Kami wa Game ni Ueteiru Vol 8 - Angel School seems fun. Now final stage?

Volume 8 of Kami wa Game ni Ueteiru (神は遊戯に飢えている) continues from where we left off, with Fay and the others sitting at eight victories. Only two games remain to reach the end of the "Gods' Games" and win their wish. While Fay has had his wish from the start (finding the woman who made him love games), Pearl and Ney still do not seem to have decided on anything.

As a result of their loss in the previous volume, the "Mind Over Matter" team led by Hereneya disappeared from the stage, preparing to stop Fay's group from reaching the fabled ten victories. In order to do so, they asked for help from Freiya, the Angel Chief, to challenge them in a nearly-impossible game.

They also revealed the reasoning behind Hereneya's obsession with deleting the "Gods' Games" completely. Apparently, she was the only other person to reach ten victories in the distant past, and she used her wish to make humanity forget about the games. They were causing havoc in her time due to people using the "gifts" as a way to wage war. Of course, forgetting is simply a temporary solution, but since she has nothing better, she plans on doing it again to keep stalling.

Freiya's game is titled "Angel Palace Gestahl Roa". It is an infiltration game where the humans must try to reach "the farthest end" (the stage that players who have won nine times reach) by going through the Angel Academy, which is filled with angels. The time limit is three hours, and you receive a ten-minute penalty if everyone is captured, which restarts the team at the fourth floor. You are allowed to free other players if you manage to find a way, but even a single human reaching the goal is enough to ensure victory.

The group immediately finds a few hints in the form of a "strategy book" from a mysterious previous adventurer, but the time is clearly insufficient to obtain all the required hints and reach the unknown location. Fay suggests that there must be some time-extending mechanics somewhere to allow the game to be fully enjoyed.

After an extremely tense sequence of events, they manage to obtain the time extension. However, it comes quite late, only increasing their remaining time from eight minutes to sixteen minutes. They eventually find the truth behind the hints: they were reading them in the wrong order, which made them feel useless. The text they assembled initially seemed hopeful about finding a way to defeat the angels but ended with "there is no way to win", while the true reading was the exact opposite.

The game ends when Fay tricks Freiya into using her super beam sword on them directly over the engine room. This causes the academy, which was floating in the sky, to fall to the ground, which was "the farthest end" they wanted to reach in the first place. This is a victory for our team, which now has nine of the ten required victories.

In the post-game, we see Hereneya, now back to her half-goddess form as Heketomaria, ready to prepare a four-versus-four game, certain that there is no way for Fay's team to win. At the same time, it seems like there are other people pulling the strings of Ouroboros and Anubis to try and make them appear in the final showdown as Fay’s enemies.

The volume was a great read, and it really brought me back into the world, even though it has been nearly two years since I read the previous volume. I really liked Freiya's character design and personality, and I feel she could have become a nice recurring character had the series lasted longer (it concludes in the next volume).

Now we know the final enemy is named Heketomaria. The first part of her name seems to be derived from the Greek "hekaton," which means "hundred", so I assume there must be something in her skill set that revolves around that. One hundred lives? One hundred skills? One hundred ways to become a new heroine for Fay? It will be something along those lines.

Fay also had a pretty scary dream in this volume where he reached ten victories but was still unable to find the woman he is searching for. Surely that isn't a prophetic dream, right? Everything in my mind still points to Leoleshea as the woman, suggesting she simply lost her memories, but the timeline doesn't fit unless something related to the gods messed it up.

The story is approaching the end, and I am quite excited to read the ninth volume in the coming weeks. I will be sure to write about it with my final impressions of the series. Hopefully, everyone gets their happy ending, even Hereneya.