7 Summing Things Up and Planning What Comes Next for a Living
Considering how freakishly busy I’ve been lately, you gotta wonder why I didn’t take care of more of this stuff before everything hit the fan, right?
Well, let me clear that up right now!
I didn’t have time!
I was really busy before, too, even if it wasn’t quite this bad!
After all, I am technically a commander.
I had to manage my troops and all that stuff.
And guess what?
On top of that, my core force is the Tenth Army, which barely had any soldiers to its name.
I had to gather up the losers who didn’t even fit in the leftover divisions, forming the Tenth Army out of a bunch of problem children who couldn’t find a home anywhere else, you know?
How long do you think it took to break…I mean, train them into real soldiers, get them armed, and wrangle them into the bare minimum level of functionality for an army?
Day in and day out, I spent every second preparing them for battle without a moment to rest.
Talk about exploitative.
I demand! A paid vacation!
Ah, I got denied again…
And guess what else?
I was doing a bunch of other stuff at the same time, too.
First of all, improving on my mini-mes.
You know, the information-gathering clones I unveiled during the big war.
Basically, I took the palm-sized spider clones I created initially and made them stronger.
They’re still the same size, but they’re stealthier, immune to any detection skills, and can even transmit everything they see and hear right back to me.
I expanded on that feature even more during the war so that they can now transmit those images to special monitors, too.
They’re like super-efficient self-driving mega-cameras!
I scattered thousands of them all over the planet, using them to gather all kinds of information in real time.
That’s how I got the deets on where all the elves are at, too.
Not to mention their hidden teleport gates.
Heh-heh.
The Word of God religion and the elves are both pretty keen on information gathering, but none of them hold a candle to meeee!
That said, these little spy clones have zero firepower and can easily be crushed by a stray footstep, which is a bit of a bummer.
That doesn’t happen super often, since they’re so stealthy and all, but once in a while, there are accidents and stuff like that.
But I guess we’ll just have to call that the cost of doing sneaky business.
Even if it is a major pain to replace them when they get squished.
So I was simultaneously operating a few thousand spy-ders while doing all this, right? And that’s while producing a bunch of battle clones at the same time.
As you might imagine, battle clones are mini-mes that are meant to be used for fighting instead of spying.
Unlike the spy clones, they come in different shapes and sizes depending on their purpose.
First, we’ve got the mass-produced all-purpose battle clones!
These guys are about three feet in size.
They look more or less like me in my Zana Horowa days, the form I evolved into right before arachne.
Basically, a white body with scythes for the two front legs.
And they’re just about as strong as I was back then, too.
They shoot lots of magic—I guess it’s technically conjuring now—they use Evil Eyes like crazy, and they counter with the scythes if an enemy gets too close.
They’re fully loaded with thread and poison, too, of course.
As you can gather from the fact that I called them mass-produced, I’ve got lots of these all-purpose battle clones.
How many? Well, that’s a military secret.
Next up is the queen taratect clones.
That’s what I sent in against Julius the hero during that war.
They’re clones I made based on Mother, the “bigger boat”-level huge ones, that crush things with the sheer power of their giant bodies.
Honestly, their overall capabilities aren’t that much higher than the all-purpose battle clones.
But since they’re physically so much bigger, they cost a lot more to make, which means I’ve only created a handful.
Finally, there’s my aces in the hole: the space-specialist clones.
As the name implies, they specialize in spatial conjuring. They’re the same palm-sized shape and appearance as the spy clones, but their abilities are on an entirely different level.
They can create other dimensions, erode the fabric of space—crazy stuff like that.
Since becoming a god, I’ve developed an incredibly high aptitude for spatial conjuring for whatever reason, and these clones are loaded up with the culmination of all that progress.
They can slice through space to remove heads and whatever else. Without some way of countering that, no enemy stands a chance against these space-specialist clones.
I mean, they could teleport your torso right off the rest of your body.
Even if you try to run away, they can tamper with space itself, so there’s nowhere to go.
The only way to counter them would be by meddling even further with my spatial meddling; you’d have to be at least as good at it, and probably better.
