by Yuu Kamiya
This proved that although Sora had been the one to provide the opportunity, the responsibility for this infidelity fell entirely upon the perpetrators themselves!!
“……No… No, there’s something wrong with your theory—”
“Gahhh, it’s the naughtiness, isn’t it? Does cheating on your husband feel so damn gooood?!”
“Uh, if I may! I still think there’s something wrong with you for making her cheat and then getting pissed off when she actually does it!”
But never mind Steph’s protests. Sora and Shiro smiled at each other contentedly, nodding at the results of their experiment. It seemed this game was fuzzier than they had expected, insofar as units decided of their own free will whether or not to cheat—in which case…
“Whatever. Next! We’re in a race against time, so hurry up and mail this now!”
Sora ceased his melodramatic wailing and handed Steph two commands he’d written in advance. Steph jumped to do it and then asked the two siblings suspiciously as they stared at the map:
“…What sort of mischievous commands have you issued this time?”
“Mischief? How dare you. This is a perfectly legitimate experiment in diplomacy and trade negotiations.” Specifically: “The Neighbor’s Wife tells the Husband they’re being blackmailed for embezzlement, and she passes on hush money to the Wife Banger. The Wife Banger takes it and flees to the third city. Those were our commands.”
“That’s not diplomacy, that’s extortion!!”
I suppose so, Sora thought in response. It came down to this:
“Your precious broad is mine. Pay up if you want her back.”
If that wasn’t extortion, then what was? Sora certainly thought it was. And thus—
Sora watched as the Wife Banger got his hush money out of the Husband and was now on his way to the third city. A wide grin spread across Sora’s face as he replied, “When you take off all the window dressing, diplomacy is really just extortion, isn’t it?”
“…Brother, you look…like you’re thinking, something dirty again… It’s so cool…!”
Shiro gazed at her brother reverently, but Sora’s bold assertion was also met by the expression on Steph’s face, as if she were looking at raw garbage. Sora didn’t seem especially bothered by this, as his grin only widened further.
You could con units without even issuing commands.
In that case, diplomacy between other races should be possible after all, huh?
As Sora reached this “breakthrough,” Steph glared at him and mumbled, “Th-this is savage… Oh, but at least it’ll bring harmony back to the household.”
However, Shiro made an observation.
“…? …Brother, there’s an…unemployed, citizen…”
Sora squinted and tapped the map to zoom in…and what he saw was the Husband roaming the streets penniless. Incidentally—
“…Sora? Is it just me, or is that the Neighbor’s Wife with the Wife Banger?”
—Sora, deep in thought, considered the units that had moved to the third city. Indeed, he intentionally hadn’t written exactly how much hush money was to be paid. He just wanted to see how much the Wife Banger could wring out of the Husband, whom he wasn’t commanding. As Sora surmised it…
“…So she conned her husband out of all his property…and ran off with…the neighbor?”
………….
“—W00t! Never mind that, we’ve found our breakthrough, Shiro!”
“…Mm, with…this, there’s all kinds…of stuff…we can do!”
“How callously you avert your eyes from the calamities you have brought upon your subjects…”
Sora and Shiro tossed Steph and her incomprehensible gibbering aside and began furiously scribbling commands.
Steph muttered as if to verify, “So you’re…not going to resign…?”
“…Huh? …What, for?”
“Things just got interesting, right? We’re gonna be busy!”
Sora and Shiro grinned and quickly sprang into action.
Meanwhile, the hall of another player space like Shiro and Sora’s cave was draped in silence. In the center of the fictional Avant Heim executive office was another beat-up mailbox, and in front of the table where the map was laid out sat Jibril. She had ten dice floating before her chest but was doing nothing. Just looking down, waiting— No, praying. Praying that Sora and Shiro, her masters, would resign.
“…I don’t wanna…lose…”
This game alone I must win, by any means necessary. Jibril had resolved and declared as much, but—
“I don’t wanna lose, I don’t wanna lose, I don’t want to lose… Masters!!”
Sora and Shiro—no, anyone who knew Jibril—would be shocked seeing her like this. She clutched the book that continuously preoccupied her: her journal. Her back, shoulders, and even her voice shook, as if she was pleading. She continued muttering furiously, her body curled up into a ball.
…If it was going to be like this, then perhaps she shouldn’t have restored her dice to ten before the start of the game. She didn’t know how to handle these unfamiliar “emotions.” Her trembling fingers touched her journal.
