“We don’t have time for this! Run!”
With that urgent cry, a rough hand snatched my arm. It was a knight in silver armor. His helmet was pulled low so I couldn’t see his face, but the grip dragging me away was steeped in desperate urgency.
Half-dazed, I let myself be pulled along by the knight. My lungs felt like they were about to tear, my breath rising to my throat, and behind me Cassian, drenched in blood, was roaring like a beast as he pointed at my back.
“Catch her! Drag her back even if you have to break her ankles!”
The sharp scrape of swords being drawn from their sheaths rang out from every part of the corridor. We ran like mad. I nearly slipped several times, but we didn’t stop. Yet shaking off knights who knew the imperial palace’s layout by heart was close to impossible from the start.
Each time I gasped for breath, the image of Scarlet’s head dropping to the floor with a thud, and her final gaze fixed on me until the very end, overlapped like an afterimage and blurred my sight.
“Damn it……!”
A harsh curse burst from the knight’s mouth.
In the end, we reached a dead end. Knights emerging around the corner were closing the encirclement layer by layer, their spears and swords flashing, and beyond them I could see Cassian slowly approaching, exuding a blade-cold killing intent.
It was the perfect end. There was nowhere to run.
At that very moment, the axis of the world skewed grotesquely out of place.
As though someone had spilled water over a massive canvas, all color was sucked away in an instant from the edges of my vision. The red light of the torches that had burned so vividly, and the knights’ cold armor, were all dyed a murky ash gray.
Even the shouts and footsteps that had been ringing loud enough to tear my eardrums were completely erased. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t even twitch a finger. It wasn’t muscle paralysis. It was an overwhelming, bizarre phenomenon, as if the world itself had been trapped inside a paused black-and-white film.
In that astonishing gray silence, only a single book flew through the air and slowly opened before my eyes.
[Congratulations. You’ve finally reached a branching point.]
Unable to even part my lips, I read the sentence as it appeared in midair like it was being typed.
[What could the gift given to you this time be?]
With a cheerful sound effect, the book closed horizontally, then immediately unfurled with a rattle like an animation as its pages began to turn. It was like a 777 slot machine. Soon, three pitch-black bomb shapes lined up and overlapped, and with a cartoony “pop,” something came bouncing out.
It was a girl wearing a pointed hat. No, she was absurdly small to be called a girl. She was a dainty little fairy, smaller than my two palms put together, the sort that might appear in a fairy tale.
[Wow. Congratulations. To think you’d draw the “Bomb Witch”!]
[She’s an ultra-super-super rare gift, so she hardly ever appears.]
[Clap, clap, clap. I’d like to applaud you, but since this is text, this is all I can do.]
[I’m sure you have lots of questions, but I hope you’ll learn the answers through your adventure.]
[Keep this in mind. There’s no paradise in the place you flee to.]
The book closed and vanished along with those mocking sentences, and at the same time, the gears of the stopped world began meshing together again in a frenzy. The colors and sounds that had been sucked away crashed back in like an explosion.
“Iliana Revni!”
The instant Cassian’s roar struck my eardrums, my vision flashed with a thunderous boom.
A massive blaze swallowed the corridor before my eyes. The splendid interior of the castle became a crimson sea of fire in an instant, and the knights who had been closing the encirclement were swept straight into the flames, screaming horribly.
The stench of burning flesh and acrid smoke stabbed into my lungs. There was not a single thing I could understand.
Then I saw the palm-sized Bomb Witch from earlier floating at my eye level.
“Aren’t you going to run away?”
The witch asked with a giggle.
“……Did you do this?”
“Yep. But it wasn’t my will.”
Even amid the pandemonium of people being burned alive, the tiny witch’s answer was as calm as a child out on a picnic.
“Then who the hell did this!”
“They were trying to kill you, so maybe your will to live manifested as an explosion? I’m sure Lord Halo wanted it that way too.”
My head spun. Gritting my teeth, I reached out to grab the tiny witch floating in the air by the collar.
“I seriously feel like I’m going to lose my mind right now. I can’t even grasp what’s going on, and I want to tear apart and kill someone in front of me. Fuck, am I that bastard author’s toy? Fuck! What the hell is this?!”
Even under the violent trembling in my eyes, the little girl calmly pointed at the blazing flames with her finger.
