— — — — — —
Mata was speechless at Indra's answer.
"Hey, quit joking around. We're talking about your great-grandson-in-law possibly dying here."
"Is your twisted sense of humor acting up again?"
Kenshin looked at him with obvious disdain. She was quite a bit shorter than Indra, yet somehow managed to project a condescending air. "Go on, finish that sentence. I refuse to believe you said it without deliberately messing with us."
"..."
"How is that a twisted sense of humor…" Indra rubbed his nose, shrugged and said, "Fine. I admit the issue with Ryo doesn't really have much to do with the Trickster. But—"
"Tomorrow's headlines: 'Indra seduced and abandoned the former Asura Race Queen, fled for the sake of Buddhist precepts, left mother and child to suffer alone, and now refuses to acknowledge them.' Thoughts?"
Mata turned her head, smiling half-mockingly at Kenshin.
Kenshin frowned and shook her head. "Too much trouble. We can just bring Asura here now."
Indra's mouth twitched. He forcibly cut the topic off. "Alright, Kenshin. Just give us what you found."
Kenshin raised a brow, didn't argue, and answered calmly. "Four-digit tier. Just an elite-level spirit rank."
"Pretty close to what I suspected. If the kid really is the Trickster, his spirit rank should be around that scale."
Indra muttered to himself, then sighed and scratched his hair. "Canaria sure loves causing trouble for her teacher."
"She's gone missing. Complaining won't bring her back," Mata shot back, then asked, "So? What's the big problem you found? What's so special about Ryo?"
Indra's lips curled slightly, his expression tinged with self-mockery. "We... got played by Canaria."
"???"
Kenshin looked genuinely confused.
Played by Canaria? What did that even mean? Was Ryo's problem actually connected to Canaria?
Right then, Indra threw out a question. "You both remember what identity Ryo had when he first appeared in front of us, right?"
"A foreigner Canaria picked up." That was Kenshin's answer.
"Wait..." Mata's face changed. "So Ryo wasn't brought in by Canaria? Or rather, she wasn't the one to find him?"
"You could put it that way."
Indra glanced at Mata, honestly impressed that her gossip-refined mind made the quickest leap.
Not that Kenshin was slower—she just tended to respond rather than speculate. The slightly puzzled look on her face was enough to show she'd already reached the same conclusion anyway.
Indra sighed inwardly, then spoke more seriously. "After news came in that Ryo defeated Ares and Hermes, I asked Brahma to investigate his background."
Brahma—the God of Creation. Formerly one of Hinduism's Trimurti, but since the Trimurti weren't completed spirit-ranks, they couldn't manifest in Little Garden, so Brahma descended as the Buddhist Dharma protector Brahmadev instead, one of the three-digit great gods.
He wielded wisdom and psychic might, and was one of the few beings in Little Garden capable of divination.
The Heavenly Army's intelligence division was naturally under his command.
"Brahma traced Ryo's origin from the very beginning, all the way to the instant he was granted his spirit rank."
"In the end, he uncovered a past that wasn't covered up."
Indra paused, then said. "Ryo was summoned into Little Garden."
Kenshin frowned. "Summoned? By who?"
Indra's expression turned strange, like he wanted to laugh but was forcing himself to stay serious.
"Queen Halloween summoned him."
Queen… Queen Halloween…
Mata froze for a second, then made almost the same strained-laughter face as Indra.
Kenshin's usual cool demeanor cracked; she blinked, stunned, then muttered under her breath. "The Queen summons someone… and he ends up as Shiroyasha's subordinate god… That's…"
Queen Halloween and Shiroyasha were Little Garden's publicly recognized mortal enemies.
Not mortal enemies in the 'kill you on sight' sense—more the 'you have a cute toy so I'm stealing it' kind of petty rivalry.
They'd been at odds since the distant dawn era, long enough that their hostility had basically become instinctive.
Suddenly, Kenshin understood Shiroyasha's excessive pampering of Ryo in a brand new light.
She'd assumed it was a main god spoiling a subordinate, but now it was obvious—she was doing it to piss off the Queen. Just rubbing salt into the wound!
Good grief. She thought Ryo crossing Zeus was already troublesome. Turns out the bigger problem had just been lying dormant!
"The Queen won't take that quietly…" Mata said, trying not to laugh, but there was a definite note of schadenfreude beneath the worry.
If Queen Halloween and Shiroyasha actually threw down, the Queen would win—Shiroyasha had sealed her spirit rank, after all—but the chaos would dwarf even the Seven-Day War from back then.
"..."
Indra managed a strained smile, then cleared his face quickly. "For now, let's just say the situation is… stable."
He sounded like a doctor giving a late-stage cancer patient an update, full of heavy sympathy.
"But if he was a special existence directly designated by the Queen, that explains a lot."
Kenshin, the only one still not laughing, took a slow breath.
"Then what about Ryo's spirit rank? When he first entered Little Garden he was rated human, with zero signs of possessing Another Cosmology."
"That part—I got an answer after writing to the Queen."
Indra put on a face that basically said 'I can't believe this is allowed', then continued. "The Queen replied: when she performed the summoning, to make it egilable—and for fun—she set summoning conditions."
"The specific conditions were: 'born human, possesses extremely high potential and downright awesome power, and has suffered severe injury but is not beyond treatment.'"
"And to reduce her own expenditure, she repeated the summoning about twenty thousand times."
Indra's expression turned stern.
"And out of those twenty thousand attempts, the only successful case… was Ryo Yagami."
"He's been the Queen's subordinate god from the very beginning."
.
.
.