IBTRFL Chapter 1

One Ending

The lives of children without parents cannot be called easy.

Aer's life was no different. Misfortune is relative, so no precise verdict can be rendered. But objectively and subjectively alike, Aer had an unlucky childhood.

She grew up in an orphanage run by the church. Grew up—or rather, survived. That is the more accurate word. She was always hungry and she was beaten often. Thanks to that, she learned early what most people don't: the human body is sturdier than it looks.

A cold and hungry life on the streets would have been several times better. The one advantage, if it could be called that: she learned to read and write.

The priests taught nothing except scripture and doctrine. Whether having scripture copied out of you until you could barely lift your hand could even be called teaching was another question—but at the very least, she came away able to read and write. That, in the end, was an extraordinary piece of luck.

Sixteen years old. Aer was pushed out of the orphanage and thrown into an unforgiving world.

There were few options for a nameless orphan. She chose the mercenary's road because she needed to eat. The cruelty and drudgery she had endured became, in the end, unexpected assets. Whatever else she lacked, she had grit and she could take a hit.

She could read, so no one could swindle her. She had stamina and a durable body, so she survived regardless. Aer did not load her sword with any goal beyond survival. She simply swung it, relentlessly.

She gained many people in the years that followed, and lost many. She grew numb.

There was no other way to stay sane. A mercenary's life is a leaf fallen onto a river. She couldn't decide anything about her circumstances, which is true of most lives, but more visibly true of hers.

Still, she thought she might stop someday. Settle in a quiet village somewhere. Farm a small patch of land. A gentle future.

Sometimes she would sketch the shapes of a husband and children into her imagination. Even that dream was a luxury for a wandering mercenary.

She held that impossible dream and kept on living, somehow.

One evening, as on any other, she finished a contract and headed for the inn. Inside, as expected, drunk mercenaries were spinning all manner of nonsense.

They were saying a strange creature had been spotted near the Land of Grief—something mixed from human and beast and animal in ways that made no sense. Aer ordered stew and ale and let the drunkards' rubbish wash past her.

But the sightings kept mounting. And in the end Aer confirmed it with her own eyes: monsters that chewed living humans apart. Things with human features that were not human. People called them chaos beasts.

The bad omen she had assumed would fade grew until it swallowed the world. Behind it stood a peculiar religious organization that would come to be known as the Extinction Cult. The Extinction Cult and the chaos beasts—a catastrophe that appeared from nowhere and consumed half the world.

Even in the disordered world, Aer's purpose did not change.

Surviving.

She gritted her teeth and swung her sword. She would be lying if she said the urge to run never crossed her mind. But when peace and safety had been stripped from every word that held them, there was nowhere to run to.

She lost people she cared about. She took on too many tragedies. By the time she could no longer cry, Aer wandered the battlefields kept alive by nothing more than the fact that she had not yet died. And in those wanderings she came face to face with one man.

A man with black hair and blue eyes.

The most ill-omened man in the world.

At some point his name began passing between people's lips.

Kardo.

She knew the name. The man who had single-handedly destroyed a high-ranking priest of the Extinction Cult on the western front. The one they were calling a hero. She wasn't particularly interested. Whether a hero appeared or didn't, nameless soldiers kept dying pointlessly.

People cheered at the arrival of a hero. Even the corrupt officers and alliance leadership threw open their arms. The soldiers, who had known nothing but despair, found something beginning to flicker in their eyes.

Whatever else she didn't care about, that part she liked.

And then, when chance put them on the same battlefield, Aer understood in her bones what the word hero actually meant.

Is that something a human can do?

One swing of his sword, and dozens of chaos beasts ceased to exist. Whatever bizarre things the Extinction Cult priests unleashed, Kardo kept walking forward without changing his expression.

Hero. She could see why the grand title had attached itself to the man.

The victory that day fell like rain after a drought. Of every battle she had fought, this one had the fewest casualties on their side and hit the enemy hardest. Everyone cheered and shouted his name.

Kardo didn't react much. He wiped the blood from his face, expression unchanged, and returned to the fortress. That was all.

The front celebrated with a small gathering. Rationed supplies they'd been holding back were finally opened. Aer collected a strip of dried meat and a piece of bread and retreated into a storeroom. It was a musty, out-of-the-way place. No one ever bothered going there.

She was sitting in the dark, chewing dried meat, listening to the noise outside.

The door had no warning of footsteps—it just swung open.

Aer drew her sword and stepped back on instinct. The moonlight that seeped into the storeroom lit up a clean-featured face.

A hero. Kardo. What is he doing here.

She was bewildered. This was not where a man should be when every voice in camp was lifted for him. She straightened and put her sword away.

Kardo looked at her steadily. A fixed, searching gaze, like it intended to go straight through. Aer, somewhere between awkward and confused, carefully opened her mouth.

"……Is there something you—that you need from me?"

"……."

"Say something."

"You."

He cut across her words. His voice was pleasant to listen to—a poor match for that blunt face. What he said with it showed no promise of decency whatsoever.

"Your name."

"What?"

"Name."

Kardo was immovable. A backstreet thug would have had better manners. Aer swallowed what had already climbed to the base of her throat.

She didn't want to answer. But he was a hero. He didn't look like a petty man, but if he took offense at her attitude the complications would be numerous.

"Aer. No surname—I'm an orphan."

Kardo blinked once and said, in the same flat tone:

"You."

"Yeah."

Aer answered with a slight sideways tilt. Kardo continued without any sign of displeasure.

"Fairly usable."

He left those words behind and walked out of the storeroom. Aer remained in the corner of it for some time, blinking with an expression she couldn't have described.