The cover read, in the Flügel tongue, Every time you lose your memory, read page 3205. As her eyes fixed on these words, she considered:
…If it was going to be like this, then perhaps she’d be better off having no memory at all. With something like a feeling of regret, Jibril slowly opened the book to page 3205, a page she knew not how many times she had turned to since the sugoroku game’s start. It was covered in countless notes Jibril herself had scrawled out, for instance:
Ino Hatsuse: Werebeast. Male. Safe to condescend to by default. Creepy.
Plum Stoker: Dhampir. Gender ambiguous. Functionally equivalent to a mosquito.
Such sloppy scribbles were followed by:
Stephanie Dola: Immanity. Female, red hair. aka Dora. Sora and Shiro’s servant. In love with Sora, but in vehement denial.
The list went on to include height and measurements, various anecdotes, and all kinds of other details.
She’d essentially written down the traits of everyone she knew. But there was one section written much larger than the rest. It was circled, double-underlined, and marked as critical information.
Sora: Immanity, black hair. Shiro: Immanity, white hair.
A brother and sister from another world. A harmonious, inseparable pair—and my new masters. The “answer” I have sought since the day of my birth…
Jibril looked down, tracing the shakily scrawled paragraph with her fingers. She recalled the time she wrote it, how she’d felt back then, just after the game started, thirty-eight days earlier. That is, on the first move. She no doubt remembered the first time she rolled the dice…
?
“…Goodness! Where am I?”
As a breeze brushed her cheek, Jibril tilted her head in a daze and mumbled. All of a sudden, she was alone on a sea of grass that rippled in the wind. There were nine white cubes by her chest, and surrounding her was an unfamiliar landmass whirling in a spiral. Jibril stood up, entirely ignorant of where she was and why. The crosses in her amber-colored eyes glowed as she looked around and then, using her space-bending vision, confirmed the existence of several entities moving along the spiraling land.
“One unsightly bloodsucking insect, two cheekily bipedal beasts…”
And— She furrowed her brow and muttered.
“…Three worms of even less value… My word.”
Jibril wondered what she was doing among such lower orders.
She couldn’t, after all, figure out what was going on.
“Hmm, I am perplexed. But surely there is someone who can explain it to me! ”
Indeed, all she had to do was to make the obvious inquiries. Though it did rankle her to think she might have to take the role of a pilgrim in a fairy tale, asking a beast or worm to show her the way…
“Then I shall be sure to slay the source of this indignity. A
fter all, it’s clearly not my fault!”
All would be settled once the bastard who had humiliated her kicked the bucket. Satisfied with her assessment, Jibril spread her wings and hastened her halo’s spinning.
—A Shift.
This warped space, connected coordinates—it was a more or less infinitely fast manner of movement. But it was still movement, so—
“Meep?!”
—if something was in her way…then this is precisely what would happen. The silly sound she uttered bore no resemblance to the ferocity of the collision she’d had with something in that void at an almost infinite velocity. There was a booming thud as she stuck to the air like a frog against a windshield. And then…slowly, slowly…she slid down, before finally getting stuck in the ground.
“…Heh, heh-heh… To entrap me by spatial isolation… Heh, heh-heh-heh—”
She rose to her feet, an enormous bump on her head…laughing all the while. This was a kind of power that even a Flügel such as herself could not detect. And, come to think of it, the spiraling landform was enough of an obstruction that even she couldn’t shift past. Who could achieve such things? If it was an Old Deus, that would make sense, but—
“—That takes quite some nerve…doesn’t iiit?!”
—in that case… Well, why don’t you just go ahead and die?
For the sake of form, she fired a few Heavenly Smites, blasted off a space destruction spell, and so on until her bile subsided.
……
“…Huff…huff… I’ll l-let you off with…that much…”
At last, Jibril reluctantly acknowledged that this seemed futile. She assumed there was an Old Deus ahead of the people advancing through the spiraling land. She pressed onward bitterly, thinking about how she’d have to hold off on the killing for now. She still didn’t know what was going on, but it only took her a few minutes to cross the mysterious darkness of the spatial barriers through forty-two spaces, and then—
—Prepare a vessel containing four liters of water before you are swallowed by the lava.
As the unbearably pretentious voice resounded, before her very eyes appeared a fountain, two vessels respectively marked “five liters” and “three liters,” and…a flood of lava charging at her like a tsunami.
…Jibril had no idea what any of this meant. That is to say, she did, of course, understand the meaning of what had just been said. She was supposed to measure exactly four liters of water using two different vessels. But she was already in the worst mood imaginable, and now this childish problem was being thrust at her.
It sounded more like, Try to solve this before the lava gets you, if you can.
