The First Life
I am an orphan.
If the people who passed for my parents had even a scrap of conscience, it showed in this much: they left me in front of an orphanage, and so I was at least permitted to become an orphan. Or perhaps someone found me discarded by the roadside and carried me there. I never knew which.
I never once resented the parents who abandoned me. To feel a thing like that, wouldn't I have needed to know their faces? I studied my own in the mirror and tried to infer theirs, but they had cast me off before I could even open my eyes properly. There was no way I could have known them. Past the age of ten, I no longer even wanted to.
Better than those who left me nothing but a body was the director of the orphanage, who raised me and went so far as to give me the name Yu Hajin. That was someone I could call a parent. And I was content with life there. I ran and played with the other children, and sometimes I read, or studied. The place they had dropped me was no hell—not enough of one to justify resenting them. Orphans in circumstances much like mine were my friends, and the director was my parent.
Then, in a single night, I lost both parent and friends.
A Gate that vomited demonic beasts opened, and of all the vast face of the Earth, it had the gall to tear itself open squarely in front of the orphanage. It happened while I was out buying food. The larder had run dry.
By the time I returned, the beasts were already gone. What remained was a hole punched through the sky, the orphanage building half-collapsed, and a sea of blood and a mountain of corpses spread across every corner. I could not even be there for their last moments. Entrails strewn in the dirt, blood pooled in the hollows, brains half-soaked into the floorboards—I could not tell which remains belonged to whom.
From the wreckage of that horrific carnage, there was nothing a worthless fifteen-year-old orphan could do. The only thing I managed was to bawl like a fool, then leave without even gathering the bodies. I did not know when the beasts might appear again. If I fought them, I would only become one more piece of that mountain of corpses and sea of blood. Because I was weak.
With every step, blood I could not assign to any face squelched underfoot, and guts sprawled across the ground were crushed beneath me. Even so, I squeezed my eyes shut and ran, swearing I would never flee again, swearing I would not remain one of the weak forever. Swearing it as I went.
From ancient times, no one had ever uncovered what caused the Gates. The demonic beasts that poured out of them were hostile to humanity and a constant plague, and to deal with them the idea of the Hunter had existed since the eleventh century. A small number of ability users, possessed of unidentified powers, gathered beneath that system, and the governments of each nation evaluated the abilities and records of the Hunters so assembled and assigned them ranks. Irregulars received S-rank. Beneath them, ranks from A to F were granted according to record and ability.
I was a D-rank Hunter, third from the bottom. God, of course, had not granted me even the strength to take revenge. I had no ability. I climbed to D-rank with a sword alone.
Others praised me for it. An abilityless Hunter officially recognized by the state was a first, and a D-rank besides—solidly in the middle of the scale. Considering that even an F-rank was a superhuman who far surpassed a hale adult man, it was a remarkable achievement. And still I despaired.
Well done, for someone with no ability? What good was a thing like that? My actual strength sat at the very bottom even among D-ranks. I could not kill a mid-tier beast alone, let alone the high-tier beast that had fallen on the orphanage that day. The beasts did not go easy on me out of consideration for my lack of an ability. So what meaning did words like that have?
"Ha. Haha."
A hollow laugh spilled out of me. It was wretched. I had tried until I thought I would die. Four hours of sleep a day, and no time set aside for meals. Fifteen years of nothing but swinging a sword. I had given half my life to the martial path.
My talent? It must have been exceptional. Aside from me, no one could have reached even this level on that much effort. And yet even I could no longer see a road forward. I swung a sharpened lump of iron, and other people flew through the air hurling fireballs.
Why couldn't I? What, exactly, was I lacking, that I could not even take proper revenge on the beasts? I kept no friends but comrades-in-arms, and I never so much as had a lover. So why couldn't I? Why could I not possess an ability? Why could I not grow stronger? Why was I still so powerless that I had to watch my companions die? Why, why, why. That single word filled my skull.
Ah—according to recent research, most human beings possessed an ability, and the condition of its awakening was said to be crossing the line between life and death. So had I failed to awaken one because I had never crossed that line? No. Impossible. I had crossed it more than once. There were times my limbs were severed and my guts spilled from my abdomen, and a healer's power dragged me back by a hair. What that meant was simple.
