Takeshi pushed open the bathroom door and stepped into the hallway.

The corridor lights, the students walking by, the sound of footsteps mixed with conversations, it was exactly the same as any other day.

He checked his stats one more time before putting his phone away.

[Life: 100%]

[Sanity: 75%]

[Points: 13]

That seventy-five percent felt unstable, like it could drop just from remembering what he had seen. He shoved the thought somewhere it couldn’t bother him and walked back to the classroom.

Class was still in session.

Takeshi opened the door carefully, muttered something about the bathroom, and headed to his desk. The teacher didn’t look up, and nobody paid attention to him for more than two seconds.

He sat down, took out his notebook, and placed his pencil against the page.

The pencil didn’t move.

The teacher was talking about something related to energy channels and magical resistance, but the words reached him like background noise.

Takeshi heard them without processing any of it because his mind was still occupied with images he had no way of erasing.

The sky turning red, the clouds darkening within seconds, and that thing appearing.

He couldn’t describe it accurately, and every time he tried to remember its shape, the details dissolved. The only thing left was the sensation of his sanity draining away with every second he spent looking at that being.

He had been dangerously close to hitting zero, and after what he saw, he wasn’t exactly eager to find out what would happen if he did.

He picked up the pencil and wrote the date in his notebook.

That was all he managed to accomplish over the next twenty minutes.

The chat floated at the edge of his vision, with no new comments. As if even the spectators were still processing what had happened.

Takeshi ignored them.

He had a more urgent problem: he needed to talk to the deity, and he needed to do it as soon as possible.

The problem was the method.

Talking to the deity required being alone, or at least somewhere nobody could hear or see him talking to thin air.

The north wing staircase had worked before, and so had the bathroom, but he had just come from there, and going back again in less than half an hour would attract attention.

He looked at the clock on the wall.

There were still forty minutes left in class.

He decided to wait until break.

He spent the remaining forty minutes writing down everything he remembered about the entity in his notebook: the sky, the clouds, the sanity loss, the speed at which he had lost the ability to think clearly.

When he finished, he read over what he had written.

It wasn’t much, and what little he had managed to write sounded like the account of someone who had lost touch with reality for several minutes.

Which was exactly what had happened.

He closed the notebook when the bell rang.

The north wing staircase was empty.

Takeshi climbed to the third floor, checked to make sure nobody was in the hallway, and stood by the window.

Outside, the day still looked completely normal, with students in the courtyard, white clouds, and a blue sky.

"I need to talk to you."

He spoke quietly.

The deity appeared leaning against the wall with crossed arms and an expression of satisfaction it clearly had no intention of hiding.

"That was incredible! That ending was a rare one."

The deity began, and Takeshi stared at it.

"You know why I called you."

"Yeah, yeah, go ahead with your buzzkill questions."

"What was that thing?"

The deity tilted its head slightly to one side.

"Which thing specifically?"

"The thing that appeared when Ophélia died..."

Takeshi replied.

"The red sky, the clouds, that entity. Whatever it was..."

The deity held the pause for a moment before answering.

"A friend’s pet."

Takeshi said nothing.

’Wait, what?!’

He processed the sentence and examined it from every possible angle, to the point of wondering whether there was any alternative interpretation that could change the meaning.

"A pet...?"

He repeated.

"Yep."

"That thing dropped my sanity to five percent just from looking at it!"

Takeshi continued.

"And it’s somebody’s pet?!"

"A friend of mine’s, yes."

Takeshi looked down at the floor for a second before raising his eyes back to the deity.

"There are more gods besides you?"

If that thing was somebody’s pet, then that somebody wasn’t human. And if they weren’t human and had a pet capable of bringing about the apocalypse, then the deity standing in front of him wasn’t the only one.

The deity didn’t answer immediately.

"I hate to say it, but yes."

It finally replied.

Takeshi felt something in his understanding of the situation shift into place. Up until now, he had assumed, without really questioning it, that the deity in front of him was solely responsible for the game, the owner of the system, the main problem he would eventually have to solve in order to escape. A single source behind all the chaos.

But that was no longer true.

Now there were others.

He didn’t know how many. He didn’t know what level they were on or what interest they might have in his situation. He didn’t know whether the one who had intervened was an exception or if there was an entire lineup of entities with pets capable of destroying a person’s sanity simply by showing up.

What he did know was that the world he was trapped in was considerably more complicated than he had calculated.

"How many?"

He asked.

"I can only say that there are enough of us..."

The deity replied, and this time there was something different in its tone. Not exactly evasive, but more like the full answer was much longer than what it intended to say right now.

Takeshi looked out the window at the students moving between the building and the courts, groups sitting on the grass, all of them completely unaware of the conversation taking place three floors above them.

None of them knew that a horrifying being had descended from the sky in a timeline only Takeshi remembered.

None of them knew there was more than one deity capable of interfering with this world.

Break was going to end soon.

Takeshi had more questions, but he also understood that the deity wasn’t going to answer all of them in a single conversation. It never did.

For now, he had enough.

More than enough.