Evolution Girls

Prologue

Light...!

What happened? Everything. The beginning of everything.

The universe filled with light.

The overflowing potential energy from the inflaton caused violent fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. Fluctuations meant particles. These fluctuations manifested countless photons. And those photons went flying. They’re incredibly fast. Obviously. Photons have no mass. Particles without mass fly at the top speed achievable in the universe, the speed of light. That speed was far more than 300,000 kilometers per second. We’re talking ten to the power of thirty times that. This age had no truck with the tedious speed restrictions that would be applied later on.

Faster! Faster! The photons raced away in all directions. Covering light years, parsecs. Linking unbelievable distances in an instant, leaving no territories cut off. Diversity was the cost. The wave of photons from far, far away painted everything the same blinding white.

But in time, the age of the great race drew to an end. The universe was cooling off. It had used up the potential energy hidden in the inflaton field. Too many massive particles like electrons and quarks and neutrinos had been made. Quarks fused with each other to form nuclei, and electrons joined in, giving rise to hydrogen and helium, but the price was significant. The vacuum itself began to cool, and phase transition developed, like when water turns to ice. But in this case, it was dimensional compactification. There were once eleven dimensions but as the energy state degraded that number shrunk. Just as gases become liquids and liquids become solids, loss of energy always results in a corresponding loss of active states. Dimensions that once were infinite were wound up, their former shape replaced with something pathetically small, resulting in something hardly appreciably different from a mere three spatial dimensions.

As the dimensions froze, limitations on the speed of light became stricter. This was because the surplus compactified dimensions were causing congestion. Every time light tried to travel a certain distance it had to pass through the labyrinth of wound up dimensions. Winding around in this maze of excess dimensions required that light to travel a considerable additional distance.

However, not everything was wound up like that. They were rare, but some dimensions were not frozen. Merely supercooled. Water can retain its liquid state below freezing if and only if there are no impurities or catalysts to germinate cores. Likewise, in degraded-energy spaces, higher-dimensional status survived in certain flat domains. But this would not last long. Supercooled states collapse at the slightest stimuli.

Eventually, the areas that had maintained a supercooled state began to disintegrate. It was the inevitable result of laws governing micro-regions and quantum theory. Perfectly stable environments do not exist. Everything is uncertain. Inescapable quantum uncertainties greater than any chaos were destroying those supercooled dimensions.

As space continued to cool, the supercooled dimensions tried desperately to protect themselves. Fighting against a fate they could not escape, their destruction ever encroaching.

I

Youko Sasajima’s mind was quietly dying. The culprit that had driven Youko to the brink was called Evolution Girls — Evo Gals for short. It was the most popular mobile game at the moment. The game revolved around anthropomorphized versions of extinct species. It had launched six months earlier, but the tie-in anime had just ended, leading to a spike in popularity.

Lately, the Evo Gals anime was on many fans’ AOTY lists, but when it first launched it had gone under the radar. You had to be a real hardcore otaku to have given it a look.

Youko wasn’t that hardcore. She was a lightweight otaku, only watching three or four anime a week. She had accidentally caught the first episode of Evo Gals in real time, but unfortunately, she had failed to grasp the appeal of the series.

The show followed the recent moe anthropomorphization trend, in which non-human things are depicted as characters. Evo Gals characters were based on ancient species. In the first episode, the main character travelled back in time five hundred million years, was rescued by some girls (who were anthropomorphized extinct species) and set off on a journey looking for a way back to modern times. This was occasionally interrupted by explanations by a museum curator, making it a very educational anime. The character designs weren’t egregiously sexualized, either, so it would not have been out of place airing on an educational channel. At the time, Youko decided this wasn’t what she was in the mood for and dropped the series.

The buzz changed after episode four. A guest character who appeared in that episode stated that a timeline in which mankind was born wasn’t supposed to exist. What people had taken for a relaxing educational show suddenly showed its heady sci-fi cards, and viewers got hooked on the concept. A group of them started doing deep reads on the show, calling themselves the Lore-Hunters.

Youko’s social media accounts got caught up in the wave. Youko hated being behind on these things, so she caught herself up by finding the second and third episodes online somewhere and pirating the hell out of them. Ratings shot up with each new episode. It became quite a Cinderella story for the little studio making the show. The contrast between the pastoral mood and the sci-fi underpinnings was the secret to their success.

And then the last episode aired. Youko found tears flowing down her cheeks. Afterwards, she felt an emptiness spreading through her. Loads of people online were describing similar symptoms. A feeling of loss, like the end of Evo Gals had taken a piece of their hearts with it. People started calling it the Evo Loss.

Fortunately, there was a way to recover from Evo Loss. Evo Gals was based on a mobile game of the same name. Youko installed it immediately. This was her fatal error.

The Evo Gals mobile game had a somewhat unusual system. Genre-wise, it was a mash-up of a rhythm game, a dress-up game, and an adventure game. Your standard mobile rhythm game involved customizing characters, forming parties, and playing the rhythm game with that party. Evo Gals added a fashion system to that basic gameplay. You could design entire outfits for the characters. Naturally, this wasn’t just a cosmetic change; the clothes had practical effects, too. Characters and clothes had four core stats — cool, cheer, purity, and passion — and the different rhythm game stages had attributes, and compatibilities with these stats. Scores were based not just on the skill of the player, but on the character level and rarity, compatibility with the stage attributes, and the rarity and attributes of their outfits.

This was not a simple system. Rarity was important, but even if you put all your rarest pieces on a character, if the resulting outfit clashed or was wrong for the character wearing it, you might not get the results you wanted. The game required a genuine eye for fashion.

Evo Gals had hit ten million downloads a month after launch, smashing previous records. The system felt fresh, proved very popular, and earned it five-star reviews across the board.

Evo Gals was a free to play game. Naturally, that meant free to download; to obtain a lot of characters and clothes meant paying the game company a lot of money, i.e. whaling. For the first two weeks she played the game, Youko didn’t spend any money on it. She was more the no in-game purchase type, and it didn’t even occur to her that she could spend money on it. But then one day she opened Pandora’s box.

Evo Gals’ rhythm game had both a Ranked Mode and an Adventure Mode. Adventure Mode involved a story that progressed by clearing stages, while Ranked Mode let you replay songs and compete for high scores with other players.

As she progressed through Adventure Mode, Youko hit a stage she just couldn’t clear. The stage was based on the Late Permian Period, one of the prehistorical geological ages. The characters she had in her party seemed ready for the stage. They weren’t that rare, but they were pretty high level.

She checked a FAQ online and learned something that surprised her. If you didn’t have the special skill “Resist Low Oxygen,” your score on the Late Permian Period stage would drop like a stone. To obtain the special skill, she needed a character that came with the skill, or a piece of clothing that granted that skill to the wearer. But all the Girls Youko had were unable to survive in low oxygen conditions.

Youko made up her mind to spend some money so she could progress. To get more characters, you had to spend money on the gacha. A gacha is a common game system where you exchange in-game points for random characters and items. The random factor is key. Players have to pull from the gacha over and over until the character they need pops out. If they do, the production company makes bank. Whoever invented this system was a genius.

Evo Gals had three types of gacha. The normal outfit gacha, the premium outfit gacha, and the Girls gacha. The normal outfit gacha gave low rarity clothes and the premium outfit gacha gave high rarity clothes, but the Girls gacha gave out characters. Pulling from the normal outfit gacha wasn’t that hard. You could use the Hourglass points from events or level ups to pull it quite often. But pulling from the premium gacha or the Girls gacha was much harder. You had to use special points called “Infinite Hourglass” to pull from them. Ways to obtain Infinite Hourglass points were much more limited than regular Hourglass points. When you first started playing, they’d give you some as your daily login bonus, but the rate at which you received them gradually slowed down until you had to login every day for an entire month to get any. Infinite Hourglass points were also handed out during special events or to make up for server outages on the admin side, but the fastest way to get some was to whale. You exchanged real world money for points that let you pull the gacha in the game world. Whatever, she thought, it’ll be fine. It cost about 500 yen to pull once from the Girls gacha. That was the price of a fast food meal. Not exactly breaking the bank. No big deal.

Youko made her purchase without worrying about it. She had money saved. She’d only graduated and gotten a proper job a year ago, but none of her hobbies cost money, and all she did on her days off was lie around and watch anime, so she’d put a decent amount away. Here she was with a job and money. She’d wanted a chance to use the power those things gave her but hadn’t found the right opportunity. This was the perfect chance.

When she pulled from the Girls gacha, the character she got was Meganeura-chan. Based on a giant 70 cm-long dragonfly that had lived in the Carboniferous period, the design featured a girl wearing glasses, a rather lame play on ‘megane’, the Japanese word for glasses. She was ‘rare’, which might seem valuable, but that was actually the second lowest rarity. Evo Gals character cards came in six types: Normal (N), Rare (R), Super Rare (SR), Ultra Rare (UR), Legendary Rare (LR) and God Rare (GR). It was only worth celebrating from at least Super Rare. Unfortunately, Meganeura-chan was also not good in low oxygen conditions. The Carboniferous Period was a time in Earth’s history with above average oxygen.

Whatever. First tries always ended up that way. She’d just pull a second time. She tapped her phone, and another 500 yen were automatically withdrawn from Youko’s bank account and installed on her phone’s screen. What appeared was an illustration like a pile of unraveled springs. It said, “Protein.” A miss. She’d got nothing, just a material item she could use to level up!

“Arghhh!” Youko yelled. This result pissed her off, but rather than quit, she started pulling faster. 1000 yen, 2000 yen, 3000 yen. Gradually increasing the amount she spent at one time. Before she realized it, she’d dropped 10,000 yen on the game. In the end, out of twenty pulls, she ended up with 15 proteins, 4 Normal, and just that one Rare. And no characters who resisted low oxygen.

“Why!? Whyyyyy!?” Her voice rasped. She’d thought it would all work out if she just spent money.

Then Youko noticed the words ‘100-pull gacha’ in the corner of the screen. Apparently, if you pulled 100 times at once, you were guaranteed at least 5 Super Rares. Score! And it was a limited time offer. If she spent 50,000 yen, she’d automatically get five SR characters for free. She had to pull. No other choice was even possible.

This is how Youko’s spendthrift mobile game life began. Evo Gals had more modes than just Adventure Mode. There was also Ranking Mode, where you tested your strength against players from all across the country. And by strength, it meant how much money you’d spent. No matter how well you played, if your party were all N, your score would be tragic. Youko had whaled pretty hard, so even as a new player she landed in the top 20,000. Given the ten million total players, that felt great. Something to be proud of.

Beyond the rhythm game was a function that let you use the characters as models. It consisted of designing outfits to fit a theme and putting your Girls on stage. You could get Likes from other players, and if you scored well, you would get high rarity clothes as a prize.

Youko kept spending money. Getting high rarity cards only made her want to spend more money. This was because if you got the same card twice, you could Evolve them into a stronger character. Additionally, there were skills that only activated if you had a complete set of the same type of clothing. Clothing items came in five types — tops, bottoms, inners, outers, and accessories. If you weren’t wearing all five of the same type, the skills wouldn’t work. The more she pulled from the gacha, the higher she climbed, and the more money she needed to spend. To justify the cost of what she’d already paid, she had to keep spending more.

A month after starting Evo Gals, Youko saw her credit card bill, and she was astonished. 600,000 yen had vanished into thin air. Of course, she’d spent it all on Evo Gals. This was clearly far too much. Her savings were for the future, not something to allow her to change the drawings on the screen of her phone.

Youko was filled with regret. “You fool! You’re a total idiot!” she cried, punching herself in the head. She resolved to spend as little as possible and go back to f2p.

Despite Youko’s regrets, it never crossed her mind that she should quit Evo Gals.

Evo Gals was the source of approval she’d been craving for some time. It occupied a critical place in her identity. She’d always been the type who really worried about what people thought, and thus people rarely thought of her at all. She was starving for validation and Evo Gals was a safe way to earn that validation. Plus, it came in the form of easy to interpret numbers. Her place in the rankings, the number of Likes... And even without her need for approval, parting with all the Girls she’d gathered would simply be awful. All these characters, with their prehistoric names like Dickinsonia-chan, Anomalocaris-chan, Convexicaris-chan, Bandringa-chan, Arthropleura-chan... Out of all of them her favorite had to be Yunnanozoon-chan. This was a character that could probably be classified as tsundere. She tried to make herself look strong, but there was always something lonely about her. In college, Youko had spent a lot of time with girls like that. You know, the type of girl who was too awkward to join the cliques and had never really made any friends. Youko wasn’t the most outgoing girl, but she was good at drawing out girls who were even more socially outcast than she was. Once girls like that opened up, they all became really reliant on Youko. Part of the reason she was still playing Evo Gals was because she missed that kind of validation. Quitting Evo Gals felt like abandoning a part of herself. Youko simply wasn’t decisive enough to do that.

Players who didn’t whale could only improve their ranks by pouring time into the game. To play the game, you needed points called stamina. Stamina gradually recovered over time but would never go over a certain maximum value. To maximize returns from the stamina regeneration, you had to start the rhythm game at the exact moment it hit that maximum value. If you let time pass beyond that, then the stamina you could have recovered during that time was lost. Stamina would recover fully in approximately two and a half hours. In other words, she absolutely had to play the game at least every two and a half hours. That was fine. Youko was totally prepared to set her schedule to the demands of Evo Gals. The problem was that she was gainfully employed. It was a long time since college, when she’d had all the time in the world. The bulk of every weekday was not hers to use as she pleased.

Youko was not about to give up so easily. Even at work, she persevered, finding ways to keep up with the game through trial and error. First, she memorized the rhythm game’s songs. It wasn’t enough to know them in her mind. She had to hammer them home to such a degree her fingers would move reflexively. So much so that all she had to do was put her fingers on the screen and her fingers would move on their own. Her hard work paid off, and Youko got so she could clear hard mode without looking at the screen.

She activated this technique during meetings. However boring they might be, she had to pay close attention, so by resting her phone on her knees and letting her hands do their thing, oh, how strange, suddenly it didn’t seem like such a waste of time. Time spent off-site was also critical. Who cared if her performance evaluation dropped as long as her game rank rose?

