Chapter 156 - The Strategist VIII

“Wait! Hold on, Mister!” Oh Dokseo screamed.

“Doesn't this turn all the God of Alienation-class firepower we prepared into a bunch of nobodies? Aren't we fucked?”

“Hmm.”

We had witnessed the exact same cliché, yet my first association was Vegeta, while Oh Dokseo's was “a nobody.” A fine example of how otaku frames of reference change from generation to generation.

Unfortunately, this wasn't the right time to discuss subculture's “images and symbols.” The Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School students—the night class—were getting their asses handed to them by All Things at Play in real time.

“Eek, eek, eek, eek!”

“Want purple toilet paper? Want purple toilet paper?”

“Thuuump... Thuuump...”

Dark, pixelated NPCs respawned inside the low-resolution, 16-bit domain All Things at Play had spread. They scurried over and beat down the ghosts of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School.

They were necromancer NPCs.

Gloomy robes. Bizarrely twisted staves. Even decorative candles far too feeble to provide any light.

Their fashion alone declared their determination to become shut-ins. They radiated an inborn social-outcast energy that not even blurry 16-bit graphics could conceal.

“Heeheehee, the place is crawling with wraiths.”

“I'll capture you and make you serve me!”

“The Thump-Thump-Thump Ghost, is it? I'll hang you from a pendulum clock and make you its alarm. The sound of a human head smashing is positively enchanting.”

The ghosts were scared out of their wits.

These days, millennial and Gen Z necromancers might enroll in academies, find romance, and splash money around as diamond-spoon heirs to conglomerates, but in RPG settings, necromancers still shared the bottom rung of the social ladder with rogues.

Despite appearances, the ghosts of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School were a sociable bunch who lived together in cheerful solidarity. They fell helplessly before the necromancer NPCs' resentment-fueled black magic.

“You bastards!”

Cheon Yohwa, the awakened who had once proclaimed herself the Korean Peninsula's original necromancer, flew into a rage.

“Stop bullying my kids!”

THWACK!

Cheon Yohwa sprinted over and smashed a necromancer's head with a kick. On a battlefield where NPCs and ghosts alike had been reduced to 16-bit graphics, she alone still flaunted live-action visuals rendered with overwhelmingly superior technology.

Even with the descent into a human body, even with the cliché debuff that weakened enemies once they became allies, Cheon Yohwa was still Cheon Yohwa.

Red aura flew in every direction, along with the NPCs' 16-bit blood spatters. She devastated the band of necromancers in an instant.

“I-it's the Demon King!”

“Huh?”

“The Demon King has appeared!”

As the necromancers cried out, blue wings fluttered overhead.

[The ‘Operator of All Things at Play’ points out that Gapless has appeared on behalf of the monsters and is slaughtering humans.]

[Activating the ‘Appearance of the Demon King’ cliché, along with the ‘Humanity Unites to Defeat the Demon King’ cliché.]

BZZZT!

New NPCs appeared in All Things at Play's domain. Their graphics were still inferior, but each character's distinctive features stood out clearly, like pixel art crafted by a master.

They were priest and Saintess NPCs.

“Behold the deeds of that utterly wicked Demon King!”

“Necromancers have strayed from the path of benevolence and righteousness. Even so, they are human. They cannot be compared to monsters, born inhuman.”

“O God! Help us!”

The white-magic priests who had appeared after the black-magic necromancers all began firing ranged holy magic at Cheon Yohwa.

She screamed.

“Eeeeeeeek!”

She had every reason to scream. Wherever the holy magic struck, her live-action graphics regressed to 16-bit graphics. Her right arm and left leg crackled with static as their image quality dropped.

Even Gapless's main body was beginning to suffer contamination from All Things at Play.

“Upperclassman! Upperclassmaaan!”

Cheon Yohwa ran around dodging ranged attacks, desperately crying out for my help.

Holy magic was a terrible matchup for her to begin with. Didn't Cheon Yohwa have a black-magic affinity herself?

Hundreds of priests... No, more than a thousand priest NPCs had already respawned and were chasing her.

Beside me, Oh Dokseo watched the surreal chase and spoke uneasily.

“Sh-shouldn't we help her, Mister?”

“Well. If I stepped in, I could easily wipe out those NPCs. But All Things at Play is our primary enemy in this fight. If I join its little game of make-believe and get hit by a cliché myself, we'll only be worse off.”

“Oh.”

