Izumi Sumeragi, an Ordinary High-School Student and avid gamer, is overjoyed when a busty upperclassman moves in next door. To his greater joy, said upperclassman becomes his partner in the virtual terraforming game "Genesis-Edge". As he learns more of the rules of the game, Sumeragi discovers this virtual reality is the real world and all the other players are gods created by an AI to terraform a whole new solar system.
Provides examples of:
- 20 Minutes into the Past: Subverted. The novel was published online in 2018 and its setting is 1990, or so it seems. In reality, the year is 3203 and the Divine World where the gods live is Another Dimension created and designed by the AI to look like the early 90s.
- Achilles in His Tent: After Sumeragi's thirteenth death in Volume 1-B, Senpai can't take watching him die over and over again anymore, deciding to quit the terraforming. She then locks herself inside her stone hut and refuses to come out, ignoring the magma dragons as they wreak havoc. It's up to Sumeragi to persuade her to come out and fight the dragons.
- A-Cup Angst: Kuwajiri, being one of the few flat-chested goddesses, often feels irritated at the humongous breasts of the goddesses around her.
- Adaptational Attractiveness: In her original myth, Senpai (Iwanaga-hime) was said to be ugly, so Sumeragi wonders why she manifested as a Hot Goddess with giant breasts. This is actually given an explanation: Iwanaga-hime was seen as ugly by other Shinto gods because she was the goddess of longevity and her marrying Ninigi-no-Mikoto would have resulted in humans becoming Long-Lived. Her "ugliness" was the result of an impurity placed on her to make sure she was rejected by Ninigi-no-Mikoto, but in reality she was always beautiful.
- Apologises a Lot: Bilgamesh is nicknamed "Apology Man" because half of his dialogue are apologies, usually for something Eshita did.
- Artificial Human: Sumeragi is a human created through the power of the AI-generated gods.
- Artificial Intelligence: The manager for the terraforming is an AI known as Balancer, who also created the gods and the Divine World through collected data from Earth.
- Attractive Bent-Gender: Sumeragi can transform into a cute and decently busty woman.
- Bald Mystic: Yomoji, who is actually God, appears as a bald man.
- Battle Couple:
- Tooru Raidou and Saku Shifu are the Norse warrior God Couple Thor and Sif/Jarnsaxa. They kick a lot of ass together and their fighting abilities complement each other perfectly.
- Bilgamesh and Enkidu are battle companions like in their myth, but here they're also a romantic couple.
- Beta Couple: Tooru and Shifu form the secondary couple in the novel, being close friends and foils to the main couple.
- BFS: Bilgamesh can eject a gigantic sword from his Hammerspace. The resulting shockwave it produces destroys hundreds of meters or even up to a dozen kilometers of terrain in front of Bilgamesh.
- Big Eater: The Norse gods are big meat lovers and eat large meat steaks at Bikkuri Donkey.
- Boarding School: All the gods live at school dorms in the Divine World.
- Boob-Based Gag: Senpai's big breasts are a recurrent source of humor.
- Sumeragi and Kuwajiri comment that they can't see Senpai's face from below because her boobs block the view (to Sumeragi's delight and Kuwajiri's chagrin).
- When giving Sumeragi a hug, Senpai realizes that he passed out because her boobs suffocated him.
- Buxom Beauty Standard: Sumeragi and Tooru are proud worshipers of big boobs, with their respective romantic partners, Senpai and Shifu, having really big boobs.
- Clothes Make the Superman: Based on the legend where Ishtar went to the underworld and was weakened by having her seven articles of clothing stripped off to weaken her, Inana Eshita's strength scales with how much clothing she wears.
- Continuity Nod: The events of The Ending Chronicle are occasionally mentioned as the "Earth age's fusion period". Some gods and other mythological figures can't be manifested by the AI because people or Gods of War had their names during the AHEAD era and they became reserved manifestations.
- Cybernetic Mythical Beast: Abinae Kido's Oktobasilia Drakon is an eight-legged mechanical dragon that doubles as a BFG.
- Death Amnesia: Sumeragi's memories reset every time he dies and gets rolled back. After his thirteenth death, however, he does start retaining memories of his previous lives.
