A Gamer's Guide 392 (Patreon)

Gecko’s vision darted over to Maggie, who did not return it, because she was busy gawking at their visitor. 

Kitty frowned at them. “Okay, um… Is there a reason you’re both on the floor? I’ve had a bit of a day, so I would honestly prefer if we were all standing. Or, I mean… Would you prefer it if I went on the floor too? I can do that. I don’t mind being on the floor. What do you think?” Since Gecko had lost all ability to speak, Kitty apparently took her silence as agreement. “Gotcha. Okay, then, I’ll just…” He slipped down from the window, and spilled down onto the floor next to her, so close that the fur of his coat brushed up against her hand. It was soft. Very soft. “Hey, Gecko,” he said, very clearly trying to be friendly. “How’ve you been?”

He didn’t smell like a corpse. The last time they’d met, he’d smelled a bit like a corpse. But a clean corpse, no longer covered in so much blood and viscera. This was different. He has a pleasant, almost soapy smell to him. Or maybe it was closer to a kitchen. Yeah, that was it. Honey and milk and vanilla, all baked together into a cake. 

She swallowed dryly. “You, uh…” Weakly, still trembling from running so much, she pointed at his face. At his everything.

“Oh! Hah, yeah, I look a bit different, don’t I?” Taking off his glasses, he presented them to her. “These were a gift from my friends! Apparently, a bunch of places in Purgatory have a thing where, instead of making New Year’s promises they’ll never keep, they exchange gifts instead. Isn’t that neat? So they got me these! They are so epic. Before, I didn’t even realize how bright and cold everything was, but with these… Here, try them on,” he said, unfolding them and presenting them to her face, close, but not too close, allowing her to take them and put them on herself. They were pretty heavy, but not uncomfortable. Wearing them, everything looked warmer and softer, and the sunlight wasn’t so harsh. And Maggie looked even more confused than before. “Neat, huh?”

“Yeah,” Rafiloe muttered, removing them. They glimmered softly in her hands. “And, the…?”

“The coat? Oh, this old thing? This is really just… Well, originally, I made it as a disguise for my brand, but as of recent, Lett—one of my friends—has been making me wear it more often, since I apparently get cranky when I’m too cold. I never noticed it myself. Have you noticed anything like that?”

“No,” she said, without really registering what he was even saying. Her eyes were fixated solely on the glasses. Within the so-called Kitty-Court, the recent war had sparked a pair of opposite camps: those who thought that Kitty had ascended and become the God of Hope, and those who rejected the very idea. Rafiloe, who typically considered herself to be apart of the latter, had spent many days and nights rationalizing why this was the case. In truth, it was an entirely emotional decision, and logically, she knew the opposite to be the truth. She was not a forgetful woman. She remembered very well what the God of Hunting had called Kitty all those months ago back at the ante-purgatory trials. And still, she did not want to think this was the case. If she accepted that Kitty had become a god, then it would only serve to further complicate their relationships in ways she didn’t even want to consider. 

Yet, holding these glasses, even her foolish heart was forced to face the facts.

<Crystal Gaze [Lv.MAX] 

activated>

<Bloodmoon Glasses:

3rd class true relic of the

God of Hope

Boons:

-Indestructible [Lv.8]

-Perception Dampening [Lv.MAX]>

There it was. As plain as day: the owner of these glasses was the god of hope. 

Silently, she returned them to Kitty, who replaced them on his face, smiling as he did. 

The pit in her stomach gaped open, swallowing her whole, leaving nothing but emptiness behind. “Do you understand what’s happening?” she asked him. 

Humming, he glanced away from her. “No, not really. I could infer that the city was under siege, but I still don’t really understand why.”

“Right,” she said, and got to her feet. A few meters away, still on her ass, still staring at her, was Maggie. The hollowness inside her was briefly tinged with pity, and she smiled at her friend. “Sorry, Maggie. I’ll explain everything later, okay?”

“Wh—wh—wh—wha,” Maggie stuttered, but the music outside was starting to fade into the distance, even though the object of their worship had been left behind. 

Leaning down, Rafiloe took hold of Kitty’s hands and pulled him to his feet, trying not to think about how cold and stiff they were. “Come on,” she told him. “We have to get going.”

“We do?” he said. “Where?”

“To meet with the Archjudge,” she said, allowing her brows to furrow. “Where else?”

“Oh, um…” Chuckling, Kitty scratched the back of his head. “I was actually thinking of leaving soon. You see, I’m really not good at this whole…” He gestured blandly in the air. “Politics business. The guy I talked to at the gate, the commander of the army I came in with, is a pretty nice guy. Once he and the Archjudge start talking, I’m sure this will all turn out great!”

For an instant and no more, Rafiloe felt enough blinding hatred for Kitty to rival even her disdain of Wittgenstein. Thankfully, she also only needed a single moment to restrain it all. “Kitty, I know we only really met in passing, and I know that this is a lot to ask of you, but,” she drew a controlled breath, “would you mind going along with my plans for a moment? Think of it like a game we’re playing.”

