My Castle received a visitor.
A man stood before me.
A man in a bizarre getup: black leather jacket and trousers, a black, angular helmet like a beetle's head, and a red scarf.
"I am the Strongest, Invincible Dark Hero. To bury evil I shall become evil myself. Fight poison with poison!"
Ugh, how tiresome. Calling himself evil—he is treading all over my character.
And "Strongest, Invincible"? That is a strictly inferior version of me.
He appears to think he is being cool, when in truth he is nothing but a narcissist spinning his wheels and bombing spectacularly.
"So? Your business? I would like you to depart, and quickly. This life."
"Hm? Ah, I see. You made it look as though you were telling me to leave, but you told me to depart this life—in other words, to die."
"Huh, so even an idiot can get it. You looked stupid enough that I assumed it would go straight over your head."
That, mind you, was pure provocation.
What he would say, and what he had come for—omniscient as I am, I knew all of it.
"Well said! But your words are light! Learn the weight of mine! Tyrant—burst!"
The narcissist thrust a palm at me and declaimed it at the top of his voice.
He had used the Goddess's Gift, [The Power to Have Any One Wish Granted], to obtain [The Power to Turn His Own Words Into Truth].
Which is to say, whatever he says becomes exactly so. If he tells someone to die, that person dies.
A wielder of word-souls, in short.
And because he called himself Strongest and Invincible, Strongest and Invincible he became.
With the hidden precondition "after me" attached, mind you—which he does not know about.
Because I am [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One], and as a Strongest, Invincible being I stand absolutely superior. So I am the stronger.
"Not happening. Struggle however you like, you cannot beat me. Whereas I can slaughter you with ease. However many times you chant the word 'invincible.'"
I am omnipotent. I can ignore the narcissist's invincibility and deal him damage all the same.
I could peel the Strongest and Invincible right off him if I felt like it, and erasing his word-power would be trivial.
"That can't be…"
The narcissist shouted every murderous phrase he had at me, trying to kill me.
But whether he tells me to die or tells me to vanish, none of it works on me in the slightest.
"Say, why do you go around calling yourself evil?"
"I am the one who judges the underhanded villains that the laws of society cannot judge. To that end I will break the law myself. And so I may call myself evil, but never justice."
"Liar. You call yourself that because you think it looks cool. And I can see straight through to the part where you want to be popular and want fans of your own. Could you stop calling yourself evil just because it looks cool?"
"You have been talking down to me this whole time—what are you?!"
The cool act was peeling away at last. This proud sort is always weak to provocation.
"I am [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One]."
"What?! Hard to credit on the spot—but since my power fails to reach you, perhaps it is not impossible after all. Even so, you have no right to insult me!"
"You really are an idiot. Rights are something laid down inside human society. I am a being outside human society, so the very concept of rights has nothing to do with me in the first place."
"Huh? I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."
"Well, you are an idiot. And while we are here, let me teach you the truth about good and evil. There is no absolute good or evil in this world, because good and evil are nothing more than concepts defined by human subjectivity. I call myself evil purely as a courtesy to human values. Properly speaking I am neither good nor evil, and there is no good or evil in anything I do. Whatever I do, the fact of it simply sits there. Which makes you—clinging so hard to being evil—a hollow, paper-thin little man."
The narcissist's face went scarlet with rage.
He seems to think the black helmet keeps it hidden, but to omniscient me it is entirely transparent.
Knowing that he could not beat me by brute force, the narcissist somehow recovered his composure and cast about for a way to win.
And this was the answer he arrived at.
"If you are [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One], then I shall go one step above that. I become [The One Yet More Superior Than the Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One]!"
Ohhh dear. He said it.
So long as I am styled Absolutely Superior, no one superior to me can exist. Were such a one to exist, the "absolutely" in Absolutely Superior would be rendered false.
Which is to say, a contradiction arises.
And when a contradiction that absolutely cannot be arises, the cause of it ceases to exist.
In this case, the cause is the Strongest, Invincible Dark Hero, otherwise known as young Master Narcissist.
The narcissist blinked out of existence.
"The mouth is the gate of calamity. For the man who of all people should know the weight of words to be undone by his own—well, he really was an idiot."
After that I dropped onto Nation M, the narcissist's homeland, a monolith—a black mass twenty kilometers tall, cut to the shape of the country.
Let me mention, incidentally, that I do not drop monoliths on my visitors' homelands as reprisal against visitors who turn hostility on me, or against the countries that sent them.
It is all to spite the Goddess.
So however humbly a visitor bows and flatters me, I kill him regardless and drop a monolith on whichever country happens to be left.
The target only ever ends up being the visitor's homeland because the visitor's turning up at My Castle happens to reflect that homeland into my thoughts.
In short: I was queuing at the convenience store register, there were pork buns sitting beside it, and I thought, "Eh, pork buns for dinner tonight." That is all it is.