Healer Jo’s Perspective

"Come on! Wake up! Please! Anna, wake up! Anna, it's me!" 

I watched the poor young man helplessly as he poured his grief into the world.

His voice cracked with anguish and a raw grief that was agonizing to listen to.

It was a sound that was raw with a desperation that echoed through the shattered remnants of Sakuraido village.

The devourers had taken more people this time. The village was destroyed and the levied soldiers who could have never helped in the first place were reduced in number by ninety percent.

I watched as the young man who was obviously a survivor of the meat grinder we called the battlefield poured out his agony into the world with nothing to show for it.

He clung to the corpse of a girl with hair like a waterfall of violet flowers. 

But the fact that she was here and I still didn’t remember her meant she was an Erased. 

The young man remembered her, but the world forgot.

My heart ached as I watched him cry and sob in anguish. 

I had taught him first-aid techniques during that worthless seven-day boot camp but I always knew it was never going to be enough.

The village square was so full of death that the scent of decay could actually be tasted in the air.

The village was a canvas painted with the blood of the dead and forgotten.

Forgotten being literal as it always was.

After all, how can you care about someone whom you have been forced to forget had ever existed in the first place?

The Erased and their loved ones were the most tragic of all when the one left behind remembered. 

It was a tragedy compounded by a world succumbing to a force that conspired to erase their very existence from the memory of anyone who had ever interacted with them.

I had trained her too, yet I had no memory of her. 

That was the tragedy.

I watched as the young man with the immense willpower to clung to memories that I knew are even now being yanked and torn from his mind as they always were. 

I watched as he continued to beg the empty corpse of someone he clearly loved to wake up.

His pain was something I could even feel.

As it intensified, it made me slam my empathic sense shut. 

It washed over me like a physical force and nearly drove me to my knees. 

He turned to me and opened his mouth with a wild look in his eyes.

I recognized that it was Darren, one of the ones with no magical talent. 

He stood on the precipice of madness and was clearly about to fall off.

"Heal her!" he demanded, his voice cracking. "You have to heal her!"

I shook my head.

I was powerless. The world had robbed him of everything, yet he clung to those fragments of memory that would continue to fade. 

I admired his will to remember her.

The will to love someone who no longer existed was a will I would never want. 

This was a tragedy.

One atop an infinite amount of other tragedies that happened this day and every other day.

I knew that even those with the most powerful wills would forget at the behest of the power the Devourer who ate her memory had affected her existence with.

He slumped to the ground with a dead look in his eyes.

I slid open my empathic sense for a monet and-

Despair. Hopelessness. Existential hate! Kill devourers! Die! Die Die! END END! AGONY END!

I slammed it shut again.

I was a healer and a man who had sworn to alleviate suffering, but in the face of such profound loss I was nothing.

I saw his eyes.

Looking into them revealed an abyss.

That was a glare so profoundly filled with hate that I knew what was coming.

I shook my head.

Seeing a hate for everything- a hate that rejected life itself.

The realization settled in fully then.

He was beyond saving. 

He was another tragedy I couldn't prevent.

I turned and I walked away. 

I ignored the unfolding tragedy in the corner of my eye as he reached for a blade in the nearby grass.

I knew what he was going to do, but I kept walking.

I wouldn't take his final wish from him.

For his suffering to end and to keep remembering until his last breath.

This was just another day in this pointless war with a pointless enemy that had no end.

Another day has passed in a world where my tears have dried entirely.

I couldn’t cry in a world devoid of fairness like thi-

Darren's Perspective

I woke with a gasp as my consciousness slammed back into the body of my past self. 

My lungs burned as if I had run a marathon.

Because I had.

Because that sadistic drill sergeant decided it was a good idea to make the levies run to catch up to the carriages before being allowed to use them!

My heart hammered against my ribs as I tried to calm down.

Damn this time loop!

The frantic drum beat of my heart slamming against the ribcage in my chest assured me that I was back here again and Anna wasn’t dead and erased. 

But I couldn’t slow my heart this time.

I felt so much rage and hate for this impossible situation.

I had lived this horrible day five hundred times.

