Echoes
It was the second time I had realized that the house that had once been my refuge in childhood was nothing but ruins.
Obviously, it wasn’t exactly a pleasant feeling.
In the place that had once been a home and was now a wreckage, there lingered a desolate sense of loss.
Back before the regression, when I first saw it, I had only stood there in the very spot where I’d collapsed, staring blankly at the ruins.
The first time, I had left without so much as looking back.
No—perhaps fled was the more accurate word.
I couldn’t bear to watch, eyes wide open, as something so far beyond my reach happened to me.
This time, the second time, was different.
I turned away from the place that had once been my home. As my gaze shifted, my head followed, and my body turned with it.
The scenery around me—scenery I hadn’t taken the time to notice back then—came into view.
It wasn’t just my house. A whole block of Nordfjord had been laid bare, its hideous innards exposed for all to see.
Several ruins that hadn’t even been cleared away yet were soaked through by the cold rain that had fallen through the night.
To be honest, I had rarely seen the aftermath of an Origin Species attack with my own eyes.
So I had never imagined it would be such a pitiful sight.
Much less that there would truly be nothing left worth salvaging.
For me, it had been nothing but news from somewhere far away, something contained in black letters on a report.
Yes.
Let me be honest a second time.
I still didn’t understand why my house had to collapse, why my parents had to die.
It was too much emptiness to dismiss with a simple, “It was just bad luck.”
When I asked myself whether that was all there was to it, I couldn’t answer confidently, yes.
They had only been living quietly, peacefully, the two of them.
“…Is there really nothing left?”
I wandered dazedly into the ruins that had once been my home.
My own voice, as I muttered to myself, sounded thin and fragile.
My hand, which had reached out to move aside a fragment of debris, froze.
The hand I had now was far too weak.
Even weaker than it had been in my previous life, when I’d done nothing but bury myself in research and development.
Then, as now, there was nothing I could do.
A dry sting settled in my throat.
That was the feeling. The reason I had turned my back on Nordfjord in the first place was because I hated this feeling.
And yet here I was, feeling it again. My steps as I backed away felt as heavy as the footsteps of a fugitive.
Still, one way or another, I had to see them to the end.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”
The voice of the woman at city hall who was handling me was drowned in exhaustion.
The atmosphere inside city hall was a mess.
It seemed they still hadn’t managed to sort out the aftermath, even now, a month later.
When I told the clerk why I was there, a bespectacled woman came out to meet me.
There were dark circles beneath her eyes that no amount of makeup could hide.
Even the simple motion of handling paperwork seemed to drain what little strength she had left.
“The death verification process is complete. As for the remains, the original plan was to hold the funeral with a guardian, legal representative, or someone in that capacity present. But…”
“…”
“Some of the relevant parties are away in the city, so we determined they wouldn’t be able to attend and took the necessary steps first before sending word. As you know, getting here to Nordfjord from the south takes quite some time.”
I nodded silently, as if to say I understood.
Ever since the fall of magic, the wasteland between cities had become a place of extreme danger.
Bandit groups, Origin Species that had been missed in the purge, dust that could cause cancer the moment you inhaled it, the occasional gate that opened without warning.
There were countless unforeseen incidents that could stop travel in its tracks.
A route that should have taken less than a week at most.
And yet, little by little, it had stretched into nearly two weeks.
How had they even endured the journey in this body, one that felt as though it had never once exercised?
“Please sign here.”
The clerk’s businesslike tone pulled my drifting mind back to the present.
She held out the paper labeled a death certificate.
There was only one place where I needed to move the pen.
“…Yes.”
I took the pen from inside my coat, uncapped it, and set the tip to the paper. I moved my hand.
What would happen if I didn’t sign?
That thought crossed my mind all at once.
It wasn’t as though my parents, already buried in the ground, would rise from the dead because of it, and my shattered house certainly wouldn’t restore itself to what it had been.
If I broke it down, this was nothing more than a routine verification process.
And yet.
Even so, the hand holding the pen felt heavy.
Each stroke of my signature was unsteady, as if I were forcing the gears of a rusted machine to turn.
Even though I was only touching, pushing, and pulling with my hand, the pen’s weight felt absurdly distant.
It was only my hand moving, and yet my breathing grew shallow for no reason, and cold sweat ran down my spine.
