A group of children quickly ran past. They glanced at each other with smiles filled with excitement and hope, leaving an innocent air that only children could possess and disappeared into the parade. It wasn’t only the children. A young pair of lovers and a middle-aged couple with their children joined the parade in order. After them, a man with a fearsome face, an old man with a cane, and all kinds of people regardless of their age, gender, and so on walked towards the city’s main road in unison.
People’s wild cheers waved across the road. They were all cheering for a group of people walking down the middle of the road. They were Zich Brave and his companions, who had saved the city from yet another disaster. To get a closer look, people pushed into the already crowded road to see Zich Brave and his companions slowly treading between the ever-increasing crowd. They were this age’s greatest heroes.
Among the crowd, there was one noticeable man watching the heroes. Like the people around him, his eyes were filled with admiration and envy. However, his clothes were extremely tattered and dirty, and his skinny, emaciated body indicated the man’s deplorable living conditions. However, his face was extremely beautiful, and it was clear that the man would make many ladies’ hearts flutter if he simply fattened up his cheeks by eating well and washed up.
The man couldn’t push his way into the crowd because he was too weak and lacked energy. However, he did his utmost best to crane his neck over the crowd to see the heroes. After a couple of attempts, he finally succeeded in seeing the hero, and the sight of Zich Brave holding up a shining holy sword stirred up a tremendous emotion inside him.
The man and the hero seemed to exist in different worlds. Compared to the hero who fought for humankind with the support of numerous countries, he was a nobody, barely surviving day after day at the city’s bottom. However, the man couldn’t help thinking while watching the heroes receive love from everyone in the world: ‘If only I could also be a hero…’
Bam!
At that moment, an enormous wave of mana fell. The man’s body disappeared first. Then, the crowd, houses, the street, and even Zich Brave and his companions disappeared. A large black hole appeared where the parade used to be.
Crack!
The rest of the scenery crumbled. Like broken glass, it broke into pieces and was sucked into the black hole. The only one who remained was Glen Zenard holding a black demon sword.
“No.” His eyes darted and shot downwards. “This isn’t me anymore. I am a hero now!”
An immense amount of mana was sent into Tornium and an ominous ringing sounded from its blades. Glen swung the sword. The black hole shook widely and broke without a sound.
Blink! Glen opened his eyes and hurriedly got up. He flung away the blanket on top of him.
‘…A dream.’
It was dark outside through the window, and the sun hadn’t risen yet. However, Glen didn’t plan to go to sleep again. He got down from his bed and raised the kettle on the table. There was a cup next to it, but Glen placed the kettle’s mouth directly onto his and drank. Half of its contents flowed past his mouth and wet his clothes and the floor. Eventually, he threw the empty kettle onto the table and sat back down on his bed.
‘Calm down, Glen Zenard. It’s just a stupid dream.’ The dream had nothing to do with the present. It was something he had almost erased from his mind completely. He didn’t know why he was having this dream now of all times, but it was all meaningless. He assured himself with these words, but he couldn’t help feeling an instinctual unpleasantness. It really, truly was unpleasant.
“Urgh!” He wanted to vomit, and Glen quickly blocked his mouth. He couldn’t believe that he felt the urge to vomit just because he recalled this memory.
“Weak! So unbelievably weak!”
The hero he dreamt of wasn’t weak like this. A hero had to be praised by all and was perfect in every way. A hero wasn’t this dirty and weak.
‘Isn’t…a hero?’ Glen felt a great sense of danger suddenly. He wondered again why he had this dream. ‘Is this a warning from myself?’
It was true that this timeline couldn’t have been stranger. There were too many changed variables to count, and Zich Moore was being treated as a hero instead of him. He had always maintained the status of a hero even in the timelines he ruined; however, in this current timeline, there was hardly anyone who called him a hero.
‘Yeah! It’s a warning that I’m giving myself because I have been watching the situation too complacently and optimistically!’ Glen thought this timeline was basically ruined and focused on gaining more information to use for the next regression as a priority. However, it seemed like that had been the wrong approach. ‘Even in a ruined timeline, I have to be called a hero. I have to be a hero!’
He had to take back the position he lost. He was no longer the poor existence watching admirable figures from afar while sucking his thumb. ‘I have to start again now!’
He even had a fitting target nearby. Glen’s eyes dangerously glittered.
* * *
Lyla was not in a good mood. It had been several days since Zich left for the Denest Mountain Range, and in the meantime, Glen Zenard continuously pestered her. As he gave her a sleek smile and continuously initiated useless conversations, Lyla felt that he was the worst kind of man.
‘If only I gained some useful information.’ The reason why Lyla accepted Glen’s company was to extract information from him. Perhaps it was because he had gone through countless regressions, but Glen was incredibly adept at evading the questions that Lyla asked about him. Thus, Lyla’s stress was at its limit.
