Two Scales of Death
Nirvakh, the de facto head of The Void.
And Ephin, the most independent divinity among the powers of the fifth dimension.
The two of them were less good friends than bad ones. Time had worn the distinction thin, granted—but if you traced the thing back to its root, that was still what it was. Ephin had first crossed Nirvakh as a snake-catcher, tracking him in hopes of bagging a monstrous serpent that carried divinity of its own. Nirvakh had declined to be caught. From the very beginning, his origin had been something no mere snake could account for.
Ages passed. Nirvakh rose until he stood among the foremost of the transcendent-class monsters of the fifth dimension, and he met Ephin again—Ephin, who had given up snake-hunting long, long ago. Old grudges fade. What had begun as an ill-fated enmity had, across that vast stretch of years, turned into the companionship of two beings who simply endured the ages side by side. Even the squabbles that flared up now and then were, at bottom, a kind of play.
"......Hey. Hey. You sure you're all right?"
So even if they called each other bad friends, worry was bound to follow when one of them turned up wrecked into some ghastly shape. For Ephin, this was that moment.
"If this is how you're gonna be, you might as well have just stayed in your true body."
Nirvakh—little more than skin stretched over bone—was staring blankly up at the sky. Every inch of the avatar had shriveled dry. Of course, that was only a gauge of his mood. An avatar's every look was simply its nature; it wasn't as if the body had truly broken. ......And yet, seen like this, the situation felt worse.
"Hey. Answer me."
"Ah... you came...?"
Nothing came back but an empty reply, without a shred of spirit in it. Ephin could guess the cause well enough.
"Don't tell me you're still shaking over that."
"......"
"Unbelievable. If you were gonna fold like this, you shouldn't have been running your mouth."
It was obviously about the string of revelations that had blown up on the gallery not long ago. No actual harm had come to Nirvakh over it. The inner truth was, naturally, nothing a handful of lines could ever dig up. But the one who had written them—Oz—knew that truth. And that fact was eating Nirvakh alive.
It wasn't that he feared some petty annihilation. In point of fact, even an ancient divinity out of a previous world could not easily erase a highest-tier god. The act might be possible, but the aftermath would be nothing small, and he didn't imagine he'd suffer it over a spat this trivial. ......No. What frightened him was the truth itself. The origin of his own being, buried in the dark, coming into the light.
"Hey. You didn't seem like the type. He hasn't said a word since then, has he."
"That's why I'm this wrecked......"
"Sure, being wrecked is fine. But do you have to sit there looking like you're about to drop dead? You're ruining the mood for the woman who has to look at you."
A complete loser, that's what he'd turned into. Ephin heaped the scorn on him, and Nirvakh only ducked his head, sullen. The avatar's dark bluish-black hair frayed into a mess all on its own. A severe case, from any angle. Ephin let out a long sigh.
"Haa...... If you're gonna be like this, just apologize or something. I don't know for certain, but I figure they'd let it go, more or less."
"......You think so?"
"Better than sitting here shaking, you moron."
A god's still a god, but this brain-dead idiot— Ephin shook her head as she said it, and Nirvakh lifted his own, just a little.
Maybe that really would be better. He'd turned it over himself more than once, and even so he was too afraid to simply do it. What if the answer that came back was wholly, hopelessly bad? Still, there was real sense in the claim that it beat doing nothing.
And so he sent the opening of it first. Praying the sincerity would get through. Praying the answer that returned would be a willing forgiveness.
"......The hell."
The one who received that desperate message wore pure disbelief across every line of his face.
"I mean, was it even that big a deal."
I'm not mad at you, you know?
"Why's this one throwing a fit again."
Watching Existence None's apologies come tumbling out one after another, I couldn't help being a little dumbfounded. Sure, at the time he'd cracked a DM open out of nowhere, and the fallout had been a mess, so my temper had steamed up a bit. But was there any reason to take it this far?
"Hmm."
If only for that question, I needed to think it through from his side.
It had started with a deal over spirit fruit. The Jade Dew Siljeong Fruit wasn't even a top-grade spirit fruit by pre-Transcendent standards, so Nirvakh—who took me for a Transcendent—assumed I was using it on my skin. Rarity-wise it was a scarce thing with a limited habitat, and plenty of Absolutes used it for nothing but beauty treatments. Because of that, he'd decided I must be a woman. Later, hearing I ranked near the top of the tier list, he'd gotten excited, run his mouth, and confessed every last fact.
