The dark night streets of Orario.
A man was running with all his might, panting hard as he fled for his life.
"Huff...! Huff...!"
His name was Janis Lustora.
He was a Level 2 adventurer and the captain of Soma Familia.
No, it would be more accurate to call him the former captain now.
"Damn it, damn it! Since when, and why...!"
As he ran, he replayed everything that had happened in his mind.
The days he had spent ruling the Familia in Soma's place.
And then, not long ago, the lucrative monster-capture-and-sale route he had stumbled upon by chance.
The alliance with Apollo Familia to take Liliruca Arde back from Hestia Familia for that purpose.
Just when everything was going smoothly, the Hestia Familia alliance had stormed the Familia home to reclaim Liliruca Arde.
And in the middle of it all, unbelievably, Liliruca Arde had shaken off the allure of the divine wine and successfully persuaded the god Soma.
And now, his own downfall—something he had never once imagined until this very moment.
"Unbelievable! How...! How could someone like Arde resist the allure of that divine wine...! Soma, what the hell was that shut-in god thinking, asking a girl like that for help...!"
As he ran, he kept thinking.
The final moment.
Just before he was caught on charges of the corruption he had committed until now and handcuffs were about to be slapped on him.
He had desperately struggled and barely managed to break free and escape from there.
But he had nowhere else to go.
He could no longer return to Soma Familia.
Then...
Since it had come to this...
"F-For now, let's go to Apollo Familia. If I get there, I'll somehow get help, get converted, or whatever. Then I'll borrow Apollo Familia's power and this time for sure, Arde, that damn Pallum bitch...!"
Just as he thought that far—
"I see. So you were the same kind as 'that guy.'"
"W-Who's there?!"
In the darkness of the street.
Someone had gotten there first.
They were waiting to welcome him.
Janis reflexively drew the dagger hidden in his coat at that ominous presence.
"Damn it, I'm busy here... Hurry up and show yourself!"
Maybe because he had lost everything he'd had in a single night.
His shout was filled not only with desperation, but with an almost indescribable irritation as well.
As if answering that pitiful struggle, someone stepped out of the darkness and revealed themselves.
"Yo, good evening. Right?"
"You... what are you?"
Janis's expression filled with confusion.
A slender young man with blue hair and sharp features stood beneath the faint light of the magic-stone lamps lining the street.
He was definitely not someone Janis remembered.
Which meant the man in front of him was, at the very least, not an adventurer of any proven standing.
"Tch, I got needlessly worked up."
With that, Janis quickly let his guard down.
Even if he had fallen this far, he was still a Level 2 adventurer.
He was not weak enough to be beaten by some insignificant commoner or a half-baked Level 1 brat.
So his judgment was, in its own way, a reasonable one.
"Hey, you there."
Perhaps because he had confirmed his own strength.
Some of the anxiety in his trembling voice had faded.
And so he...
"I don't know who you are, but get out of my way. I'm very busy right now..."
"[Stop.]"
Sshhk
Thud
"Huh?"
He had made a choice he should never have made.
Well, even if he hadn't, there probably wouldn't have been much difference in the ending he was about to meet.
"A-Aaaaaaagh!"
An arm suddenly fell away.
A shoulder suddenly felt lighter.
Red blood suddenly burst forth.
Sudden searing pain struck him.
All of those sudden things stole away the last of his composure.
What filled that empty space was incomprehensible fear and panic.
"Huff, huff...! G-Guhhh, what the hell is this...!"
"You are a 'trial.'"
Step
The young man approached Janis.
Under the faint light of the magic-stone lamp.
He stepped back into the darkness beyond the light and vanished from sight.
"He accepted that child as a 'trial' to overcome the past."
Step
A second magic-stone lamp.
The young man emerged again beneath its light.
The expression visible there was utterly flat, utterly indifferent.
"Even if you smash the past to pieces, it still crawls back out from under the stone floor like a worm. That child, commendably enough, overcame it safely.
Human growth is the act of overcoming such immature pasts. Hmm? What do you think? Don't you agree, Janis Lustora?"
"You, what are you? Just what the hell are you...?"