- Death Is Cheap: The Shinto gods created a roll back system to resurrect Sumeragi every time he dies during an accident in the terraforming.
- Defeat Means Friendship: Bilgamesh and Enkidu are introduced as enemies of Shinto sent by the Divine Committee. After losing to Tooru and Shifu in a battle, they become friends with the members of the game club, officially joining them by the end of Volume 1-B.
- Devoted to You: Sumeragi is a devout worshipper of Senpai. Even though he has forgotten about her many times after being killed repeatedly, Sumeragi always chooses Senpai as his goddess, with this being the reason why she loves him. Turns out choosing her was the first conscious decision he ever made in his first life and he declares that if he can't be with her anymore, he'll ask Balancer to erase his memory over and over again so he can choose her over and over again.
- Divided for Publication: Like the other light novel series of Kawakami, the volumes are split into Part A and Part B.
- Divine Date: Sumeragi loves a Shinto goddess only known as "Senpai" (true identity: Iwanaga-hime) and the feeling is mutual. Senpai believes a goddess and a human can't be together especially because she's the goddess of longevity and marrying her will make Sumeragi into a Long-Lived being, but he promises to one day turn her human and take her to Earth with him.
- Dumb Blonde: The blonde goddess Inana Eshita (Ishtar) is not the brightest crayon in the box.
- Elemental Dragon: In the planet the Shinto gods are terraforming, the Nature Spirits reject the influence of gods from another solar system, having created magma dragons to fight them.
- Elemental Powers:
- Dishing Out Dirt:
- Senpai has control over stone because her true identity is Iwanaga-hime, who has the kanji for "rock" in her name.
- As a lifeform made from clay, En Kidou has authority over earth. She uses this authority for a spell which can return life to earth. It does so by first petrifying the earth and then turning the stone to mud.
- Making a Splash: Abinae Kido can produce and control water because of her divine authority as the goddess Api.
- Shock and Awe: Tooru Raidou can summon lightning with his hammer Mjolnir.
- Dishing Out Dirt:
- Elemental Weapon: Tooru wields his hammer Mjolnir as the hilt of a sword and creates a blade of lightning from it.
- Embarrassing Nickname: Sumeragi nicknames the Roman god Neptune as "Mr. Vomit" because he saw Neptune puking after taking a hit from a water monster.
- Fake Memories: All of Sumeragi's memories of his life prior to high school are fake. He's in fact a human created by the gods for the terraforming and has only been alive for about four months. In extension, all the gods have fabricated memories of their nonexistent "lives on Earth" based on their mythologies.
- Fanservice: There's buxom women wearing Sensual Spandex, Public Bathhouse Scenes with the women wearing revealing swimsuits, and many other fanservice-y like that.
- First-Episode Twist: At the start of the novel, Sumeragi introduces himself as an Ordinary High-School Student and member of a game club at a normal school in the year 1990. Soon after he starts playing a new terraforming virtual reality game, the AI Balancer reveals the "game" reality is the real world and the actual year is 3203. Also, Sumeragi is a human created by the gods to help with the terraforming of the Shinto faction.
- Gender Bender: Sumeragi gets turned into a girl after he gets rolled back halfway through Volume 1-A. Later on, Kuwajiri adds a new feature that enables Sumeragi to turn into a girl whenever he eats a banana.
- God Couple:
- Tooru Raidou is the Norse thunder god Thor and Saku Shifu is his wife Sif.
- Bilgamesh and Enkidu are a demigod couple.
- The Roman sea god Neptune and his wife Salacia, goddess of salt water.
- God of Knowledge: In the Norse god faction, there's Tsubomi Kuwajiri (Kvasir, god of knowledge) who plays The Smart Girl of the game club. In the Shinto god faction, there's three gods of knowledge: Yatsui Omokane (Omoikane), Scarecrow Kubiko (Kuebiko), and Tenma Sugawara (Sugawara no Michizane).
- God of Thunder: Tooru Raidou is the Norse thunder god Thor.
