An Unwashable Sin
My second and third lives differed hardly at all. Which was only natural — every life I had lived up to then had turned on a single hinge: how Celian chose to act.
For her, though, the gap between those two lives must have been enormous. The difference between a heart I pierced while she knew nothing, and a heart she gave me knowing everything.
In her third life she must have dug endlessly into me and the assassin guild behind the scenes — which was how, in her fourth, she could move to purge the guild the moment it began. But all of it was done alone, in the shadows, touching nothing and no one around her. They say the smallest action can reshape the future, yet nothing she did in that third life bent the current of the world so much as a little.
And so, for me and for the world alike, there was nothing to set the second life apart from the third. Both were the loops in which I succeeded in assassinating her. Both were the loops in which I failed to resist the scroll.
"Seli probably never knew. How the regression actually worked…"
Of all the powers the Goddess granted her Hero, the heart of them was regression and memory. When the Hero dies, the Goddess rewinds the world, turning back everything that has happened, and through the Holy Sword she stitches one of the Hero's lives to the next so that the journey can go on. Sometimes the memories carry over from the moment of death into the next life; sometimes, as in mine, they lie sleeping until something wakes them.
Words Mariel had once offered me, when she sat and listened to my confession. Even the Goddess cannot know the future — she learns only through the past. That was exactly what she'd said. Of course, from where Mariel stood, without the Holy Sword, the very existence of regression was something she couldn't have dreamed of.
Either way, the Hero is the axis on which regression turns, and the instant the Hero dies, the world begins its slow turn backward. If only it had begun the instant she died. I don't know whether the Goddess intended for time to keep flowing after Celian's death, or whether rewinding a world was such a burden that even she needed time to gather herself for it. Even now that I've become the Hero — how could a mere human body hope to fathom the Goddess's will, or her power?
What matters is this: even after her death, the world went on turning. That is a truth Celian, the very axis of the regression, never knew — a piece of the past she could never have known at all.
"Do you remember when I was first chosen as the Hero? When we set out for the capital with the Saintess?"
Back then, with the Holy Sword's aid, I had managed to draw up a fragment of the realm I'd reached in my previous lives — not the whole of it, only as much as the me of that moment could bear. With that assassin's skill I cut down the demonkin and demons who ambushed us on the road. And even that was merely a fraction of what I had once been.
Which raises the question: if the Holy Sword's power doesn't force a talent to bloom, but instead pulls forward the realm of a past life, then where exactly had my strength as an assassin come from? In my first life — the one that ended early, at almost exactly this hour of this very day — I was, at best, impressive for eighteen… no, for sixteen, whether as assassin or as swordsman. Talented for my age, nothing more. Nowhere near enough to bring down a mid-rank demonkin.
The same held true for my fourth life, when I took the road with my friends to slay the Demon King. In raw power it was the strongest I had ever been — but that was the realm of a Sword Master reached years ahead of any natural schedule, not strength tempered in the assassin's craft. Why would I ever have honed such arts in the one life where I'd finally severed every tie to that world?
Yes. All of that power had come from my second and third lives. I assassinated Celian, and I went on living as an assassin until the day the world rewound.
Perhaps my hesitation had displeased him, because when I returned, the guild master bound me with a subjugation spell even stronger than the last. Not that a heavier Master-Servant Brand meant anything to me by then — I had already surrendered, body and soul, the moment my blade pierced Celian's heart. He had even decided that a woman's body served the work better, and contrary to everything he'd promised at the start, he never turned me back. He simply kept using me as I was.
Well — he was a guild master, I suppose. His eye proved unexpectedly accurate. The plan was to raise me into the strongest of assassins, pushing me toward Sword Master while my killing arts were honed in parallel, and then to use me as the cornerstone of the finest assassin guild on the continent. And it proceeded with almost insulting ease.
Flush with the client's payment for Celian's assassination, the guild master began swelling the guild's ranks in earnest, then turned me loose as an assassin who hunted assassins, devouring the guilds around us one by one and folding their strength into his own. My swordsmanship had plateaued just short of Sword Master's door, but even that left me overwhelmingly beyond any assassin sent against me.
In the span of a few short years, Black Moon had become the continent's undisputed premier guild of death — a name no one could afford to ignore. No one knew what Black Moon truly was, yet everyone knew its name, and everyone feared it. That was what we had become.