"But if I leave you alone like this, the past that is you will appear before that child once again. You're too boring to reuse as the past. Lukewarm. Half-baked.
It would be far too unnecessary to make that child face the past she has already overcome again. Yes, yes, an unnecessary hassle indeed."
"W-What are you talking a-about...?"
The young man approached.
The darkness swallowed him.
Janis, by contrast, backed away.
The light exposed him.
Again the young man advanced, and Janis retreated.
This time the light revealed him, and the darkness hid him.
The two men repeated that over and over.
"The past, what you did to that child... the present, what you intended to use that child for... to be honest, none of that matters anymore. What matters is Janis."
Your role ends here.
With those words,
"H-Hiiik!"
A hard wall pressed against Janis's back.
He hurriedly looked around.
But unfortunately... before he knew it, he had been driven into a dead end.
As if a convenient escape route like that was not permitted to him anymore.
"D-Don't come! D-Don't come any closer! I...!"
At last, a pitiful sob escaped his lips, a desperate plea for mercy.
And then it was torn apart by fear, becoming a rough, unpleasant scream.
"I told you not to come any closer, damn ittttt!"
Thud!
"Ghk!"
But the answer that followed was a merciless mercury spearhead.
Thud! Thudthudthudthud!
The spearhead stabbed into his body again and again and again.
That ruthlessness was as if it were venting the young man's anger for him, like a fit of rage.
"Khk...! Cough...! Kehk...!"
And yet, astonishingly enough.
Janis was still alive.
Even after countless spear thrusts had punched countless holes through his body, his breath still remained in this world.
"Tougher than I expected. Rotten fish still tastes good. So you really are a Level 2 adventurer, huh."
Still, that was hardly surprising.
For the young man in the darkness, a magus, it was an extremely easy thing to do.
How many human bodies had he touched and handled up to now, including in his previous life?
If he couldn't even manage this level of delicate control, he had no right to call himself a magus.
So this wasn't even light amusement.
It was nothing more than part of a tedious task.
"Ahh, what a relief. I've had way too many stressful things lately. At times like this, villains like you are the best medicine."
"Kuh...! Gahk...!"
"Hurting? Well, don't worry too much. I'll make you comfortable soon enough. Ah, but that doesn't mean I'm going to kill you right now. You don't need to worry about that part at all. I'd never do something so wasteful in the first place."
"W-What, cough...! W-What are you...!"
"Kanu Belway."
A name the magus spat out to the bewildered Janis.
That familiar name, long since forgotten, suddenly appearing only deepened his confusion.
For his sake, the magus kindly explained why.
"I made the mistake of killing him not long ago. Even though I could have kept him around a little longer and used him for something meaningful. Such a pity, really."
"You, khk...! You...!"
"So I needed a substitute to replace him. And look, there happens to be a fellow who's similar to him right in front of me? Oh dear, what a shame. What a coincidence this is. In this regard, the goddess of fate is quite merciful, isn't she? She even went and tied me to a replacement all on her own."
Only then did Janis catch sight of the magus's one and only eye.
A strange eye with no light to be seen anywhere in it.
Within that ominous gaze, where color itself seemed dead, his existence was not that of a human being.
Just a doll, just a substitute, just a convenient lump of meat.
"Ah...! Ah...!"
"In that sense, from this point on I'll be inviting you to my Magecraft workshop. Don't worry too much. As I promised beforehand, I absolutely won't kill you. No, rather, you'll have to work even harder to make up for what Kanu couldn't finish. For that reason, I'll take the utmost care with your life, so relax and leave everything to me. This time, I definitely won't make a 'mistake.'"
"N-No...!"
"Ah, right. I'll reject your refusal. Not that I had any intention of giving you a choice in the first place."
That was because—
"There's no place for a villain in the 'happy ending' of any story, is there? In that case, the one who picks up that useless thing first gets to keep it."
"Aah...! Aaaaaah...!"
"Great suffering for the one who committed the sin... Hmm, nice. Very nice. That expression right now. If possible, I'd almost want to show it to Lili, that child too.
But I won't. Why? Because I have no intention of making that child into someone like me. You can call it petty favoritism if you like. I don't mind if you call it cheap.
