Mushoku Tensei — Chapter 73 - Love at First Sight

A faint sound woke me.

Dark all around. Cramped.

This space is impossibly narrow. After dozens of transfers, the place I finally arrived at is barely larger than a cradle. Not enough room for one person to turn over, let alone two. The ceiling sits so low it barely clears my head.

In a space like this, at least no monsters will be teleported in. Not while I'm here.

I sit with my back against the wall, looking at the thing in front of me.

A Magic Circle.

Glowing faintly. Pale blue-white light, wavering like it might go out.

A Teleportation Magic Circle.

One step onto that surface and I'll be transported somewhere. I don't know where. Probably another monster nest.

One month ago, I accidentally stepped into one.

You could call it unavoidable. In the middle of a fight, I dodged an incoming attack, stepped back, caught my foot on a stone. One stumble. One wrong step. And I was standing inside the Teleportation Magic Circle.

I had checked the room for traps before the fight started. I had.

I stepped right in anyway.

The place it sent me to was swarming with monsters. Twenty, maybe thirty of them.

I'm a mage. A reasonably skilled one, I think. I can't use Voiceless Casting, but I've shortened my incantation time down far enough that I cast faster than most. I'm used to fighting in large numbers. I didn't panic.

I decided to wipe them out.

But I couldn't. They kept coming. More and more, pouring out without end.

This was their nest. The survival rate for any adventurer who stumbles in here is essentially zero. I knew that. I knew I was just burning through mana for nothing. I had already steeled myself for death.

But I didn't want to die.

So I kept fighting. And somewhere underneath all of it, a faint, stubborn thread of hope.

Would Paul and the others come for me?

Or had they given up?

It's been over a month. At some point, they would have had to assume I was dead.

No. They wouldn't abandon me. They have to still be searching.

But this trap doesn't work like a normal teleportation. It doesn't send you from one point to another. It chains together dozens of consecutive transfers before dropping you somewhere. Tracking it would be nearly impossible.

No one is coming.

I fought back the tears and kept moving. And the whole time, I could feel my mana draining, faster and faster.

Then I saw it.

Six Magic Circles in the wide chamber around me. From one of them, not a single monster had emerged.

Maybe wherever that one led, there was nothing waiting.

I threw everything I had left into it. Burned through the last of my mana to break through the swarm and threw myself into that Magic Circle.

This space is where I landed.

Alive. Somehow.

I was lucky. Incredibly lucky.

Water I can keep producing with magic. I still had some food in my pack. So I set about recovering my mana here, and I started trying to think of a way out.

...

Again. And again.

Leave this space. Fight monsters until my mana runs dry. Retreat. Recover. Go back out.

Honestly, I'm probably going to die.

Even if my mana holds, I'll die. Monster meat tastes awful and has almost no nutritional value. My body is wearing down. It's only a matter of time.

How long do I have left? A month? Two weeks?

Next time I step into the Teleportation Magic Circle, how many will there be?

Next time.

I'm not sure there is a next time.

This is the first time in my life I have genuinely, truly thought: I am going to die.

My body will be eaten. Picked clean. No one will remember I was here.

I've seen death before. Plenty of times. Living as an adventurer, I told myself I wasn't afraid of it. I believed that.

I was wrong. Now that it's real, now that it's certain, my hands won't stop shaking.

So this is it.

And I haven't done anything yet.

There were still things I wanted to do. Dreams I never got to chase.

I wanted to be a teacher.

I love teaching. I'm not even particularly talented at it, I know that. But I love it anyway. I had planned to rescue Zenith safely and then go sit for the teaching qualification exam at the Magic University. Get a classroom. A real one.

I wanted that ordinary kind of happiness.

And if I had a stable job like that, maybe someone would have finally wanted to marry me. I don't have much going for me in terms of looks, but I always figured the reason no man had ever been interested was the profession. Adventurers die. A lot of people don't want to be close to that.

"Haah..."

What am I even thinking about?

I'm going to die. None of it matters now.

But if I have to die... I at least don't want to be eaten. I could stay here. In this space. Leave a whole corpse behind, maybe serve as some kind of warning to whoever finds this place next.

That's a grim thought. Morbid, even.

I almost laughed.

I tightened my grip on my staff and stepped into the Teleportation Magic Circle again.

Not an ordinary labyrinth. It was another nest.

"Haha... what is this..."

Two hours later, I had nothing left.

My head was thick and swimming. That hollow, deadening feeling behind my eyes — mana nearly gone. A few more spells and I'd collapse.

An Iron Crawler was almost on top of me.

I'd used fire magic earlier to thin the numbers and the heat still hung in the air, dulling the effect of my Frost Nova. The cold wasn't spreading like it should.

It was over.

I didn't want to die. Not like this. Not here.

"No — no..."

I swung my staff. Wild, graceless. Spider silk shot across the room and wrapped around it, yanking it from my grip.

"Should've just died sooner," I muttered. "All that fighting and it ends like this anyway..."

My mouth was saying the words. My body kept stepping back anyway, retreating on instinct.

I'd heard these monsters eat their prey alive. The thought sat in my stomach like a stone.

Eaten alive.

I should have waited in that space. I should have just stayed there until the end. At least it would have been quiet.

I squeezed my eyes shut.

I waited.

The moment didn't come.

Maybe it happened too fast. Maybe I was already dead and hadn't realized it yet.

No. That couldn't be right.

But the sounds had stopped. Everything had gone completely silent.

Maybe this was already the afterlife.

Trembling, I opened my eyes.

The world was white.

Vermin Spiders. Iron Crawlers. Mad Skulls.

Every single one of them was a sculpture of ice.

Pristine. Still. Pale white in every direction.

A deep crack rang out from somewhere in the chamber. One of the Mad Skulls deep in the room buckled and collapsed, its skull crashing to the ground and shattering into pieces.

Frozen completely solid, from the inside out.

Not like my Frost Nova, which glazes the surface. This was something else entirely. Something that had reached all the way through.

Nothing in this room was still alive.

"...Huh?"

"Thank goodness."

A mage stepped through the gaps between the ice sculptures and walked toward me.

The moment I saw him, my heart lurched.

Brownish-gold hair that looked soft to the touch. A gentle face. Tall, wearing robes, a mage, clearly, but broad-shouldered in a way that didn't fit the image. He carried a large staff in one hand, and he was looking down at me with an expression of unmistakable relief.

He was exactly what I would have imagined, if anyone had asked me to describe my ideal.

"Huh? Huh?"

My head still wasn't working. Too much at once. Too fast.

"Teacher...? Teacher!"

Teacher. Was he calling me that?

Could he be —

The thought didn't finish.

The world went dark.

➤ Next: Love at First Sight 2