A Regressor's Bucket List

Chapter 169 : The Second Time (1)

U-jin's incomprehensible action.

An unknown change that occurred in an instant.

And the result.

Krrrrk—

“…….”

Watching the incomprehensible scene unfold before her eyes, Eliya retraced the sequence of events that had led to the current situation.

…No, to be honest, there wasn't much of a sequence to speak of.

All U-jin had done was let go of the sword he had deliberately thrust between the Thought Form's brows and push his hand in its place.

However.

The change that occurred after that was certainly shocking and difficult to explain.

“…What in the world is that.”

The moment U-jin took his hand off the sword and placed it on the Thought Form's brow instead, the bundle of tentacles filling the Thought Form's interior instantly flowed into U-jin's hand as if being sucked in.

Then, as if that wasn't enough, they expanded in a flash, tangling around U-jin's body.

The tangled mass formed a spherical shape, creating a strange cocoon.

The description was crude, but it couldn't be helped.

Eliya, who considered herself to have acquired a wide range of knowledge and considerable experience during her priest training, was experiencing such an unapproachably strange development for the first time.

…She didn't know what it was, but it was utterly unfamiliar.

“…Did you see that?”

“…….”

“It feels like he changed his stance at the last moment.”

Jerry muttered softly, and Eliya nodded.

She had clearly seen it too.

The moment he took his hand off the sword, the corner of U-jin's mouth had twisted, and a tension that hadn't been there before had appeared on his face.

She didn't know what it was exactly, but it was the expression of someone making a gamble on a sudden change of heart, rather than executing a plan.

“…Did it go wrong?”

She couldn't tell.

Whether it had gone well or gone wrong.

No, to be honest, it was hard to think that ending up with such an unpleasant appearance was a good thing.

But, although she didn't know what U-jin was aiming for, seeing as the cocoon was continuously pulsating, it seemed the situation wasn't over yet.

It was a situation with too little information to make any rash judgments.

Ba-dump, ba-dump—

Staring blankly at the cocoon, Eliya slowly approached it, thinking 'just in case'.

In truth, it was something she would never have done normally.

Approaching an object of unfamiliar appearance when the exact circumstances weren't even clear was an extremely dangerous act in itself, and Eliya was the type who detested taking such unnecessary risks.

But, how to put it.

Despite that, she felt like she had to.

It was hard to explain in words, but this very un-Eliya-like action felt natural in this moment.

Squish—

With each step she took, the cocoon pulsed as if in time with her footsteps, and following that pulse, Eliya eventually arrived in front of it.

And having reached the immediate vicinity of the cocoon, Eliya realized one thing.

“…….”

…It wasn't unfamiliar.

『…An egg?』

It was a fragment of an unpleasant memory.

A terrible memory she never wanted to recall, one she had buried deep in her heart.

But Eliya was certain that at some point in the distant past.

She had seen something very similar to this.

* * *

Eliya was an orphan.

Not from the beginning; she was a war orphan, created when her village was devastated during the war with the Demon King's Army.

It wasn't particularly unusual.

A considerable number of priests belonging to the Order were originally war orphans from the War against Demons, and even now, countless war orphans were being created in the battlefields adjacent to the war front.

Despite the difficulty of training priests, due to the nature of their upbringing—requiring arduous training and isolation from the secular world from a young age—the source that allowed the Order to produce so many was the constant supply of war orphans.

…The fact that they had no other home to rely on likely played a part in the high completion rate of their training.

The cause of war orphans is summed up in one phrase, 'the War against Demons'.

But strictly speaking, they could be divided into two types.

One was becoming an orphan by being directly caught up in the battlefields of the War against Demons.

The other was becoming an orphan after relatives were murdered by an invading Demonic Species.

Between these two, the proportion who became priests was overwhelmingly higher for the former, and the reason was simple.

The Demonic Species were usually dispatched to the Order Territory on infiltration missions, and thus inevitably had to hide their identities.

No matter how easy it was for a Demonic Species to wring the neck of a human who couldn't handle a single wisp of mana, they couldn't commit a massacre in the middle of the Order Territory.

Even if they caused an incident, it was usually limited to a one-off or small-scale event so that they wouldn't be traced later.

Therefore, even if the parents who directly raised a child were killed, it was not uncommon for the child to be cared for by the community in villages that practiced a form of communal child-rearing.

In these cases, since they had a place to lean on, they didn't necessarily become priests just because they had become orphans.

…Eliya belonged to the latter category.

And a very unusual case at that, one who had no choice but to become a priest despite being in the latter category.

The reason was simple.

Although it was something considered extremely unlikely to happen.

