Chapter 20 - The Companion III

6

There is an epilogue to Dang Seorin’s story.

No, in truth, all my stories are epilogues. At least until we reach the 1,183rd run.

Strictly speaking, then, it would be more accurate to say that Dang Seorin’s story had a great many epilogues, and that I intend to mention only a few.

“Oh. Undertaker, you’re awake?”

It was the day after the celebration of Tenlegs’ defeat.

Everyone had drunk themselves into a stupor. Those who could hold their liquor drank enough to get drunk, and those who couldn’t did the same. Tenlegs’ severed head was more than enough reason to keep the drinks flowing.

As dawn, unable to forget the lingering night, grew pale and blue, Dang Seorin stood beneath a white-barked pine. Alone. Rather than awaiting the sun, her shadow was seeing off the night that had already passed.

“Yes. I’m awake.”

“Doesn’t your head hurt? You drank an awful lot with Sword Star.”

“I get drunk quickly and sober up quickly. I’ve never been one to sleep late, either. How are you feeling, Alliance Leader?”

“Fine, of course. I’m always fine.”

Yet her voice was still hoarse as she said it. She had spent forty-one minutes chanting magic on yesterday’s battlefield, then sung her heart out at the celebration. Even a singer with vocal cords made of steel couldn’t have escaped losing their voice.

“I suppose I won’t be hearing you call me Alliance Leader much longer. That’s a liiittle sad.”

“Well, Tenlegs may be dead, but we still don’t know what other monsters will turn up. There’s a good chance another guild alliance will be formed then. You’ll have to lead it again.”

“True.”

Dang Seorin quietly looked up at the dawn sky.

“True.”

The alcohol hadn’t entirely cleared from my head either, so I joined her blankly in the ranks of spectators, hoping the blue sky might disinfect the drunkenness away.

I doubted the sky had any such disinfecting properties, but what did it matter?

The daytime sky received people’s sweat, and the nighttime sky received their dreams. Whatever thoughts still had nowhere to go were dawn’s share to take.

“Say.”

The wind beside me spoke.

“Want to hear what my dream is?”

“I know already. To conquer every great restaurant in the world.”

“Oh, that too. Right. I can’t give up on that one.”

Dang Seorin nodded solemnly.

“But I’m talking about a different dream now.”

A different dream?

I tilted my head. Had she had another one? I had served under her as guild leader from the fourth through the sixth run, but I had never heard of another dream.

“Ah. Do you mean your ambition to actually train three thousand elite guild members and live up to the name Three Thousand Worlds?”

“Oh. There was that too. What’s this, Undertaker?”

Dang Seorin looked at my face as though seeing me in a new light.

“You always give off the impression that you have no interest in anyone else, but you know a surprising amount about me. Are you a Dang Seorin geek, by any chance? Sorry to disappoint a fan, but it’s a different dream.”

“Then I really don’t know. What is it?”

“Traveling by rail.”

Dang Seorin rose slightly onto her toes and reached toward the dawn.

Her five fingers closed steeply around the sky.

“I want to travel by train through this world, even after what it’s become.”

“... By train?”

“Yes. It doesn’t need to be anything grand. An old junker. Just a single carriage that I’ve customized myself.”

Her voice took on a lilting, singsong rhythm.

“It would break down all the time, something whose wheels wouldn’t even turn unless I looked after it. But I could eat and sleep and travel in it, and even hang out my laundry. Like a camper van or a yacht.”

“I’m not sure there are any intact railways left. Even the KTX trains Three Thousand uses as temporary lodgings can’t run, can they? The workshops in Busan do maintain single-lane roads, at least.”

“Well, I’ll manage somehow. With the mysterious power of magic.”

Dang Seorin mimed boxing, making little “Hiyah, hiyah” noises.

“I’ll keep moving forward, repairing this world’s broken railways one by one. From station to station, forever. There will always be beautiful rails laid behind me wherever I pass.”

“Hmm.”

“And I’ll go, and go, and keep going... Until, along the way, I can go no farther and arrive at some shabby seaside station. If I end up at a station where a single utility pole stands like a lonely station attendant.”

“...”

Dang Seorin said no more.

A strange feeling suddenly came over me, and I looked at her face.

It was an odd thing to think, but I felt as though she might collapse at any moment.

