Dragon King Calendar Year 500.
There was a girl who was called the Child of Rebirth.
The girl had dead eyes.
Ever since she was born, her eyes had been hollow and reflected nothing but despair.
The adults around her found her unsettling and kept their distance.
The girl knew.
What kind of fate awaited her.
She had known before she was born.
No, saying "before she was born" was not quite accurate.
She had been born over and over again.
No, saying she was "reborn" was not quite accurate.
She had repeated the same life over and over.
No, saying it was the "same life" was not quite accurate.
She had repeated a life that differed only in the slightest ways.
A life that differed only in the slightest ways.
And yet, the ending was always the same.
It never changed. She always met the same end.
That end was death.
The girl dies.
Death is something no one can avoid, but the girl's death was a brutal one.
She was treated as a tool by her country, captured by the enemy nation, and killed.
Like a toy that children fight over.
Sometimes she was violated, sometimes she was eaten alive by monsters, sometimes she was submerged in water.
In suffering and despair, the girl died.
For the girl, life was a path leading to despair.
Every day was nothing more than walking one step, then another, toward the executioner's platform.
There was no hope.
The girl had power.
The ability to rewind the time of an object by up to one day.
The ability to restore something broken.
The ability to even revive the dead.
One day.
Just one day.
But an ability that could bring back even the dead was more than enough for the country to conscript her as a Child of Rebirth.
The king of the country claimed her for himself and kept her exclusively.
The power to rewind by one day cured the king's injuries and illnesses.
Strangely, it could not stop aging, but that was a trivial matter.
As far as the girl knew, there were three kinds of kings.
Each time she died and a new nightmare began, they changed slightly.
But every single one of them treated the girl the same way.
For the girl, all the kings were the same.
Her power as a Child of Rebirth brought her no fortune whatsoever.
It could not rewind her own time, nor could she use it for herself.
It was nothing more than a chain binding her to the prison of the royal palace.
And then she dies.
Kept in a corner of the palace, encountering slightly different people each time, only to die in the end.
Sometimes her ability fell short, and she incurred the king's wrath.
Sometimes the kingdom was invaded by another country, and she was taken as a prisoner.
Sometimes the kingdom was attacked by the Demon Race, and everyone was slaughtered.
The girl lost her life in the most wretched manner.
And then it began again from the start.
From being born in a remote backwater corner of the kingdom.
Being viewed with revulsion by the adults, taken to the royal palace, and killed.
Of course, in the beginning, the girl had tried to escape her fate.
She hid her ability and wanted to live with her father and mother forever.
But it was futile.
When she turned five, soldiers from the royal palace came, regardless of where she was, and dragged her away.
Before the soldiers arrived, she tried to run outside the village.
But it was futile.
She would be killed by monsters, or captured by bandits or slavers.
She was caught and sold to various places, but eventually she always ended up at the royal palace.
Fate bound her to the palace like an antlion pit and killed her in despair.
It was hell.
An infinite hell that went on and on forever.
Hell shattered the girl's heart beyond repair.
The girl took on an empty expression and followed the king's orders like a machine.
For a hundred years, two hundred years.
She no longer knew how many times she had died or how long she had lived.
But the moment of death was always vivid.
It must have been instinct.
The instinct not to die must have seared the moment of death into her memory as something to avoid.
As a result, the girl's life was overwritten by the moment of death.
There were no more memories to speak of.
Her memories became nothing but an unbroken chain of dying moments.
In the midst of her ceaseless deaths, the girl thought.
She thought with all her might.
(No more... someone, please help me...)
At that moment, the laws of the world changed.
--- In the next life, something was different.
She was born in a nameless village and taken to the royal palace at five.
Her days of being the king's puppet and using her power daily did not change.
But when she turned ten, something happened that had never happened before.
On the day she turned ten.
As though celebrating her birthday, the girl was taken to a certain place.
Beneath the royal palace.
She was taken to a section housing a massive magic circle.
The girl had not known the palace contained such a magic circle.
She had not been allowed to roam freely inside.
Around the magic circle stood dozens of adults.
Holding staffs, wearing pitch-black robes, their faces hidden by hoods.
From her previous hellish experiences, she knew these people were called magicians.
But she did not know what was going to be done to her.
She knew nothing of magic or magic circles.
In the girl's hell, there had never been an opportunity to learn about magic or magic circles.
The girl was bound to the magic circle.
