A Gamer's Guide 394 (Patreon)

To some degree, it’s really nice to go along with whatever happens. It’s not something I try to do often, but right now, I’ll allow myself not to think. As a treat. 

“As we have already sunk a month into this siege not to mention the hundreds of lost lives—”

“And what a siege it has been! Oh, do tell me more how necessary this undertaking was, I am most certain it—”

“Please, your Honor, put down the glass, you’ve already emptied three bottles—”

“Silence, you walking dog! I refuse to go aware to my death—”

“Kitty?”

I turn to Gecko and try not to smile too largely. “Yeah?”

“Are you okay?” Funny question for her to ask. Really, I’d like to ask her the same thing. With neither hat nor shoes, she’s starting to look a bit like me! Aside from that her skin isn’t bone-white, and her hair is a fair bit shorter, and she’s also a girl. Most importantly, she is standing. I am sitting. I am, in fact, the only one sitting. This whole room, filled with officers and judges and whatnot, and I’m the only one sitting. It’s like when it’s your birthday and people sing for you, except then they don’t sit down afterwards, they just keep standing, watching you out of the corner of their eyes, not daring to approach. 

“Yeah, yeah,” I say. “Totally okay.” It would be very unfair for me to be bothered by the solution it took the gathered parties close to an hour to agree upon. Especially since they tossed all the other chairs out of the room to avoid even the suggestion that someone aside from me could possibly remain seated. They are standing tall as they shout at each other, and I am the disgruntled and unwilling patriarch, trying not to pay too much attention. I don’t know what they’re talking about and I actually don’t want to know either. 

I can’t tell how or why, but this reminds me of the first time I was on trial. There’s very little in common between what happened then and what’s happening now, but at least in terms of the way they’re treating me, it’s the same. Though the room is crowded, aside from Gecko, there isn’t a single person within a ten-foot radius of me. Since they know who I am, this shouldn’t be too surprising. If the room had reeked of fear and disgust, I would have been content knowing that the world was still spinning and little had changed in the past years. 

But it isn’t. I can’t smell it. Even the obviously piss-drunk archjudge isn’t afraid. Not of me, at least. The room is choked by stress and anger but nothing as primal as fear. 

What they feel for me isn’t on the breeze, but rather in their eyes.

Respect. 

One of them glances my way, our eyes meet, and even though he’s far away, I can tell that he holds reverence for me greater than his own king. Unworthy to hold my attention, he bows his head and slinks off into the rest of the crowd, out of view, out of mind. 

Even though I’m sitting down looking up at them, they feel lesser because they make themselves lesser. It’s disgusting and I hate it and—

I start sinking into the chair. Damn it. IwanttoliveIwanttoliveIwanttolive…

Gecko watches me warily. That’s right. She’s the only sensible one here. The only one who isn’t looking at me like I’m inhuman. “I changed my mind,” I say, gripping onto the armrests of my chair, “I’m definitely maybe absolutely not okay.”

“That makes sense,” she mutters. “It would’ve been preferable for the Archjudge not to be here rather than to be hostile like this. Assuming your presence has any effect, at least there shouldn’t be any further combat.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” I say, because she really has been worrying way too much as of recent, “Leion has agreed to do this whole thing without bloodshed.”

“Good, that’s good,” Gecko says through gritted teeth. Yeah, no, I don’t think she’s stopped worrying. The stench is starting to get me a bit woozy, though if I mention it I think she might start worrying for an entirely new reason. “I have to admit,” she says, after some time of biting the nail on her thumb, “I can’t understand why you decided to land. Nothing about your actions so far have indicated any propensity for intervening in the war. Of course, it’s a good thing you did; nothing suggested that we were about to receive any reinforcements soon enough to abate the coming famine. In truth, I doubt the besiegers… Leion was trying to starve us out. Once they got their reinforcements, they would’ve attacked. I’m sure of it. And then, they would’ve…” She gives a full-body shiver. 

“I don’t think it would’ve been that bad,” I tell her. “I talked to Leion before coming here, and even if they had attacked, they would’ve shown mercy, as kindly as Bramtown!”

Somehow, rather than this relaxing her, her posture only tenses further, punctuated by a pronounced wrinkle splitting her forehead. “...What?”

“That’s what he said, and I’m inclined to trust him.”

“What exactly did he say?” A note of hysteria has crept into her voice. Together with the rest of her frayed nerves, she sounds about ready to burst.

I blink at her. Well, I can’t recall exactly, but… “Bramtown quarter,” I say, before nodding to myself. “That was it—Bramtown quarter. I visited Bramtown, you know. Lovely place—very relaxed, not much traffic to get in or out. And the judge was surprisingly nice, even though my typical experience with judges is really bad! He let me stay for a while and I made some new friends, even providing me with food and money for our continued travels.”

