Echoes

“At least it wasn’t a dream… probably.”

Maybe it was because I’d stayed awake until the morning sunlight started slipping through the window.

The faint wrongness lingering in my chest was something I couldn’t quite put into words.

My face twisted. The memory of changing clothes came back to me.

As if my body remembered even when I didn’t, I’d changed without hesitation. I’d taken something out of my travel bag that was perfect for sleeping in, then flopped onto the bed.

“…Goddammit.”

I’d pulled the blanket over me and tried to force myself asleep, hoping that if it was a dream I’d wake up already, but my consciousness just kept swinging back and forth between waking and sleeping like a pendulum.

While I let my awareness drift wherever it wanted, time marched on relentlessly, and when I finally dragged myself up, the clock said seven in the morning.

I’d calmed down quite a bit while lying there, so the nausea had mostly receded, but my head still swam.

That was how bad the aftereffects were. It was still hard to believe.

I pushed down the instinct that wanted to stay in bed a little longer and stood up.

When I walked over to the window, a girl’s reflection flickered in the glass.

There was a bend in the girl’s hair, a mark left from the way it had been tied to one side.

I remembered the hair I’d only just glanced at before I’d gone into the bathroom and pulled it up.

Without even deciding to do anything, I found myself working on my hair in the mirror, a hair tie held between my lips.

I took the brush I’d brought out of my bag and gently worked through the tangles that had formed while I was sleeping.

Leaving the side bangs and a few strands at the back loose, I gathered the rest and twisted it up.

I took the hair tie from my mouth, stretched it out with my hand, and wrapped it around the bundled-up hair.

The eyes in the window narrowed.

The somewhat sharpened impression I’d managed to create collapsed all at once under a sigh.

“This is ridiculous.”

I wanted to mutter something else, but nothing came to me.

If someone else were here, I could at least talk things through and sort out my thoughts, but ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠I couldn’t even fully understand my own situation. What difference would another person ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠make?

And besides, this was more than ten years in the past.

Back then, I was some nobody from a backwater town. I didn’t even have a proper person to strike up a conversation with, let alone a friend. Even the faces that did come to mind were nothing more than people I’d dealt with in an official capacity.

I was only just realizing how catastrophically bad my social life had been around this time.

Dammit.

“First, let’s set aside the fact that I became a girl.”

For now, I needed to sort out the situation.

I’d been appointed acting administrator under the Designated Survivor protocol, then regressed more than ten years through the Final Regression Protocol.

The exact point I’d come back to was one month after my parents died, the moment I’d received the news and rushed over only to stand before their gravestone.

As expected, a question rose in my mind.

Why that moment, of all moments?

My fingers, circling restlessly out of habit, wound a lock of hair around themselves.

“Can I verify it?”

The fastest way was probably to try it out.

“Access, admin interface.”

It worked. Surprisingly, it really worked.

A holographic screen slid up into the air.

The support AI displayed a message, almost as if it were greeting me.

I didn’t know what was going on, but it looked like my access privileges were still intact.

…Wait, Justina Schumacher?

“Hold on. Is that supposed to be my name?”

Enough.

The AI, which had been babbling away, shut up at once.

Heat churned deep in my throat.

My face suddenly burned. I didn’t want to hear my own past spoken through someone else’s mouth.

It seemed better to make it do less talking and handle the rest myself.

I opened the mail window in one corner of the screen and searched for the Final Regression Protocol.

It was near the top, so finding it wasn’t difficult.

When I tapped it with the tip of my slender finger, a dense block of regulations opened before me.

I searched separately for the word point in time.

There weren’t many results, and I found the regulation I’d been looking for immediately.

“When the Final Regression Protocol is activated, the Designated Survivor will regress to a random point in time. In this case, authority over remaining assets will also be retained.”

“A random point in time, huh.”

I hadn’t had the presence of mind to think about it properly back then, but looking at it now, that wording was awfully suspicious.

It said random point in time, but there was nowhere that actually let me choose one.

For a moment I wondered if it might really have been random, but I dismissed the thought almost immediately.

If it had been random, there was no way I would have landed at a timing this precise.

A fragmentary name from a disaster soon to unfold here surfaced in my memory.

Just in case, I figured I should look again.

“Search incident records. Keyword: Yggdrasil.”

I sorted the results by date and time.

Then I opened the incident record at the very top.

When the contents spread out across the holographic screen, my expression hardened on its own.

“Strategic special Origin Species: Gate of Yggdrasil.”

That was the name given to the first pillar of the apocalypse.

▼

Nordfjord was a small city on a winding peninsula in the northern part of the continent.

Wedged between massive glacier-carved canyons, the little city grew slowly by selling tungsten ore and pine lumber out to the outside world.

