Lock Pick Hero
LPL Loose in Another World!

Unshackled

A trickster god nabbed the wrong mortal and threw it into its labyrinth of little games. It laughed at the mortal’s imminent demise as he moved between empty and wet stone rooms, with little more than bio-luminescent moss to provide for light. “Is this a bad joke?” the mortal said. The god laughed—because it was! The god laughed as the mortal encountered a door with a rusted lock. He broke the first lock with a stone, only to open the door and find a second, and to open the second, only to find a third.

The third lock was mightier than the last. A feeble bashing could only flake off but a thin coat of rust.

The god laughed when the mortal picked up a thin but mighty twig, and with it—and the perseverance of aeons—opened the third lock to find a fourth, and removed the fourth to find a fifth.

The mortal mentally noted the maker’s mark on each lock, for each lock took mere seconds to open. Clearly, these locks were of poor quality, and would not protect a domicile from raiders.

Soon, the mortal was already through the twenty-fifth lock at a frightening pace. The smile disappeared from the god’s face.

“This wasn’t supposed to happen!” The god sought to correct his mistakes. He could not descend, as he was anchored to his home in higher planes, and so he sent forth a servant from the depths.

A goat-headed warrior, clad in ancient iron armor and wielding a great axe, appeared over the mortal’s shoulder, at the mouth of the Hall of Infinite Locked Doors. That was the name, but there were actually a finite number of doors: 50 in all.

In the trickster god’s defense, there was no mortal in the whole of the world of Sera who could go through even just 10 of them, at least not before the goat-headed warrior would have reached them.

The trickster god had never felt more terrified in his immortal life. The mortal had already gone through 49 doors by the time his servant reached the entrance of the Hall—but! His servant was fast, and the final door confronting the mortal was no small thing: a great, hulking stone door carved with foxman heralds, much taller than any mortal man. Even if he had picked its lock, he would have had trouble forcing it open.

—The warrior charged, and in a flash, was already halfway into the Hall!

The mortal, however, was faced with a far more pressing issue. He looked down to his mighty twig, and though it had served him well for 49 doors, it was worn down, and frankly, he needed a proper tension wrench. The door’s lock, though sizable enough to fit a twig into, was one made of some kind of ultra-hard stone. There was simply too much friction, and turning its barrel required good leverage.

He looked back to the goat-headed warrior, which was growling as it charged—so very close to him now. That guy’s axe has a decent handle on it, he thought.

He dodged at the last moment, letting the warrior ram itself straight into the stone door. He kicked the back of the warrior’s knees, causing its stance to crumble, and it found itself kneeling—then it found a pair of sturdy arms around its neck, binding it.

The lock was incredible. The warrior had been a servant of the trickster god for hundreds of years, and yet, it was being done in by a mere mortal. It flailed around, looking for the man’s head, maybe to grab it and gouge his eyes out, but even its arms were somehow locked!

The mortal found his footing, and soon, he was tossing hundreds of pounds of killing machine overhead—backwards.

In a straight vertical suplex, the warrior’s own weight snapped its spine at the base of its neck.

The trickster god was at a loss. One of his most reliable servants, who had been guarding this labyrinth for hundreds of years, had been killed by a mere mortal. What had he summoned? Who had he summoned?

This was the Lockpicking Lawyer. Many of those from his world admired him mainly for his lock-picking genius, but lest they forget, he was a lawyer first and foremost—and lawyers made enemies.

It was merely by happenstance that, over a very long career, he had acquired a particular set of skills, skills that made him a nightmare for the well-connected to deal with, in the courtroom…and outside it.

Among those skills just happened to be lock-picking. As it turned out, people enjoyed watching it, and so he had chanced upon incredible repute and a viable income stream.

Using the axe as a tension wrench, he finally opened the final door. It’s over, the trickster god thought. He hid himself, locking away his dimension behind thousands of layers of obfuscation and defenses. Despite his cunning, there was simply no way out of the onslaught about to come. Regardless, he would do use every trick in the book to keep that terrifying mortal away from him!

Behind the door was a goddess, chained onto an altar’s table. She glowed dimly, but the glow, flickering. For a moment, she glowed a little brighter. “Who goes there?” she said. Her voice was soft—weak.

“I’m”—the Lockpicking Lawyer thought of his next words carefully. There was a reason why he never revealed his true name. “I’m the Lockpicking Lawyer.”

“My…Lockpick Hero?”

“No”—

“Please…help me.”

He couldn’t refuse. There was no other way out.

The chains binding her down were unnaturally hot to the touch, but not scalding. The locks, on the other hand, were of marginally better quality than the previous doors. Really, it peeved the mortal more than it should. At least it only took a moment to remove each one.

As soon as the last shackle fell, a blast of air emanated from the goddess.

“The labyrinth is mine,” she said. From lying down, she was already standing, hovering in front of him with a soft halo crowning her. “Unto you, o breaker of seals, I gift this holy weapon fit only for you.”

A weapon? A lawyer couldn’t possibly come into possession of such a thing without studying the local legislation first!

Nevertheless, a small orb of light slowly fell in front of him. It didn’t look anything like a weapon, so he caught it with a hand.

“This weapon is fit only unto you. It will never leave your side,” the goddess said. The orb of light landed on his palm, and it morphed in a…lock-picking set?

He breathed a sigh of relief. There was a good chance that locksmithing was a legitimate profession around here, so he didn’t need to worry about being arrested for possession of deadly weapon.

The lock-picking set disappeared with a thought, and reappeared with another.

It was part of him.

