The Breaking Dawn
The sky was unusually clear and blue.
Yet to some, that brilliant azure felt less like heaven's blessing and more like a cruel mockery. Saintess Beatrice was among them. Ever since their defeat in the war and the damning revelations that the Hero had fallen to corruption, a profound listlessness had settled over her, giving way to mounting, helpless frustration.
Brushing back her tied platinum-silver hair, she bit her lower lip. Soon, Peria—once a comrade of the Hero—would arrive.
Gathered in the sacred grounds of the Holy Land where the Saintess resided were Duchess Sein Luderan and Princess Lena Tirentus. Each carried her own smoldering resentment and stifled rage.
The moment was nearing for Peria to return with her deciphering of the Hero's journey, extracted from the shattered fragments of the Holy Sword she had painstakingly retrieved. None of them were willing to let the traitor to humanity—the traitor to them—escape with mere exile. Their sense of betrayal toward the man they once revered as noble ran so deep that they had grown obsessed with uncovering exactly when the witch Grandis had sunk her claws into him.
At last, a woman with flowing ocean-blue hair and sharp sapphire eyes stepped into the chamber.
"I'm here."
"You've arrived," Beatrice acknowledged softly. "Sein and Lena have been waiting as well."
"Yeah. But the records carved into the Holy Sword are unimaginably vast. Fully deciphering them will take considerable time. Fortunately, I managed to project them as visual memories, so we can see what transpired with our own eyes."
"I see. That will have to do."
The Holy Sword was less a conventional blade and more a colossal divine circuit forged in the shape of one. Aside from Peria, no one on the continent possessed the knowledge to decode its inner workings—or rather, no one save for Peria and the witch Grandis herself.
Sein spoke up, her arms crossed. "Well, what takes time takes time. Which only means you'll have to work harder."
A faint chuckle slipped past Peria's lips. In times of suffocating gloom, even a dry joke offered a much-needed breath of air.
"Let's just watch already," Lena urged, her elven features tight with impatience. "I need to know what that disgusting bastard was hiding—the wretch who had the nerve to smile even as he was dragged into exile. If only for the sake of our fallen vanguard, I want answers."
"Understood."
At Lena's prodding, Peria set a crystal orb atop the table. The sphere flared with soft light, casting a shimmering projection against the stone wall.
Inside a rattling carriage, a plainly dressed youth fidgeted restlessly. With shaggy black hair and dark eyes, there was nothing remarkable about him other than a decently handsome face—save for the ornate sword resting quietly by his side.
A deep, weary sigh escaped his lips.
"Haaah... Me, the Hero? What kind of joke is this? I only came to the Empire blindly hoping to make something of myself, and now I'm supposed to be a savior? Can I really pull this off...?"
He hailed from a modest farming hamlet tucked away in a small, unremarkable kingdom, light-years removed from illustrious bloodlines or dazzling martial genius. The youth stole a nervous glance at the weapon resting within arm's reach. The idea that a blade forged by the gods themselves now belonged to him felt like an absurd, ill-conceived farce.
A man's voice calling out from beyond the carriage walls dragged him back into harsh reality.
"We will soon arrive at the Holy Land."
The Holy Land—sanctuary of the Saintess, the most sacred ground on the continent. Descriptions of the holy territory flooded his anxious mind, and his teeth began to chatter as dread seized him.
What if the Saintess took one look at him and said, This isn't the Hero I was looking for? In fact, wouldn't that be better than being thrust onto a blood-soaked battlefield when he had never held a real weapon in his life?
Just as he was spiraling through mounting panic and second thoughts, the carriage jolted violently to a halt.
"Fuck!"
"What the hell is that thing?!"
Blood-curdling screams tore through the air outside.
The youth poked his head out the window, his breath catching in his throat. A hulking brute with a mountain-like physique was swinging a massive wooden club, indiscriminately slaughtering the escort soldiers. When he realized that massive club was swinging directly toward the carriage, he scrambled out in sheer terror.
It was an ogre. The most brutal and terrifying of all tool-wielding humanoid monsters, towering with absurd, crushing mass.
Trembling, he managed to draw the blade into his hands.
