Chapter 1: Restart
―Boom!!
One enormous demon finally breathes its last.
The muscular limbs that had spread out menacingly were riddled with lacerations.
"Phew."
Del Roan, who had cut the demon down while drenched in sweat, wiped his blurred vision roughly against his sleeve.
The blood was making it hard to see.
But no matter how many times he wiped, his vision remained hazily smeared.
His entire body was already soaked through with crimson.
"Ah."
As if only then grasping the situation—albeit belatedly—he turned his gaze back.
Only a sprawling blackness of death filled his view.
The 6 companions he had clashed with, grown with, and aligned his heart with were gone as well.
He had climbed over their corpses just to reach this point, and yet the only thing that had come to greet him was failure.
"…Wow. Quite the spectacle."
As if dodging by reflex, Roan raised his gaze.
But there was no paradise to flee to.
Dragons embroidering the sky.
A red moon summoned by heretics.
The great demon's enormous arm.
A hymn murmured by an apostle.
And even the Transcendent's gaze.
It was a spectacle.
The spectacle of the moment just before annihilation.
The instant he realized the current situation was a quagmire with no way out—
This was the thought Del Roan had.
Ah, I have regrets.
He regretted his life.
It truly was a succession of regrets.
‘If I had worked just a little harder, slept just a little less, the outcome would have been better than this.’
A past in which he had grown complacent with the talent he possessed and let things slide.
‘Our party's destructive power was more than enough. If I had focused on defense, I could have ensured stability.’
A past in which he had needlessly fixated on offense and neglected defense.
And there were countless other regrets beyond those.
From trivial things like petty quarrels, to the real fights where he couldn't rein in his anger and left deep wounds, all the way to this very moment when the continent's peace had crumbled because he couldn't right a shaken foundation.
But there was no time to atone for any of it.
Because the demons were swarming.
―Slash!
A sharp sound overlapped.
The 2 arms that had accompanied him on the expedition tumbled to the ground.
Wounds that could never be undone.
But Roan could not see that.
Because his rapidly cooling mind was forcibly unspooling old memories.
He was born.
He gripped a sword for the first time.
He defeated a monster for the first time.
He felt it was his destiny to save people and slay monsters, and chose to walk that path.
He trained.
He achieved growth faster than anyone else.
He grew lazy because of it, and the care of his body fell into neglect.
Even so, he made a name for himself across the continent.
Evil arrived. Not one, but many, simultaneously.
He assembled an expedition with the foremost powerhouses of the land.
He joined forces with them.
He fought.
And then, the sprouted seeds of annihilation claimed the lives of his companions.
A heretic's test subject.
The Transcendent's vessel.
A demon-worship ritual.
An assassination by a traitor.
A sacrifice needed for ascension.
A noble's puppet.
If only he had seized the right opportunities.
That past—one that would never have come, had he stopped it himself.
Before long, even the regrets and sins faded hazily into darkness.
His thoughts grew shorter and shorter.
‘Another chance…’
Unable to finish even the words in his own heart, his life completely—
***
"Gasp…!"
Roan jolted upright.
Something felt different.
The limbs that should have been raw from phantom winds were all in their rightful place, and the fatigue that had saturated every inch of his body was nowhere to be found.
‘Blinding…’
The sunlight that suddenly touched him felt intense.
It was something that made no sense.
For several years running, he had seen nothing but an ashen sky and a blood-red moon.
Roan furrowed his brow and rose from his spot.
‘Everything is tall.’
Everything was tall.
No, that wasn't it.
‘I'm the one who's become small.’
An empty wooden house.
The scent of his hometown, filled with old memories.
Roan, who had been wandering inside it, looked out.
The green plants and trees filled the surroundings with fresh life, and birds perched on the branches and chirped.
Melgen.
The place where he was born and raised.
A quiet rural corner without a single tall building.
A dark neighborhood without a single light.
That place, one not easily found even on a map—he had returned to it.
…And shrunk to a child, no less!
‘This is a dream.’
Thinking that, Roan grabbed his own cheek and pulled.
"Ow!!"
And he howled.
It was because of the innate strength he had possessed since childhood.
Roan, rubbing his cheek that had nearly been torn clean off, came back to his senses.
‘So it's not a dream…’
Right.
This wasn't a dream—it was a chance.
‘Just what brought me back to the past? I have a faint memory of a conversation with the mage who was in the expedition…’
There were other suspicious things he ought to be questioning as well, but—
‘Still, isn't this a good thing! Why are you being suspicious about this! Just be happy about it!’
In reality, Roan felt nothing but pure joy rather than suspicion.
Of course he did.
The fact that he had turned back meant he had been given a chance to start over.
‘If I assume I've come back, then there's just 1 thing to do.’
Roan looked out at the peaceful world beyond.
The foretold annihilation.
He didn't know if it would come, but even if that weren't the case, he needed to prevent the things that would make him regret himself.
Because this was a chance to correct the countless regrets he had carried to his death.
"Alright!"
Having finished his thoughts, Roan burst outside.
5 moss-covered wooden houses and a dirt path.
The familiar scenery of Melgen.
"Mm— this nostalgic smell."
The words escaped him before he knew it.
It wasn't quite something a freshly 6-year-old child would say.
"Roan! What time do you think it is, only getting up now!"
