Chapter 5 — I Guess I’ll Need Her to Die Again
The classroom in the Suudoria Academy was in total chaos. They were in the middle of their afternoon classes, which was ordinary enough, but every person in the classroom knew something was wrong. Most of them had memories of a giant squid attacking and killing them. Some didn’t remember anything but being annihilated by mysterious beams of light, but all of them recalled dying, so why were they here?
Among the chaos, Van alone was calm. Since he knew of the Great Sage’s power, his only thought was to wonder why he had been returned to this place.
Hmm...1852nd year, Season of the Sun, the First Month, Day of the Tortoise? We didn’t go that far back, did we? Was there something special about this day?
Though there was nothing in the classroom to tell him the date, he had access to the Battlesong system that ruled the world. It wasn’t capable of keeping track of every little thing that happened, but finding out the current date and time was easy enough. Yet, even knowing the date and time, he couldn’t think of anything in particular that made this day stand out. He had just been in class like usual. Nothing around him seemed out of the ordinary.
Van stood from his seat and left the classroom. It was hard to think in such a loud environment. Plenty of students had run from the room in a panic, so no one noticed Van leaving with them. Walking down the halls, he found the rest of the school was also in an uproar.
This was only the second time Van had experienced the Great Sage’s power, and there had been a similar reaction the last time as well. It was normal for people to panic when time was suddenly reversed. But after a short while, their memories of the time before the reset would start to fade. They would recognize this new world as reality and eventually forget everything else like it had been nothing more than a long dream.
Van headed to the cafeteria. With no one else there, it was a convenient place to think with some peace and quiet. He sat down in a random chair.
“Hmm, what do I do now?” Though everything before had basically been a dream, time had just been reversed. At this rate, history would repeat in exactly the same way as it had before. Everyone knew what was going to happen in the future, but if they didn’t pay close attention, they would soon forget it all. They would just write off anything similar happening again as déjà vu. In other words, if he wanted to change the course of history, he would have to do something himself.
“First of all, why did the population go down so much? And what was punching holes in the surface? Gramps said that Malnarilna died, so that girl woke up...so maybe I should make Malnarilna immortal?” Van’s thinking was fairly simple. It may have been better to think things through more thoroughly, but he couldn’t be bothered. After all, if he failed and everything went wrong, the Great Sage could just rewind time again.
“Why did Malnarilna die anyway? I guess it doesn’t matter. If I hide them somewhere, they can’t die. And if I tell them it’s orders from Gramps, they’ll probably listen.”
Even the gods Malna and Rilna weren’t exempt from the reset. In short, they should have known that they’d died. There was a good chance that telling them to hide so they wouldn’t die would be enough to convince them.
“But where are they? They abandoned the Heavenly Throne, right? I guess I should check the headquarters of the Malnarilna sect first.” Though he thought that, he wasn’t the kind of guy to move quickly. He figured he had time, so there was no reason to hurry.
“Anyway, this seems like a good time, so I guess I’ll put an end to the Four Kingdoms.”
Van’s abilities as a Sage were to set the rules for a game within a given area. He had set up a game where four kingdoms fought to destroy each other on the floating islands in the sky, but he had been made painfully aware of how much of a failure it had been...
First, the area was way too big. It was far too big for the number of players and factions. There wasn’t any particular reason it had been made that big. If he had to say, it was just a thought he’d had.
At first, he considered making them use ships to travel between the islands to fight each other, but then he had the idea of connecting all the islands together to make a single large field. That idea alone drove him to stitch the islands together, and he had gotten a bit carried away. It had ended up being a continent two thousand kilometers across and four thousand kilometers long.
Just being big wasn’t a problem in and of itself, but Van had added more constraints to try and make things interesting. He had set the bases of the four factions in the corners but was worried that one could just rush down a faction’s main base at the start and take them out of the running immediately. In order to avoid that, he had placed movement restrictions on them. He divided the area into hexagons, ten kilometers long on each side, and then limited the amount of force that could enter each individual area. Assigning each unit a cost, he then put a limit on the total cost of units that could enter an area. On top of that, he required that a faction could only enter a given area if they controlled two areas adjacent to it.
That should have been enough to say something was wrong. With that rule set, it didn’t seem like the game was going to progress at all. Reducing the size of the continent may have solved the problem, but really, it was a combination of the absurd size of the field and the tiny areas it had been divided into that ground progress to a halt.
And to make matters worse, there was the problem of the Seyla. Seyla was Sage Lain’s younger twin sister. The pair had found a relic of some god while they were Sage candidates, which had transformed Seyla into an immortal monster. If left alone, it wouldn’t take long for the rampaging Seyla to destroy the entire world. So Van had captured her, locked her away in the world of his game, and then made a plan to stabilize her.
He had been the one to spread the Seyla across the floating continent, but that had just been to liven things up. There’d been nothing on the floating islands before Van got there. He could change the environment a little through the rules of the game, but it was really just a big open field. There wasn’t much entertaining about that, so he had figured some obstacle besides the other players was necessary to spice things up for the players.
Though the Seyla was weak, it was immortal. No matter how many times you killed it, it would revive. In short, there was no need to replenish the supply even as it got hunted down. The fact that he could force the players to collect energy from the Seyla as points, which he could then use to sustain the game itself, meant he could kill two birds with one stone. At least, that’s what Van had thought, but instead, the Seyla had slowed the game down even more. It spread like a wildfire, infecting all other life on the continent in no time at all. All four factions were forced to move extremely cautiously.