“Um,” Kitty said. “Okay? I don’t mind. I hope I didn’t give that impression. It’s just…” He shook his head. “No, nevermind.” He took a breath, very consciously, and as he did, she realized that aside from in the effort of talking, she had yet to see him breathe. It was an odd insight, and not one she was willing to confirm by asking. “Right! Sounds like a plan, Gecko.”

Agile like his namesake, Kitty leapt up onto the windowsill, gazed out, and then looked back at her, the wrinkle between his brows growing more pronounced. “What is it?” Gecko asked.

“No, I was only… How are you planning to catch up? They’ve gotten pretty far, so, like… Oh, unless you only used the we as a sort of you but with camaraderie. Urgh. God, I’m bad at this.” Clearing his throat, he asked, in a more direct, frank manner, “Are you coming along, and if so, do you want me to carry you?”

“Thanks for the offer, but I can catch up myself,” Gecko said, unwilling to admit that the thought of being held in stiff corpse-like arms made her feel physically sick.

He took a single whiff of the air. “Your feet are doing pretty badly, though. Can you even run anymore?”

“Yeah, I just have to…” Except she didn’t have a patron god anymore. She had nothing, and so, her trembling, battered feet would stay as such until they got all the way to the Archjudge’s castle, which was at the top of a monstrous slope, several kilometers long. Not to mention that it was wintertime. Uncobbled dirt roads filled with sharp protruding rocks. 

Atop the windowsill, Kitty nodded. “Right. Gotcha. In that case, I’ll carry you to the front, and then you can borrow one of the drakes that the guides are using. If I remember correctly, I think the human guide dude had a drake? Yeah, yeah, he’ll do well. Okay. They’re starting to get pretty far away, so I guess we’d better hurry, right?”“Huh? Wait, wha—”

Without giving her time for a proper response or any real goodbye to Maggie, he scooped her into his arms, flung her onto his back, and then clambered out of the window and onto the roof. With speed and agility that left her reeling and breathless, he leapt from rooftop to rooftop, stepping onto clay tiles and thatched roofs with the soft-footed grace of a panther. By the time he’d caught back up to the front of the parade, her mind still hadn’t come to terms with how he had, by means she couldn’t even begin to fathom, heard her line of thinking. Or he’d seen it on her face. She couldn’t tell, but the whole event had lodged itself sideways in her throat, preventing her from swallowing anything else that was happening. 

After at most three minutes of running, Kitty threw himself off of a roof, hit the ground, and then deposited her on the back of Prop’s drake without a single person even noticing that he had left to begin with. Looking back, she watched in mild amazement as he clambered back on top of the roofless litter, weightless enough to the point where not even his carriers had spotted his exit. He returned to his seat, tried to make himself comfortable on the too-small all-wood throne, and then waved at her, a big goofy smile on his face. Too stunned to do anything else, she waved back.

Then she turned her eyes forward and found Prop staring at her with all the shock of a baker finding a rat in his cake. “How—”

“Miracle,” she said. To explain her point, she pointed a thumb in the direction of the god of hope. “From him.”

He frowned at her, but since Kitty was still smiling and waving, he had no choice but to go along with it. 

Rafiloe sank deeper into the saddle. Perhaps, she pondered, her error laid in the common mistake of believing that if one could understand chaos, then one could control it. Metaphorically speaking, her house had been blown away by a storm, and so to cope, she had tried studying meteorology, only to then be shocked when she, once again, found herself made weightless by the winds that ripped and tore and held. Not that Kitty had ever been bad to her. In a sense, that had been the first thing she found curious. It was one thing to be approached by a fellow outsider, another to find that said outsider was…

She racked her brain trying to find a good way to string together every crime and flaw that made up the majority of Kitty’s public image. After a minute or so, she decided that it was useless. He’d gone through the lawbook like a bucket-list and that was all there was to it. He was a capital-c criminal, but he’d been nice. That had been enough to raise her curiosity, in the same way that hearing the refrain of the French national anthem that mentioned the marquis de Bouillé’s had. With him, she’d been lucky enough to find memoirs to read, which was always the jackpot in her particular hobby.

She liked learning about people. Historical figures were best, since then there’d be no chance of anyone else knowing what the heck she was going on about. 

Kitty had made her break this code, mainly because she could never quite connect the person she had met with the person she read and heard about. Though this disconnect made it easy for her to research him without feeling like a creep, it also meant that she kept distance to his actions. In her heart, she had her hyperfixation, and then she had her friend. Since these two did not overlap in her heart, her mind felt no guilt. 

This disconnect was beginning to melt away. In its place, a big lump of hard, knotted guilt was starting to form, jutting out against her ribs. 

He doesn’t know, she thought. He doesn’t know anything. How little does he know? Does he even understand what an Archjudge is? Can he fathom the largeness of what he’s doing even now? Her breath got stuck in her throat. Do I?

When Bouillé took part in the flight to Varennes, had he understood the gravity of the situation? When Tilly ordered the attack on Magdeburg, had he felt the full force of it? Could any one man fathom the weight of so many lives? 

She shook her head. Even the weight of one life, she thought, is too heavy to be understood by anyone, though we all carry it every day.