The door, shut from the outside, rattled against its stopper. Maya, Moritz, and the guards rose from their seats and filed out of the room, leaving behind only a single girl. Silence filled the chamber, so deep that even the faint sound of breathing could be heard.

“I’m really glad… that you’re alive.”

The words sounded as if they had been squeezed out of her chest. After receiving a transplanted eye to replace the one that had been gouged out, Walm had sworn to Ayane that he would return before heading back to the front lines. Though this reunion had finally come to pass, taking nearly two years to do so could hardly be called anything but a kind of deception.

“…Sorry for being late. When I came to, I was inside the mouth of a Tyrant Worm. There wasn’t a single person left in Dandurg. Honestly, I thought everyone had been wiped out except for me.”

Walm recounted his journey in broad strokes. How he escaped from Dandurg, passed through the fallen imperial capital, and fled all the way to the Archipelago Countries, where he drowned himself to escape reality. How he broke free from alcohol while facing the threat of blindness and finally began the long-overdue journey back home.

The girl listened to everything without interruption. Ayane paused for a moment after hearing his story, as if slowly digesting every word he had spoken. Then she finally opened her mouth.

“If you call that running away… then I’m no different. After the Great Rampage ended, the sights were terrible. What happened at Dandurg Castle… even worse tragedies were happening all across Mayard.”

Even calling the damage suffered by the Kingdom of Felius and Mayard territory, both directly connected to the demonic territory, “severe” would be an understatement. Countless corpses were left exposed across the land. Even the Great Rampage that reached the Highserk homeland had diminished in scale compared to what they endured.

Though their paths had separated for a time, Walm could easily imagine the scenes Ayane must have witnessed.

“At first… it was just to avoid facing reality. If I buried myself in treatment, I didn’t have to think about anything else. And in truth, there were so many wounded people that I barely had a moment to rest my hands.”

Following Ayane’s gaze led to the row of empty beds. The people who had once filled them, had they recovered and left the clinic after receiving treatment? Or…

“They call me a once-in-a-generation healing mage, a savior… but I’m not someone that noble. I just stayed in a safe place and treated people to blur out the past. Unlike you and the others, Walm, I didn’t shed blood or sacrifice my body to protect anyone. I’m only useful after someone has already been hurt.”

An awkward, faltering smile crossed her face. It was painful to watch. Walm waited until the girl steadied her breathing before slowly shaking his head in denial.

“Don’t belittle yourself. No one is completely innocent. And back then, at the treatment ward, you refused to back down even when threatened with swords. You chose to stay because of your own conviction.”

According to the initial strategic plan, Walm had intended to withdraw together with the remaining troops, leaving the refugees behind. To call it a decision would have been far too generous. It had been little more than blind obedience, lacking any real initiative.

If not for the voice of the girl standing before him, he might have carried it out using the chain of command and the structure of the army as his excuse.

“At that time, when the headquarters was wiped out, I was ready to abandon a lot of people. This might sound like cheap words, but… that day you changed me, Ayane. If not for that, we might not be talking like this now, and many more people would have died.”

With clouded eyes, Walm looked straight at Ayane. The girl lifted the face she had been keeping lowered and gave an awkward smile.

“We’ve only just met again, yet you already ended up encouraging me. Thank you… but Walm, you’re being too hard on yourself as well.”

“And you’re the one saying that, Ayane?”

At Walm’s confusion, Ayane let out a small laugh. It was the first genuine smile she had shown since their reunion. The tension melted away as she released the breath she had been holding. The stiffness left her shoulders, and she leaned back into her chair.

“Can I ask something that’s been on my mind?”

“What is it? Getting all formal like that.”

Despite the formal tone of her words, her voice no longer carried the earlier strain. Tilting his head slightly, Walm met her eyes and urged her to continue.

“Walm… in your first life, were you from Japan?”

“I see,” Walm said with understanding. The topic of each other’s origin was something Walm himself had been curious about as well. After all, there was no guarantee that the worlds they had come from before being swept here were exactly the same. Multiverse theory, parallel worlds… whatever one chose to call it, a different realm with entirely different laws clearly existed like this one. The possibility that their worlds were similar, rather than identical, could not be ruled out.

