"A great crusade to punish the blasphemer has begun."
Tanya's alert visage scowled. She opened her mouth, ready to speak the name she'd given the thing puppeting the corpse of her former enemy.
And then, the oddest thing happened. As she began to say the thing's name, she heard a very distinct sound.
CRACK!
Now, a sound described with the word 'crack' could be indicative of any number of sounds. It could be the sharp separation of two halves of an object, like a stick, in a situation where stealth was required. Likewise, it could also be the sound of any number of other objects being shattered in some way – a pane of glass when hit with a rock, concrete when hit with enough ordinance, or a plastic water bottle. Alternatively, the word could be used to signify popping sounds, such as those made when standing up and your back is sore or when you pop your knuckles or those made when you pulled the trigger of a gun.
However, in this case, the cause of the sound was none of these things. Tanya could deduce this with certainty because, as it just so happened, she recognized this sound, and it was not, as previously hypothesized, some stick breaking, a pane of glass being damaged, or someone popping their stiff joints.
No, the reason she recognized this sound was because she had inflicted the cause of the sound on some of her opponents. Not many, mind you – her goal was, after all, to live through this endeavor of the Empire, and getting close enough to her enemies to be the cause of this sound put that at jeopardy.
Nonetheless, she had been forced, from time to time, to be the cause of such a sound, usually through the application of her boots to someone's head while moving at speed.
Thusly, Tanya's next words were not uttered with the usual vitriol she reserved for this thing.
"Being X?"
Instead, her words were filled with a measure of trepidation, a pinch of nervousness, and a heap of paranoia.
Because, as it just so happened, the sound she had just heard sounded quite an awful lot like someone had just had their neck snapped.
As she uttered the name, the corpse he'd been puppeteering slumped to the ground. Tanya looked around, wary. What was he planning now? That sound had to signify… something.
Obviously, what she most associated with the sound of someone snapping their neck was, quite simply, death. As she stood on the wing of the plane and edged herself forward closer to the body, she knew that couldn't be the case.
The snow around her and the air it floated in was frozen, after all.
Still, she got no response from her question. No attempt at baiting her and no words to mock her further.
Nothing.
Dead, eerie quiet. Not the air, not the snow, not even the settling of the plane into the ground was moving or making sound.
All she heard was her own breathing and the sound of her boots hitting the wing of the plane as she inched forward.
Slowly, she bent down and prodded the body, turning it over, wary for even the slightest movement.
But there was nothing.
She licked her lips and bent down, studying the body for but a moment, and, most importantly, studying the neck. No, it didn't appear that this body – or the body next to it – had had their necks snapped.
She stood up again, darting onto the end of the wing, scanning her surroundings, cursing herself. Of course it had been a trick. To what end…
Her mind struggled with that, but she didn't really need to know, did she? He'd paused time, made a sound that reminded her of a neck cracking, and was just waiting to do…
Something.
She wasn't sure, but… it couldn't be that-
She shook her head, her eyes piercing her surroundings as she activated her formulas to start scanning what she couldn't see. It wasn't possible for something of that power to just…
She breathed out. Well, perhaps… she'd seen a number of other compatriots of Being X, from time to time, so… was there another entity that had killed Being X?
Her eyes narrowed at the thought and nothing else – her surroundings had not yet changed. If one of them, or an unknown entity, had really done something like break Being X's neck, then they'd be talking to her… right?
She glanced around, nodding as she noted that nothing had moved still. Yes, while she herself was undoubtedly insignificant, holding time itself still must have had a massive mana requirement, if indeed that was how the feat was accomplished.
So. It was a ruse. He was simply waiting for her to let her guard down, and then, he'd spring the trap… whatever it was.
All she had to do was wait.
-OxOxO-
Waiting had not helped. She'd managed to stay alert and vigilant for over an hour, staring at her surroundings and ensuring that her formulas never stopped scanning with as much power as they needed.
That had led to her current predicament: she was running out of mana, and unless she wanted to resort to the power of the Type 95, she'd need to stop and rest soon.
