The Late-Night Moon and the Ruined Earth
On a late night lit by a single full moon, I sat astride a dead ornamental tree that had collapsed beside the road and snapped my fingers.
A tiny magic circle flickered into existence for an instant, then vanished.
Whoosh.
The clothes of what had once been a man, along with the trash scattered around him, gathered together, greedily lapped at the heat, and burst into bright flame.
It had been a while since I'd had a campfire.
It would have been perfect if there'd been meat, too.
After taking care of that small bit of romance, I started pulling out the things I'd picked up during the day and inspecting them one by one.
"A little food. A weird-looking ID. Some iron rod I don't know what it is. One pistol and two magazines. A dagger. An old notebook."
And last of all.
"For some reason, a perfectly fine-looking bizarre motorcycle."
The man who'd been riding it had his neck twisted around and was dead as dead could be, yet the motorcycle, obviously a machine at a glance, didn't have a single scratch on it.
"If mana's flowing through it, then it's probably some kind of magic engineering thing, huh?"
I knew next to nothing about that field, so I couldn't really tell.
After staring at the bike beside me with a blank look, I turned away and reached for one of the things laid out on the ground.
It was a fairly thick, worn notebook.
It was probably the most reliable way to get any real information out of all this.
Hoping I could dig something useful out of it, I opened the notebook.
Earth was ruined.
"... ?"
That was a rough opening.
Looks like this really was the dead man's diary.
I kept reading with interest.
One page.
Two pages.
Before I knew it, I was flipping through the pages without noticing the passage of time.
And with every page, my expression changed little by little.
Much later, after I'd read through the last page and snapped the notebook shut, I gave a dry laugh, a little stunned.
"Man, Earth is fucked."
It really was a total disaster.
I thought I'd be able to live comfortably once I came back, but now that I was here, Earth was a complete mess.
If the diary was telling the truth, then what was happening now was that the monsters from the world I had lived in, Ragnarok, had appeared here and were running wild all over the place.
"No wonder Karitos showed up out of nowhere."
That said enough. If Karitos, which only lived in the Demon Realm, was running around on a perfectly ordinary asphalt road, there was nothing left to explain.
And if they were already in their breeding season, that meant the local ecosystem had already been fully established.
They were getting terraformed in reverse.
For humans, it was about as bleak as it got.
"I guess the one good thing is that only twenty years have passed."
While I had spent more than a hundred years grinding away in another world, only twenty years seemed to have passed on Earth.
The diary mentioned massive disappearances all across Earth, followed by the invasion of the monsters.
All of it had happened roughly twenty years ago.
In other words, Earth had started going to hell almost immediately after I was thrown into the other world.
For the first two or three years, humanity had apparently managed to hold on with modern firearms, but once stronger monsters appeared, creatures completely immune to guns, several countries had been wiped out as if they had never existed.
The relatively powerful nations, including Korea, had somehow held out until the so-called returners came back.
"Returners, huh."
I opened the notebook again and slowly reread that line, my eyes shining.
They were the beta testers who had survived the grind in the world of Ragnarok and returned alive, just like me.
With their appearance, humanity had finally been able to fight back.
The knowledge and power of the other world had spread quickly, and people had honed it until they could slowly reclaim a place to live.
Now they had mana, martial arts, magic, sacred arts, magic engineering, alchemy, and all the rest.
Under the broad label of Academy, they seemed to have built specialist training institutions and started teaching all of it there.
If you had the right aptitude, anyone could qualify as an awakened and rise through the world with a proper career.
What puzzled me a little was that, while I had been in the middle of the war, I had never once encountered anyone who looked like a returner.
In a war that huge, not a single person with system support had stood out?
That made no sense.
"Hmm. There are only two possibilities I can think of."
Either I had fallen not during that grim era of the human-vs.-demon-army war, but at some different point in time.
Or this was some multiverse theory where one world had been copied many times and a single beta tester had been dropped into each copy.
From the standpoint of someone who had learned magic from my master, the latter seemed more convincing, but the diary alone wasn't enough to let me say that for sure.
"Still, this poor bastard really had it rough."
A small grave sat beside the motorcycle.
Perched on the end of the wooden stake stuck into it was a broken pair of goggles, hanging there pitifully.
It was the place where the naked man's body had been buried with care.
I looked at it for a moment with sympathetic eyes.
The notebook had given me a lot of information, but it was still the dead man's diary.
It was a record of the hardships he had lived through, written down exactly as they had happened.
He had passed a mana aptitude test by a miracle even at his age.
His third child was already two. On his current income, even the living expenses were hard to cover. Maybe this was heaven's gift to him.
He quit the company he had been working for right away and took training at the Academy.
His wife had strongly opposed it, but instead of working for a corporation or institution, he had decided to become a hunter.
He knew the work of a hunter was dangerous, but nothing else paid this well.
It had been almost ten years since he last went beyond the Wall. His body was trembling with nerves. Please, let him make it home safely.
Monster hunting had been far more exhausting and time-consuming than he expected. Still, his first pay wasn't bad. He had made it back alive.
Almost a month had gone by. After splurging on a toy that was popular with kids these days and some premium Korean beef, he was on his way to the home he had missed so much. He wanted to see his family as soon as possible.
Up to that point, it had been the story of an ordinary family man.
The man's suffering began after that.
My wife disappeared.
She took out loans in my name and vanished with the children.
When I went to the general life center to check, her registered location was Seoul, up in the upper district.
I wanted to run straight to my wife and confront her, but I had already missed the deadline to pay back the debt by a long shot and ended up in the hands of loan sharks instead.
There was no way those men would care about my circumstances.
This is insane. How does the interest rate grow to hundreds of times the principal? That can't be real.
