Determined, Hiroto continued down the empty corridors. He smashed through the sealed exit and came into the outside world for the first time since he recovered his memories of his previous life.
“No way!”
Dozens of people were forming a semicircle around him, as though waiting for his arrival, and Hiroto was happy to see them all. He recognized many of them, after all.
Some of them looked a little different, but they were his classmates from the same school in his previous life, along with the teaching staff. Junpei Murakami, Miyaji Konoe, Asagi Minami, Hijiri Rikudo, and Narumi Naruse! His friends. The others who had been reincarnated into Origin. Never giving up hope had paid off. Even without a fate from gods, he had been sure his friends would find him. That his friends would save him. That was all he had clung to, for twenty long years.
They took their time, sure, but he wasn’t about to complain. He was overjoyed at this reunion. Now he had a second chance for his second life. He could fix things. Look how everyone had come to rescue him. Shaking with happiness and hope, Hiroto took a step toward them.
“Fire at will!”
At the command of a youth who seemed to be leading his “friends,” attack magic hammered into Hiroto.
“Wait! Why are you attacking me? I’m one of you! I’m one of you!” Hiroto’s cries were drowned out by the scorching fire, slashing air blades, stabbing ice, and crackling lightning that poured down onto him. Having dropped his guard completely, Hiroto was left exposed to everything they had, and collapsed to the ground.
“Pretty pathetic. All this talk of a dangerous undead, but there was no need to even use my powers,” came a voice from above.
“Hah, we’ve got thirty of the 100 Heroes here! Nothing can stop us. Right, Mr. Murakami?”
“Drop the mister stuff. I’m not your teacher anymore.”
Familiar voices chattered away, out of view. One hundred? One hundred Heroes? No! There were 101 of us, 101 with me! Hiroto wanted to shout, but his throat was gone. He couldn’t make any sound. His right arm had been burned to a charcoal stump and his left ripped off completely. His feet were gone, and his left leg was just a lump of flesh. His face and torso weren’t doing much better.
“We got off easy because this undead dropped his guard. Death attribute magic is truly terrifying.”
Hiroto turned his one working eye toward this voice, to see Narumi Naruse standing there. She was older than in their previous life, now a woman rather than just a girl.
“Yeah. In the end, he’s just another victim of this laboratory.”
The youth who had given the attack order was standing next to her. From the distance between them, Hiroto could instinctually tell that the youth and Narumi had a close relationship.
“He must’ve wanted us to kill him.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Hiroto,” Narumi said.
Hiroto? Hold on! Hiroto Amemiya? This guy is Hiroto Amemiya!?
“Let’s eradicate him, so he can’t feel any more pain.”
“That’s the only thing we can do for him now,” Hiroto Amemiya agreed. “Narumi, with me.”
Hiroto was raging inside at the injustice. The sheer nerve of his guy. He received the fate and fortune intended for Hiroto, and now he was playing the hero, about to kill him! Why did it have to be this guy, and not Hiroto himself? The terrible second life Hiroto had led was all because of this scumbag! The 100 Heroes leaving him out and then coming to kill him!
He tried to shout, to voice his anger, but then a brilliant light from the hands of Hiroto and Narumi reduced him to dust.
“This is all your fault!” Hiroto bellowed. “You call yourself a god? What kind of second life was that? You sent me into a hell far worse than my first life!”
Hiroto’s fist was wreathed in what looked like black mist, but it didn’t come close to hitting Rodocolte. That was the difference between a man and a god.
“I really am sorry for what I did to you.” Rodocolte repeated the same platitudes, explaining to Hiroto’s raging soul the situation he was currently in. The information, transmitted by the power of the gods, entered Hiroto’s head in an instant.
“You’re saying…there’s a third time for me?” Hiroto said.
“That’s right. This was the plan from before I first reincarnated you,” Rodocolte said. “You have no recourse to turn this one down, and I cannot stop it from happening.” It all seemed very unfair, but Hiroto also saw a glimmer of hope.
“Ah ha! In that case, in the next world I’ll just kill them all! The ones who killed me, I’ll kill every last one of them!” he cackled. “I was the first one to die, meaning I’ll be the first one to start my second reincarnation. That’ll give me the advantage! That’ll let me kill the lot of them!”
He could become an adult first, build up his strength, and then find Hiroto Amemiya and the others when they were reborn later, while they were still children, and kill them! He could do that even without any special powers.
“Come on then. Adjust me, or whatever you need to do, your divine holiness! I’m getting fortune and fate this time, right? I’m the first one to die, meaning even you can’t screw up again, surely?”
“I have nothing to give you.” Rodocolte pushed forward with his palm, gently bumping Hiroto’s soul away.
“What?”
That was all it took for Hiroto to start accelerating away, falling toward something or somewhere.
“At this point, I could give you something new. But for you, I can’t. “
“Why? I get nothing again? Just me? How can that be?”
“I can’t have you killing the other resurrected,” Rodocolte replied, falling into the distance. “I’m sorry, but if you kill them in revenge then you’ll interfere with all my plans. Your death in Origin was an unfortunate set of circumstances. Bad luck. The fact that Hiroto Amemiya and the others didn’t recognize you at the end was more of the same, although I doubt you will accept such an explanation.”
After the boat explosion, Hiroto was sitting at the edge of the space where the souls gathered, meaning no one had seen him there. Only one person had declined to be resurrected. And the final blow—Hiroto had been resurrected last. So Hiroto Amemiya and the others either thought Hiroto had not died with them at all, somehow surviving the explosion, or that he had just declined the resurrection like the other person. To top it off, when they were reunited, Hiroto’s face had been completed disfigured by all the human experiments, and even Narumi hadn’t realized it was him.
“I brought all of this upon you,” Rodocolte said. “I wanted you to never give up, to never hate, and to live a positive life, but that simply wasn’t possible with the circumstances you were sent into. With the discovery of the death attribute and the development of new magic, you made a contribution to Origin, but received no reward for any of it. I hope you can forgive the fact that you now go into your third life, knowing it will probably be another life of misfortune.”
The fact Hiroto most definitely could not forgive anything of the sort radiated from his soul as it fell farther away.
“All I can do is make you give up on your foolish revenge before you even attempt it, and prompt you to kill yourself.”
With that, something like slime appeared in Rodocolte’s hand. The next moment, it hit Hiroto.
Pain lanced into Hiroto as Rodocolte explained.
“That’s a curse. A curse you’ll never be able to break. That curse will stop you from obtaining any kind of power, even in this new world. But for your fourth reincarnation, I promise to wash away all of your painful memories and return you to the normal cycle of reincarnation.”
Hiroto had no time to respond to this most awful of promises, and he blacked out.