“I know,” Gecko says hollowly. “I know you did.”

“You do?”

“Soon after,” she says, swallowing, no longer trembling, only staring right into my eyes, “the city was sacked. In a single night, an army of over thirty thousand attacked, ravaging it without giving any warning beforehand. Of the twenty thousand civilians, over seventeen thousand were killed, including the judge. All because he had betrayed the deicidist cause by housing the anathema of hope.”

“What?” The room has gone silent even though people are still talking, but I’m only looking at her. A shadow has fallen across her face and she looks frightening now and I feel very small because my confusion is bad to her, somehow. She’s angry. I angered her. I don’t know how or why but I angered her and now I feel empty inside. “What do you mean?”

She takes a shaking breath, clenching her hands into fists to remain strong. “Do you know what Magdeburg quarter means?”

“No,” I admit weakly.

“After Tilly and the Catholic League sacked the protestant city of Magdeburg, killing twenty thousand of its twenty-five thousand inhabitants, Magdeburg quarter became a term used by the protestant forces to refuse mercy. When imperial forces attempted to capitulate, they would be met with Magdeburg quarter and executed instead.” In the faint light of the room, her eyes appeared like glowing balls of fire, desperate and tawny. “Do you understand what Bramtown quarter would have meant here?”

I draw away from her. “Yes,” I whimper.

“No, you don’t,” she snarls. “You don’t even understand why Leion is here trying to siege a city. Does it make more sense if I say that he’s doing it for you? Everyone in this room is shouting and blabbering because you ascended into a god.”

“I—I don’t…”

“That’s it. You don’t know that. If you’d read the forums even once during the past months, you would have seen the emergency message pinned at the top, warning all humans to evacuate the Empire due to the war. Which war? Your war. The war you’ve yet to make any effort to thwart, aside from… What do you call this?” She gestures at the room we’re in. “A spur of the moment? Or was it more of an impulse?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know why.”

She chuckles. “That’s about what I expected, I guess. The whole central continent is going to the shits and you had no idea.”

“The whole central continent? That doesn’t…” I shake my head at her. The room is reeling and I feel like puking but she’s still standing upright. “I don’t get it. What are you talking about? I never…”

“It must be quite a shock. I get it. If someone told me I’d started World War One because I reached max level in TMM I wouldn’t believe them either. I’d be all like, but I didn’t mean to, and what do you mean World War One? Is there going to be another one? And then someone would shoot me in the head and everyone would forget the critical role I served in starting the war. Except, in your case, I doubt your part will ever go away. We humans communicate quickly with each other, so we’ve already started calling it the Hopeless War. I hope that’s okay with you, Hope. Ha-ha.”

I stare at her. Then, I stare at Laion, across the room. He’s shouting about how they need enough troops to meet up with the army sent by the president of Painum so they can march into the capital of Ret-Inn. “What?” I mutter, maybe only to myself. “What? What?”

“So, in short, if you hadn’t decided to stop by, this siege would probably have continued for a month or so longer, and then we’d get sacked. Personally, I can’t be sure whether I’d lived or died. The Hope League is pretty pro-human since we’re in your image, but if it became tumultuous enough, that wouldn’t have helped. I don’t have any magic to protect myself with anymore, so I would’ve died if that happened. That would’ve been a shame. But what’s one more death among tens of thousands?”

“That’s…”

“I get it, though. This doesn’t feel real to me either. I’m looking at Leion and the idea that in a different world he could have been my killer doesn’t register at all. He’s just a goblin. A commander, drawn haplessly into this war, the same as all the rest of us. The only lucky thing about this war is that the central continent hasn’t developed enough to set up colonies elsewhere or conduct large-scale trade with the two other continents, so it shouldn’t become a World War One situation. Nope, all that’s on the line is eight countries. Almost a little quaint. I wonder how many people live in them combined?”

“I don’t…”

“Me neither. Millions of lives at the very least. And, of course, you didn’t know. I wish I could say whether that made it better or worse. If you knew but avoided all of the conflicts out of cowardice, I could understand it. Then you could even argue that you avoided the conflicts in order to reduce the amount of lives ended in your name. After all, with you being an actual, tangible presence, it gives both sides something to fight for. Becoming a phantom might have kept the opposing sides from committing fully to this ridiculous war. But, no. It wasn’t cowardice. It was ignorance. You didn’t know. Which is honestly amazing. Did nobody tell you, or did you never listen? The signs should have been there. Wars aren’t especially quiet.”

“I…”

“Maybe you noticed, but decided not to read anything into it? All the armies running about might have all been sent after you, personally. That would fit. You’re a horrible monster, so it’s obvious the Empire and Acheron could afford to raise several ten-thousand man armies to hunt you specifically. Do you hate yourself that much? Is that it, god of hope?”

The walls churn the roof lurches and my body turns weightless as everything goes black.