In system terms, I think even maxing out Dimensional Magic, the evolved form of Spatial Magic, wouldn’t be enough to save you.
In other words, it’s basically impossible to oppose me for anyone who operates within the bounds of the system.
Damn, I’m strong. Waaay too strong.
These battle clones generally exist in a separate dimension created by the space-specialist clones.
I can call them out whenever I need them.
Although at the moment, the only time they’ve seen any outside action is when I sent a Queen clone against Julius the hero.
I’m not slacking off; I’m just putting them into power-saving mode to conserve energy.
Don’t get the wrong idea there.
When Vampy and company defeated those legendary-class monsters and such, I fed ’em to the clones in my separate dimension, saved up some energy, and created more clones whenever the energy stores went past a certain point.
I’ve been slowly but surely increasing the numbers of my battle clones with that routine.
Considering that they started as cute but useless palm-sized spiders, they’ve come a long way, that’s for sure.
Seriously, those things were absolutely worthless at first.
Slow and steady wins the race, I guess.
Not everything is like skills, where you’re guaranteed to get stronger if you keep training, but I think you’re still bound to get a certain level of results if you put in lots of hard work.
Anyway, I’ve got one more kind of clones, a pretty weird type.
These ones are very much related to a different job I’ve been working on in addition to my job as a commander.
These clones are called system-related clones.
I assume you can piece that one together.
Basically, these clones have various tasks related to the system.
My ultimate goal is to destroy the system and use the energy released to rejuvenate this world.
There’s a lot of thorough preparation involved, as you might imagine.
And to do all that preparation, I’ll need to understand the workings of the system down to the tiniest detail.
This is a make-or-break gamble with the fate of the world on the line, after all.
You can’t be too careful, even to the point that it might seem borderline paranoid.
So even in the early stages, I’ve put a ton of extra work into investigating the system.
Between my job as a commander and all that clone work, I was seriously busy for sure. But honestly, it’s this system investigation that’s taken up the bulk of my resources.
The fact that I created clones for this specific purpose should tell you just how much effort I’ve been putting into this.
To sum it up, I’ve had no time to rest whatsoever!
Do you get it now, people?
Even before things got as busy as they are now, I was still crazy slammed!
Who among us would dare go up to that super-busy spider of the past and tell her, Hey, things are gonna get even busier soon, so put your back into it?!
Even if I did know the future, I would’ve said, Sorry, I’m already at my limit!
Come on, Labor Standards Act, do your thing here!
Ah, this is a different world, which means that doesn’t exist here…riiiight…
This suuucks.
But I’m still gonna do it, since I’m the one who decided to take all this on in the first place!
So let me give you the rundown on what we’ve learned about the system so far.
First of all, what exactly is the system?
Well, it’s a super-huge conjuring created by D!
Its main purpose is to dole out skills and stats and stuff to all the living things in this world, collect all of that in the form of energy when those living things die, and use that energy to revive this dying world!
Damn, that’s a long sentence!
Where’s the TL;DR?!
And that’s still simplifying it quite a bit, just so you know.
Basically, the system is a messed-up conjuring that forces anything living in this world to save up energy while they’re alive, then pay it all back when they die like some sick loan shark coming for their due.
Training your skills and stats is the main method of saving up that energy, a gamelike feature which I think is probably D’s personal preference.
And that energy is used to help restore this world, which is on the brink of destruction.
If you’re wondering why the whole world has to depend on such a convoluted system in the first place, it’s because the humans of this planet really screwed things up long ago, apparently.
If you wanna know the details about that part, ask Taboo.
It even comes with a free service where you get to hear a voice saying “atone” all the time, whether you’re asleep or awake.
Although I weaseled out of that little contract when I became a god!
It was always pretty annoying, so that was a relief.
Anyway, enough about Taboo. From what I’m told, the people of long ago managed to use up this world’s energy until it was almost completely drained. Then this goddess became a sacrifice to fill that void.
I don’t really know the details myself.
Honestly, I don’t think I really need to know, either.
I’m guessing that knowing more about it would just make me sick to my stomach.
After spending time with people who were there when it happened—like Black, the pontiff, and especially the Demon Lord—I’ve definitely gotten the impression that some awful stuff went down.
