Chapter 1 — I Definitely Didn’t Intend for That to Be Possible
The guildmaster’s room was on the second floor of the adventurer’s guild. It was Sage Van’s personal room, so no one could enter it without his permission. Van typically stayed inside his games while they were running, so this had become his place of residence. One might assume this is where he managed the game while it ran, but once he had set a game in motion, he rarely interfered with it. Ideally, he would set up the rules of the game, and the interactions between players would carry it forward from there.
Instead, he spent his time here thinking up his new game. He loved making games, and his mission in life was to find ways to entertain the Great Sage. At this point, Cavern Quest hadn’t elicited a response from him. The game had just been revealed recently, so it would take some time for his elder to give it an evaluation. Though Van had confidence in all of the games he made, none of them had managed to please his grandfather. There was a good chance this game would fail like all the others, so Van felt he had no choice but to start working on another one.
“Hmm. I thought Cavern Quest was pretty simple, but maybe I should try to go even simpler. Maybe something like a fighting game. Two are trapped inside, and the survivor gets to leave...” Sitting at his desk in his extravagant room, Van was scribbling ideas on a piece of paper. “But then the strongest person wins every time. That’s not super interesting.”
“Do you have a minute?”
Van raised his head at the sudden voice. A young man with a long coat and glasses stood in front of him. The Sage Shirou. He was the submaster of Cavern Quest, one of the few people with permission to enter this room.
“Yo. What’s up?”
“Judging by that reaction, you don’t realize what’s happened, do you?” Shirou said with a sigh.
He was right; Van didn’t know anything that was happening at the moment. But the season had only just started, so from his previous experience, things wouldn’t pick up for some time yet. If they weren’t going to do anything impressive, it was best to leave the players to their own devices for now. Or so he had thought, but Shirou’s exasperation seemed to indicate otherwise.
“Did something happen?”
“The most important items for the current season are the Philosopher’s Stones, right? And you set seven of them up as items within the game?”
“Yeah, that’s what I did.”
“Are you absolutely sure?” Shirou asked.
“Huh? Are you worried about those? Uhh...yeah, I definitely put one stone each in six people and a dog,” Van said, looking up at the ceiling as he recalled the information. He himself possessed a Philosopher’s Stone and was managing the six spares that were left over. He clearly remembered picking seven random characters in the game and embedding the stones in them.
“Yeah. Aoi was with me when I did it, so you can ask her if you want to be sure.” The Sage Aoi had wanted to give Yogiri Takatou all of the Philosopher’s Stones so that he would leave this world. She had demanded that Van hand his stones over. Van himself didn’t care much about the stones, but he felt like handing them over for free would be too boring. He promised to make them items in a game for Yogiri to obtain, but Aoi wouldn’t trust him to actually do it unless she could see it with her own eyes.
“There are fewer now.”
“Huh?”
“There are now only six items labeled Philosopher’s Stones in the game.”
“No way...” The Philosopher’s Stones were made to be indestructible by the game system, and removing them from the game should have been impossible. Not quite believing what Shirou had said, Van checked on the current locations of the stones. Four remained in the bodies of their hosts. Two had been removed from their hosts. That made six total. There were supposed to be seven stones, but Van couldn’t find any trace of the seventh. “Shirou, you didn’t take any of them out of the game, did you?”
There were only a few ways an item could be taken out of the game space. Van or Shirou could take items out as game masters, and anyone who cleared the game could take their items with them when they left as part of their reward.
“Obviously not. There would be no reason for me to do that. How about you?”
“I didn’t do it either,” Van said. “Well, this is bad. Looks like the last boss isn’t clearable anymore.”
“Exactly. You can’t even reach the last boss’s area without seven stones.”
Van paused for a moment. “Hey, could I borrow your Philosopher’s Stone?”
“I don’t mind, really, but wouldn’t it be easier to just change the settings of the game?” Shirou replied.
“That would be lame!” Van shouted, breaking his usual nonchalant air. He could, of course, change the rules of the game partway through, but doing so was unfair to the players and would shake the foundation of the game itself. A game whose rules constantly changed would be a piece of garbage. Van’s pride as a game developer wouldn’t stand for that.
“I feel like sneaking another stone into the game to hide the error is equally lame,” Shirou countered.