“O breaker of seals,” the goddess continued, “that weapon will aid you, for if you know a structure, you may summon any conceivable tool to unlock it.”

“So I can unlock anything with this?” He thought of a car door’s lock, and in his hand materialized a tricky-looking multi-levered contraption. He chuckled to himself. “How about the secrets of the world?”

“Yes…that can be done,” the goddess said.

Unbelievable. What was even more unbelievable was that she continued to explain: “Magic permeates this world. Here, to aid you in your journey, I curse upon you knowledge of the world’s nature.”

“Wait”—

She poked his forehead, and pain assailed him. It ripped him apart. It threw him to the ground and made him vomit. The world—everything—he saw was just something barely held together by invisible, infantile forces that mortals had no business toying with. Nudging even a single piece of it could collapse the house of cards, and the destruction of all creation would cascade at the speed of causality. No one would even notice the apocalypse.

He got up on shaky legs, panting. “Why—why would you do that?”

“I sense in you a great force of order,” the goddess said, her words dancing in his mind. “The rules of reality have been stated. Go forth, punish the trickster god for his childishness, and only then can you peacefully go home.”

Among the knowledge he had acquired was that of the One Seal: a barrier between mortality and true immortality—and he needed true immortality before he could confront the trickster god.

The rules were simple, and he made up his mind. He couldn’t go home without doing this.

In the left hand manifested a hooked wand, and in the other, a straight wand. With these, he played with the magic in the air, dancing to a rhythm, drawing circles in the ground with his feet, and in the air with the wands.

—Gamma, binding. Click out of Chi. Alpha, binding. Sera, turning. He stopped. The Seal was open.

It all clicked for him. The very nature of his existence had changed. Nothing drastic had occurred around him, certainly, but he felt as if—and it really was the case—that nothing could truly kill him. Not here. Not anywhere. Not anymore.

The Path of the Hero

The goddess could not leave the labyrinth, for the power of the trickster god still pervaded the world. To completely free her, the Lockpick Hero must disrupt the channel of his power: the World Tree.

For just a moment. Turning it on and off would suffice.

However, the World Tree was guarded by the Archangel of the Elves, a powerful entity who jealously defended its control knobs. To defeat it, he had to at least unlock the Second Seal.

Yes, there were actually Three Seals. He was surprised to find them. He even showed the goddess, and she, too, was surprised. She had been sealed away so effectively and for so long that the trickster god had managed to shore up the Seals by this much.

This meant that, unfortunately, the Lockpick Hero did not actually become truly immortal. He did, however, still become significantly harder to kill.

If there was another entity who knew how to break the Second and Third Seals, it would be the Demon Sage, the Dealer of Secrets. To find him, however, required a measure of omniscience—something which the goddess was lacking in at the moment.

Either that, or an audience with the Demon Queen, for even the Demon Sage was not exempt from annually declaring his present address, especially since he was a living cultural heritage under law. Granted, this knowledge was last updated 1,000 years ago. It could be wrong, but there was nothing else to go on.

Thus, the Lockpick Hero traveled the mortal lands, heading straight for Castle-between-Chasms, the heart of the demon kingdom ruled by vampires.

Unbeknownst to him, his adventures through the lands of men—and of elves, beastkin, dryads, and hives—through the forests, deserts, and plains, created such an amazing reputation that it traveled much faster than he did. Bards sung of a man who could not be stopped, could not be killed. Kings sought his consul, untangling the greatest knots in law and diplomacy, war and peace. Even the mighty Church trembled before the Lockpick Hero, hailed a Paladin of the True Goddess, as he raided their treasuries, but not of their riches, but of something more powerful than the sword: their ledgers.

—The hammer of justice fell much harder when tax evasion was involved.

Some whispered that he was the hero foretold in prophecy: one to arrive from the depths of the earth, to bring justice and return the fear of the Goddess upon vile men; to bring peace where peace was due; to bring war where war was due.

—For this was the Lockpicking Lawyer: prosecutor of the most corrupt governments of Earth. Indeed, for when even North Korea was out for your blood, there is nothing much left to faze you.

In this world, it was much the same. Though the trickster god disguised himself, he threw pebbles on the road in the hopes of tripping up the Lockpick Hero. He whispered deals of power to the kings and churches, and as expected of their greed, they threw the continent into turmoil. The Lockpick Hero was thrown into a Gordian knot of politics and upheaval…but unlike a Gordian knot, politics was a mechanism. It had moving parts and an identifiable structure. One person’s action led to others’ reactions, and it was simply a matter of figuring which pin to push first, because at some point, after trying them all, one of them will click.

Clicking the right pins, in the right order, was all that it was. To find the right order was the Lockpick Hero’s talent, and to turn the world on its head was the discharge of his skill. Not only did the nations of Sera begin to understand one another, but they also began to understand the world around them. Where the Lockpick Hero tread, culture and industry flourished. The very meaning of existence clicked for the mortal nations, their purpose aligning with something far grander than themselves.

In the end, the trickster god had accomplished nothing but making the Lockpick Hero an even more determined attacker than ever before.

By the time the Lockpick Hero stepped foot in the demon kingdom ruled by vampires, they had already heard his nation-shaking footsteps coming from kingdoms away.

Castle-between-Chasms

A soldier in chain mail scrambled down a stone hallway. “He’s here!” he cried out, hoping anyone would hear him. Behind him, he could hear the barricades collapsing like salt pillars.

He continued running down the hallway, hoping to find another checkpoint. They had already lost 200 men to the Lockpick Hero. What use was armor, anyway, when he could simply instantly remove them? What use was being alive, when he could release one’s soul with just a thought?