And since the living things in this world are trapped in a hellish cycle where they die, get their energy stripped away, and are reborn into the same world all over again, I suspect that’s intended as a punishment, too.
Although I wish they wouldn’t drag us Earth reincarnations into their problems!
Back to the subject of the system, though. Aside from those basic functions, D also added a solid handful of just-for-fun features.
That includes most of the gamelike aspects, like skills and monsters.
I don’t think stuff like skills, stats, levels, and so on were really necessary to get living things to store up energy.
That part definitely smells like D messing around to me.
What about monsters, you ask? That’s a little harder to define.
Even if the initial idea of skills and stuff was just for fun, once you’ve chosen that as the method for saving up energy, you need to have everyone fight one another.
Monsters were created to give people something to fight.
If this is a video game, they’re the enemy characters.
And the system generated those enemies.
But I get the impression that the system only created monsters at the beginning, and they’ve been naturally reproducing on their own since then.
Since it costs energy to produce monsters, it’s better for the system’s purposes if the monsters breed anyway.
Ultimately, this means the monsters that currently exist are a mix of various factors: descendants of the monsters initially created by the system, animals that already existed in this world that adapted to the current environment, and some combination therein, to the point where you can’t even categorize them all anymore.
At this point, all the system really does with monsters is imprint them with the instinct to attack humans on sight.
I know that sounds like a massive pain from the humans’ point of view, but it’s not like there’s an obvious alternative if the system needs living things to fight one another.
Besides, monsters are an integral part of the food chain at this point. It’d be worse for the world if they suddenly disappeared.
In addition to monsters, the system has other ways to make people fight one another.
Namely, the hero and the Demon Lord.
The hero is human.
The Demon Lord, a demon.
They each lead their respective peoples and fight each other.
Both of them get titles with unusual perks and abilities, too.
The hero gets the special effect of being able to match the demon lord and can use the Sword of the Hero. Plus, the hero can power up in a crisis.
While the demon lord doesn’t have a special effect against the hero, they can use the Sword of the Demon Lord.
It seems like a bit of favoritism toward the hero, but that’s because humans and demons have different base specs and life spans and such; it’s basically a handicap because the demon lord is likely to end up stronger than the hero.
Without that, humanity could easily end up at the mercy of one demon lord for ages.
The problem here is that with the hero’s special effect against the demon lord, he can fight on equal footing no matter how much stronger the demon lord might be.
Except that means that for a weaker hero to catch up to a strong demon lord, a bunch of energy has to come from somewhere.
So basically, the anti-demon-lord effect is really a power-up that steals energy from other parts of the system.
And did I mention the current Demon Lord is the strongest in history?
Like, her stats hover around 100,000 on average.
What would happen if the hero tried to fight her?
A huge amount of energy would be pulled out of the system and totally wasted, that’s what.
We can’t splurge like that when we’re trying to save up energy here!
Besides, this whole thing also means that the existence of the hero is a threat to the Demon Lord’s safety, which is why I obliterated Julius during the war and hacked the system to try to remove the very existence of the hero feature while I was at it.
As we all know, that ended in a big fat failure.
I researched the system pretty thoroughly and thought I’d be able to pull it off, but I guess that was overly optimistic.
But I learned my lesson, which is why I’m now trying to deepen my understanding and control of the system even more.
And what I really need for that control is the ruler skills.
We’re talking about the Seven Deadly Sins skills and the Seven Heavenly Virtues skills.
These skills actually serve as keys to access the system.
Once you have a ruler skill and you establish your ruler authority using the information obtained from Taboo, you get a bunch of special privileges.
Like the abilities to block Appraisal, do a search of the system itself, and so on.
Still, using those special privileges too often will wear down your soul, so I can’t say I recommend abusing them—except blocking Appraisal, which doesn’t seem to really cost anything.
The ability to block Appraisal came in handy quite a few times before I became a god.
Anyway, while I was investigating the system, I figured out that you can use these ruler skills as keys to access a sort of secret menu.
When you get your ruler authority confirmed, a list of things you can do is basically installed in your head, but this was most definitely not on that list.
