Tutorial Rewrite 49 (Patreon)

In other words, I don’t even have to press a button to go there. Sweet.

Patiently, I wait until the timer goes down, and then the world shifts around me.

I stumble a little as my feet leave the familiar half-dried floor of the lobby and instead touch down on harsh, sandy rock. When I look up, I find myself inside what seems to be a room in a castle. Not any room from the castle I was in a few hours ago, mind you, just a standard mediaeval castle-looking thing. The room itself is pretty small, and all it contains is me, a large wooden table with two matching chairs, a single woven rug beneath said table, and…

She meets my eyes.

A girl.

…A woman? I can’t tell if she’s younger or older than me, but she is almost certainly a girl. As is customary, she has a short buzz-cut, which looks awful, but since it’s grown out slightly, I can assume she didn’t arrive at the tutorial just now. As for looks… she’s alright. Clothing-wise, she’s wearing a tracksuit, but not the one you can buy from the shop. She looks pale.

Her eyes widen at the sight of me, and her entire body jerks, and I can’t tell if she wants to approach or run away from me.

“Ah, uh, uhm…” she stammers, her voice wavering with each syllable.

I stare back at her. What do you even say in this situation? Hi? Hello? What’s up? No, it feels wrong. Come to think of it, I haven’t really talked to another person in, uh… three, four months? What’s the first thing you say? Usually, you introduce yourself, and then you try to find common ground and similar interests, and you work your way from there. Yeah. I read that in a guide for making friends once. It never really helped, but maybe this will be different?

I take a step towards her and hold out my hand towards her. “He—”

Hey eyes dart down to my hand, widen at the sight of what is mostly just my own blood, and then she screams. “AAAAAAHHH!!”

H- hey, hang on, this isn’t what it looks like! Most of it is just my own, so there’s no need to—

Without giving me any time to say anything else, she practically flies out the door. Huh.

…That was rude, right? It’s not just me that thinks running away when you reach for a handshake is rude, is it? Yeah, I thought so. Did nobody teach her any manners?

Though, since the room is now empty of anything of interest, I make to leave, though not before checking if I can put the chairs into my inventory. Spoiler, I couldn’t. So, I leave the room, exiting into a narrow hallway. Just to orient myself properly, I try to take a look at how the door to the room compares to the hallway. What I find is a little different, though. Above the doorframe of the room I just left, a single sign hangs.

<Hell Lobby>

…Hell lobby? Hang on, don’t tell me…?

That girl was the one who stayed behind in the first lobby?!

Man. For someone so clever, she sure is rude. Then again, maybe this just confirms ye olde stereotype about how smart people are socially incompetent. Possibly. Who knows, really? That said, I should probably try to find her. I’m not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but her presence kind of changes the whole game. If she can tell the challengers of the fourth attempt about what the first floor entails, then there may very well be far fewer casualties.  Or so I hope. If nothing else, she can just tell them not to even try it. Then again, we’re dealing with people who willingly chose the highest difficulty, so they may very well be too arrogant to follow her clever advice.

Either way, there is only one thing I must do.

I’ve got a girl to catch.

Sniff sniff sniff. Okay, she went that way. Down the stairs, and from there on… Alright, yeah, I know where to go. I’m not in too great of a hurry since I’ve got 24 whole hours to hammer this information into her, but the sooner I start, the better.

I start running down the stairs. Hurry doesn’t make me all that much faster when it comes to running than Sprint, but it’s still useful. Running down the stairs, I actually happen to pass quite a few people, most of whom react pretty rudely at seeing me. Sure, I’m not the prettiest face in the tutorial, and I’m not exactly wearing Armani, and I haven’t washed myself in a couple of months, but that shouldn’t be the end of the world for my social life.

Running like this, I actually make a fun discovery. See, sure, running on two legs is good, but if I run on all fours, I can use my arms too, which means that I can use hurry on both my arms and legs, increasing my fracture tolerances twofold while keeping the approximately same speed. Not to mention the aerodynamics, though I’m not quite fast enough for that to matter yet.

Running like a beast, I leap through the hallways, climbing onto the walls to avoid running into people who all react in pretty much the same way, and after just a few minutes of running, I finally find her.

I leap out of the main gate to the castle, out onto a green grassy field that stretches seemingly endlessly before conjoining with the bright blue sky above, and right out there, among a small crowd of people, in the arms of some guy wearing what seems to be really expensive armour, she stands. They both notice me at almost the exact same moment I appear into the air. Mm. The grass feels nice.

