"Our wager is brutally simple, Doctor," she declared, her chilling smile never wavering. "I will give you one hundred talented and beautiful girls. Each one will fall for you. Hard. Terrifyingly hard. They will see you as a soulmate, a dark messiah, their entire reason for being. Sounds like a wet dream, right? Any ape in a human suit would be on his knees in gratitude, his base instincts howling in triumph at the mere sight of such perfection offering itself to him so completely."
She paused, her crimson eyes searching my face, trying to gauge a reaction—a flicker of lust, of greedy anticipation.
But she found nothing.
My expression remained a frozen lake, offering no reflection of the turmoil beneath.
Undeterred, she continued, her smile sharpening.
"So, here is the bet. They will love you. But you… you will not love them. Not at first. Oh, you will be attracted. You will lust after their bodies. You will feel a possessive, clawing hunger for them, because I am giving you the best of the best—girls so captivating that even the most disciplined saint would feel his resolve crack. Your task is simple, yet monumentally hard: you must come to genuinely love them. I mean GENUINE love. The kind that is pure, selfless, and awe-inspiring. Just like how you loved Ai. It was pure. It was awesome. It was so touching…"
She brought a delicate hand to her cheek, where a single, perfect tear had suddenly materialized and traced a path down her skin.
She smiled through her exaggerated crying, the contrast deeply unsettling. "…it brought me to tears, Doctor."
She leaned in slightly, the false tears glistening. "Are you afraid?"
This girl…
The challenge wasn't just difficult; it was a psychological impossibility tailored to break a human mind.
Attraction and love were fundamentally different forces.
Splitting that not just between two people, but between a hundred, without divine intervention or supernatural alteration of my own heart… it was an ontological impossibility.
How could it be called genuine love, genuine care for their hearts, if it was fractured into a hundred pieces?
Especially when that 'love' was served on a silver platter, devoid of the mutual struggle, the shared hardship, and the slow-built emotional foundation that makes love real.
I stared at her, my gaze flat and hard. "What if I ignore them?"
In the grand calculus of my existence, the bet's outcome was secondary. If I lost my soul, so be it.
As long as I carved my revenge against Ai's murderer into the flesh of this world first, nothing else—not even the continued existence of my own consciousness—truly mattered.
Her expression shifted to one of mock-horror, her innocent eyes widening.
"That would be bad. Very, very bad, Doctor. You see, you may not know who these 'soulmates' are. They are… particular. Mentally unstable. Immensely powerful in influence. Frighteningly talented. Among them is a girl who will invent a time machine and birth a dystopian future. Another will be the one who starts a nuclear war over the fate of androids. And that's just a small sample. If you ignore them… it means they will kill you. And then, in their grief and madness, they will quite literally kill the world that failed to provide the one thing—the one person—who could have redeemed them. That person is you. Only you can save them. And by saving them, you save everything else."
She blinked her wide, innocent eyes, the tears making them look deceptively pure.
"Can I punch you now?" I deadpanned, the sheer, overwhelming urge to reduce this smirking loli to a bloody paste momentarily overriding all strategy.
She simply smiled, unfazed, tilting her head as if offering her cheek. "If it would make you happy, Doctor…"
I let out a mental sigh.
It was pointless.
This loli was undoubtedly irredeemable and fundamentally rotten
Hitting her would have no more impact than punching a cloud of smoke or a mound of soft cotton—a futile expenditure of rage against a being who operated on a level where such violence was meaningless.
"Don't look at me with such a suspicious gaze, Doctor. You make it seem as if I'm offering you a bad deal."
Her voice took on a soothing, almost chiding tone, as if explaining something obvious to a stubborn child.
"The very beautiful girl I'm talking about—they are each a daughter of destiny in their own right. Haven't you ever fantasized about your favorite female character stepping right out of the screen? About living a fantasy, a love story, written just for you?"
She leaned in slightly, her crimson eyes glinting with shared conspiracy. "And even if you 'fail' in the grand sense… does it truly matter? At the very least, you would get to enjoy them. To have them, as much as you want, in every way you can imagine. A consolation prize of divine proportions."
Her voice dropped to a seductive, intimate whisper that seemed to vibrate in the air between us. "And besides, Doctor… don't you find me attractive?"
Before I could process the absurd, terrifying shift, she moved.
Small, cold fingers closed around my wrist with surprising strength.
A jolt of pure, instinctive revulsion shot through me.
I snatched my hand back as if burned, shoving her away from me with enough force to make her stumble a step.
Instead of anger, she threw her head back and laughed—a bright, teasing sound that echoed mockingly in the serene park.
"How cute! The more you resist, the more I look forward to it, Doctor. Your propriety is simply delicious."
She wiped a non-existent tear from her eye, her smile sharpening. "Anyway, I believe I've stated the essentials of our arrangement. Any questions?"
My mind was a storm of chaos, but one point of clarity remained.
Asking 'why' she set this bet, or probing her inscrutable purpose, was futile.
She operated on a logic I couldn't yet grasp.
But I needed a name. I needed to know who—or what—I was now dealing to.
An enemy?
A capricious ally?
The lines were horrifically blurred.
"Who are you?" The question was flat, direct, a scalpel cutting through the theatricality.
Her smile didn't just brighten; it transformed, becoming almost radiant with a perverse pleasure.
"I'm so glad you care about who I am, Doctor. It's a wonderful first step."
She gave a small, theatrical bow. "I am Tsukuyomi. And I am also the one who spun the threads of fate to bring you, and your dear sister, into this second life."
Tsukuyomi. The name landed with a dull, mythic weight. A god. Of the moon, or the night, or something equally grandiose and obscure.
I'd skipped over Japanese mythology in my past studies, dismissing its esoteric systems as less effective than the Western methodologies I'd pursued.
A fatal oversight, it seemed.
"Anyway," she chirped, her mood shifting again with dizzying speed, "good luck with your harem conquest, Doctor! I do so hope your love for Ai remains as fiercely pure as it is now… because in the end, no matter the result, I win. Your heart will no longer be hers alone. It will be splintered, shared, deliciously divided."
With that final, haunting pronouncement, she closed the distance I'd created.
The moment the contact seared into my perception, the entire dream-realm shattered.
I was ejected violently, not into sleep, but into stark, painful consciousness.
I gasped awake, my body jerking upright in my bed.
The first, blinding rays of the morning sun were cutting through the window, painting my ordinary room in harsh, real light.
I stared at the familiar cracks in my ceiling, my heart hammering against my ribs.
I pondered in the silent dawn.
Was she serious?
The entire framework of her 'gift'—splitting my focus, my heart, among multiple women—was it all just an elaborate scheme to dilute my love for Ai?
To corrode the single-minded devotion that had driven me to accept her wager without hesitation?
I never imagined a goddess could be so… capriciously petty.
Whatever.
The analysis could come later.
If her offer held even a grain of truth—if these "daughters of destiny" were real and attainable—then it presented an opportunity.
A terrifying, morally bankrupt opportunity, but an opportunity nonetheless.
Perhaps I should take the initiative.
Seek out these soulmates.
And with the power or alliances they might bring… hack a nuclear codes.
Press the proverbial button right against my father's ass.
And against everyone else who had a hand in Ai's murder.
The thought was dark, ludicrous, and utterly sincere.
It was the cold fire that would keep me moving forward.
Tsukuyomi thought she was starting a game of love.
She had, instead, just handed a weapon to hack the reality.