No, but think about it. Even if the other person is trashy evil scum like me, they're still a person. If you go around doing whatever you want to them, it just feels unpleasant. Then in the end, I'm the only one who gets hated, and I'm the only one who loses.
So that opinion is rejected. Besides, everything you're about to go through is the kind of red-label material that good children under nineteen aren't allowed to watch.
More than anything, though, a human-trash magus like me is already more than enough to go around in this world all by myself. We don't need any more. No need at all."
So he acts alone.
He reveals and bears 'evil' all by himself.
The magus and Janis alike.
In the end, they were both unforgivable villains in similar positions.
From the very beginning, everything had been something they had chosen for themselves.
Because of that, there was no guilt anywhere, for anyone.
And so the magus reached out toward Janis, now smeared with fear and despair.
No, toward the lump of meat that had once been Janis.
"Now then, let's move togeth—"
Thud!
"Oh?"
Then someone else interrupted him.
A sharp dagger was embedded in the middle of his forehead, killing him instantly.
As a result, the breath that had been hanging by a thread in Janis's body was severed at once.
The magus turned around with his displeased expression still showing.
Under the faint light of the magic-stone lamp.
"Firvis."
The black-haired elf he had rescued stood there with a grimace on her face.
"What are you doing?"
"That's my line. Magus, just what were you trying to do?"
"How dull. Such a textbook question."
At her accusing question, the magus gave a small shrug and answered normally.
"An evil magus was collecting samples needed for an experiment. Is there any other way to describe what just happened?"
"Magus!"
"My, my. No need to raise your voice. You're bothering the neighbors at this late hour."
By contrast, Firvis showed her emotions openly.
The magus, on the other hand, took it in stride as if it were nothing.
Instead, he shot back at her as though she were the one at fault.
"More importantly, you've experienced firsthand what kind of person I am, haven't you? Why are you acting so surprised now?"
"You... you dare say that now!"
"Why? Are you remembering your own foolish past?"
"Kuh!"
The magus mercilessly stabbed at her old wounds.
Firvis frowned at his words, but she couldn't say anything back.
She couldn't even get angry anymore.
No, from the beginning, she wasn't angry at him.
She was just...
"Stop."
"Stop or not, because of your interference just now I can't do it anymore even if I want to. An adventurer who has received [Falna] is just an ordinary corpse once they're dead. They do leave behind traces of grace... but they're not worth going out of my way for."
"Stop."
"Ah, I already told you I can't do it anymore even if I want to..."
"Please!"
"Huh?"
"Please... stop it. I beg you."
She had simply found the man in front of her deeply "pitiful."
That was why she had hovered around him all this time.
And why she had stepped in front of him this time.
"You... you are the one who dragged me out of that wandering, soaked in sin, even if it was by force. You must not do this. You absolutely must not become like this!"
"...Hey, Firvis."
Firvis pleaded with the magus in a voice thick with tears.
But—
"Looks like you've got something seriously wrong. I'm not some saint. I only play the role of a generous idiot for my own people.
As for everyone else, if I had to classify myself, I'm a villain. More than that, I'm part of 'evil'—the kind that's still not enough even after smashing its head into the bottomless pit beneath hell after death.
No, magi are that sort of breed to begin with. You should have experienced that fragment of it yourself not long ago, as you said. And yet you still say things like that?"
Unfortunately, she still wasn't one of the "people" inside his fence.
So his naturally sharp response came out even more pointed than usual.
Firvis, without realizing it, shrank back a little.
Even so, she still refused to give up.
"I know that. But..."
"Haa, this is getting boring. I'm heading back. You should hurry back to your Familia too."
With that, it was the magus who withdrew first.
He disappeared into the darkness of the street without a trace of hesitation.
Firvis watched his back for a moment, hesitated, then lowered her head and vanished into the darkness as well.
For some reason, her retreating figure looked terribly forlorn.
"Idiot."
On a rooftop beneath the night sky.
From there, her other half, Ein, had watched everything.
"I should return."
At last, she clicked her tongue once and quietly moved her feet.
She had more to report to the goddess she revered and loved.
Surely, if that one heard this news, she would be very pleased indeed.
In the darkness, Ein thought so with complete sincerity.