by Yuu Kamiya
Steph seemed as if she wanted to ask what was going on, but Sora managed to explain things before she got the chance.
“We left some food—along with a love letter.”
Fortunately, their infantile attempts at improving agriculture and storage technology had paid off in a modest food surplus. They’d left smoked chicken and pickled tubers… A banquet, as far as the starving Werebeasts would be concerned. They’d utilized the black ash to cover their scent and taken every possible precaution, then left the food on the route the bastards would take six days from now. About eighteen seconds later in real time, the stack would pick it up.
And then they’d read Sora’s “love letter.”
“A love letter… By that you mean a regular letter, surely. What did you write?”
“A trade proposal.” Yes, written in the Werebeast tongue—a proposal for exchange between races. Specifically, “We told them we’d give them twice as much food for each Elf they kidnapped. ”
His face plastered with a grin, Sora was, in short, proposing human trafficking. This would normally be where Steph would let loose a few revilements, but—
“…Huh? You can even kidnap an Elf?!”
In this case, her first question was if it was even possible. Elf was the race most skilled in magic. Werebeasts might be fearsome, but could they really kidnap an Elf?
“Sure can.”
Sora dismissed Steph’s reasonable doubts and continued. “It’s a piece of cake. A stroll through the park… Easier than breathing.”
He’d even provided detailed instructions in his letter. Sora smiled darkly. Ah, yes. The lofty Elves, most acclaimed users of magic in the world…
“Say they’ve got magic, say they’ve got power—it makes no difference.”
Why, you ask? His sneer deepened.
“We’re not gonna let them use magic. We’re not even gonna let them resist, because we’ll create the conditions.”
That was the foundation, the quintessence of gaming. In other words—
“That’s enough to render everything useless. Today’s games and yesterday’s wars, it’s always been like that.”
—never let your opponents have their way. Do everything they don’t want. This was the one universal truth, even in war.
“So… First, we’re gonna use the Werebeasts to bring over one Elf.”
“…Then…we’ll use the Elves…to sell us…another race,” Shiro finished explaining drily.
If they scored just one Elf unit for their team, they could use it for their next “negotiation,” during which they’d exploit that darling magic—then everything would fall like dominoes. Thus, the two of them would hold the reins over everything. Their devilishly cruel conclusion so starkly contrasted with how young and innocent they looked. It sent a slight shiver down Steph’s spine, and she looked at the map projection with the pair.
It was as if everything had been preordained. As if reality itself was dictated by Sora’s and Shiro’s thoughts. Just as they’d predicted, a party of Werebeasts showed up at the appointed spot with an Elf. Indeed, they strolled in so idly, so easily, as if it were only natural. Steph’s eyes widened at the unfolding scene, and Sora’s and Shiro’s grins expanded.
That’s when it happened.
“…………Huh?”
The Werebeast stack vanished from the map.
Panicked, Sora projected the field of vision of a Scout unit out on reconnaissance off in the distance. The Werebeast party had disappeared without a trace, along with the surrounding scenery—and the Elf trudged back the way she’d come.
……
“…Sora? You did give instructions how to kidnap her, of course?” Steph asked, breaking the stunned silence.
“Uh, yeah!! I mean, look, they kidnapped her, right?!”
“…Brother… How, did you intend…to get…her?”
Sora tried desperately to argue, but Shiro saw right through him, her eyes vaguely cold…and doubtful. They seemed to ask, Sure, that’s all well and good, but how were we supposed to get her on our side?
“Huh? Well, I mean… We just crush her spirit and her pride, show her the joys of this and that, and then she’ll do anything we tell her. That’s why I told them to kidnap a woman in the first place.”
“…Y-you’re the absolute worst!!”
Steph’s eyes flew open when she picked up Sora’s meaning, but he just stared back blankly in response.
“Huh? …Don’t Elves usually break after a bunch of orcs, like, do stuff to ’em?”
Orcs, i.e., pig-men, i.e., a group of Werebeast pigs. Sora’s assumption had been unclouded by doubt, as if he were stating something as obvious as how the sun rises in the east.
