On the day of the Fertility Festival, Isagi didn't make his way back to the Garden of Stars until afternoon.
He'd stayed up far too late the night before, leaving him with a pleasantly fuzzy, floating feeling — though it didn't really bother him, since the festival itself didn't start until evening and there was still plenty of ti.
He even had enough ti to go back to his room and sleep for a bit.
That had been the plan, anyway. But once he lay down on his bed, sleep simply refused to co. His mind was sharp and clear, and his body felt powerful, coiled with energy — as if he'd hit his absolute peak. Which, when he thought about it, made sense: the human body really did respond to proper rest.
The late-autumn afternoon carried a gentle chill.
The air had turned cool, a soft breeze drifting through at intervals, carrying with it the distant calls of migrating birds — and beneath that, the bright, chattering voices of the girls out in the courtyard.
That was Aphrodite, running Ryuu-senpai and the others through their final dress rehearsal.
Lively didn't begin to cover it.
Isagi only had to glance out the window to see that the courtyard had beco absolutely packed: beyond Ryuu-senpai, Lefiya, Tiona, and Ais, Riveria and Alicia were there too, along with quite a few Loki Familia girls whose nas he didn't know but whose faces were familiar.
Even Anya had shown up, along with Lulune and Chloe from the burger shop — the whole crowd of them.
Right now, clustered around Aphrodite, there had to be at least fifteen or twenty people — every single one of them a beautiful girl, all already done up in makeup and dressed in their costus, ready to head out co evening.
He was supposed to have been one of them, originally.
The Goddess of Beauty had very emphatically insisted that he play the lead in her theatrical production.
But.
After Isagi had read through the revised script, he'd declined the invitation.
To be fair, the original script had been sothing he'd helped Aphrodite put together — but that had been a first draft, a simple story that fit what the Goddess of Beauty wanted: a pure love story, nothing more.
Two lovers in the heavenly realm: Marshal Tianpeng, who had violated a divine commandnt and been cast down to the mortal world, transford into a 'monster' — and an unnad celestial fairy who followed him down, waiting faithfully, until at last they t again but could not recognize each other, and were forced to part.
Isagi had a real knack for distilling a plot to its essentials, and he'd laid the whole story out for the Goddess of Beauty in clear, simple terms.
At the ti, her breathtakingly lovely face had shimred with tears — she'd looked genuinely moved.
And then!
As the Fertility Festival drew nearer, the script had been revised again and again, each version more unhinged than the last.
The current version went sothing like this.
Two 'gods' who fell in love in the divine realm (a reasonable adaptation, admittedly) descend to the mortal world — one is reborn as an ugly pig-man adventurer, the other reincarnates as a spider monster in the Dungeon. (What on earth?!)
During an adventure, the pig-man adventurer is deceived by the spider monster disguised as a human, lured deep into the Dungeon, where he discovers a village built by monsters — hold on, was the Guild involved in writing this?!
Isagi blinked. Then he noticed that Fels was actually present at the rehearsal.
...Never mind, then.
The pig-man adventurer is then hypnotized by the spider monster (why is it that the Goddess of Beauty, who governs love, simply cannot let go of hypnosis?) and, convinced that he is no longer an adventurer but a monster himself, begins living with her in the Dungeon.
Before long, however, another adventuring party wanders in, nearly breaking the hypnosis — so the spider heroine locks him up.
(Imprisonnt play?!)
The spider heroine, as female lead, demands that he father a hundred children before she'll let him go.
(???)
Fortunately, a kind-hearted little monster sets him free — but after being imprisoned for so long, the adventurer who had once sympathized with monsters has now completely snapped, and imdiately moves to capture the very little monster who freed him and make her his slave.
(Hold on, hold on — how is this getting weirder by the minute?!)
As it turns out, the kind little monster doesn't lead the pig-man adventurer back out of the Dungeon. Instead, she leads him deeper and deeper inside, until at last they reach a place of unfathomable depth — a place unknown to anyone.
It's revealed that this little monster was the true heroine all along. The spider monster from before was nothing but an impostor.
(A plot twist?!)
The now-thoroughly-broken pig-man adventurer is hypnotized once more, and in the end, the two of them remain together forever in so hidden depth of the Dungeon, known to neither man nor monster.