“Wouldn’t it be better to run than stand around doing this? That monster over there looks like he’s about to come through the flames any second now.”
She wasn’t wrong. Beyond the pillar of fire, I could see Cassian’s silhouette wrapped in a blue sword aura. I clenched my teeth. The one who roughly dragged me back out of the flames while I stood dazed was the unfamiliar knight who had snatched me away and fled with me earlier.
“Get a hold of yourself, Rodri! This way!”
“……Rodri?”
At that moment, a detail from the original novel struck my dazed mind like lightning. There was only one person who would call me not “Iliana,” the princess of the empire, but “Rodri,” the name I had used when I was a mercenary in the eastern kingdom.
Ah. Elise.
Having only just possessed this body, there was no way I could have actually known her face. She was someone I had only read about in the text of the book. A commoner without even a family name, but a comrade as close as blood who had shared life and death with Rodri since their past days in a mercenary corps. The only person in the empire who knew my true identity, and my last loyal retainer, ready to blindly lay down her life for me.
In the flames that looked as though they would collapse at any moment, Elise was reaching out her hand to save me.
As we took advantage of the chaos and raced down a secret passage, I shot a glare at the fairy-sized witch hovering near my shoulder. She kept giggling and whispering something into my ear without pause.
The author had called this bizarre existence a “gift.” The witch said the power of bombs could now be handled as I willed. She whispered that it was a destructive authority that could blow away everything I hated whenever I wanted.
The witch moved her dainty, fairy-like lips and spoke as if sneering.
“This destruction is the manifestation of the will inside you. You wanted to turn everything that oppressed you into ash, didn’t you? Ah, that poor knight was swept up in your indiscriminate murderous intent too.”
“My will, seriously? Don’t make me laugh. There’s no way that’s true…….”
The moment I ground my teeth and muttered toward the little witch circling in midair, Elise, who had been walking ahead, flinched and looked back. The eyes visible beyond her helmet trembled slightly, like those of someone who had seen something uncanny.
“……Rodri. Who on earth are you talking to in empty air? Why have you been staring at nothing and muttering to yourself like a madwoman since earlier?”
It was clear that Elise couldn’t see the Bomb Witch giggling on my shoulder at all. To her, the sight of me covered in acrid smoke and spewing curses at empty air must have looked like I had gone insane from shock.
We had barely escaped to a secluded wall on the outskirts of the imperial palace when it happened. Elise, who had been leading the way, suddenly staggered and collapsed against the wall like a wet fallen leaf.
“……I think this is as far as I go.”
With trembling hands, she forced off her helmet and threw it aside.
Her exposed face and nape were already horrifically burned, raw and dark red. The indiscriminate explosion the witch had called forth earlier had eaten away at her life as well. Seeing her cough up clots of blood every time she gasped for breath, I knew there was no hope left.
My breath caught. Guilt mercilessly carved up my chest, but the taste in my mouth was even more bitter. In the gruesome moment when the real breath of Elise, whom I had known only as text, was slowly stopping before my eyes, a bizarre and horrifying calculation bloomed in one corner of my mind.
‘Since a helper died, will it give me another perk as a reward?’
I was disgusted by myself for harboring such a shallow expectation over a comrade hovering between life and death, as though I were trash worse than a beast. But I had to live. To survive, I had to figure out the fucking rules of this goddamn system.
In the end, Elise closed her eyes.
I was sorry, but I didn’t even have time to cling to her corpse and wail. Without even being able to bury her, I had to leave her cooling body behind in the darkness and run again.
But the moment I turned past the final outer section of the castle wall, I crashed into a wall of perfect despair. Beyond the castle wall, hundreds of imperial knights were already packed in dense formation like a swarm of ants, completing the encirclement. Their spear tips all pointed at me at once.
Either way, I was a rat in a trap.
On my shoulder, the Bomb Witch licked her lips and giggled. A sweet, disgusting whisper, as if she were urging me, “Hurry up and use me to turn all of them into chunks of meat.”
In the end, I burst into crazed laughter like someone who had snapped.
It was all ruined anyway. If I was going down, I couldn’t exactly die alone, could I? And since the power in my hands just so happened to be none other than a “bomb,” a mad character from the manga Chainsaw Man that I had cackled over in my room in my previous life flashed through my mind.
