2.1 - The Value Of A Life
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the first time I killed a monster; it was the time I felled that earth wyrm.
This world has skills, stats, and experience points, which allow you to level up if you kill monsters.
Having been reborn in such an RPG-like world, I went through life feeling like it really was a game.
But I realized how wrong I was when Natsume, now Hugo, nearly killed me.
And then I took a monster’s life with my own hands.
To be honest, it was right after that.
When Hugo almost killed me, it radically changed my views on life.
Frankly speaking, up until that point, my head was in the clouds.
I was the fourth prince, a half-baked royal.
I didn’t want for anything in life, but I was largely ignored as a prince, yet not quite enough to live however I pleased.
Like my royalty, the freedom I was given was half-baked, too.
But I didn’t have any complaints about that.
I got to be relatively carefree and didn’t have to act like a stuffy royal all the time.
I trained and polished my skills, listened eagerly to tales of my brother Julius’s heroics, and dreamed of someday being that heroic myself.
In my position, I was allowed to have such childish fantasies.
But that naive dream started to crack when Hugo tried to kill me, and it finally broke into pieces when I killed an earth wyrm shortly thereafter.
I experienced almost being killed by someone.
Then I experienced killing a monster with my own hands.
Neither of those were experiences I ever would have had in Japan.
Until then, I’d been thinking of this life as more of a game than as an extension of my previous life.
Like a bonus stage after I’d already died.
But the murderous intent Hugo directed toward me was real, and the sensation of defeating that earth wyrm was horribly vivid.
When I was fighting Hugo, I was so confused and overwhelmed that I didn’t have time to feel fear, but after I was saved, my body started shaking.
And when I fought the earth wyrm, I was so absorbed in the battle that I couldn’t think about what it would mean to take a life, until I saw the corpse and threw up.
On top of that, I later learned that it was Fei’s parent.
That earth wyrm might have been searching for Fei, its child, for years.
Once that thought crossed my mind, I couldn’t view this life as a game anymore.
From then on, I was afraid of fighting monsters.
But the experience of almost being killed by Hugo kept that fear in check.
I had to get stronger, or I wouldn’t even be able to protect myself.
After fighting Hugo and then the earth wyrm, I knew for a fact that I couldn’t become a strong and noble hero who protects all of humanity like Julius.
I realized that fighting by my brother’s side was a far more distant dream than I’d imagined.
I could never carry a heavy burden like the fate of humanity.
But I wanted to at least get strong enough to protect the people around me.
So I chose to face off against monsters once again.
At school, we had one-on-one practice fights against monsters.
Since they were meant to fight inexperienced students, those monsters were fairly weak.
They were practically rodents, small enough that even an adult without much battle experience could probably take care of them.
But still, monsters are monsters.
They’re vermin that aggressively attack humans; even the weakest ones can cause harm if they’re not killed.
No matter how weak, any monster is capable of being dangerous.
The kind that can be defeated by any adult would still be dangerous to children, for example.
And an adult could still get hurt dealing with it, or even killed if they’re not careful.
Even those weak monsters still kill or injure people every year.
In fact, the hands-on monster fights at the academy were intended to cull monsters as much as they were for the students to get experience.
So it wouldn’t make sense to hesitate to kill a monster.
And yet…
Whenever a monster tried to kill me, I could feel its living intentions.
It was thinking and acting on its own like a living being, not just a program in a game.
I was being naive about fighting monsters, or in fact any living thing at all.
And I don’t mean that I was underestimating them.
My stats are on the higher side for my age, and I could easily defeat a weak monster on my own.
But it wasn’t about that.
It’s hard to put the feeling into words.
But having faced down a monster in the form of that earth wyrm, I learned that fighting was a very real and terrifying experience.
In short, I was afraid.
Of the monster closing in on me, trying to kill me…and of the idea of killing it myself.
Every time I tried to bring my sword down on a monster, I remembered the dead body of the earth wyrm.
In the end, I couldn’t kill a monster in my first match and settled for dodging their attacks.
Then Parton, another member of my group, noticed my struggle and finished it off.
Just like that.
“Why…?” I asked him.
Even I’m not sure what I was asking “why” about, exactly.
I just blurted out the only word that came to mind.
“Oh, sorry. It looked like you were having a hard time, so I just jumped in.”
Parton responded with the assumption that I was demanding why he’d stolen prey from me.
“I guess I went overboard, though. I should’ve realized you wouldn’t struggle with a monster that weak, Prince Schlain. Oh, I get it! You were watching the monster’s movements! So you observe even the weakest monsters without letting your guard down. That’s good to know.”
No. You’re wrong.
That’s not what I was asking, or why I couldn’t defeat the monster.
But I get it now.
Whether I want to or not.
This is the big difference between this world and Japan.
In this world, lives are taken lightly.
Way too lightly.
It’s normal to kill monsters.
You have to kill them, because they’re enemies.
