Chapter Thirty-Nine

I don’t know how she slept so well. If I’d revealed something like that, that someone lost their legs because I was focused on something like… a lost cause? I honestly do not know how I could have recovered from that. I’ve never felt so weak in all my life… just to keep living seemed impressive, and yet not only was she still alive, she was still working for the guild.

I don’t know if she’d skipped out on taking adventurers out anymore, or what she really was doing just going around where her Goddess directed her… card playing, maybe. The rest? I got the feeling there was a lot she was leaving out.

‘Another time.’ I thought, and tried to force myself to sleep while the others snored.

I watched the mech pass by my field of vision again, the steady stride never wavered, and it was in the end, that ‘rhythm’ that helped me finally rest. I felt very childlike right then, just looking at her sleeping the way she was, listening to a steady beating rhythm of the mech, warmed by dying embers, the thin top of my bedroll keeping me comfortable, along with the stuffed head of it that served as a pillow.

‘I wonder if it’ll be easier to sleep when the novelty wears off and I don’t have so much on my mind. I know it’s been only a few days, but even so in most of the stories like this, I’d get a romantic interest. Now I don’t even know what I like anymore. And on top of that, my mech pilot has a grudge against my cleric and my cleric is a thief and my sorcerer is unable to control her magic. At least I have money. So it could be worse.’

But even though I thought all that, the biggest frustration to me was how ‘weak’ I felt. I curled up into the fetal position and tried to imagine how they felt. Dwarguy stuck with the woman who he blamed for costing him his legs. Crazy elf girl having to go back and face undead dwarves. Cleric… stuck with me when she’d probably prefer something else, not to mention stuck with the dwarf she let down at the worst possible time. I suppose maybe I had too much empathy.

‘Maybe I’m not cut out to lead a team.’ I thought, after all, the other heroes I’d always seen at work were tough as nails, I couldn’t picture them thinking like this, or sleeping like me. Or rather, stuck awake like me.

And I stayed that way until I wasn’t awake anymore.

I knew at least that I was asleep, when I found myself sitting on my own body and facing the fire. ‘What the hell?!’ I shouted. Or tried to shout. But no words came out. Instead my mouth moved, and I only heard the echo of my thoughts. ‘Did I… die?! Am I dead?!’ My head turned around, I wanted to reach for the others, the mech was still pacing, I tried to touch my body, my hand passed through it. ‘Am I a ghost?!’ I shouted, my tails bristled, all nine of them. The other two were no longer ‘drawn in’ as they had been.

‘No. But actually yes. Isn’t that a saying on your world?’ A deep, almost grandfatherly voice said, and I looked for the source, but it seemed to come from everywhere at once.

‘Who’re you?!’ I shouted and shot to my feet.

‘Sit down, it’s alright. Besides, wander too far from your body, and you won’t be able to get back in it, you really will die.’ The voice said, and I reluctantly sat down.

I kept my hand on the shoulder of my ‘sort of’ corpse, it felt like a stone, like my body really was dead. Interestingly enough, my ‘ghost’ mirrored the body that I had now, not the body I had on Earth.

‘That’s better. I didn’t go to all the trouble of blessing you, just to see you die before you complete your first quest.’ The voice actually laughed, ‘Besides, it would make me look bad to the other Gods and Goddesses, if you died literally the same day I graced you with the ability to control magic.’

‘A God?! This has to be a god!’ I could hardly believe it.

‘Yes, I am a God.’ The voice answered, and for some stupid reason I kept looking around for the source as if a God needed a body to talk to me.

‘Would you mind not doing that, it’s distracting?’ My deity answered.

‘I’m sorry, but I’m not used to conversations working this way, could I ask you to take some kind of a form so I have someone to look at, this is very awkward for me. I feel like a crazy person having a conversation with himself.’ I replied, and for a moment the voice was gone. I was worried I’d offended it… him… them? Whatever it was.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

‘You are from another world so… I suppose I will, just this once, mind you, take a shape you can understand.’ The voice replied, and then across from me, seated on top of Loysa, was a somewhat muscular man wearing a pair of sandals, and a bright blue garment wrapped around his body finishing over the back of one shoulder, with a long string of green tassels hung along the outer edge of the garment and down below at his ankles. He had a thick dark curly beard and a hat that frankly… ‘Why is he wearing a three layered lemon cake on his head?’

