NOVEL NEXT chapter 24
24: The Obstacles Ahead
We are warriors rebelling against the wrong world.
Karina is a year older than me, fourteen years old, and it seems she recently became aware of her “mission.”
Since becoming aware of her “mission,” Karina has found her previous relationships troublesome and, like me, has spent more time on the rooftop staring into the distance.
The surface of the world is covered in meaningless lies, and no one even notices the eerie “something” wriggling underneath, no matter how many layers they peel back.
In their minds, the world remains as it appears, simple and unchanged, and no one bothers to look towards the “truth.” They don’t even realize the need to do so.
I hate to say it, but my classmates are fools.
Studying, exercising, and falling in love… well, I suppose it’s glamorous and enjoyable.
Working hard and seeing results. Struggling and achieving. Doing your best and receiving praise. It feels good to be evaluated in proportion to your efforts. No, even if you’re not evaluated, it’s comforting and satisfying to see immediate results if something doesn’t work out.
However, the “truth” of the world is not that simple.
My battles are not easily understood by their outcomes.
The “enemies” I fight against are more vague and ambiguous, and opposing them may seem like a failure but turn out to be a success, or vice versa.
In the first place, I don’t even know at what point something is a “failure” or a “success.”
“We’re fighting against opponents who are vague and powerful. The world doesn’t understand our battles. But… only we know. That ‘enemy’ is targeting us and the world right at this moment.”
The understanding runs deep.
During lunch breaks, I started talking to Karina.
My classmates are nothing but fools who don’t even bother to look towards the “truth.”
Anna and Mirim, they don’t understand my worries.
But Karina, she shares the same worries as me and fights the same battles.
We often gather and discuss our battle against the “enemy.”
Various countermeasures are suggested there.
The content of those countermeasures mainly revolves around “calling upon mythical demons” and “borrowing the power of beings with immense strength but believed not to exist in this world.”
These ideas would be laughed at by the world, and if we were to talk about the existence of “demons” or “gods,” people would mock us, saying, “There’s no way they exist.”
But I am a thirteen-year-old who has lived a million lives.
I have encountered countless threats that the majority of people in this world didn’t even believe in, so I wouldn’t be surprised if such beings exist in this world as well.
We continue to fight.
When Karina is not around, I pretend not to be fighting and do the same things as the rest of the world.
But when I meet Karina, we discuss strategies against the “enemy” in great detail and even perform rituals to summon the “gods.”
None of them have been successful, but each one of them has allowed me to feel a sense of accomplishment in fighting against the “enemy” in a meaningful way for the first time in this world by breaking down each “impossible” task.
“We have a ‘karmic bond’ from our ‘past lives.'”
Karina often says this.
I don’t know which past life or what kind of bond she’s talking about. I have lived a million lives. The number of people I have interacted with is enormous, and Karina only vaguely talks about her own identity.
However, based on Karina’s words, it seems like she has been a guide for me at some point in the past.
I have always been betrayed by those in the position of a mentor, who should have guided me… in other words, my enemies.
There was no one to protect me, no one to shelter me. There was always a reason behind their protection. And it was a vile reason that disregarded my life and existence.
“I must **atone** for what I did to you… Yes, I must **repay** what happened back then.”
Which time was it…
There are too many possibilities to pinpoint a specific one. The “previous lives of Karina” that she occasionally hints at vary from being an old person to a child, a noblewoman, a pauper, or even just a concept without any life.
She must be intentionally spreading information to bewilder me.
It seemed difficult to extract the “true identity in the previous life” from her.
Besides, it didn’t matter. I wasn’t foolish enough to cling to past conflicts and lose the “comrade” I had finally obtained in this present life.
And so, as the first year of middle school passed, when Karina became a third-year student and I became a second-year student, the “enemies” finally reached out their sinister hands towards us.
“Rex… I can no longer fight.”
“Why?” I asked.
Karina removed the eyepatch she always wore, which served as the “seal” for her “magic eye,” and as she unwrapped the bandages that covered her arm, she spoke.
“I have… high school entrance exams to prepare for…”
“Reality” stood before us.
Karina… belonged to the group of students aiming for schools outside this system.