Prologue — What? Me?
Irok Dehaja. The worst magical terrorist in history.
According to the judgment, the charges against Irok Dehaja stood as follows.
On the twenty-fifth of December of the previous year, the accused assaulted the Fullerene Military Research Institute, seized a magical weapon then under top-secret development by the Federation, and in the course of that assault magically slaughtered the several hundred soldiers stationed to defend the facility.
Not content with this, Irok Dehaja carried the magical weapon into the heart of the city and activated it, thereby committing the worst act of magical terrorism in history and inflicting a total of one hundred and twenty thousand casualties. The viciousness of the crime being beyond all words, the Supreme Court of the Azurik Free Federation unanimously pronounces a sentence of death.
And so the worst criminal in the history of humankind became dew upon the execution ground, and was gone.
Now then. If the man himself is allowed a word—if I, Irok Dehaja, am allowed a word—every charge written up there is a groundless frame.
I had no reason to commit a crime like that. And even if, for the sake of argument, I had, I never possessed the ability.
From the start I was a useless piece of shit with no talent worth the name, scraping by as a freeter and lurching from one day job to the next. By what conceivable means was trash like that supposed to storm a military base, steal a magical weapon, haul it all the way into a city, and kill people with it?
That I was a piece of shit was plain enough from a single glance at my résumé, and still the court swallowed that ridiculous story whole and sentenced me to die.
Whatever had them so afraid, the execution tore ahead without a hitch. They carried it out the very day the sentence was handed down, and there my consciousness ended.
No. It ought to have ended.
One man's blazing hatred—the hatred of a man driven mad by revenge—saw to it that my life went on. Only in a slightly different form.