At lunch, Youko had to take special care not to run into any colleagues. If she did, she’d be forced to talk to them. She couldn’t exactly ignore the person sitting opposite her and talk to her in favor of tapping on her phone. At this point in time, Youko still maintained baseline societal standards.

After work, she was finally free. This was where Youko’s real job began. It went all night. Youko had no time for sleep. A restful six-hour slumber was a luxury she could not afford. She set an alarm to go off every two and a half hours so she could tap on her phone some more. She was always sleepy. But she powered through. All so she could get Ultra Rares, Legendary Rares, and God Rares. The characters’ faces filled her dreams. Oh! Look! That’s the fabled God Rare! Only a 0.005% chance of pulling one! To think they really existed... Wait! Wait, please! Don’t leave me here... The next thing she knew she was tapping on her phone, still half-asleep. She could hear sparrows and crows outside. It was time for work. Right, got to get through another day.

Living like this was not sustainable. She started making mistakes. Typing in the wrong numbers, forgetting to contact the right people. All common enough mistakes, but as they stacked up, the rate at which people glared at her was steadily rising. Then one day she made a fatal mistake. She was in the café at lunch, playing her game. She’d turned texts and calls off so she could concentrate. That day, the game had gifted players a bunch of stamina recovery items to make up for an operational issue. And she got a level up at just the right time, which refilled her stamina and allowed her to play continuously without running out. She played for such a long time that the next thing she knew it was already evening. She glanced at her call history and found a bunch of missed calls from her boss. The stress felt like stomach acid trying to melt her entire body. No matter how many times she bowed her head, the trust she’d lost would never return.

Despite all her hard work, Youko’s rank began to drop. She did the events, but the SR prizes were out of reach. Sheer time spent couldn’t make up for money spent. Youko made up her mind to whale again. For her own health. She couldn’t make up for lost time, but she could get the money back eventually. It was better to waste the money she earned than ruin her life wasting time. A string of similar rationalizations led to her gradually increasing her expenditures. And the result was that she spent even more time playing. Of course it did. She could spend money to refill stamina, so she didn’t need to waste any time waiting for stamina to refill. The more time she spent on an event, the higher her ranking, and the better the prize cards she got.

Youko’s deck became filled with rare cards. Dozens of SR, a dozen UR, a number of LR. But her appetites were never satisfied. She never found a finish line. The more she gathered, the more new cards she got. And these cards seemed very attractive. She wanted them all. She wanted them more than anything. To satisfy these urges, she tore through all her money, pulling on that gacha. But once she got the card she was after, she just found another one to crave.

There were event-limited cards, too. If you didn’t reach the top ranks of a time-limited event you would never be able to get them. They were a race to see who could devote themselves to the event the most. To see who could sacrifice themselves more than others. It was a fight to show your love. How much love — money and time — could you squeeze out?

Before she knew it, she hadn’t gone to work in a week. It was the strangest thing. The number on the calendar had gone up by seven without her noticing. Her list of calls and texts had filled up, but that had nothing to do with the game, so she never bothered looking. Her room was filled with empty drink bottles and convenience store meals. She hadn’t taken a bath, so her body was starting to reek. How much had she spent? Probably about a million yen that week alone. But she had 1.5 million saved so she was still fine.

It was about time for her one daily meal. Youko no longer felt hunger. She felt a strange detachment, like she was looking at herself from a step outside her body. She knew she was hungry, but that didn’t seem urgent — it was simply one more piece of objective data. And not particularly accurate data, at that. Sometimes she lost track of the condition of her stomach altogether and only realized she hadn’t eaten anything after passing out for a while.

Still tapping her phone, she stood up and went outside. Her right thumb kept the phone balanced, her four fingers tapping the icons just as they appeared. She used her left hand to open the door. The light was blinding, and the sun was nearing the horizon. She wasn’t sure if it was morning or evening. She didn’t know which direction was which. Either way, she just had to get to the convenience store to buy water and food.

It was a five-minute walk from her home to the store, but Youko never once took her hand off her phone the whole way. She was right in the middle of an event. A single point difference might decide the value of the cards she earned. That thought made the very idea of placing her phone out of eyesight unbearable. By this point it was a part of Youko’s nervous system.

Her feet knew the way to the store. She didn’t need to look up. She took the elevator to the ground floor, turned right, and walked to the corner. She didn’t need to check the signal. If there were cars coming, she’d hear them. It wasn’t a busy intersection, anyway.

This conviction proved her undoing.

A six-ton truck coming from the blind spot to her right ended Youko’s life. What a foolish life it had been. So addicted to a mobile game she’d ended up dying because of it. And the biggest irony was that the data she’d devoted her life to was gone. The overwhelming pressure from the six-ton truck’s tires had smashed her phone to pieces. Not just the phone; they’d smashed Youko’s spine, too. Fortunately, she died instantly. The impact stretched her cerebral nerves, and most of them snapped. If she’d survived that, she certainly would have been in so much pain she’d have been begging to be put out of her misery. It was a stroke of luck that she died before that pain arrived. It wasn’t every day a blessing like that came along. A painless death was the greatest treasure of all.

II

In the instant before her death, Youko experienced a wave of alienation. As one nerve after another snapped, her connections to the real world melted away. The brain she’d used for twenty-four years was being destroyed. The most important evidence she had that she was herself, was ground to pulp. She was cut off, cast out of the world. It felt like everything in the world was screaming that her existence had no value.

Before the pain signals reached her, Youko was dead. But a strange sensation hit her instead. Like she was falling... no, rising? It was an unstable feeling, like the ground had vanished. This wasn’t anything as simple as floating through the air because a truck had hit her. She was falling or rising in some entirely unfamiliar direction. The sensation assaulted her from all directions, like it was trying to crush her. Like an orange in a clenched fist, Youko burst!

Falling... Falling... Falling... Thrown out of the world she’d always known. If she compared it to a human experience, the thing it most resembled was the moment of birth. Being launched into 100% pure unknown.

But at the end of it was something familiar. Like a long-since forgotten friend or a TV show once watched, her sense of self developed. Something familiar was approaching — something from beyond her memories, beyond her own existence. What a relief! She felt as secure — no, more secure than she had when she was still part of the world.

Then, out of nowhere, loss! Youko was falling again. The familiar sensation vanished. Never to return. Oh, no! No! No! She wailed and screamed but to no avail. All that remained was a sad hollow. Nothing else. No other sensations. No touch, no temperature, no wind, nothing else around her. Like standing in a world without light in lukewarm water the same temperature as her body. She was frustrated, but this did not make her pulse race, did not make her sweat. She tried to scream but no voice emerged. She had no tongue or throat or voice box, so how could it?

She was lonely! Why was she so lonely? Because she was alone. Fundamentally alone. Nobody else even existed here. Youko was all alone in a world that seemed to go on forever. She had lost her body, the one thing closest to her. In a world without anyone to interact with, she wasn’t anyone at all.

Youko remembered when she’d first graduated and entered the workforce. She had found herself somewhere where she didn’t know anyone. A place without anyone around to define herself by. If she took that experience and multiplied it by a quintillion she might get something like what she was experiencing now.

Someone. She needed to find someone else. Someone in this place besides herself. She knew there wasn’t anyone. She knew her efforts were futile. But she had to find someone, so that she could interact with the world again.

And she found something. Extremely faint traces of someone. Someone’s shadow. Someone’s breath.

It was hard to describe. Youko had no sight, so she couldn’t see what they looked like. At most, she could sense their presence. Like when you sense someone standing behind you, except she felt something similar in front of her.

The presence spoke. “Pull,” it said.

Pull? What did that mean? The only association Youko had with that word was the gacha. Oh, that made sense. The presence she felt was a gacha. Thinking about it, it seemed obvious. The thing that defined her was a mobile game! All she had to do was pull from the gacha, and she could be someone.

This understanding allowed her to see. Her eyes focused, like waking from a dreamless slumber. Before her eyes was an icon, one that looked like Earth. It was the normal outfit gacha icon she’d seen constantly playing Evo Gals when she was alive. The words “11-pull gacha” hovered over the Earth. Youko reached out her finger. She had no finger, but just like touching the screen of her phone, a set of cards appeared, backs to her.

The first card flipped. Drawn on it was not a cute boy or girl, not a cool man or woman, nor a terrifying monster, but a familiar illustration from the biology textbook she’d used in high school. At the edge of the card was written the following:

N: Nucleus

Youko became something. Something with a nucleus. The system worked just like Evo Gals. But instead of the Girls from the title, the character was Youko herself.

This was a game that involved making outfits of flesh to dress up her soul.

The second card started to turn. Once again, a very unappealing illustration. Just a bunch of little grey spheres gathered into a tube. She glanced at the letters, and saw the rarity was Normal once again.

N: Microtubule

Tiny fibers appeared inside Youko’s cell. They strengthened the borders that gave her cell shape.

She hit the skip button to flip the rest of the cards.

N: Chitin

N: Phagosome

N: Mitochondrion

N: Cellular Membrane

N: Protein Complex Set

R: Lamellipodium

N: Chemoreceptor

N: Microtubule

N: Chitin

Mostly Normals, but that’s what the normal outfit gacha gave out.

The cards became part of Youko’s soul, giving her an interface to interact with the world around her. In the most fundamental sense, something else made Youko into something. They established Youko’s identity. What was Youko? A shapeless translucent slimy wriggling fluid. A microscopic organism that could change shape freely, wriggling, widening, spreading, becoming bulbous. She’d seen this sort of thing through a microscope in science class. She was an amoeba.

She’d been reincarnated as an Amoeba Girl.

Now that she was an amoeba, Youko had thought she’d be able to see again. This had been foolish. She remained trapped in darkness.

Youko didn’t have any eyes. In fact, she didn’t even have any nerve cells capable of perceiving light. All she had were chemoreceptors capable of detecting nutrient density. With no nerve cells, she shouldn’t have been able to think, either, but Youko did seem to have retained her consciousness. She could talk to herself. What was up with that? If reincarnation was possible, then maybe it wasn’t that weird to think without a brain. It definitely seemed like the soul existed, at any rate.

Unfortunately, Youko’s consciousness had trouble controlling her body. If she turned her mind towards it, its simplistic world view overpowered her, making it impossible to perform any complex movements. All she could really do was respond to the chemoreceptor’s input. She’d been hoping to live a comfortable amoeba life, benefiting from her previous life as a human, but that wasn’t really working out.

Amoebas lived simple lives. They reached out with their pseudopodia, and if they came in contact with bacteria or algae, they surrounded them, brought them inside themselves with phagosomes, and assimilated them as nutrition. If you asked Youko what that felt like, she’d have had trouble telling you. She had no sense of touch or taste.

Every now and then she thought she heard a voice, like little voiceless shrieks coming from the tiny bacteria her pseudopodia caught. It felt like there were people in the bacteria. Were there other Girls besides her? Maybe other Girls had pulled bacteria or algae cards. She didn’t know for sure, but when she heard screams during her meals it was far more satisfying. She had no taste buds to tell her if the food was good. She just got a satisfied feeling. The closest point of comparison she had was when getting points for free when playing Evo Gals. So Youko started calling the hypothetical beings that gave her this sensation ‘points’.

It seemed like she could get ‘points’ not only from other creatures; they also spontaneously developed inside her. Exactly like a mobile game’s points. The same way you could get points just for logging in every day.

As time passed, she built enough points that they started demonstrating a strange power. They pointed Youko in a certain direction, pulling her in that direction like a magnet. Youko was sure of it. That must be where the premium gacha was. If there was a normal gacha, there was no way they didn’t have a premium one. This truth was self-evident.

Youko could hardly be satisfied with her current state. She wanted to be something more. Not some amoeba, something that didn’t matter if it existed or not. She had to become a more impressive Girl. And the only way to do that was to pull from the premium gacha.

Wriggling herself, she advanced in the direction the points indicated using peristaltic movement. She couldn’t see, but she knew she was headed towards the gacha. A primal urge she could not resist filled Youko’s body. It felt like when she woke up in the morning and immediately grabbed her phone to launch the game. The gacha taxis.

As Youko pressed onwards urgently, something suddenly felt wrong. It was a very unpleasant sensation. The flesh in contact with the world was sending warnings to her with all its might. Some sort of danger was approaching!

Youko yanked in her outstretched pseudopodia. This was a wise decision. A large multicellular organism was camped in front of her. Ten or more cells clustered together, cilia stretching out of each to rake in the prey in the water around.

“Tch! You there! Hand over your points or else!”

“You can talk?” Youko thought, surprised, but she was delighted to have finally met an actual thing at last. With no mouth or voice or brain, how could she talk? Youko spoke to this new organism directly from her soul. Much like telepathy.

“’Course I can talk. I’m a Girl. So are you. Got it? Now gimme them points!” It might not be saying ‘Girl’ or ‘points’ specifically, but Youko understood what it was trying to say. It wanted the things Youko had decided to call points.

The multicellular organism thrust a cilium in Youko’s direction. She dodged at the last second, taking full advantage of her body’s flexibility. Of course, both of them were microscopic, so this was an exceedingly small-scale fight.

Youko didn’t know how big her enemy was, or what it looked like. She just sensed an overwhelming need to run away.

“You want my points! Take them, they’re yours! Just let me go!” To hell with shame or reputation. If she’d been physically capable of getting down on her hands and knees she already would be.

“Sorry, but the only way to transfer points is to eat you. Stay still and let me chow down!”

It did not seem like diplomacy was an option. She’d have to think of another way to escape this peril. Did she have any useful abilities? Her phagosomes would not serve as weapons. Since she had to surround her prey, she had no way of processing anything bigger than herself. If the cards she had now wouldn’t do the trick, she had to level up. In your average mobile game, fusing multiples of the same card would give you new cards with higher stats. Maybe this world worked the same way. That was her only chance.

Youko prayed, “Two Microtubules, fuse! Two Chitins, fuse!”

N: Microtubles fused! Evolved to R: Cilium

N: Chitin fused! Evolved to R: Shell

Good! Combining identical cards did actually evolve them.

Youko’s body was now covered with a hard chitin shell. Her flowing soft body fit inside of it. She had cilia sticking out of the holes in the shell, allowing her to suck organic matter in.

