The Man's 100th Bad Ending
I hated rainy days.
Because whenever I thought back on the days I had died, they had always been days when the rain came down in mournful, dreary sheets.
The sound of rain in a damp, humid, suffocating space had a way of summoning up emotions I had buried and forgotten.
Listening to it fall somewhere beyond these walls, I took stock of my situation. I had tried, and I had failed. That I never once achieved the goal I had set for myself was a fact that would not change. Which time had it been? I lowered my head trying to recall the number — though I knew all too well how pointless it was to count.
This life had been a shambles. Not that there hadn't been a few lives where it wasn't.
When I happened to brace a hand against the wall, a chill swept over me. I ran my palm across the stone floor, which gave up winter's cold without restraint, all of it rising — and soon realized I could no longer feel my feet. Frostbite, of all things. I'd wondered why I hadn't come down with it; apparently I already had. Wincing at the prickling ache, I slumped down where I stood.
It had been a full week now, locked in a room so cramped that even sitting and rising again was an ordeal, and somewhere around then I slowly began to grasp what my fate would be. I would probably die here this time, I thought.
Gauging the passage of time in this windowless room of pure darkness was no simple task. If not for the porridge that arrived once a day, I wouldn't have known at all. The dish had come six times, so six days had passed; once I received the next, it would be exactly one week.
I twisted my aching body this way and that, and at last, hearing footsteps from above, I smiled faintly.
"About time you showed up. I thought you'd have me killed within a day."
The creak of wooden boards paused for a moment. Whether they had heard my voice or not, the two sets of footsteps gradually quickened, until at last they stopped right in front of me.
"How shameless you are. Or no — do you truly not know the sins you have committed?"
A woman's voice broke the darkness. Even within that jet-black veil, her blue eyes shone with a brilliant light, drawing near like a winter wind and carving my body to ribbons.
"Why not be grateful we let you live a whole week. Merely facing someone like you turns my stomach this much — I wonder how well we would have to treat you before you managed any thanks."
At eyes that regarded me the way one regards an insect, a laugh escaped me in spite of myself. She truly had never changed, not once. Whatever I did, however things stood between us, her eyes always wore this same frigid gaze by the time it all came to an end.
Be grateful they weren't killing me on the spot, she says. In my heart I wanted to snap back at her, but at that glacial glare my shoulders flinched all the same.
"...Your fiancée has come to see you. Go on, then — exchange your farewells. It will likely be the last."
I still could not see into that darkness. All it told me was that another voice was pouring down on me from just ahead — and that the one it belonged to had once been my fiancée.
"Robert."
That sweet voice which had once sworn to love me was now laced with thorns, grown desolate and hollow. If you asked me where it had all gone wrong, I suppose it traced back to my own life — all of this, in the end, the fruit of my desperate struggling to survive.
"Every single day I spent with you... I regret them."
It was a line I had heard dozens of times before. It no longer hurt.
"If only I could erase every memory of the time we spent together. Do you know...? That meeting you turned my life into a ruin...?"
"Who knows."
"The ring and the necklace you gave me — I melted them all down and threw them away. Why did you come to me? Why did someone like you come and ruin me? Why, in God's name—!"
My heart had long since frozen hard and gone cold; there was no room left in it for wounds. So I listened to her in silence, staring at the small vial set before me. Even in that darkness, the vial gleamed bright. It seemed to proclaim itself the leap that would end all of this, radiating presence, and as I looked at it my heart slowly grew calm.
Poison this time, was it. If only it would kill me in one clean stroke.
When I lifted my head, my eyes met the cold gaze of the Young Matriarch, who held my sobbing fiancée in her arms. Meeting that look of hatred and loathing, I picked up the vial, slowly.
"This — will it kill me the moment I drink it?"
"...So you do know what it is. It's medicine far too good to waste on a miserable wretch like you — but pray that death, at least, will serve as your atonement."
They weren't even trying to hide what it was, which meant the Duke probably knew all about it as well. To be precise, the man who was my father — but why would he trouble himself over a problem child like me?
When I unscrewed the cap, a fragrant scent of almonds spread through the air. I knew it well; I had tasted it once before. Back then I had swallowed the antidote and lived. This time, the poison would be where my life ended.
Was I relieved? No — as if. But by now, it was all beside the point. Even if I tried to carry on living from here, I had finally understood that the fate allotted to me was a death this wretched.
One hundred. The number of times I had died — and the number of times I had kicked and thrashed, fighting to live.
I felt the drug slide down my throat and closed my eyes. A scalding heat spread through my chest. My heartbeat quickened, and I could feel the blood that had coursed through my body now pressing on toward death. At the sensation of a thousand fires simmering beneath my throat, I doubled over coughing. What smeared my hand was sticky, viscous liquid, and it was not hard to recognize it as blood.
I was going to die, then. Perhaps my body had already toppled over, and I was in the midst of dying, pressed against the frigid floor. The cold, clammy stillness blurred my mind. And, laughable as ever, the reaper's voice that always arrived when death loomed close... sounded, as ever, utterly sweet.
You have met the 100th Bad Ending.
This reaper, who appeared whenever I stood at death's edge, had always been rather kind to me. It turned time backward until I obtained what I had longed for so desperately. However thoroughly my life might be steeped in sin, once I died and time rewound, it always carried me back to a moment before I had committed a single sin at all.
Listening to that voice, I asked myself: did I truly want to live? Dozens more deaths — those cruel, pitiless stares fixed upon me — was I prepared to endure them all over again? I was sick of it now. I could not bear it. Whatever I did, to them I would only ever become something less than an insect, so for what, exactly, would I live through lifetimes upon lifetimes again?
Before my 101st life began, what I wished for through my dimming consciousness was a single request. Please — let this interminable regression finally end. Let what comes next be eternal rest.
The 101st cycle begins.
That crisp voice ringing in my ears felt like nothing so much as the voice of a demon — crueler than anything else in the world.