Prologue
Back then, it was a day like any other. All I'd done was meet up with an old friend fresh out of his military service — the first time in ages — drink ourselves under the table, and stumble back to my studio apartment to sleep. Not that slipping away from overtime had been easy; my company was a sweatshop in all but name.
Anyway. I drank my fill, dragged myself home, lay down... and opened my eyes to an unfamiliar ceiling. Though calling it a ceiling was generous. There wasn't a light to be seen — just clumps of moss crusted over what looked like raw stone brick.
"What the... where am I...?"
????
That wasn't my voice. The deep, weighty baritone was gone, and in its place came a pitifully boyish squeak.
"Oh, come on... fuck. No way."
There was no way a cliché straight out of an isekai story was happening to me. Still telling myself that, I looked down — and where my thick, broad hands should have been, all I could see were small, pale fingers, delicate as carved jade.
At this point, I had to admit it. This was not my body.
Around me, the other children began to stir awake. Every one of them looked bewildered, and before long a few had even started crying. Not a single one seemed to understand what was happening.
Then the iron door swung open, and a man of considerable bulk stepped inside. To sum up what he told us: we had been chosen to serve one nation as its assassins, and from that day forward, the assassin's path was the only road we would ever walk. Naturally, we had no right to refuse. And just like that, every last one of us became an assassin.
Maybe it was because I was a man of the twenty-first century, but the whole thing turned my stomach. Taking the life of another thinking being was repulsive enough — but I also hated that I'd be expected to torture without hesitation when the job demanded it, and to end my own life the moment my cover seemed about to blow.
One by one, the faces I knew began to disappear, and when word came that they were dead, I barely managed to hold down the bile rising in my throat. Of course, some tried to run. Every last one of them was caught and torn apart as an example to the rest.
Believe me, I wanted to run too. But I had no choice but to keep doing the work. Because I wanted to live. No matter how ill-suited I was for it, it was the only way to survive.
And so the life of that seven-year-old child came to an end — as a twenty-three-year-old assassin.
The cause of death was nothing special.
Betrayal.
Naturally, a clean death was never in the cards. They ground my body down, slow and painstaking, trying to pry its secrets loose — and me? Naturally... I didn't burn. Betrayal was what had put me in this state; like hell I'd turn around and betray someone else. I was dying either way. Ptooey.
The last thing I ever saw? My own guts, yanked out of my belly.
Well, at least I can brag that my life was a fucked one. With that pointless thought, my eyes slid shut — and I was born again. In a completely different era. A completely different world.
"Fuck..."
The curse slipped out loud, and there was no helping it. Reincarnation itself didn't faze me anymore — I'd been through it once already. But the clothes this body's owner had been wearing — mine now, technically — were, no matter how I looked at them, nothing but filth-caked rags.
"So after everything, this time it's slave, huh...?"
By this point, I was starting to hold a grudge against God himself. Was having a drink with a friend fresh out of the army really such a sin? Was eating both drumsticks of the chicken — I was the one who'd ordered it, after all — really such a crime?
Barely swallowing a scoff, I strained my ears toward the footsteps drawing near. A menacing-looking man barged in and jabbed a finger at me.
"Hey! You're on stable duty this time. Chop chop — get out here and get it cleaned."
Seeing a kid who looked even younger than me talk down to me made something lurch in my chest for a moment — until I remembered this wasn't my body, and I trudged off to the stables without a word.
The information I picked up on the job turned out to be surprisingly useful. One: I had been sold as a slave to a noble with a notorious reputation. Two: in this place, slaves were treated as worth less than livestock. Those two facts alone were enough to sketch the shape of my predicament.
And the shape was exactly what it sounded like. I worked like something beneath a dog. Wages were a fantasy; my daily routine consisted of beatings from the noble and having my meals stolen by the stronger slaves. If I ever fell ill, I couldn't get so much as a folk remedy, let alone medicine — for a slave, such things were luxuries.
At some point, those hours of hell became my ordinary, and I adapted to them. Though "adapted" might be too generous a word — "went numb" would be closer.
Live like that, and of course the body doesn't hold. I died even younger than I had in my past life. My body, plastered over with scars of every shape and size, turned even my own stomach, and slaves who worked harder than I did were everywhere. So on a winter's day I was dumped onto the frozen street, and there I froze to death.
Part of me couldn't help but be glad that this fucked-up life was finally over. A man of the twenty-first century — a man who'd grown up with human rights — treated as less than a dog. No exaggeration: if not for the assassin's life I'd lived before, I'd have broken long before the end. I wouldn't have lasted at all.
Ignoring the snow gathering on my body, I closed my eyes.
But that goddamn god refused to let me die in peace. It saw to it that I was born again — and still, every life it gave me was a thoroughly fucked one. There was the life of a scientist, seized by a criminal organization, tortured into surrendering his research, and finally executed alongside the very criminals who'd taken him. Every world I woke up in was lacking something, or simply wretched — and no matter how hard I struggled, I kept dying in misery and pain, only to be born again into more of the same.
And so I arrived at my seventh? reincarnation.
?? Something about this is off.
"Waaah~!!!!!"
"Congratulations! It's a beautiful young master!"
In seven reincarnations, not once had my life begun as a newborn. And not once had I ever had a family. That's why I'd never dared to hope, and never once fought against the fate handed to me.
So why? What was different this time?