“As long as there are seven stones in the end, the flags will still trigger. That’s better than changing the flags themselves, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure it’s wise to just deal with the symptoms of the problem without investigating the underlying cause. The disappearance of a Philosopher’s Stone is unthinkable. Even if I gave you my stone, if another one disappears, you’ll have no choice but to change the rules anyway.”
“Hmmm. There’s no way this should have happened in the first place... Oh! There are more stones in the game! Yogiri Takatou got some from Sion!”
Van checked the items in Yogiri’s inventory. There were no Philosopher’s Stones. There were stones in the dog and elf that were nearby him, but Van already knew about those. He expanded his search to the inventories of Yogiri’s party members, but none of them had stones either.
“Did they leave them somewhere?”
“I don’t know the details of their situation, but is it possible that they let Sion hold onto the stones?” Shirou suggested.
Van had complete control over the contents of the game. If they were trying to be careful, keeping their other stones out of the game was a reasonable decision. But Van felt like he was forgetting something. He dug through his memories for any important information on the Philosopher’s Stones.
“Oh!” he suddenly exclaimed.
“Did you discover something?”
“So, uhh...before everything got reset recently, some of the Philosopher’s Stones fused together and turned into a girl. If that happened again, it wouldn’t be that weird for one of the stones to disappear...”
“In that case, the idea of using the Philosopher’s Stones as items inside the game was doomed from the start, wasn’t it?”
“I guess, but I’ve taken the stones out and lined them up with each other plenty of times before and that never happened.”
“The Philosopher’s Stones were sealed by Malnarilna, weren’t they? Perhaps she did something to them?”
“Now that you mention it, gramps did say something about Malnarilna dying...” The Great Sage had said Malnarilna’s death was the trigger for the whole world’s collapse. Malnarilna’s power as a god was keeping numerous dangerous beings locked away.
“So, what should we do? I don’t think we can use Philosopher’s Stones as key items in the game anymore.” Shirou was exasperated, but Van never would have expected Malnarilna to die again. One of the main reasons the Great Sage reset the world was to bring her back to life. Even imperfect as she was, Malnarilna was the god in charge of this world. With memories from before the reset, there was no way she would fall for the same trick twice.
“I guess we’ll change things a bit.” They didn’t have enough stones anymore, and there was a possibility that the number they had would continue to shrink, so the gimmick had already fallen apart. No matter what changing the rules might do to his pride, maintaining the current rule set wasn’t going to work.
“There were six people and one dog who had Philosopher’s Stones in them. Let’s make those seven trigger the flag for the last boss instead of the stones.”
“Some of them are already dead, though,” Shirou reminded him.
“Then whoever kills them will get that attribute instead.” All battles that took place in the game were recorded. It was possible to find out who had been killed by who at any point after the fact.
“That makes the game clearable, but what about your promise to give away the Philosopher’s Stones as a reward for clearing it?”
“There’s nothing I can do about that, is there? It’s not my fault the stones are disappearing.” Even if Yogiri and Aoi blamed Van for not keeping up his side of the bargain, there was nothing he could do about it.
“I suppose that resolves the issue of the Philosopher’s Stones. There’s one more issue I’d like to bring up, though.”
“Oh? What’s that?” Van asked.
“Monsters are attacking the human city.”
“How did that happen? There shouldn’t be any way for monsters to even get there.”
“Apparently, there’s a way for human players to bring monsters back to the city with them.”
“Bring monsters with them? No, that shouldn’t be possible... Oh!” Van suddenly shouted, impressed. Monsters couldn’t use the gate to make it into the human city, but anything adventurers wore or carried would be treated as a part of them and therefore transported along with them. It was possible that was how the monsters were making it into the city. He wasn’t sure that was enough for them to be able to mount an invasion, but once the exploit was known, it wasn’t technically impossible. “Well, that’s a problem. I definitely didn’t intend for that to be possible.”
If the purpose of the game was just to have fights between humans and monsters, there wouldn’t be any issue. But Van’s intentions were for the game to be about players systematically improving their equipment and eventually taking down the last boss. It wasn’t just about killing.
“Well, that should be easy enough to fix, so let me—” He just needed to add more checks to the gates. As he thought through the practical solutions to the problem, he noticed a woman standing beside Shirou.
“I don’t remember giving you permission to be in here, Alexia.”
The self-styled secretary of the Great Sage gazed back at him coldly through her glasses. “I have a message from the Great Sage. He finds the current situation interesting and does not wish for you to change it,” she stated matter-of-factly, unfazed by Van’s irritation with her.
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