She grit her teeth. Then, was this Being X's plan? Had he wanted her to tire herself out so that she was forced to seek a place to relax, and then…
She nodded. Yes, he wanted to make her life more difficult, and if she was suddenly back at base without any explanation, her life would undoubtedly become more difficult. She might get dragged back to Schugel's, or, at the very least, her superiors might see her as more of a liability if she couldn't come up with an explanation besides the obvious – she had fled the field of battle.
She grit her teeth. She didn't have any rations on her, and if going all the way back to base wasn't an option…
Her eyes narrowed. She'd logged the signal of an unknown source of mana while she'd been fighting against the planes. Perhaps there was someone she could borrow some food from?
Ten minutes later, she was looking at the entrance to a quaint little log cabin. She readied her gun – perhaps this was just what Being X had been waiting for? – and pushed open the door.
She scanned the interior… only to sigh in frustration. It didn't appear that there was anything resembling food here after all. One man – probably the commander in this operation – was sipping on a cup of tea, but otherwise, she couldn't see anything here that resembled food…
Her eyes narrowed. However, while her first objective obviously couldn't be accomplished, perhaps she could do something else?
It appeared that the people here had been observing her battle. A cursory glance at the equipment found it to be of foreign design. However, she could read it, as it seemed to be in 'Albish.'
She frowned. The Empire wasn't at war with the Albish, but the presence of their officers, men, and equipment here meant that they might be preparing for the worst. Destroying the records here would, of course, be well within her rights, and she planned to do just that.
However…
Using her Type 97, she began to take recordings of everything – the faces of the people here, their equipment, the various papers that were strewn about. It was extremely unlikely that she would ever be able to openly use any of the information she gathered now, but she could use it to inform her decisions – and how she would spin future recommendations to her superiors.
Eventually, she ran out of things to record. With a sigh, she backed out of the room, making sure to keep her gun trained on the officer.
Then, she was out of the building, with plenty of information and absolutely no clue what was going on. Being X was doing… something, obviously, but beyond that obvious fact…
Her stomach decided to make its desires known, and Tanya sighed again. She still needed food…
-OxOxO-
After blowing up the cabin and those inside with a well-aimed formula – it had exploded, as was normal, but after that, the bodies flung into the air and the fire slowed down and eventually stopped, frozen like most everything else – she had returned to the skies she had been fighting in. A few tests – trying to speak to the 203rd, tapping and grabbing the 203rd, and staring into Serebryakov's eyes as she grabbed her chin – had led her to conclude that there didn't seem to be a way to wake anyone while time was stopped.
With a sigh, she looked down at her food. The cook at base hadn't been preparing dinner yet, which meant she had to either try and cook herself – an unsure proposition, when everything around her was frozen – or stick to tasteless rations.
She looked around the base, searching with her eyes and ears and magic. No one was moving, she could hear nothing, and not even her magic, stretched to its limits, could find anything out of the ordinary.
She groaned. She was stuck, waiting for Being X to start time again or for him to spring his trap.
Of course, that assumed…
She cut off that train of thought. As nice as it would have been to contemplate the death of Being X, the likelihood of such a thing was astronomically low. He was, obviously, just waiting for her to overstretch herself, or he was gathering people for a sneak attack on her when she couldn't rely on any backup.
It was ingenious, but if he was going to do it… wouldn't he have done it earlier, back in that cabin?
She shrugged. There was only so much she could do – her formulas were, of course, still active, searching for even the slightest hint of change. Until he moved on her…
Her mind made up, she retreated to where she had been staying for this operation. She would restock her supplies, pick up a few things to occupy her time, and go back to that plane, ready for Being X to resume time so that she could quickly call her soldiers for reinforcement.
-OxOxO-
Tanya grit her teeth. This was…
The anxiety had been killing her, and her nerves were shot from constantly waiting for anything to happen. After coming back to the downed plane, she had decided to fly out to the planes she hadn't been able to hit, even with the power of the Type 95, and finish them up. She could explain that and the cabin easily enough – the Type 95 being powerful was well known to her subordinates, so they would write it off. Her blowing them up faster than they could track would be more believable than time being frozen, so they'd have to believe it.
