How can a man with a level of intelligence clearly not befitting his name be considered a god? Ada thought it was incredibly pathetic that the God of Wealth refused (or rather more likely) couldn't solve a basic math puzzle which she solved in a few minutes when she was at summer camp in middle school. No wonder he refused a duel in math! Also, his inflated ego and callous cruelty angered her. She has been annoyed that Ayula had forced onto her a scenario which would inevitably lead to earlier conflicts with gods than she wanted. Now though, after seeing how one of the younger gods wantonly abused his powers, she hardened her resolve to stop their tyranny. Ayula had forced her to be on the Goddess of Life's side but maybe that was not such a bad thing.

Ada looked at the god in front of her. In her head, she ticked off a checklist. There were two main concerns where he held a moderate advantage. First, he has a lot more followers and material wealth than Ada, which could transfer into some power that she didn't understand yet. Second, she wasn't sure what those rings did; what if they could actually hurt her? From her side, she had a few advantages as well. First, he still thought she was just a mortal mage and no doubt would vastly underestimate her. Second, he might be entirely dependent on his artifacts of power. She called up systemhelper and quickly dumped her thoughts into a text file called observationsongods.txt. She would update the text file periodically and eventually create a book to give to her followers.

"Why the silence? Scared? You should be. You know during the last war, in this very city, I handily defeated over twelve dozen mages from the Academies on this continent. Afterwards, you know what they called me?"

"A gross man? You know what...I don't really care. Do you really not know how to do the missing dollar problem?"

"Foolish mortal, I do not need to solve silly children's puzzles when I'm a god. There are far more important matters in commerce I attend to."

He has gone over and beyond in proving himself to be an utter idiot, Ada thought. She stared at him in disbelief. "Okay, I see that I won't ever hire you as an accountant."

Without any more regard for her taunts, he swung his right hand underhanded as if he was lobbing a softball. The green gem glowed and three miniature tornados at least ten feet tall appeared and spun towards her rapidly. The rocks around her circled and rushed by swept up in the powerful updraft. She stood her ground and observed that though the wind blew away all the rocks near her including a gigantic boulder half her height, she felt as if a gentle breeze just blew by. It felt quite refreshing.

"An elemental shield? You're more capable than I expected." Yuano said with grudging respect.

A dagger suddenly materialized in both of his hands and he leapt forward with a series of slashes aiming at her neck and torso. Ada leapt back a few steps which turned out to be over 50 feet. Wow, maybe I should compete in the Olympics if they have one here, Ada thought. Not giving her any reprieve, the god raised his arms and opened his palms as if he was Ironman about to blast her. A torrent of red hot flames erupted out of the red ring and struck her. The rocks around her rapidly turned into a goo of magma. The heat felt like a hairdryer set to medium to Ada.

Yuano's eyes widened. "Unbelievable! To jump that far without any magic and then to activate at least a prime class elemental shield immediately without any noticeable ether change?"

"Simply someone who isn't a fool like the man I see in front of me."

"I am a god! Not a man. Are you looking down on me? You know I was considering giving you an easy death but now I'm going to give you the most painful one."

If Yuano was expecting a shudder of fear, Ada didn't or rather couldn't give him one. Whether it was due to an inherent characteristic of being a deity or just her knowing that she was near invincible as a god, Ada felt absolutely no fear. In fact, she felt quite the opposite. When she was in middle school, she had a classmate who was bullied but she never did anything about it since she didn't want to become a new target. She just kept her head down and focused on her studies. There was always a tinge of regret there for just being a bystander. Now, though, she has power and felt both compelled and delighted to confront a bully. "You know I'm really thinking that you're a lot more bark than bite."

He dashed rapidly forward closing the distance in scarcely a second. The daggers flashed in the sunlight in a blur. Ada ducked her entire body and then followed up with a punch straight to his groins. Ada felt slightly let down that the god showed no indication of pain. It was worth a shot. Instead, he swung downwards and stabbed both his daggers on her head. There was a loud crack as both daggers broke upon impact and tumbled to the ground. He stepped back with a stunned expression. "What?! How are you doing this?"

"Doing what?"

"I didn't sense any ether flow here. How did you even create a physical shield without any ether manipulation?"

"Uh, magic?"

"No matter, time for me to finish this." Yuano said smugly.

The yellow gem on his hand glowed. There was shock on his face when nothing happened. "What? Impossible! The Golden Touch failed?!"

Now was the perfect time to attack when he was in such shock that he wasn't on the offensive. Ada hasn't just been taunting. In the background, during the exchange, she has activated systemhelper and prepared a few more scripts -- notably, one to enable continuing running other scripts in an infinite loop until she stopped it and another to selectively run a combination of her scripts. Not feeling terribly creative at the moment, she named the first one adarepeat2 and the second one adacombo.

[adarepeat2]

while :

do

sh $1

done

[adacombo]

i=1

for arg in "[email protected]"

do

sh $arg

i=$((i+1));

done

"Ah, finally," she muttered.

