The Disciple Strives to Resemble Her Master
Sera, too, had once been an ordinary(?) Hero candidate. There had been a green, earnest period in her life when she walked the righteous path and believed that straying from it meant corruption—when she refused, absolutely, to set foot on any darker road. That was back in the early days of her endless regressions, before the count had even reached three digits, when she still stubbornly kept track of the number.
But after every kind of interference left her defeated and dead without ever properly facing the Demon King, forcing her to regress again and again…
Even that green version of Sera had no choice but to admit it.
To save the world, she could not cling to the righteous path alone. And so she began to step into the dark.
For someone who had known only the straight and narrow, adapting to the shadowed roads was never easy. Half-measures got her ambushed and killed more than once. It was only natural. Trying to ease yourself gradually into a blood-soaked underworld was absurd on its face. If she had already been experienced, it might have been different… but in those days she had nothing special to her name beyond the fact that she could regress, so suffering was the only answer available.
Then one day, for the first time, she received a helping hand in that underworld.
It was a strange figure cloaked head to toe in pure black, so thoroughly concealed that only the build gave away that she was a woman—a bizarre phantom of the night.
She appeared before Sera while Sera was being beaten one-sidedly, knocked every last thug flat, handed over some food, and vanished. Among the beggar children who survived in the underworld she was already a legend. She never gave a name, never revealed an identity, always hid herself behind a black cloak, hood, and mask—an invincible phantom. Yet every so often she would reach out to the beggar kids who were being crushed without hope of fighting back… grandly speaking, she was something like the underworld’s own saintess.
Sera believed that a debt incurred must be repaid, so she resolved to return the favor whenever the chance came.
She never imagined…
…that she would find that same phantom half-dead.
Sera secretly carried her back to her hideout, treated her, and kept her alive. She had accumulated enough experience by then to manage basic first aid. She was still far from the later cycles where she had piled up endless know-how as the infinite regressor Hero, so emergency care was all she could manage. Even so, she could not simply let her benefactor die, and she did everything within her power.
Fortunately the woman regained consciousness and began to recover little by little.
At first she refused to speak. Slowly, though, she opened her mouth and started teaching Sera this and that.
She introduced herself as the one called the 5th Agent of the assassin guild known as Medusa. She had long since forgotten her real name, so “5th Agent” would do. She had been forced into becoming an assassin, forced to kill people on assignment. When she could no longer bring herself to kill, she tried to escape, suffered grievous wounds in the attempt, and that was how Sera had found her. That was the story she told of her situation.
That evening, while Sera stepped out briefly to find food, the 5th Agent disappeared.
The next day Sera discovered her corpse.
The reason was simple.
If Medusa learned that Sera had helped the 5th Agent, they would come after Sera as well—that much was obvious. So the 5th Agent had erased every trace of herself and deliberately shown her face so that Medusa would kill her instead.
Sera wept. Yet at the same time, looking at the 5th Agent’s corpse wearing a bright smile, she understood.
The 5th Agent had wanted a “meaningful death.” To her, a meaningful death was happiness itself. For someone whose life was hell whether she lived or died, dying while protecting another person was the most satisfying happiness imaginable.
Other cycles with the 5th Agent proved it.
There had been a time when Sera wiped out Medusa as quickly as possible and set the 5th Agent free. The 5th Agent became a broken wreck and died a hollow death. Freedom itself could not be salvation for her. By the moment Sera had first regressed, the 5th Agent’s soul was already shattered beyond repair. No matter what Sera did, the 5th Agent yearned for death and regarded a meaningful death as happiness. Therefore Sera could not force a path that kept her alive. If the 5th Agent so desperately wanted a meaningful death… then Sera would play along.
Sera made the gift of a meaningful death her way of repaying the debt. Specifically, she would learn every technique the 5th Agent possessed. The 5th Agent wanted to leave even a little meaning behind when she died, and Sera figured those outstanding skills would be useful. So they struck a contract: once Sera had completely mastered the 5th Agent’s techniques, she would kill her. The 5th Agent accepted. Teaching a Hero candidate and then dying was, in her eyes, a sufficiently meaningful death.
In other words, to Sera the 5th Agent was both a benefactor and, for a time, a teacher. Even if, in the end, she had to kill her with her own hands.
