Meetings and Partings Always Go Their Own Way
Being reborn wasn't so bad. That was what I thought, back at the starting point of my second life.
The days I spent cradled in the warmth of a family — the one thing my past self had longed for more than anything — had been, in their own way, happy ones. Even if it was a life in a world where blades and fists sat closer than law ever did, it was still a hundred times better than dying alone and forgotten, never even amounting to a cog in society's machine.
Was it really all right to be this happy, when the only price had been my manhood? I must have been that happy, to think such a thing at all.
And then, before I knew it, my eighth birthday arrived. The day I sat before a birthday table piled high with a great slab of meat, eyes sparkling, shouting my love at my parents.
"I love you. Our daughter. You love us too, right?"
Two gold coins. One for my mother, one for my father. That was the price stamped on a girl of eight.
Packed into a sack like livestock worth less than a beast, the girl was thrown into the hands of the assassin guild. A jar of gudu — a pot of serpents forced to devour one another so that the last one standing might survive.
I, branded with a number in place of a name, had my faith stolen from me there. Unfortunately, I'd been born with a natural talent for it. When what little hesitation remained in me had all been scraped away, all that was left behind was a single monster, grown fat on the blood of innocent children.
"Take her out. She's drunk her fill of blood; it's time to put her to use."
The day I severed the breath of the final surviving girl, I was able to face the sunlight again.
The guild's seven masters, the survivors of that pot of serpents, taught me their crafts, and I did not disappoint them. Basic weaponry, concealment and disguise, infiltration, poison, attuning my mana to the surrounding environment, memorization and the handling of toxins, torture and restraint, the art of seducing a target's reason. The blade honed in the hands of the world's finest assassins was sharper than anyone else's.
And then, above all else, the one thing that mattered most.
"Repay every kindness, every grudge — tenfold. So that no one will ever dare look down on us."
It was a creed befitting a guild cobbled together by trash who made their living off other people's lives. Ruthless retaliation was the only law there was, and the masters hammered it into my very bones.
After that, my life was, quite literally, mechanical. I killed targets, extracted information, stole things or guarded them, and followed whatever orders came down the line. Looking back now, it all seems laughable — but back then, the guild's masters were the most terrifying beings in the world to me. So terrifying that even after being told I could kill them whenever I managed it, I never once dared so much as lift a finger.
"Hey. Number 8. We've got a job."
"Okay."
"One week. Method's up to you. Handle it. Got it?"
"Okay."
"Ha, little brat. You were more fun to mess with when you were smaller. Get going. Report back on time."
Unlike usual, one of the masters had delivered the contract personally. The words written on the slip were simple.
[Dispose of the Saintess]
It was a title I'd heard before. Roughly a year ago, an idiot had appeared out of nowhere and set off on a journey to defeat the Demon King alongside a human calling themselves the Hero. I'd never met them myself, but I figured tracking their movements wouldn't be difficult — the Hero Party was already famous, back then, for tripping headlong into incidents and catastrophes everywhere they went.
Sure enough, locating the Saintess took hardly any time at all. The timing worked in my favor, too — a certain Legion Commander of the Demon King's army had just begun rampaging across the Imperial Capital.
The old Emperor lay dead; the Crown Prince and the Hero Party, who had been out on the battlefield, stepped forward to manage the chaos. It was a tumultuous moment — and the perfect situation for an assassin to slip in through the cracks.
Maybe this will end easier than I expected. That was what I thought, in the instant I lunged for the Saintess's heart—
"Oh dear. We can't have that."
"Why... you people."
The one who blocked my precisely driven blade was a face I knew all too well.
"...Every single one of my masters?"
"Well. Something like that."
My blade was stopped, my limbs bound, my intentions read. My first-ever experience of complete failure. I need to run. Get back to headquarters first—
Back to what?
With my masters turned hostile, the assassin guild was no longer a safe place.
"Sorry, Number 8. We've got to find our own way to survive, you understand?"
"Ha, what can we do when that brat swears she's going to scrub the underworld clean to the last crumb? Bad luck, is all. Think of it that way."
The Crown Prince's declaration — that he would sweep away every criminal and secret society lurking in the shadows. That was where it had all begun. However much they played at being kings of the underworld, the assassin guild was, in the end, nothing more than a criminal organization.
And so I was the sacrificial lamb of a third-rate play, scriptwritten by them as they set out to abandon the shadows. I had simply been cast in the role.