I know it wasn’t actually a cake, but that was my first thought, it was a tall hat that came up in a cone shape with a series of layers that shrank as they went higher.

‘This is not a cake, and I’ll thank you to never call it that.’ He said, and then removed it to look at his own hat. ‘Great. Now I can’t unsee it.’ He replied and shoved it back onto his head.

‘I’m sorry.’ I replied.

He ignored my apology. ‘I am Utu. God of safe travels and the sun, I see all things… and I’ll have you know, Aiko, that Goddess of creation, otherwise known as ‘Shakti’ and I had quite a spat over which one of us got to claim you. All so you could insult my hat… I did not see that one coming. Which is a first, for me.’ He said bluntly.

‘I’m sorry!’ I exclaimed, ‘At least I didn’t say anything about your beard!’

He put his hand over the beard that came down to the center of his chest. ‘What’s wrong with my beard?’ He asked.

‘Nothing!’ I exclaimed, I swear if I had a heartbeat, I’d have had a heart attack.

He shook it off and said, ‘Good. So, normally most of us never talk to our followers, just our priests, and even that only a few times a year for the favorites… Kuduru is the undignified exception to that rule. She even had a brief conversation with you. I thought then, that I should do the same, so you understand what is expected of you.’

‘Am I the chosen one after all?!’ I beamed at him. Chosen ones always had so many benefits and bonuses and good luck… probably no harem and all… though I guess for me it would have been a reverse harem… or would it?

‘No.’ He interrupted my own rambling thoughts with his deadpan expression. ‘You were never meant to be here at all. Shakti made a bet with the God of destruction, the end result was that machine. In a fit of temper, the God of destruction caused that accident that you were summoned to clean up.’

‘Gods can throw tantrums?’ I asked.

‘Of course. The God of destruction is a child. What else would you expect of a child?’ Utu answered, and suddenly I felt so much… worse.

‘My life changed because of a god’s temper tantrum?’ I asked, I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or cry.

‘Unfortunately, yes. There is good news and bad news with this. The good news, you will find this world, this body, more suitable to you than your old one. Who you were there, was not who you should have been. The creation god of your world is haphazard about that sort of thing, it seems. I remember him, too, he was an absolute know-it-all. Just the worst kind of person, tell him there’s a problem, he’d say it was in his plan the whole time… I digress.’ He shook his head and rested his forearms on his knees, then leaned toward me.

‘The bad news is, you have no destiny. No ‘purpose’ as so many do, we don’t really know what to do with you, or… maybe that isn’t bad news. You can do anything you want with your life, the normal rules do not apply.’

‘Alright, so he’s bad at telling good news from bad.’ I thought.

‘I can hear you, you know.’ Utu’s voice was of a patient grandfather, but his steady stare was that of a grandfather whose grandchild had just farted in the middle of a church service… and loudly at that.

‘Sorry.’ I mumbled with contrition.

‘Regardless,’ he carried on as if I’d never apologized, ‘that means I can’t properly predict the course of your life, even accepting you as one of my own. We may or may not speak again, I may suggest things to you, but the truth is, other than lending you a little aid now and again, you are as on your own as if there were no gods at all.’

‘So does that mean I can… maybe… get this world into space exploration?’ I pressed, and for a long moment, Utu was very quiet.

‘Normally, no. The Gods would prevent something so extreme. However, one of us, no, two of us, erred grievously. Therefore we will not ‘interfere’ with your ambition. It will be up to you to achieve it. But none of us will get in the way.’ Utu promised, and I searched his face for deception, funny hat aside, I couldn’t detect any hint of deception. If anything, he seemed… compassionate.

‘Then… what now?’ I asked, ‘What do I do?’

‘You get a good night’s sleep for now, and then do the best you can after that. That is all that anyone can do. And when you eventually die in this world, I’ll see that you are given a proper choice about your next life, to make up for what was done to you in bringing you here.’ Utu then rose to his feet, and his body disappeared, dissipating like fog until there was nothing left of him.

I wish I could say I put myself back in my body. But all I really knew, was that eventually, it was morning, and I woke up to a brand new day.

That and… I felt pretty good about what lay ahead.