Judging by how they started spamming <Conversation> and <Surrender> the instant they saw Yogur-tosoth, even they themselves must have known there was no conceivable path to victory. I realized then that I had already won this match.
But when I refused to accept their surrender, the opposing players tried the next-best thing.
“Is there really such a thing as a next-best option in a situation you can’t win even if you die and come back?”
There is. It’s making me accept the surrender.
They gather every ounce of strength they have and inflict meaningful damage on me. They can’t win anyway, but they can at least threaten me.
You’ve got another game after this one, don’t you? If we beat the hell out of you first, do you really think you’ll still be able to win that?
That kind of threat.
“That does make sense as a strategy. But then I have a question. Why won’t you accept surrender?”
Who knows. Because I don’t want to be more of a bastard than necessary?
“That’s a strange way to think. There’s nothing worse than erasing a soul.”
There is. Promising not to erase them, then erasing them anyway.
“Ah.”
If I was going to get rid of them anyway, taking their surrender first and then erasing them would be fraud, wouldn’t it?
“It’s actually forbidden by the system as well. Erasure is only possible in cases of deliberate negligence, rebellion, or extreme incompetence. If you truly find a god personally unbearable, the only way to expel them is to pay <Faith> equal to that god’s contribution.”
“Then if that god keeps doing good work, you really can’t expel them even if you can’t stand them?”
“Mm. Normally, if they keep doing good work, I think most people would keep using them no matter how much they disliked them... But if you truly, absolutely hated them, you could choose to assign them no work at all. Scores explode upward every game, so eventually that god’s contribution would become negligible. Once that happens, you could expel them.”
I see.
In any case, that’s why I don’t accept surrender. The fewer intelligent species there are in this world, the better.
The enemy vanguard tried to hold out as long as possible by using mysticism to consume waterweeds, fish, the ground, and the mana in the air, but in the end they couldn’t withstand the assault of the Meat-Eating Puddings and were wiped out.
And then there was the problem with the Meat-Eating Puddings and jellies I had sent over. There was no “water” in the enemy’s land. It was a true bare desert.
My puddings and jellies had been built on the premise that the enemy would at least have some kind of water source, so they all died out.
“Ohh. How strange... How can there be no water at all?”
When I scouted the enemy world, the creatures that looked like moving sand and pebbles turned out to be spirit-type life-forms. Things that lived and moved through magic rather than protein. Their bodies, too, were made of magic instead of protein.
“So it’s not all just the same kind of magic, huh.”
Their bodies were composed of magic, and they drew strength from sunlight, sand, and the mana and elements in the atmosphere, so they could live without water. In exchange, they seemed to be monopolizing the magical resources of their world.
And the other species was a small life-form that looked modeled after a hamster. It was a bit larger, though, and its arms and hands were developed enough to make and use tools, so in practice it was no different from a small human.
Given that there are hamster species that live in deserts, it wasn’t really strange. Among desert rodents on Earth, there are extreme cases that can survive for nearly months without drinking a single drop of water.
Judging by the rocky hills and valleys in their world, they probably hid in burrows during the day and moved at night. They must have an ecology built to minimize moisture loss to the absolute extreme.
From the look of it, their desert even had cactus forests dense enough to be described as lush, along with shrubs and brush.
If there were this many plants, then I supposed they got a reasonable amount of rain. They probably drank water, but had built their strategy around reducing water consumption as much as possible.
And when I examined the hamster species more closely, they had humps. Water? Fat? It seemed they had some kind of organ for storing energy. On Earth, rodents don’t have anything like that. Camels do.
The hamsters fed on insects, cacti, cactus fruit, cactus sap, and what looked like fields laid out below the valleys... and as livestock, enormous herbivores that looked closer to camels.
I could also see buildings and tools made by splitting stone. So the city of hamsters beneath the valleys, the cactus forest, and beside that, the desert spirit zone. Had they divided the world up like that?
“Wow. The way you analyze hamsters is grotesquely detailed.”
What did they expect me to do? I don’t know anything about magic. Those rock-spirit things seemed to have made something like villages too, but I figured they probably just ate magic and built villages out of magic or something.
“Apologize to all spirit-type species.”
Anyway, all the jellies and puddings I’d sent into the enemy world were dead, and I couldn’t peer into their world anymore.
So now I had to think about strategy.
Not that much thought was really necessary. At this point I only had one strategic choice.
Either send Yogur-tosoth into the enemy side.
Or use Yogur-tosoth to intercept the troops coming in.
“That’s simple.”
Well, yes. There was no helping it. None of the Dessert Legion could survive in a pure desert environment, so what else was I supposed to do?
“Huh? Then I’m curious—if your first or second opponent had been a terrain like this, how exactly were you planning to deal with them?”
In that case, they wouldn’t have been able to live near water either, so I would’ve just kept my mouth shut and focused on multiplying life in my own ecosystem until I crushed them by score alone. Or I would’ve just coexisted with them until the next World Collision.
“Wow... So your strategy was basically up to luck?”
That’s what ecosystem strategies are always like. If you can attack the enemy, you just attack them and dry them out to death. If you can’t attack them, then they can’t attack you either, so you just endure.
“You do realize people usually call that a free-win build, right?”
If it works, it’s a strategy. And if things had gone that way, I’d have evolved my life-forms to be less dependent on water too.
【Creator. What would you have me do? Would it be acceptable for me to flow into their ecosystem?】
Hmm. Yogur-tosoth. How admirable of you to ask for my opinion first.