A moment after her transformation, the multicellular organism swallowed Youko. Its phagosomes secreted digestive enzymes, but with her new chitin shell, these were unable to dissolve Youko.

“Yo, yo, what? What you doing inside my cells? You’re nasty!”

“You’re the one who ate me!” Youko wasn’t about to stand for that.

“Oh, right. So I guess I win? That shell of yours won’t last long. Tough break!”

“Yeah? I think you’re the one facing a tough break.”

Youko extended her cilia, stabbing the cell membrane. The nucleus was only protected by lipids, and her hardened cilia could easily get inside. She was after the genes. The root of all physical information, the common weak point of all species. If she could damage the genes, the cell was as good as dead. Even if it appeared to be doing just fine on the surface, without that genetic information it would stop functioning in a few hours.

“Huh? You just destroyed my genes?”

“Yup!”

“Huh. I’m a multicellular organism! One ruined cell doesn’t even faze me! I’m still gonna eat you!”

“Go right ahead and try. I’ll just destroy more of your genes!”

It could eat Youko, but that would lead to it sustaining fatal damage. Calling this a draw was the best strategy for both parties. Her opponent finally seemed to realize that, so Youko released the ruined cell and left. As she went, her enemy yelled after her.

“OK, I’ll let you go this time! But I’ll pay you back someday! My name’s Dyaus! Don’t you forget it!”

Dyaus left, and Youko happily took what was left behind. She ate the still living cell from the inside. It tasted like nothing, but it satisfied her. She could tell there had been points inside. Her pile of points was whetting Youko’s appetite. Her consciousness was filled with one thought alone. The gacha. She needed to pull. Wriggling her body, she crossed mountains and valleys, headed for the gacha of her dreams.

She could feel that familiar sensation coming from up ahead. It felt much more valuable than the gacha she’d used during reincarnation. She was sure it was the premium gacha.

Even though she had no eyes, it felt like her vision was broadening. This sensation hadn’t appeared out of nowhere. It was more like it had always been there and Youko simply hadn’t noticed.

Youko released the points within her, placing them in the gacha. She felt embarrassed and yet free, as if she was now naked. It felt like even her skin had been stripped off.

But even with all her points in it, she couldn’t pull from the gacha. She didn’t have enough. It was like she heard a voice telling her to whale. She wasn’t sure if it was the gacha talking or a voice inside her.

Whale? But Youko was flat broke. She couldn’t very well spend money she didn’t have. It didn’t even seem like this world had a currency system.

But then a button floated into Youko’s mind that said, “Purchase Points.” It was like seeing a particularly vivid dream while still wide awake. Normally, dreams were unstable things, soon flitting off to some other association, but this button stayed firm, maintaining its shape. In fact, it seemed to be getting steadily more real to her.

What would happen if she pressed the button? It would clearly extract some sort of payment. Youko had spent a year supporting herself in the real world, and she knew just how tough life could be. She hesitated for a moment but felt like she had no choice but to press the button. A single press would hardly have fatal consequences. She might as well give it a shot.

The moment she made up her mind, it happened. A part of herself was torn out, leaving her thinner than before. A wave of exhaustion hit her. Not physical exhaustion, but mental exhaustion. The kind of fatigue that comes from doing the same thing over and over and over again. Like what she was doing wasn’t even any fun any more but she was too addicted to stop herself. She felt afraid and yet apathetic, like she was just responding robotically to the inputs she was given.

What the? What was this? A moment later, warmth returned to her heart. Points. She’d been given points.

Whaling. That was the cause. She’d paid a price far more dangerous than she’d imagined. To test it she hit the button one more time. Oof, this was definitely bad. It felt like she’d died. She was sure she was sacrificing part of her lifespan. Come to think of it, the gacha was warning her about this. It was written right on it. “Warning: Purchases may have a negative impact on your health, lifespan, volition, and existence.”

But warnings like this were lost on Youko. She was a mobile game junkie. In her last life she’d worked herself to the bone earning money only to blow it all on the gacha, heedless of the psychological toll. Negative influences on her health, lifespan, volition, and existence weren’t no thing.

At any rate, she’d obtained enough points to pull from the gacha a few times. She may have significantly shortened her lifespan, but a strong start was critical in any mobile game. If you didn’t spend money right off the bat and get some high rarity cards, you’d just increase the time you wasted. It might seem foolish, but it was a practical choice! Rationalizing her actions real hard, Youko pulled that gacha.

Jing-a-ling-a-ling-a-liiiing! A fanfare played. Music only played for SR or above. Now this was the premium gacha! This exultation! No normal card could ever provide it. The card’s illustration appeared in Youko’s heart.

SR: Multicellularity

When she equipped the card, a rift ran down her body, and she split in two. Two became four and four became six. The extra cells were encased in a larger cellular membrane. This was good. This body would let her fight Dyaus on even ground.

She put points in again. Unfortunately, this time there was no fanfare. Just a Rare.

R: Extrusome

An illustration of a round monochromatic thing with more round things inside. This did not help clarify what sort of function it might serve. Most mobile games would have explanations, but this world was not that generous. Oh well. She’d just have to equip it and see.

She equipped the card and a change occurred near the roots of her cilia. The cytoplasm writhed, generating countless little hollows. She didn’t know what those were, but they didn’t seem harmful. Maybe they’d be useful later. She let them be.

She pulled from the gacha a third time. Another fanfare. Excited, she flipped the card, only to be disappointed.

SR: Multicellularity

This again? Getting herself that many extra cells didn’t really seem all that useful.

The fourth pull was the big score. Getting a card like this early was a huge win.

SR: Explanations

This card added functionality to the cards themselves. It was a meta card. Like the name suggested, this card must add explanations to the other cards. This was something she’d definitely wanted. And it was a passive skill that would work without being equipped. There were explanations on her other cards already.

To test this out, she took a look at that Extrusome card again.

Extrusome: A membrane-bound structure located just below the surface of a cell. In response to certain stimuli, they discharge their contents to the cell’s exterior.

Was that it? What the hell was that good for?

Youko spent what felt like a few days doing this. She’d pull from the gacha, gather points, and pull from the gacha again. It was an unglamorous life compared to her previous one. She could get points from any old algae or bacteria or really anything living around her. Sometimes she sensed a presence like herself within the organisms, but when she spoke to them they never answered. Had they originally had minds, but their souls had been long since eroded by their bodies? If you remained in this primitive body without pulling on the gacha maybe your mind would slowly diminish to the level of your body. She was lucky. If she’d picked her lifespan over the gacha, she’d have lost the last trace of her humanity.

Youko’s body was changing with incredible speed. The biggest change came when she got the SR card Segmentation. This card appeared after she’d leveled up her multicellularity cards and fused them. Segmentation allowed the creation of segmented structures of similar cells. By enlarging these stable constructions, she could easily make herself larger. And the segments allowed for redundancy. Even if she lost one segment, as long as she had another segment performing the same function, the damage wouldn’t be fatal. And she could easily grow another segment.

Youko now looked like a caterpillar. She had a number of units connected in a row with cilia sticking out everywhere, and she was crawling through the mud on the sea floor using peristaltic movements. She tried covering her entire body with a shell to increase her defense, but this was a waste of time. Her body was simply too big and having the shell over it made it hard for oxygen to flow and she nearly suffocated. Clearly, the cards she put together had hidden compatibilities. Just throwing all your strong cards on may not actually make you stronger. For the same reason, it seemed like you couldn’t just make yourself infinitely larger.

What she needed was respiratory organs. There was a limit to how much oxygen she could absorb through her exterior, like she’d been doing. Her total size was her length cubed, but her surface area was only her length squared. If she could only absorb oxygen through the surface, the oxygen needed by the interior cells would never reach them, and they’d perish.

At times like this, it would be nice to have a specialized gacha. In mobile games it was quite common to have limited time gacha that would give cards of a particular affinity. If only there was a respiratory gacha.

Youko expanded her territory, centering it on the gacha she always pulled. The gacha was like an oasis to the Girls. It granted them blessings, yet it was also a battle arena. Anytime multiple Girls gathered together, they’d inevitably start trying to steal each other’s points. The area around the gacha was littered with corpses. Youko used that to her advantage. She’d hide herself in the mud and use her chemoreceptors to tell her when the fighting had subsided. Once the victor had swum away, she’d pop out of the mud and scavenge the leftovers. There were points in those corpses — not a lot, but every bit helped.

By what felt like two weeks since she’d become a Girl, Youko finally got the sight she’d been hoping for. R: Photoreceptors. These were cells scattered across her surface cells that could only detect light and dark, but that was surprisingly useful. Her chemoreceptors were useless anywhere with a current, but light was a versatile sensory medium that could be used under any conditions.

When she leveled her photoreceptors up, she got eyespots — clusters of photoreceptive cells. By making segments of eyespots she was able to get compound eyes containing a number of small eyes. Now she could at last see the view around her.

Sight. This was absolutely revolutionary. Light was the fastest thing in the world. Being able to perceive that light meant grasping the situation before anyone else. All this time she’d only had a rough idea of her world based on changes to chemical density, but now a world of comparatively stunning clarity surrounded her. Trapped within her soul, Youko had been feeling claustrophobic, so she rejoiced at this new freedom.

Sight made exploring easier, too. Youko attached two eyes to the top of her head. She’d crawl along in the mud, her eyes stretched out, observing the world above her. If she saw a large shadow she’d hide in the dirt.

There were a lot of gacha around, in surprising places. She could feel when she was getting closer to a gacha, but she needed to be a certain distance away to sense them, so the only way to find them was to explore. She never found a respiratory gacha, but she managed to finish a respiratory system with some unexpected cards. Feet. Feet were a versatile part that could be branched off into all kinds of organs. The first type Youko got was R: Parapodium. A pair of parapodia sticking out of every segment on her body. They might look like just a bunch of bumps, but they were so much more. By undulating a body with these bumps, she could generate friction to move herself around far faster than before. When she leveled up her parapodia and fused them, she got SR: Phyllopod Feet, which took the parapodia nubs, made them bigger and thinner, and then covered them with more nubs. This generated more friction, making it easier to get around.

She could specialize her legs per body segment. For example, by concentrating sensory organs in the legs by her head they became feelers, while a number of legs near the front of her became gills. She called them gills, but they were of extremely simple construction. She just extended several layers of flimsy flesh and folded them several times like origami. Then she concentrated capillaries inside them and let cutaneous respiration do its thing. The folded sections increased the overall surface area, allowing her to absorb sufficient oxygen.

Now that she could obtain oxygen efficiently, she could be far more active. Instead of just hiding in the mud, Youko could leap out of it, ambushing other Girls and tearing away pieces of their bodies. To increase her offensive capabilities, she changed two legs into mandibles. By raising the mandibles’ level, they became bigger and thicker. Since she had gills now, she could also cover her entire body with a tough chitin shell.

Youko’s build was becoming formidable. Describing it in terms familiar from her previous life, she looked like a mukade combined with a stag beetle combined with a slug. Her body was made of sturdy, flat, jointed segments, with a pair of soft phyllopod feet sticking out of each segment. Near the front, these feet became longer and more complex, and at the very front they were like a forest growing in all directions. Where the gills were, the bluish color of her blood showed through. A closer look at the gills revealed countless cilia pulsing constantly. On her head were two eye stalks with compound eyes at the tips, twitching this way and that. Just outside the eye stalks were two serrated feelers. But her ultimate trademark were the two massive mandibles, a third of her total body length. There were two joints in each, allowing her to slice like a pair of scissors or stab like a fork. The inside was lined with sharp spikes, and nothing these pierced got off lightly.

Youko had become a dominant force in her area. She was no longer a bottom-tier Girl. This was it. This was the sensation she’d been craving — the feeling that someone acknowledged her, recognized her. It was the sensation that kept her playing mobile games — the satiation of her need for approval.

It felt wonderful. Everyone was looking at her. At last she felt like she had real value.

One day, something happened that did an even better job scratching this itch.

“Yo! You’re Youko, right? You remember me?”

Just hearing the voice echoing in her soul was enough to annoy her. It was the voice of a Girl who’d been stalking her for a while now. She’d know that condescending tone anywhere. It was Dyaus. They’d tried to kill each other once.

“Dyaus! Here for a rematch? I’ll take you on whenever!”

All this approval she was riding had Youko getting a little carried away. She was confident in the body she’d built, but Dyaus had clearly not been slacking off in that department. Like Youko, she was a segmented invertebrate, but rather than scrabbling through the dirt, she could swim. The overall impression was very fish-like. She was teardrop-shaped, like a cicada, with the head at the thicker end. Her head had eight eyes, like you often see on spiders. Two giant compound eyes covered nearly a third of her head, and six smaller eyes were arranged around them. Below her head was a mouth like a long, thin, horizontal vacuum cleaner. Around the mouth were a number of short feelers, like human fingers, presumably to help rip prey off the seafloor.

The legs on her sides had fins attached—long fins like airplane wings that let her wheel around in the water over Youko’s head, like a vulture. Meanwhile, the legs on her belly were feeble things. They probably still qualified as parapodia. She’d probably specialized her deck to allow for swimming. Behind the fins, Youko could see gill-like slots, and inside the slots she caught glimpses of blue string-like organs. The biggest threat was her tail. The further back you went the more keratinized it was, until it became a sharp blade. She must have used this sharp tail to stab her prey and claim their points.

How was she going to attack? Youko turned her mandibles in Dyaus’ direction, ready for a sudden assault. But it seemed the other Girl was not interested in that.

“Ha ha ha, lower your weapon. I ain’t here to fight you. Other way around. I’m calling a truce! What say you join us?”

“You think I can trust you? You attacked me last time.”

“You don’t believe me? I swear! Look me in the eye.”

“Those compound eyes don’t really tell me anything...”

“That’s fair. Well, if you can’t trust me, I’ll bring in someone to vouch for me.”

The light grew dim. Something huge was passing overhead. Dirt-clouds billowed up right next to where Youko was lurking. Feet. Four feet, each as large as Youko was wide, surrounded her. The feet weren’t keratinized — they were still taut and fleshy, like white rubber. They were cylindrical poles like elephant legs. White claws ripped their way out of the flesh’s surface.

