Prologue – 01 – Listen to my Words

Prologue 1: Listen to My Words

Author: Kappa Alliance/Midori Yuma

Link: https://ncode.syosetu.com/n3862be/

Translated by Gumihou 

 

Spare a moment and listen to my words.

My name is Makiko Oda. A first-year high schooler.

That said, I was once one of the Three Great Demon Kings from a different world called Maydea. I was known as the Crimson Witch of the West.

 

Sounds pretty fantastic, isn’t it?

 

What’s even more fantastic was that everything I just said was true. It is also true that I was born in Japan on this world called Earth and have lived here for 16 years. Nevertheless, the fact that I had lived in Maydea for 200 years is irrefutable.

 

Right now, I am in an unused art classroom of an annexe building in my high school.

This is the club room for the ‘Past Life Confession Club’. Within the art-class room were dust-covered plaster figures, paint materials, cattle bones and other art-related odds and ends. Since everything is covered in dust, it is clear that no one ever come to this place. While we came here for our club meetings, we never touch these dust-covered things either.

We gathered here because this was the room given to us when we first established the club.

A ‘Past Life Confession Club’ is exactly what the words suggested. A club for us to look back, confess and reflect on our previous life.

 

“Why do we have to be killed by that Hero guy?”

Is generally the agenda of the meeting.

 

I have thought over this matter many times.

And, no matter how I turned the subject over and over in my mind, it always ended with remorse and regret.

 

“There are many things to reflect on. I do wish I haven’t self-destructed myself with that Hero back then. However, I was really caught up with the situation at that time, guess I could blame my youthful spirit for that, don’t you think?”

 

“A 200-year-old youthful spirit?”

Seated opposite me and nit-picking over my words is Tooru Saiga. He was the Black Demon of the North in his past life.

A guy with short black hair, a bad look in his eyes and a rather devious air about him, traits that he had brought with him into this life from the first one.

He now pretended to be some kind of stoic man, but in his previous life, he was a rascally man who kidnaps princesses from all over the place for his harem.

“…someone who had been easily beaten by the Hero had no right to criticise me.”

“Shut up, I was tricked. Strange how a great Hero man turned out to be such a coward. Hey, Yuri, don’t you have anything to say about this?”

Tooru urged a neat and smiling young man seated on his right.

Like us, he too recalled his past life. He was called White Sage of the East or something like that.

Right now, his name was Yuri Shizuka. Not sure how he ended up with such a girlish name.

He was just sitting there, sipping his tea.

“Well, I was the one who picked that guy to become a hero. I had no idea that he would hunt us Three Great Demon Kings down and kill us in such a cowardly way… for him to turn out to be such a savage bastard, in the end, I’m really sorry.”

“Even if you apologise to us now, you can’t change what happened.”

I heaved a great sigh.

Well, I know that it made no sense for us to go over these past regrets over and over again in such a shabby little room.

I was born in the same world as the other two Demon Kings. [1] As powerful beings, it was almost inevitable for us to be hostile against each other in our previous lives.

Now, however, we were the only ones who understood what the others had gone through.

The purpose of the club was for us to organise and recall the memories from long, long time ago. Things that continued to haunt us even after we have been reborn into this world.

 

Our previous world, Maydea, was divided into four continents.

Each of us occupied a continent and made a name for ourselves, transcending human limits due to our extraordinary abilities and eventually becoming the feared Demon Kings.

However, I don’t remember doing anything that evil. [1] The worst thing I did was turn beautiful women I didn’t like into frogs and threaten the local king to provide me with money and things to live a luxurious life.

Compared to the Black Demon King of the North who kidnaps beautiful princesses into his harem, my little pettiness could be considered cute.

I use to battle with the Black Demon King of the North now and then.

Well, each time we clash, a mountain or two would disintegrate or disappeared, which, now that I think about it, caused a lot of trouble for other people. Perhaps, we may have gone a bit too far.

The problem all started when the White Sage of the East could no longer bear to see us clashing like that and found a young promising young man in some random village and raised him to become a ‘Hero’.

I still remember that hero guy’s face.

He was a very beautiful looking young man with pretty blond hair. However, he was even more demonic that the Demons Kings.

 

First, the White Sage of the East, the one who was supposedly his mentor, was killed.

The Hero then robbed the Sage of all his Spirit Contracts and went on to subdue the Black Demon King of the North.

The method he used was really cowardly.

The so-called Hero kidnapped a beautiful princess who is said to be the Black Demon King’s favourite. He managed to somehow get her into the palm of his hand and manipulated the woman into betraying the Black Demon King.

In the end, the Black Demon King was killed by the Hero without him using his powers. He ended up betrayed by the woman he loved.

 

By the way, as the Crimson Witch of the West, I was really angered by this.

That’s because I really liked picking fights with the Black Demon King of the North.

It must be said, there were really no fun things to do in that world.

Unlike the overly friendly White Sage of the East or the dumb Black Demon of the North, I was just as cunning as the Hero and not easy to get rid of.

The final battle was fierce.

I ended up self-destructing and taking the Hero as well as the entire Western Continent with me.

It was a truly terrible thing to do.

There was really no way of knowing the condition of Maydea now.

Are you still plagued by the scars of our war?

 

“Hey, Maki-chan. Mother told me to ask you to come to dinner today,”

“Eh? Really? That’s great~! I’ll get to eat something good for the first time in a while~”

Auntie Yuri is really a good person.

She really cared for me, who had lost her parents at junior high school and was always inviting me to dinner. Going to Yuri’s place is more fun than returning to my little studio apartment where I live alone. It always looks extra miserable and cold during winter.

Aunt Yuri’s food is always delicious.

“Hey, Tooru-kun, you come too, alright? My sister is your fan, you know?”

“Why should I?”

Was what he said, but he ended up coming with us anyway.

Our past life was long, it was an uphill battle to loosen our shackles with the past and therefore ridiculous to imagine that we can reconcile everything in these short 16 years.

These two were the only ones who understand what it is like to have memories of the past from the moment you were born.

Right now, I’m just a high school student.

However, in the past, I was one of the Three Great Demon Kings who shook the world.

We were all killed in the end, by that Hero.

It was the one common ‘memory’ we have with each other.

 

[Gumihou: Woah, this is just prologue 1!!]

 

[1] Filling in the ‘Unspoken’. Often, when it comes to Japanese novels, the translation might be a bit lacking since the author deliberately chooses to use fewer words and let the reader fill in the blanks through a preset cultural understanding.

 

Gumihou will love to hear from you ~