Interlude: The First One, or So It Was Told

“And there he goes…” whispered the girl to herself as she watched the figure disappear into the glowing gate. “God I am, yet God I’m not. If I were truly all-powerful and all-knowing, I wouldn’t have had to ask a human child to do this for me.”

“Have we still heard nothing from the Administrators over there?”

A figure suddenly appeared behind the girl. It was one of the blond-haired beauties with wings she’d shooed away a while ago.

“Not even a peep. I swear, it’s not like I bite, and I told them I don’t want the administrative privileges back, but they just refuse to believe me. Is the throne of a god really that appealing?” asked the girl with a shrug, her tone slightly incredulous. The lady shook her head.

“I cannot comment on the throne,” she replied, “seeing as I have never sat upon it.”

“You haven’t? Really? You wanna try one somewhere?”

“Surely, you jest. That is a task far too onerous for the likes of one such as myself,” said the lady, declining the offer with a small bow.

“True,” the girl said, nodding in agreement, “that’s probably the wise answer. It’s a lot of trouble for no gain. In fact, if someone offered to do my job for me, I’d take them up on it in a heartbeat. I’d love to live as a carefree human.”

“You wish to surrender your infinite lifespan and near-omnipotent powers to step into the cycle of reincarnation with a life of barely one hundred years and your wisdom and experiences wiped clean each time?” the lady asked with mild surprise. She was met with a blank look that clearly suggested the girl did not see the question coming.

“You think it’s weird?”

“I certainly cannot see myself considering the same.”

“How long has it been since you were brought into existence?”

“If my memory is correct, I believe approximately a millennium ago,” answered the lady as she searched through her vast store of memories, trying to dig up its singular origin. As she did, the expression on the girl’s face gradually shifted from blankness to comprehension.

“Mmm, I guess you wouldn’t understand, then.”

“Is that so?”

“In my case, it’s been about eleven billion two hundred and sixty million years since I formed. That’s what I remember, anyway. A lot of things have happened during that time, and I still remember every last one of them down to the smallest detail. And in case you’re wondering, yes, it’s nothing but pure agony.”

The girl let out a sigh. It was a small one, but it was also deep. There was a weight to that sigh, coupled with a darkness in her eyes when she glanced up, that sent a chill down the lady’s spine. At once, she realized that for her, a being of mere millennia, the sheer depths of that gaping abyss she saw was entirely unfathomable.

“I’m tired… I’ve had enough… Such emotions, I’ve already forgotten. I’ve forgotten how long ago I’ve forgotten. I simply create, destroy, and create again. I’m but a vessel of memories — a mere construct of remembrance — for all that has and will transpire. If this is what it means to be God, then… is there anything left to do but laugh?”

“That is…”

The lady tried to speak, but no words came. She bit her lip, realizing the true extent of the girl’s existence and the immeasurable vastness of her time. There were no words she could say that the being before her had not already heard. There was no comfort she could offer.

“With that said, though, there is a high note every once in a while. Taking a boot to the face, for example. Even for me, that’s definitely on the rarer side of things,” said the girl in a noticeably lighter tone. It was obviously an attempt to change the topic and brighten the atmosphere, but the lady decided to play along.

“By rarer, do you mean to imply that it has happened a few times in the past?”

“Well, it’s a first for a human child. If we’re talking about angels, I’d say maybe once in a millennium or so…”

“So, some basic arithmetic would deduce that you have been kicked over a million times.”

“Yeah. Can you believe it? I gave birth to them, for God’s sake. So heartless.”

While the lady thought that the girl could drastically decrease her incidence of foot-to-face encounters simply by acting more reasonably, she had the good sense to keep that to herself. After all, mobilizing eighty percent of the entire angel population just to welcome a single human child was guaranteed to garner some ill will. While lower-ranked angels might have been indifferent, her close aids would definitely have felt the urge to give her a good kick or two.

