"Kindhearted and Simple" Outsiders

Night fell. The stars dimmed, the clamor faded, and the Uruk embassy, its lights extinguished, sank into silence.

In the pitch-black room, Samael sat by the window on the balcony, patiently carving a clay tablet with a stylus in hand. His tightly furrowed brow seemed unable to dispel its confusion and gravity.

After gathering information openly and covertly throughout the day, he had discovered that reality differed considerably from his memories.

First, the Hole of Heaven that Demon God King Goetia had bored through to incinerate the foundations of human existence had been sealed by Tiamat, who resisted her instincts. The Chaldea staff from the future, who had made restoring humanity their mission, had likewise been cut off outside Mesopotamia's World Bubble and had not arrived as promised.

Perhaps, if things continued like this, that mysterious organization would simply be absent altogether.

There would be no outsiders, nor any Messiah.

Then the task of confronting the Mesopotamian Third Storm would naturally fall entirely upon the Sumerians themselves.

They would decide their own future.

Though this deviation had a major impact, Samael had anticipated it long ago. For now, it was still acceptable.

Besides, fortune and misfortune went hand in hand. Without the true goddess Tiamat carrying out a returning-style ecological extinction, the Three Goddesses Alliance was mostly composed of unreliable double agents.

Thus, the difficulty of surviving this crisis had also decreased. For now, everything remained under control.

But the next deviation was a little too significant.

Second, after Heroic King Gilgamesh returned from Kutha, he had not followed the predetermined course of history and fully awakened the magical talent in his bloodline to become a wielder of the staff.

In other words, he seemed to have seen a different destiny.

The situation was unclear at present, and Samael did not know whether he had exposed himself.

Third, because that Wise King had not chosen the path of abandoning his talent for battle and becoming a spellcaster beyond his era.

The historical event in which he personally summoned Heroic Spirits of the Seven Classes to defend Uruk alongside them had also diverged.

According to the citizens' stories and discussions, King Gilgamesh had been unable to attend to everything while facing the Three Goddesses' siege.

To better defend the nation, the Heroic King had generously supplied resources from his treasury, gathered priests and Astrology Platform magi, and had them draw the foundations of a magic circle.

Afterward, the Shrine Maiden's Office, which had once successfully summoned Goddess Ishtar, accepted the commission and conducted a massive summoning ritual, hoping to call powerful figures from foreign lands to aid them.

In the end, only two "outsiders" who had drifted here appeared upon the altar. They accepted Uruk's call to arms and served the king.

One was Merlin, the court mage who commanded the Astrology Platform. The other was Leonidas I, Gate Guardian of the Absolute Demonic Beast Front.

These were all kindhearted and simple outsiders willing to help Uruk.

That was right. Of the Seven Classes that represented humanity's mystical power systems in his memories, only two had actually appeared.

The other "outsiders" from his memories who were meant to fill the Seven Classes had not arrived.

Of course, Anna, who had now been picked up by that White Nightmare Demon in the northern Fir Forest, also counted as one.

Meanwhile, Scorpion General Kitablu, commander-in-chief of the demonic beast army, who should have perished together with the "foreign" archer Tomoe Gozen during the early stages of the Babylonian offensive and defensive war, had instead been personally dealt with by King Gilgamesh.

Things had become somewhat different.

Samael rubbed his chin with one hand while his fingers on the other traced a relationship diagram onto the back of the clay tablet, his brow furrowing as he organized his thoughts.

Moreover, as far as he knew, among the Three Goddesses who had agreed to destroy Uruk and rule this land, two were outsiders who had drifted here.

One was the incarnation of a Mayan World deity, Feathered Serpent God Kukulkan, who had occupied Edessa through the proliferating rainforest in the south.

The other was an incarnation from the Greek World—Gorgon, the snake-haired monster who occupied the northern Fir Forest, built the Temple of Blood, stole part of Tiamat's authority, and mass-produced demonic beasts.

The hidden final pillar was naturally Ereshkigal, the native Mesopotamian goddess and Mistress of the Underworld. On the surface, she had spread plague to Kutha, but in truth, she was gathering human souls to protect them.

From his experience and perception of surviving in the Sea of Imaginary Numbers, he vaguely sensed that more than one World Bubble floated within the "void."

These fruits of human civilization, nurtured in the Age of Gods, were gradually ripening and sinking toward the real surface.

During this process, the convergence of civilizations and the connections formed between various concepts also caused gods from different World Bubbles to project part of their existence onto other lands.

The faiths that revered them could even take root, sprout, and wield significant influence in another land.

For example, the well-known name of the Egyptian God of Death, "Anubis," was actually a Greek form of expression.

Though he had been born in the ancient Egyptian Age of Gods, during the later Ptolemaic Kingdom, Anubis's image merged with that of the Greek God Hephaestus to become "Hermanubis."

The center of this cult was Cynopolis, whose name meant "City of Dogs."

According to Book Six of Apuleius's The Golden Ass, faith in this god extended into the world of Ancient Rome and lasted at least until the second century.

Therefore, divine projections—so-called incarnations—were not necessarily limited to a particular era or a particular World Bubble.

If their faith expanded, if they were doing poorly, or for some other reason, they could probably, under certain conditions, project their existence through the Sea of Imaginary Numbers into a new world and continue to take root there.

Gorgon, the snake-haired monster who had stolen part of Tiamat's authority, had originally been known as the "Gorgon Sisters." Their names were Stheno, Euryale, and Medusa, the eldest, second, and youngest sisters respectively.

As native gods, they had been extremely unfortunate. To escape rejection and persecution in Greece itself, they had drifted to an invisible island to live.

But even so, heroes seeking to subjugate them came one after another, wanting to use their lives to display their martial prowess and please the gods.

Driven into a corner, Medusa, the youngest yet most capable of growth, devoured her two sisters and transformed into Gorgon, slaughtering the heroes who had come to subjugate them.

Such was the tragic fate of that false goddess Tiamat.

And when a gap appeared in the Mesopotamian World Bubble, this hatred for humanity was exploited by Demon God King Goetia and Kingu, the Child of the Creator God.

Through incarnations and conceptual fusion, they helped the summoned Gorgon seize part of Tiamat's authority and create the Beast Goddess, who had sworn vengeance upon humanity.

Likewise, exterminating humanity and living upon this land anew might have been the future that the persecuted Gorgon longed for.

But regrettably, she was most likely only a tool for those behind the scenes, to be discarded once they had achieved their purpose.

As for that Feathered Serpent God, it was probably because the Maya had already ended the Second Sun Era she ruled over, and her World Bubble was undergoing drastic changes. Quetzalcoatl, having been driven out, had no choice but to leave and seek a new land where faith in her could take root.

All in all, from Demon God King Goetia's perspective, this war was about destroying the foundations of human civilization and restarting the world.

From the Three Goddesses' perspective, however, it seemed to carry the flavor of a struggle for dominion over faith.

If they destroyed the present-day people of Uruk and, through their own will, opened a new era, then their atrocities could be turned into achievements of expanding faith and displaying power.

So who said these outsiders were kindhearted and simple?