To start with, she has executed adacombo with inputs of adacid adaicicle adasword adatorch passed through adarepeat2 to execute them for three seconds. Yuano was hit by a streaming torrent of swords, torches, icicles and sulfuric acid that rained down on him. Caught off-guard, he wasn't fast enough to dodge all of them. Much to Ada's consternation, the ones that struck his body all deflected off as if there was a force field around him. She suspected that all gods have a basic form of self-protection. What was not protected though was the mask and the rings he wore. Several projectiles landed on the god's hand. Though his hand appeared to be perfectly fine, the three colorful rings were clearly vulnerable to the attacks. A large blob of acid hit the yellow gem and it sizzled before it cracked and tumbled to the ground in a shower of golden pieces. An icicle hit the green gem, which created a wide crack. A torch passing through fell near the existing crack and the fire's heat broke it into three pieces which fell to the site next to the remains of the yellow shards. After the onslaught, only the red gem remained intact.

One of the swords tore into the mask and struck it off from Yuano's face. The mask cracked completely once it hit a rock on the ground clearly indicating it wasn't real gold. How cheap for a god of wealth, Ada thought as she smiled wryly. With his mask removed, she could now see his face. For a god, he certainly looked ... unremarkable. That was the best term she could come up with. In a sea of people, most of his face would not catch her eye. Matching his short stature, he had a round face with brown eyes and a small flat nose. His small circular eyes were currently wide open in shock. The only notable facial feature was his thick beard which appeared incongruous with the amount of hair in other places. I am no one to ask for fashion advice but his beard really looks absurd, Ada thought.

"What!" Yuano's surprised yelp as he stumbled backwards broke off Ada's train of thought.

Before the god could find his footing, Ada yelled in her mind which prevented the god from finding his footing at all. The god's foot sunk into the quicksand. I see that he has no power of flight and that his body does have mass, Ada carefully noted and appended that thought to observationsongods.txt. The god flailed his arms. She wasn't sure whether that was an instinctive reaction for falling into the quicksand or because he was about to invoke an attack. Not planning to give Yuano any chance of retaliation, she quickly called followed by . created in front of the god's face a concentrated hydrogen and oxygen mixture that immediately exploded with the appearance of a lit torch. generated a stone wall with enough surface area to completely cover the quicksand. That wall, which was really a thick horizontal slab of granite, landed on top of the god's head.

As Ada expected, the fireball explosion did absolutely nothing though it did prove to be an useful distraction for the granite slab that landed on top of his skull. His head was unfazed by the impact but that did not matter to her. The heavy stone slamming down on him drove his entire body including his head into quicksand. She hypothesized that although he might still be able to breathe underwater, if he was stuck since his density is greater than the immersed liquid, i.e. ρ_(granite + Yuano) > ρ_quicksand, she would have effectively won the duel.

She couldn't see the god but she heard a muffled groan from Yuano who was buried underneath the slab. She heard a loud cheer and turned her head towards the hill where she saw that the sound originated from Leanne, Ruciella and even Sçæaisøh. Though all three looked happy, Leanne's face still indicated some reservation that the battle was over. None of them approached her though which was probably a wise decision for she wasn't quite sure yet that the battle was over. Well, as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, a leader is a dealer in hope. For too long mortals in this city and others had to live under the shadow of an uncaring selfish god. Ayula could not confront him directly but Ada could. She wanted to inspire that hope. That was the noble reason. The less noble reason was that she just didn't like the guy. Ultimately, what this meant was that Ada wasn't going to hightail it and run right now. She wanted him to concede by his own words.

Turning back to the scene in front of her, she saw that the god was still trapped. Though she couldn't see him, she could hear audible curses from beneath the granite. Some of those swear words were quite colorful. Maybe he should be called the god of swearing, she thought. How he could possibly talk without swallowing the sand and water was beyond her but somehow he was. The God of Wealth had no inhuman physical strength. Unless the red gem could be of aid, she didn't see him getting out of here right now. There was no need to drag this on longer than it needed to. "Yuano, do you concede defeat?"

The god stopped swearing. "Defeat?!"

He sounded stunned. It must be humiliating to be defeated by a mortal, especially one that he has mocked right before the battle. If he had a shred of honor as he claimed he did though...Ada's thoughts were cut off by a raucous laughter. "The great God Yuano to be defeated by a mere mortal? I would be the laughingstock of all the gods if they find out."

"You already became a laughingstock when you couldn't solve the missing dollar problem and still claim to be a master at commerce."

"I have no idea why you are still harping on one mathematics problem but I promise you that I'll give you a lot of problems once I'm out of here."

Ada scoffed. "I see. Does that mean you admit you're stuck?"

"I am not stuck. I can leave any time but it'll unleash powers which could devastate this entire area including the city."

"Can't you get out of there without destroying everything around you?"

There was a moment of silence. Ada continued with sarcasm, "So you're basically admitting that you're trapped. Wow, simply remarkable."

"I refuse to concede."

"Really now? You know I think I can devastate your city for you and then let you free. Same thing as what you can do right?"

There was another long pause. "If I concede, will you free me from this damnable mud?"

"That depends on two conditional statements. One is whether or not you can answer some questions of mine. The other is on whether you can promise me that you and your minions will not chase after us."

She was going to use the word follower but decided the word minion was more apt. Maybe he wasn't pure evil but from the way he acted, she was sure that his followers were both unimportant and servile in his eyes. This time, his reply came immediately. "Yes, of course. But, mortal, if you can answer a few questions of my own?"

"A few? I'm generous enough to just give one."

"Who are you? I have never met a mortal with your abilities. You're not a mortal are you?"

"Was that one or two questions?"

"Just one question. What are you?"