“Let’s put those issues aside and discuss something else. We should figure out what equipment we’re going to give Renya. We can’t send him there empty-handed and expect him to survive. That’d be just cruel.”

“True. But since this is you we are talking about, I assume you have already prepared a list of items?”

“Yeah, I guess I have. Wanna take a look?”

The lady was not surprised. She had been dealing with the girl for a good number of years and was intimately familiar with her definition of “figure out,” by which she meant “inform of the fact that appropriate items have been selected and probably already sent to the corresponding world.” At this point, being shown the list was often a formality and she had no actual say in the matter. Resisting the urge to point out that she was not even in any position to say no, the lady approached the girl, who was poking at a new window she’d just materialized. She eyed its contents.

“That is a surprisingly unremarkable list.”

It contained medicine and food, some cash on hand, as well as weapons and armor. Quite ordinary. So much so, the lady thought, that she saw no need to seek another’s approval.

“Personally, I’d have given him maybe a weapon from around here. Some godly thing, you know? But my aides, ugh, they were like, no, there’s this and that and blah blah blah. I told them that considering we’re the ones asking him to cross over into that world, we should give him some amount of power to guarantee his safety, but nope, they just wouldn’t listen.”

“It would be a problem if whatever you gave Renya remained in that world after his death,” the lady pointed out. As far as she knew, the people in the world that Renya traveled to believed that Artifact-class items were created by the gods, but they were wrong. Items like those had only two possible origins: they were either created by the Administrators and left in the world, or made by humans through some miraculous coincidence and people just decided to believe it was a gift from the gods. If real gods actually went and made a weapon with their own hands, its power would defy the comprehension of mere humans. Were such a thing left behind in a world, it would almost certainly be the cause of much trouble. In that sense, the opposition of the girl’s aides to her idea was doubtlessly justified. With those thoughts in mind, the lady’s gaze stopped on a certain row of the list.

“Uh… What might this ‘shinai’ item be?”

“It’s a bamboo sword. Some parts of Renya’s old world used it as a practice weapon. It’s light and tough, but it’s about as non-lethal as weapons get. Renya has experience in kendo, so he should be familiar with how to handle it.”

“Have you shown this list to your aides?” asked the lady. Her voice shook a little.

“Yeah. Why?” The girl replied once again with a blank look.

“Did they read the detailed explanation of each item?”

“Nah, they sort of skimmed it and were like, ‘K, this looks fine.’”

The lady looked at the list again, her mind reeling with shock. It was likely that the girl’s aides knew what a shinai was. For those angels, it was probably just some piece of bamboo, so when they saw it in the list, they just waved it off and gave their approval. For her, however, she had no idea what it was. Therefore, she had to read the appended explanation properly. That was how she noticed.

“This bamboo sword has got the ‘Indestructible’ property on it, yes?”

“Well, duh. You realize regular bamboo swords are literally just bamboo, right? They’d break if you hit anything with them.”

From the girl’s perspective, it was a mere compromise — one made reluctantly after her aides’ objections — to sending Renya a proper weapon. In a world where people swung around weapons with actual sharpened blades, she doubted there would be much point to carrying a stick of bamboo. Its lightness limited its power, and it would last only a few hits at most in a clash against a real sword. Worst case scenario, the opponent’s blade might just cut clean through it. For a gift from God herself, it was pitifully feeble, and she was not okay with that. Therefore, she added the “Indestructible” property to it. Even if it was made of bamboo, as long as it did not break, it would stand a fair chance against a real sword. Of course, being hit by it would still hurt exactly as much as a piece of bamboo, which is to say, not very much at all. Since kendo practitioners also used the shinai to block attacks, she figured that as long as Renya could land hits without getting hit himself, he would be fine. She was, in fact, a hundred and twenty percent confident in his ability to do exactly that.

“Could you perhaps enlighten me,” said the lady, acutely aware of the mistake in the girl’s logic, “of what happens when an object with the ‘Indestructible’ property collides with a destructible one?”

