I supposed to do with that?”
Even after thinking, he couldn’t figure out how that could possibly be useful. It was neither poison nor cure. The best he could think of was if he were thrown into a bizarre quiz game and asked to name how many books a person had read... but he doubted that would ever come up.
“Nothing,” said Ende. “There’s no way it’s ever going to be useful, and no dangerous situation in which it could possibly turn things in your favor. So if you’re thinking it might just come in handy someday, you should abandon the very idea right now.”
“You seem pretty confident about that... so what’s the point of me having the eye, then?”
“The ability may not be useful, but the Divine Vessels resonate from time to time,” she said. “This allows hosts of Divine Vessels to detect each other’s location. I mean, without something like that, the war would never end, right?”
“I think I get the drift. But what, concretely, am I supposed to do? Just find people with Divine Vessels and beat them up?”
“More or less. Wait for the resonance, find a host, and steal their Vessel. Incidentally, you seem like the type who doesn’t like to get innocents mixed up in these things, right?”
“Of course.” Ryoma furrowed his brow; that seemed to go without saying.
“You won’t allow innocents to be used as pawns or human shields?”
“Of course not! Stop asking already!” he snapped.
“I see. That’ll make things tricky... but maybe also interesting, in a way. Perhaps the protagonist effect will make up for it, too.” Ende looked up from her book, her expression truly troubled in a way he had never seen from her before. But that lasted only for a moment before she smiled again. “There’s an enemy here.”
“What?!” Ryoma looked all around, but saw no sign of an enemy nearby. The people around him all seemed completely ordinary.
“I can’t tell where they’re watching us from, but this book is depicting us from the enemy’s point of view, so it’s obvious we’re being watched.”
“Depicting us? Point of view?” he asked.
“It’s one of my abilities. I can choose one worldview and view it in the form of a book. If it’s about the past, I can even see people’s states of mind with perfect clarity. If it’s h
appening now, things get a little sketchier. If it’s in the future, I can only read about broad trends. Anyway, if you don’t want innocents to get dragged into this, you’d better turn right here.”
He didn’t understand what she was talking about, but he did as he was told. “What’s going on here? I thought you couldn’t know these things without the resonance stuff. Or is this unrelated to the war?”
“No, it is related... I think the final boss is about to appear.”
“Final boss?” he asked. Ende’s statements were always so clipped; they rarely made any sense to him.
“Try to read between the lines. The final boss of the Divine Vessel War would have to be the Evil God, right?”
“Huh?” he said. “I thought you said he couldn’t resurrect without all his body parts.” She had just been talking about how the Divine Vessels were parts of the Evil God’s body, and bringing them together would bring him back to life. That meant he shouldn’t be alive right now... so how could he possibly be here?
“Well, you can ask him that yourself,” she said.
At some point, the people around them had vanished. Ryoma kept following Ende’s directions until they arrived at a run-down old park. The confident way she directed him suggested that Ende knew the local geography well.
The park was in the middle of a residential zone and roughly twenty meters square. It seemed rather neglected, with rusty equipment and a sandbox littered with trash.
There were two people standing in the park. One was an older boy wearing a blazer. His hair was long, with bangs that concealed most of his face, and he was about as tall as Ryoma.
Ryoma identified his blazer as the school uniform of Seishin High School. Seishin High was in the same city, and he saw students wearing that uniform on the train to school every day.
The other person was a man, both taller and older than the boy. He was smiling gently, and had an affable air about him that got on Ryoma’s nerves.
“Hey,” the man said, addressing Ryoma and Ende. He seemed perfectly at ease with no malice about him, yet it felt unsettling to have a complete stranger call out to him in the park.
“‘Evil God’ and ‘Host,’” said Ende. “They’re our enemies. ‘Host’ is pretty vague, though... It may mean he has a Divine Vessel inside him, but it also suggests there’s nothing else noteworthy about him. Why would someone like that have a Divine Vessel?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but... didn’t we come here to get away?” Ryoma asked. “Why did we run into our enemies anyway?”
“Oh, they were clearly waiting for us here.”
“You mean we walked right toward them?!” Ryoma yelled at Ende, who didn’t sound at all guilty about it.
“You didn’t want to get innocents involved, right?” she said. “If we’d kept walking towards school, they might have ambushed us somewhere along the way.”
“Fine,” Ryoma snapped. “But look, that guy seems pretty human to me. You made it sound like he was some kind of monster. Is he even really our enemy? He doesn’t even look like he’s gonna attack.”
“It’s true that the Evil God is not necessarily our enemy. But I wonder...” Ende turned towards the man. “Are you our enemy or not?”
“That’s a good question,” said the man. “This boy is a carrier of a Divine Vessel, which means he is your enemy. Whether or not I am is a bit more up in the air... Right now, I’m on his side, but that might not always be the case in the future.” The man pointed at the boy beside him. There was no sign of tension about him at all — no sense at all that he was their enemy, nor that he was involved in the war.
“There wasn’t even any of that resonance stuff,” Ryoma mentioned to no one in particular. He had been told that vessel holders were supposed to fight after being drawn together by resonance, so why were they running into each other now?
“I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you. This is a bit of an extracurricular activity... the war isn’t meant to be so rigorously scheduled,” the young man said apologetically. There was something oddly timid about him.
