34. Summer Vacation (6)
It had been a remarkably vivid experience, and yet it felt so dreamlike that it almost seemed as though she had simply fallen asleep for a long time.
In truth, perhaps it had been a dream.
Wasn’t the very idea that there existed someone who had run on to save the world by turning back time tens of thousands of times the sort of story that only appeared in novels?
Every time he turned back time once, he had to offer up his memories as the price.
All the life and memories he had built up until then collapsed vainly like a sandcastle, and yet how could anyone repeat that process not once or twice, but tens of thousands of times?
If it were me, could I do it?
Impossible.
This one life alone was already precious and desperately hard-won, and yet to repeat it twice, ten times, a hundred times, a thousand times, ten thousand times—
If that happened…
all my emotions and my soul would wear away and disappear.
“…Ah.”
Eizel slowly opened her bleary eyes.
The first thing filling her vision was a red sky.
The horizon dyed in sunset was truly beautiful.
Not all three moons hanging in the sky were full.
That also meant that one night had already passed, and evening had come again.
With difficulty, Eizel raised her upper body, trembling from the aches running through her, and discovered Hong Biyeon collapsed right beside her.
She looked haggard from having gone a whole day without replenishing herself, and yet even the sight of her lying unconscious was noble and elegant.
“Mm…”
A beat later, Hong Biyeon’s eyebrows trembled faintly, and she laboriously lifted her eyelids as though finally regaining consciousness.
After meeting Eizel’s eyes, she lay there blankly for a moment, then hurriedly sat up.
Eizel turned her head and looked toward the far edge of the altar.
There, Flame—who had apparently woken much earlier—was crouched down, hugging her knees.
“…You’re awake.”
Because of the darkness draped over roughly half her face, it was hard to make out her expression clearly, but one thing was easy to guess:
it was a very dark expression.
Forcing strength into her shaky legs, Eizel made her way over and sat down beside her. Then, forcing a smile, she asked in a joking tone,
“Why do you look… so miserable?”
“It’s just… hard, isn’t it.”
After hesitating for a moment, Flame wet her lips.
“…Because we saw something like that.”
Flame let out a deep breath.
Because she had seen Baek Yuseol’s past in the Star Archive, she felt as though her heart had seized up from the pain of it, but at the same time she also felt a strange relief, because most of the questions she had carried all this time had finally been answered.
Why his memories and knowledge had been so tightly tangled.
Why he always seemed to know everything and yet not quite know it.
It was because he had lived through the same span of time over and over for far too many years.
At first, she had thought of Baek Yuseol and assumed, He regressed for Eizel.
The second time, she had thought, Maybe he regressed for me.
Perhaps both of those answers might be correct.
Within those tens of thousands of regressions, Baek Yuseol must have shared love, affection, and emotion with a great many people.
But they were also all wrong.
Because he…
must have been moving for all of them, for everything that included them all.
How deep a sense of duty would a person have to carry
to drive himself alone toward the very end of hell and continue fighting that lonely battle?
“…Do you two know that?”
At Flame’s words, Eizel and Hong Biyeon looked at her in silence.
Since, unlike her usual playful and lively self, she carried a sunken, heavy atmosphere, neither of them interrupted.
“A long time ago… I once seriously asked that Ahjussi. What his wish was. What his goal was.”
Back then, he had said:
‘I want to live. An ordinary life.’
At that moment, Flame felt she had probably become certain that Baek Yuseol was someone who had regressed.
But until now, she had never really felt the weight of it.
Because she had thought that anyone could say they wanted to live.
But…
from the mouth of someone carrying a fate this cruel, just how much weight could the words I want to live possibly hold?
It felt so distant and far away that she could not even begin to empathize with it.
“There’s no need to act so miserably.”
This time, the one who spoke was Hong Biyeon.
Leaning her back against a pillar and facing the sunset light head-on, she said,
“Now that we know about him… all we have to do is stop Baek Yuseol from ever turning back time again.”
“…How is that even possible?”
“It’s simple.”
Her tone was strangely flat.
“We saw the end of the world. We just have to make sure it never becomes that way.”
“Ah…”
So that he would never again have to sink into the grief of losing everything.
So that he would never again have to struggle to force himself to forget memories in a world where no one could remember him.
So that he would never again…
have to turn back time.
All they had to do was strive and strive so that this very world they were living in now would not be destroyed—and save everything.
The Baek Yuseol of now was not alone.
If he had spent tens of thousands of lives struggling through them by himself, then now three girl mages, who each took pride in possessing the greatest talent in the world, had learned the truth about him.
After slowly meeting Flame’s and Eizel’s eyes one by one, Hong Biyeon said,
“Until then, unfortunately… I may need a little help from you two, who aren’t fit to be used even as a cat’s paw.”
At that, Flame’s and Eizel’s expressions softened somewhat.
“If you want help, do you really have to say it in such an irritating way?”
“That’s right. You’re ruining my appetite.”
“…What did you say?”
Opening those red eyes fiercely, Hong Biyeon frowned, but Flame sprang to her feet and stretched her waist.
“Well, then, now that we know what we have to do, we spent all day starving and sprawled out sleeping, so how about we go get something to eat?”