 I had woken up in this rickety carriage and died again and again.

This repeating cage of misery repeated every day and my only reward was the dread known as the first deployment.

It repeated.

Over. 

Again.

Over and over!

Over Again! 

Five hundred times I had marched towards a battlefield where there was no chance to win!

The vision of creatures that were parodies of normal animals and sociopathic humanoid calamities that tore through armies like they were picking daisies flashed in my mind.

The outskirts of the agricultural zone was about to be a place decorated in blood and bone.

It would be filled with the shattered dreams and the corpses of people I had met seven days ago and the additional citizenry destined to die.

The people from the boot camp were actually pretty cool people. 

But they would all die.

They would become a graveyard marked by tombstones whose only decoration was forgotten faces.

They wouldn’t even be buried!

Devourers don’t just kill people, they erase them!

Skill devouring monsters that could also erase people’s perceptions and memories of them!

I felt sick.

All I had was a slight hodgepodge of battle experience that was built upon no technique at all!

I learned nothing at all in all these loops!

My strength had increased through the loops, but my muscles felt off.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

It was like I had done something wrong in the process of increasing my strength.

The military deployment carriage lurched forward violently as its wooden wheels struggled against the unpaved road.

Why?!

Why couldn't we just live?! 

Why did at least one of us always have to die?!

Everyone else could go rot in hell but at least let me save Anna and Jessa!

Why was I condemned to relive this nightmare?!

To witness their deaths and their corpses over and over again?!

"Five hundred times!" I roared as my voice echoed out with a raw anguish that I couldn’ contain anymore.

The feeling of anguish turned to fury as I surged to my feet.

My body trembled with a nonsensical mix of emotions that were all different flavors of anger and disgust.

The feeling of a hundred flavors of sadness, rage, hopelessness, and despair flooded my veins. 

The other levied conscripts shrank back from my outburst and began mumbling to each other. 

But I was beyond caring.

"Every single time, I'm too late!" I slammed my fist against the carriage wall as the wood groaned under the force of my fist as my knuckles cracked and bled.

My gaze darted around the carriage, desperately searching for a familiar face.

My eyes frantically scanned the faces of the conscripts. I was searching for her. For Anna. For the one person who-

She wasn’t there.

She was always there.

Sitting on the bench of the carriage.

Except she wasn’t there this time.

"Jessa," I gasped out with a dead look in my eyes.

As I turned to my only other true friend in the world, who was my only true friend besides Anna.

The girl who should still be sitting where she always was and was ready to sass and punch out anyone who pissed her off enough.

 I began to ask her a question that I knew deep down I wouldn't like the answer to. 

My voice came out as a strangled whisper.

"You have to tell me. Do you know where Anna is?" The question hung in the air as a fragile plea for a truth that I already knew to be false.

Jessa frowned. 

Her beautiful amethyst eyes were wide with concern as she looked at me.

The reaction to the name of the girl we both grew up beside was wrong.

Her face was obviously full of confusion that clearly was questioning my sanity.

I didn’t blame her.

I noted the level of bewilderment she showed was that of which mirrored the emptiness in my own eyes. 

It was a confusion that cut me to the core.

"Darren," she said softly, with her characteristically aggressive tone gone.

There was no sarcasm, but the softness of someone who didn’t want to startle a terrified animal.

"I don't know anyone by that name. What are you talking about? You’re scaring me." Her words were a dagger twisting in my gut, a cold blade of disbelief that pierced through the fragile hope I had clung to.

For a fleeting moment I could have sworn I saw a flicker of panic in her eyes as she darted to where Anna should be.

I blinked and her expression was the same concerned look.

I was clearly imagining things now!

I truly was going damn bonkers!

This couldn't be happening! 

What kind of cruel joke was this? 

What kind of twisted game was this horrible world playing with me?!

Is this a punishment for just waiting eight years to start my hero's journey?!

Because I’m clearly not the damn protagonist unless the author is selling a torture-loop! 

Reality kept dangling the possibility of hope only to snatch it away with a mocking laugh!

Regaining my memories of my life in japan was a blessing, but I did nothing with it and this was my punishment!

