A Gamer's Guide 399 (Patreon)

An odd inflection had entered his voice. Something soft and melodic and comforting but cold. Sharp, deadly. It slit a line across her forehead, furrowing her brows and drawing her lips into a thin line. But when she turned to him, she found his expression the same as before. Casual. Uncaring. Everything he shouldn’t have been. “Can…” She swallowed thickly. Calm yourself, she told herself. He’s only a man. Only a boy, deep inside. “Can you do that?”

He hummed, frowned, shrugged, and said, “I think so? Might need a bit of time to figure it out properly, but…” Abruptly, blue skies replaced by a gray storm, darkness in the daylight, his eyes turned into inkwells. Black holes on his face, sucking her in. Weightlessness grabbed a hold of her and despite her hands being on his shoulders, she felt entirely powerless, a victim of apathetic vertigo, ready to at any point start floating upwards into the great unknowable sky. And then, he smiled, all clear skies again. “Okay, looks like you have enough hope! So, together with all of the soldiers, this should be possible. Well, maybe… Give me a second.”

Not waiting for her to catch up with what he was saying, nor taking any time to elaborate on what the heck he was on about, Kitty took a seat on the floor and began fiddling with the open air. He was clearly doing something with his system, however, she had never seen anyone do those kinds of motions with it, not to mention the look of rapt concentration on him—a look she had never seen on him before. 

“Whoa, neat, those aspects are new… And if I switch these, then…”

She turned to regard the door, still being pounded. And then the city, which was filling up with more and more gunpowder smoke and louder and louder screaming. Idly, she began to wonder if anyone else had felt as utterly powerless, yet proportionally powerful as she did in that very moment. There was nothing she could do. And yet, she could convince someone to… She shook her head. At least he’d try. That had to count for something. 

“Alright, let’s test this,” he said, rising to his feet. “Would you mind opening the door real quick?” 

“What?”

“Yeah. Just let one or two through. Even if this doesn’t work, I can still take care of them, no sweat. Don’t worry about it!” And then his whole face lit up in a smile that simply beamed trust me!

Trust you? she wanted to ask. You want me to trust you with my life when you aren’t even taking this seriously?

A hollow weight settled in her gut. This was it, then. The stupidest death imaginable. As she moved over to the door, she tried to think of good final words, and maybe a few memories to recall before she went wherever it was people like her went after death. Assuming they went anywhere. Nowhere was equally possible. She’d never really pondered on it before that moment. Even when she’d had active suicidal ideation, the thought of what came after hadn’t been too important. Just that it was anywhere but there.

Now… 

The distance to the door had been crossed in a matter of seconds. Standing right by it, she turned around to give one final glance at the man who would either doom or save her. Still sitting, one hand pointing a finger gun at the door, he gave her a thumbs up and a smile. She returned it, trying to accept this as being a worthy final moment to a perfectly adequate life. 

Could’ve been worse, she thought and opened the door. 

Two soldiers fell through the opening, shoulder first, mid-tackle, and before anyone on the other side could realize what had happened, she closed the door again, sealing it. 

They’re unarmed? she thought, noticing that neither of them had any weapons in their hands. They didn’t even seem particularly fierce. One was only twenty at best, and the other couldn’t have been more than a year older. They seemed confused. But they had shortswords clipped to their belts, so they were still dangerous, still capable of—

“Bang,”

One of them collapsed into a pile of rats.

“Huh?” she said, an utterly dumb, inevitable noise. She blinked down at the pile. It was rats. There had to have been at least fifty of them, squirming and moving lazily in one big mound, pushing against the clothes that the soldier had been wearing just now. It looked as though he’d been raptured and then replaced by an equal volume of rats. But it didn’t even seem real. All it had taken was a single instant, and…

Across the platform, she found Kitty, smiling smugly to himself, still pointing his finger gun at the pile of rats. “Whoa, it worked! Neat,” and then he moved the finger gun to the other soldier, and said, simply, “Bang,” and then they were a pile of rats, too. Nothing at all anymore. Just… rats.

One of the rats, curious, scampering, sidled up next to her foot, its soft hairs brushing against her rugged skin. Its blank, dark eyes stared up at her, simultaneously mindless and sentient. Did it still have their minds? Or was it only a rat? What had happened? What was going on? “What…?”

