Tutorial Rewrite 52 (Patreon)

She looks weirdly dismayed but I’ve still gotta ask. “Hey, you got any more of those, it’s kind of nice, my poison protection finally rose!”

She frowns at me. “You mean your poison resistance?”

I blink at her. She blinks at me.

She makes one of those difficult faces again that I hate before standing up and going over to her little band of rebels. They talk in hushed tones for a minute or so before she finally comes back over. She squats down next to me. “Mind telling me what level your poison resistance is at?”

“My poison protection is now at level two, thankyouverymuch.”

She sighs and massages her temples. “Alright. Okay. Fine…” Standing up, she turns to the crowd. “Since the final executive has denied to go on his own terms, we will now send him off in a more classic fashion!”

And, predictably, the crowd goes wild.

Classic fashion? What’s that supposed to—

The guy behind me drags me off my feet before shoving me headfirst, putting me on my hands and knees. Okay, not very polite, if you just asked I would have done it on my own, but fine.

…Hang on. Is that an axe?

W-, wait just a moment. Listen, poison? Poison is fine. I can survive that sort of stuff. I—it’s just that, you know, axe to the neck? Personally, I just think that’s a bit too much, because, well, there isn’t much I can do to defend against that, so I really just—

He lifts the axe. Higher, and higher, and higher, and with each inch higher it goes, the crowd cheers just a bit louder, more and more, until the axe blocks out the sun, and his body tenses, and…!

“Stop!”

Moleman runs up onto the stage, positioning himself in front of the axe, stopping it just moments before my beheading. As I stare at his back, all the prisoners from before rush onto the stage, alongside some guy I think I saw when I was captured.

“Bach,” Moleman says to the girl, huffily. “You can’t—you can’t execute him.”

The girl—Bach—stumbles back. “Wh-, why not? He’s an executive, isn’t he?”

“He is, yes, but,” Moleman glances at me, still breathing deeply, “...he didn’t do anything. In fact, he was actually going to be executed, right alongside our comrades. He just happened to break out before he could be brought out for the ceremony.”

Her eyebrows crunch together. “Escape? How? Did he use some skill to turn immaterial?”

Moleman’s jaw snaps shut and he turns to look first at the other prisoners, and then at me.

One of the prisoners steps forward. “Um, he, uh…” She makes a face as if looking for the proper words. “I’m pretty sure that he just… broke every bone in his body?”

Back gives her a completely blank face. “Uhuh. Right, so, uh…”

Moleman takes a step closer to her. “Listen to me, Bach. This guy… he’s done a lot wrong, but I don’t…” He heaves a sigh. “I don’t think he’s guilty of this particular crime. Not right now, at least.” Pulling his lips tight, he closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them again, he looks almost defeated, somehow. “We agreed that we wouldn’t judge people for crimes they did before coming into the tutorial, right? That’s behind us, so…” A deep breath. “He hasn’t committed any crime.”

As she looks at him, her eyes soften, and her expression as whole turns quite a lot less grim. “Fine.” She turns away from him. Walking over to the podium, she takes a stand and faces the crowd. “We have come to the agreement that since PrissyKittyPrincess, the executive of the Hell difficulty, has not technically committed any crime, he will not be punished, as it would be unjust.” First, silence. And then, jeering. Just a huge wall of jeering.

They don’t even know me! What do they care that I’m not being executed? Dumb idiots. Normies the lot of them.

“That said…” Her grip on the podium tightens. “Since it was SuperMoleman who requested this pardon, from here on out, he will be in charge of ensuring that, should PrissyKittyPrincess break any of our agreed-upon rules, he will be punished just as we would be.”

…Excuse me?

In nigh-on terror, I look up at Moleman. His lips are pulled so tight they’ve turned into a white line. I kind of hope he isn’t regretting all of this. That would be, uh, not good. I’ve got a feeling that even if Bach just made that statement to the whole crowd, she wouldn’t mind going back on it. All things considered, she seems kind of, I don’t know… bloodthirsty?

