“Magnificent, truly magnificent! You’ve changed completely from when you first started… you endured that barrage of wave attacks and then delivered a fatal magic wave to crush them completely. There’s nothing that can be done about it now.”
Lady Seleneis clapped her hands, her face beaming with delight, as if she were in the best of moods.
“Well, if you get battered and beaten without any holding back, you eventually get used to it.”
…The number of times I’ve died must be in the triple digits…
It might seem like I died too much, but that’s how brutal it was.
Of course, in this world, once a human dies, that’s it.
It’s an absolute principle, unchangeable.
When a person dies, their soul and body separate, and the soul sublimates on the spot, never to return.
That is death.
Absolute and irreversible.
However, this island has already been enveloped within the giant barrier created by Lady Seleneis.
This giant barrier… in a word, it’s a space of Lady Seleneis’s convenience.
No Laws of the world, no Laws of physics, no intricate reasoning applies!
Normally, when a human dies, their soul immediately departs… and disperses instantly.
Even if their body is revived, they can never come back to life.
But in this space, even if you die, your soul remains in your body and does not disperse.
Even if your body is torn to pieces, the automatic repair of Regression magic will restore you to your original state in an instant.
In other words, you’re stopped just before death and resurrected without question. That’s how it’s designed.
It’s a chaotic, limited rewriting of the Laws of the world, but it’s the Gods of this world who make such chaos a reality.
Simply put, as long as Lady Seleneis doesn’t intend for you to die, you won’t.
Incidentally, something similar exists in Monjirou’s Miracle Dungeon, so it’s not entirely unknown.
That too is a cheat space where Monjirou’s complete convenience unfolds.
This Seleneis spacetime is similar to that.
Without me even asking, she casually created this absurd spacetime under the guise of training.
Lady Seleneis is amazing!
Moreover, the scale of the Monjirou space is on another level…
The summoned beasts she pits me against also appear endlessly.
Even if I collapse from Magic power depletion, I’m fully charged the next moment!
In short, cheat, cheat, cheat! A completely unfair space where anything goes.
In this space, whether you live or die depends on Lady Seleneis’s mood.
Even if an arm is torn off or a hole is blown through my torso, I recover instantly.
Even if I fail to dodge a sweeping attack and my upper and lower body are split in two, I recover smoothly.
Even fatal wounds are healed in one go, so it’s safe and secure?
Not at all.
It’s agonizingly painful every single time, and sometimes I’m left with a fatal wound, writhing in agony before dying…
In fact, if I don’t get a death judgment, the automatic revival won’t kick in, so if I sustain a fatal wound and linger on partially alive, I’ll have to endure hellish suffering.
“How dare you sustain such a fatal wound so easily! You shall writhe in agony and reflect for a while!”
There were times when I died like that, staring at my severed lower half after hearing such monstrous words.
That is to say, they don’t hold back to the point where I don’t die… they don’t hold back at all because I’ll just resurrect anyway.
It’s not even close to the limit; it’s outright death or die. Some days were so hellish I thought dying would be preferable.
Dying and resurrecting… the harsh training that aims to reach beyond the line of death through endless repetition.
That was what was called training in Lady Seleneis’s style.
…Amidst all this, I desperately fought to survive.
Not even allowed to die, I was killed countless times, resurrected, and killed again… Monsters were thrown at me without restraint, and she herself attacked with full force without holding back!
Various ideas and inspirations for not being killed. New powers, applications, enhancements… patching up what was lacking, and so on, and so on…
As if to mock my efforts, one tribulation after another… the deathmatch against monsters that leveled up one after another, deathmatch, deathmatch, deathmatch.
What was this again? I thought. This must be what they call an infinite hell. …a childish thought.
Seriously… I can’t count how many times I’ve regretted things. How many times I almost said, “I’ll become your apostle, I won’t be stubborn anymore!”
But as I experienced real deaths and near-death escapes over and over, I was literally reborn.
Now, I have no complacency, no soft-hearted thinking; I give my all to survive… I don’t hold back when trying not to be killed… I’ve unwillingly acquired a true fighter’s mentality.
The battles between life and death… through their repetition, my spirit, skills, and body have been forged strong!
How naive I was in the past. How weak and feeble I was.
To hell with thinking it’s okay to be the protected type! At the brink of death, no one helps, no one can be relied upon… one can only give their all to survive.
Somehow, I was forced to learn about my own weakness.
Lady Seleneis also saw the potential in me to change this world, but she could only foresee a future where I would fall midway due to my weakness, so she apparently desired an opportunity to greatly power me up as her apostle.
Well, she apparently went along with this training with the attitude that if I managed to gain enough strength to not die easily, or if I gave in to the harshness and chose an easier path, then it would be fine.
Thanks to that, I leveled up tremendously.
While my basic magic and stamina might have only improved slightly in such a short period. Having gone beyond my limits and crossed the line of death multiple times, I learned to give my absolute all.
Using everything I have, quick thinking, application… truly, a desperate spirit…
I also learned the hard way that underestimating my opponent or a moment’s carelessness directly leads to death.
That’s why I no longer show mercy to my enemies. I naturally understood that pity or hesitation would put my own life or the lives of my comrades at risk…
Before, I used to think things like, “I feel sorry for the enemy,” or “The enemy also has reasons to live and their own circumstances…”
But now, if I and my comrades die, it’s irreversible.
So, there’s no need for pity or mercy towards unknown enemies. If they are hostile, I will annihilate them completely.
That’s the reality of the battlefield.
Monsters summoned by Lady Seleneis, the kind that make you wonder about safety and security…
Fighting them, I was killed and killed again every day… I also experienced ignoble deaths, such as being ambushed or dying together with the enemy.
As I repeated these experiences, my naive thoughts vanished completely.
“Savage,” “inhumane”…
Those are the ramblings of people in a world that has become complacent.
In battle, the one who survives to the end is the victor, and the one who dies is the loser. The victor gains everything, and the loser loses everything.
I have come to truly understand that fundamental principle.
Lady Seleneis also seemed to have pinpointed that my modern-day complacency was the biggest problem.
For that reason, she allowed me to experience battles against a wide variety of enemies.
Enemies that fly through the sky, enemies that crawl on the ground. Swarms of enemies like locusts, deathmatches against colossal monsters.
I also fought against sea monsters. Ones like merpersons, vicious dolphin-like creatures, and tentacled ones like octopuses and squids.
There was even a tuna-like creature with horns…
It just kept charging, but at hundreds of kilometers per hour, so if you took it head-on, you’d be torn to pieces and die.
That tuna is terrifying!
Anyway, although it was a completely new domain for me, fighting on the sea and underwater… Lady Seleneis, being the Sea Goddess, was a specialist in sea and underwater combat.
Naturally, I acquired skills for operating underwater and unique magic, enabling me to hold my breath and dive underwater for about 30 minutes, and to literally run on the surface of the water as if it were solid ground.
I even learned magic like “Hydro Jet,” which expels a jet stream of water from my feet to move at high speed underwater, allowing me to shoot through the water like a torpedo at nearly 100 km/h!
It’s like I have SS-rank adaptability for underwater and surface combat! I don’t even need to use water boats anymore.
At first, I died a lot fighting sea monsters. But lately, I’ve been defeating them with ease.
The initial goal was to become strong enough to defeat Leviathan… and I think I’ve likely achieved that level with plenty of room to spare.
This Kentaro Takakura… I won’t be arrogant, but I’m no longer so weak as to belittle myself!