I stand up properly. Now, I just need to—

“Beast!” he shouts, pointing a sword he wasn’t holding a second ago right at me. “Are you the enemy we must conquer in this castle? How dare you assault this poor girl!”

…Okay, those two sentences are completely unrelated. How do you even expect me to respond to that?

As my mind whirls, looking for a proper response, the crowd slowly turns to us and the pressure to say something increases tenfold. Sweat runs down my back. Gulp.

I take a deep breath. “Okay, um, first of all, no, and second of all, I didn’t do anything to her, I was just, like, trying to shake her hand, and she ran away, which I think is very rude, because I didn’t do anything at all to her, I was just trying to greet her and say hello, because we’re both the only challengers for the Hell difficulty, so it’s important for me to talk to her because she’s very important right now, and her running away was actually very rude, so I’m not trying to be accusatory or anything, but it was almost kind of mean, and if it had been someone else they could have had their feelings hurt, and that would be bad, because I think we should have, like, a good relationship, since we’re kind of like coworkers right now, right?”

A thick silence falls over the crowd.

…Did I say something wrong?

The guy holding her makes a strange face. “You’re from the Hell difficulty?”

I nod at him.

“What floor are you on?”

That’s a very private question, but there’s no reason not to answer it if it helps diffuse the situation. “I just beat floor 3 and it was super hard.”

The guy’s eyes narrow. “Give me a second.” Without really knowing what else to do, I watch as he brings up the community tab, reads a post, and then turns back to me. “So you’re—pfft—PrissyKittyPrincess?”

Blood rushes from my toes all the way up to my skull and I turn RED on every conceivable level. It feels like I’ve got blood all the way up to my eyeballs. A tremble takes hold of my body and I glance down at the grassy ground. “Uh, um, uh, uh, n—n—no. That’s not, um, my username at all, my username is actually, uh, um, GentleNight, that’s, uh, w—w—what my username is, cuz, um, what kind of, uh, person would have that kind of, um, stupid username, huh? I mean, she’s also from Hell difficulty, and she’s a girl, so it makes way more sense that—”

“M-, my username…” the girl mutters, “is GuideOfVirgil…”

The guy looks down at her and back up at me. “Sounds like a standard system-generated username to me. And since there’s only one other Hell difficulty challenger, that’s gotta be you. And according to the Guild of Representatives, you’re wanted.”

The hot shame perforating my entire body is instantly replaced by cold rivalled only by the chilly glaciers of the north pole. Oh, right. I was going to get executed, wasn’t I? “Um,” I say, “No. That’s… wrong.”

With a twist of the wrist, he turns his screen around, nodding to it. Hesitantly, I inch closer.

<OrthodoxPox[F3] List of Wanted Persons:

Since challengers cannot see each other’s

level or usernames through the system,

we hereby ask that the following list of

persons should be found. Turning in one

of these will grant a suitable reward.

So let’s all help each other find these people.

1: HookedOnBach[F7] Hard

2: LeagueOfWill[F13] Normal

3: AnotherUndercover[F12] Normal

4: SuperMoleman[F24] Easy

5: LionMawMadness[F11] Normal

6: MilkInACupboard[F10] Easy

7: PrissyKittyPrincess[F4] Hell>

<...>

I feel a bead of sweat slip down my back. “Actually, um, I’m actually an executive representative, like, for the Hell difficulty, so this is, like, uh, wrong, and I need you to talk to this Pox guy, because he’ll totally clear everything up, because, like, I really am an executive, so actually, in reality, for questioning my, like, authority and stuff, I could totally have you executed, because, like, I’m an executive, you know, and you don’t want to mess with executives. Yeah.”

He smiles down at me. “If you want to discuss this with Pox, how about you do it yourself?”

Ah. Oops.

Something hard and heavy hits the back of my skull like a sledgehammer, and when I turn around, I find that it really was a sledgehammer that did it. Wack. I blink at the armoured guy holding it. He blinks back at me. Hm. It shouldn’t be too hard to take him out. Not too hard at a—

The hammer comes down again, and then again, and I stumble once, twice, because my skull plates have shifted a bit too much again, and that doesn’t feel good, but the darkness is coming, so there’s nothing I can do but stumble and stumble and stumble and stumble and then I fall and the last thing I really see from the world of light is the face of that girl, that girl from Hell, looking down at me with such a meek expression that I can’t really imagine that this was what she wanted.

<You have learned:

Brain Damage Resistance Lv.4>

<You have learned:

Fracture Resistance Lv.6>

<You have learned:

Unconsciousness Resistance Lv.6>