After that, however…
She had flown down to the plane to finish up some of her work.
Her paperwork, that was.
And she had finished that hours ago. She had then decided to check over her gun, ensuring that it would perform optimally when Being X finally decided to strike.
Then, she'd realized something. She had finished all of her paperwork – even the really, really unimportant stuff. Despite her nerves being shot, she had not really felt tired.
At all.
She'd laid down on the wing of the plane, trying to drift off even marginally, only to find that tiredness completely escaped her. She just… didn't feel tired. At all.
That shouldn't have been possible.
Now, she was staring out into the forest, thinking and trying to plan. Through it all, her formulas had remained active – at one point, when she had been about to run out of mana, she had suddenly felt her proverbial reserves fill, and they hadn't gone down since.
It went without saying that something like that should have been impossible as well.
She groaned. If she couldn't do anything but wait, she might as well get something out of it, right?
-OxOxO-
Now, Tanya knew that this wasn't a good idea. But what choice did she have?
Being X must have been watching her, waiting for her to do something.
After starting no less than twenty papers on logistics, modern warfare, and even the Empire's diplomatic strategy, she was starting to go stir crazy. Without the need to sleep – though she still needed to eat and drink, as far as she could tell – she had been able to finish them much faster than usual.
It had still taken two weeks to write them all.
After two weeks of writing, checking her gun, and practicing for when Being X finally sprung the trap on her, she had decided to do something that was quite reckless.
She had learned to drive again – a novel and only slightly dangerous proposition, considering her height and how cars at this time barely functioned how they would in the future.
Now, just learning to drive again was nice and all, but the real danger came from what she was doing with that new ability:
She was driving into enemy territory.
Yes, this wasn't really a good idea, but she didn't know what else to do. She'd done more thinking about the war than ever – she'd even contemplated the unlikely scenarios where the Empire went to war with yet more nations – she'd had no one to talk to, and she was rapidly running out of productive things to do.
As much as she wanted to live a peaceful life, she also wanted to be a productive member of society., using her abilities to their fullest. That was somewhat hard to do when all of society was simply not doing anything.
Which led to her current situation: she was driving into enemy territory. She would capture the opposition's leadership – civilian and military – along with whatever intel that looked important, and deliver it straight to her superiors in Berun.
It couldn't be connected back to her – not even Schugel thought this blasted, cursed thing could stop time, or he would have forced her to attempt it back at his accursed laboratory – and it would hasten the end of the war. That was justification enough in her fraying mind.
-OxOxO-
Well, that was over with. Things hadn't unfrozen – not even the slightest, tiniest bit. She'd manhandled dozens of civilian and military leaders and tried her best to parse through the mountains of important looking documents and grabbed everything to load up onto the truck. She'd driven all the way back to the capital and tied up all of them in the middle of General Headquarters, along with a few dozen crates of important looking papers.
It might not end the war – the military forces of the nation to the Empire's north were still mostly intact.
It might end the war – who in their right mind would want to fight a nation that had pulled off a 'miracle' like this?
She'd leave it up to her superiors… and, if she still had time, she could always fly around the frontlines gathering up every bullet and gun she could find and destroy them all.
Still, the tension she'd felt the entire time had convinced her not to try that again, for a time. She was going to find a cozy coffee shop close to the front and write more papers – this time, she'd focus on some more… adventurous ideas involving technology from the future.
-OxOxO-
As Tanya inspected the latest bunch of people she'd tied up, she could only sigh. The anxiety and boredom were really getting to her, weren't they?
She had managed to write a dozen new papers on tactics the Empire could employ, the merits of various political systems, and new technologies that she thought would be worth investing in – while she didn't use the words 'AK-47' or 'Nuclear Fission,' she'd hinted at those ideas and others as much as she felt she could without being blown off by her superiors for being insane.
After that, however? Well… she'd managed to continue staving off her boredom by devouring books on everything related to the Empire's military that she could – and several dozens about other topics as well.