“Alliance Leader?”

“Hmm.”

Dang Seorin blinked. She leaned on the broom she always carried—the one she insisted was essential for a witch.

Her complexion was just as it always was.

“Undertaker. Won’t you reconsider joining my guild as Deputy Guild Leader? As you know, our guild is doing very well. You won’t get another opportunity like this. Regretting it later won’t help you, you know.”

“... I wondered what this was about, and it’s that again. I’m not taking a pointed hat.”

“Really? Well, nothing I can do, then.”

Dang Seorin walked away, waving lightly behind her.

“Bye-bye. I’ll take a little walk before I head back. I’m going to enjoy the atmosphere alone, so don’t follow me.”

“When will you be back?”

“Let’s see. In about an hour?”

An hour passed, then two, but Dang Seorin did not return.

The guild alliance dispatched a search party at once.

Three hours after she went missing, Dang Seorin was found collapsed on a forest path.

After that day, she never stood again.

7

“What is the prognosis for Three Thousand’s guild leader?”

“Well... It’s strange.”

The medical staff looked grim.

“Her bodily functions have declined across the board. We checked to see whether it was some sort of curse, but it isn’t. All I can say is that it’s truly strange... I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but she could pass away at any moment.”

“I see.”

I braced myself and entered the room. It was a private room in one of the few hospitals still operating normally in Korea.

My eyes met Dang Seorin’s by the window.

She was reading a novel. Her weight rested not on the train she had loved so dearly, but on the wheels of a wheelchair.

“...”

“...”

Silence lingered for a while.

Had about thirty seconds passed? Dang Seorin snapped the novel shut and placed it on her lap.

SNAP

“It’s my lifespan.”

Those were the first words she said to me after two weeks apart.

“Your lifespan?”

“Yes. That’s what you came to discuss anyway, isn’t it? I hate this sort of atmosphere. Let’s get it out of the way and talk about something else.”

Dang Seorin shrugged. Her expression and gestures were no different from usual. If not for the wheelchair, I could never have believed anything was wrong with her.

No.

It wasn’t just the wheelchair. Her pointed hat hung on the room’s coat rack, and her broom leaned against the wall—not a witch’s essential tool, but merely an old cleaning implement.

This hospital room felt like an insult to the person who was Dang Seorin.

“My magic grows stronger the more of my remaining lifespan I burn. It’s an ability I awakened besides my magic. I gave it a nice name: [Equivalent Exchange]. Well, it’s not an entirely unfamiliar sort of ability, is it?”

“Then...”

“Yes. Wow, that Tenlegs was horribly tough. What kind of monster holds out until I chant the Tenth Melody? I thought I’d die on the spot. I don’t know how I’ve lived this long. Anyway, I’m not sick.”

I struggled to speak.

Not because I couldn’t think of anything to comfort her. I was simply in profound shock.

‘She never revealed it. Not once.’

That Dang Seorin was an awakened with multiple abilities.

That besides her magic-related ability, she possessed one that temporarily increased her firepower by burning her own lifespan.

Even when I had attended her closely as Three Thousand’s second-in-command, she had never revealed her secret weapon.

Because...

“... You intended to die in the battle against Tenlegs anyway?”

“Yes.”

Dang Seorin nodded without hesitation.

“It was an enemy we couldn’t hope to defeat without putting our lives on the line. Wasn’t it? You, Sword Star, the awakened who took part in the fighting, the soldiers and civilian volunteers who supported us. Everyone.”

I couldn’t deny that.

Hadn’t I myself already thrown away seven lives?

Suddenly, I remembered what Dang Seorin had said in the previous runs. The words she had uttered just before the battles against Tenlegs.

[“Thirty minutes. Hold out for just thirty minutes, whatever it takes. I’ll build up a great spell and blow Tenlegs’ head off.”]

[“Undertaker. Sword Star. Use whatever means you have to and hold out for twenty-five... No, thirty minutes.”]

She must already have accepted her death then.

In effect, what she had been asking was this:

[“Hold out for thirty minutes, until I die.”]

But defeating Tenlegs had taken forty-one minutes.

She must have consumed a lifespan far beyond her limits.

“...”

I struggled to calm my turbulent emotions.

For me, regression was also a tool for testing other people’s potential. Most people’s actions and outcomes changed from run to run. Yet some things remained unchanged no matter how often I regressed.

