<Chapter 1>
Prologue. A Star Falls
“Hey, Eunin.”
That night, the stars were unusually bright.
“What if, you know. If the world doesn’t end, what would you do?”
Lilian, lying at an angle on the grassy field, turned her head toward him and asked.
Every time a wind mixed with the acrid smell of smoke blew in, small lights flickered from the base of the hill below. Like stars.
But both of them knew that those were defense bombs imbued with divine power, buried in the ground.
They also knew that not many remained.
And that they were humanity’s final line of defense.
Eight years—a time that felt long if you called it long, short if you called it short.
In that span, the world had been thoroughly ravaged by the war against the monsters known as the “Abyss.”
To the point where there were no longer any priests left who could purify them.
“Hm?”
“Don’t say useless things and just look at the stars. You said you wanted to see them.”
“Tch, it’s the end anyway, so I can ask, right?”
“There’s no such thing as ‘what if.’ It’s all just the assumptions of dreamers.”
They’d know the outcome tomorrow anyway.
When Ileay spoke in a dry voice, Lilian grumbled.
“You’re too bleak, Eunin!”
The woman who was always so bright, despite bearing the immense responsibility of protecting a world on the brink of destruction in humanity’s final holy war.
Her black hair was tousled, and her violet eyes gazing up at the starry sky were as pure as a child’s.
This woman was the “Sword Demon.”
‘Though she looks awfully naive for that.’
In truth, she was naive.
Now, she was hailed as an unparalleled genius of the sword, a hero responsible for humanity’s last stand.
But once upon a time, she’d been nicknamed the “Idiot Princess” for behaviors unbecoming her age.
It seemed like there was some reason behind it, but he’d never heard the full story.
‘Still, she’s improved a lot.’
When he’d first met Lilian, she’d been suffering from aphasia.
By persistently talking to her and teaching her about the world, she’d regained her ability to speak, but her childlike personality remained unchanged.
He’d tried several times to uncover the cause, but in a doomed world, there were limits to what could be done, and he’d failed.
“If that really happened.”
“If?”
“I’d want to sleep until the sun rises and sets again.”
“That sounds nice.”
Lilian nodded seriously.
Ileay Serevia Leonhart. He was born into the most noble and glorious bloodline.
The sole surviving member of the imperial family, the leader of the Dawn Star Order, and the supreme commander of the allied forces.
For such a man, it was an exceedingly modest wish, but she didn’t call his dream insignificant.
“Then can I sleep next to you?”
Ileay inwardly clicked his tongue at the woman who casually said something that could cause a scandal if anyone overheard.
“Ouch!”
“Stop saying weird things and get up now. Morning’s coming soon.”
He lightly flicked her forehead and stood up.
Then, in the distance, a vast darkness began to surge forward.
The Abyss Dragon.
The entity that had appeared to bring about the world’s destruction.
In an instant, pouring rain drenched their surroundings.
And as the light of the final bomb faded, that black, overwhelming presence opened its maw.
The battlefield, once filled with explosions and screams, was now enveloped in the quiet sound of rain.
When he lowered his head, his loosened eyepatch fell onto the rain-puddled ground.
“Why…”
His left eye, already blind, captured nothing.
Instead, his blurred right eye reflected a woman covered in blood.
Ileay desperately embraced the motionless Lilian.
“Why, damn it…!”
He screamed.
The woman had died saving the man.
That was all there was to it.
‘Eunin… You know. If the world doesn’t end, want me to tell you what I’d want to do?’
Soaked in rain and growing cold, she spoke as if comforting him in his despair.
‘I’d build the biggest cabin in the world.’
In her final moments of life, smiling more brilliantly than the stars adorning the sky.
‘And live there with all the people I love.’
She spoke her unfulfilled wish and closed her eyes.
Ileay clenched his teeth, feeling as if he were vomiting blood.
‘It was a life where nothing went right.’
Irredeemable, or perhaps trash.
Born as the legitimate son of the emperor and empress in the divine empire, backed by the halo of god, he had a glorious body, but at the same time, his life was riddled with humiliation.
Because despite being born with immense divine power, he couldn’t wield it.
Still, he’d somehow clung to survival, only for the “Abyss” to erupt, heralding the end of the world.
‘And now it takes her too.’
The reason he’d held on without going mad until now was thanks to this woman.
Her childlike purity often made him forget that this was a battlefield.
At least, it allowed him to not run away from the bleak reality where no future was visible.
He squeezed his eyes shut. Something—rain or blood, he couldn’t tell—trickled down his cheek.
God really is a cruel bastard.
