The Return
A short while later.
When the man with that smiling face melted into the air and vanished, the Saintess, who had been slowly gathering the divine power still swirling around her, finally let the tears she had been holding back spill down her cheeks.
At the king’s quiet question, the Saintess neither shook her head nor nodded.
The king gazed once more at the spot where his old friend had disappeared and spoke with a bitter smile.
He remembered clearly the moments just before crossing over to another world.
He would not deny that the consideration of his comrades had been one of the reasons he was able to endure a hundred years in the Otherworld. But nothing could compare to his longing for home, the memories he clung to, or the desperate efforts he had made to never let them go.
He had repeated them dozens of times a day. So he would not forget that place…
In case the day ever came when he could return. If he ever made it back.
…He refused to become the pathetic fool who could barely remember the very home he had finally returned to.
With each passing day, his memories grew more beautiful, wrapped in ever more perfect packaging.
Whether they were good memories or bad ones, shameful anecdotes he could never tell another soul, or recollections of people he once hated even speaking about—every single one of them was precious to him.
But a hundred years was more than enough time to scatter even the strongest human will, no matter how hard one tried.
A hundred years on the battlefield.
While his humanity was erased, revived, and shattered over and over again, the memories of his homeland grew hazy.
Most of the memories he had fought so hard to hold onto, the tender moments he had cherished, simply flew away.
What little remained had become so abstract that he could no longer tell whether they were real or merely his own imagination.
Even then, he had not given up. Even when the memories felt so uncertain that he could no longer distinguish truth from fantasy, he clung to them with everything he had.
And he never surrendered.
As long as he was alive and breathing, he would do whatever it took.
“So I’m back.”
He felt the blinding white light that had paralyzed his vision fade into brief darkness, then brighten once more. When he opened his eyes, he found himself staring at a landscape that felt strangely unfamiliar. He murmured under his breath.
An ordinary mountain path.
It was probably the hill just outside the city where he used to go for morning runs to lose the weight he had gained after his discharge.
It was here that something no one would ever believe had happened to him.
He had been summoned to another world.
It was such a common trope.
An unremarkable young man—or perhaps a student—gets dragged to another world, hunts monsters, becomes a knight or a famous mercenary, embraces beautiful women, then more beautiful women, and even more beautiful women…
“……”
But the moment that childish fantasy became reality, he had learned exactly how foolish those delusions truly were.
Humans were not the ones who hunted monsters. They were the ones being hunted.
And humans hunted each other just as viciously.
In a single morning, an ordinary family could be turned into slaves or slaughtered.
If a stranger with no connections and no visible strength entered a village, the seemingly innocent locals would poison him and sell him to slavers. The money they earned would help the village breathe just a little easier under the lord’s crushing taxes, so they felt relief rather than guilt.
In that place, if you couldn’t protect yourself, no one would protect you. There was no room for pity toward those who died because they were weak.
“Hoo…”
Now that he was back, was he finally thinking about that place again?
Just as he had once clung desperately to thoughts of home while in the Otherworld, the situation had now reversed. He shook his head slightly, scattering the thoughts, and carefully examined his surroundings once more.
The mountain looked quite different from what he remembered.
He crouched down, studied the ground, then walked over to the nearby trees and touched them here and there. Eventually, he shook his head.
“This trail hasn’t been used in a long time…”
The traces on the ground told him it had once been an active hiking path.
There were clear signs of human passage, and in one spot on the forest floor, the remnants of trash someone had discarded long ago still remained.
But something was strange about the scenery.
It felt as if the entire mountain had been sealed off at some point and a ban on hiking had been issued. As if, after a certain time, all human footsteps had abruptly stopped.
The trail, once so heavily trafficked that grass had no chance to grow, was now overgrown with weeds. Even the sections once paved with bricks or concrete were cracked and split, with grass pushing up between the fissures.
Another oddity was the air itself.
The first thing that had surprised him after being summoned to the Otherworld was how refreshing the air felt there.
Simply breathing made his body feel lighter and somehow healthier. That had been the very first advantage he discovered in that world. Once he learned it was due to the mana flowing through the atmosphere, it was only natural that the air of his homeland now felt awkward.