If things kept going like this, I was doomed to die without being able to move an inch. I couldn't let that happen. I had to meet my wife and my children.
I've made preparations. The next time I go beyond the Wall, that's my chance.
I fled on a Mana Bike I had hidden in advance through a broker. Yes! It worked. I shook off those loathsome loan sharks!
The night here was bitterly cold. Even if I had become a wanderer, once I reached Seoul I could get into the city through the broker. Please, let me arrive safely.
Damn it. I'm almost out of food. The Mana Bike burns mana, but I don't.
I found a giant bird's nest nearby. Is that a Karitos? Good thing I studied properly at the Academy. The eggs of that monster are edible.
The diary ended there.
From the way it read, it seemed like he had been caught while trying to steal Karitos eggs and then fled.
"Except I went and killed him by accident."
Ha. That just sort of happened.
Sorry, friend.
That added one more spoonful of guilt to my conscience.
"If I get the chance, I'll look for your family. So go ahead and rest easy."
The man's family information was written in the diary.
I had no intention of doing anything complicated with it, but at the very least, I could tell them their husband was dead.
That was about all I could do.
I offered a brief prayer for his soul, then looked away from the grave.
From the things scattered on the ground, I picked up two items, one in each hand.
In my right hand was the iron rod of unknown purpose.
In my left, the strange ID.
First I looked over the iron rod.
"So this is what they use as a phone on Earth now?"
The name was Device.
It was a magic engineering product like the Mana Bike. It could generate holograms straight out of old sci-fi movies and let you talk face-to-face with the other person in real time, or with multiple people at once.
It also had plenty of other functions, and strangely enough, it ran on mana rather than electricity.
Ordinary people bought batteries made by processing mana stones dropped from monster hunts to recharge them, while mana users like awakened could simply use their own mana. It was a very convenient little thing.
"I'd like to use it right away, but that would probably turn into a hassle, wouldn't it?"
This was the Device the loan sharks had given him.
It was turned off for now, but if I activated it here, my coordinates would be logged immediately and my location would be pinpointed.
If those guys came looking for me, things would definitely get annoying, so I'd use it later.
I set the Device down quietly and turned my attention to the ID in my left hand.
A thin square card about the size of my palm.
In the center of the smooth silver surface was the dead man's face, pasted there as boldly as anything.
It seemed to be an ID issued to every citizen living in the city, and without it, you couldn't get inside.
After turning it this way and that for a while, I made my judgment.
"This, I might be able to make use of."
The Mana Bike and the Device were the essence of magic engineering, so there was no angle for me to touch them, but this ID was just a hard metal plate stuffed full of magic formulas.
"Let's see now."
Shape memory. Cognitive identification. Wave synchronization. Blood verification.
And on top of that, ten layers of security formulas had been piled on.
They sure crammed a lot into it.
Crackle-
"But I broke it anyway, didn't I?"
A faint spark jumped, and the man's face engraved on the ID disappeared, gradually replaced by my own.
I had altered the information on the ID at will.
"This is absurdly amateur."
No matter how many layers of security there were, if the quality was this similar, they didn't mean a thing.
There was no distinction, and the process of decoding the security cipher didn't even include any trap formulas worth mentioning.
They said Korean returners had made this, but the level was so pitiful it was strange.
There was no way they had deliberately made the magic engraved on something as important as an ID this shoddy, which meant this had to be the skill level of the returners themselves.
"Why is the gap so huge?"
This was a bit much.
Hell, I wasn't even a magic major.
I had only learned it as general education because my master taught me.
"No, wait. They might not be magic majors either, just like me."
In that case, it was perfectly understandable.
Magic really was a bit finicky, wasn't it?
While you were busy drawing formulas and marking coordinates and all that nonsense, it was easier and more efficient just to charge in with your fists.
Having more or less convinced myself, I gathered up the scattered items one by one.
Where to?
Inventory.
With a hum, a translucent window filled half my field of vision.
Hundreds of empty slots.
It was a pristine inventory I had never once used before.
The note that said all current User Information could be retained upon return.
As it turned out, that didn't mean only the status window. It meant the shop and the inventory came back intact, too.
"Karma Points, huh. What a waste that I couldn't use them, seriously."
If I'd spent the hundreds of millions I'd piled up on whatever I wanted from the shop and stuffed it into my inventory, I could still have used it here on Earth.
But I hadn't had the time to think about that then.
"Well, it's a shame."
Tutting under my breath, I packed everything away and closed the inventory.
"All right, that's enough cleanup for now. Time to move."
I got to my feet, my red cloak fluttering.
I climbed onto the Mana Bike standing beside me and fed mana into the panel attached to the grip. With a faint vibration, the engine started up.
"Oh, not bad."
It was my first time riding one, but the handling wasn't bad at all.
"So this is how it works?"
I didn't have a driver's license, of course, but how hard could it be?
I'd probably manage the same way I used to control a steel-armored golem back in the day.
Seeing the wheels roll smoothly, it didn't seem all that difficult.
"Direction is... this way, then."
I traced the residual mana left in the Mana Bike from the man.
To me, mana wasn't just a kind of energy. It was a sense, almost like touch.
Tracking down the traces of another person's mana and backtracking them wasn't all that hard.
The reason I was bothering with this at all was to get to the city the man had fled from.
The reason I chose that route was simple.
My parents.
"If only twenty years have passed, that means my parents should still be alive."
By the time several decades had passed in the other world, I'd already given up on them somewhere in the back of my mind.
But now, hope was beginning to show itself.
"Damn it. What if they don't recognize their one and only son's dick having been cut off?"
If they didn't believe me, I supposed I'd have to tell Mom to smack me on the back just to prove it.
She'd hit me so many times that she ought to remember the feel of it.
With a grin spread across my face, I cut through the cold night air and headed for the city.
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