After reaching a certain level of strength, one could fend off the Seyla’s infection, but there weren’t that many people with that level of power. You could protect yourself from the Seyla by enclosing your body entirely in armor, but that required significant time and effort.
The only thing that had really gone according to plan with the Seyla was the situation with acquiring food. Thanks to the infection, acquiring livestock and produce became extremely difficult. The few untouched areas of the continent became hotbeds for conflict, which was good.
In the end, though, there was hardly anything entertaining about the game, so the Great Sage had lost interest. He had stopped watching partway through. Feeling pushed into a corner, even Van felt there wasn’t much chance of things improving at this point. But although he realized that, he didn’t have the willpower to bring it to an end.
“I guess I’m already done preparing for a new game by now...and, well, with everything already in chaos, now’s as good a time as any.”
He could run more than one game at a time, but that would require splitting his resources. If he focused all of his resources on one game, the number of things he could do would increase, so there were better chances of it going well. Though there was no point sustaining a game with no future, Van did still have his life as a student of Suudoria Academy, so he had been hesitant to throw that all away. But now that everything had been plunged into chaos, having a sudden game over couldn’t make things much worse, so now was a good time.
“I guess rather than a game over, it’s more like a change in environment, though.”
Ending the game wouldn’t mean all the players would die. All it meant was that the rules and setting would change. The buildings of the academy would still be here, and there would be no direct effect on the players.
Van opened the console menu, which only he could see. Opening the settings menu, he erased the game. Once he had decided to take action, the rest was easy. The game of the four kingdoms on the floating continent ended, and the resources used to maintain it were returned to him.
“I bet they’ll all be really surprised to find out they were actually on floating islands the whole time... Oh.”
The barriers disappeared, freeing everyone to move as they wished. They had thought they inhabited a large continent, so it must have looked like the land had suddenly been divided into numerous small, isolated islands. And that meant the Seyla was now free to move as well.
“Hmm. But the Seyla doesn’t really move on its own, does it? Or wait, did I change it to stop moving with the game rules?”
The Seyla spread its immortality, but it didn’t really change the makeup of the creatures it infected. Plants would move a little to try and catch prey that wandered nearby, but it wasn’t like they could pull up their roots and move around. But that had been because Van had used the game rules to stabilize them. Now free of the game’s restrictions, the Seyla began to rampage anew, fulfilling its natural instinct to grow and spread.
“Did I already screw up? Well, it’s not like the world will end because everyone became immortal, right?”
Van stayed optimistic until the end.
◇ ◇ ◇
The next thing he knew, Kouryu was walking down a city street. The city was in an uproar, people panicking all around him.
“Hmm, so we’ve gone back in time. That’s too bad.”
Kouryu had killed Malnarilna and retaken his place as this world’s god. A moment ago, he had been at the center of the world, the Heavenly Throne. He immediately realized this must have been the Great Sage’s doing. This wasn’t the first time it had happened, after all. If things went well, Yogiri could end up killing the Great Sage before he rewound time. Or possibly, Yogiri would treat the reset as an attack and kill the Great Sage for trying it. That’s what Kouryu had hoped, but it seemed things wouldn’t be so convenient.
“Well, whatever. I figured something like this might happen.” Kouryu immediately recovered. He couldn’t help but feel dejected, but now that things had changed, he had no choice but to keep moving forward. Rilna was still dead, so the seal binding Kouryu’s powers was already gone. In other words, he had regained a significant amount of his power as a god.
He had always known something like this was possible. There was a good chance that if Yogiri went overboard, the world would be destroyed, and that if it happened, the Great Sage would likely start over.
“I really should have tried to get Yogiri to kill Malna too, huh?” He couldn’t quite suppress those sadistic feelings. Though he had a grudge against the Sages, the main target of his hatred was the god who had stolen his position, Malnarilna.
This world was once ruled by twelve gods, of which Kouryu was one. Their control of the world had been firm, but one day, Malnarilna had suddenly appeared. With the help of the Great Sage, they were far too strong for Kouryu’s side to handle. Kouryu had himself fought until the bitter end, when Rilna sealed his powers and threw him out into the world. The half-baked seal had effectively been an insult. They had only sealed his powers, leaving him free to wander so they could laugh at him for being helpless.
“Well, killing them once settled the grudge...but that aside, I guess I’ll need her to die again.”
If Malna died, other Dark Gods and great disasters would also be set free. But if Kouryu was to ever retake his position as the god of this world, that was something he wanted to avoid. In that case, it was most efficient to have Yogiri kill all of them while he was still here. Kouryu wasn’t particularly strong for a god. He had little chance against the powerful gods of other worlds.
“If all he did was reverse time, the Great Sage probably doesn’t know about Yogiri yet. That should be more than I need to win.”
For now, he just needed to make sure he didn’t get on Yogiri’s bad side. As long as he didn’t incite Yogiri to action needlessly, the others standing in his way would likely sort themselves out.
The immediate issue would then be how to get rid of Malna, but Kouryu already had a plan for that. Last time, he had used a godslayer who had just happened to wander into this world, but in truth, he had been putting plans in place to kill Malnarilna since long before that. Though they were far from finished, Malnarilna was a pair of twin goddesses. Malna wouldn’t be able to exert her full power with Rilna gone. In short, without Rilna, Malna was less than half as strong. If he only needed to deal with Malna, then the pieces he had in place now would likely be enough.
Kouryu made his way to the Village of the Saints, the organization he had created to kill gods.
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