The Lockpick Hero and the Archangel stared each other down. “You will not touch this hallowed trunk,” the Archangel said. She wielded a bow, an arrow already nocked, its warhead blazing with holy energy.
The Lockpick Hero moved too fast to see. The Archangel turned around, bow already at full draw, but it was too late—the door had already been opened!
But that was okay, for the first floor was labyrinthine, and the World Tree itself reached beyond the sky. To turn it off and on again, the Lockpick Hero needed to get past all 999 floors to get to the 1,000th where the Holy Control Room was located.
That he could breach any door or seal faster than one could blink was of no consequence, for the Archangel could instantly appear anywhere, on any floor, and constantly knew where everything was within the World Tree, all the time.
The Lockpick Hero sprinted down a foot trail of the first floor’s indoor forest. The Archangel appeared before him. “Stop!” she shouted.
He could not be stopped.
Having gone on a crazy adventure, something as simple as running so fast as to be able to run on walls—or in this case, the sides of trees—was simple for him. He passed the Archangel, enjoying the wind as he did.
The Archangel shot an arrow to chase him. It was no ordinary arrow; it was a patriot arrow, a magical arrow which could fly unto eternity, chasing any moving target until it was pierced.
In other words…it had a target lock.
The Archangel’s patriot arrow—missed! It hit a tree a mile away from him! “What!” She couldn’t believe it.
Once again, she teleported before him, this time firing the arrow straight at his face. He dodged, but it was to be expected that anyone who got this far would be able to do that—which was why this maneuver was her favorite. She expected the arrow to stop, do a 180, and pierce him from behind where he didn’t expect it—but it just kept going!
Thinking her arrows were broken, she switched to normal arrows and relied on pure skill and instinct. She was doing better, hitting trees beside him, but this would go on forever. She needed a new strategy.
The Lockpick Hero breached the portal to the second floor without so much as properly encountering the floor’s boss. What an utterly broken power he had.
On the second floor, she switched to using wide-area annihilation arrows—just as well, because this floor was a wide, grassy plain.
She spread her wings and took to the sky, spotting the Lockpick Hero sprinting across the plain at a ridiculous speed, going in a straight line, only twenty seconds away from the next portal many miles away.
Her annihilation arrows were the equivalent of magical nukes, which was why she was confident she couldn’t possibly miss.
She nocked an arrow, kinda aimed, and loosed hell.
In an incredible sequence of events, the Lockpick Hero stopped, jumped towards the arrow, snatched it from mid-air, turned 360, then tossed it away—harmlessly.
…How? She couldn’t fathom it.
Unfortunately for her, the Lockpick Hero had quite the knowledge regarding nuclear weapons. Indeed, when you were prosecuting an entire regime for crimes against humanity, you tended to pick up on these things.
Nuclear warheads, you see, had a multi-stage arming sequence and multiple failsafes to ensure that it absolutely would not explode unwarranted. In short, each one was a lock on the warhead’s ability to carry out its final mission, and just as much as a lockpicker knew how to unlock things, they also very much knew how to jam them up.
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In the Lockpick Hero’s eyes, there wasn’t much of a difference between a magical nuke, and a nuke nuke. No matter what the Archangel’s power and adeptness at magic, there was absolutely no stronger lock than the one he’d encountered protecting the Demon Sage’s door.
After seeing that terrifying thing, he had spent every night thereafter trying to figure out how to get something like that open, and he even traded in a new ‘Guide to the Other World: Pt. II’ just to figure out how it worked.
After dealing with a monster like that, something like jamming a magic nuke’s 52 failsafes within a split second was child’s play.
This stupid chase continued all the way until the 1,000th floor, where the Lockpick Hero took a water break and waited for an exhausted Archangel to finally catch up to him.
***
The Archangel finally made it up the last step of the stairs to the Holy Control Room on the 1,000th floor—though, she ended up just lying down on the floor, wings spread out and slowly fanning herself. So tired.
