The National Idiots Club
I ran the simulation again after that, but the result never changed.
Coordinate with Lucia.
Take Chronos hostage.
No matter how I fought, every path ended with me dead.
Again.
And again.
No matter how many times I repeated it, the outcome refused to shift.
A hundred percent chance of defeat—or death.
Nothing but bad endings.
At this rate, nothing would be different from my previous life…
Zzzt—
In that instant, noise tore across the message window.
Simulating……
Simulating……
The simulation, which normally spat out results in seconds, had glitched.
Then—
Simulating……
Confirming the outcome of your choice.
You fought with everything you had, yet face a 97% probability of defeat.
The odds had changed.
Ninety-seven percent chance of death.
A critical result.
But it had dropped—if only by three percent.
And the thing that had shifted the probability was—
"How—no, why."
Chronos's words told me everything.
His wavering eyes were fixed on one place: Laward.
He had come back.
"There should have been statues there…!"
Chronos's voice roughened. With a growl like a beast's breathing, he glared at Laward.
"I thought I could finish it in that place…!"
It wasn't only Laward.
Behind him came Amelia and Kairon.
The Holy Knights, too.
They arrived right on his heels.
"Were they waiting…? No. That can't be…"
Chronos flinched—then his expression twisted into something vicious.
"Fine… better this way. Here, all of them… every last one… if I use Lord Ballad… I can end it all right here…"
Muttering in that ragged voice, Chronos seemed to reach a decision. He lowered his eyes, suddenly calm.
"Ha… haha… at last I can make up for it…. Yes… I only needed to end it all here…. How convenient that every nuisance has gathered in one place…"
Then he spun toward me.
Thunk!
The coffin Chronos had summoned slid toward me.
As if he meant to guarantee my escape, the massive coffin charged in.
In that subspace, made even more dangerous by Ballad's appearance, Chronos wore a desperate face—trying to pull me out instead.
"Lord Karma, this place is too dangerous—get out at once! When the time comes, I shall seek you out again!"
The coffin rushed in and swallowed Lucia and me together.
"When that day comes, you shall greet us as the victors!"
Clunk!
The coffin lid slammed shut.
I reached out to stop Chronos—and found myself back in the same posture I'd left in.
I was standing in front of the Houndry guild's main gate.
Eyes that had adjusted to the dark met the sting of sunlight.
"……"
Lucia and I stood frozen, unable to keep up with how violently the situation had flipped.
"Lord Karma… are you all right?"
Lucia was the one who broke the silence.
"How could I be. I'm fine—it's just that only I…"
Only me again.
Only I had made it out alive.
This was exactly the same as my previous life.
"That isn't what I meant."
Lucia shook her head.
"The person you told me about back then… right?"
Back then…
"I'm not even sure he counts as a person, though."
Ah. Right.
The night I'd told her stories just to get her to sleep.
I couldn't tell her everything, so I'd glossed over the truth—but…
"…You heard the whole thing, then."
That night, I had told Lucia about Ballad.
Only to her—the story of the first time I'd met him in my previous life.
I had passed on that fear.
"So you'd already… been through something like that before."
Lucia's face grew complicated, as if she were remembering the snake's arrows.
It hadn't been the past so much as a previous life, but she seemed to take it as something that had simply happened before.
"Lucia. I'll find a way back no matter what. You stay here."
"I saw Amelia."
Lucia's eyes dimmed.
"Amelia was my… roommate. If there's a way to go, Lucia is going too. Yes. I have to."
She said it with conviction.
But she didn't seem to notice that her own body was trembling.
"I'll help you, Lord Karma."
She smiled—but only the corners of her mouth lifted by force, and her face twitched.
"No. The only one who can get back there in a single breath is me. Wait here."
"Then—!"
Lucia cried out with everything she had.
"Then you shouldn't go either, Lord Karma!"
"…What are you saying."
"Lord Karma, this might be your last chance. There might be no way to win. What if barely escaping was already the best we could do? What if, without that man in the uniform, we couldn't have gotten out at all? What if saving our lives… was the only choice we still had left?"
"Going back would just mean dying like a dog."
The simulation had said exactly that.
No matter how I fought, I would lose.
If I'd still had the Iron Spirit, things might have been different—but there was no point regretting that now.
The contract period was already hanging by a thread, and the only way to inherit it early was for the whole family to be wiped out.
Right now, the chance of winning was a mere three percent.
Even with reinforcements arriving, three percent.
Throw the protagonist, the heroines, and my old comrades onto a three-percent table.
Throw myself in with them, and burn everything on odds that brutal.
It was insanity.
"There must have been plenty of options for surviving, probably."
With the simulation ability, I could see the future.
I had used it again and again to check how I needed to fight in order to win.
But the option of running—
I had never even checked it. Not once.
What if, instead of "fight," I had set the result to "flee"?
The odds of survival would have been higher than this.
Maybe so high that living was a given—close to a hundred percent.
It might have been an absurdly easy choice.
But that was the one thing I never asked.
The one thing I never even let myself picture.
That, and only that—
I could not repeat.
