“I do have one question, though,” I say, rubbing my chin. “What the heck is a geckomancer?”
“Honestly?” Her smile widens, ear-to-ear. “I have no clue!”
“Do you summon lizards?”
“Seldom.”
I gasp. “But you do?!”
She hums cheekily. “As I said—sometimes. Summoning stuff takes a lot of divinity, so you need to be allied with a god who’s willing to supply you with enough divinity to make that happen. A god who doesn’t have many followers, but still fits your personality enough to like you.” I wait for her to tell me the punchline. She, meanwhile, seems to wait for me to realize it on my own. “What, you don’t get it?”
“No?”
Sighing, she shakes her head. “And to think He likes you enough to give you a rat summoning skill… All the while ignoring all my prayers… What a cruel god He is!”
I blanch. No way. “You can’t possibly mean—”
She shoots fingerguns at me. “Bingo!” She laughs. “And since I’m one of His only servants, I can deck myself out with all kinds of spells and miracles. I’m practically rich!”
My mind is drawn to my mental image of the god of comedy. The guy who would give me a skill to peel my own skin off. The guy who tormented me with posters and rainbow comic sans. “And, uh… What’s the drawback?”
Her expression stiffens. “That’s… So, heh, He kind of requires His subjects to be funny, otherwise He doesn’t really care, and…” She shrugs nervously. “Unfortunately, I’m not very funny! I’ve been convincing Him to let me stick around by saying that my unfunniness makes for a good punchline whenever I tell people, but the joke is starting to run thin.” With a look of hopeful desperation on her face, she leans in closer to me. “But you… You’re funny. You’ve caught His attention. So, if I stick around you…”
Wow. She’s going really far to convince me why we should be friends, huh?
“He’ll like you better. Is that it?”
She snaps her finger. “Exactly.”
“Right. Well… Sure.”
“...Sure?”
“Yep. Sounds good to me, Gecko.”
She draws back a little, suspicion painted all over her face. “You’re awfully quick to agree to the scheme of some random guy you’ve never met before.”
I frown at her. “Guy?”
She shrugs. “Guy, girl, whatever. You know what I meant.”
“Uh, sure,” I say. “Seriously, though, it’s fine. I’ve got a feeling the upcoming stage will require teamwork and whatever, so joining forces will probably be best for us both.”
“What do you mean, upcoming stage?”
“Yeah, you know…” I furrow my brows at her. “The stuff that comes after this floor? Didn’t Hunter—the god of hunting tell you?”
“No, uh…” She glances away shyly. “I just showed up, and there were a lot of people, so I went away, and then… Yeah.”
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
“Nobody told you…” Oh. Wait, yeah, that makes sense—a little, at least. Well, we can’t have that, can we? “In that case, to explain things…” I go through everything, though only surface-level. She nods along, and since I don’t think it’s a big deal, I even tell her we’re on Earth. My assumption is proved correct as she simply accepts it, agreeing that it’s a necessary deal and all.
“...And at this point, we have less than ten hours remaining.”
“Ten hours to laze about in the sun, getting tanned and making friends… Is this supposed to be our reward for surviving the first part of the tutorial?”
“That’s about it,” I reply. We both look out over the lake. It really is very pretty. It’s the perfect weather for hanging around and reading a book or something. Though, frankly… I glance over at her, where she sits in her heavy ankle-length robes. “Isn’t that hot?”
“Ah… this? Um… Yeah. Yeah, it is. But when I was doing cocytus, this was perfectly warm. I thought my fingers would freeze off, and I had to constantly use the Warmth spell to avoid hypothermia. If I hadn’t read up on SuperMoleman’s guide, I would probably have died when I entered it.”
“If you usually wear something less suffocating, it might be good to shift to that so you don’t get heat stroke here.”
“Is that what you did?” she asks, gesturing at my lack of clothes.
“Ah, no, I usually don’t…” I shake it off. Then again, technically speaking, I did get changed when I came here. “Yeah. Something like that.”
“Alright.” She stands up. I blink at her.
“Where are you going?”
“Into the forest,” she says. “You know… to get changed?”