I looked at the knights surging in layer upon layer and laughed like a fucking madwoman. Then, pretending to pull out the safety pin of an imaginary grenade with my teeth and toss it away, I wrung out every last bit of malice left in me and shouted at the top of my lungs.
“BOOM!!!”
With that single word, the world literally exploded.
It was a splendid and horrific fireworks display. In the storm of crimson flames, the bodies of armed men were torn apart and burst with screams. Blood and flesh rained down.
“Stop! Iliana!!!”
From beyond the hellscape, I heard Cassian’s beastlike, tearing shout. But a knight’s blade, consumed by terror and madness, ignored even the emperor’s command and did not stop as it rushed toward my neck. It was a strike I could not avoid—no, one I no longer had even the will to avoid.
Slice.
The horrifying sensation of cold metal carving into soft flesh in an instant and severing hard vertebrae with a chill. The pain lasted only a split second. Immediately, my vision spun, and heaven and earth flipped upside down. My neck had been perfectly separated from my body and was soaring into the air.
Along with that grotesque sense of severance, my own back came into my spinning field of vision, blood spouting like a fountain from the cross-section of the severed neck.
‘Ah, I’m really dead.’
The perfect end called death had never felt so hollow and so vivid.
At that very moment, the red droplets of blood scattering in every direction lost gravity and stopped, floating in midair. The roaring flames and the people’s screams also stopped grotesquely, as if someone had pressed the pause button on a remote control. Once again, the world lost its vitality and was dyed a murky ash gray.
With my tilted vision, stopped after rolling across the floor, I stared indifferently at my body lying in a pool of blood. Fully aware that my head was rolling on the ground.
Then that damn book flew through the gray air again and opened wide right in front of my nose.
#
[ #1. Final Report ]
▶ Number of times maid outfit worn: 1
[What a shame, when there are so many pretty clothes.]
▶ Number of people killed: 53
[You sure did commit a lot of innocent murders.]
▶ Witches encountered: 1
[Wiping after the tutorial gacha? Guess that’s what happens to newbies.]
[ Overall Review ]
A brain-explosion playthrough where you shoot a disaster movie by yourself in a rofan and then commit suicide!
[ Evaluation ]
★☆☆☆☆ Survival ability is so trash it makes me want to replace the protagonist.
★★★★★ A manly development where you cast an AoE as soon as you start and then die!
★★★☆☆ The maid outfit was kinda hot, though.
★★☆☆☆ I told you to film a romance, but you sat there filming a disaster movie by yourself;;
★☆☆☆☆ Fucking boring.
#
My vision rippled grotesquely, and space twisted.
My neck, which had been rolling on the floor, attached itself back onto my spine as if drawn by a magnet, and the bloodstains splattered everywhere were sucked back into my veins like a videotape rewinding through time. Everything was playing perfectly in reverse.
Time accelerated, and before long, the blood-colored film paused at that horrific moment in the solitary cell where Scarlet had lost her life.
[Will you start again from here?]
A new sentence rose mockingly above the book.
Start again from here? The slow-motion afterimage of Scarlet’s neck dropping with a thud was still gouging through my brain, and it was telling me to return to the middle of that hell?
[You don’t want to?]
Letters dripping with ridicule spread like black ink. From the beginning, I had never had anything like a choice.
The reversal of time did not stop and continued on. The corridor where Scarlet’s death throes had rung out, Cassian’s cold eyes that had ensnared me, the knights closing the encirclement—all of it curled black like burning film.
My vision flashed entirely white, and at last, a terrible silence came, as though my eardrums had burst.
And when my eyes flashed open again.
The first things to touch my skin were the feel of a hard, crude mattress and the musty smell of dust pricking my nose.
“……Ah.”
A cracked voice escaped me, like that of someone who hadn’t drunk water in a long time. The cold pain of my severed neck and the horrific heat of the flames that had burned my entire body had evaporated as if they had been lies. As though possessed, I staggered to my feet and approached the old mirror hanging on the wall.
In the mirror stood a woman with disheveled silver hair and a vacant expression. An impression as cold as frost, and red eyes burning in a way that was unpleasantly vivid.
Iliana Revni.
The very first day of perfect possession, when I had fallen into this hellish novel and opened my eyes.
“Ha, haha…….”
A dry, empty laugh echoed through the barren room.
Everything I had done to struggle and survive had been erased as hollowly as if someone had casually closed a single page of a book.