In other words, you’d have no way of knowing about it unless you’ve thoroughly inspected the system like I have.
So I did all that and found out about the secret menu.
And wouldn’t you know it…
It contained the system’s self-destruct program.
Just as I suspected, given the awful nature of D’s personality, of course she would include a hidden backdoor.
It even comes with a nice little README file explaining how to use it. You gotta laugh.
Makes you wonder if there was any point slowly saving up energy through the official menu in the first place.
And if I felt that way, I’m sure it was even worse for the likes of the Demon Lord and the pontiff, who really have been slowly, carefully saving for all these years…
But luckily, since the Demon Lord was on the verge of giving up, she was thrilled to see some light at the end of the tunnel at last.
Although I’m sure she wishes she’d known about this method sooner.
I mean, if they’d activated this right after the system was created, the world could’ve been saved already.
They wouldn’t have had to suffer through this long, drawn-out cycle of living, dying, and passing on energy through the official channels.
I’m sure there have been more tragedies throughout history than you could count, and the Demon Lord and the pontiff have probably seen all of them.
So I imagine learning that those might not have needed to happen in the first place must’ve been tough.
But you can’t change the past, so I guess there’s no point dwelling on it.
I can’t alter the tragedies that have already taken place. I can only try to make a better future.
Let time travelers handle past crises, although I don’t know if anyone even exists who can manage something like that.
I mean, D has a crazy amount of knowledge—I wouldn’t be surprised if she could do it.
If nothing else, though, I certainly can’t.
I’ve gotta focus on what I can do instead of dwelling on what I can’t.
But wait!
There’s one thing I can’t do by myself!
And that’s increasing the amount of people with ruler skills.
Ruler skills are the keys to the system.
See, you actually need all the ruler skill keys to activate the self-destruct program in the system’s secret menu.
Every! Single! Key!
Yep, that does it. This game is impossible!
There are several ruler skills that aren’t even held by anyone right now.
Worse yet, one of the people who does have a ruler skill is someone who will absolutely never cooperate with us.
You guessed it: Potimas.
Honestly! Why does that guy have to get in our way at every turn?!
The dude’s very existence is a thorn in my side!
Do you have any idea how I felt when I figured out how to activate this secret menu?!
I wanted to run right into a wall!
But it’s just like that famous basketball coach once said: “If you give up, the game’s already over.”
I racked my brains over what I could possibly do, and in the end, I decided to cheat.
Keys, doors, opening…
Yeah, let’s pick the lock!
…You there, the reader who just thought What the hell does that mean?
If the direct approach doesn’t work, you’ve just gotta use workarounds instead!
Since this secret menu itself is already a workaround, there’s nothing wrong with using yet another workaround on it, if you ask me!
Besides, I’ve got no other choice, because I’ll never be able to get the keys from all the ruler skill holders otherwise.
At any rate, I sat down and made a list of people who might be able to get ruler skills.
Then I decided to recruit as many as I could.
We already started with three people with ruler skills on our side: the Demon Lord has Gluttony, Vampy has Envy, and Mr. Oni has Wrath.
Next, I began conducting close surveillance on demon army commanders, famous humans, fellow reincarnations, and other important characters.
My spy clones definitely came in handy there.
And next thing you know, Mera picked up the Perseverance skill.
That was a bit of a shocker.
Mera was originally just a normal person, you know?
He’s had a pretty wild ride of life since then, especially since he turned into a vampire and all, but I still can’t believe he came so far as to get a ruler skill.
It’s supposed to be suuuper hard to get those skills, you know.
I mean, even Julius the hero didn’t have one!
If even the appointed defender of humanity couldn’t get any, that’s definitely a rare set of skills.
…Although I guess I can’t really talk, since I had four of them, or five if you count Wisdom.
By the way, it seems like the Wisdom skill was made specifically for me.
I got it when I maxed out Appraisal and Detection, but the Demon Lord’s done the same thing, and she didn’t end up with Wisdom.
Oops, I’m getting off topic.
At any rate, Mera really worked hard.
Good work, Mera.
Keep it up, please.
Perseverance is the key here.
