by John Gold
Akashi took charge.
“Split into trios, with a water mage, an earth mage and support. Cool the magma and keep it from spreading any further and throw up the biggest barriers you can. The mana isn’t as dense here, so it shouldn’t be a problem. I’ll modify the local climate to minimize the damage.”
Tiamat received a system message.
“The keepers of nature were disembodied in both the north and the east. The magma was contained; trees, plants, and animals were used as sources of energy.”
Azami and the other higher natural divinities had sacrificed themselves to protect life on the planet. They didn’t die, though they lost part of their body and strength for a very long period of time. But they would remain as long as there was life on the planet.
Catastrophe was averted, and the planet survived, though the portal ring disappeared into the mantle and was on its way down to the planet’s core. Everything within a hundred and twenty kilometers of the impact was dead. Not even the plants survived, nor did the interworldly portal.
Tiamat suggested that the welcoming committees enjoy a walk around the Project Chrysalis world while he figured out what to do next. Then, he yanked Akashi into the interworld using a passageway in the Heaven trial zone.
“Wait here until I come back. And whatever happens, don’t log out of the game.”
∞ ∞ ∞
Femida stepped out of the portal wearing a dress, a guy holding her hand. Why a dress? And why the guy? Why was he holding her hand?
“Huh, so the armor and its mistress get sent to the same room in the interworld. Hey, am I going to see you get changed?”
“Isaac, you damn parasite! Why do you look like that? I mean, you’re human!”
He grunted and replied seriously.
“I’m a man, too! And I’ll never have another chance to see your body, the curves of your actual figure. I’ll never have your scent, see you blush, listen to your real voice.”
The girl let his hand go and took a couple steps away.
“No, you aren’t getting anything.”
That didn’t bother Isaac in the least.
“You don’t understand. I get that you don’t accept my feelings, but please, let me stay with you. I don’t care who you live with, who you love, or who you sleep with; all I need is to know that you’re happy, and that I can continue watching you. You’re my sun, my love, my family, my entire world. You’re what gives my life meaning.”
Femida couldn’t help but be embarrassed. Isaac had never said anything half so flattering.
“Your life is your choice, so follow whoever you want.”
The girl turned away to hide the telltale flush creeping across her cheeks.
“In that case, I’m going to follow you and live for your sake.”
Femida realized what Isaac meant but didn’t say aloud. I’m going to protect you, darling. Again, he would be a weapon in her hand, her fortress, the sacrifice on the altar of her happiness. She knew that even if she didn’t know how.
Isaac took her tenderly by the hand and led her over to the enormous window, both of them looking out to see whales swimming on the other side. He was twenty-four; Femida was twenty-three. Both of them looked like teenagers. When Isaac felt that the pause was dragging on too long, he decided to ask the question that was worrying them both.
“Where do you think Sagie is right now? He misunderstood everything. That keeper, whatever he was, set you up; from Sagie’s point of view, you tried to keep him from attacking the keeper by stabbing him in the back. That drop of light was a trap to get you to throw your trident at Sagie.”
Femida barely had time to process what he said before a message popped up in front of her.
Sagie blacklisted you.
Sagie deleted you from his contact list.
“Idiot! I’m going to tear your head off!”
Isaac was perplexed.
“What? What did I… Oh, you moron!”
“He deleted you, too?”
“Yep. And the Hunters are saying he blacklisted and deleted all of them. He’s cutting ties.”
Femida glanced over at the giant whale and realized that she had to fly over to Sagie and explain everything. Finally, he would realize what it meant to be her chosen one.
Two portals flashed open on the other side of the room.
“I think that’s a hint for us to part ways. Isaac, you’re going to find me, right? Feel free to send me a message.”
The young man smiled in parting and walked into his portal first. As it closed behind him, Femida got a message from Akino. She was in another room in the interworld. When Femida stepped through her portal, she ended up in her own room, as well. She was without armor, though she still had her Valkyrie sword and jewelry. Evidently, players all had a room in the interworld.
Welcome to Papilio
∞ ∞ ∞
Akashi waited almost twenty-four hours for Tiamat to come back. He had time to get some sleep, measure how many strides it took to get across the room, figure out the problem with the unhappy masses, and work on quite a few other issues besides. Regardless of how many there were, he was able to take care of them all. Finally, a portal opened, and the senior officer in the order of knights, also the senior judge in the trial of humankind, walked out.
“Listen carefully and don’t interrupt. Nothing I’m about to tell you can ever be repeated, recorded, or even hinted at. This conversation never happened. For as long as there is no keeper in Project Chrysalis, I, as the senior judge, have access to the raw logs of everything that ever happened. This usually happens once every astronomical year when the keeper leaves for the council, but this is different. The keeper made things unbelievably hard for Sagie from the very beginning, battering his intellect and psyche to push him to the edge. He was selected as a sacrifice, at least, the keeper had everything in place for that to happen. Sagie made it through Hell, where the keeper got involved in the trial to ensure that he was constantly under psychological stress. Sagie ran like a rat from enemy to enemy until he grew strong enough to kill them. After that, the keeper weakened his emotional susceptibility using a seventh-order effect on his mental body. Sagie didn’t understand that, and he couldn’t see the message in the chat about how his sensitivity had been intentionally boosted. He started feeling the emotional pressure that mental auras exert twice as powerfully as he should have.