After reading through Aphrodite's finished script, Isagi had only one question.
Naly —
"Where's the pure love?"
There was nothing pure about this story. Nothing happy about it. Nothing at all that even resembled...
And on top of that.
This still wasn't the final version.
From what Isagi knew, once Riveria and Anya and the rest of them had gotten involved, the script had been revised over and over again, incorporating the girls' opinions through lord knows how many more rounds of edits.
What it had beco by now, he no longer dared to imagine.
Fine —
Let them do whatever they wanted. It had nothing to do with him anymore. Besides, Aphrodite had argued back when he complained, insisting, "This is called art! Do you even know what art is?!"
What was there left to say to that.
For so reason, Isagi felt a headache coming on.
He was already thinking that for the foreseeable future, if he happened to run into Aphrodite on the street, he was going to pretend he didn't know her.
As night fell.
Brilliant fireworks began rising into the sky above the city.
The first volleys ca from the direction of South Main Street and the Pleasure Quarter — the most extravagant part of Orario at the best of tis, now cutting loose entirely.
Rockets climbed, burst, and vanished in an instant — only for new ones to take their place imdiately. It seed endless.
Isagi had managed to sleep a little that afternoon, and when he woke, the sky was already dark. The girls had all left long ago, though they'd left a note for him.
And while he was still getting out of bed, the fireworks outside his window had been going off non-stop — whoosh after whoosh after whoosh.
By the ti he finally headed out the door, it had gotten even more raucous.
In every direction.
It seed the people of the city had spent months stockpiling fireworks for this very night, an inexhaustible supply launching from every corner of the visible world.
And the closer he got to Babel.
The denser the fireworks beca — until streaks of fire hadn't even finished fading before new bursts of color exploded in their place, a truly unbroken cascade of light.
Along the main streets.
Isagi had never seen so many people in the city at once. Even last year's Denatus celebration hadn't been anything like this.
He supposed it was because visitors from other countries had turned out in much greater numbers this ti.
He could indeed spot all manner of people he didn't recognize. Mages in star-spangled robes — clearly from one of the great magic nations, with their fondness for that particular style of dress. rchants from distant desert kingdoms, draped in hoods and laden with jewels of every description. Stern-faced bureaucrats in elaborate formal wear, apparently from the largest empire on the far side of the continent.
And then there were the n and won who were unmistakably from the Far East — dressed in traditional robes, long swords at their hips.
Elves, Dwarves, even Orcs and Amazons were out in greater numbers than usual. And there were even a few rare sights: Pallum rchants, mounted atop enormous beasts, making their way through the streets in grand procession — using their sharp minds to compensate for what fortune had denied them elsewhere. Though the Pallum had no nation of their own and faced widespread discrimination across the continent, many of the most powerful rchant guilds were in fact run by Pallum.
Rumor had it they even maintained a secret organization of their own, with business interests stretching across the entire Jenggel continent — an unseen financial power pulling strings from the shadows.
Though whether there was any truth to that gossip was another matter entirely.
It took Isagi quite an effort to make his way from North Main Street all the way to Central Park.
If the crowds on the main streets had at least allowed for slow shuffling progress, then by the ti he got close to the plaza itself — still a good distance from Babel — the entire area was packed solid, a wall of bodies with no way through.
And not just the streets.
The buildings surrounding Central Park — second, third, and fourth floors alike — were cramd full of people as well.
Looking out across the sea of humanity, one could almost be struck by the dizzy, disbelieving thought: Orario has this many people?!
Fortunately, Isagi could fly.
And not far off, he spotted Asfi as well, hovering in midair on her Flying Boots, gazing out over the scene.
Fels was not here right now.
As the only two people in the city currently capable of flight, the boy and the young woman quickly caught sight of each other, shared a smile, and then both turned their eyes back to the spectacle unfolding around Central Park.
Flas rose alongside the fireworks.
Starting from the very top of Babel, the four Towers of Abundance surrounding Central Park had each lit their own enormous bonfires, blazing against the black vault of the night sky.
The goddesses of fertility — flower crowns on their heads, resplendent in their gowns — ascended to the summits of their towers.
