“I don’t know,” the god said, eyes narrowing as he stared at Pandy. She was fairly certain this was the first time he’d ever really looked at her, and he seemed to be examining something that y beneath her fur. It made Pandy’s skin twitch.

  “Do it again,” he said finally. “But hold still this time.”

  Hold still? Pandy thought for a moment, then bit her cheek for what felt like the hundredth time that day, though it was actually only the thirty-eighth. Not that she was counting.

  Bite successful. 10% experience gained towards next level.

  -2 LF

  Casting of Minor Heal successful. 2.7% experience gained towards next level.

  Casting Minor Heal right after injuring herself was such a habit by now that she did it without thinking, using up another of her precious CP. Worse, the god still had that look on his face that said he had no idea what was happening, so it didn’t even help.

  At long st, he shook his head. “Whatever’s going on, it has nothing to do with the game, even though it’s using my System and these Corruption Points to work. I think someone just – what’s the word they use in your world? – hacked their way into my spell. I knew that gacha button wasn’t enough to mess everything up so much!”

  “That’s not what you said,” Pandy reminded him. “You said the gacha button was forcing things to happen that never should have, and that’s what was using up all of your magic.”

  He sighed, brushing absently at his toga, which was still rumpled from his brief time beneath Thaniel’s bed. “So, maybe sometimes I have a little, tiny problem with exaggerating things. Like, one of Agea’s sisters keeps telling her to break up with me because I’m a ‘drama queen’.”

  He made finger quotes around the st two words, then flexed his bicep, showing off the bulging muscle, which was actually still pretty impressive. “I’m definitely not a queen, you know? But yes, sometimes I can get a bit over-excited. My therapist says-”

  Pandy actually wanted to know what his therapist told him, because she could think of a few things to add, but Thaniel could notice she was missing any time now. “What did you exaggerate about, exactly?”

  The god looked up and away, clearing his throat softly. “I mean, um, a few things. But the only one that’s relevant here is about that gacha button thing. I thought about it some more, and…can that button really make anything happen in your game?”

  “Of course not,” Pandy said. “It only gives you options appropriate to the circumstances. Like, there’s this midwinter ball, and you can only dance with any of the love interests who have a high enough Affection stat. But they’re all there, so the gacha can make it so you dance with them even if their Affection is too low. But if you’re fighting in a dungeon, it’s not going to give you the option to dance. Instead, it’ll let you hit a monster with a spell you don’t actually know, or use Charm even though the stat isn’t a high enough level.”

  Nodding, the god said, “But here, that button was searching through every option that could possibly exist, not just the ones that made sense. That’s part of why it drained so much of my power. It was equally likely to give you an option to turn your fur green or blow up the pnet.”

  Pandy’s eyes widened. “That’s only part of why it’s so bad for you?”

  He grimaced. “It takes a lot of power to blow up a pnet, you know. But yeah. Like, the button is just incredibly unstable. It pulls a huge amount of power out of me just in order to exist. But the important part is that because it’s so sort of wibbly-wobbly, it would be easy for something or someone to just insert an option in there that otherwise wouldn’t have existed. I think that’s where my spell got hacked, and every time you used it, you gave the hacker a little more access.”

  “So what did they do, and why?” she demanded, only to be met with a shrug.

  “I have no idea,” he admitted. “Like I said, I didn’t really pay as much attention to the spell as I should have. That means I don’t know what it was supposed to look like, exactly. I do know those Corruption Points are new, though. They’re not part of my magic, which means they’re someone else’s.”

  Pandy felt a sudden stirring of excitement. “Maybe they’re…mine? I mean, everyone else on this pnet has magic, so I should too, right?”

  Again, he made a face. “You would have, if you’d incarnated as a character. Almost all of them have some kind of magic. But, no offense, you’re a rabbit. A dead one, at that. Regur animals don’t have magic in this world. If they did, they’d be elementals, and you’re definitely not one of those. So no, sorry, any magic you have is borrowed from me, which is why I can tell every time you use it.”

  “Oh.” She bit her lip, which was really rather painful when your teeth were as long as hers. “Should I…stop? Not just the Spin button, but,” she waved vaguely, “all of it? Not that I can, because I need to take care of Thaniel, but does it hurt you or something?”

  The god stared at her, and his expression softened. “No, I expected this. You’d have to get really, really powerful before it would bother me.” He flexed his arm again, then rippled his pecs in a way that made her slightly uncomfortable. “I’m a god, you know. I can-”

  He broke off, staring into space, and then a huge grin spread across his face. “Agea! She got the groats and flowers. What bird did you say I should find for her?”

  “A Scarlet Tanager,” Pandy said absently, and the god looked up, eyes shifting as he stared at nothing.

  “Oh! She’ll like those,” he said. “I’ll have to see if Pantheon Postal will ship them. They got really cranky about the peacocks, but these are a lot smaller.”

  He looked like he might disappear then and there, so Pandy cleared her throat loudly, drawing his attention again. “I’m gd your girlfriend likes your gifts,” she said, “but you still haven’t told me how you’re going to help me.”

  He scratched his jaw. “Oh, that’s right. Um, what do you want?” He vaguely waved his hands through the air. “I mean, I can’t do anything big. Not without, uh, somebody, you know, noticing. And I can’t help with those Corruption Points, though I’ll keep looking into it. Maybe I can figure out who’s messing with me.” He scowled. “It’s probably Hephaestus. He’s always trying to break up Agea and me. Cims the whole thing with Aphrodite was a ‘misunderstanding’.”

