Chapter 55: Chapter 54: Ophélia’s Goddess.

Recess still wasn’t over.

The confirmation that there were more gods occupied most of Takeshi’s attention, but there were questions he needed to ask before the conversation ended.

"Why did she intervene?"

Takeshi asked, and the deity looked at him.

"What?"

"That other deity, why did she do that here?"

The deity uncrossed his arms and shifted slightly, as if the question made him less comfortable than the previous ones. He didn’t answer immediately.

"Let’s just say she pressured me..."

he finally said.

"To do what?"

"To include her in the project."

The deity made a vague gesture with his hand.

"She wanted to participate and add something of her own. She bugged me for centuries to let her into my show."

"And you let her?"

"Not exactly, but..."

The deity crossed his arms again.

"Let’s just say it wasn’t worth the trouble of telling her no."

Takeshi processed that. A deity capable of pressuring another deity until she got what she wanted had sent her pet, something capable of collapsing a person’s sanity just by appearing, to bring about the apocalypse, all because she simply wanted to participate in the show.

"Are you the strongest?"

Takeshi asked.

The atmosphere in the hallway changed immediately.

It wasn’t a physical change, but the deity’s expression shifted from neutral to something Takeshi hadn’t seen from him until now. It was something like anger and irritation that had been building up for a long time and that the question had triggered without warning.

"I can’t claim that title..."

the deity replied. His tone was flat, but it was obvious he had to make an effort to say it.

"Why not?"

"Because the council has the wrong opinion of me."

"What council?"

"The divine council..."

The deity repeated, with obvious disdain.

"And their opinion is that I’m unstable."

The god clenched his teeth in anger.

"Can you believe it? They called me crazy! Crazy!"

Takeshi looked at him for a moment.

"I’d agree with the council."

It was an honest answer. He didn’t say it to provoke him, but because it was the most direct conclusion considering everything he knew.

Unstable was a reasonable description.

The deity looked at him with an expression that was no longer accumulated irritation, but something more direct.

"You should be grateful to me!"

He snapped.

"For what?"

"For not letting you meet her."

The deity pointed toward nowhere in particular, but the gesture was clear.

"Her. The one I’m talking about."

"The one with the pet?"

"Yes, her."

The deity paused.

"With me, at least the game has rules. There’s a system. There are points, a shop, mechanics you can understand if you think hard enough."

Another pause.

"With her, there’d be none of that. Just chaos. And you already saw what happens when she intervenes."

Takeshi thought about the red sky.

About his sanity collapsing without him being able to do anything to stop it.

About how his ability to process what he was seeing had disintegrated.

All of that from the pet, not even the deity directly.

"What is she like?"

He asked.

The deity looked at him with an expression that wasn’t exactly negative, but wasn’t open either.

"If you want to know more..."

He said.

"Ask your religious friend."

Takeshi frowned.

"Ophélia?"

"She worships that goddess."

The deity said it as if it were just another fact, without any added emphasis.

"If you want details, that Ophélia has them."

Before Takeshi could respond, the deity stopped being there.

He simply disappeared without warning.

Takeshi didn’t move away from the window immediately.

He needed a moment to organize what he had just heard, because there were several pieces he hadn’t connected until now, and suddenly they fit together in a way that made him deeply uncomfortable.

’Ophélia worships that goddess?’

That was what the deity had said. Not that Ophélia knew her, nor that she had heard about her, but that she worshipped her.

Which meant Ophélia wasn’t simply a girl with strange healing powers living in a shrine. She was someone with a direct connection to the entity that had appeared when she died.

Takeshi thought about the shrine.

About the church-like structure he had described the first time he went there. The stained-glass windows, the people moving around with organized calm, the priest. The entire atmosphere of the place had been built around something, someone.

And that someone was a crazy goddess who thought destroying an entire world was funny.

He reviewed the sequence of events in order.

’Ophélia dies and the entity appears...’

That hadn’t been a coincidence. Ophélia’s death had activated something, or someone had responded to Ophélia’s death with that appearance.

He still didn’t know whether it was an automatic mechanism or a deliberate reaction, but in either case the conclusion was the same: Ophélia was directly connected to an entity capable of doing what he had seen.

Which completely changed the way he thought about Ophélia’s situation.

Up until now, the problem had been relatively clear: someone wanted to hurt her, probably related to her position as a saint and what she could do. Given that, the solution was to keep her alive while the threat was dealt with.

But now something else had been added.

If Ophélia died, something responded, and that something brought about the end of the world.

Takeshi didn’t know what would happen if that entity decided to do something beyond merely appearing.

That unknown alone was enough reason to treat Ophélia’s situation as a priority that allowed no mistakes.

His thoughts were interrupted when he heard the bell downstairs.

Recess was over.

Takeshi stepped away from the window and walked toward the stairs. As he went down, the chat briefly appeared with a few comments that he ignored. He didn’t have the mental space for the chat right now.

’I have to go back to class and act normal for the rest of the day.’

And he also had to find the right moment to talk to Ophélia about her insane goddess, whose pet had nearly driven him insane, without making it sound like something a normal person would say in casual conversation.

He reached the main hallway and blended in with the students returning to their classrooms.