Freya, Deter, Hathor... Goddess Ishtar had originally been among them, but she had since departed the city, and her place had been taken by another goddess Isagi didn't recognize.
And apart from them.
At the side of the fertility goddesses stood one more figure — a goddess representing purity.
Goddess Astrea was there, beside Deter.
As the festival began.
The goddesses began to sing — ancient words, not the language of the mortal world but the tongue of the gods themselves, a hymn of blessing, a prayer for the harvest of the year to co.
This was no re ceremony or formality.
The farmlands outside Orario's walls produced enough each year not only to feed every resident and adventurer in the city, but to stockpile reserves and still export the surplus to other nations.
That bounty was directly tied to the goddesses' prayers.
It mattered enormously.
Because no matter how powerful an adventurer was, they still had to eat — and in the ancient age, the heroes who held the line against the Dungeon here had constantly struggled with supply and logistics.
The gods' descent to the mortal world had not simply given people the power to beco adventurers and fight monsters. It had changed everything, across every dinsion of life.
The goddesses' hymn had rung out across the city for a hundred years.
True, the people of today no longer danced and sang and laughed freely around the base of Babel beneath sky-scorching bonfires, as their ancestors had centuries before.
But Isagi could still see it — in the eyes of every person around him, in the countless gazes lifted toward the goddesses high atop the distant tower — sothing sacred. A genuine, heartfelt faith.
People today no longer built temples to the gods.
But faith persisted, real and undiminished — not born of so abstract doctrine or distant creed, but rooted in the lived history shared between the gods and the people of this city across a thousand years. Everything they had weathered together. Everything that had happened.
Human lives were not long enough to rember all of it firsthand.
But mory, as a thing to be passed down, never faded — never lost what it was ant to carry.
[The evil of the dark gods is absolute — and therefore, the righteousness and goodness of the other gods is absolute as well.]
Isagi now understood this world's fundantal logic more deeply than ever before.
The goddesses' prayers would continue for a long, long ti.
And so, all across the city — on West Main Street and East Main Street, in the Third District and the Fifth District, everywhere you looked — festivals of every size and variety rang out in jubilant noise.
Stalls and street vendors had proliferated to the point where even alleyways that normally sat empty were now blazing with lantern-light.
The whole city was going to be loud all night long.
And as Isagi hovered at the edge of the plaza on his spread golden wings, scanning the crowd for any sign of Aphrodite so he could watch her theatrical disaster unfold —
At that very sa mont.
High atop the soaring spire of Babel, another gaze had fixed itself on the conspicuously visible boy floating in the air below.
It was Goddess Freya.
That's right.
The goddess of abundance had begun to feel a touch weary, and so she had quietly swapped out one of her Familia's children to continue the 'prayers' on her behalf atop the Tower of Abundance, while she herself slipped back into the guise of 'Syr' and began slacking off.
In practice, it amounted to the sa thing.
Because the one praying up there right now was indeed the true Goddess Freya.
anwhile, on the other side of the window, the beautiful silver-haired girl known as Syr stood gazing out at the distant figure — a boy floating in midair on a pair of golden wings.
"How many Lv.6 mbers does Astrea Familia have now?" the goddess murmured to herself, tilting her head slightly in thought.
"Four, was it? Or five?"
"So then — are you confident?"
The first two lines had been self-directed musing. The last one was addressed to the Freya Familia officers gathered in the room with her — Ottar among them.
"We swear on our lives to defend our Goddess's honor!"
"No. This is your trial."
Syr — Freya — had been waiting for this mont all along.
She simply hadn't expected the fruit to ripen quite so quickly. The boy had been only Lv.2 last year — and now, in a single year, he had grown to this.
Outside of Loki Familia.
The mightiest warriors of the city's most beautiful goddess had finally found their match.
How very wonderful.
"I will challenge Astrea Familia to a War Ga. Whether we win or lose is entirely up to your performance."
Syr said it lightly, as if she were making so trivial, inconsequential decision.
And at the sa ti.
On the other side of the room, a red-haired goddess lounged on a sofa, eyes half-lidded, swirling a wine glass slowly in her hand.
"Am I invited?"
Loki smiled.
"Sounds like fun — why not. Let's take this opportunity to put on a grand spectacle for the whole city."
____
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