IBTRFL Chapter 2

Once More

The mercenary's life was free and precarious at once.

Wanderers who gave their lives over to a fate they couldn't see one step ahead of. Their lives took many forms, but their ends were not so different from each other.

Some look that end in the face. Some look away. Aer was the first kind, and she had imagined her ending often enough.

Torn apart by a beast's jaws, upper body shredded. Poisoned and abandoned in a labyrinth to rot. Betrayed by a comrade and left with a large hole through the stomach.

In that light, Aer thought her actual end wasn't bad. She'd been run through by ice, yes, but she'd closed her eyes in her lover's arms.

He'll grieve badly. She found herself hoping he'd cry himself out and shake it off quickly. And then meet someone else and forget me entirely.

No regrets. She had loved as much as she'd wanted to and been happy enough. The only thing left was to drink with the people she'd sent on ahead of her.

But—was the underworld always this airless? Hot, cramped, unpleasant. Even granting every possible benefit of the doubt, it could not be called heaven. It appeared that the casual blasphemy she'd committed every other day had finally caught up with her.

Petty, stupid goddess. Aer ground her teeth and cursed the goddess thoroughly.

She tried to move but the narrow space wouldn't allow it. Her waist, bent at a bad angle, registered its complaint. Her thighs, pressed under, had gone entirely numb.

Damn it…… wait.

A voice—high and not yet ripened, particular to small children. One she had forgotten over time.

A drop of sweat slid from her forehead and down her cheek. Aer, who had been staring blankly, thrashed with everything she had. Stupid thing to do, she knew. But something cold was crawling up the back of her neck and she couldn't stay still.

When the last scrap of air ran out, heavy footsteps came. The lid sealing the space was removed. Fresh, cold air rushed in through her nose and mouth. Lungs that had shriveled like old fruit expanded suddenly, violently.

Aer couldn't even get herself upright. She coughed, again and again, bent over.

"Aer. Have you come to your senses?"

A cold voice dropped onto her crumpled body.

She forced her eyes open and looked up. Thick black brows. Eyes gleaming with cruelty. A large mole at the corner of the mouth.

Unfocused violet eyes swayed, and swayed, and could not stop.

Why is this person here……

Saura Remisa. How could she ever forget—one of the people directly responsible for the worst years of her life.

She wanted to drive her fist straight into that jaw, but her body had no interest in what her mind wanted.

Her legs, crumpled for so long, buckled like dry grass. Aer grabbed the edge of the box, sweating hard, and dragged herself upright.

"Make sure to clean thoroughly next time."

Saura clicked her tongue without disguising it and left. Aer lurched out of the box.

Landscape she couldn't forget even in a dream. Achingly familiar. Memories that had been fading like old books came back sharp and whole.

The room the priests used for punishment. The place she'd been dragged to every day as a child and beaten within an inch of her life. How could she forget it.

Memory etched into her skull shook not just her mind but her body. She couldn't breathe, as though she'd taken a hard blow to the solar plexus.

Is the underworld built from a person's childhood? Even as a hypothesis it was horrible to contemplate.

Aer looked down at her own body. A thin, poor frame under worn clothing. Hands, feet, everything—small and fragile.

She hauled herself to standing, her breath coming in ragged, irregular pulls. Every sense had gone dull, like being hit by a charging bull.

Is this a vivid dream? Everything surrounding her felt like a bad joke played by mercenaries.

She made her way, unsteady, down the corridor. The arched windows. The goddess's crest in every alcove. The battered flower pots. The crack running along the wall. Like a detailed woodblock print, it matched the memory in her head perfectly.

"No. That would mean……"

Impossible. It couldn't be a dream.

The first time she killed someone. The first time she built something like affection with another person. The times she sent the people she loved ahead of her. The moment she was dying in Kardo's arms. All of it was immediate and vivid, the way something is that happened a minute ago.

That was a dream? Or—she had come back. Which would mean she was—and the time she had spent fighting, all of it was—

Something stirred that had no name. Anger, despair, grief, loss. Complicated feelings without form began to rise. An extreme confusion pressed down on her whole body.