“Oh,” I say. “You don’t…?” I mean, personally, I really don’t care, but… Whatever. “Okay. I understand. I’ll be here, so…”
“Thanks.” Nodding, she moves deeper into the forest, leaving me to sit and wait while she gets changed. I totally forgot that was a thing. I mean, bodies are… It’s all the same, you know? Men, women, children… The changes are so small that it doesn’t actually make any change. It doesn’t matter. Yeah, sure, I’m a guy, but even more than that, aren’t I a human?
But if it matters to her, I’ll respect it.
Sitting on my little rock, I wait for her to finish. It takes a few minutes, but in the end, she returns, wearing something only marginally more suited to the weather. Her wizardly robe is now noticeably thinner, and she’s got sandals on instead of her boots. But the overall look is still the same. She seems to be happier in this, though, so I guess it’s good. “So,” she says, stepping up to me again. “What should we do until the next part begins?”
“Um, well…” I scratch my cheek. “I was thinking of just taking it easy. Before you arrived, I was sewing, so I’ll probably keep doing that. What about you?”
“Sewing, huh?” She hums, sitting down on her spot again. “Fighting the monsters in cocytus did leave a few tears on my robes… I should also fix that stuff.” Her eyes move down to my bare chest and she grins. “Let me guess—your shirt needs fixing?”
I follow her eyes. “Um, no,” I say, “I don’t usually wear these types of… I’m doing something else.”
“Ah, I see. No problem with me.”
Agreeing, I pull out my sewing stuff, and she does the same. I’m not sure what I expected, but she’s pretty good. About the same level as me—which is weird, because I always thought I sucked at sewing. But she does it almost effortlessly. So, maybe I’m not that bad after all?
As we begin sewing, eventually, we start to discuss a few things. For one, I ask her about something that’s been on my mind for a while.
“What cocytus was like? Ah, that’s… It’s different between all the difficulties, but at least on normal and hard, there’s a bunch of monsters to fight. Mainly dire wolves and swooping drakes. It’s a bother, but not as bad as the actual environment. Ignoring the fact that the lake is slippery as all hell, the cold is an enemy in and of itself. You really need to stock up on warm clothes and food to get through it, and a mage who can use heat-creating spells is basically obligatory. Thankfully, you don’t have to do everything in one piece—each time you return to the lobby, you can stock back up on everything you need and keep going. Doing it on the hard difficulty was next to impossible, so I can only assume that the hell difficulty was close to impossible.”
After some careful consideration, I decide not to tell her that the cocytus floor was only mentally taxing, not physically.
The conversation slowly shifts to other topics. Mainly, I want to hear what the various floors are like in the other difficulties. It’s strange to hear about, but very interesting to learn. Some floors are almost exactly the same, whereas others are completely different. Or, specifically, it seems as though the gods decided to just… stick me somewhere completely different. I’ve been a loner for most of the tutorial, so it’s not like I’d notice.
On that note, apparently, Gecko joined on the eleventh attempt. She was impressed to hear I joined on the first attempt, calling me one of the ‘OGs’, though I still don’t know what that means. She found my ignorance too amusing to alter.
As the day grew late, she was kind enough to share some food with me, and I started a fire to grill over. Eating something that wasn’t goblin for the first time in months was delightful.
…I don’t count the fish from before.
Interestingly enough, she wasn’t too keen on eating rats made using my flesh, and the assurance that I had plenty of rats in my inventory not technically made using my own flesh didn’t entirely satiate her. Some people can never be happy, huh.
Towards the evening, the parties that had arrived began splitting up slightly, and soon, there were fires spread across the entire lake, lighting it up with a warm, yellow glow. Above, one, single moon shines with a familiar glow. It feels strange to know that this is the moon. Not one of the moons. Not just some random satellite orbiting the planet I’m on. This is the moon that we have set foot on, the same moon we have sung songs about for ages, the moon whose name we know as well as our own. We really are on Earth.
That realization feels even warmer than the fire in front of me, though not quite as warm as the presence next to me.
Gecko smiles back at me.
Hm. Maybe the world isn’t better off without me, after all?
The night passes quietly, only interrupted by some of the parties having a celebratory party, though by the end, most people get to sleep enough to be awake and ready when the time comes. At nine in the morning, almost twenty-four hours after I beat cocytus, the time has come.