Dantalion couldn't help but sigh internally. 'Sigh… If only I were actually outside…'
He wasn't sure if this was supposed to be normal, but he needed quintuple the amount of focus and brainpower to use his abilities outside than what it would take inside.
'I can't even accurately measure it because of how everything in this space just fucking listens to me down to the subconscious.'
Alongside controlling the space inside so that it wouldn't be chaotic--his thoughts constantly jumping from one thing to another, his subconscious threatening to manifest whatever it pleased --he had to use quintuple the focus and--
'[Parallel Processing] would be so convenient…' he thought.
If anything, with how much he was already handling, from keeping the space in order, to controlling the continuously accelerating poles he had created earlier but never gotten the chance to fully use, to running the system with nothing but his mind, to keeping track of what Kujou Sara and Atsuko were doing, shouldn't he have already qualified to gain the skill [Parallel Processing], or at least some inferior version of it?
He does.
He just thought it would be convenient. He did not say he wanted one, not yet, at least.
Dantalion believed he could still handle this on his own.
Lacking a way to use anything as a comparison, he leaned toward this being the normal procedure when using magicules.
Even though he had already converted other beings in Teyvat into what a native of the Cardinal World would be like, he had yet to observe any of them use magicules the way a native would.
'The concept of otherworlders in Teyvat is not foreign, so there is a possibility that someone connected to the Cardinal World would be here, or had been here before.'
But he knew that was just a hopeless, impossible, unlikely thing to hope for.
Teyvat was extremely isolated from the rest.
Encounters with otherworlders here were close to impossible in the next 1000 years, unlike the Cardinal World, where they literally kidnapped beings from other worlds for the skills manifested upon crossing over.
Though it rarely happened, people--perhaps like Dantalion himself--who were simply going about their day in their original world would suddenly get dragged into the Cardinal World for no reason at all.
Like Yuuki, Hinata, and Masayuki.
By the time he finished setting everything up, the game and sofas for each of them were ready. The only thing remaining was making Atsuko's controller, and as it turned out, he finished just as Atsuko set her tray down on the table.
So, he looked at her, waited for her to finish drinking, and then asked, handing her his own controller alongside Kujou Sara's to show her clearly what he meant.
"How do you want your controller to look?"
Atsuko had yet to understand what the thing was for, though she guessed it was related to the game. She noticed that the controllers Dantalion showed her generally seemed to reflect something of the user--or at least, that was what she could infer from the one the General had.
So she simply said she was fine with whatever Dantalion decided.
He gave her one with the base color being the same as Atsuko's hair, the contrast matching her eyes, and the finer details running through various shades in between.
As for the design, Dantalion handed it to her and said, "You continue it. Do whatever you think would make it look better."
Leaving her with that, Dantalion and Kujou Sara played first while Atsuko worked on customizing her controller.
But wouldn't it have been fine to just use it as-is, without any personal design, so they could all play together right away?
No.
To Dantalion, the game was just a game.
It was not as important as what your hand was physically touching.
During the match--with just the two of them--Kujou Sara was first to notice something.
"You let Atsuko do it herself, yet you didn't even ask the Shogun a single thing about whether she even wanted--"
"It is precisely because I understand Ei that I can hand it to her without saying a word." He cut her off, then added, "And why aren't you including yourself? I didn't ask you anything either, did I?"
"..." Kujou Sara observed him. She knew she would gain nothing from violently punching him; this was just an illusory avatar, after all, not his actual presence.
Dantalion had selected Money in the Bank Ladder Match.
"...I don't like the way you talk about her Excellency."
"I don't care what you think about it, Sara." He said it in a humorless laugh.
"Watch your tone when regarding her Excellency." Her voice was firm and steady as she watched the screen, Dantalion navigating to the team selection. "And do not forget--your autonomy depends on me."
"Yeah, I know." He selected John Cena and Rey Mysterio. "And also don't forget how I can cause irreparable destruction to everything around you."
"There is no way her Excellency would allow that."
"Yeah, she wouldn't--that's exactly why she'd kill you to stop me."
"...her Excellency would never do that."
"Yeah."
Dantalion just said that and stopped.
Kujou Sara let it stop there, too.
"My stance does not change. Watch your tone when referring to her Excellency."
"Mhm. Okay."
"..."
"..."
"...Tell me where the culprit is."
She set up the ladder. Dantalion's character drop-kicked it over.
"He escaped before we even arrived."
"That's obvious."
They hadn't seen the man here, so it was the only answer.
"Yeah. And I watched him do it--"
"What--?!"
"That night you said, 'Shut up, your boredom does not warrant sacrificing our sleep.'" He even imitated her voice and cadence as he said it.
Even without facing her directly, Dantalion could already see--through his [Magic Sense], which granted him 360-degree vision through scattered magicules--that Kujou Sara's grip on her controller was tight enough to probably crush a skull.
She chose not to speak. She was too emotional to open her mouth right now.
Dantalion, however, had no such problem.
"Think back on our conversation that night," He said, maneuvering his character to get Kujou Sara's stuck in the cables, then landing a 619.
"If you want to find him, let's do it after dealing with the Tatarigami." Seeing she is in no mood to reply, he reached out his hand--controller resting on his palm--toward her.
Sara looked at the controller being offered, her foul mood still intact.
She raised her gaze slightly and was met with Dantalion's expression.
A soft smile. Saintly, almost--the kind that drew whoever looked at it into a strange, unwilling sense of peace.
"I know you also want to do that cool move," He urged, gesturing for her to swap with him.
But the look on his face had already brought Kujou Sara to a conclusion she hadn't intended to reach.