As if she could hear my thoughts, she turns towards us, nailing Moleman with her gaze. “Is that acceptable, Mole?”

After a pause that was just a little too long for comfort, he replies, “...Yes.”

And so it begins. Moleman grabs my arm and brings me up to my feet. Someone throws something at me but I can’t really feel it, even when a second and a third one follow. Moleman hurriedly brings us off the stage and back into the castle, and all the while I can hear Bach talk in a grandiose fashion about how the former representatives will all be banned from making parties and that from now on there will be order and peace.

But just one question weighs on my mind, heavier than any other. Once we’re inside, Moleman drags me through the entire castle, into a backroom and up winding stairs until we reach a small room. He sits me down, and he sits down across from me, burying his face in his hands. I look at him. I’m not sure I recognise him at all.

“How did you know?” I ask him. He doesn’t lift his face from his hands. “I haven’t told anyone. I look completely different now. Nobody should recognise me. So how did you know?”

“...Know what?” he asks, but we both know that that might as well be a rhetorical question.

“That I’ve done something… bad. Before all of this.”

He gives a chuckle, but not a real one, not a happy one. Finally, he looks up from his hands. His eyes are reddish. “How could I not know you, Ho-Jae? How could I ever forget the face of the man who killed me?”

I can’t feel the chair beneath me.

“...I didn’t kill anyone.”

“You did, Ho-Jae.” And carefully, gently, he unties the strap around his chest, removing his right arm from its position on his back and placing it on the table with a thud. “They had to amputate, you know. It took too long to get to the hospital, and they had to amputate. But I wasn’t aware of that. For me, the last thing I ever really saw was your face. How are you supposed to forget something like that?”

“I didn’t kill you,” I say, again, just a little louder than last time. “You’re here, aren’t you?”

He just smiles. “There’s a theory, you know. People have been considering it for a while, about how and why some people were invited here. Why us? Why then? Why? And it all brought a theory to the forefront of our minds. You don’t seem like you’re too invested in that sort of theorising, but… In what state were you in when you were invited to the tutorial?”

“What state?...” I look down at my lap. At my blueish, reddened hands. “I was just… playing games. Lost a match. That’s all.” When I look up again, I hate that it’s his face I see. Any other face would be fine. Any other face I could strangle and be out of here and not have to care anymore. Any face but that one.

“A heart attack, then? Pretty common,” he says softly. His eyes go distant. Hazy. “I’d been in a coma for six months when it happened. Lack of oxygen and all that. If it makes you feel any better, it was a painless death, once I was actually there.”

“But you aren’t dead!” I shout, standing up so fast that the chair behind me topples over. “You’re alive, and you’re sitting right there, and that’s that!”

He goes silent for a second. The only sound in the room is my breathing, huffing, dragging breaths down by the ankle, scraping through my throat.

“I’d almost call it ironic that we died at the same time if it wasn’t like this. I’ve talked with a lot of people who feel the same thing. They were about to die, about to bleed out, about to eat a handful of pills, and then the invitation appeared. They weren’t dead, but if it wasn’t for the invitation, they would’ve been. So, in a sense, you didn’t kill me. But I can’t say that I was alive for those past six months before being invited here.”

My chest heaves. Up and down. In and out. My brain buzzes as though filled with a million crammed-in wasps. Mutely, my eyes fall to the table between us.

Another question bubbles up in the stormy sea of my mind. A little question, so quiet it might as well be a hummingbird’s whisper. “...Why?” I ask. “Why, if I killed you, did you save me?”

And for once, he’s the one that looks away. His face pulls itself tight. “I don’t know. Maybe I shouldn’t have.” He looks back at me. “Do you think it was a good idea?”

“Uh,” I say, without really thinking. “Rescuing people about to die is…”

“If you were in my position, would you have done what I did?”

I can feel the lines of my face deepen. Okay, hypothetically, a guy kills me. I get him into a position where he would rightfully be killed for that crime by someone else. I wouldn’t even need to get my hands dirty. Everything would be left up to the world. It would do itself. Inaction isn’t a sin. Nobody would even look at me wrong.

It’d be perfect.