Betrayal
Living in the orphanage as I had in my first life, I gathered what I could about this world, and a few facts came clear.
First: its language was nothing like the one I had known, and yet, somehow, I could understand it. Speaking and listening came naturally. Reading and writing did not, so I had to learn the script on my own. A mind past thirty picks these things up quickly enough.
Second: the world resembled the medieval Western Europe of my old one, save for a foreign power called mana—magical force. It was used to work miracles, which they called magic, or by knights to reinforce their own flesh. In that case they named it aura.
None of it concerned me. The meridians through which mana was meant to pass were sealed shut, and the power was beyond my reach. Worse, those blocked meridians meant I was fated to die young. Even here, it seemed, God had cast me aside.
Third: my body was identical to the one from my previous life. More precisely, the way I looked in infancy was the same as I had looked just after that last reincarnation. What, then, of my parents? Did the same people exist again? That much remained unknown.
I picked up the rest of what I needed in rough outline—what passed for currency, what it was worth, how far their science and technology reached. Things of that sort. Plenty still escaped me, but I was getting by in this world well enough. I had always been quick to accept a thing and adapt to it, even as a child. In my last life I had neither resented my parents nor longed for them, in part because I understood that resentment would change nothing, and so I had simply made my peace with it.
And yet I could not understand why, now, the heavens felt so hateful.
"…Why. Why, of all the gifts you could have handed me, did it have to be this worthless thing…."
I set the wooden sword I had carved myself down on the floor and dragged both hands over my face. Why had I awakened an ability like this? The orphanage director I had wanted to protect, my friends, my comrades—I had lost every one of them long ago. And they send me back in a body that nearly blacks out after two hours of swinging a wooden sword, and expect me to do what, exactly?
This life was the same as the last. Weak. Powerless. I trained with the sword every single day, and still this frail stamina had no intention of improving. On top of that, I was told I would die before I turned twenty. If that was the plan, they should have just killed me. To be given another life in which I could change nothing was not a gift. It was a curse.
…
Then why hadn't I killed myself?
I had forgotten how to live like a normal person long ago. Even at the orphanage I drifted at the edges, swinging a wooden sword I had carved with my own hands. And still the body was filthy weak. Honestly, I doubted I could take a single back-alley thug. Set beside my previous life—rotten as it was, I had at least been a D-rank hunter—this was far too feeble, even allowing for thirteen years of age. Worse, I didn't even know where the sword I swung so blindly was aimed. There were no monsters in this world. What was I trying to cut?
The problem was that I didn't know either.
I had once dropped a pickpocket by cracking his skull with the wooden sword, but that hardly required endless refinement of the blade. I could have picked up a solid rock and split his head with that. Why insist on a sword? For the applause of passersby? Absurd. To say I stayed alive in order to swing a blade that had protected nothing, and never would—when all my sword ever cut was empty air.
I didn't know why I was living. A life without purpose, without reason, without strength. Why did I refuse to give it up?
I didn't know. First I needed to cool my head.
I opened the orphanage window and threw myself out. Snow lay thick upon the ground and took me in.
"Hah…."
When I breathed out, a white plume spread into the air and vanished. Where I stood now, measured against Earth, was something like Russia—a bitter climate. Not that it mattered much to me.
Shhk. Shhk.
Each time I swung the wooden sword, paths of the blade stacked layer upon layer through the air and sheared the cold, and each time the cold grew a little warmer. It was the art of reading the grain of things, grinding the wooden sword against the air itself. I had learned it to cut the hides of monsters, hard as metal. And here I was, using it for this. A hollow laugh rose of its own accord.
Empty. A world without monsters was a fine world to live in, but a worthless wreck who had known how to do nothing except cut them lost his purpose and his reason in a single stroke. I had given my whole life to the sword, and now I didn't even know where it was meant to point. And still I clung to a thread of hope that there might yet be something I could do, and so I could not manage to die. There had never been a defective fool quite like me.
Thud.
I drove the wooden sword into the ground and dragged in a rough breath. Goddamn body. Winded by a few cuts like these. I was cursing under my breath when a middle-aged man caught my eye. Snow or no snow, he was running for his life, as if something desperate were driving him. He ran up before a man in a black fedora, dropped to his knees, and begged.
"Please—please, save my old woman…! The devil's curse has turned the ends of her hands and feet black…."