"You're going to kill me?"
"It's a necessary sacrifice. You're used to that, aren't you?"
Of course I was. My own position had been a special one, so I'd never been on the receiving end myself — but I'd watched assassins cut loose mid-mission more times than I could count. They died for the mission, for the guild. I was the same. My turn had simply come around. Nothing special about it.
"...Ngh."
"...She's crying."
"She was never going to be a finished product anyway. What good is talent, if you can't throw away a single emotion? Look at her, bawling her eyes out. Finish it quickly. We still have to report to our dear 'Saintess.'"
"Right."
The instant the ice-blue blade came down toward my neck, the mana I released on pure instinct sent the masters staggering. A split second. That was all I needed.
"Ghk, you little... Gaaagh!"
"Oh, you little—"
One. Two.
Just as I'd been taught. Just as had been carved into me. Read the flow, slip into the crack of a heartbeat, strike the vitals.
Three. Four.
Sever the throat. Tear out the heart. Pluck free the eyes and the tongue.
Five. Six.
Give up flesh. Catch the blade burrowing into my shoulder and crush it in my fist. Endure the searing pain, close the distance, and rip out the throat.
And at last, the seventh.
"You were... finished, all... along."
As I stood staring blankly down at the ones whose breath had stopped, a single sentence carved into my mind seared through it like fire.
Repay every kindness, every grudge — tenfold. So that no one will ever dare look down on us.
And so I stayed in that room for a long, long while. Until their battered, shattered bodies no longer resembled anything human at all.
"Drop your weapon and put your hands up! You're surrounded!"
"Damn it. Of all the lunatics to run into."
I hadn't bothered with even the most basic cover-up to erase my traces, so the guards swarming in was only the natural course of things. I was a criminal guilty of capital sins several hundred times over — but I didn't want to die. Surrender quietly, and execution was the obvious future waiting for me.
Which meant.
"Everyone, step back. She's just a child."
I didn't much care to remember what came after. All that remains is the memory of a warmth flowing out of the Saintess as she pulled my blood-soaked body into her arms, and the humiliating image of myself, gasping and sobbing for the longest time.
"I'm sorry. If only I'd found you sooner."
Was she really so foolish that she couldn't even tell I'd come there to kill her? I couldn't understand it at all.
By the time I'd cried myself to exhaustion, the place I woke up in wasn't a cold underground cell but the Saintess's own bed. Startled wide awake, I slipped out of the room and went looking for her.
"You were trying to kill me. Are you sure this is okay?"
"It's fine."
"Stubborn, aren't you. Well, do as you like. I'll move as I like, too."
The other members of the Hero Party worried over her, but with no one left to hand down my orders, only one course of action remained. The debt of a saved life. The debt of a stayed execution. Repay each tenfold, and then simply vanish, far away.
After that, nothing much happened. I received the name Arte. Every night, demons came howling to kill the Saintess, and when I cut them down, she'd thank me and press food into my hands — and the debts piled up all over again. So this was why the grown-ups always said never to owe anyone anything, I thought.
Half a year passed that way — hovering at her side to repay my debts, killing demons all the while.
"It looks like she's going to keep following you around. Why not just take her with you?"
"Well, I don't know about much else, but she'd make a serviceable pet."
"Shut up, baldy."
"...Right. Manners first. We'll start with etiquette lessons."
"I don't listen to anyone weaker than me."
"Fine. Come at me, then."
I was never an official member of the Hero Party — but I suppose I'd come to fill a role somewhere between pet and tool, tidying up around them. And so the time passed aimlessly, until they struck down the Demon King, and the victory celebration was held in the Imperial Capital.
That night — a night that should have been filled with nothing but joy and laughter — the Hero Party died.
Not by poison, not by magic, not by curse. Or rather — not by anything I could recognize, at least.
"Who did it?"
"H-hey, calm down first. We don't know what—"
"Wrong answer. Next."
"P-please, spare—"
"You're wrong too. Next."
The leftover remnants of the assassin guild I'd failed to finish. The pig-noble officials who had watched the party with covetous eyes. The rotting priests of the Papacy and the black mages of the Mage Tower. I killed them all — in order to find out who had killed the others.
There was no answer to be found.
So I prayed. Three days, I said. If no satisfying answer reached me by then, I would kill everything my eyes could see, every day from that one forward until my own breath stopped.
The Saintess had told me that any prayer, in any form, would reach the Goddess, so long as it came from one of her creations. She was right — the Goddess answered me in barely two hours.