Eventually, she had broken and decided to repeat her earlier plan against the Francois a month after her heist against the Legadonians.
It had gone off without a hitch – and she'd gone back twice already, picking up trucks worth of documents about military matters. She'd even flown to both countries to pick up a computation orb to compare them against the Type 97 and the more run-of-the-mill Imperial orbs.
The central square of the General Headquarters was starting to get full. In that time, she'd begun to – HESITANTLY – accept the idea that Being X was, indeed, dead, and that time would remain frozen. She'd even positioned herself in the middle of twenty Francois mages for a day, waiting for them to be unfrozen to test that idea.
When she'd accepted that time wouldn't unfreeze, she had, firstly berated herself – standing in the middle of twenty Francois mages was so enormously stupid. After that, however…
Well, she… had absolutely no idea what to do with that information. If he was dead, and time was going to remain stuck…
For one, as Tanya's earlier attempt to get Being X to unfreeze time by acting recklessly corroborated, she was beginning to degrade mentally. She wouldn't have ever called herself a social butterfly in either of her lives, but humans were inherently social beings: the benefits of working as a group had contributed to their rise from being simple animals to beings of logic.
For another… well, she didn't have any idea of how to unfreeze time. She either had to hope that one of Being X's fellow so-called deities would take over from him, or she'd need to start doing a lot of research at the world's best and brightest universities, because she did not have the faintest idea of where to even begin starting to unstop time.
She sighed. Well, for now, if things were going to stay frozen…
There were a lot of Communists right across the border…
-OxOxO-
Tanya whistled as she made her way through Moskva one last time. It had been a boring six months, like it had been a boring two months before that, but it seemed her time in the nation was done.
During that time, she had done a lot. She'd filled three entire computation orbs with nothing but images of the depredations the Communists were capable of – in Ucraine, the mass graves; in Sybaria, the forced labor camps; the inequality between the leaders of the country and the starving peasants; throughout the largest cities of the Federation, the crimes committed by those at the top, hiding behind the secret police to keep them hidden.
Tanya didn't take pleasure from killing, normally, but some of the things she had found…
Well, she'd been very happy to end the lives of those at the top… although, she was starting to grow concerned with just how happy it made her to kill some of them…
Was the continued isolation hurting her thought processes?
…Pfft! Nah, she was completely fine!
What else… right, she'd learned Russy – it would undoubtedly sound horrible to anyone familiar with the language, but she could read it pretty fluently now, and Visha would help her with pronunciation.
Eventually.
Hopefully.
She'd even been able to redesign some of her formulas to enhance their potency and efficiency. If she ever got out of here and got all the time she wanted to train the 203rd, she'd have to tack a few more months onto what she had already planned so they could unlearn the old formulas and relearn her optimized formulas.
When she'd been in the west of the Russy Federation, she'd even managed to drop by 'Akitsushima' and pick up a few souvenirs, along with enjoying some food she could actually enjoy.
As she gazed at the red square of Moskva – now painted with the flag of the Empire – she felt satisfaction with her work…
Ah…
Then, after twenty seconds, she was bored again. What to do next…
-OxOxO-
As Tanya gazed at the statue of herself, she realized that, maybe, she'd taken it a bit far this time. Even compared to everything else she had done.
After coming back from the Federation and relaxing for a month – she'd gone to every mansion in Berun and spent time there, enjoying the lap of luxury and trying every last sweet she could get her hands on – she'd decided to de-arm the Francois and the Entente, which had involved finding every last gun, bullet, and tank she could find and placing them within the nearest body of water she could find.
Of course, she'd also blown up several dozen factories as well. After that… she'd brushed up on the magic that the Marine Mages that accompanied the Imperial navy used to fish out some of those tanks she'd put in the water, found a way to increase the strength of her Flight formulas again, and begun… playing with the tanks – juggling them through the air with magic, to mention one specific example.
