38 Terms and Conditions

"This is insane..." Shizu whined as she leafed through her own papers. "Why do I have to read the stuff you already read too, Riku?"

"Because we saw different terms being given to the two of us on the same page," Riku explained, his own exasperation starting to get to him as he signed on yet another dotted line on a different page. "We can't afford to miss anything on this. Our lives are literally on the line, and I don't want us getting screwed over by fine print."

Shizu shivered at his statement, a testament to how notorious contracts were and still are as they negotiated through the inch-thick paperwork Themis's bureaucracy gave them. She came to sit in front of him a few minutes after he started reading through the first page, and since then, they've both been giving each other pointers or notifying one another if they saw something suspicious in the contract.

"Oh, there's a clause here that we're not allowed to draw our weapons in the presence of Themis," Shizu pointed out. "Should we sign that?"

Riku quickly shook his head. "Absolutely not," he scoffed. "We're not going to leave ourselves defenseless like that."

Nodding back, Shizu skipped over the dotted line that she was about to sign, making Riku hum in approval before going back to his own papers. It was something that he caught in the very early papers of the stack. It stated that Champions should only sign those that they were willing to approve, and that some agreements didn't need to be signed before being submitted to the required window for them to proceed. Honestly, it was a rather clever clause hidden beneath a sea of random legal jargon that it almost felt like luck that he managed to catch it.

"Oh, there's a clause here that says if we didn't agree to being forbidden to use our weapons, we'll have to take a combat challenge to get to the higher floors," Shizu pointed out yet again.

"Just skip it," he told her, having already read through her portion of the papers in his own stack. "It's just a calculated risk we'll have to take."

Shizu gave him a look before shrugging and moving forward. All the while, he continued reading through his stack, making sure each and every line was taken into account before signing the next dotted line. It was a long and tedious process, one that he thankfully didn't have to do alone as Shizu commiserated with him every step of the way.

"How long is this going to take," his fellow Champion grumbled as she tapped her pen on the table, her brows twitching with annoyance. "I'm really tempted to just go through it all and sign every dotted line I see."

"There's a reason companies and legalese make their terms and conditions long and hard to read. It's to trick people into signing their life away before they even knew what they did," Riku explained as he leafed to the next page of his stack. "At the very least, I haven't read anything that I could consider as malicious so far in my progress. It's long and tedious, but it's being fair so far."

The fact that it even allowed them to skip signing on to some of the other rules made it far more lenient than any other company's terms and conditions by a large margin. It was just... long and grueling to read through it all, almost as if it was... "By design..."

"Hmm? What is it, Riku?" Shizu asked, having noticed him whispering to himself. "Did you catch something?"

"The forms are all long and tedious... Some pages don't even have anything substantial written on them," Riku postulated, his pen starting to spin in his fingers as he began leafing to the end of the form. "We might be missing something here."

Shizu's eyes widened. "Wait, you mean this might be one of Themis's puzzles?"

He nodded. "That might very well be the case. Why else would we be given this many redundancies to read through?" he questioned. "There has to be something here..."

It made sense for a God of Order to give them a puzzle pertaining to laws. It just made sense in terms of how the entire Realm was structured alongside his domain. Sure, Themis might still give them a combat puzzle after all of this, but perhaps this was already the first part of the test they had to pass before even proceeding.

"Oh, I think I found something," Shizu called him out, making him give her a silent nod for her to continue. "It says here that... Submitting the forms with incomplete signatures will result in the Champion being committed to the main puzzle... What?"

"A main puzzle... That implies that this is still not a part of the puzzle, but at the same time, it is," Riku mumbled in deep thought. "One of the clauses state that we can submit these forms despite not agreeing or signing to some of the clauses though."

"Maybe it's a discrepancy?" she shrugged in confusion. "It's kind of expected with stuff like this, right?"

Riku shook his head at such a notion. A literal God of Order having a discrepancy in his own paperwork sounded so improbable that he'd bet his own life that such wasn't the case. "Unlikely. There might be a clause somewhere that invalidates some of the other clauses," he postulated. "I don't believe that god obsessed with order would be that careless."

"O-Oh... That sounds about right, actually..."

Sighing, Shizu dove right back into her paperwork. Likewise, Riku did the same, his eyes rapidly scanning through every sentence in a bid to find something that might give them an edge to decipher this thick stack of papers. All the while, Nyx was still napping away beside him, looking rather cute while she wasn't constantly radiating her usual smug aura.

Somehow, he couldn't help but think of how his life turned out like this.