But her eyes remained hollow.
Something new was happening.
But it did not even create a ripple in her heart.
She would die in the end anyway.
No matter what happened along the way, nothing would change.
That resignation had taken hold of her heart.
The ritual began.
The magic circle ruthlessly drew mana from the girl's body.
A human known as a Child of Rebirth harbored an enormous amount of mana within.
It was of a fundamentally different nature from what was used in ordinary magic or swordsmanship, and was not something that should have been usable in magic or magic circles like this.
So was it a coincidence that the magic circle drew mana from the girl's body?
No.
That magic circle had been deliberately constructed.
It was designed to use the mana of the "Child of Rebirth" to activate.
Who had made it?
Though outside the girl's line of sight, the creator stood in a corner of the ritual.
A single magic knight who had been called the greatest genius in the history of the kingdom.
She too was watching the magic circle with an expression that, like the girl's, bordered on indifference.
And the ritual succeeded.
The magic circle blazed with brilliant light.
Light of seven colors.
The light of a summoning.
And when that light subsided, at the center of the magic circle stood a young boy.
"It worked!"
"It succeeded!"
"The kingdom is saved!"
As the magicians celebrated, the boy looked around with a bewildered expression.
Then he turned toward the girl sitting flat on the ground before him, her eyes hollow as ever.
"Um... where am I? I'm pretty sure I was with Nana and Kuro and... huh?"
It was a language no one present recognized.
But somehow, the girl understood it.
Perhaps it was because her own mana was being used, or perhaps it was because the girl was connected to his very presence here.
"Oh, my name is Shinohara Akito. ...And yours?"
"I am the Child of Rebirth."
"...what? Um... I was asking for your name?"
Come to think of it, the girl had never been asked for her name, especially since coming to the royal palace.
A Child of Rebirth had no name.
If a Child of Rebirth happened to be royalty, there might be an exception, but in principle, a Child of Rebirth had their name taken away.
After that, they were called only "Child of Rebirth" and no one ever spoke their name.
The girl was no exception.
However, whereas a normal Child of Rebirth had their name taken before they could even remember it, the girl remembered hers.
She remembered it because she had died so many times, again and again.
The name her father and mother had given her.
"...
"Oh, that's a nice name."
The boy smiled.
That smile made the girl's heart race.
--- The girl felt the change.
The girl was freed from her duties as a Child of Rebirth by the king and placed in the role of interpreter for the boy.
With a single magic knight assigned as their escort, the three of them began roaming the royal palace together.
"Lilia, what's that?"
The boy, who had come from another world, asked the girl about everything.
About the world, about daily life, about people.
The girl had died many times, but she knew nothing.
"What's that... you're asking?"
"Huh? That's a magic tool. You pour mana into it and fire shoots out the tip. They're probably heading into the forest to slay some monsters."
The girl, knowing nothing, asked the knight, and the knight answered.
The magic knight called a genius, despite her languid demeanor, answered everything.
Unlike the girl, she knew everything.
"Oh, like a flamethrower or something... come to think of it, this world has a lot of tree-type monsters, right...? Have you ever seen any, Lilia?"
"...A few times. They were rustling about."
"Rustling, huh... haha, I can't even picture it. Oh, but I think I saw something like that in a movie once."
"A movie...?"
"A movie is—"
Days spent as an interpreter.
They were entirely different from anything she had known before.
They were fresh.
Whenever the boy learned something new about this world, he laughed without a care, and each time the girl felt her heart flutter.
At first, she had thought nothing would change.
She had thought her life was already over.
But from time to time, listening to the boy's stories about his world, she could let her mind wander into dreamlike thoughts.
Hearing the knight's answers to the boy's questions, she felt the vastness of this world.
She learned that this world stretched on without end, filled with all manner of people and things she had never known.
A little after the boy's arrival, she noticed that the food she ate had flavor.
She found herself able to listen to the chirping of birds when she woke in the morning.
She could feel the warmth of sunlight and find it pleasant.
She felt that she was truly alive.
She thought hell had ended.
The boy had come to save her.
He had come to rescue her from that long, long hell.
And she had been born in order to meet this boy.
From now on, her real life would begin.
This was fate.
The boy was so strong, so kind, that he became the pillar supporting her heart — that was how it seemed.
But fate betrayed her.
--- The kingdom was engulfed in war.
The girl knew.
She knew that every single time, she would be caught up in that war and killed.