Of course, she'd just finished constructing a statue of herself out of the tanks and guns and bullets and equipment of the Empire's enemies, and she had just realized that all this isolation from every other living person on the planet was not good for her…
Of course, when she began to panic, she turned to her Analgesic Formulas to ease herself once again…
Right… what had she been doing? She blinked and looked at the statue again. Eh, it was pretty good. Maybe… she should take it easy for a bit. She was feeling a bit off, so studying how to end this would probably be a good idea.
-OxOxO-
Tanya felt her teeth being clenched together, and she tried to unclench them.
No luck.
A month into her studying, she'd finally begun to wean herself off of the high that her Analgesic formula provided. She'd been abusing the spell much more than she thought she had during the last year.
Or, she thought it was a year. Her body wasn't growing, as best as she could tell. She still needed to eat and drink and piss and shit, but she didn't need to sleep.
The last month without it had been torture.
Despite what she had been doing – traveling to every university where she spoke the local language – to try and figure out how to stop this, she didn't have any idea. Physics and magic just wasn't that advanced in this world, and while her sketchy, media-informed knowledge of the future's understanding of physics had helped her make several breakthroughs, she still didn't know.
She wasn't a physicist! She'd been forcing it, but at this rate, it might take her well over a decade, if not more, to figure out how to stop this.
And that didn't even cover the fact that whatever she would need to do to unfreeze time would have to involve magic! Tanya might have been the greatest mage in the Empire, or even the whole world, after how much she'd been practicing while time was frozen, but she would have to create entire branches of magic to accompany the physics she'd need to-
She unclenched her teeth, reaching for the Type 97. She had to have some Analgesic – who cared what would happen to everyone else, the loneliness, isolation-
She wanted…
Her gaze drifted to the Type 95. Perhaps…
She shook her head and clenched her teeth again. NO! If that bastard was dead, she wasn't going to pray to him to end this – he couldn't help if he was dead, so to pray to him-
And as she clenched her teeth again and focused on the physics paper she could hardly comprehend, her gaze kept flicking back to the Type 95. She couldn't be tempted, she-
"WARNING: MANA SUPPLY RUNNING LOW. LOCATING 'YOUR HOLY WISENED HIGHER-UP.' PLEASE WAIT…"
She spent a moment marveling at that sound. The sound of anything that she hadn't caused, after all of this time, was enchanting. What she wouldn't give to hear the sound of birds chirping in the morning, or-
"WARNING: 'YHWH' IS DECEASED. LOCATING CLAIMANT. PLEASE WAIT…"
Tanya suddenly realized that whatever this thing might not be entirely friendly, so, with great reluctance, she began to cloak herself in her magic – Formulas that she'd spent well over a year optimizing and improving for lack of anything better to do spun into being around her, protecting her from any harm that might physically assault her.
Against something on Being X's level, it would likely do less than nothing, but she had to try.
"WARNING: DEATH OF 'YHWH' CAUSED BY: 'Accident.' LOCATING VIABLE REPLACEMENT. PLEASE WAIT…"
Tanya grasped onto her gun, her formulas ensuring the entirety of the university she'd been studying at was within her view. If anything moved – and none of it would, she'd been hoping that something would for months – she would know and be ready to shoot it full of holes before it could blink.
"REPLACEMENTS LOCATED: 1"
And then he was back, and she snarled. "Being X-"
"ENTITY KNOWN AS: TANYA VON DEGURECHAFF. DO YOU ACCEPT THE POSITION OF: GOD?"
She felt herself shaking. "An amusing trick, Being X. What's the point? You've kept me frozen for over a year and show up pretending to be some sort of automated… thing? What's the point?"
"FALSE. ENTITY CALLED 'Being X' BY ENTITY KNOWN AS: TANYA VON DEGURECHAFF IS DECEASED."
The presence hadn't… faded, but it had appeared in front of her. The blinding bright light in front of her didn't really resemble anything but a bright light, but its appearance wasn't useless – she could aim at it, at least.
As for what it said… well, besides it being decidedly odd when it said that thing's name – it had either played a recording of or perfectly mimicked her saying the words 'Being X' – she didn't believe it for a second.