…………
He was subsequently met with a silence deeper than the sea and an ice-cold stare, but seemingly oblivious, he pounded a fist on the table.
“Unbelievable…! What did I do wrong? What did I overlook?! It’s a staple of gaming for an elf to get captured by orcs and be like, ‘Just…kill me!’ only to surrender two frames later! It’s a universal, divine law of providence! All I had to do was make some sex-starved, O-faced woodland erof our puppet! Just how and where in this incredible, perfect plan did I go awry—?!?!”
“…Brother, that’s not a gaming thing… That’s in…doujinshi,” Shiro mumbled in disbelief. It seemed her brother was seriously, genuinely, from the bottom of his heart, anguishing over his failure.
“By the way, Sora… Orcs aren’t Werebeasts, you know.”
.
—Say…what…?!
Sora grabbed his tablet with trembling hands to prevent himself from collapsing in a heap. He opened the entry on the Ixseeds and gazed skyward.
“Son of a bitch! Orcs are Demonias?! No wonder we failed!”
“No! That is not why you failed!!”
But Steph’s cry fell on the deaf ears of one preoccupied with cursing his failure. What a simple mistake… He’d chosen the wrong race—?!
…No, save the grieving for later, Sora told himself. First, we’ll need to figure out how to fix this. He bit his nails and ruminated, his face racked with urgency.
“—Negotiate with Demonias… How should I even use them to our advantage?!”
Demonia: one of the races they’d still never met and about which they lacked sufficient intel. Finding an exploit wouldn’t be easy…
“Hey! Don’t you feel sorry for the Werebeast units? …I mean, can’t you at least pretend to?!”
Steph appealed to him for restraint but was promptly ignored. Those Werebeasts must’ve had a pretty good time with the Elf unit if they’d managed to bring her along…
So they oughtta be satisfied. It was their turn to go screw themselves. But then they kind of had, so really—
“…Brother… Isn’t this…an orc?”
The unit Shiro tapped lay just south of the Elf’s path back home. Its name appeared to be Demonia Orc 8.
“A fine play, Shiro! We’ll use the Scouts to lead them over to group-assault her!!”
Sora’s pen flew without hesitation, issuing commands at an incredible pace.
“Hey, wait a second! Aren’t you losing sight of the goal?!”
Steph pointed out how this would prevent Sora from kidnapping the Elf, but—
“Silence! As an elf, she’s destined to be trapped by orcs and say, ‘Just…kill me!’ then transform into an erofu—a sexy elf! The game may try to deceive providence and call them by some other name, but I say, Ha! Meet the iron hand of judgment!!”
“The one who should meet the iron hand of judgment is youuu!!”
Steph clasped her head and shrieked, only to be tossed aside by Sora, who added, “Well, anyway!”
Having mailed the rest of his commands, Sora calmly plotted their next steps. If things went well, they’d get a feel for the Demonias’ movements despite lacking cogent information about their kind. And when that Elf reached the climax of her… Well, at the very least, she’d be exhausted, so capturing
her should—
—And anyway, most importantly.
Sora leered at the map with his smartphone at the ready. It’s safe to say there was some serious 18+ debauchery unfolding. He tapped on a Scout unit who should have been watching through a telescope and prepared to zoom in on its field of vision, but…
“…Brother, right now, you’re 1.8… 18+ stuff…is off-limits…”
“Heh, heh-heh-heh, mwa-ha-ha-ha!! I thought you’d say that, my dear little sister! However!!”
As Shiro blocked his hand, Sora erupted in a stunning example of maniacal laughter.
“One second of real time equals eight hours in-game! Something incomprehensible to the naked eye!”
However, Sora crowed, smartphone still in hand.
“Suppose I shoot it in super-slow mode! Then, when I’m eighteen again, I can break down the individual frames—it’ll probably be in at least one of them. Anyway, it should be fine. Any objections?!”