She couldn't breathe properly. Both hands clutching her chest, shaking, Aer burst outside as if something in her had snapped. She went down stairs that screamed with every step, turned a corner, passed doors with numbers on them, and stepped out into a dark forest path.

She ran through it without direction. Stones and wood splinters hidden under fallen leaves passed over her bare feet without consideration.

Something red and hot ran from the soles of her feet. The stinging pain was proof that this was real.

Through the autumn trees, a black rock. Beside it, exactly as she remembered, a pond. She reached it, dropped to her knees, and stared at her reflection in the water.

A child who hadn't yet shed even the fine baby down on her skin, pressing fear down again and again.

Aer touched the surface of the water with her fingertips. A small ripple spread outward. The reflection blurred and dissolved.

"……So that's when it is."

Age twelve. The autumn. The day she was caught spilling a bucket while cleaning the prayer room.

She looked blankly at her wet hand. Not the hand with its accumulated calluses, but a soft hand with patches of eczema from washing and scrubbing.

The memory and the reality were so badly mismatched that the hair stood up all over her body. Like she had stolen someone else's body.

"Damn."

A crude word, in a child's voice. Aer pressed her mouth shut and lifted her face to the sky. An enormous field of stars was doing what it did best. She hadn't seen it in a long time.

Insects sounded quietly in the dark. A wind came from somewhere and riffled through a pile of fallen leaves. Just that.

No shouting. No blood. No cult. No dying. A calm she wasn't familiar with. A landscape that felt deeply, painfully strange to someone who had lived her whole life inside violence.

Aer's brow creased. She breathed out, long and slow. She breathed in and out again and again, but her troubled thoughts wouldn't settle.

Is this what a small fishing boat feels like when a great wave takes it. Nothing visible. Nothing certain.

"I don't even know what I……"

Aer put her face down onto her knees. Cool air settled on a small back.

Cold. A sharp, living sensation she couldn't have felt inside death. Her arms tightened around her knees.

She could be sure. This was not a dream. This was real. And for whatever reason, she had returned to the past.

To the worst years of her life.

A curse, or a miracle. She didn't know which kind of event this was—but a new opportunity had been placed in front of her.

Standing before it, Aer found exactly one question.

How should I live.

The young mercenary who had only ever scrambled to survive could not produce an easy answer.

Choosing the direction of a life was an act profoundly unfamiliar to her.

There are people who can choose most things for themselves, and people who cannot. Aer was obviously the second kind. She had been pushed by the world and done nothing but survive it, stubbornly, by the skin of her teeth.

She looked up and let out a short humorless sound.

"Worrying about the future first—is that even the right order."

If it was true that she had returned to the past, then even now, this very moment, the Extinction Cult would be operating in shadow. Gnawing through the world from within and without, readying themselves to drive everything into catastrophe.

No hope had ever been possible in the face of that catastrophe.

"Goals. As if. Me, an ignorant mercenary."

She muttered quietly, scratched her head, and sighed. She supposed she'd have to defer the question. What was urgent first was confirming whether the future matched what she remembered. And after that—she had to survive this wretched orphanage.

Aer brushed fallen leaves from her clothes and stood. Her fingertips had gone stiff in the cold and ached in a distant way. She didn't want to go back, but staying in the forest any longer would be dangerous.

The forest darkness, having sensed its guest's unease, shook with something eerie.

Like something might come leaping out from between those tree trunks. Something monstrous, that would swallow a lost child whole.

She looked away. She turned her back. Above all, if she were caught outside, there would be consequences. A beating at minimum—and then three days locked in a narrow closet with no food.

This was not the same as before, when she'd been capable of fighting her own corner. Right now she was a child with nothing on her but skin and bone. Walking out of the orphanage with no plan would only produce a worse outcome.

She had to endure it. Whatever hellhole it was, she had to last—until she had enough certainty about the future to act on it.

"……Life, honestly."

Aer looked up at the sky and murmured.

Overhead, bleak, ink-dark clouds covered a moon that was shining with quiet, composed grace.

Tonight, it seemed, sleep would not come easily.