Volume 1 | Prologue

Before one girl and another even younger one stood a figure in full plate armor brandishing a sword.

The blade swung, sparkling in the sunlight as if to say that taking their lives in a single stroke would be an act of mercy.

The girl shut her eyes. She didn’t want to be biting her lower lip. She just had no choice but to accept what was about to happen. If she had even a little power, she probably would have been able to shove the figure away and escape…

But she was powerless.

And so there was only one ending.

She would die.

The blade came down—

…The pain still hadn’t come.

She unscrunched her eyes.

The first thing she saw was the sword, stopped mid-swing.

The next was the figure holding the sword. The knight was practically frozen, looking at something off to her side. His unprotected stance manifested his internal shock.

The girl turned to follow his line of sight…

…and saw despair.

It was darkness.

A patch of raven black, ultrathin but so deep it seemed as if it went on forever. It was an oval rising up out of the ground, its bottom half cut off. It was a curious sight, but at the same time, it made her feel indescribably uneasy.

A door? was what came to mind when she looked at it.

A heartbeat later, she would be proven correct.

Something glided out of the darkness. And when she saw what it was—“Eegh!”—a dry shriek escaped her lips.

A human would have no chance against this being.

Hazy red light flickered flame-like in the vacant orbs of a bleached-white skull. The gaze was trained unfeelingly on the girls as if they were live prey. Skinless, fleshless hands, both sublime and terrible, clutched a staff so gorgeous it seemed to be the concentration of all the world’s beauty.

It was as if Death had donned an intricately ornamented raven-black robe and been born into this world from another along with the darkness.

The air instantly froze.

At the entrance of the Absolute even time seemed to stop.

As though her soul had been taken, the girl forgot to breathe.

With no sense of time, inhaling was difficult, and she nauseously gulped for air.

A messenger from beyond has come to lure us away. But that didn’t seem right. The knight behind them had frozen as well.

“Ngah…” She heard an exhalation that could not even be called a scream, but whether it had been her, her trembling little sister, or the knight with the sword before them, she didn’t know.

Death’s fingers—of which only the bones, picked clean, were left—stretched out slowly and then violently snatched at, not the girls, but the knight.

She wanted to look away, but she was too scared. She had the feeling that if she looked away, the monster would transform into something even more horrible.

“Grasp Heart.”

Death incarnate made a clenching motion, and metal clanged noisily next to the girl.

She was scared to take her eyes off Death, but she lost to the tiny bit of curiosity still dwelling inside her and looked at the knight lying facedown on the ground. He wasn’t moving.

He was dead.

Yes, dead.

The danger threatening to take her life had evaporated in a laughably simple way, but she couldn’t celebrate. Death had only assumed a more concentrated form.

Sensing the fear in her gaze with its entire body, Death moved toward her.

The darkness that had been contained within her field of vision began to expand.

It’s going to swallow us up.

She hugged her sister close.

The idea of running away didn’t even occur to her anymore.

If her opponent had been a human, she might have been able to act on the faint hope of “maybe,” but the being before her dashed that hope as if it were nothing.

Please let it not hurt, at least…

That was the most she could hope for now.

Her little sister clung to her waist, shaking with fear. She wanted to save her, but she couldn’t. All she could do was apologize for her powerlessness and pray that they would die together so she wouldn’t be lonely.

And then…

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