As it turned out, the Archangel’s magic wasn’t unlimited in use. Sure, she could teleport to any place within the World Tree pretty much instantly, and her body was made of magic, powered by the World Tree itself, so she shouldn’t ever run out of magic.
However, each teleport caused mental strain, and a mind made of magic was not the same as a physical brain. It was a lot faster, but also easily more volatile. This meant that she could effortlessly cast ultra-powerful magic, but also that she was limited to 10,000 uses per day.
Unfortunately, whether it was a simple fireball spell or an earth-rending cataclysm, one use was one use, and to be fair, no one would expect all 10,000 uses to be exhausted within a day—and less so in under 9 hours! Seriously, the Lockpick Hero was so fast and cunning, that she didn’t realize that she was teleporting dozens of times per floor.
It was only the time they reached the last 100 floors when she started to feel the strain, and she had to limit her magic use. She started using physical enhancement magic more often, as it was more use-efficient, lasting for a minute each time.
Still, it had come to this.
“You’re finally here,” the Lockpick Hero said.
“That’s…that’s supposed to be my line.” The Archangel panted. She’d run out of magic uses a long time ago, and had to take the stairs—for the first time in a while.
“Come on,” he gestured for her to come over. “Unlock the control panel for me, will you?”
“Why don’t you unlock the control panel yourself, huh? ‘Breaker of Seals,’” she scoffed.
“If there’s anything I’m not…it’s a ‘Breaker of the Law.’” Indeed, he treated the Holy Control Panel as someone else’s computer. Something about data privacy.
Fury and exasperation mixed in the Archangel’s chest. “You came in here with an army!”
“That’s just Queen Fraise doing her own thing, though.”
“You broke into my home!”
“This place is a common facility and falls under the public interest, and I’m the contractor permitted by the legitimate government—with written documentation, mind you—to fix it.” He took out a glowing note and, walking over to the Archangel, gave it to her.
The note read:
“I still have your baby photos. Allow my Lockpick Hero to refresh the World Tree, or suffer the consequences. Love, Goddess of Sera.”
She gasped. Everything she thought she knew was a lie. Indeed, the magical signature imprinted in the note was of the True Goddess’s! In fact, it was a very specific magical signature, imprinted on all of life of Sera, that coded for, “You’ve messed up.” It inspired a feeling of dread, regret, and longing for redemption!
For you see, a thousand years ago, the trickster god imprisoned the Goddess of Sera and impersonated her, fooling the gullible World Elves into thinking there was an imminent threat to the world, greater than all they had ever seen, and that they must defend it to the last, even if they must defend it against the goddess herself.
Of course, that was just a joke. The demons didn’t take the joke too well, and for 600 years thereafter, secretly raised a grand army to reclaim the World Tree and demand that the True Goddess be returned. Many of the mortal nations actually supported this sentiment. Really, the trickster god was spouting a lot of B.S. at the time, in the distasteful guise of the Goddess of Sera, and was single-handedly responsible for converting most mortals to atheism.
The demons easily lost after the World Elves bought the other mortal nations with lifetime supplies of fruits from the World Tree, giving them an army of supermen to fight on their behest. This may have been a geopolitically destabilizing move, but in the grand scheme of things, one mortal lifetime wasn’t all that much, so it all worked out for the World Elves in the end.
The Archangel had been alive to see all these events unfold, and had even made some of the most important decisions, herself. Now, with this single note from the True Goddess, it all clicked into place for her: they had been utterly and thoroughly fooled, and they had no one to blame but themselves.
She gladly placed her hand upon the Holy Control Panel, unlocking its controls.
“Is there a restart button somewhere,” the Lockpick Hero asked.
“I don’t know. It’s been a thousand years since I’ve last looked at this…”
They both blinked. The console started updating. It would…take a while.
In the meantime, the Archangel hurried to announce an end to the fighting, calling up all the sages and generals of the battered World Elves. They wouldn’t like the news at all.