Was it because of memory?
The end that had come without warning, my parents’ deaths that had crashed down on me without a word of warning.
Time had changed, my body had changed, and yet the situation given to me was exactly the same.
The thirst that had been circling my throat only grew worse. It sank down like a dryness in my stomach and writhed there.
“….”
The pen stopped short just before the final stroke.
If I drew this line, would I be crossing a river that could never be crossed back?
Would I be turning them into nothing more than figures left behind in memory?
“…I should, get this done.”
I steadied myself.
I had to finish what I had never managed to do.
I repeated the words like a sigh.
A faint strength returned to the tips of my fingers. With it, I drew the final line.
Only after seeing the completed signature did I finally feel a little more at ease. It was as if some old, caked-on grime had grown just a little lighter.
“That completes all the administrative procedures. As I mentioned earlier, all of the deceased’s assets will be inherited by Miss Justina Schumacher. The details are in this document, so please review it.”
I took the documents she handed me and left Nordfjord City Hall.
Somehow, before I knew it, I was outside again. The air was just as bleak as before.
Perhaps because I still hesitated, I led my unwilling feet toward a quieter place.
The envelope felt light.
When I took out the contents somewhere no one would likely come, there were only about two sheets of paper inside.
The first sheet recorded the house that had now collapsed entirely, the land it stood on, and the deposit entrusted to the bank.
It was a trace of two people who had lived so frugally all their lives.
“For something like that…”
I tilted my head slightly.
The amount listed in the deposit felt strangely small. Sensing that something was off, I turned to the next page.
That only deepened my curiosity.
“A safe deposit box?”
One item had been entrusted to the Nordfjord Central Bank’s safe deposit vault.
A safe deposit box.
It was a word that felt as though it had nothing at all to do with my parents. They had seemed like people who owned nothing more precious than the wedding rings they kept.
“The deposit date was a month and a week ago.”
What’s more, the date they’d deposited it was unsettling in itself.
Based on the date alone, it had been entrusted just a week before they died.
Coincidence?
I couldn’t find any clear connection, and yet my honest answer was closer to Maybe not.
My parents were not the sort of people who moved carelessly without thinking. If anything, they were cautious about everything and acted with painstaking thoroughness.
Almost as if they were wary of something.
…
“I should check.”
I headed straight for Nordfjord Central Bank.
By the time I returned to the inn, it was quite late.
On the way to the bank I had gotten lost. On the way back to the inn, I got lost again and ended up taking the wrong bus.
I could have just checked the map built into the interface, but I’d let my pride get in the way because this was supposedly my hometown.
The distant ridgelines were stained with the colors of sunset. In the continent’s northern reaches, daylight was painfully short.
“I don’t know what this is, but…”
What I’d taken from the bank’s vault was a small box and a sealed envelope.
The box looked old, with scratches all over it and even a few dented corners.
The envelope, by contrast, seemed newly made—stiff, with plenty of life left in it.
When I saw them inside the vault, the letter had been placed on top of the box.
As if they were telling me to read the letter before opening the box. And I had the distinct feeling that this arrangement was no accident.
My parents had always been meticulous people.
“How old-fashioned.”
When I turned the envelope over, a wax seal sat squarely in the middle of it.
I didn’t particularly want to damage the seal, so instead I cut open the top of the envelope with a knife.
Inside was a letter folded three times over.
The faint scent of vanilla, the same smell that had always drifted through our house long ago, rose softly from the paper. The stationery was thick and sturdy.
Once, twice, I unfolded it, and the first line of the message came into view.
And it was not something I could simply brush past.
「Justina, if you are reading this letter, then we are no longer in this world.」
It was my mother’s handwriting. Without a doubt.
The writing on the page was neat and orderly. For words that foretold death, the tone was astonishingly calm.
As though she had somehow sensed this would happen long, long ago.
「First, there is something I want to say. Being strict with you when you were young, not letting you go out carelessly, and trying to keep you from leaving Nordfjord—everything we did was to protect you.」
This was the same as it had always been, then.
A bitter smile rose to my lips before I could stop it.
Though exactly what they had been trying to protect me from still remained a mystery.
With that question in mind, I lowered my eyes and continued reading.
The bitter smile I’d worn vanished in an instant.
「Justina, you are a descendant of mages.」