Recollection (1)
Rumble—!
“Ugh...”
Yeona woke in the heart of a ruined Seoul.
“Where... is this?”
All around her stretched a sky the color of blood and the uncollected corpses of the dead. Collapsed concrete buildings. The howling of monsters.
She knew this landscape intimately.
It was the ending of the world she had lived in for decades—the fate she had never been able to escape.
“A dream...?”
She had already returned to the past. Not the parallel-world transfer of so many stories, but a true regression. Maxwell’s Demon had succeeded in completely escaping the problem of causality.
By all rights, the original world should have vanished. That this one still existed meant the world itself was a lie.
Clink. Clatter—
She walked between the crumbling buildings as concrete dust sifted down.
It’s been a while since I was here.
In the old days she had slept inside these half-collapsed concrete shells, clutching a hand warmer for warmth. The world itself had fallen; virtually no organized human forces remained. Being able to sleep inside a concrete building at all had counted as a lucky day.
A past she had no desire to revisit.
Or was it the future?
More importantly... why am I here?
It made no sense. She had clearly been in the middle of the Sirius Academy entrance exam.
Did Maxwell do something?
Thinking that, she fumbled inside her clothes for the pocket watch. No matter how thoroughly she searched, the watch that should have been there was gone.
“Huh? Where did it...?”
While she stood bewildered, a massive vibration rose from somewhere.
Rumble-rumble-rumble—!
She had heard the same sound the first time she opened her eyes in this world. She could not name its exact nature, but experience told her it resembled the wingbeats of insects.
“...!”
Instinctively she shrank back.
In a world where even cockroaches had failed to survive and gone extinct, only one being could produce the sound of insect wings.
“Darwin...”
The same Darwin Seo-hyun used. But in this world, Darwin had no master to control it.
Kiiii—!
Kiiit—!
Tens of millions of locusts, each the size of a compact car, swarmed in a single seething mass. Their mere movement looked like a vast avalanche rolling toward her.
“Ah...”
Even now the swarm was devouring every organic thing nearby, growing larger by the second. Then they spotted Yeona standing alone, and part of the horde wheeled toward her.
“Damn it...!”
She snatched the sword hanging at her hip. Mid-draw she realized the feel of the hilt was wrong.
“...The Three-Star Sword?”
Around the age of twenty-five, after her superior had died suddenly and no general-rank officers remained in the national army, those who had distinguished themselves against the demonkin had been specially promoted. She had received this blade when she was unofficially raised to brigadier general...
“Haah. At this point I don’t understand anything.”
An unofficial brigadier’s rank meant nothing now that the national army was gone. What little military force remained had splintered into fragments; most had become raiders or defected to the demonkin. Flashing a brigadier’s insignia at them would accomplish nothing.
“Still... the Three-Star Sword itself is useful.”
A true blade forged by Korea’s finest smiths, every technique they possessed poured into it. Its functions were excellent as well.
For example...
Yeona gripped the Three-Star Sword in one hand and swept it sideways in a great arc. Blue lightning erupted at once, taking the shape of a dragon and swallowing the locust swarm. Countless insects, electrocuted, rained to the ground.
A technique usable only once a month—yet its power rivaled the strike of an A-class hero. Depending on the user’s level, it could even be pushed to S-class.
“Not bad. The problem is... the ones still left.”
That was the truly unfortunate part. No matter how powerful the blow, Darwin could take it head-on and, given only a minute, regenerate every part of its body almost completely. The Three-Star Sword, once its ability was spent, was nothing more than a somewhat sturdier sword.
I figured I’d wake from the dream around now.
Yeona swallowed as she watched the approaching swarm. Darwin reshaped itself into centipedes hundreds of meters long and came at her freely through earth and sky, intent on grinding her to paste.
Without Maxwell or a famous blade, she was little more than an ordinary person with a slightly tougher body. And Darwin was a monster that could ignore “slightly tougher” without effort.
“Might as well just die and see.”
If she died, something would react. She squeezed her eyes shut, ready to hurl herself into the insects—when someone appeared.
“A person...?”
The newly arrived woman had half-dead eyes. Then her gaze met Yeona’s, and she slowly lifted her head.
“Yeona...?”
“You are...”
The regressor—no, the human Lee Yeona—finally remembered what day this was. Why the pocket watch had sent her here.
Today was the day Seo-hyun, Maxwell’s creator, met her death.
Let’s be honest.
Yes. We failed.
We gathered every force we had, persuaded the World Government, and faced the Demon King. In the end we succeeded in slaying him.
What we never anticipated was that something called the Demon God stood behind the Demon King. The trap the Demon God had laid was so meticulous we could never have predicted it. As a result the Demon God descended into the present world, and we were crushed by its overwhelming power.
And the Goddess. Failing to grasp her true intentions was another major cause of our defeat. Or perhaps the real cause was that we fought among ourselves while facing what might have been the strongest enemy in human history.
Anyway, what follows is not a record of the efforts we made to defeat the Demon King. It is more like an afterword. What became of humanity after we lost to the Demon King—something like that.
The answer is obvious, of course. Humanity fell. Only a handful of survivors clung to lives as fragile as flies.
Darwin went berserk.
During the Demon King subjugation, Darwin had been forced to draw out every last scrap of its potential. Even the so-called perfect life-form had compressed decades of evolution into a single moment; the side effects were beyond description. Darwin managed to gouge out one of the Demon King’s eyes and sever its left leg—but lost the intelligence it had built over decades. Within three days, Darwin covered the entire Earth.
Laplace became uncontrollable.
Laplace had gathered every scrap of data, calculated the most probable futures, and guided humanity toward victory. After the unexpected death of the Second Wind Count, however, it began observing a particular stretch of future and twisted beyond anything we could comprehend. With most of the world’s electronic devices already infected by Laplace, human civilization itself was forced back centuries.
Maxwell started breaking down from that point on.
Maxwell had used its power to turn back time and saved humanity from extinction more than once—unexpected apocalypses, sudden appearances of powerful enemies, the Demon King’s premature descent, and so on. How many times the pocket watch had been turned, no one could say. What was certain was that it had been turned until it was half-ruined.
“So, what are you doing here...? Didn’t you set out to join the national army?”
“...Unfortunately, almost no troops remain. I’ve judged them essentially annihilated.”
“Well, America fell too.”
Seo-hyun spun the pocket watch on her fingertip.
“...How much time is left on the watch?”
“About an hour? Not that it can change anything anymore.”
She poured coffee from the pot inside the bunker and held the cup out.
“Here. This is all I can offer.”
Yeona set the steaming cup aside.
“Where is the Hero?”
“Iris? Hmm... I think she’s out searching for survivors.”
“I see.”
Seo-hyun gave a meaningful smile to Yeona, who was staring blankly at the coffee.
“You look like you’ve got a lot on your mind.”
“How could I not?”
“Is that so?”
“...You’re smiling more than usual today. Is there something on my face...?”
Until that moment Yeona had been worrying about the situation itself, not Seo-hyun. Experience had already taught her this was not reality.
But the next words from Seo-hyun’s mouth froze her solid.
“So, how does it feel to have gone back to the past? Have you met the me from fifteen years ago?”
“...!”
“Sit down. I’m about to tell you a pretty interesting story.”
At Seo-hyun’s words, Yeona set aside every stray thought and focused entirely on her.