What the hell is that bastard? The anger arrived a beat late. On the battlefield, a mercenary was a consumable—die and get swapped out, that's all. She knew that. But being treated like an object to her face still set something burning.

Ill-omened bastard.

The first meeting with Kardo was as bad as it gets.

The day after learning what a hero actually was, Aer received an unexpected summons.

From the Marquess—the commander responsible for the wall's defense, and her employer. She followed a soldier to the meeting and found the Marquess in his plate armor and the ill-omened man from yesterday, both seated.

The Marquess didn't offer her a seat. He stated his business.

"The hero here, Lord Kardo, has expressed a wish to hire you."

Damn it. Aer had to work with everything she had to keep the crude word from leaving her mouth.

Hired by that ill-omened, blunt man. She would rather have walked into the Extinction Cult's main stronghold with one sword.

Both men's eyes settled on her. You. Dare. Refusal is not on the table. That was the gaze.

She had no power and no money and no leverage. She tried to refuse anyway. A nameless mercenary with nothing—but she still had her pride.

"It is for the sake of saving the world. We cannot allow any more sacrifice than there has already been."

At that moment, Kardo turned—his eyes shining quietly.

She knew those eyes. The eyes of people she had already sent off to somewhere she couldn't reach—people who had carried a better will than anyone else she had known. Something like a wistful ache. Whether it was that—she accepted.

From that point on, a brutal march began.

She followed Kardo onto one battlefield after another. The hero stood at the front, as heroes do, and Aer stayed close behind.

In the heart of enemy lines, the two of them cut down an endless stream of opponents.

A fight that walked the edge between living and dying. In that place, trusting someone else with your back means you've formed a bond. Even with someone who made the worst first impression of your life.

The relationship that had been cold as ice thawed, little by little. Aer learned about Kardo the person, rather than Kardo the hero.

He was shyer than she'd expected. Clumsy with people, with being around them. The bluntness and the flatness were tension—the tension of someone who didn't know what to do when a face appeared in front of him.

When she heard that the crowd's cheering made his heart slam in his chest, Aer clutched her stomach and rolled on the dirt.

Kardo disliked vegetables. Especially peas. When she scolded him for being picky he would put them in his mouth with a sulky face. The day she found peas tucked into the corner of his empty bowl, she let out a flat laugh.

He was, unexpectedly, a disaster. The man who tore through enemies like a demon the moment a battle started spent an entire day without noticing his shirt was inside out. She straightened it for him and received a bashful, stumbling word of thanks. Aer looked at Kardo and smiled.

Like clothes slowly drenched in a quiet drizzle, imperceptibly, the two of them had seeped into each other.

Since when? The most ill-omened man in the world had become the finest man in it.

Aer wrote something other than survival into the purpose of her life. I want to be happy with this person. When all of this is over, I want to settle somewhere peaceful, raise a couple of children, live well.

The happiest dream a wandering mercenary could manage.

Her head kept trying to fall forward. The world in front of her was pale and blurred, like frost on glass, and from the great wound in her stomach, raw blood was heaving out in pulses.

Aer used everything she had left to try to hold her body upright. But a body that had already reached its limit wouldn't listen.

Can't. Have to see. She blinked unfocused eyes and looked at what was in front of her.

Kardo, covered in blood, swung his sword with everything remaining in him. A massive creature let out a grotesque death-cry and split in half. The two pieces of it collapsed onto a mountain of bodies already stacked there.

She could see Kardo stumbling toward her from beyond that. The sword he'd always kept close had been thrown somewhere—she didn't know where.

Your father's keepsake, you said. Her lips moved without strength. What she'd meant to say came out as a faint breath instead.

Like a wooden puppet whose strings had been cut, Aer's body fell. Kardo, who had run with everything he had, caught her and pulled her into his arms.

"El, El, please. Aer, please."

Broad, capable hands—a swordsman's hands—wrapped around shoulders that wouldn't hold themselves up. Through the thick smell of blood, she could catch a familiar scent. Something crisp and clean, like the heart of a deep forest.

Aer squeezed out the last of her strength and raised her hand.

"El, it's me, please."

"……Kardo."

"Yeah, I'm here. I'm right here."

Aer's hand found his face and moved across it gently. Kardo caught the hand against his cheek, held it there urgently.

Cold. Like something belonging to the dead. Not like his warm hands on ordinary days. That wrong temperature broke something in him past mending.

Tears came from those blue eyes—wretched, unstoppable. They ran down his face and fell onto hers.

Kardo was crying. The man who had not cried through any tragedy was crying. That fact settled onto Aer's chest, heavy and fading.

I hope I don't look terrible right now.

She was leaving, but he was staying. He would cry every day and drive himself mercilessly. Pain and grief and loneliness—those always fell to the one left behind. A man as soft as down, whatever his face suggested, would probably never forget this moment as long as he lived.

"Please! El, please. I don't want to be alone. I can't do it without you."

"……Kardo."

There was at least this much to be grateful for.

Heroes draw people to them. Among those people, there would be someone who would take his hand and walk beside him. There had to be. Wouldn't it be even better if there were a lovely woman who could make him forget the likes of me.

Kardo. You have to be happy.

That pitiless, resentful death allowed her one last word. But Aer refused it.

That word was a curse. A compulsive curse that would plague him his whole life. She didn't want to place another obligation on the shoulders of someone already carrying too much.

Her beloved's scream was the last thing she heard. Then every sensation was severed at once.

Aer's eyes closed quietly. A single tear—impossible to say whose—ran down a pale cheek.

Goodbye, Kardo. I was happy. I really was.

The mercenary Aer, twenty-eight years old, closed her eyes like that.