“So, what do we do? Fight?” Ryoma asked. “You seemed to have your hopes up, but right now it’s not humility to say I’m just an ordinary high schooler.”
In certain circumstances, Ryoma had found himself able to use special powers or weapons, but at the moment he effectively couldn’t do anything. For instance, if he’d been summoned to a fantasy world where magic was commonplace, he’d be able to use it, but the minute he came back to his own world, he’d lose that ability.
“There are things we can do, so don’t worry about that,” said Ende. “The question is whether or not you want to fight him. I think he just wants to size you up, and I’d rather avoid a fight right now if we can.”
Ryoma looked at the man again. There was nothing bloodthirsty in his manner, and he showed no signs of wanting to attack them right away.
The boy spoke for the first time. “You want me to take these guys on?” The words bespoke a great confidence on his part.
“No, I’ll fight this time,” the young man said. “I don’t think you’re quite ready to handle an Outer.” He stepped forward and left the boy behind. “Shall we, then? I just want to see what you can do, but it could still turn out fatal if you’re not careful.” As the man spoke, the sky above them suddenly turned black. “I overheard you saying you didn’t want to harm innocents, so I’m putting up a precaution. No matter what happens in this park, it shouldn’t harm outsiders. Also, you’re only supposed to fight me. This boy isn’t ready yet.”
“What the heck?” Ryoma asked, dumbfounded. He was no stranger to odd phenomena, but seeing the sky turn black like this was still surprising.
“It’s a barrier,” explained Ende. “If it’s true that nothing we do in here will affect the outside world, then we probably can’t get out, either.”
“That’s right,” the man said. You can’t escape until I release it, or you defeat me.”
While Ryoma was still fishing around for how to respond, the man approached him.
“Well, this isn’t any good... I can’t exactly get your measure if you won’t fight me...” The man rubbed his head with his right hand, looking troubled. Perhaps he could tell that Ryoma was in no mood to fight. “You leave me no choice. I’ll provide a light show of my power, and you can decide what to do from there on.” With those words, the man disappeared.
“Where’d he go?!” Ryoma shouted.
“I’m right here.” The voice came from behind him.
Ryoma turned around to see the man standing about five meters behind them, his hand on the support pole for the slide. There was clear disappointment in his eyes.
“If you can’t see me when I’m going this slow, you might want to quit right now.” As he spoke, the man uprooted the slide from the ground. It wasn’t that big, but it still should have been too big for a human to lift at all, let alone with one hand.
Then the man threw the slide at him.
Of course, Ryoma couldn’t perceive that movement, either. He could just assume what had happened from the fact that the next thing he knew, the man was in a throwing position, the slide had disappeared, and there was an enormous crash behind him.
He turned around to see the slide in pieces at the entrance to the park.
It must have hit the barrier — that’s what he’d meant when he said what they did here wouldn’t affect the outside world. It was as if there was a thick wall around them.
“You said there were things we could do, didn’t you?!” Ryoma grabbed Ende’s shoulders and shook her. He had no idea of how to deal with this. Pathetic though it may be, all he had to rely on now were Ende’s words.
“Let’s see... The boy looks weaker, so why don’t we go after him?” Ende pointed to the boy, who hadn’t budged from his original position.
“I wouldn’t recommend that,” the man said breezily. “If you do that, I’ll get serious. I just want to see what you can do. If you ca
n prove that you’re worthy to participate, I’ll withdraw.”
“That’s probably true,” Ende said.
“Don’t give me this ‘probably’ stuff! What are we supposed to do, then?” Ryoma shouted.
“Don’t worry,” Ende said. “I’d expected we’d have to fight on about this level. That’s why I chose you.”
Something hit the ground beside Ryoma, as if cued by her words.
“Huh?!” He looked beside him to see if the man had thrown something again, but all he saw was a giant box looming over him. It was squat and wide, but still taller than Ryoma.
“Huh?!”
The box also had legs. Its knees were bent as if to absorb a shock, suggesting it must have jumped here from somewhere.
As he watched, dumbstruck, the legs withdrew into the box, and then it opened from the center as if spreading its wings. It took Ryoma a few seconds to realize that this thing, stuffed with books, must be a bookshelf.
“What is this?” he demanded.
“My bookshelf.”
“I know it’s a bookshelf! Why did it jump here, what does it want, how’d it get around the barrier, and all kinds of other questions! Well? Is it gonna fight for us or something?”
“What are you talking about?” Ende said. “A bookshelf can’t do anything but hold books.”
“It just jumped here, didn’t it? It has legs!” As Ryoma continued to lay into Ende, he could hear the young man laughing.
Ryoma realized it wasn’t time to be squabbling with her — their enemy could attack at any moment.
“Oh, don’t mind me,” the man said. “You have some sort of plan, right? Then I’ll wait as long as you want.”
Ryoma looked over and saw the young man smiling. Maybe it was true that he was going to wait. He must have really thought they were no threat at all; the man was brimming with confidence.
“He said he’ll wait,” Ryoma said. “So the big bookshelf jumped over to us. What now?”
Ende didn’t answer him, but just started browsing through the books on the shelf. “Hmm... ah, there it is.” Ende pulled out a book and opened it up.
“Are you seriously going to start reading that?” he demanded.
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