He didn’t believe in god’s existence to begin with. If there was one, would the world be in this state?
Boom!
Lightning struck. In the blinding white light that erased everything before his eyes, he opened them.
The Abyss Dragon was opening its maw once more.
White sparks gathered there, an unstoppable force.
After being forcibly erased from the imperial registry, Ileay had never once offered a prayer to god.
Not even once.
“…Damn you, God.”
Now, with his vision completely dyed pure white, he held Lilian in his arms.
“If you truly exist.”
In the light that was erasing the world in white, he gazed down at her steadily.
Unaware of it himself, he wore a faint smile as his lips moved.
“Grant this woman’s wish.”
I hope, in your next life, you can be a little happier.
1. Regression
Dawn Star, Serevia.
The god said to have restored light to the continent shrouded in deep darkness in the distant ancient times.
After a prolonged war with the ugly serpent known as the <Abyss Dragon>, he emerged victorious, finally liberating humans from the darkness within their hearts.
Thus, the era of brilliance dawned upon the continent—
“But, where there is light, there is always shadow.”
The remnants of the abyss did not vanish completely.
Wary of this, the god manifested and protected humanity.
However, the abyss, which had been parasitizing in the dark recesses of one human’s heart and biding its time, eventually succeeded in sinking its black fangs into him.
“Gasp, then he died…?”
“Haha, fortunately not, my dear.”
Thankfully, the god managed to subdue the abyss once more.
But due to the severe blow he suffered in the process, he could no longer appear before humans, and so the supreme god proclaimed:
[Darkness shall return, so I bestow upon you the sword of light to aid you.]
The god sent an apostle to the human world in his place.
That individual was the empire’s founding emperor and the leader of the Dawn Star Order, ‘Leonhart I.’
“That’s how the era of brilliance faded and the era of humans began.”
Leonhart I wielded the divine relic, the <Dawn Sword>, to eradicate the remnants of the abyss lingering on the continent.
This was why the Dawn Sword had been the imperial family’s treasure passed down through generations, symbolizing the legitimacy of the royal bloodline.
“As long as light exists, darkness shall never fully disappear. But fear not. Someday, the brightest star to illuminate the darkness will return… Hm? You’ve fallen asleep.”
“Zzz, zzz….”
The man who had been reading the fairy tale book inscribed with the empire’s founding myth noticed his daughter soundly asleep in his arms and smiled softly.
He kissed the child’s forehead and whispered.
“Sweet dreams, Lilian.”
* * *
‘Ugh, my body….’
The harbinger of a fierce ache throbbing through her entire frame.
Lilian groaned, feeling as if she’d just slashed through 300 abyss ghouls in succession.
“Hwaaa, ghoul slashingggg… Huh?”
She assumed a sword-drawing stance and snapped her eyes wide open.
Naturally, she expected a black, sticky, ugly abyss ghoul to be right in front of her…
‘Lace?’
Instead of the abyss ghoul, what met her eyes was a canopy adorned with fluttering lace.
Three layers, no less!
Blinking blankly, Lilian reached a conclusion.
‘I’ve been hit with illusion magic!’
She quickly scanned her surroundings with keen alertness.
Lilian knew she wasn’t particularly clever or quick on the uptake.
What she could do was compensate with physical prowess.
Lilian immediately rolled off the plush something to land on the floor…
“Wah!”
…or rather, failed to, tumbling down with a crash.
‘Huh?’
Her twenty-five-year-old body wasn’t enormous, but it was reasonably proportioned.
She’d clearly accounted for her limbs and stride in her movement, so why was the distance so much shorter than anticipated?
Of course, Lilian wasn’t the type to calculate things with her head.
Everything came from instinctive senses akin to a beast’s!
Her creed was ‘If the body falters, the mind suffers.’
“What’s this noise? My lady?”
Lilian clutched her reddening, swelling forehead, grunting in pain, then whipped her head around like lightning.
‘A familiar voice?’
Of course, since it was an illusion, auditory hallucinations could happen.
But…
No, even so, could an abyss sorcerer’s illusion be this intricate?
At this level, humanity would be insta-killed, wiped clean in a second, doomsday party incoming?
Click, the door opened.
Without realizing it, Lilian stared transfixed at the door swinging open, as if being pulled toward it.
And there—
“My lady, our treasure! You’re awake~?”
Seeing the black-haired, ultra-handsome man with a cool and dignified aura appear with a utterly dopey, grinning face, she gaped in shock.
That ultra-handsome man looked exactly like her father, who had passed away a whopping eight years ago!
