My Castle received a visitor.
This time, of all things, the king of Nation W came in person.
A man in a white vest of expensive cloth with a red mantle over it and a gold crown on his head—splendidly turned out, every inch the king.
This man is eighteen, though. Young.
The black hair and the drooping eyes carry a boyishness appropriate to the age.
He is the king of Nation W, but he was not originally a person of Nation W at all. He is a human reincarnated out of another world.
Reincarnated, or rather, one who hijacked the body of a man of Nation W and took his place.
"I am he who serves as king of Nation W. It is an honor beyond words to come before the sovereign of the Demon Realm. I beg you, pardon the discourtesy of my setting foot in your castle uninvited."
With that, the king of Nation W went down on one knee before me and bowed his head.
"I don't like it. Why did you let yourself in when you knew it was rude?"
"That is—I called out any number of times and received no answer, so I had no choice but to..."
He answered with his knee still on the floor, raising only his head.
"Then normally you go home, don't you."
"But my business with you was of the very greatest urgency."
"Look, picture your life before you were reincarnated. Say you had something to discuss with your homeroom teacher, so you went to his house—and nobody answered. Do you just let yourself in?"
"…………"
He had worked out that silence was optimal and abandoned the reply altogether. Rude little thing.
Though whatever he said would have come back at him twice over or simply earned my dislike, so it was indeed the least bad option available to him.
"I really don't like you. That humble little greeting wasn't sincere either. It was pure calculation—if a king of an entire nation abases himself this much, surely that'll put him in a good mood. All of it comes through to me, you know."
This man used the Goddess's Gift, [The Power to Have Any One Wish Granted], to obtain [the ability to know the optimal choice].
Which is why, for the future of Nation W—or rather, for his own future—the optimal course of action was to visit My Castle.
And true enough: had he not come to My Castle, I would have gone to Nation W myself, and the version of me that did would have been rather less forgiving than this one.
"Hey. Why are you king?"
"Why...? That is..."
Because I had asked so vaguely, he was trying to pin down what I had meant by it—by searching for the optimal choice.
I graciously waited for a reply, and the king of Nation W produced one.
"It is because I was nominated by the people of Nation W."
"Wrong. You steered them into it."
I pointed it out, though had he said so honestly he would have been condemned for that instead, so the result would have been identical.
"But the people of Nation W require my guidance. Nation W stood at the brink of collapse. I was the one reincarnated into it, and with [the ability to know the optimal choice] I rebuilt Nation W."
"Your nation-building simulation game must have been great fun. Nation W is nothing but idiots, after all. Teaching them to store the water and food they'd been burning through day to day, getting them to work efficiently with levers—smugly explaining things anyone would work out with a moment's thought, and collecting admiring looks for it. That is the entirety of what you did."
"You speak as though I were something wicked, but is educating an underdeveloped populace not a good deed?"
"You just wanted to be fussed over as king. Nation W was half sealed off from the world from the day you took the throne. Merchants got through, but you never permitted immigration from other countries. Nation W's people are dim, which is the only reason someone like you could squat on the throne—and if anyone with ordinary intelligence moved in, being one of the neighbors would only make it easier for the people to hoist him up as the amazing one. And then there'd be candidates for king who weren't you."
The moment I pointed that out, a conflict arose in the king of Nation W.
The optimal choice was to concede everything I had said and apologize abjectly.
But the king of Nation W did not want to. His pride would not permit it.
Why should he have to hear such things from a complete stranger with no stake in any of it?
Whatever his motives, the sheer scale of the achievement—rebuilding a nation that was sliding into ruin—does not change, does it?
And so the king of Nation W wrestled with himself, as though arguing with his own ability.
Unfortunately for him, every last bit of it was audible to me.
However well one may select the optimal choice, one cannot conceal the thinking and the true feelings that go into selecting it.
'Don't think about anything' may be the optimal strategy, but knowing that is not the same as managing it.
Before the king of Nation W could finish wrestling with himself, I pressed the verbal assault further.
"There's a phrase for someone like you: king of the sandbox. Even in a low-grade little group, being the one on top and getting a swelled head must have felt marvelous. Handing out ideas any fool could have had, and receiving praise and envious looks in return. Is what you actually want a kindergarten play recital?"
That was the point at which the king of Nation W finally broke.