‘I can feel it.’
Contrary to his fear that the polluted air of home would choke him the moment he returned, he found he could breathe without much difficulty. And faintly—very faintly—he could sense mana within it. The amount was incomparably smaller than in the Otherworld, but it was undeniably there.
He couldn’t tell whether this mana had existed in the past and he simply hadn’t been able to sense it back then, or whether it had only appeared after his departure.
What was certain, however, was that mana existed in the air of his homeland. And that meant he would be able to wield the same mana-based powers here as he had in the other world.
‘That can’t be right.’
If mana had existed here from the beginning, there should have been people who knew how to use it in some way. Scientists might have even analyzed the air’s composition and proven its existence.
But from what he remembered, the so-called psychics of the past had mostly been frauds or simply people with unusually sharp observational skills.
There had been no true superhumans who could create fire with their hands, no real mages.
Yet in this current situation, he could no longer say such things didn’t exist.
Just as a wider field of vision allowed one to see things that had previously been invisible, sensing mana in his returned homeland brought new thoughts to mind. He shook his head.
‘This is no time to be standing around.’
He cleared his head and refocused.
The image he had seen in the crystal orb before returning had clearly shown that some kind of disaster had struck this place. First, he needed to figure out exactly how much time had passed since he left.
‘Is this fortunate, then?’
Judging by the state of the trail, it was clear he had not returned to the time before he was summoned to the Otherworld.
Still, the fact that enough time had passed for human traffic to cease and weeds to overrun everything suggested quite a lot of time had indeed gone by.
That realization made his steps quicken.
“……”
He was still holding the palm-sized leather pouch the king had given him. He slipped it into a hidden pocket sewn inside his shabby pants, then covered it again with both his trousers and outer garment.
‘It’s a little embarrassing to go back looking like this, but I suppose I don’t have a choice.’
When he had first been summoned to the Otherworld, he had been completely naked. No tracksuit, no sneakers—nothing. So he had assumed the return trip would be the same and hadn’t asked for clean clothes.
During his time there, he had never clung to material possessions because he believed he would return home empty-handed anyway. Even though he had accepted the pouch the king tossed him, he had thought it would simply remain behind in that world.
‘Is this thanks to the Saintess?’
Perhaps it was because the Saintess who had sent him back possessed far greater power than the priest who had originally summoned him. Thinking gratefully of her, he began to move, then suddenly slipped behind a large tree in the underbrush and climbed up its side.
There were only two soft sounds—tap, tap—barely louder than the rustle of leaves.
In an instant, the man had hidden his body perfectly among the branches and foliage. From below, he was completely invisible. His concealment was flawless.
And a short while later.
A faint rustling sound came from the grass a little distance away.
It wasn’t the sound of wind moving through the vegetation. It was the deliberate, artificial noise of something moving. The sound grew gradually louder as it approached.
From his vantage point, the man soon spotted a single rabbit pushing its way through the thick undergrowth. It hopped once, closing the distance toward him, then stopped and rose up on its hind legs, lifting its front paws.
With its head held high, it pricked its long ears like radar, scanning the surroundings warily. Its behavior was not much different from that of an ordinary mountain rabbit. The only obvious difference was its size.
“……”
It was a massive, heavy-looking rabbit, the kind he had once seen on overseas news segments. In fact, it might have been even larger. If its fur were stripped, its body might look smaller, but at a glance it seemed to weigh around fifty kilograms.
Even though it was a rabbit, its size was enough to make an ordinary person freeze in fear. If it had been a more aggressive-looking beast, it would have been downright terrifying.
And even a rabbit could be dangerous.
The eyes he glimpsed carried a hint of aggression.
If someone let their guard down just because it looked big and cute, they could easily get their flesh torn off.
Of course, the man felt no fear. But he wasn’t particularly hungry, nor did he need its pelt right now.
So he simply watched as the giant rabbit, after scanning its surroundings for a moment, hopped off into the distance. Once he confirmed no further movement followed, he quietly looked up above his head.