I was in the middle of thinking about what kind of ecosystem to build around that desert when time suddenly stopped.
This wasn’t a joke. Time had actually stopped. Every life-form froze in place. The air, the mana, the writhing tentacles, the water—nothing moved.
What now. A bug?
“It isn’t a bug.”
“Don’t tell me this is a penalty for not building a civilization.”
The Angel hurriedly denied it.
“Of course not. As I told you, we’ve been watching your build very closely ourselves, Nonhuman. Time stopping now was always part of the schedule.”
“?”
“The first and second collisions are, so to speak, a tutorial for filtering out the chaff. Since you cleared the tutorial, the Community function is now unlocked. And players who survive the third collision are given a choice.”
A choice...?
“To go farther, or to withdraw.”
“I’ll go farther.”
“I thought you might say that, but please at least listen to the explanation first.”
“...Fine.”
What the Angel explained was a little different from what I’d expected.
Because withdrawing wasn’t “giving up.”
“Immediately after every third collision comes an ‘exit interval.’ Every player is given the opportunity to exit.
If you choose to advance, you continue participating in the game.
If you exit, you’re given the chance to convert all the score and Points you’ve earned so far into divine power.”
“Divine power?”
“As you can tell from the fact that we’ve stopped time, the organizers can adjust the flow of time however we wish.
You would return to the point in time when you entered the game, wake up in your original body, and possess divine power that would let you freely manipulate everything in the world, just as you can now.”
What?
“Of course, the wishes you could grant after only the third game would still be limited. For example, with 10,000 Points, perhaps around a million dollars in tangible assets, or services of equivalent value.”
“That wouldn’t be nearly enough to wipe out humanity.”
“No. It wouldn’t. Of course, if you gather enough Points, you really could reign over Earth like a god. That is, if your goal isn’t becoming a true god.”
“Then if I win the final round?”
“Then naturally, all the world score you’ve accumulated so far, along with the score of the world you continue to manage afterward, will all be converted into divine power. You could spread into other stars across the universe, or join the organizers. If you want to manage multiple other worlds, that too would be allowed.”
“You’re explaining something this important only now?”
“To be fair, I could have answered when we first met if you’d asked. But you accepted before asking a single question.”
Well. Fair enough. That one was my fault.
Come to think of it, of course it was. If the odds were one in a billion to become a “god,” with soul erasure otherwise, who would ever join? I’d vaguely assumed it worked because they were gathering participants from across dimensions, but apparently there had been a midway exit system all along.
“Then let me ask now. If someone does become an ‘exiter,’ what happens to their world?”
“A world without a god continues developing independently. Even so, it can still become the target of a World Collision.”
“So any player who collides with that world is basically getting a free world, since there’s no opposing player... no?”
“That’s right! Which is why you can only apply for ‘exit’ until the midpoint of the designated Protection Period.”
That didn’t seem to solve the problem at all.
“I’m not finished explaining. The players who stay then begin an ‘auction’ for the remaining worlds! Whoever pays the highest amount of [Points] for a given world will be the one to collide with it next.”
“So you can buy the world you want?”
“Exactly! If you discover an attractive world among those left behind by exiting players, you can spend [Points] without restraint and choose it as your next collision target. Since it’s a world without a god, everything in it is yours to command, Nonhuman! Its creations will worship you in place of their former god. Please become the new god of the civilization whose old god has vanished.”
“What about things like the original owner’s Traits?”
“You can’t inherit those. Traits belong to each player alone.”
“Then who gets the Points I pay?”
“Naturally, the world’s original owner. In other words, the more attractive a world you build before exiting, the more Points you’ll gain when you leave. Exiting at the right moment is a strategy in itself.”
Hmm...
So if I piled up, say, ten million Points, could I go back to Earth, exterminate all humans, destroy every structure civilization had built on the planet, restore nature, manipulate the ecosystem however I wanted, and play [The Real World Creator] on the real Earth?
“Well, ten million probably wouldn’t be enough. Around three hundred million should do it. I can at least tell you that gaining an immortal life costs fewer Points than you’d think.”
Wait. The more I listened, the stranger this game became.
“So outside the ‘exit interval,’ leaving is impossible, right?”
“Yes. And to add one more point: even if nobody buys your world after you exit, the exit still succeeds. You just won’t receive any additional Points.
And exit worlds will ‘preferentially’ collide with other exit worlds first.
After that, those worlds become auction targets as well. And of course, if the number of remaining exit worlds is odd, then one of them will inevitably collide with a world that still has an owner. That part is simply luck.”
“Hmm...”
“And... it’s also possible for an absurd situation to occur where your world’s inhabitants ‘lose’ after colliding with an exit world.
But don’t worry. Once you’ve collided with an exit world, both of them are your worlds anyway. You can just think of it as the species you’d been raising as your main force having changed.”
“Does that happen often?”
“Hmm... if that world’s <Politics> score is high, it can happen easily enough. You could also say the original god was irresponsible. They perfectly controlled the world, then abandoned it.”
Just hearing that much had already set a thousand thoughts racing through my head.
“Wait. Then what happens to players who surrendered?”