Click—was the last thing anyone ever heard.

The soldier finally reached a door, but its intricate carvings of thousands of years of valor and vampiric supremacy sank his hopes. This was the door to the throne room. Commoners were executed for entering it, and even nobles wouldn’t dare enter uninvited. Still, the Queen must be warned!

Death was behind him. Death was in front of him. He knocked on the door, performing his last duty. “My Queen!” he announced. “The Lockpick Hero approaches! Please, make preparations to leave the castle!”—

Someone poked his shoulder. He slowly turned around, feeling Death’s breath on the back of his neck, and he met Death in the eyes.

“P-please don’t kill me,” was all he could muster.

“Hm? Kill you?” the Lockpick Hero said, genuinely confused.

“Y-you killed everyone!”

“I didn’t”—he sighed—“I even sent a letter in advance saying I’ll be arriving, and I even had it checked and edited by a vampire noble. Isn’t that the custom here? It’s not my fault you threw magic at me first.”

W-what? As the Lockpick Hero undid the magic seals on the door, pushing them open, and disappearing into the kingdom’s most hallowed halls, the soldier stood in slack-jawed wonder: Were we in the wrong all along?

Finally, the Lockpick Hero stood face-to-face with the Demon Queen, seated upon her iron throne: Her Majesty, Fraise the Unassailable. He stood before the main reason why this little corner of the world had withstood invasion after invasion by the forces of elves and men, and because of it, he showed her the deference of a sovereign: a bow and a kneel.

“What foolishness,” she said. “You come here, massacre my soldiers, and do this to me? If we are to have a deathmatch, I would prefer it at the earliest convenience.”

“Again, I didn’t kill anyone. I even sent a letter in advance”—

“A veiled threat.”

He eyed an unopened letter at her foot. “Did you even read it?”

She winced so slightly, anyone else could’ve missed it. “Even a foolish monarch wouldn’t need to open it to know as much.”

Instead of that, he focused on the collar around Fraise’s neck. He needed to get on her good side so she could call over the Demon Sage. “This is your house,” he started, “so I play by your rules”—

“Then please, off yourself.”

—“as a guest, geez. Look, there’s been a massive misunderstanding here…”

“Wherever you tread, a world-shaking event occurs,” Fraise said. “I’ll be damned if nothing happens today.”

“I didn’t even really kill anyone, just saying.”

“That’s foolish. If I look outside my window right now, I can see their unmoving bodies right there in the snow.”

“I just ‘unlocked their spines’ a little bit. I can put them back and they’ll be fine.” Indeed, the Lockpick Hero knew the structure of the human spine—and vampires aren’t any different. This, he knew from firsthand experience, as after a certain accident, his doctors had very much explained everything to him in excruciating detail.

Fraise sneered in contempt. Unlock a spine? “Unbelievable.” She shook her head.

“No, really. If I can do it to one right now, I’ll prove it to you.”

Fraise weighed her options. She could either die proud as the last Demon Queen, going down in history as one who faced the Lockpick Hero in harrowing combat—or take this crazed man’s words at face value and see if he could really…’unlock a spine’ like some visceral padlock.

She whipped her hand forwards, and the throne room’s doors opened on their own. There stood under the doorway a frightened soldier.

“Come inside,” she said. The soldier obeyed, and when he was in the middle of the room… “Halt,” Fraise said. With another wave of the hand, her soldier fell asleep right then and there.

If he was going to die for this wicked demonstration, then he should go painlessly.

The Lockpick Hero walked up to the man’s body, like a shark prodding its food. With a click, there was a snap. Thence, Fraise knew that the soldier was dead—

There was another click, and a lighter snap. She couldn’t believe it. She waved a hand, and the soldier got up—a little dazed, but he was alive!

The Lockpick Hero and Fraise the Unassailable locked eyes. “Okay,” she said, “let’s say I believe you. Why are you here?”

That was already in the letter, but he didn’t mention that. “I need to talk to the Demon Sage.”

“Hah!” What a cruel joke. “As if I could call him so easily!”

This was no lie. She wanted this ‘Hero’ to go away as soon as possible and give him what he wanted. Unfortunately, the collar around her neck prevented that. It had sapped at her power for 400 years now, and it tied her forever to this castle—free to roam, but never to escape.

“Is it because of that collar?” the Lockpick Hero…pointed at her neck!

Fraise shot to her feet. “Are you proposing what I think you’re proposing!”

The Lockpick Hero pulled his pointer finger back, a little surprised. “I mean, well, I just want to take that collar off your neck.”

Fraise blushed, restlessly glancing around the room and out the window.

Indeed, the Lockpick Hero’s talents extended to nonchalantly opening one’s heart.

He finally noticed the strangeness of their exchange. Had he been a bachelor, he would have rolled with it. For better or for worse, however, was already a married man. Needing to calm down the Demon Queen’s heart on the road to fighting a god was the last thing in his mind.

To blow away and reset her emotions, he quickly kowtowed and smashed his head into the floor, putting a small crack in it. It hurt like hell, but this was the only way to do things properly: a traditional vampiric display of utter apology. “I made a mistake! I totally forgot!” He smashed his head into the floor again.

Fraise was shocked, then panicked. “What do you mean! Answer me!” she demanded, yet, the Lockpick Hero continued smashing his head into the floor.

“That wasn’t supposed to be”—he smashed his head—”a marriage proposal!”

