The current time was 3 o’clock.
With the ticking of the clock hands, I sat up.
Then I looked around and realized something was off.
"Hmm... what the hell?"
The place I was sleeping wasn’t my room, but the living room of the spirit mansion.
And when I looked down because something felt strangely empty, my half-asleep mind snapped awake and the drowsiness vanished.
"...Shit."
The moment my foggy mind cleared, the curse came out of my mouth.
"...Shiiiiit."
I had no idea why I was sleeping naked in the living room, or why Yoshino and Natsumi were lying there next to me.
And they weren’t the only ones. The people living in the spirit mansion, Rinne, Rio, the commander, and Itsuka-kun were all there too.
Even if the others were living here and had just ended up sleeping in the living room, I had no idea why these people were here.
But that wasn’t the important part.
The important part was that I was naked right now.
"F-first, put some clothes on."
If I stayed like this and everyone woke up and saw me, it would be the perfect setup for them to think I was some legendary pervert, so I hurriedly looked for clothes.
The only silver lining was that I’d kept a few spare sets in my inventory just in case.
After putting them on and carefully getting out from under the blanket, I tried to figure out what had happened. That was when a delayed headache hit me, and memories I’d forgotten until now started coming back one by one.
"......"
The fact that every word and action I’d done while I was younger came back so vividly made it obvious that if there was a god, he was trying very hard to kill me.
It would’ve been better if I’d stayed forgotten, so why did those memories have to come back and make me feel this level of self-loathing?
"Gyaaaah――!!!"
I’d forgotten everyone was still asleep and started writhing in self-loathing, slamming my head into the floor.
No matter how I thought about it, I still had no idea why I’d done any of that.
All I knew was that I’d annoyed everyone in those memories and used disgusting ways of addressing them, and that alone filled me with self-loathing and shame.
Realizing I’d done something so insane that I didn’t just find myself disgusting, but actually started to hate myself, I couldn’t endure it with a clear head.
If there was anyone who could endure this with a clear head, they couldn’t really be called human anymore. They’d have stepped into the realm of a mental superhuman.
I hadn’t stepped into that realm, so there was only one thing I could do.
Move to the corner and smash my head into the floor again.
"Kieeeeeek――!!!"
My body didn’t feel pain anyway, so the reason I was doing this was just to cool my head and somehow forget those horrifying memories.
But even if I was an undead, my forehead would just regenerate, and my mind was still perfectly intact, so there was no way this would erase anything.
"Why did I do that, seriously!!"
But that didn’t make my self-loathing and shame go away, so I had no intention of stopping until they did.
"Please! Just die! You lunatic!"
As I kept banging my head and wishing for my own death, I felt several gazes on me.
Of course, they belonged to the people who had woken up.
In other words, while I was doing this, everyone had already woken up and was staring at me.
"......"
"......"
With blood running down my forehead, I met Itsuka-kun’s eyes.
His expression was the kind you’d make when you saw something bizarre.
The same went for everyone else I looked at.
Honestly, anyone would think a person pounding their head in the corner was weird.
I knew that perfectly well. I understood it completely.
But when I thought about the words and actions I’d shown them while I was younger, and then the disgrace I was showing right now, it felt like dying would be better.
And since nobody said anything, and only an awkward silence hung between us, my self-loathing and shame only grew stronger and crashed over me.
"Mm. It was a good life."
Saying that, I drew my spiral sword.
Whoosh
At the strange sound, the spirit group woke up.
What spread before their eyes was Hieta in one corner of the living room, screaming and smashing his head into the floor.
The way he twisted his body around as if writhing in pain while repeatedly slamming his head down was close to madness, and it was more than enough to terrify anyone watching.
"Sh-shouldn’t we stop him?"
"...Shido. If you’ve got the guts to stop that, go ahead and try."
Kotori absolutely did not have the courage to stop him.
The thought of what he might do if she got close kept circling in her head, and even her instincts were reluctant to approach him.
The others were the same.
When rational beings encounter the unknown, they’re supposed to feel fear. In that sense, it was a very natural reaction.
While they were watching Hieta like that, he felt their gazes, turned his head, and met Shido’s eyes.
"......"
"......"
They just stared at each other in silence, and then Hieta suddenly smiled with a benevolent expression.
The group, thinking his strange behavior had finally ended and he’d come back to his senses, sighed in relief.
They didn’t know.
They didn’t know that Hieta’s smile was the warning sign of more strange behavior to come.
"Mm. It was a good life."
Muttering those words in a voice small enough to be heard by everyone in the living room, Hieta reached out into the air and pulled out his spiral sword.
Then, just as he was about to use it to cut his own throat, Kotori shouted.
"H-hey! That—"
Before she could finish, Mayuri, Kaguya, and the others rushed forward and restrained Hieta’s arms.
"Gyaaaah! Let go of this, let go!"
"Calm down! Calm down, Hai!"
"I am! I’m someone who deserves to die!"
"What are you talking about!"
Hieta, having fallen into the deep swamp of self-loathing and shame and lost all reason, struggled against their restraint and kept trying to slit his own throat with the spiral sword.
He was an undead, so even if he cut his throat with the spiral sword, he wouldn’t die, but nobody wanted to watch his throat get cut, and if things went badly, the mansion itself might catch fire. So Kotori joined in and helped stop him.
Girls restraining him, the boy resisting, and ash scattering from the force of his violent struggle. Anyone who saw that scene would have had no choice but to think everyone there had gone insane.
"Waaah...!"
"Rio!"
"It’s okay, Rio. It’s okay."
For a child, it was a shocking sight, so Rio burst into tears. Shido and Rinne covered her eyes and desperately tried to calm her down, while Tohka saw Kotori jump in and started helping restrain Hieta too.
"Mmya..."
In the middle of this total disaster, Mana was still wandering through dreamland, tossing and turning as if she’d fainted in her sleep.
Watching all of it, Reine sipped her coffee and murmured quietly, "...What chaos."
The spirit mansion’s living room had become chaos itself.
After Hieta finally calmed down and stopped trying to hurt himself, he was told everything about why he had become younger.
"So that’s why..."
I never expected something like that to happen just from the process of regenerating the head I’d smashed into the floor, so Hieta rubbed his face and let out a long sigh.
"Haa..."
"S-sorry."
"No, it’s fine."
Natsumi apologized, feeling guilty at the sight of him, but to Hieta, it wasn’t that big a deal.
It hadn’t been Natsumi’s intention, and her spirit power had just flowed into him by accident, so there was no reason to make a big issue out of it.
More than that, the bigger problem was that he still vividly remembered calling the others big sister or big brother, and that made him want to die.
"But, Reine. Why is Hiki already back?"
"Yeah. Didn’t you say he’d be back tomorrow?"
At Kotori and Shido’s questions, everyone else in the room had the same thought.
As Reine had said, Hieta was originally supposed to return tomorrow, more precisely at 0:00.
However, she had overlooked one thing: spirit power and souls repel each other.
If the Fire Keeper didn’t regulate it, they would push each other away by nature, and because of that, the spirit power that had flowed in from Natsumi during the regeneration process while he was taking a nap got pushed out and returned to its original place, undoing the transformation.
"So that was the reason..."
"I’m glad he’s back, but I’m a little disappointed. I wanted to see more of my darling while he was younger."
When Miku said that with complete sincerity, several people nodded slightly in agreement.
Seeing that, Hieta shook his head and muttered, "I need to make sure something like this never happens again..."
If something like this happened one more time, Hieta was seriously considering suicide.
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