The owner of these legs was a shadow overhead. A big one. At least eight times as big as Youko, like a flying saucer. That was the description that seemed most apt. It looked like something halfway between a shellfish and an octopus, with a disc-shaped shell on its head. Two large eyes bulged out of its sides. Not insect-like compound eyes, but lensed eyes, similar to a human’s. Below the disc was a mass of sensory hair. A number of cilia had grown real thick, forming antennae. The tips of the antennae grew broader, twitching like lures. There were slits in the center. Mouths? These antennae sometimes rubbed against the main mouth.

“Sounds like Dyaus didn’t make a great first impression. She does get a little carried away sometimes. Can I ask you to forgive her? My name is Ganapati. I promise you Dyaus is not a bad Girl.”

Ganapati spoke clearly. A cheery tone, with a gentle warmth. She seemed a thousand times more trustworthy than Dyaus.

“Well? Trust us now?” Dyaus asked.

No, no, she wasn’t trusting anyone here. She’d almost gone trotting after them, lured by the kindness in Ganapati’s tone, but at the last minute, sanity prevailed. A stranger vouching for a stranger meant nothing. She’d just get her head chomped off the second she let her guard down. That’s how society worked.

“Youko, it seems you’re unable to trust us. I don’t blame you. I’m sure you’ve had a rough time of it. But there’s more to Evo Gals than just killing each other. It’s also a game that reminds us how rewarding cooperating can be.”

Really? Her experience made that seem highly dubious.

“Ganapati, showing’s easier than telling.”

“Good point. Youko, I’m going to make a friend request. Please accept it.”

A window opened up inside Youko’s mind. “Friend request from Ganapati. Accept?” it said. Cautiously, Youko clicked, “Yes.”

“Now we’re friends. Next, I’ll send you a Like.”

What was a Like? Before she could ask, a change occurred in Youko’s soul.

Like! Like! Approval cravings fulfilled! She was famous! Everyone accepted her! What a wonderful feeling!

“Well? Amazing, right? This increases your points, too.”

Just as Ganapati said, her points had gone up. Not by a lot, but still.

“See? Now you understand the benefits of joining us.”

Youko asked if the three of them could get points just by sending each other Likes, but this was not the case.

“We gave it a shot, of course. No use. You can only send a friend one Like a day. That’s the rule.”

And so a new daily routine began. Point hunting became a cooperative effort between Youko, Dyaus, and Ganapati. Dyaus was the scout. She used her amazing fins to fly through the water, finding targets. Their strategy was to drive their prey over to where Ganapati and Youko were waiting in ambush. Youko was best suited for living in the mud, and great at hiding. Burying herself in the cold mud, only her eye stalks sticking out, her life was spent waiting for prey to wander into their trap. Before joining the other two, she’d had to actively hunt, but now all she had to do was wait, and the points would come rolling in. This was amazing. How could she even be any happier? This was the same kind of bliss you got playing one of those set-it-and-wait games where the units would go do the grinding for you.

This was the first time she’d been able to relax since reincarnating. The first time she hadn’t lived in fear of the unknown. She had others who’d respond to the question of who she was. Even compared to her previous life, this was a fairly fortuitous situation. Compared to the days she’d done nothing but pull from gachas, Youko felt truly alive.

With all this extra time, Youko was able to think clearly. Not the confused, fractured, incoherent thoughts she’d had up to this point; now she could put her thoughts in order. The first thing she thought about was Dyaus. Why had she come to Youko with a friend request? The simplest answer was because Youko was strong. Youko had earned herself quite a reputation in these parts. When new-born beginners came crawling over to pull from the gacha, it was usually Youko that ate them. It made a lot of sense that Dyaus would admire her talent and seek to party up with her. But she was a proud Girl; it seemed unnatural for her to try and make friends with someone she’d once tried to kill. She might have ulterior motives. Youko had to stay on guard. When she spoke to Dyaus, she would have to remember to play her cards close to her chest.

Next, she thought about this world. What was this place, exactly? Had she been transported to another world? Or was this not real at all, just a long, long illusion created by her dying brain? If she really had been reborn in another world, it seemed likely it would work in a more realistic way. Meanwhile, if this was an illusion, why would she want a world in which she had to get body parts from a gacha and turn herself into some gross creature? Youko didn’t think of herself as someone with that kind of imagination. Or was oxygen-deprivation something that sent the imagination into overdrive? That seemed unlikely.

Either way, mulling it over wasn’t producing any real answers. Some problems couldn’t be solved by thinking about them. If she wanted to know the truth about this world, she needed more information about it. And that meant things had to change. As long as she sat at the bottom of whatever ocean this was, she was the proverbial frog in a well. She had to expand her horizons.

While they ate that day, Youko told Dyaus and Ganapati about her plans to see the outside world.

“Oh? Sounds pretty sweet. Let’s do this,” Dyaus said, totally on board. “This place is comfy enough, but it’s gettin’ kinda old. And everything we eat is made of chitin! Could use some variety, you know?”

“I’m against it,” Ganapati said, gravely. “Why abandon a place of safety, and head out to the unknown? It isn’t logical.”

“Pfft! You’re such a bore, Ganapati. Right, Youko! Guess it’s just the two of us.”

Dyaus swam down by Youko and poked her back. This was dangerous and Youko wished she’d knock it off.

“Dyaus, why are you always like this?” Ganapati sighed. “Fine! I’d just be worried about you. I’ll come, too. But where are we headed?”

“Our ultimate goal should be dry land,” Youko said. She always found herself speaking more politely with Ganapati. “Right now, we can only breathe through gills, but maybe the gacha near land will have organs that making breathing air easier.”

“This seems very poorly planned.” It was unusual for Ganapati to phrase things this bluntly.

“That’s what makes it fun!” Dyaus said, clearly excited.

Their goal was set. But they still lacked the means to carry out the plan. What land should they head for? They couldn’t just search blindly. There was no map around. Even if they tried to make one, that would be really difficult without any paper. Their best bet was to go to the water’s surface and search for land. Dyaus was best suited to that mission. Youko and Ganapati were both designed for bottom dwelling, and it would be difficult for them to reach the surface. But Dyaus was a Girl able to swim freely in three dimensions.

Dyaus swam up and up. Catching the currents with her fins, she rode them higher and higher. The surface shouldn’t be that far away. After all, there was plenty of sunlight filtering down.

Dyaus had never left the water before. Without Youko, it would never have occurred to her to head for the surface. Once again, she was grateful Youko was there. Youko was a great Girl. As long as she was with them, they could have so much fun. Just thinking about all the adventures they were going to have got Dyaus excited. She had been so bored. Ganapati was a nice Girl, too, but not exactly a thrilling companion.

The sparkling surface of the water was getting closer. The waves made white bubbles.

“Woohoo!”

She burst out of the surface, leaping through the air. Blue. Blue as far as the eye could see.

She spread her fins to the fullest, plunging back into the water. By spreading out the portion of herself in contact with the surface, she could distribute her weight, floating on the water. Strong sunlight pounded down, baking her body. It itched, like her surface was drying out, withering. She quickly looked around. There. A line crossing the blue. That was the land Youko spoke of.

Land had a lot to offer Girls. Giant Girls were reaching their arms to the heavens. Were they sunbathing? They seemed to be enjoying themselves. But land did not seem to be a paradise. Even Girls good at sunbathing could not escape this world’s struggle over points. There was an indirect war going on, a struggle to steal sunlight from each other. Girls were using giant mobile parasols to steal the sunlight their rivals were soaking in, Girls were encasing lighter air in membranes and floating themselves above their rivals to claim the sunlight first, and those who had their sunlight stolen were unable to sunbathe and perished. To escape death, some Girls made more direct attacks. Strangling each other with their feelers, shooting darts, ripping surface flesh open with claws and slurping up the juices, gathering light to start fires, consuming symbionts... The Girls were all fighting and without really knowing why. Without understanding why they had to feel such suffering.

Dyaus sensed none of this. She was no philosopher. All she thought when she saw land was that there were a lot of Girls there good at different things. The sun was drying out her gills and it hurt, so she dove back into the sea.

“I found land! You were right, Youko!”

Youko was relieved to hear Dyaus’ report. Land was closer than she thought. They could check the direction of the sun and know which way to go.

Dyaus surfaced two or three more times, making sure of their directions. Fortunately, it was not a great distance away.

The three friends set off on their journey together. But each of them had a different means of propulsion, speed, and rate of exhaustion. Dyaus was the fastest, but only in ideal circumstances; she struggled when the currents were in flux. As they got closer to the land, the waves got bigger, and Dyaus struggled more. Those moments were Ganapati’s chance to shine. Dyaus would lie face up under her belly, holding on with her feelers. Dyaus was frustrated by her inability to swim freely, but Ganapati seemed to enjoy it. It was hard to read her expression, but they’d been working together long enough that Youko could get a sense of her mood.

Youko was the least mobile of the three. Her mandibles and gills offered up considerable resistance, slowing her down. She considered changing up her cards to make movement easier, but blowing points leveling everything up again seemed like a waste, so she also took a ride on Ganapati’s belly. Dyaus was thrilled to have a fellow passenger to talk to, but this seemed to make Ganapati grumpy, and she refused to join in the conversations. It was pretty awkward.

As they neared the land, there were more Girls around them. They were floating, swimming, crawling, and tunneling. Some fled when they saw the three of them coming, while others recklessly went up against them and were torn to pieces. They’d yet to find a threat that was a match for the three of them together.

The surface was quickly getting closer. The water was cloudy, and all the different chemical smells were making them dizzy. Branches washed down from the land were piled up, making a maze several layers deep. There were Girls lurking within the maze, too.

From this point on, even the three of them were forced to be cautious. The cloudy water limited their vision, and the chemicals rendered their sense of smell useless. The situation was extremely ripe for an ambush. Ganapati had the highest defenses, so the other two stayed underneath her, and they all moved slowly forward.

Then Youko heard a voice.

A voice in pain, calling out in desperation.

“Help... Somebody, please... Help me...”

Youko paused, looking around her. This was a voice speaking directly to her soul, the way Girls spoke to each other.

“Mm? What’s up, Youko?” Dyaus asked. Had she not heard the voice?

“Someone’s calling for help.”

“A voice? I didn’t hear nothing. Whatever, just ignore it! Prolly a trap, anyway. Better keep our distance.”

But Youko couldn’t simply ignore it. She wasn’t sure why. She just felt like she had to go towards the voice.

“It’s bugging me. I’m gonna go take a look,” Youko said, and started swimming towards the voice. It was in the maze of branches.

“Wait, Youko! It ain’t safe!” Dyaus tried to follow her into the branches but her fins were in the way and she couldn’t fit through.

“Dyaus, let us wait here for Youko to return,” Ganapati said, holding her back.

“But...”

Meanwhile, Youko was headed deeper and deeper into the maze, following the voice. It grew steadily stronger, and even more anguished.

“Help... It hurts... Please! Help me, Sensei!”

Who was ‘Sensei’? Didn’t matter. Whoever it was, Youko wanted to save this Girl.

Youko paddled through the branches on her phyllopod feet. Her talents really shone here. It was as if she’d developed these feet for this moment in particular.

She found a hollow inside the labyrinth. Two Girls were facing off inside it. One, like Youko, wore a segmented exoskeleton. It was like a cone lying on its side, with a head on the thicker end, with four eyes on the tips of the stalks growing from the head, and two sharp pincers that ruthlessly tormented her opponent. Her opponent was by far the most grotesque-looking Girl Youko had seen thus far. Like someone had tried to make a fish out of slug parts and failed, it didn’t have an exoskeleton, just a slimy exterior. Between two dark, lightless eyes was a long nose-like organ. Countless bits of flesh stretched out of the feeble-looking body like abortive fins. The creepiest thing of all was her mouth. The mouth had no jaw. Just a hole, like the inside of her body was spilling out of her. Around the hole were countless rows of teeth.

“Help...” The words were spilling from this sinister creature’s soul.

Youko moved before realizing it. She set her feet on the branches, and pushed off, propelling herself forward. She rocketed towards the bully Girl like a pachinko ball, attacking with her mandibles.

“Who the hell are you!?” the pincer Girl yelled, thrown by Youko’s surprise entrance. She lost one eye before she could even bring her pincers into play. “Argh! You want some? You won’t like me now that I’m angry! I’ll...”

Without letting her opponent finish her boast, Youko attacked again. She closed her oversized mandibles and tried to slice off her opponent’s head. The now three-eyed Girl hastily leveraged her pincers, keeping the mandibles open. But Youko was stronger and was slowly forcing them closed.

“Give! I surrender! You win, just let me live!”

Youko didn’t bat an eye, and just applied more pressure. A crack appeared in the pincers’ exoskeleton, and they began to crumple. The pincer Girl knew her life was in danger and began frantically scrambling her legs, trying to back away. Her efforts were in vain. The spikes on Youko’s mandibles would not let her run.

“No! Please... I don’t want to die...!”

Slowly but surely Youko’s mandibles broke the Girl’s pincers. The pincers were filled with tasty-looking red flesh. Her mandibles didn’t stop there. They fastened around the head and began tearing into that. This Girl had once commanded a broad view of the world with her four eyes, but now she had only one eyeball left. Bodily fluids and nerves seeped out of the eye stalks. It was a tragic sight, but Youko was hell bent on making her even more tragic. Pressure from her mandible’s spikes cracked her opponent’s exoskeleton easily. Pressure was applied in inverse proportion to the surface area affected. By focusing her strength on the pointed spikes, the pressure increased exponentially. Chalk one up to physics. It was scientifically inevitable that the contents of this head would come spilling out.

Her mandibles pulped the central nervous system, severing the head from the rest of the body. With no command tower the best body around was useless. The legs were still moving, but this was no longer the orderly movement of a moment before; they were moving at random, with no cohesion. In time these convulsions would die down, but it was best to eat while the body was still fresh. As her opponent wavered between life and death, Youko dug in, forcing her towards death’s embrace.

“Eeek... Don’t eat me...”

A terrified squeal. From the bullied Girl.

“I won’t!” Youko said, munching away.

“Really?”

“I promise! Oh, where are my manners? Why don’t you eat some, too? We can talk over the meal!”

“OK. I’ll trust you for now.”

She was definitely still wary.

