Chapter 28: The Second Time
Chapter 28: The Second Time
In the midst of an uneventful, peaceful life, I came to a humble realization: my thinking had been completely backward.
"Fuck, I'm bored..."
My muttering drew absolutely no reaction from the huge golden retriever I'd summoned—except it was white, so maybe I should call it a white retriever.
Anyway, the big dog just wagged its tail.
If it had suddenly answered me in human speech—'I'm bored too'—well, that would've been a hell of a lot more Nightmare-appropriate.
"Stay out of trouble."
I spoke to the dog that couldn't answer back and sent it on its way.
My already silent single room grew one step quieter.
I'd thought I was used to a life of doing nothing.
Hadn't the divine being that dragged me into this world outright named me a lethargic bastard?
There was no working clock to tell the exact time, but I knew the routine: lie in bed until I was about to starve to death,
then tear open the emergency rations sitting next to the bed when dying felt genuinely imminent.
A life where, by my gut sense, I'd eat one can every day or two and just slowly fade out.
But things were entirely different now.
Forget one can a day—I had food that never ran out no matter how many times I ate to kill the boredom.
Instead of water that stank of iron, I had drinks that were fresh and cold, plus a way to freely buy whatever I wanted.
Lying around limp when there's nothing you can do is nothing like doing nothing when there is plenty you could do.
My plan to hyper-focus on only Han Ye-ji had been wrong from the start.
This wasn't a nightmare world where monsters invaded dozens of times a day.
Han Ye-ji even landed a job earlier than planned, at the end of the year, but the boredom didn't go anywhere.
Sure, she was patrolling a route every day, but incidents happened maybe once a week to once a month.
So I sat back down at the computer.
To find a second contractor.
'Conditions similar to last time... but maybe I'll tighten them a little.'
The contractor criteria were basically the same as before.
The Eastern Continent, since I was a bit more familiar with its way of life.
A woman in her early twenties or so, since she might end up deployed to war.
And, just because it's nice to look at, a decent face.
I only got a little stricter from there.
As with Han Ye-ji's case, the probability of having sex in a dream with a future Incarnation was close to 99%.
Not because I'm some permanently horny beast who can't control himself, but because the basic point differential is five times.
On top of that, being able to read people's fears meant I could filter out anyone scared of battle and war.
What's the point of spending forever picking people who look like they have potential if they're psychologically incapable of doing anything? That'd just be a pain in the ass.
So I turned the screen to a place where I could run a hard filter from the get-go.
Namely, a military college.
From the dorms packed with hundreds of women sporting short-cropped hair, to the training grounds where they did morning runs in shorts and tanks, tits bouncing freely.
Nobody here had been forcibly conscripted; every last one of them had fire in their eyes.
Not a single person in that place would be afraid of fighting monsters.
In a world with no wars between humans, soldiers had exactly one role.
Supporting Incarnations on the continent's outer frontiers.
Inland, from what I'd seen, suppression squads from counter-terrorism units under the police handled things, not the military.
I wasn't too clear on this world's laws and government structures, but that's what had come up when Han Ye-ji searched it with her ID card.
Put another way, every last person in this military college who'd cropped their hair short belonged to the elite.
Every student who'd voluntarily undergone training stricter than what Incarnations received had chosen for themselves to go to the very front lines of the war and kill monsters.
The reasons were as varied as they came.
From a yearning toward Constellations and Incarnations to a pure hatred of monsters.
Inland, deaths from monster attacks were rarer than getting mauled by a dog or stung to death by a bee, but they weren't zero.
These were people who'd steeled themselves, so unlike Han Ye-ji, they probably wouldn't have Nightmares crushed under the psychological weight of heading to war.
"Think any contractors will come out of this class?"
"Who knows, it's been a while. The blatantly outstanding ones get contracted before they even enroll."
Eavesdropping on the instructors as they smoked and chatted, I gathered that
Constellations looking to send Incarnations to the battlefield seemed to drop by and contract people fairly often, too.
Apparently it was something of a tradition for top students to become Incarnations before graduating from the military college.
People really do all think alike—I wasn't the only Constellation plucking a few from here.
'Well, it is convenient to just scoop them up openly.'
They already wanted to head to the war's front line anyway; the only difference was going as a junior officer or as an Incarnation.
And obviously, the gap in treatment between a junior officer and an Incarnation was beyond enormous.
Some of them didn't just hold a favorable view of Incarnations and Constellations—they cherished a loyalty toward them that surpassed mere goodwill.
People who knew that becoming a soldier meant heading to the front lines to fight monsters, knew the mortality rate comfortably topped ten percent—and still marched toward war.
