Chapter 5 - Regression

“You little shit!”

A harsh shout. Then a foot filled his vision, and a heavy pain struck his jaw.

“Ghk...!”

Bera groaned, his eyes widening almost to the point of tearing, before finally letting out a wet, labored breath.

“Ughhh...”

“Quit being such a fucking baby! You should have brought back your quota!”

Shouts hammered his ears. Pain made him retch. Feeling both, Bera roused his dazed mind and lifted his head toward the voice.

'... Doran?'

Doran. The leader of the gutter’s beggar gang. A dead man whose neck Bera had snapped with his own hands.

Bera stared at him, his expression unsettled and his breathing still ragged, then gave a hollow snort.

'Ah...'

He had come to hell. His shredded soul had finally fallen into hell to suffer.

As Bera began snickering at the thought, Doran’s face twisted violently, and he kicked again.

“Still at it, you little shit!”

THUD!

The blow caught Bera in the jaw, knocking him backward.

Still wearing that snickering expression, Bera lay in the muddy water and looked up at the sky.

Gloomy, stale air. It was the gutter. Despite all his desperate struggles to escape, he had returned to the gutter in the end. Cruelly enough, his hell had taken its shape.

At that realization, even louder laughter burst from Bera’s mouth.

“Pfft... Hahah!”

“You’re laughing?! LAUGHING?!!!”

Watching Bera laugh, Doran flew into a rage and kicked him over and over. As those furious kicks battered his entire body, Bera’s thoughts drifted on.

'The Saintess...'

What was there to wonder about? That woman would be in the gods’ embrace. She was never someone he needed to worry about. She had managed to shake even a vile bastard like him in the end, so surely that was where she had gone.

Bera snickered as he recalled the final moments of his life. What had he been thinking? He laughed at his own shamelessness, at having dared to hope for another life.

A god wasn’t a fucking idiot. Why would one show such mercy to a vile bastard who had spent his entire life using its sacred mark however he pleased?

'... How shameful.'

He was ashamed of himself for weakening at the end, for clinging to a warmth that had only brushed past him.

This suited him. This was the ending a vile bastard like him deserved. He had used a god’s grace as a tool, sat upon a throne fashioned from the despair of ordinary people, and spent his whole life indulging himself. This was only the natural outcome.

Kicks battered his entire body. Yet laughter still burst from him. Enduring those two conflicting sensations at once, Bera thought of the Saintess again and felt his insides tighten.

'... If only I had never met her.'

Then he would have truly welcomed this. He would have accepted it humbly. He would never have regretted his former life.

Amid those thoughts, another suddenly occurred to him: 'Could all of this be the Supreme God’s design?'

Perhaps she had been placed at the end of his life to make him regret the sins he had piled up—to make the sinner who had dared defile a god’s sacred mark suffer all the more.

Wasn’t that quite plausible? If it were true, the Supreme God was indeed omniscient. Bera would pay for his remaining sins in profound regret and despair. If the Supreme God, who had arranged that in advance, was not omniscient, then what was?

Laughter burst out again.

“Hehehe...”

He had no reason to laugh. He ought to have been weeping. Yet somehow, he laughed.

After he had laughed for a long while, he found Doran had stopped kicking him and was staring at him with a sickened expression.

“Hah, haaah...”

“Why? Aren’t you going to kick me some more?”

“You c-crazy fuck...!”

Doran backed away in hesitant steps. With something like terror on his face, he kept retreating, then ran off into the distance.

Watching him go, Bera thought that the bastard had no grit even in hell. Only then did he notice something was wrong.

'... Wait.'

Did this make sense? This was hell, wasn’t it? A place that punished wicked souls. That was what it ought to be. So why was the jailer meant to punish him running away like that?

“Urgh...”

Bera raised his aching body and steadied his breathing. Something was strange. With that thought, he spent a while running his hands over himself to check his injuries, until he spotted something through his torn sleeve that should not have been there.

He hurriedly rolled up the sleeve.

Beneath it appeared a circle formed by eight intertwined curved strokes.

'The sacred mark?'

It was the sacred mark of oaths. Why was it embedded here? Why did it remain?

Pondering that, Bera closed his eyes and examined his soul. This was one of the divine powers granted to those bestowed with the sacred mark of oaths.

Against his closed eyelids appeared an ink-black soul, its murky darkness wavering like a flame.

'... It’s whole.'

It had not been torn apart.

'... No.'

It had been fully restored. Even the part torn away when he had once broken an oath had healed completely.

As Bera stared blankly at this bizarre phenomenon, he suddenly remembered the oath he had inscribed before dying and examined his soul again.

Golden letters were engraved upon the ink-black soul.

'... It’s there.'

The final oath of his life. The oath that he would live for the Saintess. It was inscribed there.

Bera opened his eyes and surveyed his surroundings. A back alley of the gutter, gloomy beneath the Magic Tower’s shadow, closed in and thick with stale air. His soul, with not even a fragment torn away.

This strange situation seemed to suggest that everything leading up to his death had been a dream. But the oath inscribed upon his soul said none of it had been a dream.

Bera looked at his skeletal wrist.

'My body from when I was a beggar.'

That was the only time in his life he had been this thin. Once he no longer went hungry, he had always maintained a sturdy build. There was no mistaking it.