Strength of heart and firmness of conviction.

So far, Dang Seorin had spoken of defeating Tenlegs and asked for thirty minutes without a single exception.

In every run, the principle guiding her actions remained the same: sacrifice her own life to annihilate humanity’s enemy.

“You say it consumes your lifespan, but how exactly does Equivalent Exchange work?”

“Oh. When I awakened the ability, it showed that my body’s natural lifespan was eighty-five years. Then I just have to think something like, ‘I’ll use this many years out of the sixty I have left,’ and my firepower increases automatically.”

“Then did you consume more than sixty years in the battle against Tenlegs?”

“Uh, hmm...”

Dang Seorin furrowed her brow.

“That’s the really strange part.”

“What?”

“Did I tell you? Even while I was performing Spell-Song Chanting, I honestly didn’t expect to last more than thirty minutes. If my calculations were right, even reaching the Sixth Melody should have been touch and go.”

Dang Seorin touched her chin.

“With Spell-Song Chanting, the more melodies overlap, the more the mana consumption increases exponentially. Truly exponentially. Even if I used sixty years of my lifespan, reaching the Tenth Melody should theoretically have been impossible.”

“You seemed to sing it just fine.”

“I know. Isn’t it strange? While I was chanting behind you, I was actually thinking, ‘How is this working? Why does this even work?’ My head was full of question marks.”

“...”

“Whew. It had me breaking out in a cold sweat.”

That was when it happened.

A strange premonition spread up from my back—a sensation entirely different in color from unease or foreboding, yet almost identical in the waves it sent through me.

“Alliance Leader. Then exactly how many years of your lifespan did you consume in the battle against Tenlegs?”

“Hmm? Things were so hectic that I didn’t count them individually. Let’s see...”

“... Was it perhaps around two hundred and fifty years?”

“Oh.”

Dang Seorin nodded.

“That’s right. I can’t say exactly, but it was more than two hundred and definitely less than three hundred. About two hundred and fifty years. How did you know?”

An electric current—a realization—raced through my body.

For example. Just suppose, purely hypothetically, that this was the case.

What if the lifespan Dang Seorin hadn’t consumed carried over to the ‘next run’?

I don’t know how Dang Seorin met her end in the first through third runs. She probably fought Tenlegs then too.

But without Old Man Scho and me, even if they launched an assault, the death squad would be annihilated in a mere five minutes.

Dang Seorin would have died before she had a chance to perform Spell-Song Chanting.

Dang Seorin’s natural lifespan was eighty-five years.

Subtract her current age, then deduct the years she had already borrowed against her future in various situations outside the Tenlegs battle, and roughly forty-five years remained.

In other words, in the first through fifth runs, when the battle against Tenlegs had never properly gotten underway, she had left a full forty to forty-five years unused in each run.

From the sixth run, when Old Man Scho joined us, the battle against Tenlegs gained momentum. That gave Dang Seorin more time to burn her lifespan.

Ten years more, fifteen years more, twenty years more.

Little by little, her lifespans accumulated as ‘savings.’

And so, by the tenth run, she had unknowingly saved two hundred and fifty years’ worth of time in an account called her lifespan.

‘If this deduction is true.’

Unfortunately, Dang Seorin had used up every year she had accumulated in the previous runs during this tenth run.

But my regression hadn’t ended with the tenth run. It would keep going. And depending on the circumstances, she might be able to continue saving her lifespan.

‘What if she saves not two hundred and fifty, but five hundred years? What if she saves a thousand, two thousand?’

I couldn’t stop trembling.

“Guild Leader.”

“Hmm?”

Without realizing it, I had called Dang Seorin Guild Leader as I used to. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed anything odd, for she tilted her head as usual.

“What is it?”

“There’s something important I need to tell you.”

8

That I was a regressor.

That perhaps her lifespan had been accumulating with every successive run.

“That’s incredible!”

Throughout my explanation, Dang Seorin was intrigued and astonished, her eyes sparkling.

“Undertaker, you were actually my lackey?”

“That’s the part that surprises you...?”

“Of course! What else would surprise me? Wow, the other versions of me were impressive too. My eye for people was right after all. A pointed hat would suit that frame of yours. Hey, hey, Undertaker. Want to be witch buddies?”

