Chapter 9 — Interlude: It’s Morning! You’re Going to Be Late for School!
This is a story from another world. In concrete terms, it was a world very similar to modern-day Japan, though it had no connection to the world Yogiri and Tomochika came from. Either it was a parallel world, or perhaps at some point in the past it had branched off from the same world and become slightly different. Perhaps it arrived at a similar place entirely by coincidence, life and culture evolving in the same way entirely by chance.
In any case, it was the world where the one who would one day become the Great Sage Mitsuki was born.
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Mitsuki opened his eyes to see the face of a young girl directly above him.
“Uhh...good morning?” Still half asleep, it took him a moment to realize what was happening, but it seemed for some reason Yumeno was sitting on top of him while he slept. She was staring at his face from uncomfortably close, but when he started staring back, she hurriedly sat back up.
“G-G-Good morning! Get up, Mitsuki! You’re going to be late for school!”
“Hm? Oh. Thanks.”
Looking at the clock on the wall, he saw it wasn’t quite time to get up yet. In only a few minutes his alarm clock would wake him, so he would have been fine without her help, but he felt he should thank her for coming to wake him up anyway.
“Hey! What are you two doing?!” Still in a sleepy haze, Mitsuki heard his window open as his neighbor Rio stormed into the room. The balcony outside his window connected with the neighbors’, so they could easily come and go between them.
“Morning. She was just here to wake me up.”
“That’s right! I was just waking him up!” Yumeno echoed.
“If you were just waking him up, why are you on top of him?!” Rio demanded.
“Actually, that’s a good question.” Gently pushing Yumeno off of him, Mitsuki finally sat up.
“Jeez! I can’t take my eyes off you for a second!”
“By the way, why are you here, Rio?” Mitsuki asked.
“I-I just came to wake you up! If I leave you be, you’ll sleep all day!”
“I mean, I have an alarm clock...” However, he didn’t think of these two as a bother. He was thankful they were trying to help. “I’m going to get changed; can you two step out for a minute?”
“Ah, sorry!”
The pair stepped out of his room, though he didn’t know why Rio went downstairs when she had come in through the window. After changing into his school uniform, he headed downstairs where his maid, Akane, was waiting.
“Good morning. Your breakfast is ready.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“I could have made breakfast for him. Why do you need her?” Yumeno mumbled, though considering her culinary “skills,” he was quite glad to have Akane make breakfast instead.
Mitsuki’s parents had gone abroad for work and wouldn’t be back for some time. In their absence, they had hired Akane to take care of him. Normally one would think of a hired housekeeper as a middle-aged woman of some sort, but for some reason, the maid they had hired was close to Mitsuki’s age and had decided to live in the house alongside him, taking care of all the housework herself.
“Wait, why is Rio eating breakfast with us?!” Yumeno protested.
“It’s fine; she’s here anyway,” Mitsuki said.
Finishing breakfast, Mitsuki headed to the front door and left for school. His stepsister Yumeno, childhood friend Rio, and live-in maid Akane, now also wearing school uniforms, were in tow. All of them attended the same school. The moment they made it outside, they were greeted by a sleek black luxury car waiting for them.
“Mitsuki, sir! Salutations on this fine morning!” Standing beside the car was his classmate, Reika. Saying she was just like she looked may have come across as a bit mean-spirited, but she was indeed a rich young heiress.
“Reika, I don’t mind if you want to walk to school with us, but bringing a car isn’t a great idea.”
“He’s right!” Yumeno declared. “The roads are cramped enough as it is! You should have thought this through!”
“It is no matter! I have already acquired assent from the people of this neighborhood.”
“Except I live in this neighborhood, and you didn’t talk to me at all!” Rio snapped back.
“My, how rude of me!” Reika replied. “I thought it would be sufficient to speak only with the owners of the houses, but I suppose I will need to be more thorough in the future.”
“What’s that for?” Mitsuki asked as Reika pulled out a stack of bills.
“I need to acquire Miss Rio’s approval, do I not?” she said boldly.
“I don’t need money from you! Let’s go!” Rio said, storming off. Mitsuki followed close behind as other girls from the neighborhood joined the entourage one by one. It was kind of a strange sight, but it was an everyday thing for Mitsuki. That everyday occurrence was about to be interrupted, though.
A bolt of lightning from the blue, despite there being not a cloud in the sky, struck the ground a few steps ahead of him. If he had stepped a little farther forward, he would have died. The asphalt shattered, cracks running out in every direction. A young girl wearing a white robe now stood where the lightning had struck.
“Ah! Of course he looks even better from up close, but this aroma too! I can’t get enough!”
The girls around Mitsuki froze. Lightning had struck right in front of them. The shock of that would leave them confused regardless, but the fact that a girl had emerged from the strike had them even more bewildered.
“Now, I suppose I cannot afford to waste much time. I am sure others will have noticed your awakening by now. I will need to take you away before anyone else comes to interfere.”
The beautiful young girl approached. Mitsuki was powerless to do anything but watch as she stepped closer. Before she made it to him, the chaos continued with another explosion and cloud of dust. Judging by the aftermath, it seemed like something had struck the first girl and sent her flying to the side. She had been sent through walls and houses, leaving a trail of destruction in her wake. It felt like a miracle that Mitsuki and the girls around him hadn’t been injured, as close as she had been to them when she was struck. It looked like rubble from the blast was going to hit them, but it dodged around them instead.