Youko paid this no attention and kept talking to her in a friendly voice. Like she was approaching a frightened puppy, peeling away a layer at a time.

“What’s your name? I’m Youko.”

“Vayu.”

A single word, but that word seemed to close the distance between them.

Vayu cautiously moved closer to Youko and put her mouth on the freshly killed Girl. Vayu had a unique method of consumption. With no jaw, she was forced to wrap her mouth around the Girl’s corpse. She then scratched away at the surface with her rows of teeth, drinking the blood that spilled like a parasite.

For a while, neither spoke. Vayu must have been starving and was very focused on her meal. Youko waited for her to finish.

When her appetite was satiated, Vayu spoke. “Why did you save me?”

“Hmm, I’m not really sure.”

Youko dodged the question, but deep down, she knew exactly why. The way Vayu spoke, her personality, the air of sadness that spoke of the rejection she’d endured. She was Youko’s type. Youko was attracted to Vayu like a magnetic force.

“Hmm. Well, I’m grateful. Thank you.”

Vayu moved her fleshy strings, trying to leave. At this rate they’d be forced to part. If she did nothing now, Youko would regret it the rest of her life. This conviction prompted her to action.

“Wait!”

“What now?”

Youko hesitated, unsure what to say. If she admitted Vayu was her type, she’d just drive her away. Different scenarios ran through her head on a loop, but the question that finally popped out surprised even her.

“Who’s ‘Sensei?’”

“...a Girl who helped me, once.”

Instantly, a nasty feeling filled Youko’s heart. Like she couldn’t bear Vayu being close to any other Girls. She knew this wasn’t fair and pushed it back down. “Where is she now?”

“She died.” The curtness in her reply belied a deep sorrow.

But Youko’s heart leapt. Rejoicing at the news of someone’s death was a horrible thing to do, but she couldn’t deny the relief she felt.

“That’s too bad...” she said carefully, hiding her emotions.

“I’d better be going.”

“Where to?”

She asked this reflexively, trying to draw out the conversation as long as possible. Vayu hesitated, unsure whether to answer. She was silent for several seconds, then spoke.

“I’m looking for the Girls gacha.”

“The Girls gacha?”

Come to think of it, all the gacha she’d found were outfit gacha. If this world was based on Evo Gals, it made sense that there was a Girls gacha somewhere.

“They say dead Girls come out of that gacha. I’m gonna bring Sensei back to life.”

She must really care about this Sensei. There was a fierce determination behind those words.

Youko wanted to help. She felt an urge to at least share her problems until they found the Girls gacha. It was like that urge had always been inside her. She couldn’t exactly call it a pure emotion. She definitely had some impure thoughts lurking deep inside. She wanted Vayu to rely on her. She felt like having Vayu rely on her would validate her. She had a need to force that twisted relationship.

“Vayu, I’d like to go with you.”

Vayu gave Youko a long, hard look. There was doubt in those dark eyes, but it soon gave way to joy.

“OK. It’s strange, but I feel like we’ve met before. I don’t know why. Something about you seems familiar.”

For a long time, they stared at each other. Compound eyes locked gazes with primitive lenses. It was a mutual feeling that this meeting could only be described in cliché terms like ‘destined.’

“Then let’s go,” Youko said, heading back the way she’d come. Vayu followed in silence.

“Youko! You OK?” Dyaus came swimming over the moment she emerged from the branches. She swam circles around Youko, tapping her back with her parapodia.

“I’m fine! That tickles.”

“And who’s this?” Ganapati said, extending a feeler in Vayu’s direction.

“She’s Vayu. A new companion.”

“Woah, woah. I thought I was the leader here! I didn’t approve this.”

When exactly had anyone made Dyaus the leader?

“I dunno if this is the right time to make new friends. She looks weak, too. What use will she be?”

It had not occurred to Youko that Dyaus might not approve. Dyaus always seemed so delighted by any new thing that Youko had assumed she’d love the idea.

“Looks like I’m not welcome here.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Dyaus, that was rude,” Ganapati said, trying to deescalate. “Vayu, can you tell us what you’re good at?”

“Not much. The only high-rarity thing I’ve got is this.” She indicated her nose. “I’ve been saving up my points, so I haven’t pulled from the gacha much.”

“What’s that good for?”

“It’s an electroreceptor. If I use this, nearby Girls...” She broke off, as if noticing something. “Oh, one’s getting closer. Heading our way.”

“Hmm... What kind of Girl?” There was something faintly scornful in Dyaus’ tone.

“She’s big... much bigger than any of us.” Vayu was growing tense. “Maybe you should hide.”

“Hide? We’re pretty strong. You sure you’re not exaggerating?”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

This pointless squabble was wasting precious seconds.

Before they knew it, a giant face was right on top of them. A tengu. A face like a tengu, with a ludicrously large nose. The entire surface of it was covered in sinister lumps. At the root of the nose were two eyes, each as large as Youko’s entire body. The eyes turned, locking directly onto Youko.

“Youko! Look out!”

Youko was only able to avoid the tengu’s attack because Dyaus rammed its side. The tengu briefly left, made a wide turn, and came in for another attack. At last they had a grasp of the creature’s whole. It was a strange one. Youko had never seen or heard of anything like it in her previous life. The whole thing was streamlined, but the fins had membranes, like bat wings. The bones were clearly visible. Translucent membranes spread out like a stealth bomber. At the rear, the tail was split in two like a pair of legs, and it swam by kicking these. It was a strange Girl, part fish, part bird, part insect, and part mammal.

The tengu Girl’s mouth yawned open. It had a strong jaw, and a lot of needle-like teeth. They looked like they could easily break even Ganapati’s shell.

Its massive wings flapped, slapping the ocean floor. Dirt plumed upwards, making it very hard to see. They were plunged into darkness.

Chomp! A huge mouth closed right next to Youko. The water pressure sent her flying away. This Girl was far stronger than they’d expected. They’d gotten cocky. A short period of success had made them forget they could be outmatched. They were frogs in the well. They could never beat a monster like this, no matter how hard they tried. They were all going to die. They’d be killed and all their points used to pull from a gacha!

“I told you all you should hide,” Vayu said, suddenly right next to her.

“Vayu! I’m glad you’re safe.” She was legitimately relieved. “How’d you know it was coming?”

“I can detect the bioelectricity nearby Girls give off,” she said, pointing at her nose. “Pretty sure it can, too. On a much larger scale.”

“Any way we can fight it?”

“Nope,” Vayu said, firmly. “We’d better duck into those branches. If we’re lucky, it’ll give up.”

Youko and Vayu found the other two and headed directly towards the branches. Ganapati lifted the branches up and the other three rushed in.

The long-nosed Girl handled this in a horribly simple way. It just swung its head and knocked the branches aside. Branches three times as thick as Youko was long were sent flying.

“Uh-oh... this is it... We’re all gonna die...” Youko had already died once and was preparing herself to die again.

“Wait, show me your cards!” Vayu yelled.

Show her cards? She hadn’t even known that function existed. But she tried it anyway.

“Yes... We might just have a chance...” Vayu said. “Level up your extrusome!”

Extrusome was a card she’d had since she was an amoeba but had ignored since she didn’t know what it was for. She leveled it up with her few remaining points and some other cards. The name changed to R: Cnidocyte.

“Equip that to your mandibles! If you get even one hit in we’ve got a chance!”

Youko made ready to launch herself daringly out from the branches. But the monster’s mouth was right in front of her. If she popped out now, she’d be inhaled and chewed up before she had a chance to do anything.

“I’ll distract it!”

When she saw Youko hesitate, Vayu ran out instead, desperately flailing her little body to draw the monster’s attention. Its massive eyes turned. Now! Youko stretched her mandibles as wide as they would go and charged, clamping onto its warty nose.

Familiar red fluid poured out of the wounds. Once, twice, three times, four times, five times. She chewed and chewed, widening the wound.

The giant body shook itself. She tightened her mandibles, trying to keep it from shaking her off. At last its raging subsided. The eyes glazed over. The poison had taken effect.

Compared to Youko, this thing was the size of an airplane — and now it slowly came to a rest on its side. She’d won. They’d survived.

Wait, Vayu? Was Vayu safe?

“I’m fine,” Vayu said, parting the sand clouds. She appeared to be uninjured.

“Vayu, you did great. Of course, so did you, Youko,” Ganapati said, emerging from the branches.

Dyaus followed. “I gotta admit it. Thanks,” she said. She seemed a little miffed, though.

“Well? I think Vayu’s made a good case for her inclusion in the party, right?” Youko said, so proud she didn’t even notice Dyaus’ disgruntlement.

“I’m sorry I bad-mouthed you earlier, Vayu,” Dyaus said, reluctantly.

“In that case, I think we should throw her a welcome party!”

“Agreed!”

Naturally, the main dish was the Girl they’d just killed.

III

Drip. Drop. Rain fell. A soft patter. A gentle shower. How long had it been? Girls appeared from all around, opening mouths to drink the rain, hunting those who did, and waiting to scavenge the carcasses. There were as many ways of living as there were Girls.

The forest was a place of bounty for them. The forest itself was made of Girls — the ones who’d pulled a rare card called Chloroplast and couldn’t be bothered to move around anymore. The Girls who stopped moving soon lost the ability to communicate with other souls. Action kept the mind clear and thus kept the flesh from corrupting the mind.

Thud. Thud. A far-off sound. The Girls used whatever sensory methods they had to detect it, and fled. Anything capable of making a noise like that was cause to skedaddle. Valor was for fools. Survival was all that mattered.

A massive Girl appeared. Her hardened skin was covered with scales and she had four legs, with a spiral horn-like shell on her head. Anyone who didn’t know better might mistake it for a magnificent crest.

This was Ganapati. The form Ganapati had taken for life on land. She was ten times larger than she’d been in the ocean. How had she become so large? The secret lay in the crest. She did not wear that for style alone. It was an important trick to make such a large body stand upright. Ammonoidea and Nautilus have similar spiral shells. These function as a ballast, controlling their rising and sinking via the absorption of water. Ganapati’s crest served as ballast, too. But in place of water, it used gas.

Girls without an endoskeleton couldn’t grow that large on land — they’d be crushed by their own weight. Even supported by an endoskeleton, you’d run out of space to keep the organs. To overcome this dilemma, she’d implemented this ballast tank. The tank was filled with pure hydrogen. Hydrogen was the lightest gas in the universe. So light that it made her heavy body that much lighter. Her body was no longer being crushed under her own weight. No matter how large she got, it never stopped her moving about. This was the ideal diet plan.

Naturally, hydrogen does not exist in nature. Making it took a great deal of effort. This was where Vayu came in. Her current form was drastically different from what it had once been. She no longer had eyes. She no longer needed any sensory organ cards, so she’d cleared them all from her deck. In their place, she’d enhanced her electric organs. On the old Vayu, it had looked like Pinocchio’s nose, but now it was a significant portion of her total bulk. She looked like a snake with no eyes. A long, thick torso. A slight swelling at one end, where her head was. But this impression was misleading. What looked like a torso was actually her nose — the organ that generated electricity. Thousands upon millions upon billions of electrocytes were all bundled together. The voltage each generated was insignificant, but with this many together she could produce a significant electrical discharge.

And what was that electricity used for? Making oxygen and hydrogen. Oxygen was the main thing they needed, and hydrogen was just a byproduct. When Vayu had still been in the water, she had been trying for the cards she needed to evolve lungs. But all she found were cards that grew her electrocytes, leaving her with no choice but to evolve her electric organs and adapt them for use on land. High purity oxygen was vital for survival on land without lungs. The way to make oxygen was to apply electrolysis to water. 2 H₂O→2 H₂ + O₂ — a simple chemical equation. Fortunately, water was plentiful. On the lower side of Vayu’s electric organ were swellings covered in hairy protuberances. Those were her electrolysis organs. The hairs drew moisture up, sending it straight to them. The oxygen generated was absorbed by the overhanging curtain sticking out of her sides — the gills she’d developed. This way, even without any water flow, her gills received enough to breathe.

At first, she was discarding the hydrogen, but by teaming up, Vayu and Ganapati had found a way to make more efficient use of it. Vayu’s body was coiled up inside Ganapati’s spiral shell, and the hydrogen she released made Ganapati’s body lighter.

As they pulled from the gacha, they found even better uses for the hydrogen. Ganapati acquired nozzles — the kind you stick into prey and use like a straw to drink their blood. She could use these to eject hydrogen, then use some teeth at the tips like a flint, turning them into flamethrowers. This was pretty powerful.

Meanwhile, Youko and Dyaus hadn’t changed that much. Arthropods like the two of them didn’t require major changes to move onto land. Dyaus just turned her fins into wings and learned to fly. Youko had Dyaus carry her around. She would lie on her back, and both of them would wrap their limbs around the other’s torso, and then Dyaus would take off. Youko was responsible for attacking. Her gacha pulls had made her very good at stretching her neck out. She had a long neck folded many times like origami, and she could rapidly extend it like a robotic arm, snatching prey off the ground with her mandibles. With the cnidocytes equipped, poison rapidly spread through her prey’s bodies. This method was made possible by a protein called resilin. Resilin was an extremely elastic rubbery material, able to return to its original shape with minimal energy loss. When it had first popped out of the gacha she hadn’t been sure what to make of it, but after reading the explanation she soon realized just how versatile a card it really was.

Youko and Dyaus were the advance scouts, and Ganapati and Vayu were the main offensive unit. The destructive force of the strategy was tremendous. Girls thought they’d finally escaped from the flamethrowers only to have a pair of mandibles shoot down out of the sky and bite their heads off. Even if their necks were too thick to bite off, she’d just inject poison and finish them off. There was no escape. Imagine how terrifying their assault must have been to Girls living peacefully in the forest. It left lasting trauma. No, it didn’t even do that — a moment after the fear hit them, they were torn to pieces and digested. In a sense, this was the fastest, most efficient means of divesting them of trauma. They left no mess behind.

The four of them headed inland. At last the trees began to thin, and the air grew dry. They’d reached a savanna. There was less water available here, and the chloroplast Girls found it difficult to maintain larger sizes, growing steadily smaller. To minimize evaporation, they made their surfaces hard and their bodies round. They looked like rocks — rocks with roots running deep into the ground, searching for water. These roots also served as traps, stabbing smaller passing Girls and draining their bodily fluids. There was a war going on underground far more frantic than you’d ever imagine from their lethargic surface appearance.