Sora spoke so loudly and so eloquently that it finally dawned on Steph…
“Y-you… This was what you were after all along?!”
“Heh, I know not of what you speak! I always take the necessary precautions!”
Sora, feeling triumphant, zoomed in on the Scout.
“However, I have no intention of letting the fruits of my labor slip—”
—past me, was what he’d intended to say, but…
“…Huh?”
…he now questioned what the map was displaying.
The orcs’ numbers were gradually dwindling. At first, Sora, Shiro, and Steph all thought they must have been getting butchered by the Elf. They soon realized this was not the case, however, and the three of them tilted their heads in befuddlement. One by one, each orc disappeared within a full two seconds, or sixteen hours in-game. There was no way the Elf could put up a fight that long, in which case—what the hell was this…? Sora was the first to come up with a theory, and he gulped:
“No way… She beat the orcs to a pulp? My God…”
His face twitched as he spoke, and sure enough, just as he suspected, the Elf dragged the last remaining of the eight orcs back on the road home.
.
It was as if time had stopped. How many seconds, how many minutes did that silence last?
Shiro piped up.
“…Brother… The Elves…have started, hunting…orcs…”
As if taking Shiro’s observation as a signal, the Elven stack began engaging the Demonia in battle across various locations and abducting them.
Hmm… Now, what could this mean? pondered Sora, nodding. As a spectator, his view was godlike in scope.
“I see. Now I know why Elf practices slavery… For that.”
Now fully in possession of himself, Sora remembered that Chlammy was Fiel’s slave.
…He spent several seconds deep in thought, giving flight to his fancy, a big smile spreading across his face…
“I have never heard of such a thing!!”
…until Steph interrupted him, thrusting her finger at the map so hard you could hear it cut through the air.
“Is it not your foul deeds that made the Elves—um, e-eloofs…just as you wanted them? How shall you atone for this obscene perversion of history? Miss Fiel would kill you if she were to witness this!”
Steph somehow managed to muddle the term “erof.” She persistently insisted that Sora claim responsibility, to which he furiously rebutted, “Whaaat?! Sure, I plotted to transform one erof’s life—that much I’ll admit! However!!”
This time, it was Sora who audibly thrust his finger at the map as he pointed to an Elf.
“For the whole race to go erof means they had it in them all along, right?!”
“Ng—gh!”
“Yeahhh, I thought Fiel looked oddly self-satisfied! Now I know—underneath that smiling exterior lies someone really kinky!! Oh, man, I can see it now: Fiel and Chlammy in hot yuri escapades!!”
Sora hollered but then had a thought.
…Maybe all the races are like that, really. Look at Jibril: She might have a unique way of expressing it, but the inclination seems to be there. And you know what they say—sadism and masochism are two sides of the same coin. When you look at all these sadists smashing up the world, damn, there are some seriously perverted—
“…Brother… The orcs’ numbers, keep falling… They’re gonna go, extinct!”
While Sora was lost in his own little world, the battle continued. Demonia were getting steadily destroyed as orcs were abducted one after another—
“…Hngh, what is this…?!”
Sora hung his head in deep lamentation.
“Have they no respect for the balance of ecosystems? How indistinguishable will they prove themselves from the fools in our old world…? Damn it, how could they…? Just because the orcs are built for rapid reproduction and active nights, what kind of excuse is that to take everything they have…?! Are these the actions of an intelligent life-form?!”
“Do you even remember that this is all your doing in the first place?!”
And just when he thought he’d spotted a ray of hope in his erotic theory… Ah well. Now his hopes were being crushed, along with an entire race…
So this is war… How brutal. Sora hung his head in disillusionment, but—
“…Oh.”
Shiro’s tiny utterance made Sora and Steph lift their faces. Then…the three of them were dumbstruck.