Fraise was offended, but only until the Lockpick Hero smashed his head yet again into the floor. For a while, she mused over the sweetness of watching someone inflict upon themselves their suffering for a transgression against her—and yet, it irked her. “You may cease,” she said. The Lockpick Hero looked up to her with a bloodied forehead. The floor beneath him had been cracked into bits and powder.

“How ridiculous that the floor of this castle has inflicted more damage upon you than the knights of a hundred nations,” she scoffed. “This is no way for the Lockpick Hero to behave.”

For Fraise was a Queen, and to watch someone who should be her equal consider himself lower than her rubbed her off in the wrong way. Where did the chance at harrowing final combat go?

The Lockpick Hero had accomplished what he’d set out to do, for just like any good lockpicker, he had succeeded at properly closing the things he’d opened without breaking them, no matter if that thing was someone’s heart.

“Your…collar,” he said, wiping the blood from his forehead, “I can remove it.”

“And in exchange, you wish for me to call upon the Demon Sage?”

“Well, that’s the short of it.”

“You must tell me first,” she narrowed her eyes, “why? Why do you seek such a shadowy persona?”

“I’m going to fight god,” he said, “and go home.”

God, not goddess, she noted. “So it’s true,” she said. “You truly are Her Paladin.”

“The goddess? I met her once.”

“What—never mind. Please, do away with this cursed collar.”

—Click.

The Light of Atheneum

The Demon Sage, Fraise discovered, had done the magical equivalent of disabling his ankle monitor hundreds of years ago. This made sense, for if one’s superior were put under house arrest by a tyrannical god on charges of rebellion, one would dunk out, burn all traces, and go off-grid at the earliest convenience.

Luckily, Fraise knew of the Demon Sage’s haunts.

From Castle-between-Chasms, Fraise directed the Lockpick Hero to the icy-cold peak of Mount Atheneum in the northernmost reaches of the demon kingdom ruled by vampires. There held the entrance to the Demon Sage’s private library.

It was a cave. The Lockpick Hero was grateful to be out of the blizzard behind him. Before him was a pair of obsidian doors with the thickest magical seals he had ever seen—t’was to be expected from someone who had access to all the knowledge in the world.

For the first time in his life, the Lockpick Hero found a lock quite vexing. In a world where most locks, magical and physical, relied on the idea of spatial alignment, this one relied on temporal alignment.

The seal was magical, and he suspected an anti-tampering mechanism. Ideally, as a determined attacker, he would copy the mechanism and attempt a solution, many thousands of times if he had to.

However, as a lawyer, he was not mainly a determined attacker, but a smart one.

The Demon Sage was a known collector of arcane knowledge. If he had been holed up here for many hundreds of years, then it would figure that he must have been starving for something new. Indeed, the key to someone’s cooperation was always, first and foremost, trade.

The Lockpick Hero knocked on the door. “Good morning! Is there a ‘Demonious Sanguinius the First and Only’ here who ordered a LIMITED EDITION, I’ll say that again, LIMITED EDITION ‘Guide to the Other World’?”

This was no false advertising. He had actually taken over a week to hand-scribe a 107-page manuscript briefly describing Earth’s cultures, technologies, and recommended restaurants around the San Francisco Bay Area.

All this was necessary, because in front of the Dealer of Secrets, nothing was secret. All lies and omissions were revealed before him, and all truths, bared naked.

That’s why, the door flung open, and a cloaked individual whose face was eternally in the shadow of a fuzzy cloak came out. “I didn’t order anything—but give me that!”

The Lockpick Hero pulled the book back, evading the grasp of the Sage’s stringy fingers. “Oh, apologies, sir, but if there’s been a mistake with the order, I’m not allowed to distribute our products.”

“Blasted!” The Demon Sage balled his fist. “Is there any way I can acquire that dazzling manuscript written in alien texts!”

“Why, of course, sir!” The Lockpick Hero’s words inspired hope in the Sage. “We have a Product Exchange Program that allows me to trade our products with those of yours of equivalent value.”

“I see.” The Demon Sage narrowed his eyes. “You seek knowledge of the Seals?” Alas, all truths were bare before him.

“That’s right,” the Lockpick Hero said, dropping the skit. The Sage appreciated that.

“Come inside,” he said.

The Demon Sage’s library…was just a room. There was a bed, a kitchen, and a thick book upon a lectern, where ghostly glyphs manifested and flew around like faeries.

The Sage walked up to the lectern, flipping through the pages. He flipped through thousands of pages, eventually, and it never seemed that the thickness of the book ever decreased nor increased on either side of its spine.

The Sage motioned for the Lockpick Hero to come hither, and he moved beside him.

A mere glance of the book knocked the Lockpick Hero unconscious.

***

Upon awakening, he remembered his time in law school. Strangely enough, the headaches and hardship he had suffered there were much greater than the pain of learning about the Second Seal.

He sat up on the bed. He was still in the Sage’s room, and the Sage was there, standing by the lectern, feeding the Guide to the Other World to the book on the lectern, physically disappearing straight into its pages.

“If you must unlock the Second Seal,” the Sage said, “please do so outside. This book will suffer no damage, but I would like to have a bed and a kitchen, still.”

The Lockpick Hero thanked him and left. The snow outside the cave had melted, and the rocky face of the mountain was exposed.

On that day, the peak of Mount Atheneum shone like a second sun in mid-day, serving as the signal for the Archangel of the Elves to call her forest friends to arms, and for Her Majesty, the Demon Queen Fraise, to once again raise her mighty armies—in want to achieve what had been attempted 400 years ago.