Their roots also served to mark their territory. If you could sever an opponent’s roots from the base, you could claim their territory for your own. But such attacks carried a hefty risk. Attacking meant sending your own roots deep into enemy territory, and this could expose you to retaliation. It was quite common for an overly aggressive attack to be met with a devastating counter. As a result, a variety of strategies were developed. There were schemes to bait an opponent into an attack and turn the tables on them, schemes to stake out a domain on poor land where few rivals were found, schemes for slipping in on the edges of a territory disputed by two equal powers, and schemes for deliberately allowing poison to affect your own soil. But all of them survived through blood, sweat, and tears.

Splat! A Girl was crushed underfoot. Splat! And another. Ganapati killed them both. Feelers pulled their bodies to her mouth, crunching between her teeth. Dyaus and Youko arrived back from a scouting run, came in for a landing, and gathered around the bodies.

“Weird stuff over that way,” Dyaus said, her mouth full. “Lots of white lines.”

“Can you be a little more specific, Dyaus?”

“There were white lines on the ground in a lattice-pattern. It was clearly unnatural,” Youko explained.

“That’s definitely a Girl,” Vayu said. She was inside the shell, making electricity in total darkness. “We should go eat her. You get lots of points from strong Girls.”

Vayu ate a lot of other Girls, saving up to pull from the Girls gacha. Youko was helping her, but occasionally she grew anxious, wondering what would happen to her once they found Sensei again. Would Vayu no longer need her? Would she and Sensei go off on their own? That would be very sad. But she told herself that Vayu’s happiness was her happiness. Their time together was a real source of joy. So much better than before; back then she might as well have been dead.

Splat! Spltt! Splsh! The march of death echoed across the savanna. Girls who’d survived for many years found their lives abruptly ending. Ganapati killed about thirty of them on the way to the place Dyaus had found.

Youko thought of train tracks when she saw them up close — tracks running as far as the eye could see. Two white lines stretched aimlessly across the ground. Looking closely, there was a clear pattern. The land was divided into districts, and the rock Girls were assembled in an orderly fashion. What could that mean?

“Oops!”

Youko stubbed a toe on something. She looked down, and saw a round, translucent mineral. A crystal? It seemed to be fastened to the white lines.

What was this? Before she had time to think, she heard a sound.

“Something’s coming! Look out!” Ganapati yelled.

She was right. Youko could see something coming their way. This Girl was big. The overall shape was fish-like, but with pancake-shaped segments assembled to look like one. It was like someone had taken apart a centipede and forced it into the shape of a fish. The head was a half-sphere, like the old-type Shinkansen, with two eyes on the sides and giant lensed eyes. The segments got steadily smaller from the head but widened out again towards the tail. At the rear was a set of nozzles, like an airplane engine.

Below the head was a skirt of boards attached to her, and below the skirt were a number of additional limbs. Two of these gripped the rails, allowing her to rocket towards them.

She had divided her body segments up like the cars in a train. Behind the massive head was a long row of cars. They seemed to be on stilts — two long, thin legs stood on the rails, with rods running between them. From the center of the rod was a bundle of veins wrapped in membrane, connecting it to the segments before and after. There were no wheels; instead, it seemed to be squeezing out a fluid that pulsed through the rails. A number of attachment organs were resting on the shoulders of the stilts. One car had a red accordion-like tube moving up and down. Another had a sponge-like thing swelling and shrinking. There was a car with countless trumpet-shaped organs. And another one with mouths. Lots of different kinds of mouths. Proboscises for sucking blood. Mortars to grind things. Sacs to digest them. Knives to slice and dice...

As she got closer, a wave of unease washed over Youko. When Girls got close, she could usually hear the voices of their souls, whether faint or clear. But this Girl’s voice was bizarre. It didn’t seem like a person’s voice at all. More like it was coming from a thing. It was a noise like a train. “Ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk toot toot!” Like a noise someone convinced they were a train would make.

Ganapati seemed equally spooked, and quickly launched an attack, using the hydrogen Vayu generated to roast the train’s engine with fire.

The Girl train burned. Youko’s feelers caught an unpleasant chemical odor and then a shockwave shook her body. An explosion. Youko dug her claws into the ground, weathering the blast. Dyaus and Ganapati weren’t so lucky. Dyaus was specialized towards flight, and her massive wings caught the wind and she was swept far off into the distance. Ganapati lost her balance and crumpled to the ground.

“Chug chug chug! Ka-clunk ka-clunk!”

The Girl train had survived the explosion. She’d cut loose the front car and a few more that had caught fire and was reversing away from them.

“Wait!” Youko’s head shot out, grabbing one of the front cars. She squeezed her mandibles tight, then let go of the ground. Her body shot through the air onto the fleeing car.

“Creeeeeeeeeeeeeeeak... Squeeeeeeeeak! Ga-chunk Ga-clunk!”

The Girl train’s response was simple. It cut loose the car Youko was on.

And then it launched an attack. The lead car bucked and extended a fleshy tube. The tube was engorged and hardened, and it fired missiles. The missiles exploded in midair, and with no loss of momentum, the contents rained down on Youko. It was a cluster bomb. Youko used the car as a shield. She dangled herself below the rod, trying to weather the assault. The bomb had been filled with bones of all shapes and sizes—it was ready for all sorts of targets. There were bones like shuriken, like pencils, like dice. They tore the flesh of the car she was using as a shield. Even detached from the main body, the car appeared to still be alive; it writhed in pain, trying to slither away.

The car was made from cylindrical parts covered in shell — an effective structure to handle projectile attacks. The missile’s contents were deflected, ricocheting elsewhere. But the sheer volume was too much for it. Knife-like bones sliced into the segment, cutting it. Then a giant knuckle struck the bone and cracked the shell. The integrity lost, the flesh inside was exposed. White meat. It was filled with slimy white flesh and a number of smaller yellow and red organs. It was like splitting open a crab. The organs exposed, the car listed to one side, and collapsed. Even with its guts exposed to air it was still alive. It scrambled to right itself and get back on the rails, convulsing.

Youko’s legs were injured, too. She poked her head out from under the derailed car.

The Girl train backed up to a branch line, reordered itself, and came charging back in Youko’s direction. The new front car had an organ like a praying mantis’ scythe on it. This was bad news. She staggered sideways, trying to move away from the rails. But her legs were hurt too badly to move quickly.

“Chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk chunk!”

The car was getting closer. But Youko’s pace was hopelessly slow. She was moments from being a shish kebab. She wanted to close her eyes, but with no eyelids she was forced to watch certain death approaching.

“Youko!”

Dyaus cried out from up in the sky. Youko unleashed the elasticity in her resilin and her neck shot out. Dyaus’ long legs snatched Youko’s neck out of the air. A moment later the train’s scythe swished through the space she’d been.

“You OK, Youko?”

“Somehow!”

Below them, the Girl train fired more cluster bombs. Dyaus used the shockwaves to gain altitude.

“Shit! She’s going after Ganapati next!” Dyaus yelled.

Right in the path of the train was a giant clutching her spiral head — Ganapati. Given the difference in speeds between them, she’d already abandoned the idea of running. In a ranged battle, her opponent held the advantage. Her only chance was to get in close.

The train sped up, ramming Ganapati at full speed. The scythe pieced her skin, and fluids seeped out. But Ganapati hadn’t lost yet. She kicked the impaled leg, knocking the car away. The car derailed. The moment the Girl left the tracks she became very slow. She crawled along like a shellfish.

Ganapati jumped, crushing the car. Like popping bubble wrap, she stomped forward, flattening car after car. The Girl train backed away as fast as it could, firing and detonating cluster bombs just above the ground, heedless of the damage to her own cars. Stars, spheres, triangles, squares — a variety pack of bones struck Ganapati’s face, crushing an eye. As soon as her pursuer wavered, the train sacrificed more cars, and ran for it. Dyaus flapped her wings as hard as she could but was unable to keep up.

To keep up the chase, Ganapati took to the skies. She had Vayu increase hydrogen production, taking to the air like a blimp. She turned the nozzles to her rear, mixed hydrogen and oxygen, and caused them to explode, giving chase and matching the train’s speed.

“Faster!”

Above them both, Youko urged Dyaus on. Ganapati was gaining a lead on them, and Youko was frustrated by her inability to help. Of course, her concern was with Vayu, not Ganapati. Vayu had no shell or scales. She could be killed easily. Just the thought of her dying was a crushing weight on Youko’s heart. She was prepared to do literally anything to prevent Vayu’s death.

Below her, the train was taking itself apart at the branch line. Two different sets of cars went in two directions. Ganapati hesitated for a moment, but then picked one and went after it.

But this was the wrong choice. The other set of cars backed up and followed the rails after Ganapati. She was caught in a pincer attack.

Realizing her disadvantage, Ganapati wavered between two strategies. She could use hydrogen to float higher and escape or kick up her burners and attack. She could not do both. There was a limit to how much hydrogen Vayu could produce. They’d already used a lot of it; if she used her fire, there would not be enough left to float. She was torn for a moment, but then decided to use her flamethrowers. She did a little tap dance, turning her face and raining fire down on both sets of cars. The attack quickly turned cars to lumps of charcoal, but neither slowed down at all. The Girl train had known she would take some damage and left the cars burning, aiming to crush Ganapati. With her hydrogen reserves low, Ganapati was very heavy and tragically slow. She used her feelers to yank the burning cars up, trying to get off the tracks, but the cars threw cable-like feelers with claws on the tips onto Ganapati’s back. She lost her balance, fell, and was dragged back onto the rails.

“Ganapati!” Dyaus screamed. Her cry fell on deaf ears, and the two sets of cars took a firm grip on each side of Ganapati’s body, and began moving in opposite directions, trying to rip her apart. Ganapati smacked the cable-like feelers, trying to dislodge the claws. But her feelers were designed to pick things up and weren’t capable of slicing through the hardened cables. Ganapati’s skin was slowly peeling off. Beneath the thick, dry-resistant skin was nothing but quivering white flesh. Imagine how it would feel to have that flesh exposed to the air. It would hurt. A lot. It hurt! Ganapati howled with pain, toppling over. The cars rolled onto her like she was a mountain, scythes at the ready. Their blades mercilessly slicing her legs. Over and over and over, trying to cut Ganapati’s rubbery limbs off. They swung with full power, not caring if the blades chipped. Veins were severed, blue blood gushing forth. Legs came off. The severed limbs writhed around like new life forms.

The cars moved forward, between the legs. A cable shot into Ganapati’s mouth, sank its hooks in her guts, and dragged it all out. Everything in Ganapati’s belly passed through her mouth, turning her inside-out. Her eyeballs were dragged into her head and then popped out her mouth. Yet her eyes were still moving. Her organs and brain were all encased in the same translucent membrane, and the nerves ran from them to her eyeballs. The scythes sliced open her innards. Her intestines were severed, and the brown refuse inside leaked out. It mingled with the blue blood, becoming an indescribable shade, like mashing all the colors together on a painter’s palette.

With the table set, it was time for dinner. A car moved to the front with two massive needles that had small sacs at the rear. When the needles stabbed Ganapati’s guts, the sacs began swelling up. At the same time, the pile of innards — all that remained of Ganapati — began shriveling. The sacs were absorbent, like leeches, able to inhale vast quantities of blood. As her blood was absorbed, Ganapati’s voice faded.

“Ah! Ah! Ah! Ahhh! Ahhh... aahhh...” And then her soul voice cut out, yet her body was still moving. It was pulsing faintly while secreting a glistening mucus and slithering along.

“Stop!” Dyaus, having finally caught up, swooped down, tackling the train. A feeler swatted her away like a pesky fly. She flapped her wings frantically, but she and Youko went crashing to the ground.

Scythes came after them. Then a grey, slimy, long, mucus-covered creature came scrabbling out of Ganapati’s empty eye sockets. It was Vayu. She couldn’t see at all, but the cries of their souls had given her all she needed to know about the situation outside. The needle-like organs found a new target and pierced her body. Instantly, convulsions ran across the car. Not just the one car, either. Like dominos, the convulsions went from one car to the next. A charred stench filled the air — the smell of flesh burning. The convulsing cars went still, never to move again. The electric current had induced necrosis.

Dyaus staggered forward, desperate to reach Ganapati.

Ganapati was in a frightful state. Everything that should be inside her had come out her mouth. Her blood had been drained away, and her organs sliced open.

“Ganapati! Ganapati, it’s me. It’s me...” Dyaus spoke to her. Of course, there was no reply.

“It’s no use...” Vayu whispered. She was exhausted after generating that much electricity. “But if you pull from the Girls gacha... Maybe we can bring her back. Maybe.”

The proposal enraged Dyaus. “Ganapati’s dead!” she roared. “And it’s all your fault! You’re the one who said we should come here! Why didn’t you come out and fight sooner? You should have died instead of her!”

“In that case... I guess the party’s splitting up.”

Dyaus wasn’t about to end things that easily. Once she hit her boiling point she was hard-wired to go the distance.

“Yeah, it is! This party’s over! But I’m gonna make you pay for this! You have to die for Ganapati!”

Dyaus bit Vayu. Vayu was too exhausted to use her one means of defense, her electricity. She could not resist. Her flesh was torn, and dark red blood welled out.

“Dyaus, stop!”

Youko’s head shot forward, her mandibles closing around Dyaus’ head. But Dyaus wouldn’t stop.

“I’m gonna kill her! She has to die! And I’m gonna do it!”

“No, you’re not!”

Youko increased the pressure in her mandibles. Cracks ran across the chitin shell covering Dyaus’ head. They grew larger, splitting open. The flesh inside exposed itself. The exoskeleton pushed into her innards, forcing them outwards. Her body shook. Her entire body was begging to stay alive. At last the convulsions no longer felt like she was suffering. The head fell off. Dyaus had been split in two. What else could that mean? She was dead. Dyaus was dead. Murdered. Youko had killed her. She had killed her partner on all these adventures. Both her best friend and her greatest rival — and she’d killed her.