I had never possessed an ability to begin with.
"Aaaagh!"
I screamed and swung the sword crosswise, and the wind shrieked. Had I been an S-rank Hunter, that single stroke would have sheared away a forest. I let out a hollow laugh and sank to the ground still gripping the blade. I could not bring myself to let it go.
Back when people believed only a few were born with abilities, it had not been this wretched. But that was wrong. I was a congenital null—one of only three or four confirmed among a population of eight billion? Why me, of all people. Still unable to release the sword, I dragged my trembling right hand across my face.
They say effort never betrays you. Yes. That much was true. The only thing that had betrayed me was heaven. Not people, and not my own effort—a god I was not even sure existed. I had lost the director I took for a parent, lost my friends, and lost even the comrades who crossed the brink of death beside me. And I could do nothing. All I had was effort. Heaven had not granted me power. So I was a wreck who knew only how to swing a sword blindly.
I drove the sword into the earth again and again and railed at the sky. My right hand, once torn clean off, trembled because the treatment had come too late, and because of it even the place the blade struck shifted little by little. I had given half a lifetime to the sword, and to save my companions from the beasts with skill that fell short, I had been forced to give even that.
I had no regrets. Ever since the incident they called the Saebit Orphanage Gate Disaster, I had always lived this way. I only resented—a god who might not even exist, and myself, weak and weaker still. The moment I lost my right hand I had faintly seen the road ahead, and now I was supposed to lay down the sword as well? A ridiculous thing to say.
Some people would tell me so. If the right hand doesn't work, why not hold the sword in the left? Yes. Anyone who didn't know I had originally been a left-handed swordsman would offer that as advice.
"Haha..."
I laughed hollowly and tore at my hair with the only hand I had left, the right. With a dull rip, a fistful of hair black as ebony came away.
Empty. Hollow. Futile.
To grow strong, one had to receive an ability from God at birth. What a horrific world. No amount of effort was enough. A worm like me could writhe all it liked; it would only be stepped on and die.
While I sat on the ground with my head bowed, a man who had come up without my noticing tapped my shoulder and spoke.
"Um, Mr. Yu Hajin? Your retirement pay has come through from the state. Given that you're the world's first abilityless Hunter—a symbolic figure, unavoidably—we thought it better to bring it in person than to deposit it into your account."
He was an employee of the Hunter Association under the government. My crimson eyes turned toward him, and I slowly opened my shut mouth.
"Please donate the entire amount."
"As befits the Association, it's over seven hundred million won—...pardon?"
At the flatness of my voice his eyes went wide. Well, no one knew that I had always donated my entire salary, leaving only enough to buy swords. I smiled bitterly and went on.
"If you can, direct it mainly toward orphanages. Especially toward preparing them against attacks by demonic beasts."
So there would be no more wretches who lost a director and every orphan to the beasts, swore revenge, and only after losing even the sword to which they had given their lives cried out raggedly to God. I swallowed the rest of it.
"Then I'll be going. I'd like to be alone for a little while."
"Ah, no... wait...!"
I left the man frozen where he stood and headed for the mountain.
Crunch. Crunch.
As befitted autumn, dry leaves crackled under every step.
Squelch. Squelch.
Of its own accord, the memory of that day—running, fleeing across pools of blood—rose to the surface of my mind. I did not stop until I reached the mountainside.
"Haa..."
A sigh echoed through the silent mountain. Retirement. And I was only thirty, still in my prime.
"Heh..."
A laugh that never quite formed slid up my dry throat. The sword I had set down rolled across the dirt with a thin ring. A sword that had protected nothing.
What was I supposed to do now? Die? I had long forgotten how to live without a sword in my hand. That would not be so bad. I wanted, at last, to rest.
It was as I lifted the blade and set it against my own throat.
Crack. Craaack...
From far off, something was splitting apart. The direction of the city. And that sound was unmistakable—the omen before a Gate opened.
"...Ha."
I lowered the sword from my neck and ran toward the source. If I was going to die anyway, it would be more in keeping with duty to save even a few more people on the way out. And this was the only thing I knew how to do.
I came tearing down the mountain in a breath, glanced at the fissure in the sky, and shouted.
