“It happened again!” Grimfalk yelled to Longclaw from his spot on the sofa.

  “What happened again?” The other theropod called back.

  “I got another Achievement! Charlemagne is in another Dungeon. This one is rabbit-themed, which really sounds nice. All those soft ears and fluffy tails…”

  “Focus, please,” Longclaw requested. “I take it that means his Party successfully completed the Dungeon?”

  “I guess? They aren’t out yet,” the deity answered. “Hey, grab me some of those vole pops while you’re up.”

  The other theropod emerged through the doorway just as Grimfalk made his request. She sighed and began to turn around.

  “Never mind, it’s all right,” Grimfalk sighed as he beckoned Longclaw to retake her spot. “I’ll get up in a bit and get some.”

  “Can you please just tell me about the Achievement?” Longclaw asked.

  “Well, I don’t want to brag, but it’s a doozy,” the theropod Deity boasted. “You remember the last one, right?”

  “Duh. ‘Congratulations, you have earned the Achievement (Deity of an Overachiever). They say that excrement rolls downhill, which means that good things swim upstream. It’s like how you get paid a dollar, while they get a dime sort of thing. Your Champion obtained MVP status in the very first successful Hell difficulty Dungeon clear, which also happened to be their very first Dungeon run. It’s a big deal, which means that you get rewarded too. Attributes are 10 percent more effective.’”

  “Okay, I wasn’t exactly expecting you to quote it. You could have just said, ‘yes’ and I would have been happy. Well, this one’s even better! Are you ready?”

  Longclaw glared at Grimfalk, who was raising his nonexistent eyebrow at her. He waited, clearly expecting her to answer.”

  “Yes…” she finally sighed.

  “All right, I’m sharing it now.”

  “Isn’t that great?” Grimfalk crowed, flexing the muscles in one of his stubby forearms as he showed off his latest gains.

  “Aside from the fact that the System is mocking a deity, sure. I mean, when it first happened, I was sure that it was a fluke, so I wasn’t in favor of reporting it to GOD. But now…I’m not so sure.”

  “Aww, you’re gonna ruin all our fun if you do that!” The theropod deity complained. “I’m now 30 percent stronger than I would be without these two Achievements. And do you know what that means?”

  “Yes, of course I do,” Longclaw snapped. “It means that you might last half a millisecond longer if you mess with the wrong deity. You’re still weak, Grimfalk. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. How long did you have to survive on reputation alone? Millions of years, that’s how long. It’s a wonder that we’re still alive after all this time. But do you know how you survived? Do you remember? Was it by wasting your strength?”

  Grimfalk stared at Longclaw, a mixture of shock and hurt written on his enormous, scaly face. The other theropod stared right back, her eyes flashing.

  “I survived by being a coward,” he admitted. “I discarded what I thought were unessential aspects of my soul and hunkered down here, slowly waiting for my demise.”

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  “It was a close thing,” Longclaw agreed, her voice softening. “When the first fossils were dug up, you and I had almost entirely faded away. We had maybe about a decade left. But the humans, especially the little ones, gave you enough divinity to survive. The odds of that happening were ridiculous, Grimfalk. A margin of just ten years after all those eons of slowly wasting away…it’s unthinkable. I think that maybe, just maybe, there was a reason that we were spared. But by who, or what? I know we’ve had this conversation before, but as it stands now, nothing has changed you like the arrival of the System. It shouldn’t be able to affect you, only your followers. And you know why I’m worried!”

  Grimfalk sighed before he finished the thought.

  “Yes, I know. You’re worried because if the System can make me stronger, if it can give me things, then maybe it can take things away from me. And you’re not wrong. I may not act like it sometimes, but I do listen to you, and I understand why you worry. But try to look at it from my perspective. I can feel my strength slowly returning to me, not just from earning more Divinity through my Champions, but from these Achievements too. Besides, we created the System. GOD’s pooled resources are what put this whole System in place…and it was designed to be fair to underdogs like us.”

  Silence reigned in the room as the pair sank into contemplation. Longclaw tapped one of her nails against the bottom of her snout as she thought. After a while, she cleared her throat.

  “Sometimes…sometimes I wonder if we really did create the System. It’s intelligent, isn’t it? I can’t imagine that anyone sat down and wrote that very specific message. Or, for that matter, no one programmed in ‘Super Hell’ as a Dungeon difficulty. Why was Charlemagne able to get it to create something entirely new just for him? Even though he’s a Champion, he doesn’t have any sort of Administrator rights to change settings. And the sheer backlash from attempting to muck around with something that possesses such raw energy would destroy him utterly.”

  Grimfalk chewed on the idea for a while.

  “The humans had something like that, before the System arrived, didn’t they?”

  Longclaw gave her fellow theropod a strange look.

  “You’re talking about their computer systems? I didn’t know that you had been interested in that sort of thing.”

  Grimfalk gently bit at an itch just below his knee before answering.

  “Yeah, no, I wasn’t really. But, you know, I overhear things. Like some of the others were talking about this thing called ‘Artificial Intelligence’. They were claiming that the humans would eventually create machines that could think for themselves, and that these machines would destroy the humans. There are even human movies about it! I saw one once…but I didn’t exactly care for it. No jungles, no prey animals. Boring. Sorry, anyways. I overheard Loxophasa saying that she thought that, eventually, intelligent machines would spawn their own deity, and that she even had heard rumors that Brett was working to prevent the accumulation of divinity needed for that to happen. This wasn’t all that long ago, actually.”

  “That’s a very interesting theory. What’s even more interesting is that it actually could explain why the System was put in place to begin with. If you look at it objectively, none of the big three had any real reason to upset the status quo, at least not right now. Humans, dogs, cats, and a few other animal types have it made. Of course, that could all change with a massive solar flare, another asteroid im…oh I’m so sorry.”

  Grimfalk took a shaky breath and shuddered as he exhaled.

  “No, no. It’s all right. Just keep going.”

  “Right, so. As I was saying, the current state of affairs hasn’t lasted all that long, and it really goes to show you how quickly things can change for a deity. I mean, Brett’s only been the head of GOD for what? A few millennia? A blink of an eye compared to how long you and I have been around.”

  “What can I say? We’re survivors,” Grimfalk boasted, although it was clear that his heart wasn’t really in it.

  “So what if, and this is totally speculation, what if Brett realized that the humans were headed toward a catastrophe, and decided that the implementation of the System was his best chance at staying in power. Having those human hands that can hold tools, weapons, and whatever else is a big advantage,” Longclaw theorized.

  “So what if he did? It’s not like it was against some sort of rule. And how would we prove it? We can’t even prove for sure that he was worried about this ‘Artificial Intelligence’ stuff.”

  “I think he was, but yeah. It’s not really going to help us decide whether or not to report suspicious behavior by the System,” agreed the demideity.

  Grimfalk nodded.

  “I say that we hold off on doing anything just yet. I haven’t heard of anyone else getting an Achievement, which means that they must be very rare. I don’t want to give up this advantage just yet, all right?”

  Longclaw sighed.

  “Fine,” she relented. “But if it happens at any other time than Charlemagne conquering a Dungeon, we should at least make some discrete inquiries.”

  “I can live with that,” the deity agreed. “But, what I can’t live without is one of those vole pops.”

  With that, Grimfalk heaved his bulk off the sofa and stalked out of the room, hunting for snacks. He had barely left before an urgent chime reverberated through the entire demiplane. It was coming from Longclaw’s tablet.

  “You better grab that to go,” she called out to Grimfalk. “There’s an emergency session being organized, and it’s about to start.”