Onion of War

In little more than a month’s time, a puzzling day of battle came, for as soon as dawn broke, not three, but five armies showed up:

• • The Demon Queen’s

  • The World Elves

  • The Order of the True Goddess 

  • The Alliance of the World Tree

  • The Lockpick Hero

It was puzzling, because nobody had been aware of the Order and the Alliance at all until just then. They had come into existence just three weeks ago in anticipation of this very battle; they didn’t even know the other guy existed until their marching columns started meeting each other and their captains couldn’t identify the other’s banners.

The mortal nations were like that, doing things on a whim, in short order, and without prior warning.

As a result, there were four banners flying that day, but under each of those four banners were dozens of colors, coats-of-arms, and insignias. It was simply logistically impossible to color-coordinate this world’s equivalent of NATO and the Warsaw Pact within a span of three weeks; the logistics of turning in tens of thousands of uniforms, dunking them in dye, and shipping them back to their soldiers, was just too impossible for a pre-industrial world which hadn’t invented trains yet.

The real root of this issue was even more vexing.

Both sides believed their intelligence and counterintelligence operations to be flawless. The truth was that both sides’ counterintelligence operations were so good that they had both successfully fooled the other into thinking they didn’t exist at all—and if they were the only secret alliance, then why bother color-coordinating? This led to both sides cutting the budget on color coordination, which was a prohibitively expensive endeavor just for a one-off military campaign.

One might believe this to be stupid and unrealistic. However, in societies where politicking, and not rational thinking, was the meta for surviving in the upper echelons of society, it regularly occurs that a decision-making body accumulates a critical mass of sycophants to the point that the last remaining pocket of diverse ideas shrivels into nothing, and the real facts on the ground never reach the top leader’s ears until it’s too late.

Even now, each camp’s tailors and seamstresses were busy crafting new banners and flags just for the sake of clearly identifying each unit’s allegiances. It wouldn’t take long, actually, but it was still a few hours. The soldiers had taken to painting color-coded stripes upon their helmets and shields, because clearly, high command was high on something before they decided to just charge in here without doing something as simple as this.

Not until a sufficient number of banners were produced that any of the armies wanted to make a move, for fear of accidentally moving against their own allies. Verbal identification was out the window—anyone could do it, and if everyone did it, then you still wouldn’t know who you were fighting! On the other hand, violating the Convention on Banners in Warfare was also out the window: an army disgracing its kingdom, violating pre-established codes of honor, would result in political and economic contempt against that kingdom. Therefore, banners were more trustworthy than words.

There was, however, one man who was not beholden to any of this. This was a legal fact, because the Lockpick Hero was an individual, not a corporate nor military entity. Banners? Flags? Answering to someone else who probably didn’t have his best interests in mind? That didn’t matter to him.

He was no soldier, and yet, as he nonchalantly strode forth through the Forest of the World Tree, entirely shattering the barrier that fenced it off from the rest of the world like it was nothing, all the armies—camped outside the forest, marching towards it, or watching from within—quavered in their sandals and boots. This was a man who could not be restrained, not even when a rain of arrows from the elven rangers came, and not even when the World Tree itself fired a great spell at him, shrouding him in a firestorm, was he dissuaded from the path he walked.

—A straight line.

He reached the base of the World Tree—then turned back.

This confused the World Elves and the Archangel herself. Did he suddenly become…afraid? Some of the elven rangers jeered at him, calling him a coward.

The truth was, he just wanted to make sure this wasn’t a fluke. For Christ’s sake, he walked in a straight line! That shouldn’t be possible! What kind of defense system did they have going on here?

Thus, he reached the edge of the forest, and once again turned around—to the World Elves’ horror.

This time, their defense was more sustained—more desperate. A thicker cloud of arrows rained, and the Alliance of the World Tree joined the fray, having finally made 3,000 banners to equip all their platoons. These were mortals who revered the World Tree, and earnestly believed that it shouldn’t be touched.

…On the other hand, they also believed that they couldn’t touch the Lockpick Hero. Fighting the Demon Queen’s forces was also out of the question, and so they focused their energies on fighting the Order of the True Goddess, instead.

In the first place, some of these nations were saved by the Lockpick Hero, and neither did they really have a bone to pick with the Demon Queen. Their participation in this battle amounted to “gaining rep and glory,” and it just happened to be in the name of the World Tree.

Just like the Alliance, the Order of the True Goddess also didn’t have any real vested interest in fighting the World Elves in particular. Yes, their kings may have received a few visions from the True Goddess of Sera to inspire them to support the Lockpick Hero, and neither did they think that turning the World Tree off then on again, for just a fleeting second, was a bad idea. However, they had to be realistic: the only person who could really do anything about the real problem here was the Lockpick Hero, and it didn’t look like he was going to have any problems doing it at all.

So, just like the Alliance, the Order was just here to rack up rep and glory.

Even if there were a hundred-thousand soldiers on each side, moving in grand formations that kicked up dust in their wake, that was just the result of hundreds of nations sending a thousand soldiers each—not even an exceptionally huge chunk of their respective standing armies. Given their intentions in this battle, they wouldn’t even be fighting tooth-and-claw, either.

The majority of battles in this world was just taunting each other and occasionally hooking the other guy’s leg. Few battles were ever to-the-death, although people certainly died. The aggrieved were simply compensated, and the whole thing, dismissed as an operating expense.

Although this battle between mortals might seem unnecessary, the meta of this world was politicking. The one who would come out of this time in history and be able to say, “We fought for the victors,” had more clout, rights, and privileges than the losers.

That said, they were just poking each other with very long sticks right now, and among the miles-wide battle lines clashing with each other in the plains surrounding the Forest of the World Tree, only twenty-one people have been sent to the back lines for bone fractures thus far.