While he was taking a deep lungful of the green fragrance, a thundering voice erupted from the building right in front of him.
An old memory, yet a voice still familiar to his ears.
‘Could it be… Grandpa Melberick!?’
"Get up on the double and tend to the farm… if you skip even 1 day, there'll be hell to pay!"
‘Ah! It's him! Grandpa Melberick!’
In his previous life, Grandpa Melberick's roar was the kind that made Roan's heart drop.
He used to cry under his blanket whenever he heard it.
But! There had never been a moment he'd missed that roar as much as he did right now.
"Go draw water and pull weeds right now!"
"Grandpa!"
But missing someone was one thing, and this was another.
For the sake of something more important, he would have to set farming aside for a moment.
"I'm sorry, but there's something more important than that! The world is in danger of annihilation, so I need to build up my strength!"
"Wh… what?"
Melgen.
Population: 10.
A community too small to even call a rural village.
An environment where a rumor could spread in just 10 seconds—and within it, Roan earned himself the dishonorable label of:
‘Worked the boy too hard and he's gone and become a doomsday cultist.’
….
Regardless of the rumors outside, Roan's second life pressed on.
‘Actually, this might not be bad? Now that rumors are going around, people leave me alone.’
Though it was a slight shame that the uncle who had looked after him stopped coming by.
He had been one of the few people who had been kind to him—an orphan found alone and left to fend for himself.
At least he was still slipping food through the door to keep him alive, so it didn't seem like he'd cut off all interest entirely.
‘I can actually boil water and light a fire myself, but still.’
Even so, having food delivered was something to be grateful for.
Today, same as always, Roan tore into the grain bread that had been slipped through the door crack, then rose to his feet.
The short legs he'd once had were by now considerably grown, and the chubby, childish body that had been round with youth had ever so slightly found its balance.
4 years since the day he returned.
The year Roan turned 10.
And today, as always, he was devoting himself to training.
‘Annihilation will inevitably follow. The same events as before are occurring.’
Roan's gaze turned to the newspaper lying on the desk.
[Red Moon Spotted Temporarily.]
[Demon-Worshipper Faction Discovered.]
And various other things.
The harbingers of annihilation and the incidents that those who had gone before him had dealt with.
Having recognized it, there was no need to hesitate further.
‘I have to grow again. This time, I can't afford to be complacent. I'll grit my teeth until the very end and keep going—this time, I'll stop it.’
He would accomplish the goal he had failed to achieve before.
Stop the annihilation, and shatter in advance the seeds he hadn't managed to find in his previous life.
That was the ultimate purpose of this lifetime.
‘But… there's something more important.’
Roan's gaze turned back to the newspaper.
[Prodigy of the Red Mage Tower, Debbie Jane, Develops New Magic…]
‘The expedition friends.’
They had fought plenty, but they had been as close as family because of it.
In this life starting anew, he wanted to set off on an adventure with them again.
No! He absolutely had to!
Because in this lifetime, he intended to train in defense.
The expedition's overwhelming destructive power was not an option—it was a necessity.
‘Defense… I've never really thought about it.’
He had fixated on offense.
Because it was cool.
But what had come back to him as a result?
‘Thinking about it that way, it really wakes me up.’
Because it was a life he had been given back, he could focus all the more and build up his strength.
Even in the days when he had made mistakes, he had at least maintained the flow of his training—so now, remembering that, he just had to repeat the same training.
‘I can't be complacent. This time, I go all the way.’
Push the body to its absolute limits.
Prepare for the coming annihilation sooner than anyone else.
‘And then…’
He needed to find the expedition members he would fight alongside and deliver word of the annihilation to them.
‘In my previous life, we naturally came together.’
The foremost figures across the continent had heard word of the expedition and gathered in one place.
‘This time is different.’
He would go to them himself.
Go to them and ask, one by one, to become his companions.
Going back to the very beginning—for the sake of that plan, what mattered most?
‘Not being arrogant. Building up strength steadily!’
For a child of the right age, a life far too lonely and bitter.
But for Del Roan, who had so much to think about, it was not.
And so the days of forging his foundations from within continued once more.
***
Age 12.
"Right, Roan. You can't go around talking about annihilation and whatnot, okay? Still, I'm glad you've finally come to your senses…"
He dropped the talk of annihilation and rejoined the community.
***
Age 13.
"Roan, don't overdo the training. If you get hurt, we've got almost no one left to do the work."
"Don't worry! Something like this won't even faze me! With that said, I'm counting on you again today!"
"Uh, uh… you really are alright? Rolling boulders down the hill… and on top of that, you moved all of them here yourself, didn't you?"
"Really, truly fine!"
Growing the body was an important matter.
Which was why Roan ate whatever he could, trained however he could, and worked however he could.
***
Age 15.
"Roan, you're still training?"
"Of course! 16 hours a day!"
"…Isn't that too much? Once you take out sleeping and working, barely anything's left."
"Don't worry! I'm perfectly fine!"
"That whole 'don't worry' of yours is honestly terrifying…"
Carrying those worries on his back, Roan continued to forge his foundations from within.
The body that had been crammed with nutrition gave him the same build as before, and the far more intense training regimen compared to back then hardened his body.
And at the age when he judged his preparations were roughly complete—age 20.
"I'm leaving Melgen now!"
With nothing left to weigh, Roan declared his departure.