Listening, I flinched. If the extremities were blackening, wasn't that the Black Death? Did this world have the same plague that had erased a third of Europe? I was staring at them, eyes wide, when the man in the fedora opened his mouth.
"Let us go. Lead the way."
At that dried-out voice, color returned to the middle-aged man's face.
"Thank you—thank you…!!"
He was weeping. This was no ordinary gratitude. And watching that scene, I thought:
Ah. The road I'm meant to walk in this life isn't the way of the sword. It's that.
If a sword can't save people, then I'll save them with something else.
I was twenty-one. Even after stretching my lifespan as far as it would go, I had failed to overcome the fate of an early death. For all twenty-one of those years I had lived exactly as the old saying had it: plow by day, read by night. I worked in the daylight, bought medical texts with the wages, and studied through the nights on stolen sleep. I did not forget to treat the villagers tormented by disease.
In my previous life, hovering again and again at the edge of death, I had of course learned emergency treatment and the like. In a place whose medicine lagged even behind the medieval Western Europe of that life, getting into a university was not especially difficult. I distinguished myself enough among them to go on to graduate school. I could not understand why a world like this possessed a university closer to the modern age than to medieval Europe—but then, this was another world, one in which even mana existed. There was no law saying it had to make sense.
In any case, this was the fruit of a lifetime: research I had carried out alone at the graduate school, without a scrap of support.
Antibiotics. I had invented an antibiotic capable of treating the Black Death. A miracle wrought by a man who, in his previous life, had known only first aid, built upon a foundation of medieval medical knowledge.
Yes. The very thing my advisor had stolen and presented to the academic world as his own.
"You haven't much time left, have you…. Those who can live ought to live. Frankly, how persuasive do you imagine a paper by a common-born orphan like you would be? I had no choice, for the patients' sake. Try to understand."
At my advisor's smiling words, I froze where I stood.
Understand? Why? Not even asking me to understand—ordering me to? After he had taken a paper I had written out in full, in silence, and published it under his name alone? Even if I was a man about to die, even if he had been born a noble—was a person allowed to do this to another person?
My head felt as if it were catching fire. Something surged up, and the words tore out of me.
"Yes. You're right. I'm going to die soon. If you had asked me, I would have handed the paper over gladly. I'm not that selfish a man."
"Good. Thank you for understanding."
My advisor laughed, loose and easy, as if he were the one doing me the kindness of understanding. How could a person be that shameless? I ground my teeth and went on, eyes bloodshot.
"Then why did you do it? Why, why, why! For that pathetic money and fame—you stabbed me in the back!"
Why.
Why did I
have to be betrayed by human beings as well?
"You wouldn't understand, but for a noble, honor is everything."
The way he said it was perfectly calm, as if he were merely stating a fact. I clenched my fist and shouted.
"And this is an honorable act? This? Stealing your own student's research?"
"Honor is the respect of the public. Are you the public?"
Thud!
I dropped to my knees and pitched forward. My knees split and bled, but the pain meant little.
"…People—at least people shouldn't do this. Trust between people isn't supposed to collapse this easily…!"
Blood from my bitten lip ran down my chin. Drip. Drip. In the falling drops, my advisor's face showed only one thing.
Displeasure.
Displeased? After betraying a person? This wasn't right. The only ones allowed to betray me were God and the heavens.
I had earned the research funds myself. I had cleaned his house myself. When he alluded, none too subtly, to my lack of parents and looked down on me, I endured it. When he slapped me at the slightest excuse, I endured that too. He had never even taught me a thing, so I had studied on my own and produced the paper. And he could do this to me?
Then his mouth opened.
"…I kept giving you rope, and you've gone entirely too far."
What? Gone too far? Who? Me?
"As you yourself said, I am your teacher! I am sorry about the matter of the paper. But what manner of speech is that?"
Sorry? Was that the face of a man who was sorry? Brows faintly knit, the corners of the mouth faintly lowered—that expression? I was glaring at him when his face twisted.
"I picked up some orphan brat and made him my student, and he doesn't even know enough to be grateful…!"
Thwack—!
His kick drove into my jaw. With a crash I slammed into the leg of the desk behind me.
"…Heh."
A laugh that never quite formed slipped out of me. Even a hollow one felt too good to waste on him.
Crack!
I struck the desk leg with my elbow, snapped it off, and took it in my hand.
"You want to try me, is that it…!"
