Chapter 2. When I Opened My Eyes, I Had Become a Hero
“Help me! Huonis! We’re almost there—just a little more and it’ll be completely annihilated, so hurry and lend me your power—!”
Boom!
Just as we were about to defeat the great demon beast ‘Genesis’, I shouted toward my comrades.
Our mana collided violently, and I, standing at the front line, began to be pushed back.
“Soltabloom! Perillei! What are you doing?! Don’t let your guard down—hurry!”
I screamed at the top of my lungs, but no one came.
“What the hell are you all—!”
The moment I turned my head without thinking, I froze.
Why are they all standing over there?
Huh?
All six of my companions—everyone except me—were standing far away, simply watching.
As if there were a line drawn between us.
“What are you doing? Why are you all just standing there? I said help me! Yerakan! Rut! Jabeldick!”
“We can’t.”
One of them finally spoke.
He looked at me with a solemn expression, as though he had steeled his resolve.
“…What?”
Confusion struck me.
“We can’t help you, Yuritie.”
That was absurd.
Why all of a sudden? We’re right on the verge of defeating the great demon beast!
My mana wavered violently.
Don’t tell me—don’t tell me—
“You’re betraying me?! You’re not… You’re not like that, are you? You’re not those kinds of people!”
“One sacrifice is enough.”
“What?”
“To annihilate Genesis, a living sacrifice is required.”
Huonis, the leader of our party, declared it like a final verdict.
“R-right. We don’t all have to die. And I—I don’t want to die. I’m scared of dying. I’m sorry, but I’m terrified.”
“Defeating Genesis isn’t the end, is it? Someone has to return and rebuild the continent.”
“What kind of bullshit are you spouting right now?!”
“Yuritie.”
Another companion met my eyes with a faint smile.
“We all have somewhere to return to. I have a child who was born not long ago.”
“There are people waiting for us to come back—”
His lips curved into a slow, faint smile.
“But you don’t.”
“…What?”
It felt as though someone had struck the back of my head. A dull pain shot through my entire body.
My body trembled from the shock I couldn’t believe.
“What are you saying? You’re joking, right?”
“Sorry, Tia. You’ll have to go with Genesis.”
“What?!”
I shouted in disbelief.
“You’re saying you’re going to kill me?!”
“Resent us, Yuritie.”
In that moment, I saw all six of them clearly.
Huonis—the leader and my master—who had saved me when I was starving to death in the back alleys.
The moments we gathered one by one, forming the Seven Heroes.
The days we rolled across the continent together, surviving brushes with death.
The comrades who would shout at me to abandon them and run if danger struck.
The friends—no, family—who gave up their own arms to buy me time when I was about to be devoured by monsters.
“…Was all of that a lie?”
Boom!
Before I could hear an answer, a powerful attack struck me.
“Please, Yuritie!”
A blinding white light swallowed me whole, as if erasing everything.
Then my vision went black.
“So I thought I died. Those sons of bitches.”
For reasons I still don’t understand, I came back to life.
The burning pain that had consumed my body was gone. I was perfectly fine.
‘Well, not perfectly. My mana’s been reduced to a third.’
I lay flat on my back and stared at my small hands.
The frail little girl reflected in the golden fragments of the ceiling stared back at me.
This is what I look like now.
A skinny girl with brittle lemon-blonde hair and hollow cheeks.
“I looked like this when I was ten.”
It was exactly the same as when I was starving to death in the slums.
“Though at least I’m putting on weight faster than back then, thanks to the food in the Imperial Palace.”
I was about ten when I first met Huonis in the back alleys.
He picked me up when I was rummaging through trash cans to fill my stomach.
He raised me.
Taught me many things.
How to survive without eating leftovers.
How to awaken my innate abilities.
And even the lesson that you must never trust people.
In short, Huonis was both the leader of the heroes and my master.
“And in the end, he became the bastard who offered me up as a living sacrifice.”
By some miracle, I was given a second chance at life.
And not just that—I had returned to the body of my ten-year-old self.
But that wasn’t the only strange thing.
‘You have to go to the Kingdom of Prident?’
When I first opened my eyes, I was in the back alleys.
It was the exact same situation as my childhood, but doing slum life for the second time wasn’t so bad.
Except this world was different from the one I knew.
There was no war.
No battles.
The roads were clean.
No choking smoke rising anywhere.
‘The Kingdom of Prident disappeared long ago. This is the Aion Empire.’
An old man who took me to an orphanage had laughed as he said that.
An empire?
There had been no empire in my time.
Everything was a kingdom.
‘What day is it? Imperial Year 723, November 1.’
That’s when I realized.
This world is 723 years after the annihilation of the great demon beast, Genesis.
The Aion Empire.
That was the name of the empire I now lived in.
Statues of heroes, paintings of heroes, songs dedicated to heroes filled the empire.
Even the name of the nation told me that this was not the world I once knew.
‘This is an age of peace.’
In my time, wars broke out constantly over territory.
Even on the day we set out to subjugate Genesis, dozens of kingdoms were still locked in brutal conflict.
I had wondered which would ultimately win.
Now I knew.
The Seven Heroes.
The very comrades who betrayed me.
After annihilating Genesis, the Seven Heroes were exalted and founded the empire.
The first emperor was Huonis.
The other six became the six founding noble families that supported the imperial house.
The names of the heroes became the names of their houses, guarding the empire for centuries and continuing their legacy to this day.
They even included my name among the seven families—perhaps the last shred of their conscience.
‘Though since there’s no head of my house, it’s been reduced to a ghost family.’
When I first realized this was the world 700 years in the future, I was shocked—but I accepted it.
It wasn’t nearly as shocking as being betrayed by companions I had spent ten years with.
What mattered was where I was now.
And what I would do next.
Right now, I was in the Imperial Palace.
I had infiltrated it to use the warp gate the traitors had left behind.
A warp gate was a long-distance teleportation circle installed beneath royal palaces in an age when wars broke out every other day.
More precisely, it was created for escape.
But I needed to move not just through space, but through time.
A full 700 years.
To be exact, 723 years.
There was only one person on the continent capable of such magic.
One of the six comrades.
Jabeldick.
He was an 8th-circle archmage—the most talented among us.
‘Even now, Jabeldick’s barrier protects this Imperial Palace.’
His presence lingered throughout the entire palace.
Since my former comrades had designed the palace, there was undoubtedly a warp gate beneath it.
And to activate a warp gate, one material was usually required.
‘Royal blood.’
The imperial family here was the House of Huonis.
Which meant I needed the blood of the Crown Prince—the grandson’s grandson’s grandson’s grandson’s grandson’s grandson… of Huonis.
‘Seven hundred years ago, Huonis offered me up. Using his descendant’s blood seems like a very polite response.’
The Crown Prince’s name was Kazen.
Kazen Huonis.
A boy with violet eyes, astonishingly similar to his ancestor’s.
“But honestly, his looks were shockingly handsome.”
For someone descended from Huonis…
“Guess the family line breeding program was a huge success?”
I congratulated the long-dead Huonis on his successful “genetic improvement.”
“Everything you left behind turned out to be quite useful.”
I had stuffed gold, silver, jewels, iron, and weapons I stole from the imperial vault into my subspace.
So to take all that with me, the one thing I had to do now—
“Is get close to the Crown Prince.”
I was going to use Crown Prince Kazen Huonis—body and heart alike.
