Silence. Heavy. Absolute.
The screams fade, swallowed by an eerie stillness. I stand amidst the wreckage, the only living thing left.
The pain doesn't come from torn flesh or broken bones. This runs deeper—an ache carved into my mind. Overflowing mana tears at me from the inside. The burden of stolen years. The memories of another life. The torment of captivity. All of it churns together, amplified, boiling in the fragile body of a ten-year-old. My skull feels like it might split.
But I keep moving. Step by step. Not into shadows. Not creeping toward escape. Straight through the front. Through the broken doors. Toward the light. A deliberate choice—defiance against the darkness I endured.
The cold hall opens into a cave's mouth. Sunlight spills through, a single ray piercing the gloom. It touches my skin. Warm. Real. After years of sterile lights and cold hands, the sun feels like a revelation.
The outside air rushes in—raw, earthy, alive. It smells like freedom. For a fleeting heartbeat, I almost feel something close to peace.
Then the warmth dies. A shiver at the base of my spine. Instinct whispers a warning.
Something terrible is coming.
The shadow falls before I can react. Not a cloud. Not a trick of light.
A broad axe.
It crashes down with impossible force, splitting me clean in two—from shoulder to hip, like a page ripped from a book.
A sound ripped from my throat—raw, jagged, animal. Before I could even choke on the pain, the sky itself rained death.
Blades. Spears. Arrows wreathed in fire. Shards of ice sharp enough to carve bone. They come from every direction. Above. Below. Behind.
My body is shredded. Again. And again.
My blood doesn't even touch the ground—it hisses away in the heat of the battle.
It hurts. It hurts so much.
Please—stop.
Make it stop.
But it doesn't stop.
My cursed mana drags me back. Flesh sews itself together. Bones snap straight. A heart pulses again in the chest I just saw torn apart.
I can't breathe. Can't think.
Is this my punishment?
Every second of healing is met with another death. Another strike. Another tearing. Another scream.
Tear. Heal. Tear. Heal.
Over. And over. And over.
I've become something else again.
Not human. Not even alive.
A puppet of meat and mana, stuck in an endless loop of agony.
Please…
Please.
And then, at last, it did.
The blades vanished. The fire cooled. Silence returned.
I lay there, whole again, body trembling, phantom pain buzzing in my veins like poison. My breath came shallow, ragged. My mind couldn't tell if I was alive or already gone.
"The hell… just happened?" The words scraped out of me, too small, too weak.
That's when I heard them. Voices—cutting through the ringing in my ears.
"Stop! You can't do this!"
My blood froze.
That voice.
I turned my head—and saw her.
Aiko.
Aiko Tachibana. She stood only a few steps away, framed in a pale shimmer of light that didn't belong in this place. Her hair clung to her cheeks, her eyes wide and wet, her lips trembling as if she were about to laugh, or cry, or both.
It couldn't be real.
But it wasn't just Aiko.
They were all there. The entire class.
The rowdy jocks, the girls who whispered through every exam, the quiet boy by the window, every face I knew from that other world. Standing in a line, caught between fear and disbelief, staring not at me but at the child's body I now wore. Naked. Bruised. Soaked in blood that was mostly my own.
Their eyes said it all.. fear, guilt, horror.
They hadn't found a friend.
They'd found a monster.
Aiko's voice cuts through the chaos, sharp and desperate.
"He's just a kid!" she shouts, standing between me and the others, her arms spread wide like a shield. "Can't you see that? He's not some monster,
he's just a kid stuck in this mess!"
Kenji snarls, sparks crawling over his fists.
"Aiko, stop being an idiot! Look at him—mana's eating him alive. If we don't take him out now, he'll wipe out everything!"
Sakura crossed her arms, lips curled in a half-smile.
"You saw it yourself. He's not some poor kid. He's a monster. Let him live, and we'll all end up like the ones in that facility.. splattered on the walls."
"He's not evil, Aiko shoved forward, he's just lost! Remember what we were like when we got dragged into this? He deserves a chance.. at least one!"
"Lost?" Takeshi's tone cut through, sharp as glass. Calm, but merciless. He wiped out a whole facility. Guards, researchers… even kids. Doesn't matter if he meant to. The result's the same: "he's dangerous."
Hiroki scoffed from the back, surrounded by his usual group.