Show me what an ordinary human can really do.
Although I guess he’s a vampire, not a human anymore.
Meanwhile, on the human side, Natsume really screwed things up.
He tried to plot an assassination to get revenge on Yamada.
Although it ended in failure thanks to Ms. Oka.
On top of that, she even used her ruler authority to erase all Natsume’s skills.
Since Ms. Oka was able to use those Ruling Class Privileges, that means she has a ruler skill.
And she’s even established her authority.
There’s no way Ms. Oka has maxed out her Taboo skill, so Potimas must have told her how to do that. I’m sure he has his authority established, too, naturally.
Most likely, Ms. Oka’s ruler skill is Charity, one of the Seven Heavenly Virtues.
I used to have that one, too.
I got it when I was saving tons of people’s lives; it just randomly came with one of the titles I got.
It’s unclear whether Ms. Oka got it in the same way or if she used skill points to acquire it.
But how she got the skill isn’t that important, as long as she has it.
As long as Potimas is around, though, I can’t really go near her.
So if Ms. Oka has a ruler skill, that also means there’s one less key that I’ll be able to use.
That hurts, for sure.
But there’s nothing I can do there.
It was always going to be impossible to get all the keys anyway.
Man, though, Ms. Oka really overdid it.
Out of all the ruler privileges, erasing skills eats up an especially large portion of your soul.
Normally, that should have done some serious damage to her soul, enough that she could’ve lost a bunch of skills and had her stats seriously lowered in the process, too.
Ironically, it might be thanks to Potimas that Ms. Oka came out unscathed.
Part of Potimas’s soul is attached to her like a parasite.
Actually, that’s true of all elves, not just Ms. Oka.
I think this is an effect of Potimas’s Seven Heavenly Virtues skill, Diligence.
He can take over people he’s infected and use them as his own body doubles.
Once someone’s been taken over once, they can never go back to their old selves.
In other words, Potimas was basically holding Ms. Oka hostage.
Note the past tense, though.
That was before the Natsume-goes-crazy incident.
Ms. Oka used her ruler privileges in a way that should have consumed her soul, but miraculously, it consumed the soul of Potimas that was parasitically infecting her instead.
I don’t think even Potimas saw this coming.
Thanks to that, the part of Potimas’s soul that was attached to Ms. Oka got seriously weakened, making it much harder for him to take over her body.
All that being said, it’s only harder, not absolutely impossible, which is still concerning.
But still, anytime Potimas is inconvenienced, I’ve gotta celebrate!
Besides, that wasn’t even the only advantage we gained from this little incident.
We also succeeded in brainwa—I mean recruiting Natsume to our side.
Hmm? Was I about to say brainwashing?
No, you’re imagining things.
There’s no such thing as the brainwashing clones that I conveniently didn’t mention earlier.
And there’s definitely not a fingertip-sized spider inside of Natsume’s brain or anything like that! What is this, a horror movie?
Ha-ha-ha.
Look, if we just left him alone, he definitely would’ve gone crazy again and gotten himself executed this time for sure. So why shouldn’t I use him to our advantage instead?
And then I really hit the jackpot: He gained not one but two ruler skills, Lust and Greed!
Talk about a bargain.
We’ve pulled off all kinds of mischief thanks to Lust’s brainwashing effects, so now I can say for sure that I made the right choice!
Although I wasn’t expecting Yamada’s little sister to attack while we were brainwa—I mean persuading Natsume.
Gotta admit, the thought of keeping her quiet through violent means did cross my mind for a second—but when you really think about it, she’s actually pretty smart and talented, enough that she did a respectable job holding her own alongside a reincarnation like Yamada.
Doesn’t that mean she stands a chance of getting a ruler skill?
That’s why I very kindly approached her to suggest that she work with me in exchange for not doing any harm to Yamada.
Since she’s a little too obsessed with her brother, that threat—no, wait, I mean offer, definitely just an offer—worked on her right away.
Unfortunately, she hasn’t been able to get a ruler skill just yet.
But considering that she still helped us out with some other small favors, I’ve kept my promise not to do any harm to Yamada.
With my own hands, at least!