She knew it better than anyone.
But the girl did not know.
That the boy had been summoned to win that war.
That the kingdom's prophet had advised them that if they fought as they were, they would surely lose, and that they should summon a hero from another world to fight for them.
And that, just as the prophet said, the kingdom had spent ten years summoning the boy, after which there was no turning back.
The girl knew nothing of this.
And so the boy fought.
But the boy knew nothing of fighting.
The people of the kingdom knew he could not fight, yet they sent him to the battlefield.
They dressed him in armor, placed a sword in his hand, and put him on the front lines of the army.
And the boy died.
In the midst of the war, he was brutally killed.
His head was cut off in a single blow by the enemy commander.
The head was taken by the enemy commander, and only the boy's body was returned to the girl.
The people of the kingdom looked at the dead boy and simply sighed.
The hero from another world had been useless after all.
Believing the prophet's ravings had been a foolish mistake.
They spat those words and nothing more.
The girl clung to the boy's corpse and desperately used her power to restore him.
It was futile.
More than a day had already passed since the boy's death, and decomposition had begun.
There was nothing the girl could do.
The girl wept.
She screamed, asking why.
She screamed, asking why this always happened only to her.
She wept.
It was not only sadness.
The sensation of being toyed with by fate.
A helplessness that made her feel as though she were being mocked — no matter what you do, it is useless — seized her heart.
And then, the kingdom fell as well.
The girl was captured and, as always, lost her life in the depths of despair.
But the girl thought.
For the first time since being born, she thought with all her might, with all her might, with all her might.
(I want to live...!)
Not just "I don't want to die," and not just "someone save me."
(I want to live alongside him...!)
The time she had spent with the boy had not been long.
But that brief time had truly taken hold of her heart.
It had effortlessly overwritten a heart that had been painted over entirely with the memories of death.
The boy was hope.
The first hope the girl had ever known.
Hope lifted the girl's gaze and made her look forward.
For the first time since being born, the girl turned her attention to her own power.
At the moment of death, the girl bit her lip until it bled and used her power.
Rewinding time by one day.
That was what everyone believed her ability to be.
She wrung out every last shred of power, nearly burning out her brain, and used it.
She used the ability to "alter the past."
The world looped, with the girl's existence at its center.
--- The girl's power reached into the past.
Dragon King Calendar Year 400.
The town of Roaa in the Fittoa Region.
Where the boy had lost his life.
Above that spot, a rift in space-time appeared.
Within that rift existed a being with a strong connection to the boy.
That being closely resembled the girl's soul, which longed to live alongside the boy.
And so the world was naturally altered to create a future in which the boy survived, carving out a path for him to live.
As a result, in Dragon King Calendar Year 500, the boy survived.
...Or so it should have happened.
Creating a person who should not exist and placing them in the past was impossible, no matter how powerful the girl's ability might be.
The rift in space-time existed, but the being could not descend into the world.
The girl's power and the world's power were locked in stalemate.
Year 400, 401, 403.
The world progressed without incident.
But during that time.
A single soul slipped through the rift in space-time.
That soul had no connection whatsoever to the boy.
It was simply a soul that had died nearby before the girl's power could call forth a being when the boy was being teleported.
However, because it existed as a soul, it was able to pass through the gap in the rift that the world was trying to hold shut and enter the world.
It then drifted aimlessly and entered the body of an infant on the verge of death.
That soul's owner would be named
The existence of Rudeus Greyrat altered the world in small but meaningful ways.
He changed the thinking of
Those actions weakened the world's resistance.
The rift in space-time was pushed open further.
And in Dragon King Calendar Year 417.
However, the existence of Rudeus Greyrat had caused the world to undergo changes beyond what the girl had intended.
What should have been changes triggered solely to save the boy spiraled beyond that scope.
History began walking in a direction no one had foreseen.
The world had changed.
Whether that change was what the girl wanted, no one could say.
But several years after Rudeus's death.
The girl was born.
Having lost nearly all her power as the price of the loop, an empty shell of a Child of Rebirth came into being.
In order to fulfill her final wish.
She was born into the last world.
Whether she would live to the end — that, for now, no one can say.
This concludes the story of Rudeus Greyrat, formerly known as a NEET with no job.
The Human God saw a future of defeat, but the future is ever-changing. The battle between the Human God and humanity will continue onward.
However, this is, at its core, the story of Rudeus, so I would like to bring the main story to a close here.