Eliya was almost the sole survivor of a 'village annihilated by a Demonic Species'.

『…Did you see it, Robinson? That strange squirming thing at the bottom of the stream.』

At first, it was just a mystery on the outskirts of the village.

A wriggling cocoon that had suddenly appeared and settled in the village stream one day.

Most of the villagers found it bizarre but thought nothing of it.

Although its appearance looked a bit unique, they thought it was a clump of frog spawn or rice straw.

Its size was only slightly larger than an egg, so they didn't find it particularly strange.

『…Shouldn't we get rid of it soon? It looks rather ominous…』

The villagers, who had thought little of it, began to feel something was off one by one after it suddenly grew in size one day.

In truth, the cocoon had been growing little by little even before that, but on a certain day after a month had passed, it swelled to nearly double its size.

From the villagers' perspective, the mysterious cocoon that had been merely the size of an egg was now the size of an ostrich egg.

Around that time, the village tried to take some measures.

It wasn't that they felt any particular inconvenience or had discovered any clear bad omens, but everyone commonly felt an inexplicable sense of foreboding from its appearance.

『…It's not cutting?』

『Huh? Isn't that a sword you're holding?』

『It is…』

『Then why won't it cut, you fool. You probably didn't sharpen the blade properly.』

『That's strange… I'm sure I sharpened it thoroughly.』

The problem was that even when they tried their best, the villagers lacked the ability to dispose of the cocoon.

At first, they tried to cut it down with a roughly sharpened rusty sword, but perhaps due to its squishy nature, the rusty blade couldn't sever the cocoon's tentacle-like stem.

Realizing it was difficult with a sword, the villagers found another alternative.

『There. Will this do? The main body couldn't be broken even with the axe blade.』

『Wow. A woodcutter is really something else.』

『Well, I've done nothing but this my whole life.』

『This should do it. It seemed to be absorbing nutrients from the stem stuck in the ground, so it should wither and die without us having to cut the main body.』

In the end, they were able to sever the stem with the woodcutter's axe.

The strange thing was that even with the strength of a lifelong woodcutter and his well-honed axe, sharpened daily, the main body of the cocoon could not be broken.

But the people didn't mind.

They thought that without a continuous supply of nutrients, the cocoon would surely shrink or wither and die.

However, the villagers' expectations were shattered the very next day.

『…Huh. Why is that…』

『Hey, Ivan. Didn't you say you cut it yesterday?』

『Yes, Village Chief… I'm sure we cut it with Hans's axe…』

Because not only had the severed stem reattached itself, but the cocoon had grown another size larger.

The cocoon, which had begun to gradually shrink from its ostrich-egg size, had now grown to the size of a child of about eight.

Only then did the villagers realize something strange was happening and that this was not something they could handle on their own.

They decided to report the matter to the Order, which was a long way from their remote village.

However, because the Order was inherently slow to act due to its principled nature, and because Eliya's village was located in such a remote area, an investigation team was not dispatched immediately on the day they made their decision.

In the meantime, the cocoon continued to grow larger.

The cocoon, which grew gradually every day as if breathing, and then would suddenly shoot up in size as if leveling up… in an instant, it surpassed the size of a grown man and swelled to the size of a huge beast.

『…When in the world is the Order going to get here.』

『…Did the message even get through? I'm not even sure if that fellow Ivan made it there properly.』

『We should have reported it as soon as we found it… I thought something was strange from the moment I first saw it.』

『What's the use of saying that now, it's all in the past. For now, let's wait. The Order will surely take some action.』

『I'm so worried I can't even work…』

By that point, everyone was feeling an inexplicable fear from the cocoon.

What happened next was a clichéd, trite development.

The cocoon, which had been growing endlessly, suddenly split in half one day without any warning—*crack*—and spewed out what was inside.

What emerged from inside the cocoon was a Demonic Species of a corresponding size.

But even by then, the Order's investigation team had not been dispatched to Eliya's village, and without any particular reason or understandable explanation, the Demonic Species began its massacre.

In a scene where everyone was fleeing for their lives, the Demonic Species began hunting humans one by one.

The moment Eliya, who was hiding in her house's storeroom with her parents' help, was about to be the last one hunted by the Demonic Species.

A woman arrived in the village alone and barely managed to save Eliya.

Thus, Eliya became the village's sole survivor.

In other words, she became a war orphan, entrusted herself to a convent, and became a priest.

‘…….’

…And in Eliya's mind.

The faint appearance of the cocoon she had seen in her village back then.

Seemed to be an exact match for the appearance of the cocoon now enveloping U-jin.