He had been down on one knee the whole time; now he rose deliberately and brushed off his kneecap with a hand.
There is not a speck of dust on my floor, incidentally.
"That's enough. What are you? How do you know what I was thinking? Even supposing you had some ability to read minds, what you just threw at me was about the past—it wasn't in my head at the time, so there's no way you could know it."
I shall answer because I was asked. I was not sitting there waiting to be asked, mind. I am not like him.
"I am [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One]. That much should suffice, should it not?"
"Omniscient and omnipotent?! Strongest and invincible?! You're joking!"
"I am not."
He is a mediocrity after all. Nothing remotely resembling a strategist.
Because the most important of my components is neither omniscient-omnipotent nor strongest-invincible. It is absolutely superior.
The king of Nation W failed to notice that, and is therefore a mediocrity. An ordinary person in the end.
Not that there's anything wrong with being a mediocrity. It is by definition the norm—most of the world is precisely that.
But being that and calling yourself king is presumptuous, isn't it. A king who knows he is ordinary and rules humbly would be one thing. This is not that.
"Then what am I supposed to do?"
He has an ability that tells him the optimal choice, and yet here he was, finally begging me for the answer.
Comical. Comical in the ironic and delightful way—not cynical, ironical.
That question was, without question, the optimal choice.
And he had not selected it with the ability. He had blundered into asking it all on his own.
That is what made it good.
"Nothing you do against me will avail you. Which is to say that even your very best ends in nothing but death. However—I happen to be in a fine mood. I shall give you one chance, and one only. That chance is..."
"That chance is...?"
Our eyes met and held, the king of Nation W and I.
Left dangling, the king of Nation W was growing flustered.
"You, or every citizen of Nation W—I shall spare one side and one side only. Which side I spare, I shall let you choose. Well then. Which would you like me to save?"
What he had been handed was a scale of lives.
On one pan, his own life.
A perfectly ordinary young life.
No—a life superior in precisely one respect, possession of [the ability to know the optimal choice], and therefore, from the outside, a gifted one.
On the other pan, the lives of a great many other people.
The lives of an enormous number of low-intelligence people who, without him, might well die out within a few generations.
And once again the king of Nation W fell into violent conflict with himself.
(What do I do, what do I do?! The people of Nation W are a mass of humans who can't survive on their own. Without me, their king, the whole thing is finished. No—no, that's the official line. It isn't worth it, me throwing my life away for the likes of them. Obviously the one to save is myself! No, wait. What if this is a test? If I say 'save me,' he might say, 'Just as I thought. You are unfit to be king. Unfit to live,' and kill me. Whereas if I say 'save the people of Nation W,' he might say, 'I see. So you are worth keeping alive after all,' and save me instead. He might even save both of us and tell me to work hard as king. But what if... what if he simply takes it at face value—'Oh. Fine, I'll do that, then'? That's possible too. What do I do, what do I—ah, that's it! Of course! There is an optimal choice! I have [the ability to know the optimal choice]! I just have to make the optimal choice with it! Right. The optimal choice is—)
"All right, time's up!"
"Huh...?"
A moment of silence enveloped the throne room. The king of Nation W was frozen with his eyes wide open.
"I told you to choose. To use the ability is to hand the choice over to a god. In ramen-shop terms: you were told only that noodle refills are free, and you construed that as broadly as you pleased and helped yourself to the pork as well. Therefore, death to both."
"That's not fair!"
The king of Nation W dropped to both hands and both knees and hung his head.
Then his head snapped up and he fired off a question, fast.
"Ah—just tell me this one last thing, please! If I'd answered by myself, without using the ability, would you have saved whichever one I named?"
"I would. Had you said 'save me,' I would have saved you. Had you said 'save the people,' I would have saved the people of Nation W."
"Oh. I shouldn't have overthought it like an idiot. Now I really do look like an idiot."
"Not like an idiot. You are one. Right from the point at which you'd have to throw up your hands and stop using [the ability to know the optimal choice]. Also, being omniscient, I knew it would turn out this way."
"Wha—"
The king of Nation W was unable to produce any further words.
Because his neck twisted around and around like an electric screwdriver and wrung itself clean off.
Then I erased the corpse of the king of Nation W, head now parted from body, and dropped onto Nation W a monolith—a twenty-kilometer-tall black mass cut to the shape of the country.