Compared to their petty little war games, the Demon Queen had a real bone to pick with the World Elves. The friendly forest bastards were quaint little creatures, thinking themselves above everyone else. Certainly, they guarded the World Tree and were very good at it, but their stubbornness as defenders also extended to their stubbornness in general, not even listening to reason!

Just turn it off then on again, that’s what the goddess had said, and yet, why didn’t the World Elves follow? She had created them, and yet they dared question her wisdom?

Vampires, orcs, goblins, and wicked men flooded the forest, setting it alight to flush out the elven rangers. Tree roots shot out, impaling charging trolls and war boars, flailing them around, then tossing them away. The magics of the Four Demon Generals cut through swathes of forest in cataclysmic beams, vaporizing hapless defenders, while Sages swept away the goblin hordes with raging rivers, and Talking Trees lulled entire orc battalions to eternal sleep in clouds of poison pollen, turning their corpses back to nature. The wicked murdered the rangers and strung them up from their own tree-homes, and the rangers avenged their comrades in efficient lightning assaults that left the forest in silence.

For these two sides, this brutality had to be earned, and it was: by 400 years of contempt that had, all this time, bubbled under a facade of peace.

With a hundred-thousand mortal soldiers poking each other in the plains around, and true murder and carnage between demons and elves in the forest behind him, the Lockpick Hero reached the base of the World Tree, proving once again that its barriers were just feel-good contraptions that failed to keep anyone out.

The Archangel waited for him at the very entrance.

Ascent of a Thousand Miles

The Lockpick Hero and the Archangel stared each other down. “You will not touch this hallowed trunk,” the Archangel said. She wielded a bow, an arrow already nocked, its warhead blazing with holy energy.

The Lockpick Hero moved too fast to see. The Archangel turned around, bow already at full draw, but it was too late—the door had already been opened!

But that was okay, for the first floor was labyrinthine, and the World Tree itself reached beyond the sky. To turn it off and on again, the Lockpick Hero needed to get past all 999 floors to get to the 1,000th where the Holy Control Room was located.

That he could breach any door or seal faster than one could blink was of no consequence, for the Archangel could instantly appear anywhere, on any floor, and constantly knew where everything was within the World Tree, all the time.

The Lockpick Hero sprinted down a foot trail of the first floor’s indoor forest. The Archangel appeared before him. “Stop!” she shouted.

He could not be stopped.

Having gone on a crazy adventure, something as simple as running so fast as to be able to run on walls—or in this case, the sides of trees—was simple for him. He passed the Archangel, enjoying the wind as he did.

The Archangel shot an arrow to chase him. It was no ordinary arrow; it was a patriot arrow, a magical arrow which could fly unto eternity, chasing any moving target until it was pierced.

In other words…it had a target lock.

The Archangel’s patriot arrow—missed! It hit a tree a mile away from him! “What!” She couldn’t believe it.

Once again, she teleported before him, this time firing the arrow straight at his face. He dodged, but it was to be expected that anyone who got this far would be able to do that—which was why this maneuver was her favorite. She expected the arrow to stop, do a 180, and pierce him from behind where he didn’t expect it—but it just kept going!

Thinking her arrows were broken, she switched to normal arrows and relied on pure skill and instinct. She was doing better, hitting trees beside him, but this would go on forever. She needed a new strategy.

The Lockpick Hero breached the portal to the second floor without so much as properly encountering the floor’s boss. What an utterly broken power he had.

On the second floor, she switched to using wide-area annihilation arrows—just as well, because this floor was a wide, grassy plain.

She spread her wings and took to the sky, spotting the Lockpick Hero sprinting across the plain at a ridiculous speed, going in a straight line, only twenty seconds away from the next portal many miles away.

Her annihilation arrows were the equivalent of magical nukes, which was why she was confident she couldn’t possibly miss.

She nocked an arrow, kinda aimed, and loosed hell.

In an incredible sequence of events, the Lockpick Hero stopped, jumped towards the arrow, snatched it from mid-air, turned 360, then tossed it away—harmlessly.

…How? She couldn’t fathom it.

Unfortunately for her, the Lockpick Hero had quite the knowledge regarding nuclear weapons. Indeed, when you were prosecuting an entire regime for crimes against humanity, you tended to pick up on these things.

Nuclear warheads, you see, had a multi-stage arming sequence and multiple failsafes to ensure that it absolutely would not explode unwarranted. In short, each one was a lock on the warhead’s ability to carry out its final mission, and just as much as a lockpicker knew how to unlock things, they also very much knew how to jam them up.

In the Lockpick Hero’s eyes, there wasn’t much of a difference between a magical nuke, and a nuke nuke. No matter what the Archangel’s power and adeptness at magic, there was absolutely no stronger lock than the one he’d encountered protecting the Demon Sage’s door.

After seeing that terrifying thing, he had spent every night thereafter trying to figure out how to get something like that open, and he even traded in a new ‘Guide to the Other World: Pt. II’ just to figure out how it worked.

After dealing with a monster like that, something like jamming a magic nuke’s 52 failsafes within a split second was child’s play.

This stupid chase continued all the way until the 1,000th floor, where the Lockpick Hero took a water break and waited for an exhausted Archangel to finally catch up to him.

***

The Archangel finally made it up the last step of the stairs to the Holy Control Room on the 1,000th floor—though, she ended up just lying down on the floor, wings spread out and slowly fanning herself. So tired.

