Chapter 41 – The Perks of Failing Upwards

【Amaterasu PoV】

My promotion felt like a prison sentence.

The new office was a cruel joke. It was twice the size of my old one, a sprawling void of tasteful minimalism that screamed corporate success. Outside the floor-to-ceiling non-window, vibrant nebulae swirled in colors I didn’t know existed. It was an upgrade from the boring old stardust, I guess. If you’re into that sort of cosmic screensaver garbage. The centerpiece of the room was my new chair, a monstrosity woven from pure, shimmering moonlight.

I collapsed into it.

The chair was ridiculously, offensively comfortable. It molded to my form perfectly, supporting my divine spine in all the right places. It felt like sinking into a cloud that had been to a Swiss finishing school. I hated it with the passion of a thousand dying suns.

My old chair had a satisfying wobble. This one was just… perfect. It was engineered for productivity. For focus. For all the things I actively tried to avoid.

A potted plant sat on my new desk, which was carved from a single, impossibly large asteroid shard. It was a gift from Zeus. A tag on one of its perpetually blooming, disgustingly cheerful flowers read, “Congrats on the promotion! So proud of you!”. The plant radiated a pure, unfiltered joy that was a direct violation of my personal space.

I considered setting it on fire with a stray thought.

How did I end up here? My plan had been a career-ending masterpiece. A symphony of incompetence. I broke cosmic laws. I summoned mortals from another world, a taboo of the highest order. I had hand-picked a walking, talking catastrophe of good intentions and set him loose, expecting him to curdle into the perfect little villain.

Instead, he’d failed upwards, and he’d dragged me with him.

My travel brochures for Cancún were probably cosmic dust by now. My dream of opening a celestial coffee shop on a forgotten moon was officially dead. My glorious, thousand-year vacation was cancelled. All because of one impossibly pure-hearted, chaos-derailing Japanese teenager.

It was all his fault.

A soft, melodic chime echoed through the silent office. It was the sound of a new prayer request. My eye twitched. I had specifically requested the jarring, nails-on-a-chalkboard notification sound, but my settings had been “upgraded” to something more serene.

This place was hell.

I waved a lazy hand, and a shimmering, golden screen materialized in the air. The prayer was from some farmer named Jedediah. His crops were wilting. He was begging for rain. It was so pathetic.

“Oh, great Amaterasu, Goddess of the Sun and Bountiful Harvests, please bless my fields.”

I read the words aloud, my voice dripping with a sarcasm that could peel paint.

“My turnips are so very thirsty.”

I stared at the image of the farmer, his hands clasped together, his face a mess of desperate sincerity. He looked like he was about to cry over a root vegetable. Mortals were so dramatic.

My finger hovered over the “Send Monsoon” button. It was tempting. A little flash flood would certainly solve his thirst problem. And it would be funny. But that required effort. Paperwork. Explaining things to the divine environmental council.

I sighed, the sound echoing with the weight of my infinite boredom.

“Fine. Whatever.”

I flicked my wrist. Far below, in the mortal realm, a single, tiny cloud formed directly over Jedediah’s turnip patch. It began to drizzle. A weak, annoying drizzle that wasn’t quite enough to solve the problem, but was just enough to make the dirt slightly muddy and inconvenient.

I marked the prayer as “Resolved” and swiped the screen away.

Another thousand years of this. My soul shriveled a little more.

But then I remembered. I remembered my new plan. My glorious, last-ditch, get-out-of-jail-free card. A slow, bitter smile spread across my face. If my own failures couldn’t get me fired, then maybe my chosen hero’s could.

My last plan was too subtle. It relied on nuanced things like social manipulation and betrayal. That was my mistake. Ryuuji’s goodness was like a cheat code; it broke the game’s social mechanics. He saw through the fake hero and trusted the good-hearted mayor with the villainous face. It defied all logic.

So, I had decided to stop being clever. It was time to be blunt. It was time for overwhelming, unsubtle force. I needed a problem that no amount of pure-hearted sincerity could solve.

I needed an apocalypse.

I closed my eyes, savoring the memory of its creation. It was the most fun I’d had in centuries. I had reached into the darkest corners of the realm, into the pits and abysses where the first, failed drafts of creation were locked away. I had gathered an army.

There were Razor-Winged Grotesques, their leathery wings capable of shredding steel. There were Behemoths of the Chasm, hulking beasts of rock and rage that could level a city wall with a single charge. And for good measure, I’d thrown in a few legions of Shadow Stalkers, creatures made of pure nightmare that fed on fear itself.

It was a beautiful, terrifying, and utterly unwinnable scenario.

I imagined the horde descending upon the pathetic little town of Olvido. The screams. The chaos. The beautiful, beautiful property damage. The celestial insurance claims alone would be a nightmare for Zeus to sort out.

And at the center of it all would be Ryuuji Sato.

I pictured his calm, unassuming face. The one that held that bizarre, innate purity that acted like a moral compass. I imagined that face crumbling. I imagined his eyes, wide with the horror of a situation he could not fix. A battle he could not win. A people he could not save.

Let’s see how your perfect soul handles an apocalypse, Ryuuji. Let’s see you talk your way out of a thousand tons of angry monster.

His failure would be epic. It would be legendary. A goddess who chose a hero that failed so spectacularly? That was a mark of shame. A career-killer. Zeus would have no choice. He’d have to demote me. Banish me. Fire me.

My vacation was officially pending.

The thought filled me with a warmth that my stupid moonlight chair could never hope to replicate. It was the warmth of pure, delicious, liberating purpose.

I kicked my bare feet up onto the asteroid desk, scattering a few reports about soul-transference quotas. Who cares.

I could almost taste the margarita. I could feel the hot Brazilian sun on my skin. I could hear the distant, blissful sound of absolutely no one praying to me for anything.

The anticipation was almost unbearable. I had to see it. I had to watch my masterpiece unfold.

“Alright, showtime.”

I waved a hand, my boredom momentarily replaced by a flicker of genuine excitement. The entire wall opposite my desk shimmered, the swirling nebulae dissolving into the flat, golden light of the divine monitor. I focused the feed on Olvido, zooming past the clouds, through the atmosphere, until the town came into sharp, perfect focus.

The screen resolved into a crystal-clear image of the town square.