I never promised that Natsume wouldn’t hurt him, okay?
And I’ve still made sure that he stays alive, okay?
So I haven’t broken my promise.
Anyway, all jokes aside, I am planning on making sure she doesn’t get caught up in the shock waves that’ll inevitably come when we destroy the system, as thanks for helping us out.
Especially since I did kinda make her kill her own father.
I did have Natsume brainwash her and force her to do it, to make sure it was against her will at least, but it might’ve still been a teensy bit traumatic for her.
Next, I used Natsume’s brainwashing abilities to control other reincarnations like Ooshima and Hasebe and check whether they had any ruler skills.
If they did, I was planning to steal the keys from them while they were still brainwashed, but sadly, none of them had any.
I didn’t brainwash Yamada, since I made a promise to his sister and all.
Not to mention the little matter of Divine Protection.
I’ll admit, part of it was that I was just scared something weird would happen if I tried anything on him.
The fact that Yamada turned out to have the Mercy skill definitely stings, though.
Maybe I should’ve broken my promise to his little sister and stolen the key from him…
Well, no use crying over spilled milk.
And Shinohara is usually attached to Yamada at the hip, which means I can’t touch her, either.
So that’s the deal with the reincarnations at the human academy.
Other than those guys, there’s also Tagawa and Kushitani, two other reincarnations who’ve been traveling around the world as adventurers and built up a fair amount of combat experience, too.
Neither of them seems to have gained ruler skills as far as I can tell, so I’ve just been keeping an eye on them, but then they clashed with Mera in the war and ended up following Ms. Oka to the stupid elf village.
Maybe I could have stopped them if I tried, but it would’ve seemed weird for us to intervene at the time, and I was so busy with cleanup afterward that I just ignored ’em.
There’s also a reincarnation named Kusama who’s been working under the pontiff, but he doesn’t have a ruler skill, either, placing him solidly in the ignore column.
Hmm? I’m dismissing Kusama way too easily?
It’s not my fault. He’s just that kinda guy.
The other reincarnations are all confined in the elf village, and I seriously doubt they’d be able to get ruler skills in that situation, meaning they also get ignored.
To sum it up, the current ruler skill holders are as follows:
Wrath: Mr. Oni.
Envy: Vampy.
Greed and Lust: Natsume.
Gluttony: Demon Lord.
Pride and Sloth: Both unclaimed.
Mercy: Yamada.
Perseverance: Mera.
Diligence: Potimas.
Charity: Ms. Oka.
Temperance: The pontiff.
Chastity and Humility: Both unclaimed.
Of the fourteen, I’ve acquired the keys for six.
Four are unclaimed, and four belong to members of other factions.
I would’ve liked to get at least half of ’em down, but this might be the best I can do…
I’ll just have to use lockpicking for the rest.
So yeah.
As far as that part goes, apparently, the difficulty varies based on the state of the ruler skill.
Specifically, in order of highest difficulty to lowest: authority established > authority not established > unclaimed.
Unclaimed skills are basically like the key is lying around undefended near the lock, but if someone has the corresponding ruler skill, it becomes a lot harder because someone else is basically carrying the key around.
And if they’ve also established their ruler authority, it’s kinda as if there are additional security measures around the lock itself.
It’s because of this range in difficulty that I was able to figure out someone already had the Mercy skill.
In other words, the hardest ones to contend with at the moment are Diligence, Temperance, and Charity.
Mercy takes fourth place.
If I can just figure out these four somehow, the unclaimed ones should be easy enough.
I’m gonna kill the crap out of Potimas soon, meaning Diligence will go back to being unclaimed.
So I’ll just wait to pry it open until after all that.
As for Charity, I might be able to talk Ms. Oka into handing over the key once Potimas is good and dead.
I don’t know if she’s going to agree or not, but if I have a chance of resolving it peacefully, I might as well wait until then.
Which means that one’s also on hold until I massacre Potimas.
I’m not sure if there’s much I can do about Temperance…
Let’s just put that one aside for now.
I can make a judgment call on it after I kill Potimas.
That leaves Mercy as the highest priority.
It’d definitely be best to pick that lock before Yamada establishes his authority.