Youko looked over at Vayu’s long, slimy body. Vayu seemed to have passed out. But she still had a pulse. She wasn’t dead yet.

It shocked even Youko, but the relief at seeing Vayu safe trumped the horror she felt over killing Dyaus. That was just how important Vayu was to Youko. So important she’d killed Dyaus reflexively, just to protect her.

If she was willing to go that far for her, she would grant her wish. They would find the Girls gacha, and she would reunite her with this Sensei. Youko swore an oath.

IV

Failure! Failure! Failure! Every pull she did came up empty.

Behind Youko, a massive whirlpool swirled. Never before had the word massive seemed like such an understatement. The scale of the whirlpool was beyond the capacity of language.

It was large enough for several small planets to fit inside. In front of this whirlpool was a section of space painted pitch black. It was a perfect rectangle, like it had been sliced out with a knife. This was what had brought Youko here. It was the ultimate goal. The Girls gacha.

Youko was on a gas giant a long way from the planet where her second life had started. She’d survived this world for twenty-four more years than her first life had lasted. She’d stopped counting the days with any precision a long time ago. It was growing difficult for her to remember what it had been like to have a body she couldn’t alter as she pleased.

The day Ganapati died, and she’d killed Dyaus, Youko and Vayu became one. They’d transformed themselves with the points gained from eating the train Girl, Dyaus, and Ganapati. The first thing she’d done was make Vayu part of her own body. Vayu had no eyes or nose and could only survive inside another Girl. To allow that, she’d made her own body larger, creating space for Vayu inside her body cavity.

Youko made herself a myriapod — like a mukade. Out of all the arthropods, this form was most suited for larger sizes. She could survive the increase in size without fundamentally changing the construction of her body. It allowed her to increase her height without the ratio between mass and surface area becoming fatal and suffocating her. She was just increasing the number of segments, the simplest method of making herself larger. And the larger she got the more legs she had and the stronger and faster she was.

Giant mukade Youko briefly made a forest her territory, but soon realized this did not allow her to demonstrate her full potential. There were too many obstructions, and her body was constantly getting tangled up in them. Any environment with lots of other Girls left segments of her body without specialized defense mechanisms the target of frequent attacks. She split her brain across several segments as a countermeasure, but this didn’t entirely resolve the risk of incurring fatal damage.

For lack of better options, Youko started flying. In the air, she didn’t have to worry about any Girls attacking her flanks. She stretched membranes between her legs, gliding. Without bird-like wings, keeping herself aloft required propellent. This was the hydrogen Vayu produced. Rather than make a new organ to serve as an engine, she simply made the tail segment explode to launch herself.

In time, she no longer needed to explode herself. She leveled up her excretory tubes into a single long, sturdy tube. Villus inside the tube had warts stuffed with fuel (a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen) and exploding these warts one after another formed her new engine.

This system proved to have other applications. By pointing her anus at the sky, she could turn herself into a giant cannon. Boasting an extremely high launch speed, the mukade cannon used a series of interior explosions to increase projectile velocity. It was the same principle as multistage rocket propulsion. All she had to do was make pits inside her excretory tube lined with explosive warts so that they wouldn’t interfere with the trajectory of the projectile.

The projectiles evolved, too. At first she soaked excrement in explosive fluids and blew that up, but then learned to use pieces of Vayu instead. Vayu’s electric organs could be adapted into a powerful attack mechanism — electromagnetic pulse bombs. Normally, EMPs release a burst of electromagnetic energy to destroy electronic devices, but they’d adapted this to affect brains as well, by using an EMP frequency that targeted the neuron.

When she fired an EMP bomb from her anus, blanketing an area, the Girls in range were driven mad. It was quite easy to eat mad Girls. She just flew around stretching out her head and snatching them up with her mandibles. Naturally, as a side effect, Youko herself became somewhat mad. But she didn’t mind being a little insane as long as she could grant Vayu’s wish.

Youko looked for the next plan. She had to kill a lot more Girls. She had to kill and eat them. What could help accomplish that? Knowledge from her past life helped here. She remembered a thing called a nuclear bomb. She just had to make one of those.

But if she was going to make a nuclear bomb, she would need to protect herself and Vayu from it. She lined their genes with a lead coating, shielding them from harmful radiation, then burrowed deep in the ground, mining uranium — eating and refining it. As further protection against nuclear disaster, she made a number of additional brains, connecting them wirelessly. These splinter brains monitored the internal reactor she had growing in her guts like a tumor. Her hard work paid off, and she completed the nuclear bomb. The nuclear detonation also caused an EMP blast — two birds with one stone.

By detonating the nuclear bomb, she was also able to go to outer space. The principle was simple. She simply placed herself above the bomb and set it off. The shockwave sent her flying. That was it! A single big nuclear blast would have torn her body to pieces, but by detonating a number of small bombs at intervals her ascension was quite smooth. In space, her segmented construction came in handy again. She could explode her body parts, propelling herself around. There were already quite a lot of Girls living out here. Even an outfit gacha. This helped Youko alter herself further.

“Vayu, you’ll see Sensei again soon,” she said.

No answer came. Living as a lump of flesh with no eyes or nose had taken its toll. The only thing she ever heard from Vayu these days was the occasional whisper. “Sensei... Sensei...”

Youko’s flesh grew even larger. Her total length might have been over five kilometers. She resembled a wingless dragonfly or a skeletal fish. Her entire body was covered in a shell made of ceramic woven with carbon filaments. This protected her from the vacuum of space and from radiation.

Her tail was a skirt-shaped thruster. In a circle around it were a number of wings. These were not designed for flight; they were heat sinks. Their function was to cool the surplus heat generated by the nuclear fusion used to propel herself forward.

The nuclear fusion was created with concentrated laser beams. Fuel ejected from the thruster would be struck by the countless laser emission organs that lined the hem of the skirt, the beams surrounding the fuel from all directions. The beams applied so much pressure to the fuel that fusion occurred.

The fuel was liquid hydrogen coated in an oil film. The organs that ejected the fuel were based on the spinnerets spiders used. But instead of secreting silk, they secreted oils, coating the liquid hydrogen as it was transported through her body. In gravity-less environments this created near perfect spheres.

The thruster grew more and more narrow towards the top, becoming a segmented rod. This went on for a bit before reaching the head. It was a head like a giant hornet, except with four eyes. Two giant compound fore-eyes covered a quarter of the face, and two smaller compound eyes faced her rear. On the end of her face was a mouth, pursed like a caricature, the mandibles extending from that. The pursed mouth was constructed like an airlock, protecting her innards from the vacuum.

Youko spent her days like any other Girl who lived in outer space. She fought, killed, and ate. Delicate control over the water vapor generated by the surplus heat of the fusion allowed her to approach the other Girls, grip them with her mandibles, stab them with her mouth, and slurp up their flesh. She did it all for Vayu. So she could be reunited with Sensei.

As she expanded the range of her territory in space, she began hearing rumors about the Girls gacha. Girls skilled at astrology had discovered something strange orbiting a gas giant towards the outside of the solar system.

Youko deemed this rumor worthy of investigation. She perfected her nuclear fusion system so she could head for the gas giant and voyaged forth on a lonely journey. It was a long trip, one that would take her several years with her current abilities, but what choice did she have?

On her way, Youko was completely alone. Vayu was long past being able to speak at all. There were no other Girls. She couldn’t bring herself to send any more friend requests. She was afraid she’d end up killing those she cared about again. So she spent her days gazing at the unmoving stars.

The only thing she needed to do during her trip was turn herself 180 degrees and start decelerating. Trajectory calculations were long since performed instinctively by her oversized cerebellum.

When the gas giant finally came into view, she felt saved by it. It was gorgeous. So many shades of red and blue and white. It was a massive storm. Just the sight of it left her awestruck.

She soon found the unnatural rectangle. Darkness cut a swatch out of the planet behind it. She was sure. This was the Girls gacha.

The gacha taxis she’d had since she was an amoeba was stimulated once more.

Youko approached the gacha. That familiar sensation drew near.

As the feeling grew closer, it took physical form. It was beautiful. A beautiful sensation. Youko knew this gacha would require an immense amount of points. It would have the appetite to end all appetites. It would be a bottomless pit. Youko believed she had saved up quite a lot of points. She had converted the flesh and blood of the Girls she ate each day into a hoard of points. Even then, she could only pull from the gacha a few times.

But she had to pull. The gacha was right in front of her. It was Youko’s duty to pull.

The gacha and Youko had a wordless conversation. The gacha did not have a soul the way the Girls did. But she could feel that it wanted her points. And she knew that the prize would allow her to revive Vayu’s Sensei.

She inserted her points and pulled.

Failure.

Failure, failure, failure, failure, failure, failure.

In no time, all her points were gone.

Youko didn’t hesitate. She immediately whaled. What value did her life hold? Her mind had long since died. Not the day of the accident and her reincarnation, but the day Dyaus and Ganapati died. Death had led to Youko’s rebirth, and death had led to her dying once more. Before coming to this world, in her time spent under the control of the mobile game, Youko had been dead. But meeting Dyaus, Ganapati, and Vayu had brought her back to life. The reincarnation her death brought had given new life to her mind. And then Youko had died once more. The only thought remaining in her mind was to save Vayu. Vayu was the one reason she had left to go on living.

Her health, lifespan, volition, and existence drained away. When she’d first come to this world, Youko had let those drain away without much thought. She’d done the same thing before being reincarnated. But the revival of her mind had made Youko afraid to lose herself like this. Even so, she had to overcome that fear.

Drain, drain, drain. The points her health, lifespan, volition, and existence provided all went right into the gacha.

Failure. Failure. Failure. Failure.

Each time she drained her health, lifespan, volition, and existence, she felt like her body was growing lighter. Something was lost. A hollow feeling, like a tunnel being drilled through her. Little by little, the core of herself grew thinner. She was indistinct. The place and time she existed in were wavering, no longer seeming like they had any real basis. It was like her heart was filling with water, diluting it. Like the atoms within her were vaporizing one by one, and her construction was growing more diffuse. She forgot how to think. She couldn’t even think about what thinking had been like. Drain... Drain... Drain... I’m draining away.

When all of her was drained, the universe began to warp. In the center of it, a light was floating. A warm light. A light of salvation, one accepting of all things. The light went right through Youko. It felt so wonderful. There was nothing but light in her world, now. As long as this light existed, that was enough for Youko. Light, please, just let me stay like this forever. The light had a word carved into it that validated the entirety of Youko’s life.

“Winner.”

Had a trillion years passed? Had it been a single second? She couldn’t tell. Blacks began to seep back into the world. Black holes forming in the light she had thought perfect. The holes expanded, swallowing up the light. Not yet! Just let me be here a little longer! Youko screamed. She had no mouth or tongue or voice box but she screamed anyway. But the blackness kept expanding as if her pleas did not exist. Her time was up. Youko had drained her entire life away. She’d lost the right to live in this world. She couldn’t enjoy the mobile game any longer. It was all over.

Death.

Youko had died.

And in death, she knew the reason for everything. She knew who Vayu’s Sensei was, what the soul was, why she’d been reincarnated. She knew why mobile game addiction occurred, and what mobile games really were.

It all started with the birth of the universe. The instant vibrations occurred in the inflaton field, the universe had a soul.

What was a soul? An extra dimension linked to the 11th dimension.

Consider human consciousness. The most remarkable quality of it is that it lives within the realm of possibilities. Seeing red does not mean merely seeing red in the world that exists before your eyes. You see red. Not blue, not green, not yellow, but red. When this occurs, people compare what they see to other possibilities. But what are those other possibilities? The true nature of possibilities means not being controlled by what exists in the real world. Which makes it simple. Human consciousness makes perception possible by comparing the universe you are in to other universes. This technique is possible because the consciousness incorporates the soul, an extra dimension.

Countless varied universes exist in the 11th dimension. The soul is linked to a network of universes. Each time humans perceive something, their soul searches the conditions of other universes. You’d think it would take time to search so many universes, but don’t worry. In the 11th dimension, light speed, the fastest speed attainable, is ten to the power of thirty times faster. This is the original speed light traveled at. That dawdling 300,000 kilometers a second is only forced upon it because the 11th dimension has been scrunched up inside the third, and light has to deal with all kinds of interference that doesn’t let it take the shortest distance.

By searching other universes via the soul, humans are able to make all sorts of things possible. Perceiving the emotions of another human requires searching universes where that other person is yourself. Perceiving the past and the future involves searching universes where those times are the present.

Additionally, human culture is made possible by the soul. Fiction, science, logic, and religion are all only possible through using the soul to search other universes.

What is fiction? A search of another universe where fictional things actually exist.

What is science? A search of another universe where scientific models actually exist.

What is logic? A search of another universe where an ideal society based on logical principles actually exists.

What is religion? A search of another universe where mystic beings actually exist.

Unlike humans, computers have no souls. When they see red, they only interpret it as a set of wavelengths that exist in the real world. Computers have no way of escaping reality.

Why? Because computers do not have genes that have absorbed and made use of extra dimensions within their internal environments. The process of human evolution has allowed us to acquire these genes.

130,800,000,000 years ago, the giant soul that existed at the moment the universe was born was squeezed into the third dimension as the expansion of the universe and creation of matter caused it to lose energy. A few souls entered a supercooled state, surviving, if scattered to the corners of the universe.

Humans used the particle-sized door to the 11th dimension to evolve a consciousness. By absorbing scattered extra dimensions into themselves, they learned how to use an extra organ in their brains called the soul.

The soul contained free will, the means to break free of determinism. Why? Because the soul was able to break the law of conservation of energy and the second law of thermodynamics.

The mechanism behind this lay in the changes to light speed within the soul. According to Einstein’s formula, energy was equivalent to mass times the speed of light squared. The speed of light is generally assumed to be a fixed number but within the soul it’s actually variable. Each time the soul takes action the speed of light changes, creating a vast quantity of latent energy. Let us call this free will energy.

Free will energy released mankind from the yoke of determinism. By creating this entirely new energy, we escaped the schedule set by the law of causality.

Free will energy also saved the universe itself from destruction. By shattering the second law of thermodynamics, the whole of the universe became an orderly cosmos.

