“There you are!” I hear a familiar female voice from behind my back. "Leaving a fair maiden to fend for herself during a monster attack! And you lot call yourselves adventurers!? Shame on you!"

The sound of that voice snaps me out of the ‘fatal error’ cycle of torn screens and high-pitched noises that were only a small step away from a flat out BSOD. I turn my gaze away from the cosmic being in front of us and turn around to see Cyra, pulling herself out of the water on the other side of the staircase, where the Guild building used to be. Does she not see it? Without saying a word, I simply point in the direction of the Water God.

“Ah, you’ve met daddy?” Cyra asks unfazed. “Why did you summon him thought?”

I’ve met who!?

“Say what now!?” Casper asks and turns to Cyra also. His expression of shock and confusion is what my expression must look like.

I try to take a look at my passive spell that started this whole mess but it is still all torn and messed up, flitching in and out of existence, just like the rest of my character info bars. Something has corrupted it all. Was it the overuse of the spell at forbidden casting speeds? Was it the Water God Suijin that did this?

I point my finger at my dress and whisper, “Minor Spark.”

Nothing happens. This is bad, with a capital 'B’. If I can’t even cast my smallest and weakest spell, what am I supposed to do?

“Who disturbs my slumber?” a deep voice thunders across the skies.

There is no way for me to fight something of this magnitude when all my cheats appear to be busted. The only chance I have is talking my way out of this. With a nervious smile, I can think of only one thing to say, “It is I, Lilith!”

“Know this. Only one may summon me. One whose worth lies far within. A diamond in the rough.”

“Ah, then, since I’ve summoned you, I am that diamond in the rough?”

“You are a sociopathic mass murderer, who has Hades working overtime!” Suijin thunders in response. “Due to your spell, already over thirty thousand men, women and children have perished. And that number will continue to grow until the entire world is submerged under water.”

“That’s great!” I exclaim.

“... W-what?” It is amusing to hear this cosmic being pause from the unexpected answer.

“Of course!” I double down on my response. “Suijin, listen to me. This world—it’s a mess! Kidnappers, murderers, baby-eating unicorns, adventurer guilds on rocket thrusters... Life under the sea has got to be better than anything we’ve got up here!”

“The seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake,” Suijin says.

“Ah, then you agree?”

“No. It means that you’re not satisfied with what you have you should aim to fix what it is you don’t like about your own world, instead of looking elsewhere.”

“And that is exactly what I am doing!”

“By turning it into a water world?”

“Yes!”

“And have you asked anyone else how they feel about literally drowning in your ambition?”

“Since when do Gods concern themselves with the opinions of lesser beings?”

“Since I’ve taken over five thousand of those lesser beings as my concubines!” Suijin roars in anger. “And I have no intention to let some little pipsqueak halt the growth of my harem!”

“But I do,” a female whisper, like the hissing of a snake, comes from the surface of the sorrounding lake, which now looks more like a sea, with no end in sight. Out of the water, just a couple of feet away from the staircase, a single snakehead slowly rises. It looks like a cobra, colored in a mix of green and black, with two blue eyes. It slithers higher and higher from the surface, before morphing into a slender female with bronze skin, straight, deep-blue hair and a golden dress. Her head is adorned with a green and black crown in the form of that very same snake.

“Naunet,” Suijin roars the name of the being that has appeared. He does not look pleased.