Even humans can start killing each other at the drop of a hat.
And the people in this world have no regard at all for the lives they’ve taken.
They take lives like it’s just another chore.
Parton didn’t show any signs of feeling anything about killing a monster, either.
Not that I’m one to talk.
I did eat meat when I lived in Japan, and I killed bugs sometimes, too.
I can’t claim that the lives of insects, animals, and humans should all be valued equally.
And I know that monsters are harmful creatures that attack humans, and you have to kill them or be killed yourself.
But it felt wrong to kill monsters as casually as killing insects.
In the end, though, I still gritted my teeth and killed a monster myself that day.
I was afraid of betraying the admiration in Parton’s eyes.
Most of all, I remembered the time Hugo attacked and almost killed me.
I knew I had to get strong enough that I could at least protect myself, and I used that as motivation to take a monster’s life and level up.
I murdered a living creature for my own convenience.
I won’t forget it. I can’t.
The sensation of my sword ripping through skin, slicing through flesh, cutting through bone.
The stench of the spraying blood.
The monster’s dying cry.
I burned the moment the creature expired into my mind.
It was a death all too real, much more so than any CG in a game.
In Japan, vermin are sometimes exterminated, too.
Not only that, but the meat lining the shelves once belonged to living cows, pigs, and so on.
People have to take lives in order to go on living.
We humans steal countless lives over the course of our own, even if indirectly.
But I never realized how much heavier it would feel to purposely take a life.
And then I can’t help thinking…if this is how bad it feels to kill a monster, how much worse must it feel to kill a human?
It’s terrifying.
Just thinking about it scares me.
How was Hugo able to do such a thing?
If he’d been through similar experiences, surely he wouldn’t think of this as a dreamlike world.
This world might seem like a game, but it’s not.
Even if lives don’t seem to be worth as much here, they’re just as valuable as they were on Earth.
It’s just that people don’t realize that here.
I get it.
In this world of endless war, you have no choice but to view your enemies’ lives as cheap.
They’re killing monsters and demons for the sake of their own lives.
I’m not going to demand that they stop, of course.
I’ve killed monsters for my own sake, too.
Each life you take is a cross that you have to bear.
I understand trying to ease the load a little by viewing lives so lightly.
But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to change my own views so drastically just to go with the flow.
Because I once knew a hero who chased his ideals until the moment of his death, even knowing they were impossible to achieve.
“I know I’m just dreaming. I don’t care if people laugh at me for being unrealistic. But there’s nothing wrong with having a goal to strive for. Mine is a world where everyone can live happily in peace. And I’ll keep chasing that ideal until I die.”
Julius said that and kept on fighting.
Such a contradiction: fighting for the sake of peace.
He struggled with that but never showed me his suffering as he kept fighting.
I decided I wanted to carry on Julius’s ideals.
I’m afraid of fighting.
Afraid of taking lives.
And afraid of having my own life taken.
I can’t be a hero who fights with resolve and determination, like Julius was.
Even my goal is just an imitation of what Julius told me.
I’m a sham of a hero, halfhearted and cowardly.
But part of me thinks that maybe there are things I can do because of the way I am.
Like maybe knowing the true value of a life is the first step.
Maybe my values from being born and raised in a peaceful country like Japan could be of some use in this world.
Even if I can’t put an end to all wars, I might at least be able to end some of the fighting.
I’m not qualified to be a hero, but I still want to find a way to be of use.
I want to do everything I can, for all that I’m worth.
I believed that before Natsume chased me out of the kingdom, and I kept on sticking to it even after that, taking on any task set before me.
So when I heard the truth of this world being told to me as if in ridicule of my beliefs and Julius’s dreams, I got overly emotional.
I realized I’d misspoken as soon as I saw Kyouya’s face.
He looked like he was holding back some painful feelings of his own.
When I saw that expression and realized that Kyouya hadn’t really wanted to kill the elves, either, a part of me was relieved.
But that wasn’t enough to calm the storm of emotions in my heart, nor could I bring myself to accuse him any further. So I just kept gazing into Kyouya’s face.
“…I’m sorry. I got a little worked up and said too much.”
After a while, I finally calmed down enough to apologize to my old friend.
For whatever reason, I had a feeling it was wrong to blame Kyouya for all this.
“No, you don’t need to be sorry. You’re right, Shun.” Kyouya shook his head softly. “I’m envious of your ability to stick to what’s right.”
Suddenly, I found it hard to believe that this fragile, exhausted expression belonged to the same person who had mercilessly slaughtered the elves.
That face told me that Kyouya had been through a lot and had his own reasons, too.
After showing me such weakness for only a moment, Kyouya closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the fire had returned to his gaze.
“You’re right. But I’m not going to change my ways now. Nor am I going to regret what I’ve done.”
In those eyes, I saw the conviction of a man who would never back down from his belief.
Beliefs that could never be reconciled with my own…
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