"To give you the conclusion first — I don't know what happened, either."
"If you don't know, then find out."
"Hey. Just hear me out a little longer, would you? I came all this way to tell you what I do know."
"..."
To summarize what the Goddess — appearing before me with a rueful smile — had to say: those who belonged to the Hero Party had never belonged to this world in the first place. They were beings of another dimension, and the contract those beings had made with this world had simply run its course. That was why their souls had vanished.
"I know it sounds like an excuse, but there's a limit to what a body bound to this world can uncover."
I didn't want to believe it — but I could understand it. All their prattling about equality and love, their philosophies that had once seemed so strange, made perfect sense if they'd come from the modern age. They'd probably kept it hidden all along out of consideration for me.
"So in the end, they were... disposable?"
"...I'm sorry."
Living weapons borrowed for the sake of slaying the Demon King; used up; discarded. That was all. That pitiful ending — was that all it had ever been for?
"Are you all right?"
"No."
When the throbbing in my head finally subsided, I remembered the things I'd left behind in the imperial palace.
"I'm going. You come too."
"I'll come, yes — but where, exactly?"
I'm not letting go of a single strand of hair.
"The imperial palace."
"You can't be serious. You've stirred up this much chaos, and you're going to walk into the palace?"
"Yes."
"Then come with me instead! That would be better than dying — maybe worse than dying, even...!"
"That's why I'm going."
"...You mean it."
"I do."
"A goddess who can't even shoulder her own responsibility has no right to stop you, I suppose."
After the sad-eyed goddess departed, I made for the Imperial Palace — the glass conservatory where the bodies of the Hero Party had been laid to rest. I kicked the doors open without ceremony, and what awaited the assassin who strode inside was a sealing array woven by the palace's court mages.
"You must understand. They may be people who could never have helped us in any way — but I cannot allow them to be desecrated like this."
"Move."
"That's a bit difficult, I'm afraid. Forgive me, but I have my own position to consider."
"Going to kill me?"
"I intend to put a leash on you."
"Try it."
The old Emperor, declaring he would bind a girl wreathed in bizarre blessings and curses with a few scraps of magic — there was something almost sorrowful in his eyes.
"If you mean to resist, then by all means. As it happens, I've grown rather curious just how far your limits reach. Rampage all you like. No — I'd rather you did. Once you've swept away every one of the old serpents choking this empire, things might improve just a little."
That was what he was saying, with those eyes. And the me of that moment, meeting that gaze — I think something inside me simply gave out.
"...One thing. Grant me this."
"Of course."
"Don't touch those people. Not ever."
"You have my word. I would stake everything I am to ensure the thing you fear never comes to pass."
"Even after you're dead."
"...Yes. Even staking everything I am."
And so the contract was sealed. Trapped inside the seal, I became the hound of the imperial family, killing whomever they pointed to; in exchange, the imperial family guarded the bodies of the Hero Party so that no one, ever, could lay a hand on them. Thinking had become tiresome, so I simply handed my leash over to them and let it be.
Inside the seal, I listened now and then to the Emperor or the Goddess when they came to air their grievances; when something erupted, I'd be let out briefly to clean it up, then return. And on the rarest occasions, during those short excursions, I would pass their faces by in a blur — then go back to killing time in a daze within the seal.
And so, the one calling himself Emperor changed twenty-four times over.
[The Boss Descends!]
After a strange radiance washed over me and the seal came fully undone, what stood before my eyes was not this era's Emperor, but the living, breathing body of the Hero.
You're asking for it, aren't you? Right?
"Let me ask this first. Are you willing to talk—"
"No."
Don't worry. The innocent, I won't kill.
KAANG—!!!
"Tch...!"
The fake parried the blade I drove at him in a single bound with irritating ease, and our eyes met. Even the bewildered look on his face was utterly detestable.
"I warned you a hundred times. A thousand times. That one thing — never do it."
"What... are you talking about...!"
"Using me as a hound. Binding me like a monster while calling me one. I didn't care."
"You don't mean—"
As a storm of black mana howled to life, the ground itself began to twist and warp under its wake alone.
"I told you. Don't touch those people."
I gathered my killing intent, condensed my mana, and forged the blade that would kill the Hero, reborn.
"...Arte?"
"I'll kill them all. You, and the ones who brought you back."
The reunion I had finally seized after crossing the years — it was the worst one imaginable.