“What is going on?” Rio muttered.
“I have no idea.” Mitsuki echoed her thoughts.
“I do not know who you are, but I have to praise your nerve if you are willing to get in my way!”
“I was hoping that would have been enough to put you down for good. I really wanted that to settle things.”
The girl in white seemed impressed by the woman in red who emerged after, wearing a strained smile.
“Fear not. Now that you have brought this fight, I will take it quite seriously. This won’t end until you accept total defeat!”
“I wanted to finish this quickly so I could leave right away...but it looks like it’s not just the two of us anymore,” the woman in red said, looking behind the girl in white. Mitsuki turned to follow her gaze, finding a woman in blue descending from the sky in a pillar of blinding light.
“What a pain...” the girl in white said, clicking her tongue.
Mitsuki couldn’t help but agree.
◇ ◇ ◇
Worlds existed within Celestial Foundations, and these Foundations existed within the “sea.” The sea was enormous, containing countless such Foundations, but it was not hard to imagine the existence of worlds outside of it. There were worlds, the space outside them, and another place beyond all of that. Worlds with different fundamental laws all existed nested within each other. That was apparently the structure of the universe. “Apparently,” because it was impossible to observe the entire thing.
That said, there were some who treated this as all that existed, since it comprised the entirety of the territory perceptible to the most intelligent life forms on these worlds. For convenience, the term “Ultimate Ensemble World” referred to this collection of worlds. Many of them followed similar laws, while many more followed entirely different ones. No through line could be established that applied to all of them.
In short, what counted as rare and exceptional in one world was perfectly natural in another, but there were still things that counted as exceptional in all worlds. These were referred to as “exceptions.” The name was nothing special, only enough to evoke the intended meaning within the proper context. There were few enough such phenomena that they needed no special name. None were particularly impressive on their own, notable only for having a characteristic that was applicable across all worlds.
The Great Sage Mitsuki was one such “exception.” His unique trait was to be loved by everyone and everything. The effect varied depending on who it was applied to. On men, it often didn’t manifest as much of anything, but it was particularly pronounced on goddesses.
Goddesses, the females among the gods. As creators and rulers of entire worlds, it seemed a bit strange that they would take the sex characteristics of their creations, but it was possible to explain this through the strong anthropic principle.
That was what the gods of the Ensemble World were like. Worlds that followed a similar pattern were more convenient for those gendered gods, or in another way of putting it, because the Ensemble was observed to contain beings that existed in a gendered system, even the gods it produced would necessarily exist within that structure.
These goddesses, the greatest of intelligent life forms, took notice of Mitsuki. They would eventually come to be known as Alexia, the UEG, and Luu, and their conflict over him would lead Mitsuki to a bizarre fate.
If there had been only one, Mitsuki would have been taken captive and turned into their object of affection for eternity. But with three, a war broke out around him instead. They were three goddesses of equal power. None of them could directly interfere with Mitsuki, so the winner of his affection was entirely up to him.
With no other recourse, the three goddesses called a truce, allowing all of their interactions with Mitsuki to be observed by the others and to be restricted in how much time they could spend with him.
After this agreement, the three goddesses did everything in their power to win Mitsuki’s favor. They gave him gifts, they gave him power, they granted his every wish. The world around him changed drastically. The continents changed shape, and the people and cultures populating them were totally transformed. If it was to make Mitsuki happy, they would do anything.
They were wildly obsessed with him, quite literally driven mad by love. If they could earn Mitsuki’s love, they didn’t want anything else. They offered him everything, with no consideration for themselves. It did not take long for them to reach the tipping point, Alexia being first.
At first, it seemed she had lost. But at that point, the other goddesses had been giving Mitsuki more of their power. Say, for example, that each goddess had one hundred points of power. In their contest for Mitsuki’s affection, they had each given Mitsuki ten. While they wanted to grant him power to earn his favor, giving him too much would be ceding their ability to contest the other goddesses. So they had slowly and gradually given power to him...until one day Alexia suddenly gave up eighty points of her power to him.
That left her at ten points, the UEG and Luu at ninety, and Mitsuki himself at one hundred and ten. Alexia had greatly weakened herself, and it looked like she had no chance in the conflict any longer. However, it also resulted in Mitsuki having more power than the goddesses.
Though everything had revolved around him, Mitsuki had been no more than a spectator up until that point. Now things were different. While Mitsuki was used to members of the opposite sex constantly falling for him, a situation like this was too much. He lent all of his power to Alexia, feeling sympathy for her after she had given up everything she had.
The truce between the goddesses collapsed back into war. When their powers had been more or less even, any such conflict would develop into an eternal deadlock, but now that Alexia was a full third stronger than the other two, it was over in no time. If the other two had cooperated, they may have been able to resist her, but with them still in conflict, Alexia was able to defeat them one at a time.
Mitsuki had been freed. Though he had been granted nigh omnipotence, at heart he was just a boy with good looks. With far more power than he could handle, a long life of trial and error in figuring out how to make use of those abilities followed.
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