“Congratulations! The kid turned out to be smart enough to think up and create activated weapons in primitive conditions. The keeper didn’t have anything to do with that, though he did step into the trial and almost kill Sagie. When Idzumi showed up, the keeper decided to summon an officer from another world to wipe Sagie’s character. The boy didn’t have a shot at winning except for the fact that the officer was stupid enough to showboat in front of his victim. Idzumi saved Sagie at the last minute, addressing the keeper directly. In Hell’s ninth trial zone, the giants had an expanded detection range. There was interference with the boy’s seventh-order mental body, too, to the point that I didn’t even notice the changes. But Sagie got lucky again. Idzumi decided to cut the trial short and send him back into the real world. I confiscated the weapons he made and the abilities he picked up, all in keeping with the rules for testing new civilizations.
“After that, the keeper kept throwing up new challenges for Sagie, pushing his psyche and intellect far beyond normal bounds. There was the supposedly random encounter between the boy and Idzumi’s pet, the goddess’ curse, and the meeting with Talamei, not to mention the mutual hatred that kindled. All of this was created by the keeper to ensure that Sagie learned to despise the gods. But something went wrong, and even the keeper lost control.
“After visiting Ferengar, Sagie’s mental body was altered partially due to the third world order radiation he was exposed to. He started controlling his abilities better, making unpredictable decisions, drawing unpredictable conclusions. In just a few weeks, the accuracy of the keeper’s forecasts dropped to 22%.
He decided it was time to get rid of Sagie, so he engineered a situation where his abilities were guaranteed to kill his real body. And from what Miguel has told me, Anji really was clinically dead. He only survived thanks to your group stepping in. The keeper, in the meantime, forgot about Sagie and started working on other projects.
“First, Aurin appeared, a non-level player the keeper took through the Heaven trial and dumped in Papilio. Three years later, he came back to our world and started using spells he got from Papilio. The logic of the game had changed, of course, and he was able to do the same things you and I are capable of. He became a chimerologist, a universal mage, a unicorn who could develop his own spells, move through the astral, pretend to be a spirit, and inherit his victims’ abilities. Yes, he’s especially dangerous now that he has killed the keeper and stolen his body. Oh, right, keepers are players just like you and me, only from a ninth-order world—the primordial soup we all came from. They go from world to world accumulating abilities and becoming stronger and stronger. But just like us, they lose levels when they die. The more worlds you’ve been through, the more you lose. Keepers lose all their levels and get sent back to their own world if they’re killed.
“For right now, the problem is Aurin and the abilities he was able to pick up by swallowing the keeper’s body. Once Aurin reached the peak of strength, he didn’t start working on his legacy by focusing on new accomplishments. He started finding ways to boost his potential as a mage instead. He modified his mental body, creating new energy channels, key nodes, and compensator designs to handle overload. He also went looking for abilities that changed his body. When he moves to a higher-order world, he’s going to be a monster with incredible physical and mental potential thanks to the synergetic effects all the different manipulations he will have. Hlou bugs do the same thing to make defenders for their queens and battle marshals. But Aurin will be a monster’s monster if he can fulfill the potential he’s created. The synergetic effect in a third-order world would give him strength equivalent to a player in a second-order world. I’m not sure what he thinks of people or what he wants, though I can say that he’s impossible to control unless he desires it.
“He covered up his tracks really well, though I was still able to follow his experiment. He created a non-level player in Project Chrysalis and gave him the limitless ability. That’s how Reiji came to be—the guy who cut right through that planetoid. He has structural changes in his physical and mental bodies from the fifth to the third order. His physical body is closely tied to the energy channels, creating something like a life strength condenser out of his mental body. Ultimately, it was an experiment to see what kind of effect that change would have. When the result exceeded his expectations, Aurin modified himself to turn into a living fortress equipped with weapons of mass destruction.
“Then, Sagie came back to the world, and the keeper instantly reacted to the emptiness in his consciousness by sticking a pseudo-intelligence in its place. That’s how Sagie picked up the ability to be as empathetic as some animals. The keeper did his best to foster hatred toward people, throwing him up against the dregs of humanity. While Sagie was in this condition, the keeper loosened his nervous system until he became practically animal. The hints he gave the kid to see if he would remember his past didn’t come to anything. Then, the keeper rigged the results of a battle and threw Sagie up against some pagan god during the yearly tournament in Kkhor, but Sagie slipped the prediction and remembered who he really was. The keeper responded by working on Sagie via the pseudo-intelligence to instill specific moods and emotions in him.