“Alright, so, just to test that this is working properly,” his voice roused her from her thoughts, and she raised her face to look at him. He was pointing his finger gun at her. “Stand still for a moment,” he said. It was an order she found herself physically incapable of disobeying. Her feet had fused to the floor and her body was rooted in place. Stiff as a statue, cold as marble, her eyes trained on the clawed finger. 

I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to—

“Bang.”

She flinched. Her body tensed up, shoulders raised, hands clenched, but… 

Slowly, she opened her eyes again. When she looked down at her hands, she found that she wasn’t a rat, nor was she a mound of rats, nor was she dead. She was alive. That meant she could breathe again. In, and out, in big breaths that felt like gasps. 

It took several seconds for her to dare to look at him again. But he was still smiling. “Okay, great! Looks like it should only affect bad guys. Now, I just need to expand the radius a bit…”

“What did you do?” she asked, startled to find her voice even and not wavering. “How did you do that?”

He glanced up from his… whatever he was doing. “Oh, that? Um… Remember how I had a skill to summon rats using my own flesh and blood?” Ruefully enough, she did remember that. “Well, heh, since I became a god, I can edit skills, to some degree. And since we both have enough hope… The details are unimportant, but I edited it so that it works on people other than myself! Oh, but only people who don’t view me with any love, hope and-or faith. So, all the baddies! Normally, this would be way out of my league, but I happen to have a miracle that kind of makes anything possible as long as I hope for it hard enough, so… Yeah! Now, I’ll just edit it so that it’ll affect everyone within the city, and we’ll be golden.” He paused. “No, wait, better make it a bit beyond the city, too. Garath seems to be having trouble with those dragons. Better get rid of ‘em! Or, as I’d like to call it, eraticate them! Isn’t that fun? Yeah, this is…” He smiled, all proud, all happy. “It’s nice to finally solve a conflict instead of starting it. And bloodlessly too.”

She could have died just now. The realization seeped in like icy water through the hull of a broken ship. Had she not felt love, hope, or faith for him, then she would have been a mound of rats at this moment. No longer Gecko the human, or even Rafiloe Smith. Nothing but a pile of rats wearing a witchy dress. 

What response could she give him? A part of her knew that one ought to be angry at being used as a guinea pig, especially when her life was on the line. Another part of her, sweet, sentimental and sick, sick, sick, told her that it was a little cute that he felt no doubt whatsoever that she loved him, had hope for him, or had faith in him. But then a third voice—something horrible and deep and pathetic in the same ways that he was—chimed in, mentioning that if she had died, then he wouldn’t have had any reason to grieve her. 

And while all of these thoughts, feelings and hollow realizations battered her insides and smashed against her skull, she completely forgot to voice her opinion on the morality of turning people into rats.

Perhaps, if he had given her more than three seconds to respond, she might have figured out what her thoughts were on the matter. They were, after all, under attack. The enemy soldiers knew that going to war had a very real chance of being the final thing they did. They were risking their lives willingly. Wasn’t it fair that their lives were then taken in turn?

“Let’s see, all I need to do is switch out this with that, and then…” 

She moved over to the edge of the tower, her eyes grazing the city idly. The pounding at the door echoed through her skull. 

“Alright! Here we go. And a one, and a two, and a—”

Splat.

She turned to find that Kitty had transformed into a pile of rats. 

The banging at the door had stopped too, replaced by the scuttling of hundreds, thousands of tiny rodent feet, scratching at the door, tumbling down the staircase, squeaking piteously.

Ignoring them, she returned her attention to the city. Down below, the streets were now filled with rats. Hundreds of thousands of rats. At first people were confused and disoriented, running around in abject terror, some horrified soldiers shooting at the fleeing rats. But it would soon end. The banging of gunfire was fading out, going away, because the soldiers had all turned into rats. All forty-thousand of them, nothing but rats.

But then she spotted something else down there. A pile of rats just like all the others, but the rats were few, hardly more than a dozen, all crammed into the clothes of a child. Next to it was another pile of rats, bigger, scurrying out of a pile of clothes that couldn’t possibly have belonged to a soldier. 

It took a few moments for the realization to settle in. 

Kingfist wasn’t a pro-hope city, she recalled. 

It was deicidist.