No Game No Life Audiobook

Urban legends. These whispers traveling through the world, as countless as the stars, represent a kind of wish. Like the urban legend that humans have never been to the moon. Like the Freemason conspiracy hidden in the dollar bill. Like the Philadelphia Experiment into time travel. The nuclear shelter on the Chiyoda Line, Area 51, the Roswell incident, etc.

Looking at these innumerable urban legends, one can see a clear pattern emerging. Namely...they are composed of a wish: “It sure would be cool!” It’s said that there’s no smoke without fire. But when you think about the nature of rumors and how a big fish gets embellished until it’s too big to even be a fish, you can see how these urban legends come to form. In short, they’re based on true stories but are not themselves true. To put it bluntly, they’re mostly BS. And yet they don’t quite deserve to be complained about, or even wondered about, really. Since ancient times, people have always preferred fate over coincidence beginning with the very fact that the birth of humanity was the product of astronomically unlikely coincidence. Thus, people wanted to think, from their instincts, from the rules they had experienced, that someone intentionally made humanity. That the world was made not of chaos, but of order. Imagining someone in the back pulling the strings, to find meaning in an absurd and unreasonable world...at the very least, wishing that it could be true. So, too, can it be said that urban legends are generally another product of this earnest wish.

Chess is a finite, zero-sum, two-player game with perfect information. It’s a game with no room for luck to intervene. In theory, an unbeatable strategy does exist, but only in theory. Only if one can grasp all of the vast number of possible games: 10 to the 120th power. Practically speaking, such a thing is impossible.

But Shiro says it is not. She says with conviction that all you have to do is read all 10-to-the-120th-power possibilities. And she did in fact beat the world’s top chess program twenty times in a row. In chess, the person who goes first merely has to pick the best move to win, and the person who goes second can only draw. That’s the theory, anyway. She played this game against a program that explored two hundred million possibilities a second. She won twenty times in a row, alternating who moved first, just to demonstrate the imperfection of the program. And yet.

Stephanie slammed her bag onto the table in a blind rage, apparently having no ears for Sora’s modest request. Her shriek rose further.

“If you knew she was cheating, then couldn’t you at least have told me how she did it? If I showed everyone, I could have won!”

Remembering the notes he was looking through on his phone before sleeping, Sora said:

“Hmm... The Eighth of the Ten Covenants: ‘If cheating is discovered in a game, it shall be counted as a loss.’ That one.”

So just knowing that they were cheating wasn’t enough. “Discovered”—it meant you had to prove they were cheating for it to count as a loss.

“And now I’ve lost! Thanks to you, I’ve been eliminated from the running for the monarch!”

Say something you think would fit