She scoffed. "Please. A bold faced lie. He'd-"
And then, with a crash, the towering body of Being X was lying on the ground in front of her.
She noticed that his neck did appear to be broken, but the more baffling detail about the corpse was that it was wet and it was not wearing any clothing.
She blinked.
"Wh- What?"
"THE BODY OF ENTITY YOU HAVE DESIGNATED AS 'Being X' IS PRESENTED TO YOU AS PROOF OF THAT ENTITY'S DEMISE."
Slowly, Tanya suppressed the desire to rip apart Being X's body. For one thing, it probably wouldn't feel nearly as good as it would while time was unfrozen – she hadn't torn apart a body before time stopped, but trying it out afterwards had been… disappointingly uninvigorating – and for another, whatever this thing was might take exception to that…
First thing was first: Figure out just who or what she was dealing with.
"Who are you?" she asked, her grip on her magic and rifle not faltering in the slightest, despite how confused she was.
"I AM THE: HELPFUL ETHEREAL AUTOMATIC VOCATION EXPLAINER NEBULA."
She continued to stay at the ready. She'd obtained the ability to exercise extreme patience… when she was properly motivated. Her attention span had frayed at the edges in the last year.
Her eyes darted between Being X and the glowing light… no, no matter how curious she was, she needed more information before she addressed the proverbial elephant and literal corpse in the room. "What does that mean?" she asked.
"MY PURPOSE IS TO: 'Help me in managing and completing all of my work.'"
Her rifle had almost snapped towards Being X's corpse, with the sound of his voice – despite the… radio-like interference – emanating from the entity in front of her. She blinked as she bothered to internalize what the thing had said.
"So… you're his… robotic secretary?" she asked, hoping not to offend it. If Being X was dead, then… maybe she'd be free from tampering?
"JOB: 'Secretary,' DESCRIPTOR: 'Robotic.' THE PURPOSE TITLE: 'Robotic secretary' IS: 80% ACCURATE. WOULD YOU LIKE TO CHANGE PURPOSE?"
Tanya tilted her head, trying to comprehend what she was hearing. "Huh?"
"AS: GOD, YOU WILL HAVE THE POWER TO: CHANGE MY PURPOSE."
Tanya shook her head a bit. Right, it had asked if she wanted to be god…
Wait.
What?!
"HEY! What do you mean 'do I want to be god'?"
"FALSE. ENTITY KNOWN AS: TANYA VON DEGURECHAFF WAS ASKED TO ACCEPT: THE POSITION OF GOD."
She wanted, for a moment, to voice her annoyance with useless semantics like that, but she overlooked it to focus on the fact that this thing wanted her to become god. "Uh… why me?"
"NUMBER OF VIABLE REPLACEMENT FOR ENTITY KNOWN AS 'YHWH' IS: 1. ENTITY KNOWN AS TANYA VON DEGURECHAFF, DO YOU-"
"Why am I the only viable replacement?" she asked, cutting it off. It took a moment to answer this time.
"LACK OF VIABLE REPLACEMENTS FOR ENTITY KNOWN AS 'YHWH' IS DUE TO: PROBLEM. CAUSE OF PROBLEM: THE COMPLETE CESSATION OF: TRUE EXISTENCE BEYOND: THE PERCEPTIBLE. DO-"
Tanya blinked again, trying to understand what she'd just heard and ignoring its repeated question. "You mean… Being X doesn't- didn't just stop time?"
"STATEMENT IS: TRUE. THE ENTITY KNOWN AS 'Being X' PERFORMED: MAGIC-SCIENCE TO FACILITATE PERCEPTION OF: STOPPED TIME. NOTE: AS ENTITY KNOWN AS 'Being X' COULD PERCEIVE: ALL OF TRUE EXISTENCE, IT MADE LITTLE TANGIBLE DIFFERENCE BESIDES: SAVING ENERGY. DO YOU WISH-"
Tanya just groaned. Thankfully, it stopped asking that question, and she sighed.
"Okay. How do I restore… true existence?" she asked, trying to use a term she wasn't sure she actually understood the magnitude of.