“…What sort of insolent braggart is responsible…? Here—”
Jibril sneered and went ahead and solved it. In short: She concentrated all the moisture in the air and earth, along with the water in the fountain, and smacked it against the lava. Thus, an explosion of steam gave way to a torrential downpour. Then Jibril magically created her own four-liter vessel and watched it fill with rain. As she reveled in her too-perfect answer—
—The Task is deemed fulfilled.
—the pretentious voice spoke up again, and the number of cubes at her chest increased by one. She gazed at them suspiciously, and the next moment—
“?!”
—Jibril clutched her body as if her knees were about to crumble beneath her…
“…What is…happening…?”
…and, shaking, just barely managed to get the question out.
What had happened…was clear as day. The questions with which she’d been plagued till just now—Where am I? Why am I here?—melted away. She was on the sugoroku board of the Old Deus, playing the game. For a time…she’d forgotten. That was all. But she felt an indescribable chill that threatened to sap her dry, a shock that rattled her teeth and made her want to run from everything.
Just what was happening to her?
“…Calm…down… Think…”
Jibril desperately talked down the incomprehensible thoughts driving her to distraction. She went over the rules, carefully, and began considering them objectively, starting with what had happened. That is—
Why did only she lose her memory?
01: The seven are granted ten DICE that apportion their TIME OF SUBSTANCE.
Time of substance. Yes, however long they possessed a body. That didn’t include the soul, which contained no mass. Jibril had recognized as much from Sora’s provocations since the start of the game. She knew her masters had contrived so that they could continue to move even if they dropped out of the game. In other words, they’d split their vessels and souls, wagering only their bodies. Still, there was one highly likely hypothesis that came to Jibril’s mind. Once more, Jibril surveyed the area with her vision that transcended space. On the game board: Plum, Ino, Izuna, Dora, and Sora and Shiro…her masters. As Jibril watched them continue without issue despite having lost some of their dice, her hypothesis changed to conviction.
She alone—not a living thing, but an entity, a Flügel—
—had no clear boundary…between her soul and its vessel…
“—Oh… This is—”
Jibril finally grasped what was happening, and she struggled to cling to her consciousness, which threatened to abandon her. Teeth chattering, hands shaking, she took out her journal and began writing furiously. She jotted down her memories of the two players moving along the board, the ones she had until recently considered beneath her: her masters.
These memories should have been more precious than anything. They’d been lost with a single die, and she hadn’t even realized… Jibril experienced something she’d never known in her 6,407 years:
“…I see… So this is—fear…?”
She’d finally learned to understand it, yet, as if frightened of it, as if to run from it, she attempted to record in her diary every single thing she had seen and heard.
Jibril thought that, even if she lost her memory, as long as she read this journal, she should be able to recall.
The constant silence in the fictional Avant Heim executive office was interrupted only by the sound of Jibril languidly turning the journal’s pages.
All right, so losing dice made her lose her memory. It was because she was a Flügel, whose vessel and soul were not clearly demarcated. Even her masters must have overlooked this pitfall when they set the rules.
No. Her masters—in fact, living things in general—could not be aware of this. If anyone were to spot this problem in the rules, it should have been her. More importantly, Jibril thought as she turned another page.
If that were the case…then what would happen if she lost all her dice?
The other players would be left as souls—in other words, ghosts. But what about Jibril? The next page had a hypothesis: Perhaps…
…only my core rite shall remain, and then reboot.
Yes. That was it. She wouldn’t die like the others, because the minimum unit that composed a magical being such as herself, an insubstantial “rite,” would remain. However, in that case, all her memories would be reset, in which case, all she had to do was write everything in her journal. Even if her rite rebooted—even if she were “reborn”—Jibril would still be herself. Rather, it was much like the question, If you lost your memories, would you still be you? As long as she recorded in this journal all her thoughts, her memories, everything—even if she lost all her dice, Jibril would surely continue to adore her masters. Of this—
—she had once been convinced.
“Yes… Until my master casually handed me his dice in that bath…”
On the second move, as soon as she’d rolled the dice once more and lost one, everything written in her journal—its meaning, its sentiment, its value—came to elude her.
It was surely some sort of mistake that she adored the base likes of Immanities as her masters. They must have tricked her in a game and planted some convenient memories. Why don’t I have a look at these arrogant apes? And
why don’t I kill them when I have an opportunity? With this conviction in mind, she’d gone…to meet her masters.
That day, after her masters had handed her those dice in the bath—after all her memories had returned—she’d asked them if they believed in reincarnation as clones. Would someone with exactly the same soul still be you?
The soul. The core rite. If the constituent elements were all the same, would that still be you? When her masters responded…Jibril at last understood.
The way she’d felt. The past she had recorded in her journal. This page which she now looked at with a single involuntary chuckle.
NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO
