Moon Waltz was an ability that technically sat "above" skills in classification. As such, even now, when skills hadn’t yet become available to the world, it could still be used.

Of course, this also meant that...

"Oh, I did it!" Miyabi cheered, successfully jumping three meters forward and leaving a clean crescent moon hanging in the air behind her. "I finally used Moon Waltz!"

At her excited voice, Eri clapped from the side, smiling sweetly in the way a mother might while watching her daughter take her first steps. "Congratulations! I knew you could do it from the start."

"E-Ehehe... Now I have to practice while the sensation is still fresh!"

"Don’t overdo it," I quickly cut in. "Using abilities without enough stats to back them up causes backlash. Muscle pain being the gentler end of it. Keep it under ten successful uses and stop for today."

"Got it!"

Of course, given the excited state she was in, I already knew she probably wasn’t stopping at ten.

But then again, letting her feel firsthand what I’d been dealing with lately wasn’t the worst outcome. Experience was the most persuasive teacher in the end.

Either way, now that both of them had actually managed to use the same skill themselves, there wasn’t a shred of doubt left to work with. My explanation had run its course.

Still, Eri pulling it off had genuinely caught me off guard. She had the look of someone who tripped over her own feet on a regular basis—the clumsy ojousama type, through and through. And yet she’d picked it up faster than Miyabi.

If she could learn it that quickly, how had she failed to learn it in time back inside the game? Trying to preserve some image of ladylike elegance, maybe? A genuine mystery.

While they practiced, I also walked them through my "predictions" on what all of this implied—easing them toward the concept of an apocalypse, a world of gods, and the various other flavors of insanity waiting down the road.

I was circling the upcoming tragedy in six months, of course, but giving concrete details was still out of the question.

Dropping foreshadowing, careful word choices, letting things sit between topics—that was the most I could manage for now.

But more than anything else—

"Gods as sponsors...?"

"Yes." I nodded.

This was its own category of not-so-simple.

When the apocalypse arrived, gods would choose their "heroes" from among the people of the world—specifically from the players of Heaven’s Path.

Not every player would receive one, of course. Only a select few—like Kiki and the others—the ones who made the world’s top 1000 leaderboard. Each of those players would receive at least one guardian god, but the one with the most backing had been the previous rank 1, who’d had 100 gods throwing their support behind him.

A walking cheat code by any reasonable measure.

Though even he died in the end.

As for me—I hadn’t played the game in my past life, so none of that applied. No cheats, no blessings, no divine backing of any kind.

Kay and Tee and the rest had been spectators, nothing more—watching without offering so much as a single gift or blessing, only occasional hints and fragments of information. And even that had only come after a decade of humanity being ground down to nothing, with me as the last one left standing.

As such...

"We need to hold our top positions on the leaderboard. Right now we occupy four of the top spots, but sooner or later people will start catching up."

I knew this because of the whales already dumping money into powerful items, and the genuinely sleepless grinders running multiple characters around the clock.

Some were even organizing entire armies of players to funnel EXP into their main characters using a particular special class’s skill—playing the system with the kind of dedication that was almost impressive if it weren’t so annoying.

And last night’s rankings had already shown the gap closing. Outside our group sitting comfortably in the 30s, fifth place had already hit level 25. Still a distance behind, but the trend was clear enough.

"...Really, just being an alpha tester gives you access to this much?" Miyabi sighed, dropping onto the floor. "But why hasn’t anyone posted any of this? If someone shared details like these, they’d be famous overnight."

She’d already hit her ten uses and was resting obediently. I’d half-expected her to blow past the limit I’d set, but she’d known when to hold back. Smarter than her excitement suggested, apparently.

"We can’t share it. It’s in the ToS." I said flatly.

An outright lie, of course. I hadn’t joined any alpha testing, and hadn’t signed anything. Everything I knew came from living through a past cycle. But the excuse was convenient enough.

Eri furrowed her brows slightly. "Oh? Then wouldn’t you be in trouble for telling us?" She asked, dropping her voice just a touch.

"As long as you don’t spread what you heard from me, it should be fine. Honestly, it’s more that the situation forced my hand—you caught me with Ram and Gwen, after all." 𝒻𝑟𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝑛𝘰𝓋ℯ𝘭.𝘤𝘰𝘮

I shrugged.

"Speaking of which..."

Only then did Miyabi sit up, eyes narrowing with something that looked suspiciously like intent.

"Ram-chan and Gwen-chan... where are they going to stay?"

"Huh?"

Was that even a question worth asking?

"My room, of cour—!"

"Stop! No! A single guy living with two girls—that’s immoral! Ecchi!" She fired off in a cascading barrage. blushing all the way.