“Do you have something I can write on?”

“Just a moment.”

Ayane hurried over to a desk with quick, light steps. After rummaging for a moment, she found paper and a pen and handed them to him.

“Japan?”

“Yes, I know it well.”

As Walm wrote, they began confirming what they shared in common. It had been a long time since he had written kanji or even drawn a map of Japan. The result was terribly crooked, so bad it almost looked like the scribbles of a small child.

Yet even those crude drawings stirred nostalgia in Ayane.

He cursed his lack of artistic talent while sketching a crude imitation of a famous national mascot. Her reaction to the ridiculous drawing wasn’t bad either. The two of them laughed together over the strange doodles. To an outsider, the sight of them laughing over such strange pictures might have seemed completely insane.

Ignoring the fact that wasting paper and ink was an outrageous act to the frugal Highserk people, Walm continued adding familiar things to the page. Paper and ink were valuable commodities in a world without established mass production, yet he couldn’t stop.

In one corner of the misshapen map of Japan surrounded by odd characters, he circled a spot and asked:

“I was born in the city of Yashirazu. Ever heard of it?”

“Yashirazu?! Of course I have! That’s where I’m from too!”

“No way… you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Walm immediately blurted out the response, unable to believe his ears.

“Then do you know the old lady who runs the candy shop in front of the station?”

“You mean the one near Yashirazu Station? She’s been the same old grandma since I was a kid.”

His surprise turned into certainty. There was no doubt that they had come from the same world. Distant memories that had begun to fade resurfaced, bringing back the past he had once lived as Raizou Takakura.

Bottled carbonated drinks. Bags of cheap sweets. Spinning tops and menko cards hanging as if time itself had frozen around them. The old wooden candy shop had the worn charm of the past era, yet it was filled with things that attracted people of any generation. It was like a toy chest overflowing with treasures.

“That woman… she was already a grandma when I was a kid.”

For thirty years she had looked exactly the same, and that unchanging presence always gave those returning home a sense of comfort. Even as the town’s appearance transformed through redevelopment around the station, people believed that shop and the old lady who ran it would never change.

Thinking back on it now, it might have been a kind of marketing strategy in its own way. After all, it wasn’t just once or twice that Walm had seen fully grown adults return to their childhoods and spend far too much money in that shop more times than he could count. She must have been quite the businesswoman.

“Haha… maybe she’s actually some kind of spirit.”

“Actually, she was one of the seven mysteries at my school.”

Covering her mouth with her hand, Ayane laughed mischievously.

“Ah, I remember that. Don’t tell me we even went to the same school?”

“They say the world is small… but this is really something.”

Paper airplanes disappearing into the clouds, a staircase at dusk that never seemed to end, a dark corridor whose far end could never be seen, and among the more harmless ones, perhaps the mysteriously appearing and disappearing black cat. Just thinking about it, several examples came to mind.

They were called the seven mysteries, but in reality there might have been ten or even twenty.

Their conversation showed no sign of ending, after all, they were not only from the same world, but quite literally from the same hometown. For a while they even forgot their original purpose.

Ironically, the thing that reminded them of time passing was the demon mask.

Part of Walm thought he should have left it with Moritz, but imagining the soldiers trembling in fear at the cursed mask shaking with rage made him hesitate.

It was a thoroughly grotesque mask, but time was still limited. Even if the situation wasn’t urgent, there were still other patients waiting.

Walm leaned back on the bed and closed his eyes Despite shutting out his vision, he could still sense the swirling mana gathering beneath the palm that must have been hovering above him. A warm light glowed within the dim darkness.

“Just relax and stay comfortable.”

“Alright.”

Just as Walm had experienced many things over the past year and a half, the girl had grown as a person as well.

The treatment of his eyes began.

Bathed in the gentle warmth of the light, Walm felt drowsiness creeping over him. At least for this moment, the grim reality surrounding his homeland faded into the background.

Translator – Lyxxna