- Gods Need Prayer Badly: Gods need worship from their believers to elevate their Divine Rank and achieve Released Manifestation. Since Senpai (Iwanaga-hime) is a very minor and practically unknown deity, Sumeragi's (boobs) worship is why she can contribute to the terraforming at all.
- Gonk: Yomoji is rather goofy-looking; bald head, small eyes, and big swollen lips.
- Headless Horseman: In the Divine World, spirits can take the form of European legendary creatures, one of them being the headless horseman.
- Historical Gender Flip: Several male gods turned female upon physical manifestation. Examples include Tsubomi Kuwajiri (Kvasir), Yatsui Omokane (Omoikane), Tenma Sugawara (Sugawara no Michizane), and En Kidou (Enkidu).
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: Shamhat, the temple prostitute from Mesopotamian Mythology, is portrayed as a nice woman and a good friend of Bilgamesh and Enkidu.
- Hot God: Every single goddess is highly attractive (and buxom in most cases).
- Human Popsicle: While the AI and gods work on the terraforming, humanity has been placed in a cryogenic sleep until the newly terraformed planets are ready.
- Humongous Mecha: Like in other works of Kawakami, there's Gods of War in the setting. Here, they're piloted by gods of Greek mythology.
- Impossible Hourglass Figure: Most of the goddesses have incredibly curvaceous bodies, with enormous boobs, a tiny waist, and wide hips.
- Infodump: More than half of the dialogue are overly long exposition about terraforming and mythology.
- Japanese School Club: Sumeragi is part of his school's video game club, which is actually the group of gods in charge of the terraforming for the planet assigned to Shinto religion.
- Jerkass Gods: Shinsei Yomoji (God) is known for treating his believers terribly and then joking about it to other gods, who call him an evil god for it.
- Jumping the Gender Barrier: Enkidu chose to manifest as a woman out of love for her mythological best friend and partner Bilgamesh. Although, Bilgamesh says he wouldn't have any issue if Enkidu was still male.
- Lethal Lava Land: The real world looks like a giant see of lava because in the planet that must be terraformed by Shinto gods, Nature Spirits changed the entire environment to make the job harder for the gods.
- Literally Loving Thy Neighbor: Sumeragi and the Senpai he loves are next door neighbors at the school's dorms.
- Look Both Ways: In the middle of Volume 1-A, Sumeragi gets hit and killed by a dump truck on the road, forcing a new roll back to happen.
- Loveable Sex Maniac: Sumeragi is a big pervert who never shuts up about boobs.
- Love at First Sight: Sumeragi falls for Senpai at first sight and he always does each time he loses his memories of her.
- Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Bilgamesh's equipment includes a giant shield that can grow to a size of at least 2 km. The shield, as the rest of his equipment, is made from steel and by that resistant to electicity attacks by harmlessly conducting them into the ground if they manage to penetrate.
- Luke, I Am Your Father: Near the end of Volume 2-B, Abinae Kido/Echidna/Api reveals to Sumeragi that she's his mother.
- Magical Girlfriend: Sumeragi is an Ordinary High-School Student with a busty Shinto goddess as his neighbor and girlfriend in all but name.
- Magic from Technology: A highly advanced Artificial Intelligence known as Balancer created the Physical Gods to have them use their godly powers for the terraforming.
- Meteor-Summoning Attack: Yomoji's favorite move is summoning meteors. In the Divine World, he can call down meteors that are 1.4 trillion tons big and in the real world, even much larger ones. These meteor impacts produce devastation on a massive scale, but luckily Yomoji can return the world to normal.
- Mundane Object Amazement: The Mesopotamian gods are marvelled by being introduced to openable plastic bags with snacks inside.
- Mundane Utility:
- En Kidou uses Heat Body, her Auth Spell which superheats Bilgamesh's equipment, to cook dinner.
- Abinae Kido's authority over water is very useful for cutting onions without crying.
- Nerf: Balancer restricted the power of the gods because they would have been much more powerful and potentially dangerous with their full divine power. Gods can only remove these restrictions and achieve Released Manifestation through worship from their human believers.
- Non-Action Protagonist: Sumeragi is a normal human with no power of his own and he repeatedly dies because he's so weak. What he can help with is getting his goddess to level up and achieve Released Manifestation with his worship. The Norse and Mesopotamian gods are the ones who handle the fighting parts in the Shinto terraforming.
