First Meal (1)
Everyone has entertained the thought at least once in their life. The what-if: If I were given another chance, I would do things differently. It is a profoundly pointless hypothetical, something that can never come true in reality. Yet if I were truly given another opportunity to live… I would imagine correcting all the mistakes I had made in the past and living in a way that would finally satisfy me. A childish, laughable fantasy and nothing more.
[People aren't something you can just rewrite.]
[You think one person's desperate effort is going to change the world?]
[If that were true, the world wouldn't be in this sorry state.]
[Sometimes, even when you know it's the wrong path, you have no choice but to walk it anyway.]
Those were words someone had once said to me. And I believed they were right. If the entire flow of the world could truly be swayed by the power and effort of a single person, then why was this world hurtling toward such a miserable, ruinous end? At times, it almost felt as if the world itself desired that destruction.
But even so, to me—
Do you want to live?
I will take 'death' away from you.
—that meaningless, childish hypothetical was granted to me once more.
“Hah—?!”
I bolted upright in shock. A completely sealed space with no light whatsoever. Then, as if a switch had been flipped, my vision cleared and my senses flooded back to life.
“Ugh… this is…”
The moment I sat up, a splitting headache slammed into me. I clutched my skull, face twisted in pain. I took a deep breath, trying to organize the chaotic flood of sensations and memories. Only then did the recollections begin to surface—my powerless, miserable death, the moments leading up to it, and the state of my own body.
“Why…?”
I had definitely died. So why was I alive right now?
I remembered it clearly. Being helplessly torn apart by a monster with the head of a bull—a minotaur. Startled, I immediately checked my arm. It was perfectly intact.
“How…?”
Had it all been an illusion? Maybe even that brutal battlefield had been—
“No way.”
I lowered my gaze and looked down at my body. Despite having been brutally ripped apart right before death, my lower half and arms were completely unharmed, as if none of it had happened. But the fact that I wore nothing on my lower body and that my military uniform top was shredded to rags told me those memories were no illusion.
“……”
For a moment, the image of the minotaur just before I died flashed through my mind, sending a violent shudder through me. No. It couldn’t have been an illusion. The pain from that moment. The overwhelming pressure the monster had radiated. The way the air and ground had trembled. My body still remembered it all so vividly that merely recalling it made me shake.
But if that was the case, then what was this perfectly healthy body? What was this reality?
Had I truly…
“…come back to life?”
What I had been denying as impossible slowly began to settle in as fact. I had no way of knowing how it had happened, but this was undeniably real.
And then, once again—
“Ugh…?!”
An indescribable, violent headache crashed over my mind.
Do you want to live?
I will take 'death' away from you.
“Aaaaagh!”
Something was speaking to me. No—it had spoken to me. This was a memory. The recollection of a conversation I had shared with ‘someone.’ A part of it that I had forgotten until now. Simply recalling that fragment was enough to—
“Aaaaaaaaaaaah!”
It felt like my head was going to split open. As if someone were forcibly shoving a blade into my skull. I couldn’t resist it. All I could do was endure the helplessness as the pain tore through me without mercy.
Please don't break, alright? I'm looking forward to it.
That person—she—had said she had expectations for me. And then she had brought me back to life.
Why? How? Who in the world—?
Memories I had never experienced. Things that should not exist. No. That wasn’t right. These were my memories. I had simply forgotten them. I couldn’t explain the basis or the principle behind it, but the pain hammering into my skull was convincing me beyond doubt that these were memories that had been erased from me.
“Aaaaagh!”
It felt like my head would burst. Like violent waves were ripping through my brain. Something—no, someone—had resurrected me with certain expectations in mind. I had no idea what method or process had been used, or what the reason was. But this knowledge and these memories being forcibly driven into my head like blades were probably that ‘something’s’ way of at least giving me the minimum context I would need.
'Death' is the final destination that every living thing eventually reaches. By erasing that destination, I have denied the very concept of death from your body.
“What the hell are you saying…?”
Is this crazy bitch for real? I muttered, but my words could not reach the unidentified speaker. This was no different from replaying a pre-recorded voice. It was closer to knowledge or memories that had been forcibly injected into my mind.
The end that humans naturally meet when their lifespan reaches its limit. I will take that death away from you.
So consume the deaths of other beings.
Whether it was plants, humans, or monsters—consume the ‘death’ of any living thing that possessed life. Devour the Heavenly Fate, the final limit of life itself.
“Are you some kind of god or something?”
