My Instant Death Ability is So Overpowered, No One in This Other World Stands a Chance Against Me! - Volume 13 - Chapter 4

Chapter 4 — This Feels Super Wrong. Isn’t There a More Natural Way of Doing It?

Mitsuki had taken the name of Great Sage in part out of a desire for fame and in part as a joke. He could do more or less anything. There were a few things beyond him, but from the perspective of an ordinary human, he was effectively omnipotent. With powers like his, calling him a god wouldn’t be much of a stretch, and in fact none of the gods that populated the world he ruled could hope to match him.

However, he hesitated to call himself a god. As an ordinary human who had come into such power, he felt that calling himself a god was arrogant and lacking in beauty. But of course, he couldn’t pretend he was an ordinary human. He couldn’t see that as anything more than an act of self-contempt. As someone who held power, he knew he needed an appropriate title.

And so he had come up with Great Sage. Although calling himself a sage was a bit pretentious, adding “great” in front of it made it so exaggerated that it had a humorous nuance to it. His family had called themselves Sages, but that was necessary to set them apart from Mitsuki himself. Either way, there weren’t that many people who had the ability to complain about the Sages, so it hadn’t really been a problem.

Mitsuki himself didn’t do much of anything. He loved to laze around, spend time with his women, and gaze out over the world, looking for anything fun and interesting. That tepid way of spending time had become his daily life. He didn’t remember when he had started living like that. If he really tried to remember, he could probably figure it out, but he had no interest in doing so.

Some might see a life like his as boring. That wasn’t really wrong, but Mitsuki liked it that way. This calm, stagnant lifestyle was exactly what he wished for. In fiction, it was common for immortals to grow tired of eternity and long for their own deaths, but he didn’t understand that way of thinking.

If one asked whether he was good or evil, he would probably say something like, “Evil, I guess?” Though he made no effort to conquer the world or oppress its people, no matter what happened, he would never leave his spot as an observer. Of course, if the whole world was destroyed, things would get rather boring, so in those cases, he would reset things, but in any other case he would only watch. He had no intention of proactively protecting or managing his world. Instead, he had set up circumstances to create interesting situations for him to observe.

While he didn’t interact directly with the world, he had the Sages live according to their whims, had set the world up to make it easy for others to fall into, and made no move against the Aggressors that infiltrated it. If he really wanted to, he could wipe out the Aggressors in an instant. He could also block them from entering the world in the first place, or disguise the world so that no one else could find it. Instead, he had taken no measures to defend against them and had left the Sages in charge of fighting them off.

As a strict observer, one might argue that he was more neutral than evil, but since he tilted things towards being more difficult so that they would be more interesting to watch, he felt he was closer to evil. He was originally human and didn’t feel like his sensibilities had strayed all that far from when he was mortal, so he was at least self-aware. But if one asked if that gentle guidance of the world to create interesting situations for him to watch had worked, he couldn’t really say it had. At first, things were fine, but it didn’t take long before they started getting repetitive. He had pretty much seen all of the situations that could naturally occur in the world’s current environment. Even so, he had no intention of getting more involved. Watching the world was only one of his pastimes, so he had no desire to step in.

As if understanding his thought process, Van had worked hard to develop a performance that would entertain him. But unfortunately, Van lacked the talent necessary to create an interesting game. They had all turned out to be somewhat lackluster.

That said, his adorable grandson was still trying to entertain him. There was a certain cuteness to his lack of skill. Mitsuki would feel bad if he completely ignored Van’s efforts, so he at least took a look at the beginning of each of his games. And that was why he had turned his attention to the beginning of Cavern Quest.

◇ ◇ ◇

Attached to his luxurious mansion was a beautiful garden. Atop the perfectly maintained lawn, gorgeous women sat around a table, enjoying an elegant tea party. A small distance from them, a young man lay on the grass, staring at the sky. That boy was Mitsuki. He possessed a peerless kind of beauty himself.

It was something he had been born with, the only power he’d had from the start. However, that attractiveness had led to him obtaining his powers as the Great Sage. Other transcendent beings wished to preserve his good looks and so made him immortal, leading to him gaining a tremendous amount of power.

The women nearby had been glancing his way for a while, clearly enchanted with him. They couldn’t approach unless he called them over, but it was too painful for them to leave his side, so they stayed only a short distance away.

As Mitsuki gazed blankly at the sky, he remembered that Cavern Quest was beginning and projected an image of the game above him. Getting up was more trouble than it was worth, so he lay where he was and watched it in the sky.

The screen above him displayed an open grassland, populated with adventurers fighting an enormous monster floating in the sky above them. Turning in curiosity to see what he was looking at, the expressions of the women nearby began to cloud over. The monster seemed like a collection of viscera, so it wasn’t something you could enjoy watching.

The monster attacked by shooting fluids and thrashing with its tentacles. The adventurers were using bows, magic, and harpoons to try and drag the monster down to the ground. A number of parties had formed together into a raid, creating an immense boss battle.