On the occasional day when the sea grew calm and safe, people would even take boats out and come back with fish.

This was the place that held the pastoral scenery of the town where I’d been born and raised.

“Huh.”

Half dazed, I trudged along and looked around.

There weren’t many people on the streets.

Low buildings, three or four stories high, lined the roads and tucked themselves into the alleys, stretching all the way to the outer wall visible at the edge of my sight.

Now and then, cars passed along the road, though most of them were trucks loaded with lumber or ore.

But even as I looked away, a new scene I could never have counted on the fingers of one hand drifted past me, and the city continued to pulse, slow but steady.

It sounds ridiculous even to me, but I was suddenly scared.

The hometown I should have known felt unfamiliar.

After being battered and swept along by so many different sights, I started to think I might get lost.

Over and over, I found myself tangled in roads and alleys without even knowing where I was going, and after wandering like that for an hour with my mind completely blank, I ducked into a neighborhood park the moment I saw one with hardly anyone in it.

“I’ve probably been here a few times.”

I let out an empty little murmur.

My body slumped across the bench.

Since what I remembered was only fragmented, it seemed like my mind couldn’t keep up properly in real time.

If you counted it by years, it had been more than a decade since I’d left Nordfjord, and in all that time the only reason I’d ever come back was when my parents died.

A damp wind blowing in from the sea tousled my bangs as it passed.

The long fringe I’d been brushing into place with my slender fingers felt strangely unfamiliar.

“I came out here to clear my head, and somehow it got even worse.”

Instead, everything felt tangled beyond belief.

Whenever my mind became crowded, I used to walk without aim.

The fact that I was moving toward somewhere seemed to give me at least a little comfort.

As I walked and took my thoughts apart one by one, analyzing each piece, I sometimes stumbled across solutions I never would have expected.

So I’d come outside intending to do the same this time, but apparently that wasn’t going to work today.

When I let the scenery of Nordfjord sink in—the canyon embracing the sea, the low buildings painted in patches of color—my unease only grew more complicated.

I knew how my ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠hometown’s story ended.

“...”

Leaning back against the bench, I called up the incident record in my mind.

Strategic special Origin Species: Gate of Yggdrasil.

Though it was classed as an Origin Species, its outward shape was closer to a plant, specifically a tree.

In fact, before it grew to a certain point, it was nearly impossible to distinguish from an ordinary tree.

Until it was fully mature, it merely eroded its surroundings a little.

The real problem began once the Gate of Yggdrasil entered its proper growth phase.

From some point onward, it began absorbing energy—soil, electricity, anything it could reach—and grew at a terrifying rate.

If an ordinary person approached the area without protective gear, they would either be eroded within six hours or die after having their energy drained away, one of the two.

On top of that, the erosion zone expanded rapidly, and it wasn’t uncommon for healthy animals to be corrupted and turn into Origin Species themselves.

At that stage, it had to be stopped or uprooted somehow.

That was exactly what had failed here in Nordfjord, my hometown, where the First Yggdrasil Incident had taken place.

Once the Gate of Yggdrasil fully matured, a massive gate would form from the tree itself, true to its name.

The tree body would be completely protected by the energy pouring out of that colossal gate, and I’d be willing to bet humanity had nothing capable of breaking through it.

Even approaching it was no easy matter.

Countless Origin Species poured endlessly from the gate.

Back in the previous world, the first Gate of Yggdrasil that opened in Nordfjord had been enough to create an entirely new northern front.

There had been sixteen of these in the previous world. Nine had been cut down before they fully matured, but the remaining seven had grown all the way and become untouchable.

Just those seven had pushed humanity to the brink of extinction.

“But that’s strange.”

No matter how hard I searched the records, I couldn’t find any sign of a precursor.

If I really had to force it, the Origin Species attack that killed my parents could be called one, I supposed.

In fact, the incident record had even highlighted that point briefly.

But that was only circumstantial evidence.

One month after my parents died, the Gate of Yggdrasil in Nordfjord had ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠fully matured.

And yet, for something that catastrophic, I couldn’t find a single trace of erosion anywhere in town.

Even the fragmentary records from right before that showed no sign of a precursor, not even a report that anyone had seen the Gate of Yggdrasil’s enormous body.

It should have been visible over there somewhere.

I turned my head and looked beyond the ridgeline. There was nothing there but eternal snow and dark stands of pine.

After staring for a long time, my eyes stung from the sunlight scattering off the snow near the summit.

Was this why they’d sent me back to this point in time?

I thought about it carefully, but no clear answer came to me.

Then, all at once, one thought surfaced.

“Right. I should deal with that.”

Something I still hadn’t done.

And something I hadn’t managed to do in my last life either. The task of settling my parents’ affairs rose in my mind.