"Save it, Rep. You're just itching for something to prove. Don't go playing the big moralist now."
"Shut up, Hiroki," Aiko snapped, "This isn't a game. This is someone's life. You can't just—"
Before another word could pass, a voice cut through the argument—steady, final.
"That's enough."
A girl stepped forward, dragging a massive battle-axe etched with runes.
"The Knight Commander—sanctioned by the Emperor himself. That's what they told us. Unstable vessels threaten the balance. If we want to go home…"
She paused. Her eyes found mine—not with cruelty or anger, but something worse: acceptance.
"We can't leave loose ends. This is the price."
She turned toward Aiko.
"You think I wanted this? A few months ago we were high schoolers. Now we're soldiers. Survivors. And he's not some poor boy—he's carrying something that's already killed hundreds."
"A–Rika…" Aiko's voice broke. "You're really going to kill him because it's easier than trying to find another way?"
Rika's grip tightened on the axe.
"I'll do what has to be done before it's too late for any of us."
The others nod. One by one. No hesitation. No mercy.
My head spun.
They weren't talking about some cursed spirit. They weren't warning about some unstable vessel.
They were talking about me.
The broken child lying in the dirt.
The one barely holding together.
Me—Daiki.
My classmates. My old life. My world.
And yet, they didn't recognize me.
To them, I was just a monster in the shape of a boy.
All of them—except Aiko.
She stood firm, reckless as ever, the only one who still looked at me like I was human.
it hit me, like a knife in the gut.
I wasn't being rescued.
I was being hunted.
The enemy.
The monster.
The target.
"Aiko, please…" My voice trembled as I reached for her. "It's me—it's Daiki. I'm still here—"
But the words drowned beneath the roar of steel and spellfire.
They attacked.
All of them.
A storm of blades, flames, and crushing force—perfectly timed, merciless, final.
No hesitation.
No mercy.
Aiko screamed, but the executioners didn't falter.
The attacks struck.
Agony tore me apart. My body shredded, crushed, burned—again and again. But this time, no regeneration came. No grotesque rebirth. The mana inside me sputtered, useless, like a broken engine.
My body couldn't take any more. Piece by piece, it came apart—flesh bursting, bones collapsing into ash, blood boiling away in the flames. Until nothing was left to put back together.
"I was undone."
As the darkness closed in, my last thought was a single, unanswered cry:
Why?
When the light faded, Aiko stood untouched. They'd aimed around her. Careful. Precise.
Their blades were never for her.
Only me.
They stand over what's left of me—nothing but a splatter of blood and the faint outline of a shadow burned into the stone.
Their voices through the ringing in my ears:
"It's done," Kenji muttered, swiping blood from his cheek. "Ugly, but necessary."
"Clean enough," Sakura quipped, smirking.
"Guess all that practice wasn't a total waste after all."
"He never stood a chance," Hiroki scoffed, kicking at the dirt.
"Pathetic. Good riddance."
"What a waste," Takeshi murmured, his tone flat as stone. "Ending like that."
They didn't see a boy.
Not even a person.
Just a parasite, finally purged.
Aiko fell to her knees, sobbing.
She didn't know my name. Didn't know my story.
But her heart still broke for me.
Rika laid a hand on her shoulder.
"Let's go, Aiko. It's over."
And they leave.
One by one.
Their footsteps fade into silence.
But my voice remained, echoing in the dark.
I will never forgive them.
———
Ugh. Again? Figures.
Daiki's eyes fluttered open to that same blinding-white nothingness. Not standing. Not sitting. Just... falling. Like some celestial free-faller who forgot his parachute—and dignity.
"Hmph. Dead. Again."
At this point, reincarnation feels less like fate and more like some bored god smashing the reset button just to see what happens.
He glanced down—though "down" didn't really exist here—and noted with mild annoyance that he was back in his original body. Or something close. Definitely not ten
Not that it mattered. Overthinking the afterlife was just a one-way ticket to an existential headache.
The falling stopped, as abruptly as if the universe had hit pause.
He stared at the blank sky and muttered, "Right. The void. My least favorite waiting room."
Gravity didn't feel like cooperating, so he sprawled there like a discarded puppet.
Then she appeared.