“Well, it’d— AH!” After a short moment of consideration, the girl shrieked as realization dawned on her. “Okay, so, when an indestructible object collides with a destructible one, the destructible one breaks without exception, right?”

“That is correct. Without. Exception. Let that sink in for a minute. In other words, the bamboo sword you gave Renya is imbued with the ability to shatter absolutely anything and everything, be it physical or ethereal. So long as it is destructible, if he keeps hitting it, he will destroy it! Do you see the problem here?!”

“Right. That means he can walk up to literally anything, whack it with his bamboo, and watch it crack. Castle walls, dragonscale, mithril and orichalcum, it’d rip through all of them… He can even nullify magecraft by wiping out barriers, spells, and seals!”

“You did not give him a weapon. You turned him into a walking armory! Is there anything you can do to fix it right now?!”

“I already sent the damn thing over! I can technically still change the properties of an item in another world, but I’d have to override the Administrator, and that’d have some serious repercussions for that world. Ugh, I’m such an idiot!”

The girl squatted down with her head in her hands. Seeing the regret on her face, the lady decided that maybe she had been too hard on the girl. At least she recognized just how serious the issue was and reflected on her mistake. Her repentance would not fix the terrible problem she caused, but it was worth something. Or, it would have been, were it not for the girl’s next words.

“What was I thinking, putting such an awesome ability on a bamboo sword of all things?!”

“That is not the problem!”

Her gaze fixed on the crouching girl, the lady pulled up her leg and swung it forward in a wide arc. The hem of her clothes rolled all the way up to the top of her thighs, but she paid it no mind, instead focusing all her attention on unleashing a full-blown soccer kick at the girl’s head. In terms of pure muscle power, there was a considerable difference between Renya and her. He was a human. She was an angel.

With no time to block, the girl took the kick squarely in the head and shot up into the sky. Spinning like a soccer ball, she spiralled wildly through the air before landing back on the ground with a heavy thud.

“Wh-Who’d have thought this would happen twice in such a short time…” groaned the girl as she crawled back with one hand pressed against the spot where she was kicked.

“To be fair,” said the lady, “some things such as iron or mithril can probably take a few hits and still survive. Not everything is going to melt like butter. Human bodies, though, will! Skin, muscle, bone, whatever. It will chew right through them! Non-lethal? No. That thing is going to be very, very lethal.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Being indestructible, it might as well be a club. An insanely sturdy club that’s light enough to be swung like a bamboo sword. Man, I definitely botched this one.”

“On top of that, things produced by magecraft have no physical toughness, so they will be falling apart left and right.”

“Some might be a little more resistant depending on the scale and strength of the spell, but yeah. Ultimately, there’s nothing it can’t destroy, so it can technically nullify all forms of magecraft. Pretty crazy.”

“Just so you know, nothing in that world has the ‘Indestructible’ property. No such object exists there.”

That meant it was impossible to find another item like the bamboo sword in question in that world, no matter how hard one looked. Its rarity alone would make it priceless. Such concerns, however, seemed to have gone right over the girl’s head.

“Indestructibility is a doozy, huh. I mean, it’s on every single weapon around here, so it never occurred to me how significant it was.”

“The only silver lining in all this is the fact that the sword is not sharp.”

Otherwise, it would be an unstoppable blade that never dulled. It was terrifying to imagine the effects that would have on the world.

“Hmm, I guess there’s no point crying over spilled milk. Still, seeing the ‘Indestructible’ property on some dinky little bamboo sword offends my artistic sensibilities. That needs to be remedied.”

“For the love of— Ugh, whatever. I don’t care anymore,” mumbled the lady.

“It’s gotta look cooler! I need to remake it into something awesome! You know those swords protagonists use in those games? Yeah! Something like that!”

“Go choke on your stupid swords, you dumbass deity!”

For the third time in one day, the girl who styled herself God was sent flying through the air by a kick to the head.