So what happens when instructors casually drop remarks like 'If your grades are excellent, there's a tradition of a Constellation taking you in~' to people like that?
"The Incarnation Academy really was just an academy, huh."
At the Incarnation Academy, I'd often see them having secret relationships among themselves, sleeping in on weekends since there were no penalties for being a little late,
enjoying off-campus outings and overnight stays—very human, relaxed behavior. Here, there was nothing like that.
This was a neighborhood where it was common to see people stacking their outing passes and leave chits neatly on the unit equipment shelf and going straight back to training.
'At this point, it's kind of terrifying.'
My jaw dropped a little without me realizing it as I panned the screen, just watching.
Comparing building scale, facilities, and the like, the military college was shabby beyond all measure compared to the Academy.
But the people inside it?
Spending a whole day observing them slowly, I felt an honest awe toward humanity. Was this what a human anthem felt like?
Unlike me, who'd hidden in my room just waiting for the day I'd die, it felt like I was watching again the people who'd struggled to rebuild humanity even as they mutated into creatures.
People aiming to be both polished and martial, as befitted an officer-candidate school.
Look behind the dorm at the recycling station, and battered old notebooks, grubby with hand-grime, were stacked taller than a person.
In the fitness center, people pushed their bodies in increments of minutes and seconds,
while in the library, others were self-studying, printing out entire dissertations on monsters.
The most idle people inside the military college were, ironically, the afternoon training instructors once classes were over.
'No wonder people poach from here...'
Even being mercilessly picky about looks, the spectacle was such that hundreds of people were probably contractable. I genuinely had no words.
This explained why random people had whipped out their phones, amazed, when Han Ye-ji got contracted.
They'd practically gathered the candidates here for the Constellations' convenience.
Han Ye-ji, who'd just started her new job on the suppression squad, couldn't even be guaranteed a win against one of these military college first-years in a one-on-one. Enough said.
Sure, after a few years, once she accumulated points and her Authority bloomed, Han Ye-ji would transcend human limits and become superhuman.
But comparing just their current state, these first-year military college students could beat the brakes off most cadets at the Academy.
Browsing the military college like some kind of window-shopping, one person caught my eye.
A woman with shoulder-length bobbed hair that had been cut a little while ago.
Physically, she wasn't particularly burly—she stood out for the opposite reason, being a bit on the small side.
But what drew my attention wasn't her physical traits; it was her actions.
'Praying?'
Amid all the gym rats measuring their muscle mass by the second, she was clasping her hands and praying at fixed intervals.
Literally, fixed intervals.
Curiosity piqued, I observed her for a solid day.
Waking up in the morning, after washing, before a meal, after the meal,
right before class started, during breaks between classes, at the bell signaling class ended,
before exercise, in the short breaks between exercise routines, before bed—
In a world where the existence of Constellations had rendered organized religion toothless, what sort of prayer could be so intensely devout?
In a world where any faith worshiping a god rather than a Constellation got treated as a niche, otaku hobby,
she was offering up prayer practically every hour.
Clutching an old bracelet in her hand.
But that didn't mean she believed in a religion.
"My Constellation, today as well, I—"
She wasn't praying to a god, but to a Constellation.
Not to any specific Constellation, either.
It was a fervent belief in the very existence of the concept of 'Constellation.'
Not merely goodwill toward Constellations and Incarnations, but prayer raised to them as objects of worship.
She was a kind of supremacist.
Just one who placed herself at the very bottom.
An Incarnation supremacist who wasn't yet an Incarnation.
That seemed to sum it up neatly.
In fact, her very reason for entering the military college was that it was the group with the highest Incarnation contract rate.
She was sharp, so her grades were good, but her physical ability just barely fell short of top-tier warrior level.
Because of that, she was notorious even among the instructors as a fanatic.
A stubborn wretch who desperately chased after Constellations despite her poor fitness—that was her reputation.
Plenty of people in that military college were called stubborn wretches.
People brimming not with a duty to protect humanity, but with vengeance aimed at killing monsters.
Most of those were avengers who'd lost family or loved ones to monsters.
But this girl, Lee Ha-rin, was different.
She'd decided her entire life's path based purely on one single wish: to become an Incarnation.
Not for the vast material benefits or social status she'd gain from it.
She wanted to become an Incarnation for one reason alone: being able to communicate with a Constellation.
Just by watching her eyes after she finished one of her brief prayers, I could grasp the purity of her obsession.
Because Lee Ha-rin's Nightmare was a world without Constellations.