“Sounds good!”
When Eizel also stood up, Hong Biyeon had no choice but to follow after them.
Even so, she could not help thinking it.
With a combination of three people who did not suit one another in the slightest, just how far would they be able to help Baek Yuseol?
That…
Baek Yuseol himself probably did not know either.
Because in none of the histories up to now had a combination like this ever come together.
Honestly, at first, when some girl who looked like a middle schooler came up to me asking for an autograph, I was startled, but I also felt kind of good about it.
After all, whatever my past life had been, didn’t it mean I’d gained at least a decent amount of popularity in this life? It was the kind of simple, stupid thought that slowly crept into my head.
It was exactly the sort of stupid thought it seemed.
Because the moment I met eyes head-on with the girl named “Anella,” a skill activated.
[Trait ‘Blessing of Crimson Spring March’ has activated and detected the Trait ‘Nightmare’s Return.’]
[Nightmare’s Return is burrowing into your mind. Will you refuse?]
At first, I had no idea what this was.
All of a sudden, Crimson Spring March popped up in the air like some kind of firewall antivirus program and told me to choose Yes or No.
Ordinarily, choosing “Yes” would have been the normal thing to do.
But one peculiar note caught my attention.
[Even if you do not refuse, there is a 0% chance that the target will be able to infiltrate your mind.]
In other words, even if this so-called Nightmare’s Return dug into my mind—a Trait I was hearing about for the first time, despite knowing the original game—it would not be able to do anything…
And that stirred my curiosity.
By the time I came to my senses, I had already pressed “No.”
And so,
that led to the current situation.
‘Aaaahhhhh! Help me, help me! Save meeeeeee!!’
The girl’s scream resounded noisily inside my head.
I was vividly watching Anella sitting collapsed on the ground, screaming.
Is this… inside my mind…?
My world of mental imagery resembled the sea.
There, through her Trait, Anella had triggered the “most horrible trauma” I had ever experienced.
But as for me, who had lived a pretty smooth life in modern times, the most horrible trauma I had ever experienced was probably no more than the time the electricity suddenly went out just as I was trying to kill a boss monster after three days of repeated attempts.
Honestly, even after coming to this world, I had not gone through anything I could really call all that horrific.
And yet,
strangely enough,
I did have trauma.
But those things…
“Ghk!”
Stab!
“Ugh!”
Crunch!
Countless—
truly too many deaths to count.
Those were my traumas.
Deaths so horrible that even I, just watching them, felt my mind go numb and nausea rise in my throat.
And Anella was experiencing that pain vividly there.
What the hell is that… that’s insane…
I had never experienced traumas like that.
Those weren’t my traumas.
Thinking that, I turned my head away and tried to look elsewhere, but this was without question my own mental-image world.
The Blessing of Crimson Spring March proved that.
Which meant…
I had no choice but to face “my trauma” again.
Craaack!!
A “me” being torn apart alive in the jaws of a giant beast with bright red teeth.
Boom!!
A “me” dying after failing to control Blink and crashing into a wall.
Fwoooosh!
A “me” dying engulfed in flames.
Bang!!
A “me” whose body bursts apart and dies after being struck by a goblin’s club.
And yet, not at a single moment of any of those deaths
did “I” scream, or cry out for someone to save me.
I merely accepted death humbly, with an expression devoid of emotion.
Only then did I realize those deaths were familiar to me.
Aither World Online.
There, even if you died once, you would revive after a slight penalty, or else return to a designated save point and play the game again.
Those countless deaths…
were the deaths of “Character Baek Yuseol,” the one I, Baek Yuseol of modern Earth, had played.
But then why are those a trauma?
It was a phenomenon I could not understand at all.
Weren’t those deaths nothing more than deaths inside a game world? It was even an all-ages game, so blood had never even been properly depicted.
And yet those deaths, so vivid that I was afraid even to face them…
what the hell were they?
‘S-save me… please save me…’
After screaming, Anella finally fainted, and my head too began throbbing so badly that I could barely endure it any longer.
…That’s enough. Stop showing me this.
At that, all the traumas scattered like smoke and vanished, as though it were a lie.
Only then, having barely managed to calm my chest, I was trying to think of how to get outside my mental-image world, when—
…Huh.
I met someone’s eyes.
It was “me.”
A me who felt different from the me on Earth and subtly different from the me in Aither.
…A “me” who looked like the sort of version I might become if I struggled for about ten more years.
He looked at me quietly, then turned around and began walking somewhere.
Hey, what the hell are you? Wait, that’s me, right?
But even when I called out to him, he showed no sign of stopping and just kept walking somewhere.
This place was a boundless sea, and no matter how hard I ran, it only felt like running in place, yet strangely enough he grew farther away from me at an incredible speed.
Wait, hey, what are you! Hey! Answer me!
I sprinted after him with all my strength, and “I” did not even pretend to hear me, only moving farther away.
Farther still.
Like a mirage,
he vanished.
“Hey! …Huh?”
And when I came to my senses—
I was back in the café.
[…Thud]
And a girl, Anella, fell unconscious toward me.
Without thinking, I caught her in my arms and stared blankly into the air.
What the hell… was that…?
I could not understand anything.
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