Honestly, if I sent you out, you’d probably just sweep everything away and win this simply. But I want to watch their numbers first and respond slowly, so for now you’re to focus on developing magic and devising counters for the kinds of moves they’re likely to use.
【Understood, Creator.】
At that, Yogur-tosoth went to Nectar Lake, bit down on one of Abhojuth’s tentacles, and started sucking with loud slurps, drawing in an absurd amount of nectar.
【Aaaaaaaah I’m being drained dryyyyyyyyyy】
It drank so much that it slowed the growth of the ecosystem as a whole, but there was no helping that. If I won this match and gained access to more resources, and if Abhojuth grew further as well, then we’d probably be able to handle it just fine.
The dimensional gate opened, and I was given a few more chances to attack, but neither I nor the enemy sent out any life-forms at all. They were probably thinking the same thing I was—that anything they sent would just die.
The same held true years later in in-game time, even after it reached the dimensional passage stage.
Yogur-tosoth spent the whole time training magic alone, my ecosystem recovered to about eighty percent of its original state, and the enemy only occasionally sent a few scouts into my world.
Why didn’t I send any scouts? I couldn’t. At the dimensional gate stage, I could choose which life-forms to send, but from the dimensional passage stage onward, they had to be sent under direct orders.
But my <Politics> score—the stat that reflected control and loyalty among creations—was zero. And the intelligence of my Dessert Legion was rock-bottom. In other words, even if I sent revelations down through something like <Divinity>, my life-forms wouldn’t obey at all. They were simply too stupid.
So I used my spare divine power to keep tuning my life-forms instead. I was busily evolving puddings so they could survive both in water-rich environments and in environments with no water at all.
But whether I should call it fortunate or just exactly as expected, the enemy finally sent an army.
An army they had raised over more than ten years of world-time. It looked as though they had gathered every resource they possessed, and more than half of it consisted of ranged mage forces assembled with the sole purpose of damaging the airborne Yogur-tosoth. The other half was an enormous mass of hamster hordes.
The interesting part was that there was one species among them I hadn’t seen before. An insect-like species that could handle tools with its hands. It didn’t look like the enemy’s main force, more like something lower-ranked. Probably the species of a defeated player.
The insect species seemed capable of using magic. Together with the spirit species, they prepared to fire magic at Yogur-tosoth. And then a message popped up in front of me.
「The opposing player ‘Sansan’ requests <Conversation>.」
So there was a player I hadn’t blocked. Naturally, I refused. I let moving Yogur-tosoth stand in for my answer.
The battle between the enemy world and the Dessert Legion began. Although calling it “began” was a bit questionable, because my puddings had already caught the smell of meat that had entered here long ago—their sense of smell was their only sensory organ—and were charging at the enemy like lunatics.
A creature that looked like a hamster general, some distinctive individual, had the hamsters form an actual battle line with equipment made from processed cactus spines and brush, and they held off the puddings’ suicidal flesh-charge.
The hamsters were handling physical combat? Outstanding. They had huge numbers and their formation was extremely tight, so the puddings couldn’t get at the enemy’s main mage force.
【Creator. How shall I deal with them?】
Instead of attacking, try defending yourself against their attack first.
【As you wish...】
Soon the enemy mages unleashed their magic in unison. Yogur-tosoth moved its tentacles and countered with magic in midair.
Yogur-tosoth’s magic magicked, magically blocking the spirits’ and insects’ magic with magic.
“No, come on!!! That’s your reaction to a high-level magical barrier woven by a Legendary Creation against primitive magic?!”
My world doesn’t have magic, so what exactly did they expect me to do—I don’t know how to read it.... They were getting mad like some military nerd who loses it because you called a gun a gun instead of naming the exact model.
Anyway, Yogur-tosoth’s magical skill really did seem extraordinary. It spent a great deal of mana, but it had blocked the attack of an army the enemy had desperately scraped together without taking any damage at all.
“Yogur-tosoth. You do have the ability to brutally crush them, I assume?”
【Of course. If you so desire, I believe I can annihilate them at once.】
“Don’t. Can you cook them slowly enough that our Dessert Legion can devour them, while using as little mana as possible?”
【If you do not mind it taking some time...】
What followed was a one-sided slaughter.
Yogur-tosoth’s primary magic was wind magic. It ravaged the enemy lines with tornadoes made of sand, water, and stones mixed together.
The lighter-bodied hamsters were simply swept up and thrown around by the storm, and even the sturdier-looking insects and spirits had their bodies shattered outright under the bombardment of water-and-stone-laced tempests.
And then the Dessert Legion swarmed over the shattered remains and began feasting to their hearts’ content. The fact that the spirits’ bodies were made of stone too was fatal, since even the Rock Jellies could melt and eat them.
“This is good. Unless the enemy is strong enough that you can only defeat them by going all out, make it a priority to subdue them in cooperation with the Dessert Legion whenever possible.”
【For the sake of increasing the resources of our ecosystem. I understand. Everything is for the prosperity of the Dessert Legion.】
Flourishing.
【Everything is for the flourishing of the Dessert Legion.】
That’s exactly it.
“Probably not, actually...”
And so the enemy world lost all of its military strength. Thanks to Yogur-tosoth advancing while scattering water magic, the Dessert Legion seized the third world.
Now my world’s area had reached a full 80 square kilometers. In this ecosystem—doubled in size once again, yet containing no water at all—what would the Dessert Legion be able to do next?