[Regression]
It was nonsense he had never heard of in his life.
Wasn't that something tasty salmon did?
So he'd never met a man who had regressed, nor a child who claimed to.
He'd never even met a swindler who used it for a scam.
The con men must have decided it was too cheap a premise to bother with.
'And here I've gone and done it.'
For the first few days even the great Delam couldn't accept it.
That was how impossible the thing was.
He'd been through fire and water in his time, but this was another dimension entirely.
Still, he couldn't very well keep denying it forever.
Everything he saw, heard, and smelled was far too vivid for that.
Vivid enough that he couldn't harbor the faintest suspicion it was a dream.
'...How was it done?'
That was the first thought that came once he'd accepted it.
It wasn't as if every person who died automatically regressed.
If they did, the world would already be overflowing with regressors.
The likeliest candidate was the Cardinal he'd seen at the end.
To begin with, that old man was the only person left alive on that battlefield.
And he thought he'd seen some tremendously bright light right before he died.
The man was a Cardinal of the Church of [Radiance], so it all lined up well enough.
'If that's true, then, Cardinal... you're a demon.'
In that case it was an extraordinarily cruel thing to do.
He had spent his whole life on battlefields as the Empire's Supreme Commander.
And when he'd finally been about to rest, he was sent back into the past?
The old man was more wicked than any demon.
The second thing he felt was regret.
Regret toward humanity.
Hadn't the Cardinal said as much?
That humanity was ruined because Delam had butchered every hero.
The truth was, to some degree, he was right.
The Emperor, Leosax II, had wanted to conquer the continent.
He wanted only the [Fior Empire] to exist upon it.
And that Emperor's sharpest sword had been Delam.
Delam had led the imperial army and invaded kingdom after kingdom.
Before him, there were only ever two choices.
Surrender, or resistance.
Surprisingly, surrender was almost unheard of.
The heroes rose up in righteous fury and fought for their homelands.
And Delam had butchered those heroes on sight, every one of them.
He was the Empire's Supreme Commander, so he did his job.
'The demons attacked much later.'
By the time the Empire had finally unified the continent.
By the time humanity's strength was at its weakest from all those wars.
The demons pried their way into that opening.
Controlling monsters, they marched upon the Empire.
He scraped together every soldier he could and fought back, but it wasn't enough.
The problem was above all the [quality] of the troops.
The strong had all died in the wars up to that point.
More precisely, Delam had killed them all.
And so came the final battle, somehow strung together.
But the result, as you saw, was humanity's defeat.
The human army Delam led was trampled by the demons.
'What happened after that... doesn't need looking at.'
Would what remained of humanity have united as one and fought the demons?
Not on your life.
If they'd been capable of that, the war would never have started.
Rebellions would have broken out everywhere the moment the Empire weakened.
The demons were far away, and the Empire they hated was close.
Delam suspected he'd have done the same in their place.
'And then they'd have been picked off one by one by the demons.'
That was the end of humanity.
They'd have met an extermination that was tidy in the extreme.
Whatever humans were left would be bred as [livestock], perhaps.
Either way, a large share of the blame lay with Delam.
The Cardinal's words were right a hundred times over, a thousand times over.
So why had he done it back then?
'Because I didn't know. Because I didn't know the demons would invade!'
But now he knew.
And to know and still go raving on would make him worse than a fool.
It would make him a prize idiot with no right to draw breath.
So Delam had to do something, whatever it was.
Prevent the heroes' deaths, or warn them of the future.
Or else butcher the heroes even faster than he had before regressing.
The problem was that all three were enormous undertakings.
As a mere individual there was nothing he could do to manage any of them.
'So first I have to climb.'
Even if he couldn't become Supreme Commander like last time, a high noble at minimum.
He had to reach the point of having a voice in the kingdom.
Only then would anyone listen to him.
Or, alternatively, building his own faction independently was an option.
There was just one minor obstacle.
The fact that Delam was a country bumpkin from the Kingdom of Fior.
One whose entire worldly wealth was some potatoes and two sheep.
And he wanted to be a high noble? To have a voice?
No matter how he thought about it, there was only one way.
"So I have to enlist again......?"
A laugh escaped Delam in spite of himself.
Hadn't that childish son of the house up the hill said it earlier?
That a war was the chance of a lifetime for commoners to rise.
More to the point, Delam had spent his entire life in the army.
His body had gotten younger, but his strategy and tactics remained exactly as they were.
And how well would he do the second time around in the service?
"If you were going to make me enlist again, you could at least have sent me further back."
Delam grumbled to no one in particular.
Because his mother had come to mind.
The mother he had missed his whole life.
Today marked three years to the day since she had passed.
So if he had only regressed to a slightly earlier point—
'Ha. Even then, saving her would have been hard.'
If she'd died in an accident, it would have been possible.
He'd only have had to prevent that one thing.
But his mother had been gravely ill from the start.
She'd been born with an exceedingly weak body.
She collapsed at the slightest provocation and coughed blood if she moved even a little.
So when she conceived Delam, they said everyone had worried.
But she'd crossed the threshold of death and borne him anyway......
And that was simply the final blow that killed her.
In the end there had been only one road on which his mother lived.
Never bearing Delam at all.
'So no matter how far back I went... hah.'
Delam let out a dry laugh and felt along the back of his neck.
What he found was a leather cord, and hanging from the end of it, a single locket.
His mother's one keepsake.
In the old life he had lost this locket during the war.
More precisely, the conscription officer had taken it and never given it back.