But Mitsuki had seen things like this any number of times. There was no stimulation to be found here, nothing interesting at all.

“Van knows I’m tired of this stuff, though, doesn’t he? I doubt this is what he was trying for.” Considering Van’s previous attempts, Mitsuki didn’t hold much hope, but there was a possibility Van was getting better. So keeping his expectations low, he looked at another place, a city where adventurers were gearing up and drinking together. As thrilled as they may have been on the eve of some adventure of their own, Mitsuki had seen scenes like this countless times as well. The fact that they were being forced into role-playing also gave the scene a certain blandness.

“This feels super wrong. Isn’t there a more natural way of doing it?”

When Mitsuki had been an ordinary human, he had loved fantasy and adventure stories. He had wanted to create a world where people with magic and other supernatural powers lived, so he had developed the Battlesong framework. But he had stopped at making that framework. Whether it actually developed into a heart-pounding, enthralling adventure story was something he left to chance. Rather than force something to happen, he wanted to see it develop naturally. It was a hard idea to express, so it seemed Van had misinterpreted the reasons Mitsuki had influenced the world the way he did. Mitsuki was the type to care a lot about his family, so he couldn’t bring himself to chastise Van after how hard the boy was working to entertain him.

That said, if the result was boring, he had no obligation to watch. Mitsuki decided to take a look at one more place. If there was no sign of improvement there, he would be done. He flipped to a random channel.

“Huh?”

It was a sea of blood. Destroyed bodies, dismembered limbs, and spilled innards covered the floor. Images of monsters toying with and devouring people filled the screen. The scene was so chaotic that it took him a moment to realize he was seeing the inside of the adventurer’s guild.

“This is...not on purpose, right?” At first, he thought this was part of Van’s plan, but he quickly changed his mind. Van knew full well that Mitsuki wasn’t interested in gratuitous violence, so this scene must have been outside of his plans.

Interest piqued, Mitsuki rewound a little. It seemed this was a plot from the Kingdom of Momurus. Momurus was one of the factions from Van’s previous game on the floating continent, a nation made up of monsters. For some reason, it had made it into Cavern Quest. Rewinding further, he saw Van releasing the barrier around the floating continent, causing mysterious creatures to rain down on the world. Van hadn’t told him very much, but it seemed the surface world had effectively been destroyed.

“Huh. Did he think I wouldn’t notice if he didn’t say anything? Well, I guess I didn’t until just now.” Van’s only comment had been that he was closing Four Kingdoms and moving on to another game he had been working on: Cavern Quest. An incident that threatened to wipe out humanity was one that would likely call for the Great Sage’s intervention. He wished Van had told him about it, but on closer inspection, he saw that the majority of the human population had gone underground to join Cavern Quest, so it seemed things had been resolved after a fashion.

“But with Cavern Quest’s rules, they’re still going to get wiped out, aren’t they?”

In order to spur the players on to adventure, Cavern Quest charged a Life Tax. Anyone who failed to pay the tax would die. Defeating the last boss would reset the game and return everything to square one, but if things didn’t go well, they would all be killed. The season framework the game was built on didn’t seem to take that possibility into account.

“Well, if that happens, I can just reset everything again. Alexia, do you have a minute?” Mitsuki called out to a table nearby. A woman wearing glasses and dressed as a secretary immediately stepped over to him and knelt down. “Could you go tell Van this is a little interesting, so I want him to keep this going the way it is?”

The chaos was interesting specifically because it was outside of Van’s plans. Cavern Quest itself seemed like it would soon bring about the end of the world. In that case, he figured he could let things go crazy without having to worry about the consequences.

“Understood,” the woman replied.

Mitsuki was fully capable of delivering messages to people without sending a messenger, inserting thoughts directly into their minds, but he didn’t like doing it that much. He preferred to send messengers when it came to delivering messages to his family, the Sages.

“Oh, there’s no rush, though. No need to hurry.” If he didn’t say that, she would likely have dropped everything to immediately go carry out his instructions. It wasn’t that urgent, so he told her to take her time just in case. Now that he had done so, she would accept his consideration and only go when she had a free moment. “But I guess I’ll probably have to reset things again anyway. I’ve never done it in quick succession before, so that’s a bit worrying.”

He didn’t know what would happen if he reset things while people’s memories of the previous reset were still hanging vaguely in the back of their minds. Things would likely get more chaotic, and some might even go insane. It was possible for him to reset things perfectly so that there were no lingering memories if he tried, but then things would just turn out the same as they had the first time around. The Sages would have to intervene directly to prevent the destruction of the world. He wanted to avoid intervening as much as possible, so that method was only a last resort. He would rather leave vague memories of what had happened before so that the people could resolve things on their own.