And apparently being the worst guild humanity had ever produced wasn't enough for him. Our path grew darker still, trampling even the barest minimum of human decency. No — truthfully, from the moment we put a blade through the Hero Celian, Black Moon had already given up on being human at all.
I never learned who the client was. After that day I had abandoned all resistance — to orders, to the Brand, to my own fate — and I had neither the means to uncover the client's identity nor any wish to. Looking back now, though, I suspect it was a demon, or one of the demonkin. The next target I was handed was a person who could not possibly have earned a single grudge in this world, a person whose death could benefit no one alive.
Saintess Mariel.
Eccentric she may have been, but she was incapable of harming those around her. Even her unwitting nuisances could never have stirred a resentment deep enough to warrant a contract on her life. And with the Hero already dead, she was the last of her kind — the Goddess's proxy, humanity's hope. Were she to die, humanity would find itself in a pit with no bottom and no way out. In that world, what lunatic but a demon or demonkin would commission the Saintess's assassination?
As befitted humanity's hope, her guard was airtight. It meant nothing against me — a blade already brushing the threshold of Sword Master, perfected in every art of the assassin's trade. And so, after Celian, I pierced Mariel's heart as well. The sight of the Saintess — humanity's hope — collapsing was the sight of the Hero falling in front of me, all those years ago, come again.
But even with the Saintess gone, humanity's resistance went on. There were still masters among them formidable enough to threaten the demonkin. One was a girl already a brilliant Archmage, whose talent would one day have made her the greatest on the continent.
In war, a mage is hunted as relentlessly as any commander. So the commission came in again. The guild master, caring nothing for humanity's extinction, accepted — and naturally the guild's strongest blade went out once more. Mine. The girl whose talent should have burst into full bloom in the years just ahead took my sword through her heart instead, her flower never opened, her life ended before its season.
She was not the last. A contract even came in on a Sword Master.
By then I had reached Sword Master myself, but he had arrived there long before me — a fresh entrant like me could never have beaten him blade to blade. But my goal was never to out-sword him. Only to kill him. So I chose another way.
I took his family hostage. His daughter — frail to a fault, having inherited none of his gift — I seized, and used her to lure him alone to some remote place. He came without resistance, driven by a father's fear for his child. Before his eyes, I drove my blade through the heart of the daughter I'd held hostage, without a flicker of mercy — though whether I still had any will or feeling left to spend by then is a question in itself.
I didn't spare the collapsing girl so much as a glance. I watched the Sword Master as he charged at me. No — as he charged at his daughter. In that instant where grief and rage crossed, my sword had already pierced the father after the daughter.
With the Archmage fallen and the master of the sword fallen, the balance between humanity and the demonkin shattered completely. The imperial capital had already been taken, and most of the continent lay tainted by demonic miasma. For all intents and purposes, humanity had no hope left.
Yet even then, the survivors made humanity's last stand in the final city left on the continent. The lord of the family guarding that city was no Sword Master, but her bloodline power — a flame that burned away all miasma — stood against the demonkin better than any ordinary Sword Master could have.
And of course, another contract came in. It would be the last one that mattered. The guild master had long since crossed over to the demonkin's side; by then they came to us openly, placing their commissions in person. Kill her, break humanity's final line of defense, and there would be no one left on the continent worth assassinating.
This one, if anything, was simpler than the rest. The bloodline power my target carried burned only what was demonic — against a human, against me, it was useless. And so the girl who had burned like flame met her end with my blade in her heart.
I could make excuses, the way Celian once spoke of it — that the Master-Servant Brand left me no choice in any of it. But how could I ever have the gall to say such a thing to their faces? Even now, with every memory returned, the feel of their hearts breaking around my blade is still vivid in my hand.
I snapped the sword that should have been pointed at the Demon King. I crushed the hope humanity carried. I used an ordinary girl as nothing more than a means to an end. I broke the flower of the talent that would have made the continent's greatest mage. I snuffed out the flame that stood as humanity's final line of defense.
This is my karma, and my unwashable sin — one that could never be forgiven no matter how it was begged for, one I have no intention of asking forgiveness for, and one I cannot forgive myself for…