My hand instinctively reached into my pocket.

I began grasping for something solid and real in this swirling vortex of despair. 

Something that was always the same.

My fingers closed around a small, rectangular object.

I rubbed my hand upon its smooth leather cover which WAS NOT a comfort against my trembling hand.

A book.

Why a book?!

Why not Anna’s ribbon?!

It was the token of our promise to get through this and start a family together!

The symbol of our shared hope was replaced by a book!

No! 

This couldn't be happening! 

She was Erased, devoured, and forgotten. 

But that had happened before in a previous loop!

She always returned upon the loop ending and returning to the time we were still in carriage and moving to worthlessly enforce soldiers who didn’t need us anyway!

Had my attempts to save her somehow backfired?

She must have encountered something stronger this time.

A normal erased is simply forgotten and people’s minds fill in the blanks with the closest probable series of events.

But with her missing from the reset-

Would her very existence be erased from the fabric of reality itself?!

It seemed like the case was ‘yes, you better believe it, you dumb bastard!’

She should be sitting next to me!

But due to the absolute garbage of the countless devourers in that battlefield she was gone.

There was a void where her laughter and her love should have been.

Despair continued to fill me to bursting with anguish.

These speculations were more than likely exactly after what I had seen these past five hundred loops.

The ribbon she had always worn before this mess and had handed to me on the first loop was gone.

It was replaced by a simple book.

I might as well try to read it.

We were still a couple hours out.

I pulled out the book.

It was the consolation prize for her existence and a cruel mockery of what could have been but I took it out anyway.

The book was bound in ancient looking brown leather and running my hands over the smooth leather cover somehow made me have the urge to smell it.

It smelled like boiling tar and- swords?

Do swords smell? 

How do I know what boiling tar smells like?

I looked closer and its cover had a written title.

The title, however, was written in japanese.

But the lines were blurry and waved together as the kanji swayed back and forth in a way that made it completely unreadable.

No, the ‘tee’ in my ‘teeburu’ of the table is not supposed to flip, am I high?!

Am I dreaming right now?

Did reality break in a way that the japanese katakana table is supposed to do a barrel roll?!

This doesn’t make sense!

Can reality stay goddamn serious for one moment while I have my existential crisis?!

I felt a strange premonition after that last thought.

I felt a sense that something even stranger was about to happen and I wasn’t sure if I was ready for absolute nonsense to have a party where Asatoth was the DJ.

The world began to stutter as reality itself broke down like a broken computer trying to play a video game with more required video RAM than amperage could support and supplemented itself with the power in the goddamn sun to compensate.

If that analogy doesn’t make sense to anyone not familiar with power supplies and graphics cards and the knowledge of how motherboard manufacturers in my past life fuck them up by accident, then neither did this!

The words on the cover flew off the book, swirling in the air like angry ghosts who wanted me to pay taxes on my life insurance that I still don’t have! 

The book opened and its pages started glowing with a dim light as they turned rapidly.

I’d make a joke out loud right now if I wasn’t so goddamned baffled by the stuttering of reality around me as the carriage decided to do the time-stutter dirt-shuffle trail-dance.

No, mr. time, please do not reverse entropy and then decide to return in rapid succession while I am still in the area, I don’t want to vomit on my shoes!

The words etched upon the air began to whisper secrets that I couldn’t understand as everything around me began to vibrate.

This was happening and it was beyond my comprehension and defied the very laws of reality.

I’m pretty sure another eye would spontaneously appear on my brain if I could figure this out, so I wont think about it.

For a fleeting moment, I was back at boot camp. I watched my past self as I fell onto the dirt mid-sprint. 

Yamate, Time-travel-sama.

I am not interested in you that way!

Please let me go back to class and take my how-not-to-die-again final in peace!

"Faster, you worthless piles of shit!!! You want to run from a devourer like that, then stop wasting everyone’s time and go to the woodchipper outside the camp and compost yourselves right now!" our assigned drill sergeant's voice bellowed in my ears as the other me struggled.

Then I was yanked further back to a week before the forced enlistment. 