‘Moreover, there’s that dream I had.’ Her body shuddered as she recalled it. Lyla had dreamed of when she was Clowon’s princess—a time period she had only glimpsed through in Finel’s memories. Even though their appearance was the same, they were completely different in behavior, mindset, and most of all, their gaze.
‘Her eyes look like there’s no emotion in them.’ Lyla couldn’t believe they were the same person. After she woke up from her dream, Lyla had a hard time suppressing the vomit rising in her throat.
‘On the bright side, after this dream, the amount of time Glen Zenard has tried to converse with me has decreased.’ If that wasn’t the case, Lyla might have thrown a fireball at his face in frustration. She didn’t know why Glen Zenard changed his behavior.
‘It might be because I didn’t properly converse with him.’ Even then, her suffering was not fully over. Even though his attempts to converse with her had noticeably decreased, she still had to talk to him sometimes.
“Ah, Ms. Lyla.” While walking down the hallway, Lyla heard an annoying voice. She desperately tried to keep a straight face, and she had never felt so jealous of Zich’s shameless acting skills.
‘No, if Glen Zenard was his opponent, even his thick skin would crack.’ Lyla gritted her teeth at Glen’s horrific tactics.
“Hello, Mr. Zenard,” Lyla replied while keeping her face and expression as normal as possible. She couldn’t make a smile. There was no need to, and she didn’t have the confidence to pull off a smile while looking at Glen’s face. The two of them shared a short conversation in the hallway. Then, Lyla slightly tried to elicit information by saying, “Mr. Zenard, you seem a bit busy these days. Is there anything going on?”
“Things are slightly better than before, but as you know, we’re still currently battling monsters. So I increased my patrol duty for a bit longer. No matter how much I enjoy my time here, protecting people is more important.”
Glen said a couple of ‘righteous words’ that seemed scripted. Lyla could slightly grasp why Zich hated hearing people say righteous words so much. ‘No, that’s not it. I only feel this way because I know that Glen Zenard is a hypocrite. There’s no way that I’d have the same thoughts as Zich. That’s impossible.’
Even though Lyla loved Zich, she didn’t want to think like him at all. However, there was no way that Glen could read Lyla’s thoughts. He asked Lyla for tea as he had constantly been doing for the past few days, and the location was always at the garden in their lodging. They shared small talk while drinking a cup of tea. However, neither of them enjoyed their time together as they merely said empty words to fish out information from each other. On the other hand, Glen was satisfied with this situation. ‘If she had zero interest in me, she wouldn’t converse with me like this.’
Glen couldn’t catch Lyla’s true intentions in the slightest and he felt satisfied with himself. ‘I just have to slowly gauge her interest like this.’ It didn’t matter if he only gained one piece of information about her in this timeline. He could use this piece of information as his base to get two, four, or eight pieces of information in the next timeline and eventually figure out the perfect condition to make her his comrade. This method had never failed him so far because he just needed to keep trying until it worked. Moreover, to get what he wanted, he used any means or methods possible.
‘There were many people I couldn’t even converse with like this in the beginning.’ A prime example of such a person was Lara Browning. He didn’t know how much effort he had to exert to get her. In their early meetings, Lara Browning rejected him so firmly that he wondered how anyone could be so firm. However, what was the situation like now?
‘With just a few words from me, she’s now willing to throw away her precious sword.’ However, as soon as he thought this, Glen Zenard’s mood turned sour. In this timeline with a lot of unknown variables, Lara Browning stubbornly held onto her sword without throwing it away. After perfecting her route, this had never happened before.
‘The Lara Browning who refuses to throw away her sword is not Lara Browning anymore.’ Thus, Glen Zenard almost lost all interest in Lara Browning in this timeline. To get the Lara Browning he wanted, he just needed to return everything back to normal in the next regression. It was better to focus on Lyla for now.
‘Isn’t this situation pretty good for now?’ Even though Lyla never smiled at him, she accepted his invitation for tea every time. He was sure that Lyla had some sort of interest in him as well. He smiled darkly inside his mind at the thought that he could steal something from Zich again.
“Oh? You were here?”
Glen heard a familiar voice. When he turned around, he saw Zich standing in front of the garden entrance. ‘Did he already return?’ Glen desperately tried to stop himself from frowning. However, he became happy when he thought of what he and Lyla currently looked like to Zich.
‘His comrade is drinking tea with me while he was struggling outside.’ Moreover, he felt even more pleased as he was confident that Lyla was opening up to him. Glen turned back to look at Lyla. He was curious about what type of reaction she would show, but he completely stiffened when he saw her face.
“Zich!” Lyla made a bright smile that she had never shown him even once. Her goddess-like beauty exploded at that moment. It was to the extent that even Glen became speechless even though he had all kinds of experiences throughout his many regressions. Lyla immediately got up and quickly walked towards Zich. Glen could only blankly stare at her back as she walked. He couldn’t think properly because his mind felt so cluttered and confused, but he was sure of one thing—he felt like a dumb clown.