“So that bastard… pulled another fucking trick.”
It took me a long time to fully understand what Gestas was trying to tell me.
Nine years.
The time I had given up for the boy.
Amazingly, it had all been nothing more than an illusion.
[Uh… You really didn’t know. I thought you might at least suspect it.]
“Fuck.”
Suspect it?
Yeah.
I had.
I assumed he’d pulled some kind of stunt.
That he was probably still trying to pull another one even now.
But who the hell could have guessed?
Who could possibly have guessed that the nine years I had to endure were not nine years in this world, but nine years in my own reality?
“You fucking bastard…….”
Ah.
Now I finally understood why he had renewed the contract this time around with my body’s safety as the condition.
“I knew you were trying to stop me from hurting myself, but you planned even for this……!”
Back then, I had thought he was merely preparing in case I changed my mind, abandoned Faust, and went home.
And since I had no intention of abandoning Faust and returning anyway, I had gone along with his obvious intentions……
“You goddamn bastard!”
But what he had really been aiming for wasn’t some backup plan for a hypothetical future.
It was the nine-year trick he had set up long ago.
In other words, that goddamn bastard had arranged things so that by the time I discovered the truth, even my final means of returning home would already have been taken from me.
He knew everything.
And once every route had been blocked,…