We had gotten told we were being enlisted, but at least we had hope then, before the endless cycle of death and despair.

"If we're going to be forcibly enlisted-," Anna's voice began.

With a jolt I saw myself looking in the mirror when I was ten.

Friggin Yamero!!

Make this stop!

None of this is okay!

"Does that mean I'm the protagonist of an Isekai?" My own voice filled the air with words of naivety that the me right now wanted to slap my younger self for thinking that idea, let alone speaking aloud.

My younger and more naive self giggled happily as I scowled at the moron I had become in a few seconds of gaining my past life memories. 

I remembered my past life as a worthless delinquent who had dropped out of high school.

For some reason I thought an extra set of memories made me special.

I was a fool.

A talentless and moronic fool who had dared to dream of a happy ending in a world consumed by darkness.

I was yanked back to the carriage.

I watched as reality stuttered and jarred itself back and forth in time around us as no one else seemed to notice the strange phenomena unfolding around them. The letters of the pages that I still couldn’t read swirled in the air, and the world trembled beneath the carriage.

No one acknowledged the book in my hand as it pulsed with an otherworldly light. 

The ancient leather hummed with power in my hands.

Literally.

The rumbling humming of too much power being shoved into a space that was probably too small was probably bad.

That’s something obvious, after all.

I began to wonder if this book had somehow just transformed into a mana bomb.

Then the words that had flown out of the book and swirled around me like an insane group of children on a sugar rush with some chaos emeralds mixed in.

Then all of a sudden they stilled as they assembled themselves into neat lines.

Ah, yes, pronouncements of doom.

A goddamn prophecy.

Wonderful.

Then the words were spoken aloud by the goddamn air for some ungodly reason.

Just why?!

“HERE LIES THE LAMENT OF THE SWORD GOD EMPEROR.”

Maybe be quiet then?

“HERE YOU ARE, THE FINAL HOPE OF THE SWORD GOD EMPEROR.”

Am I really, though?

“HERE YOU STAND AS THE FINAL HOPE OF US ALL!”

Me? Seriously? You’ve got literally the absolutely MOST wrong guy.

“ALL FELL BEFORE THE PRIME DEVOURER.”

Ah, yes, the terrifying part of the prophecy starts. 

“ALL WILL FALL AGAIN BEFORE THE PRIME DEVOURER.”

Mhm, butter me up before telling me everyone’s gonna die. Classic.

“BE CONSUMED AND FORGOTTEN,”

I don’t think I would be forgotten, I wanna taste really bad, you see.

“BE EATEN AND BECOME A PASSING THOUGHT OF AN EVIL THAT KNOWS NOTHING BUT GLUTTONY!”

Can I make them pass something else? Maybe a kidney-stone? Infinite gas that is also on tabasco sauce and fire?

“ALL WILL FORGET UNLESS YOU SAVE THIS WORLD.”

Can I take too much god damn responsibility for 500? Oh it’s a double jeopardy!

“ALL WILL BE TURNED TO SUSTENANCE FOR A THING DESERVING STARVATION!”

Can I literally not?

“ONE HUNDRED YEARS FROM NOW, THE PRIME DEVOURER WILL RETURN.”

I have time, man, just freaking let me take a nap!

“UNTIL EVIL WILL NOT STAND IN YOUR PRESENCE, YOU WILL START AGAIN AND STEP FORWARD.”

How about I run away instead!

“THROUGH YOU, MY SUCCESSOR, THEY WILL FINALLY REMEMBER US!”

Can I just have Anna back? You know, my girlfriend who reality decided wasn’t allowed to exist anymore?

“WE WILL START AGAIN AND WE WILL TRIUMPH!”

Apparently that’s a no. Maybe later? Please?!

I need her.

She’s all I have.

She’s my everything…

Then the light dimmed as a blinding flash of light engulfed me with ten times the fury of a thousand suns!

The light erased everything from my sight.

I felt a sickening lurch and a sensation of being ripped from one existence and hurled into another.

As I disappeared, I didn’t notice the relieved smile that tried to escape from a grimace on Anna’s face as she poked her head of violet hair out of the bottom of the carriage bench.