To face an ogre as his very first battle as the Hero—it was monstrously rotten luck. Yet in the back of his mind, a naive thought surfaced: Wasn't being chosen as the Hero proof that I'm special? It seemed unthinkable that someone destined to slay the Demon King would perish at the hands of a common ogre. Yes, perhaps he possessed some dormant, incredible talent waiting to awaken.
Clinging to that groundless optimism—or rather, forced to believe in something to keep his mind from shattering under sheer terror—he charged headlong at the monster.
The ogre's club swung in a dull, brutal arc, connecting squarely with his head.
His skull caved in with a sickening crunch, brain matter bursting into the air. His body convulsed once before collapsing limp, lifeless as a puppet with severed strings.
He died.
"What... did I just watch?"
The Red Duchess's stunned, hollow voice pierced the heavy silence. According to every official record, the Hero had repelled an ogre during his initial journey and arrived at the Holy Land completely unscathed. How could this possibly make sense?
None of the women could find words to speak.
The Holy Sword had undeniably recorded his demise. Yet the Hero had not died. It was an objective impossibility—he had gone on to slay the Demon King, endured exile, and was still alive somewhere in the world today.
Ignoring their turmoil, the projection continued to play.
The boy gasped violently, his eyes flying open. The interior of the carriage filled his vision once more.
He desperately tried to convince himself it had merely been an awful nightmare, even as a phantom throb pulsed painfully behind his eyes. Then came the voice from outside:
"We will soon arrive at the Holy Land."
A sickening wave of dread washed over him. Something was terribly, horribly wrong.
The screams erupted right on cue.
The ogre appeared before his eyes.
The moment he came to his senses, he bolted. Only a single thought screamed through his mind: I can't win.
Tragically, the monster's lumbering gait was far swifter than his own.
He died.
He opened his eyes. Back inside the carriage.
He realized something was broken, but running away was impossible.
He gripped the hilt with white knuckles.
The ogre roared into view.
Throwing himself to the dirt, he barely rolled under the first club swing. But as the brute swept the weapon back horizontally, his arm and ribs snapped like dry twigs. The following blow crushed him into bloody paste.
He died.
He dodged the overhead smash, closed the distance, and thrust his sword deep into the creature's flank. But the ogre's thick hide absorbed the strike, sparing its vitals. The monster's massive hand closed around him.
He died.
He died.
He died.
He died...
Only after the ogre was crisscrossed with dozens of lacerations and finally collapsed from catastrophic blood loss did he drive the Holy Sword straight through its heart.
Only then did he truly become the Hero.
"Urrrgh..."
Lena, who possessed the weakest stomach among them, gagged, pressing a trembling hand to her mouth. Even hardened warriors who had spent years steeped in the horrors of war could only freeze in horror as they watched a single human being slaughtered across every gruesome variation of gore, brain matter, and splintered bone.
The Hero, Einzel Leonhardt, was never incompetent.
It was simply that no one had ever known what his true power was.
"Th-This is..."
Beatrice tried to speak, but her voice died in her throat. The Hero's power was to turn back time upon death? How could something so absurd be real?
Yet the undeniable evidence was laid bare before them through the divine memory of the Holy Sword. They could not look away even if they wished to.
"Just how many..."
Just how many times did he die?
Sein choked back the rest of the question, and her companions did the same. Every one of them burned with questions and unvoiced cries, yet none possessed the courage to break the silence.
"F-For now... his guilt hasn't been disproven, so I'll keep decoding the rest," Peria managed, her voice trembling slightly.
The others could only nod in stunned, hollow agreement.
In the suffocating quiet, Sein found herself remembering a conversation she had once had with Einzel Leonhardt.
'Tell me, what are you going to do once you kill the Demon King? You'll finally be free of this wretched fighting and get your ordinary life back.'
During the early days of their quest, Einzel had spoken endlessly of his rural hometown. Sein had naturally assumed he would say he wanted nothing more than to return to that peaceful, mundane existence.
Yet for some reason, Einzel had hesitated, scratching his chin awkwardly.
'Well...'
After pondering the question for what felt like an eternity, he had murmured softly:
'An ordinary life... I wonder if that's something I can ever get back.'
Why did that answer, that weary expression, that distant gaze from so long ago tear through her mind so violently now?
Sein did not have an answer.