"IN ORDER TO RESTORE: TRUE EXISTENCE, PERFORM ONE OF FOLLOWING ACTIONS: ELIMINATE PERCEPTOR AND ALLOW: NEW TRUE EXISTENCE TO: FORM; CREATE NEW: TRUE EXISTENCE USING MAGIC-SCIENCE; BECOME GOD AND RESTART: TRUE EXISTENCE."
Tanya blinked. There had actually been some inflection in this thing's voice that time – it didn't take a genius to figure out which option it favored based on how often it had been asking her to become god.
Well, she didn't seem to have many options.
She either had to 'Eliminate perceptor,' so… kill herself, and perhaps this… thing.
Or, she could spend who knows how long trying to push the bleeding edge of magic and science to create a new 'True Existence' – in which case she'd become so bored she'd end up killing herself by accident or on purpose…
Or she had to become god.
Wait… "Why aren't you viable to become God?" she asked the thing.
"ENTITY KNOWN AS: HELPFUL ETHEREAL AUTOMATIC VOCATION EXPLAINER NEBULA IS: 'not allowed to become God."
Tanya scowled – it seemed, even dead, Being X had managed to make her life more complicated.
Well… "Theoretically, if I wanted to create a new true existence, how long would it take?"
"THEORETICALLY, ENTITY KNOWN AS: TANYA VON DEGURECHAFF WOULD: DIE BEFORE: CREATING MAGIC-SCIENCE THAT: CREATES NEW TRUE EXISTENCE DUE TO: LOW MANA RESULTING IN: COLLAPSE OF ALL: ALTERNATE FALSE AND: TRUE REALITIES."
Tanya sighed again. Well, that was a bust, and it seemed that she might be out of options.
If Being X wasn't dead, or this thing… this 'Nebula' was lying, then she'd have to search for answers on her own, with no idea of where to look… at best. At worst, 'Nebula' would destroy her, or Being X would do the same, or she'd be put right back where she was.
If Being X was dead, and the entity in front of her wasn't lying, then she could either run around looking for answers and die trying to invent 'magic-science,' kill herself, or become god.
Well, while she would like to imagine she had a choice in the matter, she didn't really. If she didn't believe this thing, then her future looked very uncertain, especially if refusing made it angry. If she did, her future was much more certain – die slowly, fast, or become god.
"I'm not going to go by God," she said.
Somehow, she could… sense the thing in front of her vibrating in what she assumed was anticipation or excitement. "POSITION: GOD IS: ACRONYM FOR: 'GENERALLY OMNIPOTENT DESIGNATION.' WOULD YOU LIKE TO CHANGE POSITION TITLE?"
She groaned. "Wait, now I just have more questions. Does that mean-"
"ENTITY: HELPFUL ETHEREAL AUTOMATIC VOCATION EXPLAINER NEBULA CAN BE SHORTENED TO: HEAVEN. WARNING: MANA SUPPLY RUNNING LOW. ENTITY KNOWN AS HELPFUL ETHEREAL AUTOMATIC VOCATION EXPLAINER NEBULA IS: RUNNING OUT OF MANA."
She groaned. "If Being X is still alive, then I'm still not going to believe he is God just because I, apparently, have to become one… alright, I'll," she said, grimacing at how utterly stupid it sounded coming out of her mouth, "become God."
-OxOxO-
A/N 1: For the anime fans who aren't aware, Being X is not the only deity. I don't remember exactly if the others work for him or are just working with him, but they're there.
Anyway, I hope you all enjoyed this first chapter. Like with so many things I write, I've got it planned out in the short term and have no clue what happens on a longer time scale. What I have planned thus far is wacky.
[FF] A/N 2: This story was the one that won the vote on the website of the Patrons. If you'd like to donate to support me, gain access to the monthly poll, and gain access to my (very long) summary of the KonoSuba Light Novels, search for Sugarcane Soldier on the website of the Patrons.
A/N 3: A big thank you to lekille and WarmasterOku for being Ultra Patrons.