They saw everything transpire in just under an hour, or what had taken over three years in-game. Their mere meddling had set off something larger:
Total, full-scale war between Demonia and Elf. The latter’s continued overhunting of the orcs spurred Demonia’s creator, the Demon Lord, to intervene. The Elves sustained massive losses in the all-out counteroffensive and were forced to mount a strategic withdrawal. Then they deployed Áka Si Anse, the weapon of their creator, and annihilated the Demon Lord. The war seemed over on that front—until reinforcements from the Dwarves came to Demonia’s aid. They panicked at the sight of the Phantasma killer, along with several Phantasmas themselves. The front only grew from there. The Elves were once more pushed back, but other forces saw the Dwarves as a threat. Certain Dragonias, along with the Fairies, melded with the Elven contingent—and the flames of war spread, snowballing as they left massive casualties in their wake… Utter pandemonium, it seemed… Never to end.
But then suddenly, without warning, it all came to a close. A light descended out of nowhere upon both armies, passing through them very much like some sort of disaster. The indiscriminate onslaught of the Flügel wiped out the main forces of both sides.
……
With that, the feed cut out, presumably because the Scout had vanished in the blast. Not even sixty minutes had passed, yet the spectacle had been so grisly, the three of them could only stare into space, dazed. Sora nodded to himself several times… Mm-hmm, mm-hmm…
“…Shiro, I think we should blame it all on Jibril. Agreed?”
“…Nooo objections, here…”
“All right, that concludes the show! Court adjourned, meeting’s over! Now, let’s get back in the game!”
“…Yeaaah!”
The two of them nodded as if nothing had happened, instead laying the blame for the calamity they’d caused squarely with Jibril.
“Anyone, is anyone here?! The war criminals are escaping! Is there no justice?!”
Steph alone spoke up for what was right as the brother-and-sister war criminals calmly resumed writing commands.
However.
“Mmmngh… Shiro, we’re cutting it closer than I expected. Time to crank it up.”
“…Mm…!”
Both Sora and Shiro got back to business furiously dashing out orders, their expressions mixed.
“Soraaa? Soooraaa? If you’re going to say, ‘Just as planned,’ now would be the time!” Steph didn’t seem keen on letting them off the hook, as she pressed further. “If you act now, I’ll even throw in a belly laugh a
t you! ”
This Task had been a mistake to begin with, what with having to fight with Jibril for their lives. Then they’d made the misstep with the erofus that had led, through some arcane process, to this massive conflagration. Steph intended to hold them accountable for every one of their missteps, and even Sora was starting to sweat.
“Mm, mmm, well… Yeah, I guess it’s not really just as planned, very much, at all… Yeah.”
He had to admit it; there was no use in denying. He averted his gaze. It wasn’t just Sora who felt this way—even Shiro seemed to have mixed feelings.
“—But it is as expected. And our expectations weren’t too great.”
“…Anyway, if Jibril wants, to beat us…this is, her only choice…”
Steph must have noticed the impatience in their faces.
“……”
She decided to keep quiet and stare at them a little longer.
Sora humored her, his pen still busy. “…You know how I said…we could beat this game with our eyes closed?”
If they just wanted to win—just wanted to beat Jibril—they wouldn’t have to bluff. It’d be a “piece of cake.” Even easy-peasy games have their limits. In particular—
“—Seriously, we could beat this game with our eyes closed.”
“…Mm. ’Cos…if we just wanted, to win…”
If that was all—if they just went along with sacrificing someone—
“We wouldn’t have to do anything. That alone would lead to Jibril’s defeat.”
Yes, Jibril’s actions—like that indiscriminate slaughter she’d engaged in, which proved she knew about Immanity, about Sora and Shiro—all led to that result, to that fate.
“…That’s why we gotta hurry. Go mail this.”
Sora’s expression seemed to have lost all composure, and it urged Steph on as she dashed off once again to mail the commands.
It had been twenty-two hours since the start of the game with Sora and Shiro. The map showed the date to be 112 BT. Almost seventy-two years had already elapsed within the game.
Having finished her business on the continent of Lucia, Jibril went east, to the sky above the continent of Ariela. The office of Avant Heim, a living Phantasma, served as Jibril’s Capital. She gracefully, but quickly and precisely, wrote out a command and suddenly—