“He was sent to the city of the dead under Kkhor, where he somehow survived after just about losing his mind. Then, he broke his girlfriend out of jail and picked up the demigod class rank. You have to hand it to him, he’s the only artificially created demigod this world has ever seen. Aurin achieved his transformation in the physical world, carrying around hundreds of kilograms of blood malachite. Anyway, when Sagie became a demigod, the keeper stepped up the range of effects his pseudo-intelligence would have on him. Sagie already hated people and the gods. With that in mind, the keeper got back to work undermining his psyche even further, attempting to push Sagie outside normal bounds and get him thrown out of the game. When Sagie got to my trial area, I was able to see for myself how the keeper made it twice as hard as it should have been. There was evidence of multiple other violations, too. His opponents were given abilities, strength, and knowledge they couldn’t possibly have had in life, but Sagie was able to insulate himself from the mental effect and make his pseudo-intelligence autonomous. After the trial, the keeper insisted that the boy had earned a reward and ordered me to resurrect his sister. It’s ridiculous, first of all, that the keeper was getting involved in the reward process, and I wasn’t sure why he was doing it.
“I sent Sagie to Tanatos after that, making a deal with him to remove the seal from the portal. The keeper insisted on that particular condition. I agreed. The races on Tanatos were starting to heat up, and the keeper manipulated them on both the mental and physical levels to make sure Sagie became the stumbling block that kick-started everything else. That way, the players following him would see the tears of mothers, the graves, and the empty homes. They’d hear that everything was Sagie’s fault. If that had just been the case in one spot, it would have been one thing, but it was everywhere on Tanatos. After the battle for the portal, when I stepped out to meet your group, he dropped down from the tree to claim his reward. But he accused me of betraying him and lying to him when I explained how to claim it. That was when the pseudo-intelligence kicked in and latched onto something outside of him. And in letting the pseudo-intelligence gain complete control of his consciousness, Sagie enabled the keeper to walk right in. A very slight seventh-level effect was exerted on the crowd of players to instill in them a general feeling of hatred. All they could see was a player who had brought misery on Tanatos. The keeper used Sagie’s pseudo-intelligence to manipulate him and intensify all the negative emotions he was feeling, which was a smart move, as I can’t sense manipulations going on from within. It was a delicate game of minds that fell outside my sensitivity range. Anyway, that’s what triggered Sagie’s massacre. But it didn’t end there. The keeper had allowed one of the locals to create a weapon that does damage from the first world order. Yes! The limitations placed on the trial should have eliminated that possibility, but the keeper allowed the weapon to be created for emergencies. And when Sagie kept venturing outside the realm of the predictable, the keeper decided that this was just such an emergency. Aurin’s interference, however, was completely unexpected. The keeper thought it was great at first as Aurin was capable of killing Sagie, but after Reiji talked to him, Aurin decided to tie his mind and health to Sagie’s in order to figure out why Reiji was standing up for him. Due to the bodily contact, Aurin realised that a foreign stream of consciousness was forcing a faulty emotional field. Somebody was trying to kill Sagie in the real world by making him activate a resonance. When Aurin left for the astral, the keeper pulled out the last ace left up his sleeve in an attempt to clean up the evidence that he’d been manipulating a player: he tried to destroy the pseudo-intelligence and he was successful. He really was. If it hadn’t been for Aurin jumping in at the last minute to kill the keeper, we would never have discovered the truth. Sure, you can’t wipe the logs, since they were made by the Fukai race along with the game, but nobody would have raised the incident with the council of keepers. And nobody would have checked the raw logs. As far as what I promised Sagie goes, his family will be resurrected, and his sister returned to her parents. I’ll personally make sure they’re safe. As for Sagie, the council of keepers apologizes and requests that we don’t disclose the violation. They have good reason, too. The interworld is the only place we can talk where we can be sure nobody’s listening in, and their offer is to boost humankind’s chances in the next six trials as they move toward a second-order world. That’s two trials for each player the keeper d
irectly manipulated. The trials happen every five years, so that means humankind will have a better shot at moving up to a second-order world for the next thirty years. What do you think? I’d say it’s a great offer. It’s an opportunity for an entire civilization!”
Akashi looked at Tiamat, unsure of what to say. It was undoubtedly an attractive offer. He had no choice but to accept it. Humankind had buried the truth on multiple occasions for the common good. But Sagie was a chosen one! He was someone who could take humans to the next level, elevating Earth’s entire civilization in the alliance. Just like Akashi himself, he was entirely capable of getting his team to a second-order world and even beyond.
“But what about Sagie? He was injured with a first-order world sword, and he already moved up to a higher world. What did they do with him?”
“You’re not going to like it. I contacted humankind’s senior judge in Papilio, giving him a brief description of the situation. Sagie spent less than a minute there before leaving. None of the judges or caretakers was able to locate his whereabouts, and the keeper left the world for an emergency meeting of the council of keepers. It would break the rules of the game to kill him, so that won’t happen. You and I are aware of what’s going on, too. On the other hand, they can accuse him of crimes against the world and force him to accept some kind of punishment. I suspect he was sent to a hidden location that’s impossible to access or escape from. Most likely, they’ll replace the Papilio keeper and have the new one announce that he can’t say where Sagie is. He’ll say there was a violation, say there’s some kind of punishment going on, or refer me to someone else, but he definitely won’t say that he doesn’t know.”