Once he maxes out his Taboo, it’d be great if he decided to help us… But if not, then it’s gonna be a huge pain.
Prying it open before then would be safer for sure.
Same goes for the four unclaimed ones.
I held out for as long as I could, but I doubt any of my players are gonna pick up a ruler skill anytime soon at this point, even if I put it off a little longer.
If anything, the chances might be higher of someone on a different team getting one instead.
Even among the people on our side who might get one, there’s an all-too-real chance that they might lose their lives in the battle at the elf village.
That even goes for the ones who already have a ruler skill, like Vampy and Mr. Oni.
And if they die, then another Ruler seat will be empty again.
Better to at least use the keys that I already have now and open as many locks as I can before any of that happens.
“So yeah, I’m gonna go take care of that stuff real quick.”
“Hmm. You can’t let those ‘system-related clones’ of yours take care of it like usual?”
I report in to the Demon Lord before I head out, since communication is important.
We’re in a horse-drawn—or rather spider-drawn—carriage.
It’s basically a fancy basket being carried on the backs of arch taratects. The lap of luxury.
“Nope. It’d be too risky for me to control them remotely from afar for such an important job.”
“Gotcha…”
I can understand why the Demon Lord would want me to hold off, though.
We’re right in the middle of preparing for battle with Potimas, which is clearly very important to her.
I can gather information on the enemy faster than basically anyone else in the world, I can teleport anywhere at any time, and I can even deploy whole formations that way. Since I’m the strongest force on our side, it’s no wonder she’d want to keep me close at hand.
Huh?! Wait, I’m so skilled it’s scary!
Is it just me, or am I too talented for my own good?!
Is this even allowed?
I’m not gonna get banned for hacking, am I?
I’m just that talented. It’s almost creepy.
“White…you’re lost in some stupid thoughts again, aren’t you…?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I’m pretty sure you only say that when I’ve hit the nail on the head.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about…”
The Demon Lord rolls her eyes and shrugs exaggeratedly.
Grrr. Offense taken!
And I want to file a complaint against the super-toxic work environment in the demon army, too!
As the CEO, the Demon Lord should pay me a settlement!
“……”
For some reason, the Demon Lord grabs my hand tightly and pulls me toward her.
Whaaa—?
As I freeze in place, she lays me down and promptly bundles me up in her own thread.
The thread is woven like cotton and wrapped around my entire body.
Um, whaaa—?
“You can take care of that tomorrow. For tonight, you sleep right here.”
Sleep?
In this bundled-up state?
Okay, I’ll admit that this is actually super soft and comfy, but still.
If I sleep bundled up adorably in the Demon Lord’s carriage, what about my dignity?
“White, do you even realize how exhausted you look right now?”
“For real?”
Is it that obvious?
I guess I have been working too much overtime lately.
Even though I’m a god, I still have a physical body that can get tired.
Maybe I’ve been pushing it a little too much.
“But there’s not much time…”
“It’d be worse if you doze off and mess something up.”
Fair!
They say that since your performance gets worse when you’re tired, it’s actually more effective overall if you take regular breaks while working.
“All right, then.”
“Good. Have all your clones and stuff rest, too, except for what’s absolutely necessary.”
“Oh c’monnn…”
But then my whole worldwide surveillance network will temporarily shut down…
“Well? I’m waiting.”
“…Fine.”
Sheesh, the Demon Lord’s kinda pushy today.
Seems like she’s gonna force me to sleep by any means necessary.
“…I am aware that I’ve been relying on you too much, you know.”
“Hmm?”
The Demon Lord murmurs something with a bit of a rueful expression.
“So when I see you looking this exhausted…well…you know. I want you to rest, that’s all.”
“…I’m doing it because I want to, okay? Don’t make that face.”
“Sorry. No, wait. I guess what I should be saying right now is thank you.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
“Once it’s all over, I really want to thank you again, properly this time. So don’t fall out on me before then, okay?”
“You got it, boss.”
In that case, I guess it’s time to sleep!
I’m gonna get drunk on sleep!
Goodnight!
No Comments Yet
Post a new comment
Register or Login