But watching the 5th Agent die with a smile of pure happiness, Sera could not bring herself to call it wrong. If that was happiness for her, then there was nothing Sera could do about it. She simply accepted it.
And once she herself fell into the hell of infinite regression—wanting to die yet unable to—Sera came to envy that 5th Agent. After all, the 5th Agent had been able to die because she wanted to. That was why Sera never once questioned it. Never once wondered whether her method of repaying the debt might have been wrong.
That, too, was one of the changes brought about by Jade.
What would Jade have done? The moment she asked herself that, she knew: the master she knew would never kill someone and then claim he had “repaid the debt.” Jade could not be wrong. Therefore she was the one who was wrong. Her method had been mistaken. From the omniscient master’s point of view, Sera began to correct herself. It was no longer the level of “you come to resemble the one you love.” It was the level of loving him so fiercely that she poured every ounce of strength into becoming like him.
In the end Sera decided her way had been wrong. A meaningful death is happiness? If she ever said something like that to Jade, he would answer without the slightest hesitation:
What a load of crap.
…Just like that.
So Jade would never leave the “meaningful death equals happiness” theory alone. He would try to change it somehow. That was the kind of man Jade was; it was certain. And the one who had been saved by that Jade was Sera herself. Therefore she concluded that only by handling the 5th Agent the way Jade would handle her could she truly repay the debt.
If the meaningful-death-is-happiness theory was nonsense…
Then what should she do?
First, she had to keep her alive.
And so, in this very moment, Sera had to walk a road she had never once taken before.
“5th Agent.”
“…….”
“I’m going to wipe out Medusa.”
“…….”
“What do you think? Don’t you figure I can pull it off?”
“…You could.”
“Right. I could.”
Wiping out Medusa was something far too familiar to Sera. Until the day she gave up on saving the world, she had always started by eliminating them, so no one knew better than she did how to erase Medusa cleanly. Calling her a Medusa-extermination specialist would not have been an exaggeration in the slightest.
“I’m going to destroy Medusa. What are you going to do?”
“…Are you telling me to help you take them down?”
“Yes.”
“Impossible. They put… on me—”
Whoosh!
Sera swung her Aura Blade. Anti-Aura dismantled and erased every single curse laid upon the 5th Agent in an instant. Those things had been constructed of mana, so before Anti-Aura they simply vanished. If Medusa had known of Anti-Aura’s existence they would have prepared other measures, but Anti-Aura was still unknown to the world, so of course no such countermeasures existed.
In that moment the 5th Agent became completely free.
“What was that about it being impossible? You’re not still saying you can’t because of the things that just disappeared, are you?”
“…A lie.”
From the 5th Agent’s perspective—someone who had lived a hellish life under the horrific things they had placed on her for an entire lifetime—it was simply unbelievable that a single swing of a sword had erased them all so emptily. Yet she herself stood in the ranks of the masters, so she could not help but know: every last filthy, polluted thing that had been inside her was gone.
“All right. So what will you do?”
“…Could you leave destroying Medusa to me?”
The instant Sera saw those eyes, she understood.
She’s planning a mutual destruction…
Having played along more earnestly than anyone to grant the 5th Agent’s wishes, Sera read it at once.
“You’re thinking of dying together with them, aren’t you? No. You’re going to keep living.”
“…Why? I… don’t want to live…. I’m a sinner….”
“You’re a victim. You were just a pitiful victim swept up by those lunatics, forced to be tossed around and dragged along by their madness.”
“But I killed so I wouldn’t have to suffer! Because I hated being in pain! Because it was better for other people to hurt than for me to hurt! That’s how I killed! You have no idea how much blood is on these hands! If you knew, you couldn’t say something like that!”
“Hmm. Around this point the number you killed on contract is roughly thirty, right? Counting the training period, maybe around forty.”
“…….”
The 5th Agent stared at Sera with a vacant face. Adding the number she had killed on assignment to the number she had been forced to kill during training under Medusa’s “fratricide plan,” it really was about that many. The mad scheme of locking them up, making them kill one another, and turning the final survivor into an outstanding assassin—and the 5th Agent, caught in it, had no choice but to kill fellow victims just like herself. So the total she had killed… did not stray from what Sera had said.
“So what?”
“…What?”
“Sure, you’ve killed a fair number of people. And so what?”
“…….”