“Hmm...last time, the problem was caused by Malnarilna’s death, and I traced the cause all the way back to this point in time.” Mitsuki didn’t know all the details of everything that had happened. He called his mysterious power “magic,” so the magic he used to parse through information and determine the cause of a given situation only resulted in a guess as to when the events leading to Malnarilna’s death had begun. He didn’t know what the precise cause had been, nor did he want to know. He didn’t want to go back too far in time either, since if he did, people’s memories of what had happened before the reset would disappear and they would just repeat themselves.

“But if Van’s failure is the cause now, I can go back to the same point in time. If he doesn’t screw up, Malnarilna will probably handle things, right?” He was sure that Van wouldn’t repeat the same mistake. Malnarilna had also made a mistake leading to their death before the reset, but as imperfect as they were, they were still a god. If they had another chance, they should be able to figure out how to survive.

As that thought crossed his mind, another question tugged at him. Though it was a bit late to think so, he found it odd that Malnarilna were doing nothing while humanity was on the brink of destruction. Though they may have just been playing around half of the time, in a situation like this, they would at least save their own followers, wouldn’t they?

Curious about what they were up to, Mitsuki turned his attention to the twin goddesses and immediately noticed that something was wrong. One of the twins, Rilna, was nowhere to be found. Looking back to the reset, he saw that Rilna had never existed in this world. Assuming something was wrong, he checked the current number of people against how many had existed before the reset and found that a huge number of them were missing. Using his data processing magic, he analyzed those who had disappeared and quickly found his answer. Every one of the missing people had been killed by a boy named Yogiri Takatou before the reset.

Yogiri Takatou was a Sage candidate summoned to this world by Sion, and he possessed the ability to kill anyone just by thinking. Anyone killed by that power wasn’t affected by Mitsuki’s reset magic, so the world had rewritten itself to fill in the gaps.

With things going so far off track, Mitsuki couldn’t just stand back and watch anymore. He considered reviving the dead himself, but that would create contradictions in the new world’s history. In the end, the easiest solution would be to reset again, so he simulated a reset to see what would happen. The results were the same. No one Yogiri had killed came back. As long as he existed, no one he had killed could be revived.

“Alexia, can I ask one more thing?”

“How may I be of service?” Alexia’s face lit up as Mitsuki called to her again. She was still kneeling at his side, apparently hesitant to leave.

“I’m supposed to be omnipotent in this world, right? But I just found something I can’t do. What do you think about that?” Mitsuki gave her a brief explanation of what he had discovered.

“I see,” Alexia replied. “First, you understand that omnipotence does not mean everything will go exactly as you plan, correct?”

“Yeah, right. I had a feeling it would be that way.”

For example, it was impossible to create a beautiful woman that perfectly aligned with his tastes. Creating a person was easy enough, but their appearance was something that depended on artistic talent. With no head for design himself, it was something he just couldn’t do. That was why he looked for women who matched his tastes out in the world and brought them here. Since they were all born by chance, they weren’t created by his will.

“For example, assume you deigned to create a stone so heavy that no one could lift it. You yourself would also be unable to lift it, according to your own design. The situation with that boy is similar.”

“Really?”

“You allowed visitors to come into this world without restriction. That means you accepted his power, making it as if you had created it yourself.”

“I guess that makes sense,” Mitsuki said. “I don’t limit anyone’s powers in this world; that would make it boring.”

“In effect, even if you attempt to revive someone, you have already made it a part of the rules that anyone the boy kills cannot be revived, so that rule takes precedence.”

“I see. I didn’t do it consciously, but I guess it’s as if I wrote the rule myself.”

“As such, the solution is simple. If you wish to lift the stone, you must simply erase the rule that no one can lift it. If you want to revive people, you simply must erase the boy that killed them.”

“Hmm. But that would be pretty lame. I can’t just give up because things got inconvenient for me.”

“This world is nothing more than your dream,” Alexia replied. “You can do with it as you please. No one can blame you for any decision you make, as you are the world itself.”

“That’s true, but even if I can do anything, I still have to worry about the aesthetics of it.” Accepting someone as they were and then changing your mind when things got inconvenient for you felt lacking in style to him. He couldn’t bring himself to act like that. “I could easily erase him, but I already said I wouldn’t do things like that.”

Since he could do almost anything, if he was willing to intervene, any problem would be resolved instantly. If that were to happen, there would be no problems in the world, and it wouldn’t be interesting to watch.

“I feel like problems in the human world should be resolved by humans,” he said. That still gave him room to perform the resets when he had to. Even if he reset the world when humanity was on the brink of ruin, the people still had to work hard themselves to avoid that destruction the second time around.

“But is that something they can do?” Alexia asked.

“Yeah, I suppose nothing will get solved if I just watch. So maybe I’ll give them a little information. If that doesn’t work, I’ll try something else. I’m kind of looking forward to seeing what will happen!”

The situation had deviated far from the harmonious world Mitsuki had grown used to watching. His inability to tell what was going to happen next thoroughly piqued his interest.