"Sorry, the God of War was off duty."
The girl named Eva tilted her head and gave Sandora and me a pure, innocent smile—a smile that could only come so naturally from a "Saintess" who had grown up in a church district and barely encountered the mundane world. Though what she said might have sounded strange, Eva's expression remained utterly serious when she spoke the words "the God of War is off duty," as if she did not find anything odd about it at all. Even Old Man Lei beside her looked perfectly normal, merely somewhat regretful.
Hearing a system notification during prayer, the God of War having working hours, reciting a certain passage of scripture to leave God a voice message... All these things that seemed ripe for mockery to me were apparently not strange in the slightest to Eva and Lei.
Sandora and I exchanged helpless looks, then I figured out what was going on a moment later: they were used to it.
I found it absurd because everything I had learned about gods growing up had portrayed them as solemn, rigid, and meticulous. Sandora found it absurd because she knew far more gods, and most of them probably were not as unreliable as 123. But Eva and Lei had no such preconceived notions. Since the day they were born, Yiersen had already been the god of this world—I remembered hearing that 123 had descended here over a thousand years ago. Not only their generation, but even several generations before them had known the God of War as this sort of person. So generation after generation grew accustomed to it, until the locals now regarded "the God of War is sometimes offline" and "reciting Chapter Two, Verse Six lets you leave God a voice message" as perfectly natural,