As it turned out, the Archangel’s magic wasn’t unlimited in use. Sure, she could teleport to any place within the World Tree pretty much instantly, and her body was made of magic, powered by the World Tree itself, so she shouldn’t ever run out of magic.

However, each teleport caused mental strain, and a mind made of magic was not the same as a physical brain. It was a lot faster, but also easily more volatile. This meant that she could effortlessly cast ultra-powerful magic, but also that she was limited to 10,000 uses per day.

Unfortunately, whether it was a simple fireball spell or an earth-rending cataclysm, one use was one use, and to be fair, no one would expect all 10,000 uses to be exhausted within a day—and less so in under 9 hours! Seriously, the Lockpick Hero was so fast and cunning, that she didn’t realize that she was teleporting dozens of times per floor.

It was only the time they reached the last 100 floors when she started to feel the strain, and she had to limit her magic use. She started using physical enhancement magic more often, as it was more use-efficient, lasting for a minute each time.

Still, it had come to this.

“You’re finally here,” the Lockpick Hero said.

“That’s…that’s supposed to be my line.” The Archangel panted. She’d run out of magic uses a long time ago, and had to take the stairs—for the first time in a while.

“Come on,” he gestured for her to come over. “Unlock the control panel for me, will you?”

“Why don’t you unlock the control panel yourself, huh? ‘Breaker of Seals,’” she scoffed.

“If there’s anything I’m not…it’s a ‘Breaker of the Law.’” Indeed, he treated the Holy Control Panel as someone else’s computer. Something about data privacy.

Fury and exasperation mixed in the Archangel’s chest. “You came in here with an army!”

“That’s just Queen Fraise doing her own thing, though.”

“You broke into my home!”

“This place is a common facility and falls under the public interest, and I’m the contractor permitted by the legitimate government—with written documentation, mind you—to fix it.” He took out a glowing note and, walking over to the Archangel, gave it to her.

The note read:

“I still have your baby photos. Allow my Lockpick Hero to refresh the World Tree, or suffer the consequences. Love, Goddess of Sera.”

She gasped. Everything she thought she knew was a lie. Indeed, the magical signature imprinted in the note was of the True Goddess’s! In fact, it was a very specific magical signature, imprinted on all of life of Sera, that coded for, “You’ve messed up.” It inspired a feeling of dread, regret, and longing for redemption!

For you see, a thousand years ago, the trickster god imprisoned the Goddess of Sera and impersonated her, fooling the gullible World Elves into thinking there was an imminent threat to the world, greater than all they had ever seen, and that they must defend it to the last, even if they must defend it against the goddess herself.

Of course, that was just a joke. The demons didn’t take the joke too well, and for 600 years thereafter, secretly raised a grand army to reclaim the World Tree and demand that the True Goddess be returned. Many of the mortal nations actually supported this sentiment. Really, the trickster god was spouting a lot of B.S. at the time, in the distasteful guise of the Goddess of Sera, and was single-handedly responsible for converting most mortals to atheism.

The demons easily lost after the World Elves bought the other mortal nations with lifetime supplies of fruits from the World Tree, giving them an army of supermen to fight on their behest. This may have been a geopolitically destabilizing move, but in the grand scheme of things, one mortal lifetime wasn’t all that much, so it all worked out for the World Elves in the end.

The Archangel had been alive to see all these events unfold, and had even made some of the most important decisions, herself. Now, with this single note from the True Goddess, it all clicked into place for her: they had been utterly and thoroughly fooled, and they had no one to blame but themselves.

She gladly placed her hand upon the Holy Control Panel, unlocking its controls.

“Is there a restart button somewhere,” the Lockpick Hero asked.

“I don’t know. It’s been a thousand years since I’ve last looked at this…”

They both blinked. The console started updating. It would…take a while.

In the meantime, the Archangel hurried to announce an end to the fighting, calling up all the sages and generals of the battered World Elves. They wouldn’t like the news at all.

Dispatch of the False God

An air of disbelief came over the battlefield—and also smugness on the demons’ side. They were right all along.

It was a hard lesson for the World Elves to accept. Meanwhile, the Order of the True Goddess celebrated their political victory, and the Alliance of the World Tree ended up with bruised egos. Still not as bruised as the World Elves’, though.

Now, the Lockpick Hero, Archangel, and Demon Queen were in the same room, staring at the Holy Control Panel.

The update progress moved from 99 to 100%, and the screen finally appeared.

…and the Archangel immediately restarted it.

The World Tree shook, and a pulse of energy danced all along the exosphere, across the whole world. Auroras danced in the sky for a few fleeting seconds, before being sucked back into the World Tree.

Things continued as they were, as if nothing had changed.

“It was so easy…” Fraise sighed.

“Look, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” The Archangel was about to smash her head into the floor for the N-th time today, so Fraise stopped her.

“Look, girl, I understand. We all make mistakes.”

“Millions of people died over this! Look, the blood outside is still unwashed!”

“Boohoo. Will you cry, little girl? This is the burden of a leader.”

The Archangel just stayed quiet. Fraise might have hurt her too much with those words, but her pride wouldn’t let her take it back. If the girl didn’t have what it takes, then she should just switch jobs.

“Thank you,” a voice said, serene, and all around them.

Immediately, Fraise and the Archangel knelt, and before them materialized the Goddess of Sera. She ignored the two, walking straight towards the Lockpick Hero.

“With the World Tree refreshed, I am free to exercise my power over my world. I have also determined the nature of the Third Seal. The lock is the World Tree, itself.”