- Non-Nude Bathing: After Sumeragi is turned into a girl, he goes to the girls' side of the bathhouse, but everyone is wearing swimsuits.
- Petal Power: In her Released Manifestation, Senpai spreads a storm of flower petals made of stone around herself. Anybody that comes into contact with the petals will have their lifespan reduced and get petrified, ultimately bursting apart into more stone petals.
- Physical God: The AI created virtual manifestations of gods from many mythologies to later give them physical manifestations so they could use their power in the terraforming of a new solar system. However, only a few gods can get physical manifestations and some others have "reserved" manifestations from the AHEAD era and therefore can't be given new bodies.
- Pose of Supplication: Kuwajiri does this pose when she apologizes to Senpai for not watching her sharp tongue in front of an upperclassman.
- P.O.V. Boy, Poster Girl: The events through the story are mostly told from Sumeragi's point of view while his goddess partner and upperclassman is prominently featured on the covers of the books. This is only in the two first volumes since the following volumes give considerably more focus to other characters besides the two leads and other characters get featured on the covers.
- Power Dyes Your Hair: Shifu's golden hair turns black when she uses her divine authority as Jarnsaxa.
- Power Fist: Bilgamesh can summon giant gauntlets that basically work like floating metal arms that immitate the movements of his actual arms. He can grow them between 5 meters and 600 meters big.
- The Power of Hate: Senpai's secret power as the goddess of longevity Iwanaga-hime is to reduce the lifespan of those she hates, being able to instantly kill them in her Released Manifestation.
- Prehensile Hair: Shifu can transform her golden hair into golden blades.
- Public Domain Artifact: Tooru (Thor) has the three divine tools he's known for in Norse Mythology: the gauntlet Jarngreipr, the strengthening belt Megingjord, and the divine hammer Mjolnir.
- Semi-Divine: Bilgamesh and Enkidu are half-gods, half-humans from Mesopotamian Mythology.
- Sensual Spandex: As standard in a work by Kawakami, the female characters wear skintight suits.
- Shorter Means Smarter: Tsubomi Kuwajiri (Kvasir) and Tenma Sugawara (Sugawara no Michizane) are gods of knowledge who manifested as petite girls.
- Shout-Out:
- The chapter titles reference video games from the late 80s and early 90s: Shining Force, Hellfire, Paperboy, Crackdown, Junction, Dangerous Seed, Heavy Unit, Forgotten Worlds, Gauntlet, The Flintstones, Thunder Blade, Blockout, Lemmings, Cool Spot, Twin Cobra, Tempo, Midnight Resistance, Comix Zone, Zoom!, Gain Ground, Death Bringer, Kageki, Arrow Flash, Marvel Land, Chiki Chiki Boys, Side Pocket, Ichidant-R, Rampart, Mega-Lo-Mania, Tetris, Sword of Vermilion, Greatest Heavyweights, Double Switch, Battle Mania, Shining in the Darkness, Rise of the Dragon.
- The process and mechanics of the terraforming are usually compared to SimCity, with chapters even being titled "SimEarth".
- Sumeragi calls Tooru Raidou "Kamen Raidou" because his belt buckle spins and then his hammer appears.
- Sumeragi mistakes the goddess Athena with the one from the video game. She even ends up wearing the iconic red micro bikini at one point.
- Shown Their Work: The novel provides very extensive and detailed information on mythology, as well as the historical and cultural influence behind it.
- Smart People Wear Glasses: Tsubomi Kuwajiri (Kvasir), Norse God of Knowledge and The Smart Girl of the game club, wears glasses.
- Snake People:
- In Volume 2-A and 2-B, there's a water monster that looks like a woman with snakes for legs. Said monster is actually the Roman goddess Salacia, who turned into this form after failing an experiment to achieve Released Manifestation.
- The true form of Abinae Kido is Echidna, the half-woman, half-snake monster from Greek mythology.
- Snakes Are Sexy: Echidna, also known as Abinae Kido, is an attractive woman with very huge breasts.