By the time he went looking for it later, the man had sold it off somewhere.
The locket he had never found for the rest of his life.
Only after crossing back through time had he finally held it again.
Click.
Delam slipped his thumb into the groove and opened the lid.
Inside was a small portrait.
His mother's face as a young woman.
The first thing Delam had done the moment he regressed.
This was it.
Running to the village chief's granddaughter, the best hand at drawing in the whole village, and asking her to paint his mother's likeness.
He hadn't drawn it himself for reasons other than a lack of skill.
Before regressing, Delam had been a body well past fifty.
Far older than his mother had been when she died.
And on top of that, the battlefield had been so very cruel.
Her ungrateful son had gone and forgotten it.
His mother's features, the shape of her face......
'I'm sorry, Mother.'
Even so, there was one thing he still recalled clearly.
His mother's eyes.
As said, his mother's body had been so weak that, having barely managed to give birth to Delam, she could have died at any moment.
Which was why her eyes were unlike those of any ordinary parent.
Less warm maternal love than something like a crystallized, jaundice-yellow obsession.
[I want to live one more day and watch over my child]
[I want to teach him one more thing before I die]
[The knowledge one absolutely needs to get through life!]
That kind of obsession......
It was still lodged in Delam's heart.
Flutter—
"Whoop."
Delam, sunk in his thoughts, shot out an arm.
He'd snatched something that had fallen out of the locket.
When he opened his palm, what lay there was an ordinary leaf.
The green sort, scattered all over any forest.
It wasn't Delam who had put it in.
It had been inside from the moment he received the locket from his mother.
By her account it had come from her mother, and her mother's mother.
It was an item handed down for a very long time, she'd said.
It wasn't an ordinary leaf, though.
And no wonder, given how many years it had been.
Despite all of it, the leaf had no rotted spot and no tear.
It was as fresh as if it had been plucked off a tree moments ago.
"Hoooo."
Another peculiar thing about it was the scent.
When he breathed in, a clean, cool fragrance drove deep into his lungs.
It came off the leaf.
He could swear he had never smelled anything like it in his life.
Not from any medicinal herb, not from any forest.
Like the vital essence of nature itself, condensed — that was the only way to put it.
-Hello?
"......!?"
Just then, out of nowhere, a voice came to him.
Before he knew it Delam had bolted upright from the bed.
But as expected, there was no one around.
Which was only natural.
The place Delam was in right now was a cramped hut.
If someone had come in there was no way he wouldn't have known.
"...Did it come from outside?"
Delam poked his head out the window and looked around.
Sure enough, only the wind was blowing hard; there was no sign of anyone.
He was about to shut it again when this time a real voice reached him.
"Delam, Delam!"
The urgent voice belonged to the granny from the house down the hill.
Her knees were bad enough that she couldn't so much as walk on rainy days......
And that granny was running up the slope.
Which meant the matter was that urgent.
Delam hurried out of the house and asked.
"Granny, has something happened?"
"Delam, it's bad! The conscription officer's barged in and he's trying to haul off every able-bodied man there is!"
"Huh, already?"
"Already!? You knew he was coming?"
"Well, I mean... the world outside is noisy with war talk these days, isn't it. Our village is in a corner so it'd be late, but I figured he'd show up sooner or later."
"Good heavens, you fool boy! You knew that and you're still standing here? You should have had your bundle packed and been ready to run long ago!"
The granny shouted at him.
But Delam only asked, puzzled.
"Why? I'm thirteen. Conscription applies to adults, fifteen through thirty-five, so there's no way they're dragging me off."
"You silly thing, you're bigger than the others your age. You've no parents either — if the conscription officer insists you look fifteen, who's going to stop him!"
"Ahh."
Delam nodded in admiration.
Wasn't there a saying that the village's children were raised by its grandmothers?
Years lived really did make a person wise.
Only then did Delam remember it clearly.
The conscription officer came to the village twice.
Now — that is, at the first conscription — he had been left in the village.
But two years later the conscription officer came again, and—
That was how his shit life had begun.
'That's right, the older boy!'
The older boy from up the hill was taken this time.
And he never once came back to the village.
Later, once Delam made centurion, he'd made inquiries, and the outcome was bitter.
All he'd turned up was a document stamped [MISSING].
Which meant he had died a dog's death somewhere.
As the great majority of conscripts did.
"Granny, I'm going on ahead."
"I said run, right now!"
"If I run and get caught, the village chief gets punished. Your legs hurt, so rest at my house. I'll be right back!"
Delam tore off down the path at speed.
There was still time!
***
-The young men are gathering in front of the chief's house!
That was what Granny Miel had said.
Fortunately, there was only one road from Delam's house to the chief's.
Which meant the older boy would have gone this way as well.
Run hard enough and he could catch up in no time.
Sure enough, before long a familiar back came into view up ahead.
The older boy who'd run off during the potato digging, and his father.
Just then the older boy, having heard footsteps, turned around.
"Huh? Delam! Did you hear— wha, whoa?"
The older boy, in the middle of a cheerful greeting, froze solid.
A natural reaction.
Because Delam, mid-sprint, had launched his body into the air.
THUD!
"Kheeek!"
The older boy went rolling across the ground.
Delam, who had gone down with him, rolled right along and stuck close to his side.
Then he wrapped both arms and his lower body around the older boy's leg—
And wrenched.
CRUNCH!
"Aaaaargh!"
At that crisp scream, Delam dusted off his hands.
With that, grounds for a military exemption, complete!