The Archangel shot to her feet. “My goddess! You can’t possibly be suggesting”—

“I am,” the goddess said. She turned back to the Lockpick Hero. “As promised, this is my gift to you. Unlock the Third Seal, and punish the god that has inconvenienced us both—and return to your world. I trust that you will exercise utmost care.”

The Lockpick Hero never breaks things on accident.

For three days and three nights, he studied the structure of the World Tree. The Archangel hovered closely over his shoulder, making absolutely sure he wasn’t doing anything that would break it. She was useful to him, too, having intimate knowledge of its innermost workings as its caretaker for many thousands of years.

The day of the Unbinding came.

For three days and three nights, creatures of the depths and the skies—servants of the trickster god—assaulted the World Tree. Once again, armies fought, but this time alongside each other, and this time, towards the same goal: spiting the god who reigned a thousand years of bad jokes on them.

Finally, the Third Seal was broken. The Lockpick Hero…was truly immortal.

“Thank you for freeing me from my collar, Hero,” Fraise said. “I will forgive you for your mistake that one time.”

The Lockpick Hero died a little inside. “Thanks, I’ll do my best to forget.”

Next, the Archangel went to him. “My name is…Aranel,” she said, at once nervous and embarrassed—cringeful of a thousand years of black history. “Thank you for…enlightening me.”

The Lockpick Hero smiled. “Let’s do our best to forget.”

Finally, as the battle in the forest still raged, the Goddess of Sera showed him the place where the trickster god hid. It was protected by insurmountable obstacles and obfuscations, but in front of the Lockpick Hero, who simply walked in a straight line, they were naught but fun exercises and monetizable content.

The trickster god watched as the Lockpick Hero neared his home, in the Hypergame, where everything was a game. Here, he would make his last stand, for here, he was Master.

***

The Lockpick Hero tore through the fabric of heaven itself, and the trickster god was there, waiting for him. He clapped. “An amazing show!” he said.

Before he could say anything more, the Lockpick Hero pointed at him. “I challenge you to a game.” In this place, everything was a game. You couldn’t do anything if a game wasn’t involved.

The trickster god was shocked, the initiative was stolen from right under him! Never mind that, but what was this silly mortal—well, he was immortal now, wasn’t he—thinking about challenging the trickster god at a game? He smiled. “What game is this, pray tell?” If it’s a game, he would win it.

“Easy,” the Lockpick Hero explained. “The first one who unlocks forbidden knowledge wins. The winner lives, the loser dies.”

The trickster god had no idea what the angle was here. Uncovering forbidden knowledge would necessarily mean death from going mad, and there had only ever been one instance when any entity did that and lived!

The first one to uncover forbidden knowledge would die. The loser is the true winner here, of course! That’s so obvious!

“I accept,” he said. Now, he might have been called a trickster god, but he wasn’t particularly smart. Really, he had survived this long because smarter gods and goddesses had been forced to prioritize fixing the damage his mindless chaos had caused, and he would dunk out of the local galactic cluster before they could catch him!

The game started. “I win,” the Lockpick Hero said.

Although the trickster god allowed the Lockpick Hero to accomplish it first, he was still shocked at the sheer speed of it. He turned to the Lockpick Hero, just in time to see the swirling, writhing mass of something breaking into the Hypergame, feeling around and looking for its victim.

This is it, the trickster god thought, the Lockpick Hero is dead.

—But the dark appendages shot out towards him, instead!

“Wh—how?!” he blurted out. Forbidden knowledge filled his mind, about universes above even their own.

“I just said unlock. I didn’t say to look at it.”

At the time when the Goddess of Sera filled the Lockpick Hero’s mind with all the knowledge of reality she possessed, this was one very simple rule: Do not look at forbidden knowledge.

With that done, the Lockpick Hero tore a hole straight out of the Hypergame, leaving the trickster god to writhe and suffer, and eventually, to die. He’d expected more of a fight out of the guy, but it turned out he was just a big brand, nothing more or less special about him.

He was finally back at home, back to the familiar. To come from the chaos of that place, only to suddenly be in silence and right at home...was strange. The only proof that that whole escapade wasn’t a grand delusion was the other world’s adventurer gear, stained in dirt, still on him.

The nearest digital clock indicated that no time had passed at all, between his being whisked off to Sera and coming back here—both the date and time were right. There was a padlock on the table before him. His overhead recording setup was raring to go. His usual lock-picking set was stowed away somewhere, but he had a thought.

He looked down at the palm of his hand, and there, materialized in his hand, was just the right pick for the job. Nice. Maybe he could bring his wife on a nice and relaxing vacation around Sera once she’s free.

He sat down by the table, padlock and magic lockpick ready. He had been away for two months with reference to his own time frame, adventuring in another world, and now, he was back here. Shouldn’t he be more frazzled? No. He was a man who couldn’t be stopped, and nothing could stand in his way. He was just a guy, doing what he could do, yet confident in himself that, eventually, something would click. He could live life here—or he could live anywhere. All doors were open for him, now.

But that’s what was so paralyzing, wasn’t it? There were so many possibilities now, he didn’t know what to do. He’d carried something with him from that world, and he didn’t know what it was. Something in him…was binding.

He chuckled to himself. What’s with the melodrama? He was the most determined attacker in two worlds. His wife rejected him six times before they got married, and he could’ve kept that number going as long as he wanted.

Yeah. That’s right. He’ll always keep on going.

He breathed in deeply, and pressed a button on the overhead camera, starting the recording. “This is the Lock Picking Lawyer”—he said, a little tired. He let a sigh escape, letting go of a whole world’s worth of worry—”and oh boy, do I have a story.”

End.