“If a higher god exits, then all subordinate gods exit simultaneously. They can’t inherit the world even if they want to. They receive Points in proportion to their contribution.”
“And if, during an exit interval, there are two or more players in one world? That’s possible if a war drags on.”
“In that case, they need to conclude peace negotiations immediately before the moment exit becomes available. Then they can leave. If not every god in that world exits, the world does not go to auction. Naturally, an exiting player who leaves behind another player in the world receives only the Points they personally possess and does not receive any Points from a world auction.”
Huh?
Because of this so-called “exiter” mechanic, the nature of the game had suddenly changed.
This wasn’t a game where everyone fought over a single seat as the last god.
It was a game where you held out as long as you could, then cashed out at an appropriate point and left.
“Ah. So that’s why they were all begging me to accept their surrender.”
“That’s right.”
“Then wiping out their souls was the correct move. If I’d been forced to exit later while I had subordinate gods under me, those bastards would’ve leeched off my score.”
“No? Subordinate gods simply receive compensation based on contribution, while the higher god is paid based on the total score, so that wouldn’t happen at all. It’s a mechanic designed to encourage accepting surrender.”
“Hmm.”
In a world where time had stopped, I found myself thinking very hard.
The first thought was that winning might be easier than I’d expected.
In practice, the number of people seriously competing for the seat of god probably wasn’t one billion. More like ten thousand. One against a billion would be absurd, but one against ten thousand... well. About like winning gold in one of the Olympics’ popular events, maybe.
The second thought was that those serious competitors were inevitably the ones I’d meet later.
Of course they were. They’d have plenty of score to spare, so they’d all pick the worlds they liked, gobble them up, and expand at a leisurely pace. Maybe I’d meet them directly around round ten.
After the exit interval had come around three times, and the number of remaining worlds had dropped to 1,048,576—about a million.
At that point, the gods left in those worlds wouldn’t be the sort of nobodies I’d met three times already, the kind who thought, If I win, great, and if I lose, I can just surrender. They’d be the real thing.
And then there were the ten thousand the Angel had mentioned in passing—the ones who had some chance of killing Yogur-tosoth by their own strength—and the ten percent of those who could do it without mutual destruction and still try to beat me afterward.
Realistically, among this billion-player pool, only about a thousand were true opponents.
“That’s an interesting way to look at it. Then again, given your abilities, Nonhuman, perhaps no one below that level would even register to you as competition.”
That was as far as I got in my thoughts.
“Ah?”
“What is it? It looks like you just had another horrifying idea.”
Wait. Wait...
No. This doesn’t just end with, The game got easier to win.
“Angel. Can I assume every player knew the rules of the game you just described?”
“Almost all of them probably did, and even if they didn’t, they do now.”
“I see... Then every player understood the game’s ‘environment,’ didn’t they?”
“Uh, well. Yes.”
Good God.
I’d thought this game was a tournament that would narrow one billion people down to one.
That was why I’d focused exclusively on researching how to win a one-on-one match, no matter what.
But it wasn’t. Win twice, and the Community function opens.
Win a third time, and there’s an exit interval. And apparently there will be more after that.
On top of that, surrendered players are absorbed into the victor’s power structure, and if they work hard under that victor, they still leave with Points—whether they exit later or the victor ultimately wins.
No. It’s not a tournament. Every rule in this game points not to tournament survival, but to something else entirely.
An environment in which multiple actors gather, make rational decisions, and pursue the greatest possible benefit.
In academic terms, that’s called a game situation.
At that moment, my eyes snapped wide open.
Why was it specifically “gamers,” not politicians, businessmen, or scholars, who were given tickets to compete in the contest that would decide a god?
Why were there as many as one billion participants?
Why is there effectively no penalty for surrendering, and no benefit at all to refusing surrender?
Because only that way do you create an environment with a large sample size and repeated, sustained confrontation—an environment where game theory applies.
Then the Angel smiled.
“Oh. To reach that point entirely on your own, without a single hint. You really are an exceptionally capable player, Nonhuman. Reaching that conclusion alone already puts you in the top one percent.”
And there is one environment above all others where game theory, where game situations, most characteristically occur.
An ecosystem!
An environment where differently evolved life-forms each compete using different strategies, where only the most successful strategy survives and all others are weeded out.
The very environment I had been building ever since the start of the game, after abandoning civilization.
“To be fair, game situations aren’t limited to ecosystems. They also include strategy and diplomacy between civilizations and states... That was our intention too.”
The essence of this game was a competition of strategy against strategy, with one billion life-forms—worlds—competing against one another to extract the greatest possible gain.
Then I would need to change my own strategy as well. Since this was not a tournament where failure to beat your opponent meant death, but a game where “a good loss, then exit” was in fact the optimal strategy.
From now on, I will no longer make winning a one-on-one match against an opposing world my objective.
“Oh. Then from now on, will you be aiming to lose well too, Nonhuman?”
No.
I’ll become the most vicious, most relentless predator of all—the one that preys on players who choose “good defeat” instead of victory—crushing the souls of all who oppose me, destroying their worlds, and making my Dessert Legion conquer the whole world.
“To be honest, that’s exactly what I expected.”