"Hold on. They’re androids."

"Even so, they’re girls! You might... y-you know... make some kind of mistake!"

"That’s absurd..."

Just as our little quarrel began drifting into increasingly strange territory—

CLAP!

Eri brought her hands together.

"Alright, alright. So—Kamishiro wants to keep his androids close to him."

I nodded.

"And Miyabi wants to keep them at a safe distance to prevent any accidents."

Miyabi nodded as well, not objecting to the summary.

"Then what if she stayed with them? That way, she can keep an eye on things and make sure nothing goes wrong!"

"Wha—?!"

Miyabi and I both went silent at the same time.

It was technically sound logic—with Miyabi there to supervise, the chances of any so-called "mistake" dropped to near zero. But at the same time, her presence was its own variable.

One with a fairly unpredictable track record of going extremely wrong in its own right.

"I’m not suggesting you all cram into Kamishiro’s flat, obviously. He stays in his room, you three girls take the one next door. Simple as that, isn’t it?"

"That..."

The logic was actually hard to argue with.

Though how she knew about my apartment complex’s situation, that all rooms but mine had been vacated, was a separate question I chose not to dig into.

Either way, with Miyabi coming around to the idea, she quickly stepped aside to call her parents.

She sounded distinctly annoyed at some point during the call—right around when she mentioned my name, from what I could hear—but came back with permission regardless. Face a bright, burning red.

"Those two, honestly...!" She muttered under her breath, not elaborating.

With that resolved, I contacted my landlord and booked the room directly next to mine. Mine was at the far end of the building, so there’d be no chance of any mix-up on either side. Oh, of course, I’m the one paying. I can’t let Miyabi pay for it, and it’s not like I’m short of money either.

The landlord sounded noticeably on edge throughout the entire call, though.

Some kind of misunderstanding was clearly forming—probably related to this early morning’s case—but I chose not to pursue it.

And just like that—I ended up as flat neighbors with Miyabi.

---

Somewhere along the bays of Tokyo, in an old but unmistakably grand rest house—the kind that wouldn’t look out of place hosting big-time bosses and their guests.

A certain group meeting was quietly getting underway.

In a wide room, a long table had been set.

Food covered nearly every surface, all of it prepared with ingredients that had no business being modest. Almas Caviar. White truffles. A5 Wagyu. Saffron. Several dishes finished with a garnish of edible gold leaf that caught the light whenever anyone shifted in their seat.

A single plate of any of it would’ve run close to—if not well past—a normal office worker’s monthly salary.

Along the table’s edges, various figures had taken their seats.

Some had the kind of build that filled a room on its own. Others carried the quieter, more unsettling weight of sharp intellect. Each one gave off something distinct, something uniquely their own—but one thing was identical across all of them. The insignia pinned to every chest.

A badge bearing the side profile of a Roman war helmet, a sword and spear crossed beneath it. Familiar to anyone who knew what it meant, and to plenty who didn’t.

Ares.

From the banner hanging across the wall behind the head seat, the occasion was clearly something significant.

The welcoming of Ares’s new Head.

The seat itself, however, remained empty—and had been for the past hour. That particular detail had been making everyone at the table quietly, visibly uncomfortable.

Their wait, though, was finally over.

"Sorry for the delay. I had a few things to sort out on my end."

A figure stepped in, sliding the door aside as she entered.

She was short—barely a hundred and fifty centimeters—but the aura that came with her was something else entirely. Like rats suddenly aware there was a cat in the room, everyone at the table seemed to shrink inward as they lowered their heads in unison.

"Welcome, Boss Yuzuha!"

The greeting hit the walls loud enough to rattle them, every figure on their feet and bowing at once.

"Ah, enough of that. I don’t like things this stiff." The woman smiled, waving a hand.

Nobody took her word at face value, of course. Every figure held their position until she had settled into her seat and casually pulled half of her white hakama aside, half-revealing a chest wrapped in white bandages—a sarashi.

She had brown hair cut into a bob, tied into a short ponytail at the back with two loose strands framing a sharp, well-defined jaw. Eyes dark as a starless sky, narrow and cutting. And a smile that never quite said what it meant—the kind that left everyone in the room a degree colder just from looking at it.

A face that was somehow both unfamiliar and, in some hard-to-place way, not unfamiliar at all.

"Alright, let’s cut to it." Yuzuha spoke without preamble. "As the new Head, I have one command for all of you, at least for now. It’s of the highest priority."

She let her gaze sweep slowly around the table, drinking in every stiff, carefully composed expression, and smiled with what looked very much like satisfaction.

"Starting today—every one of you will be playing a game called Heaven’s Path."

At that moment, the hand of destiny shifted.