“You killed people, so you have to die too? If you take your own life right here, what changes? Do the dead come back? By that logic we should send every mercenary who kills for money straight to the guillotine, shouldn’t we?”
The 5th Agent did not yield. A resolve to kill oneself was never the sort of thing that could be cut short by someone else’s words in the first place. You could not simply decide to die that easily, after all. So the 5th Agent’s determination did not waver at mere talk.
“…A sinner has no right to decide that.”
“But the other party who could decide it doesn’t exist either.”
“Even so…! That doesn’t mean a sinner gets to live shamelessly!”
“Right. As you say, the sinner can’t decide, and since the victims no longer exist, the victims can’t decide either. In that case, don’t you think it’s proper to leave the judgment to a rational person qualified to make it?”
“…What do you mean?”
“When nobles get into legal trouble they hold a trial, don’t they? And the ones who decide are people granted the qualifications by the emperor. It’s the same idea. When the answer isn’t clear, you entrust it to someone who has the right to give that answer. For example… the one up there.”
Sera pointed a finger at the sky.
In other words, at God.
“But as you know, the one high up in the heavens is famous for never answering no matter how many times you shout the question. So you just ask someone who has the qualifications of His proxy.”
Then Sera pointed at herself.
“The existence that saves the world from crisis in God’s place—that’s the Hero. Being a Hero is more than enough to qualify as God’s proxy. So don’t you think it’s reasonable for me to take on the judgment of your sins?”
“…That’s forced. You’re only a Hero candidate, not the Hero yet….”
“You think I’m not?”
“…….”
The 5th Agent could find no words.
She herself stood in the ranks of the masters, yet this opponent had defeated her so easily—even though she had clashed under the most advantageous conditions possible. And that opponent was not a Hero? Even she had to admit she was in no position to say such a thing.
“I’ll pass judgment with the qualifications of God’s proxy. Become my companion.”
“…….”
“As a Hero I have countless things I must do. Every single one of them is necessary to save the world. So helping me is, in the end, saving the world—and it will become the path that saves hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, unimaginable numbers of lives. Therefore live, and help me from my side. That is the verdict I deliver to you as the Hero who holds the qualifications of God’s proxy.”
“That kind of… one-sided convenient story can’t possibly….”
“If the people you killed all come pouring out after you die and start yelling at you, just tell them this: ‘The Hero forgave me. If you want to argue, go argue with the Hero.’”
“…….”
“A sin like yours—I’ll carry it along as a free extra, since I’m already shouldering the fate of the world.”
It was nothing like a fair judgment descending from the heavens. It was far closer to a devil’s secret whisper. A devil’s meticulous temptation itself.
And yet she could not ignore it. She could not pretend she had not heard that voice.
Because if those words were true, then she had the right to live.
The right to see tomorrow while still alive.
She had discarded, discarded, and discarded the idea that she possessed any such right.
And now she was being told she did not have to.
How sweet a sound was that?
She wanted to obey those words right this instant.
But a sinner like her had no right to decide that….
But is there anyone else who would offer to carry my sins for me?
If it had been any other words, she could have ignored them. “You have no sin,” or “You’re only a victim so don’t feel guilty”—she could have dismissed those as much as she liked. But the words Sera had chosen just happened to be an offer to shoulder the sins. It was no different from saying she wanted her to live even if it meant taking the sins in her place.
She did not know the reason.
Why this girl wanted her to live so badly.
Why she would go this far for her.
But
one thing was certain:
this Hero candidate was the first person who had ever sincerely wished for her to keep living.
The word “first” held a strange power.
That strange power shook the 5th Agent.
In the end she dropped to her knees. She had knelt countless times before the executives of Medusa, but that had always been forced by torture curses. In this moment there was no pain at all. Only pure sincerity.
“This life is for the Hero. This body is for the Hero. This blade is for the Hero…. Until the moment I die, for the one who carried my sins…. I swear it.”
At those words Sera wore an awkward smile. It was not the ending she had wanted, but as long as the 5th Agent had decided to live, the worst outcome had been avoided. It was a result she could be reasonably satisfied with.
She missed her master’s hand.
She hungered for Jade’s praise.
I’ll do it in secret.
Tonight, while she went to apply holy water to the dragon egg that slept beside Jade, Sera added one more thing she wanted to do. The dragon egg was a well-behaved child, so a perfect crime was already in the bag.