  Pandy had questions, but she said, “Can you at least make it so the System is more clear about what I can and can’t do? And maybe get rid of the percentages? It’d be a lot easier to tell how many times I need to use a skill if it told me how many more uses I need to reach the next level or something. I’d also like to know what other skills and spells are avaible before they just appear. And I want to know what I’ll get for reaching the next level of each skill before I waste my time getting there.”

  The god edged further and further away from Pandy as she spoke, but the look on his face wasn’t exactly promising. “Oh. Um, yes, I’ll…work on that,” he said. “Definitely. But, uh, I really need to go bird hunting now, so I’ll-” He vanished into thin air, leaving Pandy standing in a field of flowers with no way home.

  She tried to yell, but found that her voice was gone again. So instead she shifted into the internal voice she used with the System and called out, For a terrible instant she thought it wouldn’t work, but then she found herself once again in the dark, surprisingly clean space beneath Thaniel’s bed. The two children were no longer giggling, but she could hear the not-so-soft sound of their voices, and knew they were still above her.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, Pandy settled her chin on her paws and called up her stat sheet, hoping for a literal miracle.

  Name: Pandy

  Race: Rabbit? (Deceased)

  Age: 24

  LF: 1/1

  Mana: 10/13

  Stats?

  Strength: 5 Intelligence: 12 Agility: 15 Pain Tolerance: 1

  Skills?

  Hop: Lv. 15 (28/55) Bite: Lv. 10 (1/10) Scratch: Lv. 10 (0/10) Minor Heal: Lv. 13 (25/37) Wings of Glory: Lv. 1

  Boons?

  Ismara’s Blessing I Mark of Keros

  Corruption Points: 86

  That…was actually better. Not a lot better, but better. And when she looked closely, she saw that there were little triangles next to the different sections of her stat sheet. She tried touching the one next to Skills, and the section colpsed, leaving only the title. Another touch and her skills were back. That could be very handy, especially as she gained more skills and, apparently, stats.

  Pandy spent a moment opening and closing the sections, tapping on skill names, and asking for more information, all to no avail. Apparently this was all she was going to get, at least for the moment. Now, what’s this Mark of Keros?

  It was the only part of her stat sheet that was new since the st time she looked. The rest might be dispyed a little differently, but she was certain she would have noticed a second boon. There were only a few gods mentioned in Gacha Love, however, and she was certain Keros wasn’t one of them.

   she asked the System, not expecting to get a reply. The answer was prompt.

   the god’s voice said in her ear. She looked around wildly, but as far as she could tell, she was still alone beneath the bed. Well, her, Thaniel’s dusty shoes, and several blood spots that hadn’t been there before.

  No, she hadn’t known. How could she? She probably should have guessed, though, given all the rippling muscles and the talk of protein shakes and leg day. she said, rather mely, finally noticing that she did indeed have five points of Strength now, not just four.

   His ughter boomed through her head, and if it seemed a bit forced, she might have just been imagining it.

   Pandy asked, suddenly suspicious.

  

  It had been a long time since dial tones were a thing, but the echoing silence in Pandy’s mind was undoubtedly a divine disconnect. She stared at the hovering stat sheet. If it was that easy for the god – Keros – to give her more Strength, why stop at one? Though he had said he wasn’t really supposed to interfere. Had she gotten him in trouble? Who could punish a god?

  Pandy shook her head. These questions were much too rge for a rabbit, so instead Pandy focused on some things she could control. First, she had to continue leveling up her skills. Second, she had to keep Thaniel safe for three years, eight months, and however-many days were left. She really needed a calendar.

  “Bunny?” The bed shifted as Thaniel leaned down over the edge, lifting the bnket so he could see Pandy. His hair hung down, looking like he’d just stuck his finger in a light socket, and she realized that he really needed a haircut. Marta used to trim it with her kitchen shears, but no one had done it since shortly after Pandy arrived, and it was getting quite long. It was usually difficult to tell because the curls made it look shorter than it was, but now it brushed the floor.

  She hopped forward until he could grab her, though he almost fell out of bed as he did so, and only Eleanor’s quick reactions saved them, as she grabbed onto his waist. Pandy was swung rather wildly through the air as the boy rolled over and sat up, puffing and ughing. Thaniel’s blue eyes sparkled as Eleanor giggled.

  “You look like a hedgehog,” she said, pointing at Thaniel’s hair.

  He plopped Pandy down beside him, then patted his head until the worst of the wild locks had been tamed. As he finished, the bell rang to let them know it was six o’clock, and the door opened, revealing Timon’s freckled face.

  “That’s it, kids,” he announced, gncing back out into the hall and motioning for Eleanor to come with him. “When you see each other at dinner, just remember that’s the first time you met today, huh?”

  Both children nodded, and Eleanor hopped off the bed, giving a little wave before the door closed behind her. Thaniel threw back the bnkets and got out of bed with a huge sigh of relief. He changed into a pair of short brown pants, a white shirt with small ruffles around the wrists, and a navy jacket with a falconet sewn onto the breast pocket. This was his school uniform, and it was the first time Thaniel had gotten to wear it since he arrived.

  Pandy nearly hopped out of her fur when a loud thump came from directly beneath Thaniel’s bed, but the little boy grinned. “She really is in the room right below mine,” he told Pandy. He crouched and rapped on the floor twice. A series of excited barks answered. “And there’s Winston.” He held out his arms. “Come on, Bunny. Let’s go eat!”