Prologue: A Dying Wish
Droplets of water pattered softly against my face.
Straining against the suffocating heaviness in my chest, I forced my eyes open. Through the blurring haze, Elias's silhouette slowly came into focus. My childhood friend was cradling me against his chest, weeping uncontrollably.
Ever since he had awakened the power of resurrection, people had hailed Elias as a veteran hero. A hero who treated his own life as expendable—who died thousands, tens of thousands of times, tormented by endless agony and nightmares, yet still dragged himself forward through the blood and mud. How I despised that hero. How desperately I had wished he would throw such a cursed title away.
Why are you crying over me? Please, don't cry... Ah, I've made another mistake, haven't I?
If my death added yet another scar to his overburdened heart, his suffering would only grow heavier. The regret gnawed at me all over again.
A crushing drowsiness washed over me, and my eyelids slipped shut once more. From the navel down, a numb, prickling cold had set in; I couldn't feel a thing. Everything inside my body felt as though it were spilling outward, draining away into the dark. My heart labored violently, straining in a desperate, shuddering squeeze to pump whatever meager dregs of life still lingered in my veins.
Ah... I'm going to die soon.
The thought of what lay ahead for him—the agonizing truth that I would no longer be there to hold him, to shelter him from the world—ached far worse than the wound tearing through my flesh. If I died too, he would truly be all alone.
Cruel words flickered through my fading mind like a revolving lantern of nightmares.
"What's the big deal if you die a few more times? Cowardly bastard, cowering like that. Sheesh."
"If we die, that's it for us! But you just come back to life, so what does it matter to you?!"
"Ha, hesitating just because it hurts? This is all your fault. You're the one who got them killed!"
"Why the hell would a meat shield need to think?"
The wretched creatures he had once called comrades. The people he had trusted as his allies.
Those were the venomous words they had spat at Elias after he became their so-called hero. And worse than any of them was me—who had turned my eyes away even as his soul wore down to nothing, on the very brink of shattering into dust.
I resented them all. I drowned in sickening regret. As much as he had leaned on me, I should have held him close. I should have stood between him and those poisonous tongues. I never should have treated him so coldly without ever trying to understand the agony he was enduring.
With the last dregs of my strength, I forced my eyes open once more.
The veins along Elias's neck bulged as he screamed something at the top of his lungs, but his voice could no longer reach my ears. I won't even get to hear his voice one last time before I go. I wanted so desperately to touch his cheek just once more, but when I tried to lift my arm, my hand and fingers refused to obey. My consciousness was drifting further and further away into the cold.
If only I could go back to those days... I swear I will stand by Elias, no matter what.
I made a vow. I prayed with every shred of my dying soul.
Was that... Elias's voice?
No. It sounded heavier. Stronger.
Yet the thought struck me that if it were the voice of an Elias from the distant future, perhaps it would sound just like that.
An auditory hallucination, heard at the very threshold of death. But knowing that my desperate wish—to walk beside him until the bitter end—had been answered, if only in some small part, I forced a faint smile onto my paralyzed lips and let go of the final thread of life.