'I would have done everything not to meet him, just as her Excellency did…'
It was just unfortunate that, for her, it was unavoidable.
Not long after, Atsuko--seemingly satisfied with her work--looked up at the two of them.
From what she could observe, the General and Dantalion were controlling small figures on the flat, window-like panel. She wasn't entirely sure which controlled which, but she could tell they were doing exactly that.
Dantalion was the only noisy one, seemingly enjoying himself in his own way. The General was silent by contrast, though she occasionally dodged her head to the side for some reason Atsuko couldn't quite figure out.
"Atsuko, I have the perfect game for you! Wait a bit--no, let's do it now." He changed his mind before he could finish the sentence.
He had already won. What else was there to wait for?
Without delaying it any further, he paused the game, then quit to the main menu, and from the main menu, quit the game entirely.
The screen now showed only the game selection.
Kujou Sara stood up--calmly--and made her way to the table behind their sofas.
Atsuko was heading to the same place, so Sara naturally caught sight of what Atsuko had made of her controller.
It looked different from theirs. Theirs were precisely colored, the hues seemingly infused into the material. Atsuko's looked painted--hand-done, uneven in the best way.
Kujou Sara couldn't help but smile.
Now she understood what Dantalion had meant when he called Atsuko cute.
"That looks good. The unoccupied sofa is yours."
Sara drank some water. Her smile faded, returning to the expression she'd worn before seeing Atsuko's work.
She had just had an epiphany.
The peaceful atmosphere--the meal, the time spent playing with Dantalion--had given her room to reflect on everything that had happened leading up to this point.
Her gaze drifted toward where Dantalion and Atsuko had just taken their seats.
Dantalion, having seen the same thing Sara had, said nothing about the controller. He simply looked at the selection screen and asked Atsuko, based on what she was already seeing, what she preferred.
As she pointed to each game's logo and asked what it was, he answered.
He knew she knew nothing about any of this.
Sara returned and settled back onto her sofa.
"This one is simple and good once you've learned it--after that, you'd be able to pick up practically every other game by instinct."
"I will follow Sir Dantalion's arrangements."
"Mhm. There's a switch at the bottom of your controller. It'll float on its own as it morphs, so don't try to catch it when it jumps."
Atsuko did as instructed.
She found the switch at the bottom and toggled it. The controller literally leapt out of her hand; she resisted the urge to grab it--barely.
It morphed. Then it floated back smoothly into her hands.
The shape had gone flat. A screen had appeared in the center, with controls on either side. The design she had painted on it was still there, but a rectangular black glass panel now occupied the middle.
She glanced at Dantalion and saw him dismantling the large display and its stand.
The General was doing the same as Atsuko had--her controller floating a few centimeters above her hand, morphing.
Atsuko looked back at hers and searched for the power button, watching carefully how the General had pressed it and mimicking the motion exactly.
It worked.
The dark glass was filled with color, showing the same screen that had been on the large display earlier.
She read the text at the top.
Game Selection.
"Select the icon I pointed out earlier."
"Okay..."
Half a minute later, as Dantalion and Kujou Sara waited for Atsuko to finish hosting the world, with nothing to do but wait a few seconds--
"I could have won that--"
"Get off my dick. I was practically hanging off the briefcase."
The reason for Kujou Sara's extreme composure when Dantalion had quit the game was exactly that--she had been controlling her reaction. She rarely dwelt on it, but she knew she could get competitive.
"You were," Sara replied. "But just before you paused it, the ladder was swaying--it looked like it was about to fall."
"I saw that too." Dantalion nodded sagely. "But you didn't see John Cena about to catch the ladder at the bottom."
"I see," Sara pressed. "However, I quite clearly remember Cena being thrown out of the ring."
"He flash-stepped."
"..."
"And there's no way you can see John Cena."
"Hmm..." Kujou Sara wanted to call him a moron right then and there.
She held herself. That would be unbecoming.
Dantalion checked his screen. Atsuko's world is now joinable.
He selected it and didn't wait long.
He had added loading screens to everything but made them fixed--exactly five seconds each, no more.
The 'space' is truly overpowered…
Under normal circumstances, objects created inside the space shouldn't have been transferable into reality. But he had found a workaround during his fight with Ei--tested it extensively with the system users, and by randomly dropping things outside at random locations, which had produced the very threat that put him and Ei on negotiation terms in the first place.
How exactly had he pulled it off?
Well, first, from the very beginning, when he had figured out that he could exert his magicules outside--
Nah. Long story. Not really relevant to the genuinely excellent game they were playing right now.
"What do I do now?" Atsuko asked aloud, moving her perspective around, walking, and looking at the world around her.
After learning the controls and creating the world, there were on-screen instructions to follow. She had followed all of them.
Now there were none left.
No goal. No prompt.
"Just do whatever--build a base, farm, gear up and go exploring, mine underground, find the seven dragon balls, become Hokage, find the One Piece, save the Soul Society, become the Dragon Warrior, or redefine the Jujutsu World. Your choice."
As he said this, Dantalion found Kujou Sara in-game, and as any sane and civilized adult would do, they immediately tested whether friendly fire was on by punching each other to death.
The game chat produced two notifications in quick succession: Paracetamol had died handsomely at the hands of Kujou Sara. Followed by: Kujou Sara kissed the ground like a retard.
They had both died.
Friendly fire: confirmed on.
As for why Dantalion used a medicine as his username--he couldn't be bothered to think of anything else. It was just a game.
Kujou Sara had simply used her own name. It was her name, after all. Why use another? It was just a game.
Same with Atsuko. Just Atsuko. No need to complicate it.
It was just a game.
---
-Chapter End-
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