Shff—
The appearance altered by the ring's effect washed away clean.
"Being afraid is only natural, Lucia."
Even the Holy Knights had all been the same.
Blash. Kaine. None of them could hide their fear.
"Aren't you afraid, Lord Karma? You of all people should know better… You already know exactly what happens."
"I do know. That's why I'm going."
Looking at Lucia's worried face, I felt a laugh rise up.
It came out for no good reason.
I knew this wasn't the time—but the sheer absurdity left me no choice but to laugh.
"Why are you laughing? How… how can you laugh?"
A hollow laugh was the only answer left.
Laward and Amelia—and Kairon, too—were all there.
In my previous life, the protagonist and heroine who had turned their backs on the apocalypse to hold a wedding.
And Kairon, who in that life had turned his back on humanity.
I had pulled every one of them to my side, gathered them in one place—and still it was only three percent.
In other words—
In my previous life, even that three percent hadn't existed.
So what, exactly, had we believed in when we fought back then?
What confidence, what grounds, made us think there was hope?
Of course. A shady otherworld goddess was never something you could trust.
We had died for nothing—without meaning, without hope.
We had screamed and despaired over failing odds that didn't even reach three percent.
"Haha…"
When there had never been a chance to begin with.
"Dying like a dog, huh…"
Once I thought of it that way, even dying like a dog no longer mattered.
My heart felt lighter—just a little.
From the start, we had been dying like dogs over and over.
We had staked our lives against an enemy we could never beat.
Unlike the Holy Knights, Laward had accepted the end early and spent his final moments with the heroines.
Laward… might actually have been a fairly objective, cold-blooded bastard.
At least more so than the Holy Knights.
Suddenly, everything I had suffered in my previous life stopped mattering.
Charging an unbeatable enemy without running—that had been the path the Holy Knights chose for themselves.
There had been hundreds, thousands of reasons to give up, and people had been throwing them hints the whole time. They had simply been punished for refusing to quit anyway.
So there was no reason to grieve, and no reason to regret.
I was neither holy nor even a knight—and yet I was unmistakably a Holy Knight all the same.
I couldn't hide the fact that I was the ringleader of the National Idiots Club, the ones who threw themselves at the apocalypse like moths to a flame when everyone else ran.
Use Bond Skill (Amelia)?
…Seeing me about to repeat that same insane act again—
Looking back, the Holy Knights had been nothing more than the National Idiots Club. And that was exactly why they were noble.
Diving in while knowing the odds are three percent is reckless and foolish—but charging ahead without even knowing those odds, just to see the end, might be something else entirely.
Even if that end is the apocalypse itself.
Now. In my previous life. Even before I ever came to this world.
Not only the Holy Knights—countless people, without knowing the odds,
without magic,
still challenge their limits and try to break through walls.
Whatever the ending, whatever the result, they are ready to burn their insignificant bodies.
That, at least, is not foolishness.
It is courage.
"I have an idea. This is sudden, but all of you—follow me."
"Eunsanim!"
"Hasgard…!"
The moment I appeared at Amelia's side without warning, Laward and Amelia both snapped their heads toward me.
I met their eyes, then looked to Blash and Kaine.
In my previous life, I had resented those two.
I had hated them to death for dumping a crushing responsibility on me and dying however they pleased.
Was it rebellion born from that?
I hadn't even acted like a proper commander.
I had abandoned the Holy Knights, turned my back on the ones left behind, and tried to give up on living myself.
I had said I, at least, wanted an easy death.
But now, somehow, I felt pride in the fact that I had been the knight commander.
I even felt gratitude toward the two of them.
Luckily—and undeservedly—I had been given the chance to lead brothers bound together by courage and trust.
"Besides the bastard sitting up there shooting arrows like he owns the place, there is another enemy here you cannot see."
The moment I spoke, I felt all five pairs of eyes lock onto me at once.
The pressure came with them.
Every word I said would decide life and death.
"We go through the rain of arrows and deal with that enemy first."
Originally, I had meant to use Chronos as a bridge between myself and the Death God Cult.
But in a moment when the odds of survival were this low, thinking about the next move was nothing but greed.
For now, I would think only of keeping everyone alive.
If Chronos died, the battlefield would change.
The odds would change with it.
Challenge-quest bounties.
With enough coins, I could upgrade the Scouter to its final specification.
Accelerate. Slow. Stop.
It was the only weapon that would let me fight Ballad without the Iron Spirit—something that had been essential against him before.
"We're going to cut that ghost's throat."
It was time to throw Chronos's own words back at him.
I was no different.
Chronos. Ballad.
I would end them all right here.
In my previous life, everyone had looked to me just like this—and I had taken responsibility for nothing.
Space and time had shifted through an absurd regression, and I had thought I alone remained unchanged.
"I know my words are hard to accept."
But the words came out on their own.
"Even so—believe in me. Open a path for me."
Words I could never have spoken in my previous life spilled out before I knew it.
It was a strange feeling.
If it was something I couldn't take responsibility for, I would have chosen silence instead—and yet.
"Everyone, fall in with me."