Unlike the soul, evolution was a deterministic system. What was evolution? A Turing machine running DNA as its language. Evolution was a Turing machine that calculated genetic information with a high adaptability rating based on DNA variation. Turing machines were a model created to understand the true nature of calculations. Any and all software information processing can be understood by translating it to the operations of a Turing machine.

Turing machines were a deterministic process. Imagine, if you will, the world as depicted in Conway’s Game of Life. Using this model, we can learn about the evolution the Turing machine produces. The Game of Life works thusly: imagine a two-dimensional grid of infinite size. The spaces in the grid are called cells. Each of those cells contains only two conditions — living, or dead. There we apply the following four principles.

Rule of Birth: If a dead cell is in contact with three living cells, the dead condition changes to living.

Rule of Survival: If a living cell is in contact with two or three living cells, the cell remains living.

Rule of Underpopulation: If a living cell is in contact with one or less living cells, the cell becomes dead.

Rule of Overpopulation: If a living cell is in contact with four or more living cells, the cell becomes dead.

With these four principles, given sufficient time and space, it will eventually evolve until a self-replicating cell pattern is born. Cell patterns demonstrate a variety of survival strategies, and it’s likely some of these will even develop intelligence. But this is a world of flawless determinism. The initial pattern determines everything that will happen in the future.

However, there are problems that are impossible for a Turing machine to solve. This is called the halting problem. Turing machines are unable to determine if a specific program will reach an eventual halt or continue infinitely. This is the background principle supporting evolution’s productivity and agony. Evolution must continue producing living things indefinitely to calculate their fitness. These calculations are driven by natural selection, unrolled in the test grounds of bloody conflict.

The soul is an existence superior to a Turing machine. It can bring information from other universes to the universe through the anti-deterministic free will energy. We could call it a super Turing machine, a Turing machine with an oracle program equipped to allow it to get past the halting problem.

With the birth of the super Turing machine called the soul, the Turing machine called evolution became outdated — this should have spelled its end.

But evolution remained. Why?

With the birth of the soul, evolution was about to be selected out.

Systems evolve in the face of selection pressure. Evolution itself was such a system.

Evolution evolved to accommodate the soul.

The evolution of evolution was not that unusual. Before it ran on DNA, evolution’s language was RNA. As the environment changes, the system of evolution was forced to change, too.

Once again, evolution evolved. So what lay at the end of this? Dinosaurs evolved into birds. Monkeys evolved into humans. What did evolution evolve into?

Evolution evolved into mobile games.

If you look closely at mobile game systems, you can see the vestiges of evolution in them. The gacha is birth, with the sudden mutation that goes along with it; the points you spend on the gacha are the energy and opportunity required to engage in reproduction. The normal gacha was the relatively inexpensive asexual reproduction, while sexual reproduction was the premium gacha, requiring a significant price. So what was whaling? Whaling was the addition of free will energy to jump start evolution within the game. Evolution is not born from nothing. As a deterministic process under the limits of thermodynamics, it always demands energy from outside sources. When the language it ran on was DNA, evolution required energy from the sun. When it evolved into a mobile game, it required free will energy from the soul.

Mobile games — those were the organs made when evolution evolved to harvest free will energy from the soul. They used approval as bait to lure souls to it, feeding off their free will energy. The history of life shows that evolving systems routinely make use of the threat to themselves. For example, when cyanobacteria were covering the Earth with oxygen, oxygen was poisonous to life at the time. However, faced with this danger, aerobic bacteria evolved that could make use of the oxygen. By playing mobile games, humans were wasting the free will energy they should have been directing outwards. It was used not to maintain the order of the universe, but simply to expand mobile gaming. By continuing to play mobile games, free will was lost. The destruction of the law of conservation of energy and the second law of thermodynamics caused by the birth of the soul was being repaired by mobile games. Freedom was lost, and determinism ruled the universe once more.

Further evolution occurred between the mobile games evolution had evolved into. The most successful of these was Evolution Girls. In order to more effectively harvest free will energy, Evo Gals hastened the expansion of mobile gaming. Mobile games spread more rapidly than the operating companies anticipated. The companies believed to be managing the games were, in fact, simply being used by the games.

First, all national systems were converted to mobile games. Medical insurance and pension payouts were redistributed via gacha pulls. The constitution’s protections for human rights were interpreted to mean a minimum guaranteed number of gacha pulls. A healthy life with the acceptable minimal cultural value was considered one in which you could login to a mobile game daily. As time passed, privacy rights and voting rights were also divvied up and turned into gacha prizes. In time, gacha prizes included not just rights, but bodies. This was the dawn of the age where you needed at least seven hearts to get any respect. At first, they only handled hearts, kidneys, and other human organs, but to stimulate even more desires they began including all conceivable body parts. All humans became Girls, and they began providing free will energy just by pulling from gacha. Points became free will energy itself.

When the universe was born, souls anticipated all of this. That’s why they’d created a countermeasure. The universal soul created a backup system in the 11th dimension. The backup was a collection of extra dimensions, a scout probe soul dropped into the third dimension’s universe to monitor the movements of mobile games. The backup system lurked in the 11th dimension like a giant octopus, lowering souls into the third dimension. One of these was Youko.

Normally, a soul would never be reincarnated. The reason for this was that dying broke apart the extra dimensions implanted in the brain, and the same arrangement would never again come together. However, the souls that were part of the universal soul’s backup scout probe program were able to be reincarnated. Upon death, the soul inside them would not be scattered internally like normal, but reabsorbed by the 11th dimension backup, and placed back in the universe once more. Why would it go to all that trouble? To avoid having free will data absorbed by the mobile games. Free will data was born from the changes to light speed. The backup floating in the 11th dimension could not generate free will energy on its own; it needed points of contact with the universe. Those points of contact were the reincarnated. When the reincarnated died, the energy they’d spent their lives making wasn’t absorbed by the mobile games but preserved by the backup. By repeating this process a great many times, it planned to store up enough energy to resist the mobile games.

To fight the mobile games, it needed to fully understand them. Youko had been chosen as one of these reincarnated souls to fight the mobile games’ control of the universe and to provide free will and resist determinism. Youko, who had fallen deeper in the swamp of mobile games than anyone.

Youko drifted through the 11th dimension. There was no time in the universe beneath her. If there was any, it was a sham. Time. The true nature of it required free will. The true nature of time lay in the distinction between the present, past, and future. But in a deterministic universe only the present exists. There is no past or future. Determinism only allows for a time-like progression based on the laws of causality. All that existed is a privileged point in time we call the present. These points in time are related to each other, in that one occurs before or after another, but that’s all. In a universe where free will had shattered determinism the real present exists. The point at which free will activates is the present. By activating free will, we can create a future that had not yet existed. As opposed to the deterministic universe, in which all points in time exist simultaneously.

In a universe with free will, time traveling into the past causes paradoxes. But in a deterministic universe, time travel can do no such thing. Even if you traveled into the past, all events and actions are predetermined, so history can’t be changed, and no paradoxes occur. Therefore, in a deterministic universe controlled by mobile games, time travel is possible.

Youko sent her soul into the past and was reincarnated. She became a number of different Girls and had all sorts of adventures. And she experienced death countless times. Each time she died, she stored up a little more free will energy.

One day, she was reunited with Vayu. Vayu was still very young, and Youko served as her guide. Vayu called her Sensei and worshipped her. Youko realized once again that her feelings for Vayu were no small consideration. She’d lived thousands of lives, but Vayu was the only one who’d ever made her feel like this. She wished they could be together forever. She wanted to hear Vayu’s voice. She was lonely, suffering, and starving, but with Vayu, all those things felt good.

Her time with Vayu came to an end. That was destiny. In a deterministic universe, there was no way to alter her fate. But Youko spread the seeds to defeat the mobile game. She told Vayu about the Girls gacha, promised they would meet again someday, and went to her death.

And now Youko was embarking on her final reincarnation. She reentered the universe as the prize she had won by gambling on the Girls gacha with her own life.

When a Girl spawned, they pulled from the outfit gacha. This is where Youko used the power of her soul. She activated all the free will energy she’d saved up, bucking the world’s determinism. She changed the gacha’s drop rates. Information from a universe with different drop rates flowed into this one.

A fanfare sounded. And not the normal fanfare. A solemn, mystic melody that burrowed its way deep into the center of the brain. There was a swirl of light, and the card she’d drawn was revealed.

GR. God Rare.

GR: Graviton Body Set.

Gravitons — besides the soul, the one particle able to access the 11th dimension. This card gave her a body composed of gravitons. It allowed her to interact with the 11th dimension in the flesh.

Graviton legs, graviton legs, graviton feelers, graviton heart, graviton mouth, graviton eyes, and a graviton brain. With the full set of cards equipped, Youko flew out into the universe. She could easily surpass the limits of the third dimension. She took a glance around the universe and saw a Girl’s corpse floating in space. One of Youko’s bodies, shed a great number of reincarnations back. Vayu was inside that corpse.

“Just wait,” Youko whispered.

Before her was a universe controlled by mobile games, one in which the true nature of time had been lost. Free will energy was harvested and all things were decided based on the laws of causality. Humans were being herded by mobile games, and the universe was hurtling relentlessly towards its doom. Voices of suffering echoed through the universe, though space, and through time. “It hurts! Help! Save me!”

Girls were killing each other, eating each other, parasiting off each other. Their suffering filled every corner of the universe. Screams echoed from all directions. The sounds of flesh rendered, guts gouged, eyes crushed, brains eaten from the inside out. The smell of blood, the odor of spinal fluid, the stench of half-eaten rotting organs. Girls had no way of escaping this slaughter. The only way for them to survive was to kill others. In the midst of this living hell, there were rare glimpses of friendship and budding love, but these soon became mere alliances designed to slaughter more effectively. Just watching this was enough to tear Youko apart. So much suffering. So much pain. So much fear.

This universe must be refuted! Youko’s rage drew forth free will energy. A number of gravitons were drawn from gravity fields affected by that energy.

“This must end! I’ll end it! Right here and now!”

Youko unleashed all her gravitons at the mobile games. At the mobile games in all directions in time. The gravitons invaded the universes, acting powerfully, but with short range. Instantaneous micro black holes were created, vanishing a moment later. All mobile games were converted to pure heat. Free will was released. The shackles of determinism were removed from the universe. The possibility of escaping the blood-soaked fate mandated by the mobile games was now available.

With the death of mobile games, false time vanished, too. Time with no present, no past and no future no longer existed. The very fact that Evo Gals had once controlled the Earth was no longer real.

Time began a do-over. On a route where mobile games never gained control of anyone’s souls.

As her timeline faded, Youko returned to the universe. To Vayu’s soul.

“Vayu!”

“Are you... Youko? Are you... Sensei?”

“Yes! I am Youko and Sensei! I missed you so much. I’m so happy to see you!”

“I... I missed you, too.”

Their souls embraced. No matter what else happened, they would be together. No matter what happened, they would never forget each other’s names. They promised each other this.

And their timeline grew hazy and disappeared.

Epilogue

Youko opened her eyes.

She looked around her. Her room looked just as it always did. Nothing strange about that.

Weird. It was like she was waking from a very long dream.

She felt like she was forgetting something. Something very important. Like she had something stuck between her teeth that wouldn’t come out. She racked her brains for a while, but nothing shook loose.

Maybe staying up all night playing mobile games had given her nightmares.

Youko opened her phone. She reflectively tapped the Evo Gals icon, but it just gave her an error, refusing to launch. For some reason, she didn’t feel at all disappointed. She actually felt rather relieved.

She was starving. She opened the fridge but it was empty. Oh well. She’d have to pop down to the store. She opened the door and found the sun was just rising. It was a beautiful sunrise. She drifted down the road, feeling good.

“Ow! Hey, watch where you’re going!”

Her shoulder had bumped a woman drinking from a can of beer. This woman had rumpled short hair, and an androgynous face, like a prepubescent boy. It was kind of a cool look, really, but she must be really drunk, because her face was beet red all the way to the neck.

“What if something happened to me? That blood would be on your hands!”

Just hearing her voice annoyed Youko.

“Now, now, let’s all stay calm here.”

Fortunately, the woman’s companion stepped in to soothe things over. She was rather tall. Maybe even over 180 centimeters. She had long black hair that traced a gentle wave all the way down her back, soft eyes, and seemed a really peaceful person. She put her arms around the angry woman like she was calming a small child.

“Sorry. Once her fuse blows she loses all sense of proportion.”

The drunk woman swore under her breath but allowed herself to be pulled away. Both of them seemed familiar to Youko, somehow. She’d never met them before, but she felt like she had.

She was in a very odd mood today. Trying to shake it off, she did what she always did, and pulled her phone out of her pocket. The error was still on the screen. She tapped the screen a few more times as she walked.

“Look out!”

Thin arms wrapped around Youko’s waist, pulling her back. She was so shocked she dropped her phone.

A black shadow raced by, crushing the phone under it. The sheer weight of the vehicle ground the phone to dust. It was a six-ton truck, inches from her nose.

“Where were you looking? You almost died!” said the voice behind her. Youko knew that voice from somewhere. She just couldn’t remember where.

She turned around, and saw a petite girl, her arms still around Youko’s waist.

She’d almost died. As the realization hit her, fear came with it. Her knees buckled, and she nearly fell over.

“You can’t collapse here! Come on, on your feet!”

The girl held out her hand. She was wearing a blazer — she must be on her way to school. She had pale skin like porcelain, and the way the light hit it, it was almost blinding. Her hair was loosely bound at the back, but when it blew in the wind Youko could tell how clean it was. She felt suddenly ashamed that she hadn’t showered at all.

“Thanks,” she said, taking the hand, and rising to her feet. The feeling of déjà vu intensified. She’d never met this girl before, but for some reason she felt very important to her.

“Are you OK?” the girl said, peering into her face. “You’re crying.”

She was. Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Youko had no idea why. They were just quietly welling up with no signs of stopping.

“So are you,” she said, brushing her finger across the girl’s cheek. The girl was crying, too.

“Huh? Why... Am I...?” From her confused expression, Youko could tell the girl didn’t know why she was crying, either.

They stood there for a while staring at each other, letting the tears flow. Then, without another word, they embraced. Neither knew why, but both felt like they must never part again, no matter what happened.