What on earth were witch buddies?

“Have you considered the possibility that I’m lying?”

“Hmm? Why would I consider that? We’re comrades in arms. If you say you’re a regressor, then you really must be one.”

Dang Seorin cleared away a cough and laughed softly.

The tremor of her coughing spilled her remaining lifespan thinly into the air.

“Anyway, your dream is rather like mine.”

“What?”

“You’re moving forward, repairing this world’s broken rails one by one. The rails Tenlegs destroyed. The abandoned lines other monsters wrecked. If you keep repairing them a handspan at a time, someday the tracks will connect one station to another, and other people will be able to follow that path.”

“...”

“Not bad at all.”

Even without [Perfect Recall], I probably would never have forgotten the words I heard at that moment, on that day.

Dang Seorin grinned.

“And what a coincidence. I can’t walk the rails you travel alongside you, but at least my lifespan will follow you, matching your stride step for step. We can’t travel together in life, but we’re companions in death.”

Still smiling, Dang Seorin reached out.

The novel on her lap slipped and fell.

FLUTTER

The white pages, bound in a hard cover instead of becoming wings, spread partway across the floor.

Dang Seorin’s eyes shone fiercely.

Her five fingers tightened around my forearm. Someone who had lost her parents and all her younger siblings to monsters—someone who therefore could not remain merely a slightly eccentric person fond of witches and railways—was gripping my arm.

Hard.

“Don’t squander my lifespan. Put it to good use, Undertaker.”

“...”

“I had to reach the Tenth Melody to defeat Tenlegs. That’s far too wasteful. You need to get a little stronger.”

And so I did.

“I can’t consume too much of my lifespan through Spell-Song Chanting. This is only a hunch, but for some reason I feel Tenlegs won’t be the end. The others might be stronger. We might need five hundred years, a thousand, rather than two hundred and fifty. We need to save as much of my lifespan as possible to prepare for the monsters that come after Tenlegs.”

And so it was.

“And unless you absolutely have to, don’t tell the next run’s version of me that you’re a regressor. I’m greedy, and I worship the god of impulse purchases. I could never think, ‘I’ll abandon this run for the sake of the next.’ If I find out I have hundreds of years left, I’ll absolutely spend them on the current run. Until the final crisis—the truly, truly final crisis—comes, steer things so that my lifespan keeps accumulating.”

And so it was.

“And always be my Deputy Guild Leader in the other runs too.”

That did not happen.

Dang Seorin smiled radiantly.

“I’m counting on you from now on. My companion through time.”

That night, Dang Seorin died.

Her ashes were scattered on a beach.

Keeping her last wishes was not all that easy.

I grew stronger, until Tenlegs could no longer force me into a difficult fight. Dang Seorin no longer needed to chant as far as the Tenth Melody to defeat it.

But even after Tenlegs was gone, powerful enemies kept appearing, and Dang Seorin stood on the front line every time.

She was always on the front line. The end of the broken tracks was always the place she headed for.

Supporting her, both openly and behind the scenes, when she was so quick to spend her lifespan was harder than I had expected. In the end, there was even a disaster partway through that reset all her accumulated years.

Of course, that was only one mistake.

Now, after more than a thousand runs, I calculate that Dang Seorin has accumulated tens of thousands of years of lifespan.

More than thirty thousand years, at the very least.

‘If she sang now, how far could she go?’

Sometimes, as I drink my coffee, I lose myself in imagining it.

The sight of Dang Seorin singing on some battlefield.

The First Melody, the Second Melody, the Third Melody... No matter how they continue and overlap, her song never ends. At last it echoes beyond the horizon, reaching every shore to which this world’s tracks lead.

Only then will Dang Seorin arrive at the coast she has longed for. Wearing her pointed hat, cradling her staff, riding in a single-carriage train.

Even as I wish to hear that song someday, deep down I also hope the day I hear it never comes.

Even in recent runs, whenever chance brings Dang Seorin and me together, she asks me the same question. Exactly as she did when we first met in the fourth run.

“Undertaker. Any interest in joining my guild? I could even offer you the Deputy Guild Leader position.”

Then I smile a little and answer.

“I’m not joining.”

It can’t be helped.

The pointed hat is a bit much, wouldn’t you agree, Guild Leader?

- The Companion. End.