“I'm better off waiting to deliver the final, decisive blow. Dokseo, instead of getting caught up in the enemy's schemes, we need to exploit its void spot. Is there a cliché we could invoke in this situation?”

You're an otaku, aren't you?

Oh Dokseo picked up on that implication with uncanny precision. She groaned.

“Ugh. Hang on, clichés... So the God of Alienation has formed an allied army on the pretext of defeating the Demon King and the monsters...?”

At that moment, her eyes lit up.

“... Oh! Ohhh! Th-that's it! That one!”

“That one?”

“The story where the monsters were just minding their own business, but evil humans invaded first, killing them for fun and making them slaves! There's the ‘Humans Are Actually the Bad Guys’ cliché! Tons of novels and comics use it!”

Oh Dokseo dashed forward like Archimedes shouting Eureka.

Before her lay Hanako of the Toilet, half-dead after the necromancer's earlier attack. The red, blue, and purple toilet paper scattered around her made for a striking sight.

Oh Dokseo knelt and wrapped her arms firmly around Hanako's shoulders.

“Purple toilet paper?”

While Hanako looked bewildered, Oh Dokseo put on a face filled with outrage. Then she shouted, her voice brimming with grievance.

“Why...!”

“Purple toilet paper?”

“Why do humans persecute us like this...!”

The blue butterfly paused at Oh Dokseo's impassioned wail.

It wasn't alone. The thousands of priests and Saintesses gleefully chasing Cheon Yohwa—their numbers had grown again—whipped their heads around in unison.

With every gaze fixed on her, Oh Dokseo threw herself into her performance, utterly unfazed and without a shred of embarrassment.

“Hanako only wanted to hand out toilet paper to people visiting the restroom...!”

“Purple toilet paaaper?”

“The Thump-Thump-Thump Ghost was just a child who moved on their head instead of their legs! Do humans abuse, despise, and torment us like this simply because we are different? I curse you! I curse you, humans...!”

The ghosts of Hundred Flowers Girls’ High School, already half defeated, wore peculiar expressions, as did Cheon Yohwa, who was panting now that the chase had briefly stopped. Were we really that nice?

But actual history didn't matter much in fiction. If realism mattered, King Arthur would have been a man.

[The ‘Operator of All Things at Play’ accepts the shrine maiden's assertion.]

And this was precisely the anomaly's void spot.

I wanted to applaud her.

'Well done, Dokseo! That's it!'

An anomaly could not reject its own essence.

And whatever might have been true of anyone else, Oh Dokseo was the shrine maiden All Things at Play had chosen as its champion. If its shrine maiden prayed aloud, the god had to answer her prayer. The moment it refused, All Things at Play would inevitably damage itself.

At the very least, the shrine maiden could turn the God of Alienation's own power against it. That was also why recruiting its shrine maiden as an ally was essential to any operation to defeat a God of Alienation.

[Activating the ‘Humans Were the Evil Ones All Along’ cliché.]

Then all hell really broke loose.

“Would you like some purple toilet paper?”

“I've actually always wanted to walk on my legs instead of my head.”

Suddenly, the ghosts' facial muscles became more “human.” Their noses straightened, their lips grew neat, and above all, their eyes became bright and focused.

Just as goblins mysteriously start looking human in stories with goblin protagonists!

The ghosts' language skills also suddenly evolved. Even their facial appearances acquired narrative plausibility. This was the miracle of the nonhuman-protagonist genre.

“Why would temple priests come to help necromancers who tried to capture ghosts and got beaten instead in the first place?!”

Oh Dokseo, the God of Alienation's shrine maiden who had personally brought about that miracle, pointed at the sky.

“And it wasn't just one or two priests! Thousands joined forces all at once! That means the necromancers and the temple secretly had connections behind the scenes! That's the only way it makes sense!”

Unbelievable.

This time, I actually applauded. What was I to do? Our Dokseo must be a genius.

“Connections? What does that mean?”

“I think it means things are somehow linked.”

“Our temple had secret ties with the necromancers?”

Murmurs spread among the 16-bit NPCs as they began to panic. Even amid all this, they maintained the detail of not understanding the word “connections,” as though committed to their fantasy setting.

Oh Dokseo shouted.

“The monsters have always been unfortunate! They've always suffered every kind of unfair bullshit! We weren't evil!”

Strictly speaking, the only unfortunate ones were the three people who had taken hate potions: Oh Dokseo, the Saintess, and me.

Still, it was true that misfortune had piled up on our side. I simply hadn't bothered describing it because I had no taste for misery fiction, but we had suffered considerable misfortune in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber while defeating Gapless during this run.