Only then did Bera realize what all of this meant.

'... Regression.'

He had returned. Time had rewound. He had returned to when he was a wretched little child in the gutter, when he had accomplished nothing at all.

His thoughts went numb, and the pain receded with them. Bera stared blankly at the sky, unable to comprehend this phenomenon.

He should have been asking why. Yet absurdly, before any such question, one thought began filling his mind.

'The Saintess is alive.'

That fact alone filled his mind. Relief began welling up inside him, though even he could not explain why.

She was alive. And not merely alive. Her skin had not melted from burns. She was not starving on slop worse than animal feed.

... She had not gone into hiding in this gutter.

Clenching his fists at the thought, Bera savored the surging relief for a long while before another question came to him. What had caused this? Why had he regressed?

He tried to form a plausible guess, but no suitable answer came to mind. Only a being capable of accomplishing such a thing occurred to him.

'... The Supreme God.'

The one seated upon the most exalted throne. The one who shaped the world and wove destiny. No one else could do such a thing.

* * *

Covered in muddy water, Bera wandered dazedly through the gutter. He could not sort out his thoughts.

If the Supreme God had done this, what did he want from Bera? The questions continued for a long while, until at last Bera recalled the oath he had sworn.

'... I will live for the Saintess.'

If the Supreme God wished to accomplish something through him, it would be the fulfillment of that oath. Surely that was it. What was there to like about him that would warrant such attention?

He was an apostate who had abused a god’s divine powers. A vile bastard who had thrown the world into chaos. This second life the Supreme God had given him could not possibly be for his sake.

Suddenly, Bera recalled a conversation with the Saintess.

[“If the Supreme God treasures love so greatly, he would have taken pity on you, Saintess, and never left you in a place like this.”]

He had said that to the Saintess as she eked out her miserable life in the gutter. Her answer had been that it was her own choice.

Bera gave a faint chuckle at the memory and looked toward the sky again.

'It seems even you could not break that woman’s stubbornness, Supreme God.'

Was that not why he was trying to save her through someone else’s hands?

His thoughts continued at length. If that was what the Supreme God wished...

'I’ll gladly play along.'

He let out a long breath, expelling the stale air that had filled his lungs.

'Before that...'

Bera turned toward a corner of the gutter—one of its deepest alleys, the scavengers’ den.

He remembered Renée’s corpse sprawled in muddy water. At the memory of that moment, of the strange and indescribable despair that had risen within him, his fists clenched tight.

'... I should clear out the trash before I go.'

It might have become something that never happened, but to Bera, they were still sinners who had to be torn limb from limb.

* * *

A shabby tavern reeked of mustiness. In the middle of that wreck of a room, its furnishings all smashed and scattered, Bera stood drenched in blood, looking down at the corpses.

They were scavengers whose necks he had broken with his own hands.

It was absurd that the very first thing he had done after finally receiving a second chance was murder. Even so, he had no regrets. In fact, he would have regretted not doing it. Wasn’t that true even from a logical standpoint?

They were the gutter’s deepest darkness. Mold that would spread endlessly if left alone. Unless he cleaned them out like this, they would crawl even beyond the gutter. It was right to do it.

... He could have said all that, but...

'... It’s an excuse.'

A faint chuckle escaped Bera’s mouth. He did not bother dressing up his actions. He had sought them out and killed them purely to vent his anger.

Her end was still engraved in his mind. Remembering it enraged him, and he had killed them to take that anger out on them.

The smell of blood filled the tavern. It seeped into him, stirring an unpleasant sensation. Bera expelled that sickening feeling with a long breath.

“Haaah...”

He had won by borrowing the sacred mark’s power, but fatigue still filled his body. Naturally. His current body was simply too weak.

Bera looked toward a shard of mirror on the floor. Reflected in it was a gloomy-looking boy with a gaunt face and black hair covering his eyes.

Yes, a boy. His current body belonged to a young boy who was only fourteen years old.

What was more, he was emaciated from inadequate meals and injured from being trampled all over. He had fought the scavengers in that condition. No wonder he was so exhausted.

'The cleanup is done for now...'

Bera found a chair that was still reasonably intact, sat down, and continued thinking. He needed to plan what came next. The oath inscribed upon his soul—what would he have to do to keep it?

He could not live as he had before. ... No, having already come to regret that life, he had no desire to live that way again.

He had vowed to live for the Saintess, for that peculiar woman. He needed to become someone fit to remain at her side.

... Fortunately, he had a good tool for that. Bera looked at the sacred mark inscribed on his right forearm.

'... A holy knight.'

A holy knight of the Holy Empire.

An option he had never even considered in his previous life. Yet if he chose it, it would be easier to achieve than anything else. And it was precisely the right position from which to guard the Saintess’s side.

The events that would unfold across the continent lined up in Bera’s mind.

'The Saintess receives her sacred mark four years from now.'

The year she turned fourteen, and he turned eighteen. He remembered clearly because that was when he had been gathering rumors about the Empire’s nobility to begin doing business with them.

'Four years...'

His previous life. A stretch of time that no longer existed. To Bera, it felt like barely more than two weeks ago.

He remembered her finding him collapsed at the entrance to the gutter.

'You found me in my last life...'

So...

'In this life, I will come find you.'

A smile formed on Bera’s lips.