A Clichéd Tragedy
Immediate annihilation of the soul, or a brief lingering in the world of the living. The system's demand that you pick one or the other was cruel in its own right.
After all, the only thing they could do was watch. In trying man's case, because I had possessed his body, he at least got to watch me moving around. For most people, it meant being stuck beside their own cold corpse, unable to leave, with nothing to do but stare into the Extinction Gallery's deceased board.
So why would the dead choose residual existence over annihilation, when they couldn't affect the living world in the slightest?
Regret, of course.
Everyone carries regrets. Even over yesterday, a human being is the kind of creature that thinks I shouldn't have done that, or I should have acted differently.
How much greater must that regret be for those who died unjustly?
But this had to be remembered clearly: wandering the living world was a curse upon themselves. If they could never come back, nothing would change just because they kept watching. Even if they gleaned some scrap of information through the Extinction Gallery's deceased board, they were still fated to vanish someday.
Everything ended eventually. They couldn't influence the living world at all. And yet regret still forced countless people into the choice of residual existence.
It was a clichéd story. Even so, I wanted to hear trying man's.
So trying man had seen it too — the red rain that poured down in the Trauma space, and the figure of me unleashing overwhelming power across that battlefield.
I was curious about trying man's story. For some reason, he reminded me of my own school days.
The merciless bullying. The people around him who didn't even treat him like a human being. Under those contemptuous stares and that constant oppression, I hadn't tried to overcome it the way trying man had — I had simply collapsed once.
If not for the cheat key of possession, I might have met an end even more miserable than his. That was why I wanted to hear this man's story. I wanted to understand the regret he still carried… and ease it, even a little.
In the first place, that was why I had been wandering around in this body.
With those words, trying man began to tell it.
trying man. His true name in the novel was Cael. Unfortunately, he had been transmigrated into the body of a newborn. His mother and father abandoned him. He never knew why. But the mind of Cael, already present through possession, remembered that day with perfect clarity. The emotion on his parents' faces as they left him behind was relief.
The place that took Cael in was an orphanage. Because his parents had dumped the infant near its gates and fled, you could say it was a connection they themselves had forged.
But the parents who had severed the bond of parent and child with their own hands remained irresponsible to the end. They had tossed their child away without ever checking that the orphanage was little more than a front set up to collect government subsidies.
The director took Cael in, but to him Cael was nothing but a number — a means of receiving state funding, nothing more.
I'll spare you the grim details of the abuse doled out whenever he failed to fall asleep on time. He received only the bare minimum of food and care. He was treated less like a human being and more like livestock.
A single daily ration of something closer to feed than food was all he got, and every day he had to clutch at an empty, churning stomach. Once he was old enough, he was forced out to labor as well, and still his life never improved.
As time passed, the wounds on Cael's body only multiplied.
Because he couldn't use magic, the work available to swordsmen was limited and poorly paid, so the director always treated Cael the same as the rest of the livestock.
Realizing there was no hope for him here, Cael forced an escape in the dead of night.
Ironically, the director never pursued him. Apparently he said that since the boy was useless anyway, it was better that he'd run off.
Ah — and for the record, it later came out that the director had tearfully lied to the state that Cael had been kidnapped, then claimed he needed security equipment, collected more money for it, installed the barest pretense of security fixtures, and used the rest for his own greed.
Life after leaving the orphanage was predictable enough.
The world was cold toward an orphan who couldn't even use magic. But the temperature wasn't so bad. It wasn't all that different from the orphanage.
He had nothing to begin with, so he had nothing to lose.
After that, he seemed to have lived diligently. Somehow he found day-labor work, earned money, and secured a one-room place he could at least live in.
It was larger than he'd expected. Not owned, of course — he paid rent month to month — but it came with a story about a previous tenant who'd lived there for years and died alone, which meant he could move in for far less than the room's condition would otherwise command.
Ghosts didn't frighten Cael. The fact that he might have nothing to eat tomorrow was far more terrifying.
"Cael. Starting today I'll pay you your proper wages. In return, no tricks — work hard. You understand? We're the only place that hires kids like you, so be grateful."
After Cael had shown up consistently at the construction site for several years, the foreman finally began paying him a normal wage. With the cuts restored, life grew a little less desperate.
Even so, Cael never changed his one-meal-a-day pattern. He kept saving.
Because he wanted to enter the Academy.
His reason for wanting to go was simple. He needed friends. In this wretched life, Cael had never once had a peer his own age. Even at the orphanage, everyone had ignored him.
What Cael wanted was ordinary friendships. Landing a good job after graduating from the Academy, the kind everyone else aimed for, was only a secondary goal. Once he accepted that he could never use magic, he started thinking that way.
He wanted to be recognized by everyone through the sword.
But his dream crumbled fairly quickly. He was lucky enough to get into the Academy, yet as the lone swordsman he was subjected to relentless bullying from the other students, and his relationships with his classmates remained as hierarchical as they had been at the orphanage.
Cael was always the man at the bottom.
In the past, and even after walking into the Academy alone.
It was around then.
A girl so beautiful it stole his breath — a girl who made the heart of Cael, who had never once felt anything for the opposite sex, race madly in his chest.
The moment Levia spoke to him.
"Um… Cael… right? I think I've talked to everyone else, but… I don't think I've ever spoken with you. Let's be friends from now on."
Ridiculous as it was, Cael fell in love with that single sentence.