Slash!
Blood drew a red line through the air. I had sheared through my advisor's arm.
"Gyaaaah…!!"
He screamed, clutching the right arm that hung half torn away. I stared at him for a moment, then opened my mouth.
"…Professor. It was a moment's mistake, wasn't it? Just—just…. You didn't betray me. There was some reason, wasn't there?"
The tone was nothing short of a plea.
"Please. Please…. Say that. That's what this is, isn't it. At least human beings—human beings aren't supposed to betray each other…."
A single tear ran from my eye. So I still had tears left in me. I left that dry thought behind and stared at my advisor rolling on the floor.
"You orphan bastard! Do you think you'll walk away from this unharmed?!"
Hah. I sighed.
Why, why, why! Why did I have to be betrayed by human beings too? People weren't supposed to betray other people so easily. Parents, friends, comrades. And a teacher. That was what they were supposed to be.
The sensation of every last brain cell catching fire ran the length of my body.
"You're only angry because you wanted honor too! People live for hon—!"
Slash—!
"Gyaaaah!!"
Blood spraying from the fully severed right arm drifted through the air.
"…Trust. Faith. That would have been enough. If we just believed in each other and helped each other live, that would have been enough. I didn't need some pathetic honor. Just trust, and help, and live that way. That's what a person is…!"
Creak…!
Strength went into the right hand gripping the chunk of wood. Please. Even now, get on your knees and beg.
"Y-you dog…."
Please.
"You think I'll walk away fine after laying a hand on you? No. I won't. I never did this expecting to walk away fine."
Crack—!!
I swung the wood up from below. Struck in the jaw, my advisor's body lifted into the air.
Thud—!!
"Guhk…."
He was nearly unconscious.
"This isn't how it's supposed to be…. A person isn't supposed to do this…."
I went toward him slowly, repeating the same words like a man who had lost his mind. Or perhaps I truly had. Four years together. And he betrayed all of that time? Was a person allowed to do this? Weren't people creatures meant to live alongside one another, helping and trusting?
"H-hk…! I-I'm sorry! No—I apologize! Just spare my—"
The man before my eyes was submitting to nothing but force, treating trust and the bonds between people as nothing, and shameless about it.
Crack—!!
The chunk of wood smashed into his head. His neck whipped around, and terror pooled in his eyes.
"…See. You should have done that from the start. Not begged for your life like a beaten dog howling after the fact."
I spat the words, thick with resentment, and kept swinging. Whom that resentment was aimed at, I didn't know myself.
Crack. Crack. Crack!
Each time the impact struck my ears, blood sprayed in every direction, and my advisor's thrashing lost its strength. For an instant my body locked stiff.
Was this right? Was this truly the right thing? Anguish churned through my skull. Inside that halted thought, what moved my body was a heart pounding fit to overflow.
Crack—!!
The wood that shattered his skull snapped in half.
"Hah—hah…."
Before me, gasping, lay a lump of meat that had lost its life. The first human whose life I had taken with my own hands.
Disgusting. Who? Me? Or that corpse? Perhaps both.
Thud.
The wood left my hand and rolled across the floor. I was a murderer. I had taken another person's life. A sticky sense of sin ran out along my nerves.
"U-urk…!"
Seized by a revulsion I could not put into words, I vomited everything I had eaten that morning.
"Khak—khak…!"
When I clutched my throat on reflex, my breath caught hard. Then—
Clack!
Someone opened the laboratory door. A cleaner, come, it seemed, at the sound of my advisor's screams.
"H-hiiik…!"
Eyes soaked in terror. Shoulders flinching. The reaction of someone looking at a monster.
"Ah. Ah."
I worked my closing throat and let a broken sigh leak out. My pounding heart shook my whole body, and blood from burst capillaries mixed with tears and ran. Every inch of skin stung.
Why. Why are you looking at me like that. I'm not a monster. I'm human.
I seized my trembling gaze and turned my eyes to the advisor's corpse at my feet. Reflected in the blood pooled and lapping on the floor, I was a monster. A monster who, in the despair of having no one on his side in all the world, had beaten a man to death, and was weeping afterward as if he were the one in pain.
Ah.
Something in my mind snapped clean.
Crash!
The window, unable to bear my weight, shattered and threw me out. A long rush of wind followed. With the crack of my neck turning, I died.
That was my second reincarnation.