"Thinking it over again, this guy is ridiculous."
Separate from how absurd that empty-headedness was, I—having been put through a fair amount of trouble—had mixed a little personal bias into the write-up at the bottom of the tier list.
......And this was now.
"What the shit."
I didn't understand it at all. Why in the world was he making such a scene? He'd clearly come down with some grand delusion, and I couldn't begin to guess the cause. ......Of course, it wasn't doing me any harm. It was only that the sight of him pressed flat and shivering like this was a little hard to take.
The problem was that I wasn't anyone who had any business forgiving people, or refusing to.
On the gallery and in real life alike, I went around with my neck held stiff, playing the scoundrel—or the terminal case of too-cool disease—but that was miles from what I actually wanted. If anything, I was the one who'd come out ahead, pocketing the real goods by tipping him off to those tier-list rankings in advance. The cringe inside the gallery seemed to be dying down bit by bit as well...... so in any practical sense, the damage he'd done me amounted to nothing.
"......Hold on."
So at first I'd meant to send back a single line saying it was fine. But thinking about it, a chance like this didn't come along often. Granted, my DMs were already packed with Transcendents of a pretty incredible caliber. Judging by the way they talked, they were ready to carve out liver and gallbladder both and hand them over.
In a way, that was only natural. Most of the Transcendents currently in female form either already had a partner, or had declared themselves perfectly, permanently single. The desperation of old bachelors who had missed their marrying years by tens of billions—hundreds of billions—of years was on another level entirely. Coax them gently into talking, and I could probably strip them of absolutely everything. But if I did that......
"I might actually die."
Even setting aside anything like my conscience, you didn't play games with a man's pure devotion. What would come of it in the end wouldn't be some petty knife fight, but galaxy-scale annihilation at the hands of an enraged higher divinity. An opportunity to fleece someone legitimately (?), the way this one presented itself, almost never came along. And looking at the state of these messages, the other side would probably rest easier if they got to give me something.
What should I ask for.
"Not a weapon. Nothing like that."
Nirvakh would obviously be rotting in incredible treasures. But anything of a decently high grade ran straight into the limits of civilization level. Never mind the Great Thousand Worlds—I couldn't even accept goods that circulated at the upper grade. This ring was an enormous exception on account of its peculiarities, which was also why I'd given in to my greed for it. Then take something whose grade fell far, far short of that? That made no sense either. That much I could just trade for with the points I'd stacked up.
And so, for a while, I turned over the substance of a transaction brimming with fairness and reason and mutual benefit—
......and in a single instant, I remembered a passage from the novel.
"Ah. That's the one."
I sent the message at once.
"What is this."
I couldn't help being a little thrown by the censorship that had appeared in the DM window.
"This is getting censored too?"
I'd never run into it before, so I hadn't known, but it seemed the gallery had censorship of its own. Well, it was something that only came up in the extreme late stages, but still.
But the reply came back as if nothing were wrong. He'd probably guessed for himself what sat inside the censorship. Playing along a little with all that Big Sis, Big Sis had been the right call.
......It seemed the honorifics would need a little time yet before they disappeared.
The joy and relief coming through from beyond the text were a little unbelievable. He'd spoken as if it were nothing, but it was clearly a loss for him, however slight.
"......What was he thinking?"
He must have braced himself for a price far steeper than this. Was this the ultimate scam. A scam in which even the victim got to be happy.
"This isn't stacking karma, is it."
If I transcended at this rate, I was afraid I might turn into an evil god. Seemed I ought to live a little more kindly.
The Transcendent Gallery, still softly humming with the embers of the fifth-dimension tier list and the lingering bait about my gender. What remained after that one great uproar was idle chatter about shitposts and the arguments spun off from them. I went along with the peaceful mood and wrote a single post—half to toss out some bait for the next topic, and half to kill the boredom of waiting on the Grand Exchange.
"Ah, fuck, what is this now."
Peace, it seemed, had been limited to the gallery when I wasn't in it. Countless stares locked onto me as I swore at the comment section that had lost its mind.