The girl looked sixteen at most—bright blue eyes, pink hair flowing like she was trapped in some eternal shampoo commercial. She carried herself with the smug aura of someone who'd been introduced as "goddess" far too many times to argue otherwise. But the pout tugging at her lips ruined the effect. She looked less like an all-powerful being and more like an honor student caught faking divine authority.
Daiki, meanwhile, lay there with one leg lazily hooked over the other, a finger resting on his nose—peak relaxation mode.
He turned his head, gave her one long, tired look, then rolled his face away from her.
"Nope. Not today. Not in the mood for a cosmic sales pitch."
"Excuse me?" Her voice cracked high, offended. "Not today!? Did you really just say that—to your goddess?"
She stomped closer, hair swaying with dangerous energy.
"Get up. Now."
Daiki remained perfectly limp. Not even a twitch.
Her eye twitched. She grabbed his wrist, tried tugging. Nothing. She switched to shaking his leg, muttering under her breath like someone trying to fix a vending machine that just ate her coins.
"Get up, you stubborn soul! Quit ignoring me!"
The mood in the blinding white space shifted abruptly.
Finally, Daiki sat up, though not from her effort. Shoulders slumped, his sarcasm dimmed, his expression hollow.
"…What's the point?" he muttered. "Why send me back just to break me again? I die, I get rebuilt, and every time it's worse. If this is divine justice, I must've stepped on some celestial butterfly in a past life."
The goddess faltered. Her smugness melted.
The silence stretched a beat.
Then—
She knelt before him, close enough that her warmth cut through the void, and gently lifted his chin.
"My poor child" she said softly, "you've suffered more than most lives could bear. But you're not just punishment or failure. You're proof that pain can be endured—and turned into something stronger."
For a moment, the words broke through his armor. His eyes softened. Hope flickered.
And of course, he ruined it.
"…You're good at this," he muttered, the corner of his mouth twitching into a smirk. "Ever thought of publishing a self-help book? 'From Zero to Hero in Three Reincarnations.' You'd crush the market."
The goddess blinked, then huffed softly, a faint color brushing her cheeks as she drew back just enough to mask it. "Y-You're impossible."
"Maybe," he said with a shrug. "Sarcasm's all I've got left."
He drew a slow breath, then nodded.
"…Alright. One more reincarnation."
For a moment, the goddess only stared, her lips parting in quiet relief. Then the tension melted from her shoulders, and her expression brightened — not divine, but almost childlike.
"Perfect! Now—about your… blessing! We wouldn't want you going into this reincarnation empty-handed, now would we?"
She clapped her hands together, her eyes sparkling with excitement.
"So, tell me! What do you want? We're talking top-tier cheat skills here! Maybe some kind of ridiculously overpowered ability? Or, ooh, how about a dimensional storage thingy? Like a Doraemon pocket, but instead of random gadgets, it's filled with... well, anything you can imagine! Infinite snacks? A self-cleaning house? A portable hot spring? fireballs that level cities—you name it!"
Daiki cut her off with a raised hand. "Pass."
Her smile froze. "…Pass?"
"I don't want cheats. No powers. No destinies. Just a quiet life. No demons, no ancient prophecies. Just… peace."
The silence stretched. Then her grin twisted into something sharp, like a delinquent loan shark in divine cosplay.
"…You what? Say that again, soul-boy. I don't think I heard right."
Daiki didn't even flinch. "I said I want nothing fancy. Just a slow life. No chaos. No explosions. No random ancient evils waking up and choosing me as their nemesis. Just a house, a quiet life, and no one screaming my name every five minutes."
She stared.
He blinked.
"…Seriously?"
"Dead serious."
She groaned, throwing her hands up. Her face, which had been a rollercoaster of celestial emotions, finally settled into a look of comical frustration.
"Fine! One boring, peaceful life coming right up!"
Her words oozed divine sarcasm as she waved a dismissive hand. Then, under her breath:
"Unbelievable… give them infinite power, they beg for gardening tools. Should've reincarnated him as a cow, at least then he'd get his quiet pasture…"
The void split open beneath him. He began to fall.
A faintly amused smile tugging at his lips.
His last glimpse of the goddess was her expression twisting into the kind of melodramatic sob reserved for bad soap operas—tears cascading in torrents, her hands clutching dramatically at the empty air.
"...Don't forget about the offerings, okay?!" her desperate plea echoed after him, half command, half whine.
And then, the void swallowed him whole.
* * *