My Castle received another visitor.
Alone again, this time.
Over white garments suggestive of formal knight's dress, he wore a breastplate and guards in a blue that was deep and yet somehow translucent.
His hair, swept to one side and spiked at the tips, was a lighter blue than his gear.
His eyes drooped slightly at the corners, but his eyebrows were groomed into a sharp upward angle.
Incidentally, the white garments carried an effect raising resistance to magic, and the blue gear was adamantite, high in physical defense.
He also had gold and silver accessories jangling from various points on his person, granting him stat corrections and the benefits of always-active skills.
"You're the new Demon Lord who took over, aren't you? I am a Hero. I've come to slay you!"
This one was foolishly entertaining a needless worry along the lines of what if I overdo it again.
And, out of what one might call sticky fingers or perhaps sticky eyes, he reflexively tried to peek at my stats.
So my supposed stat window played him a slideshow: a curated selection of his most embarrassing moments from his previous life.
His eyes went round and he hurriedly stopped looking at my stats.
As though nothing had happened, he drew the black longsword at his hip from its scabbard with a ring of steel and leveled the point at me.
"Surrender now and I won't take your life."
I let out a long sigh and informed him of the difference in power he had been so keen to know.
"Sigh. Of all the possible visitors, I get the one whose only merit is numbers. Let me be clear: your odds of beating me consist of zero factors."
"Huh? You clearly don't know, so I'll tell you: I am the strongest Hero, and I have four titles. [The Godspeed Hero], [The Living Weapon of Destruction], [The Walking Fortress], and [The Pinnacle of Magic]. However ignorant you may be, surely you've heard at least one of them? Apparently some people think the bearers of those four titles are four different men. They all refer to me. That is the sort of opponent you are facing right now."
The sole reason this narcissist Hero had been able to nurture such foolishly total self-assurance was his stats.
He was the Cheat-Stat Hero.
Using his reincarnation bonus—the Goddess's Gift, [The Power to Have Any One Wish Granted]—he had acquired the permanently active skill [Super Growth].
With it he grew faster than anyone and broke through his stat ceiling. As a result, he reached higher stat values than anyone.
Those values are as follows.
Lv: 99999
HP: 999999
MP: 999999
STR: 99999
INT: 99999
VIT: 99999
DEX: 99999
AGI: 99999
Note that his [Limit Break] has itself broken its limit, so his maxed-out figures run two digits longer than an ordinary person's.
Incidentally, the parameters break down like this.
Lv / Level — degree of growth; an index of how high all stats stand
HP / Hit Points — vitality; at zero, you die
MP / Magic Points — magical energy; spend it to cast spells
STR / Strength — muscle; affects physical attack power
INT / Intelligence — affects magical attack power
VIT / Vitality — endurance; affects physical and magical defense
DEX / Dexterity — accuracy, and attack correction for ranged weapons
AGI / Agility — speed; affects movement speed, action speed, and evasion
Also incidentally, not everyone perceives numbers like these.
They exist only inside the perception of game-brained reincarnated Heroes. If one of them pulls up a villager's stats in a window, what appears is not any figure the villager actually possesses—it is a value the Hero's own head has automatically converted.
Now then. How shall I discipline this narcissist?
Let us start by winding him up.
"Dummy. You're the one who doesn't know his enemy. I am [The Omniscient, Omnipotent, Strongest, Invincible, Absolutely Superior One]. Being omniscient, I know everything about you—and I am stronger than any being that exists."
The blue-haired Hero, poor in comprehension, tilted his head.
And then talked back anyway.
"I couldn't see your stats, sure. But there's no way anyone exists who's stronger than me and my cheat stats."
Does it not occur to him that not being able to see my stats already places me above him?
He is so stupid that I am, frankly, appalled.
"It'll be quicker to just do it. Come at me."
I set the Mofu from my lap onto the armrest and stood.
Then walked out in front of him.
"It's too late to regret it now!"
"Ugh, honestly, so stupid. I'm omniscient. As if I would ever regret anything."
"Godspeed Blade!"
He closed on me at what would be described as a speed the eye cannot follow, and near enough simultaneously swept the sword through a diagonal cut.
It did not hit me.
I dodged, and once the blade had passed I returned to where I had been standing.
No matter how fast he swung, he did not so much as graze me.
"'Godspeed'? Isn't that a touch presumptuous?"
I patted him on the forehead, lightly, several times.
The intent, of course, was purely to provoke.
He raised the sword. Then brought it down with maximum force at maximum speed.
The blade cut air, and then fell to the floor.
He had let go of it himself.
"What—? The sword is… heavy… That's absurd. Nothing is heavy with my cheat-stat STR."
And when he reached out to pick it up, his body would not move forward.
"Do you actually know what 'cheat' means? You haven't mistaken it for simply having high stats, have you?"
Naturally I knew he had, without needing to hear the answer.
"Huh?"
"Cheating means changing the specifications however you please. Like this. Right now, your STR and AGI are zero. One little tweak of the numbers from me, and a man who is nothing but numbers is worth less than an insect."
He opened his own stat window to check whether what I had told him was true.
And, catching sight of an actual zero, went pale.
Oh—with the blue hair and the blue gear, I do think that shade suits our Hero rather well.
"Put it back!"
"That isn't right, is it? It's 'please put it back, I beg you,' isn't it?"
"…………"
"Has your pride broken through its limit as well? Here, let me adjust you a little more while I'm at it."
I rewrote his figures. Every stat he currently possessed apart from HP went to zero, and I added a new entry: JP, set to ten billion.
I removed the ceiling of the room, looked up at the clear sky, and let him in on it.
"I made exactly one of them incredibly strong. Go on, try jumping."
He gave a light hop.
In that instant, without even time to make a sound, he shot off into the far distance of the sky.
JP / Jump Power — leg strength, applicable only while jumping
I put the ceiling back, and onto Nation C, the Cheat-Stat Hero's homeland, I dropped a twenty-kilometer black object cut to the shape of Nation C. A monolith.
Territory: erased. The third, after Nation A and Nation B.
Incidentally, I say Nation A, Nation B, Nation C, but these countries are not adjacent to one another. I am simply lettering the homelands in the order their Heroes visited My Castle.
Because there is neither meaning nor value in going to the trouble of naming a country I have already erased.