"Run! It's a Gate!!"
The moment my cry reached them, the people, confused as they were, fled. When I had first begun working as a Hunter, the usual answer had been And who are you supposed to be? I must have become fairly well known. Not that it mattered. I was nothing but a wreck who could no longer even swing a sword properly.
And then the fissure in the sky yawned wider, and a demonic beast burst out of it. Mid-tier.
"...No need to kill myself. I'll die right here."
I let out a hollow breath and looked down at my trembling right hand. I was in no state to fight as I should. And the beast, lion-shaped, raised its forepaws and charged. Damn thing. It wouldn't even spare me a moment to think. I clicked my tongue and cut sideways.
Steel rang. My blade caught on the foreclaws of a lion whose shoulder stood taller than I was, and the scrape of metal raked my ears. My right hand was in no condition worth speaking of; I could not even shove the blow aside. I spat curses inwardly, kicked off the ground, and retreated.
The lion's other forepaw drove into the stone of the street. One paw lifted, the other planted. The moment best suited to a vital blow. I finished the judgment in an instant and launched myself at it. A diagonal slash, rising from lower left to upper right, scored once across the lion's face. It roared in agony and fell back.
I took measured steps and seized its flank. Too late to cut. So I thrust. The point rushed in—and with a clear ring of metal, the sword, struck by the lion's forepaw, left my hand. A failure of speed and of grip. The injury to the right hand.
"Heh."
A laugh that died halfway left my mouth in the same instant the lion's hind leg kicked me and hammered me into the ground.
"Ghk...!"
A groan burst out of me at the sensation of my organs twisting and crushing. To take a blow like that and still not have my abdomen torn open—the physical training I had done all these years had not been entirely in vain. So the result of fifteen years of training without rest was dying a little more slowly to a mid-tier beast. Truly something to be grateful for.
Immediately after, the lion's teeth tore away the whole of my right side.
"Keuh..."
Even the groan was losing its strength. A ringing scraped at my ears. Powerless. So my end was to be eaten alive, my body ripped apart by a mid-tier lion. Had it been a high-tier beast, I might not have felt quite this powerless. To drop my sword over an injured right hand and end up like this. A fucked situation.
The jaws at last tore into my lower body. The sound of bone being chewed, and pain driving up the nerves to lodge in my brain. Screaming was impossible. My lungs were gone. That I could still string one thought to the next was only thanks to the blood and oxygen lingering in my brain, and soon even that would be cut off.
Powerless. What, exactly, was I supposed to have done? I swung the sword every day. I tried. And this was still not enough?
God. What part of me, exactly, was lacking? Why is it that I cannot?
Drip. Drip. Tears mixed with blood ran from my eyes. If even this much effort was not enough, how was I supposed to have lived?
The lion savagely tore away my left arm, the wrist already gone. I could no longer feel pain. Why did I always have to be powerless? Why did I always have to be robbed? Why, why, why!
Why! Why! Why can't I!!
And with a wet crunch the lion chewed up my skull, and my vision went black.
A powerless, futile, wretched life.
I opened my eyes on a street. What? I wasn't dead? I flailed my arms and legs. They were short.
"Oh my, why has a baby been abandoned here? Such a pretty baby, how could they..."
A middle-aged woman, towering and immense, gathered me up where I lay wrapped in a blanket. No—perhaps she was not especially tall. I might only have felt so because I was a baby.
...Wait. A baby? Me?
My mind registered the wrongness of it. My round, wide eyes swept the surroundings. No skyscrapers. Only buildings of the sort one might find in medieval Europe filled the street. Why was I a baby, and why was this place strewn with medieval Western architecture? No. It was hard even to call it Western European.
My hazy consciousness cleared in an instant. Suddenly I remembered the novels I had read back at the orphanage. What were they called... Yes. Regression? Was that it?
No. It was not. Regression meant time turning back, and I had not been a person of the Middle Ages. Then there was only one answer. Reincarnation. Yes. I had been reincarnated.
"Aigoo, on a cold day like this, you'd need to be a knight who can handle aura just to endure it alone..."
And into another world, one where unfamiliar concepts existed. The ability I had believed I did not possess was Otherworld Reincarnation.