Oh Dokseo delivered the finishing blow.

“The temple's high-ranking priests are the ones behind the necromancers! When the necromancers captured wraiths, the high-ranking priests passed those achievements off as their own, and in exchange, they gave the necromancers all kinds of lucrative privileges!”

“Is that true, Father?”

“Absurd! That can't possibly be true!”

“Can't possibly be true, my ass! Corrupt high-ranking priests are a cliché that shows up in novels ninety-nine percent of the time! I guarantee at least one cardinal-level priest has fallen under a demon's influence!”

“What?”

“How could such a thing...”

[The ‘Operator of All Things at Play’ accepts the shrine maiden's assertion.]

[Activating the ‘Corruption of High-Ranking Priests,’ ‘The Mastermind Held a Key Position in the Temple,’ and ‘A Priest Summons a Demon’ clichés.]

“How did you know? Hehehe. Now that I've been exposed, I'll sacrifice every last one of you too!”

“Aaaah! His Eminence the Cardinal has gone mad!”

Tens of thousands of NPCs—their numbers had grown yet again—began bickering and fighting among themselves.

The hotel's back garden had long since been razed into a wasteland. A religious war had erupted out of nowhere.

Then...

“... Oh. I'm strong again.”

Cheon Yohwa's right arm and left leg returned to normal as well.

“Hup!”

“Aaaaah! The Demon King has revived!”

Without hesitation, Cheon Yohwa turned around and started bursting priests' heads again.

Judging by how she singled out the corrupt priests who “gave off a vaguely sinister air” to beat the shit out of, she seemed to have roughly caught on too.

All Things at Play was cornered again in an instant. It didn't have many options left.

[The ‘Operator of All Things at Play’ points out that even if the humans are at fault, the monsters also have many stains on their record.]

[The monsters have also slaughtered countless lives.]

[Activating the ‘There Is No Good or Evil, Only the Struggle for Power’ cliché.]

The both-sides argument!

A back alley any work dealing with good and evil could wander into. Instead of discussing precisely what was evil or good, and how, it neatly adopted a relativist perspective to win every argument—a forbidden finishing move.

The battle reached a stalemate again. All Things at Play was probably starting to look for a chance to escape, as though asking, “Can't we call it a draw?”

But I couldn't let a God of Alienation that lurked in the background, sinisterly manipulating clichés, get away.

'Saintess.'

I moved my lips.

The Saintess, who would have been stopping time periodically to monitor the battle even now, decoded my silent words perfectly.

From me to the Saintess, and from the Saintess to Oh Dokseo.

Through translation and relay, the message reached the Shrine Maiden of All Things at Play. Understanding my intent, Oh Dokseo immediately cried out.

“Monsters slaughter lives, and humans slaughter lives! Whatever race you look at, whatever land you look at, the world holds nothing but tragedy!”

Thus, those words were effectively being spoken by all three of us—myself, the Saintess, and Oh Dokseo—at once.

“If the world is only tragedy, and life is only suffering, then I ask you: what, exactly, is a ‘god’ in such a world?!”

They froze.

The NPCs, whose numbers had swelled into the tens of thousands, and the ghosts, each fighting a hundred foes but still being overwhelmed by sheer numbers—friend and foe alike all stopped.

Those 16-bit anomalies mimicked human expressions, only emphasizing the uncanny valley all the more.

Oh Dokseo alone bore their impersonal stares, tens of thousands of pairs of eyes.

She swallowed once, then stretched out her hand and pointed at the sky.

“If the world is evil, isn't the god who allowed it to become evil at fault?”

Exactly.

All Things at Play had made a mistake.

In reality, a both-sides argument might pass muster. But what if a “god” existed as unmistakably as this?

What if that god had personally proclaimed, “Both sides in this world are evil, and only the struggle for power is justified”?

“Is there any reason we should worship such a god?”

All Things at Play might have thought it had made the cleverest possible move, but in truth, it had merely committed the worst possible mistake.

“There is no reason for us to keep killing and dying, repeating this slaughter forever! The one we truly must defeat is the god who forced this hell upon us! That evil god alone is our enemy!”

Led by Oh Dokseo's ringing declaration, every human and anomaly looked up at the sky together.

There was a blue butterfly.

[The ‘Operator of All Things at Play’ accepts the shrine maiden's assertion.]

[Activating the ‘The True Final Boss Was God’ cliché.]