Literally. There was no other way to explain or accept the reality I now faced.
“Who the hell are you…? No. Never mind. There’s no point in thinking about it now.”
I decided to stop pondering the identity of the voice that had resurrected me. Next, I turned my thoughts to the condition of my body. According to the knowledge that had been forced into my head, I could now take life from any living being in this world. I could absorb the vitality—the energy—within them and use it as the nutrients I needed to function. It was similar to how people ate food when they were hungry.
“‘Eating death,’ huh…”
It sounded like an exaggerated expression, but it also left a rather unpleasant aftertaste. It might be a clue to the identity of whatever had brought me back.
What concerned me more was the act of taking that life energy as nourishment. I couldn’t really explain how I knew the method. It was like how a person couldn’t explain how they learned to take their first steps, cry, laugh, or make sounds as a baby. It really felt as if someone had shoved an instruction manual straight into my brain.
“…Let’s try it, then.”
As an experiment, I drew the life from a blade of grass growing from the ground. The grass instantly withered and dried up. Seeing that, I finally realized I had not returned as a normal human being.
The vitality I had taken from the grass was pathetically small. My most honest impression was—
“Not even enough to reach my liver.”
There was no sensation of having eaten something, no feeling of fullness whatsoever. I stood up and looked around.
“By the way… this is the Beltar Plain, right?”
The final battlefield where I had died was indeed the Beltar Plain. It had been one of the few large-scale operations in history, established at the strong insistence of the Allied Forces and led by Central Command. The main objective had been to subjugate the massive hordes of monsters flowing in from the west and expand territory, but—
“It must have failed, huh?”
I had died midway, so I didn’t know the outcome, but I was certain it had. From the very beginning, the gap in power between the monsters and the Allied Forces on the battlefield had been overwhelmingly clear, and the Allies’ momentum had only grown weaker as time passed.
“There’s nothing here.”
Just looking at this plain told me everything I needed to know about the result. Traces of battle were scattered everywhere, hinting at the fierce fighting that had taken place. The cracked, broken dry earth evoked the terrible violence that had unfolded here. If this really was the Beltar Plain—the site of that decisive battle—and if the Allied Forces had won, they would never have left the reclaimed land in this state. People would have gathered, the land would have been cultivated and tended, and villages would have sprung up. At the very least, some kind of ‘result’ should have been visible.
Which meant this place was—
“A dangerous zone where you never know when or where you might run into monsters.”
In short, the situation was completely fucked.
On top of that, I was completely broke, without even a single proper weapon. The clothes I wore were even worse—nothing at all on my lower half, completely exposed. At this point I might as well be naked.
“No. It’s actually worse than that.”
Wearing only a tattered military jacket with nothing on my lower body. If I ran into another person in this state, I’d be labeled a pervert in an instant. Meeting a monster would be bad enough, but running into people seemed even worse.
“……”
Every time the wind blew, the lack of pants made my lower half feel unbearably awkward. I did my best to ignore the strange sensation and walked barefoot across the plain. It wasn’t a pleasant feeling at all. The texture of dirt and grass against my soles. The sharp edges of the occasional stone I stepped on made me grimace.
“Never thought I’d miss combat boots this much…”
It was ironic that I was now missing the soles of the military boots I had grown so sick of wearing. Even as I grumbled quietly to myself, I never let my guard down. This was the place where I had died. In other words, it was crawling with dangerous monsters. And though it was unlikely, running into people here would also be troublesome.
If I did encounter anyone in this place, the only ones that came to mind were soldiers who had somehow survived the battle against the monsters. Whether human or monster, I had no idea who—or what—I might run into. With every sense sharpened to the limit, I continued walking without any clear destination.
That was when I saw it.
“That’s…”
Small, scrawny figures. Green-skinned creatures caught in the wide-open view of the vast plain.
“Goblins.”
Small stature, angular and pointed ears and chins. Thin arms holding daggers and hand axes. All of it entered my sight.
“Why are there goblins here?”
I had expected monsters, but I hadn’t thought I would encounter low-grade ones like goblins. After all, this was the place where a minotaur and other mid-to-high-grade monsters had been advancing when I died. That was why I had been keeping every sense on high alert, ready to run the moment I spotted anything.
“……”
I crouched down. There were six of them in sight. That number was manageable even bare-handed and without weapons. The concept of Heavenly Fate and how to use it that had been injected into my mind. This was the perfect opportunity to test this bizarre ability to consume death from living things.