- Son of an Ape: Balancer always refers to Sumeragi as an ape.
- Statuesque Stunner: The buxom Hot Goddesses are very tall; Senpai is 175cm (5'7"), Shifu is 185cm (6'0"), and En is 180cm (5'9").
- Stripperiffic: The outfits Senpai and Abinae wear in their Released Manifestation are see-through, leaving nothing to the imagination. At least they can hide the nipples, but the outfits are still very skintight.
- Super Mode: Released Manifestation is the state in which the AI-generated gods obtain true divinity and power of the deities from the mythology they're based on. The only goddesses who can achieve this are Senpai and Abinae Kido thanks to being worshipped by Sumeragi.
- Sword and Sorcerer: Bilgamesh uses an equipment of divine weapons, including a BFS, and his partner Enkidu is a spellcaster.
- Taken for Granite: En Kidou petrifies Shifu during their duel in Volume 1-B, but Shifu breaks free thanks to her authority over iron as Jarnsaxa.
- Taking the Bullet: In Volume 1-B, En Kidou is demanded by the Divine Committee to recreate the myth of her death and return from the underworld, with Shinto making the arrangements to add her to their roll back system so she will come back to life after being killed. Eshita throws a spear at En to kill her instantly, but Sumeragi saves her by getting in the way and making the spear kill him instead.
- Terraform: The AI-generated gods have the job of terraforming planets of a new solar system to make them suitable for humans from Earth.
- They Killed Kenny Again: Sumeragi has been killed many times since the terraforming started. To make things more complicated, he loses his memories with each roll back until he starts retaining memories after the thirteenth time.
- This Is My Name on Foreign: Nearly all the non-Japanese gods use a Japanese name that's a close equivalent to the Romanization of their original names from mythology.
- Token Human: The protagonist Izumi Sumeragi is the only human in the cast because the rest of humanity is in cryogenic sleep while the AI and gods work on the terraforming project.
- Token Mini-Moe:
- Kuwajiri is short and flat-chested, in contrast to the tall and buxom goddesses who are also members of the game club.
- In the Shinto faction, two of the three gods of knowledge look like young women, but Tenma Sugawara appears as a little girl with a flat chest.
- Tomato in the Mirror: Soon after his twelfth death and roll back, Sumeragi is told by the gods and Balancer that he doesn't have a real past nor family and everything he remembers are Fake Memories. He's actually a human made by the gods because Shinto gods needed assistance of human worship to advance their terraforming project. While surprised, Sumeragi takes it in stride and doesn't have much to complain about because he has Senpai with him.
- Top God: Everyone besides Sumeragi is a god, but Shinsei Yomoji is the God and by far the most powerful.
- Trademark Favorite Food: Eshita is a big lover of the snack Karamucho, to the point Sumeragi nicknames her "Mucho".
- Trickster God: Yatsui Omokane is the god of wisdom and intelligence Omoikane, but here she acts like a crafty and guileful goddess who uses trickery to deceive and outsmart political rivals.
- Truly Single Parent: Abinae Kido gave birth to Sumeragi from a piece of her soul, without the need of her absent partner Typhon.
- Walk on Water: At the start of Volume 2-A, Senpai uses her divine powers to make it so she and Sumeragi can walk across a river's surface.
- Water Is Womanly: Abinae Kido is the Team Mom to the club members as well as Sumeragi's real mother and she's a goddess with authority over water. Her true identity is Api, the Scythian goddess of rivers and seas.
- The 'Verse: The setting is the EDGE era of Kawakami's universe. It takes place hundreds of years after the fusion of concepts in the AHEAD era (The Ending Chronicle) and establishes how humanity ascended to space before they were forced to return to Earth in the GENESIS era (Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere).
- Volleying Insults: Sumeragi frequently has insult contests with Balancer and Kuwajiri.
- Withholding Their Name: The goddess Sumeragi worships abstains from revealing her name, with Sumeragi only knowing her as "Senpai". Her true identity is Iwanaga-hime, the Shinto goddess of longevity.
- World of Buxom: Like in Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere, most of the female characters have very big breasts and the number of flat-chested girls is small.
