Being Loved for the First Time – Chapter 1

Author: B0ucha

Prologue. An Unwanted End and Beginning

I was a little starved for affection.

“Mom suddenly said she was feeling down over the weekend and wanted to go somewhere, so~”

“Did you watch last week’s drama? I cried, you know. The little kid was crying because she missed her mom….”

So whenever I heard stories like that, I would find myself listening without even realizing it.

Because they were things I didn’t have.

What was a warm, happy family like?

In my first life, I longed for things like that.

Even though, at least in form, I had belonged to a perfectly proper family.

We were an utterly ordinary family of four.

It was just that my parents regarded marriage and having children as items on some passing bucket list for life.

If they only had one child, it would feel like something was missing, so they had two. That was precisely the attitude with which they had my older brother and me.

Fortunately, my older brother was good at everything, whereas I could only manage to be average at everything.

Perhaps that was why my parents never forced me to do anything, but they never paid any attention to me, either.

“Hey, ramen.”

“I’m done eating. Wash the dishes.”

The person called my older brother made remarkably good use of that indifference.

Well, I wasn’t passionate enough to persistently pester my parents to pay attention to me, either.

So, to me, my parents were little more than a few bills left on the dining table, while my brother was the sort of person whose absence would have been more helpful than his presence.

Even so, I liked people.

My friends accepted all the affection that had nowhere else to go.

“Let’s go see a movie and get our hair done. Hm? Hm?”

“I found a great place to eat. Let’s go!”

Though I was blunt like my parents and seemed indifferent at first glance, my friends recognized my clumsy affection before anyone else and always reached out to me.

That was why, even when I died in my first life, I was afraid, but I had no regrets.

‘My family wouldn’t have been sad anyway.’

My brother might have been a little disappointed to lose his errand runner.

“No! Why, why you…!!”

When a car driven by some lunatic suddenly came hurtling toward us, I instinctively shoved the friend beside me away.

Hearing my friend’s anguished cries at the very last moment, I felt relieved.

‘Thank goodness. You’re safe….’

After all, my friend had a younger sibling who adored her older sister and parents who were proud of their dependable daughter.

And so, on the threshold of twenty, before I could even enjoy the freedom of having finished my college entrance exams, I said goodbye to my first life.

***

‘It would have been reeeally nice if that had been the end of it.’

I sighed and stared with bored eyes at the scene before me.

I was being forced to die for the ninety-ninth time, no less.

“I’m asking you like this. You’re the only one who has to sacrifice yourself.”

The person called my older brother in my ninety-ninth life opened his mouth.

“Yes, I know. I know we’re being shameless…! But we can’t all die, can we?”

The one speaking now was my father.

“Ah, my child. I truly don’t want to send you away. But… but there’s no choice, is there? If we’re to save everyone, everyone….”

The person dabbing away her tears so disgustingly was none other than the mother who had given birth to me.

Ha. They really were putting on quite a show.

“This won’t be entirely bad for you, either. Through your death, the family will earn honor, and you will be revered as a hero for all eternity.”

Even a bastard I’d met for the first time today was blabbering away, claiming to be my fiancé.

I clicked my tongue as I looked at them.

‘No wonder my first life comes to mind every time I die.’

Back then, I hadn’t been forced to die.

‘It would be an insult to compare that with dying for these absolute scumbags!’

Back then, I’d even felt rather proud of myself.

Never once dreaming there would be another life afterward.

‘No, even if I could have imagined it, ninety-nine times is going too far.’

It was a truly horrific disaster.

And what was even more outrageous was that perhaps because I’d thrown myself into danger to save a friend in my first life, every time afterward, too, I was thrown to my death to save something.

Ninety-nine times, no less. Every. Single. Time.

‘If that were all, I’d feel a little less wronged.’

Frankly, wasn’t it unfair enough that I’d died just after taking my college entrance exams?

Yet even after ninety-nine lives, a number as enormous as 99, I had not once reached twenty years old.

Was I supposed to remain a teenager forever, or what?

‘Even right now, I’m only seventeen.’

In other words, these people who called themselves my family were asking a mere seventeen-year-old girl to die for them.

‘Even if I have the power to do it, seriously, have they no conscience?’

When I saved my friend, I’d been an entirely ordinary person.

Someone excited to have finished her college entrance exams and eager to go out and have fun.

But as my lives accumulated, all sorts of strange powers accumulated as well, as though they were some kind of reward.

‘Far from a reward, they’ve made my life harder more often than not.’

Weren’t these people demanding right now that I use that power to save them?

‘After treating me like I didn’t exist all this time because they were afraid of that damned power.’

These people, who forced sacrifice on me in the name of family, were worse than my parents in my first life.

No, in the first place, I had always ended up with parents and families like that.

If anything, the family in my current life had been relatively conscientious: they had merely given me the cold shoulder and fed me enough to keep me from dying.

I truly had the most wretched luck.

Why had I been forced into sacrificial deaths all the way up to my ninety-ninth life?

The answer was that I had only ever been born into worlds as filthy as sewers.

Worlds on the verge of destruction. By now, I couldn’t even imagine what a peaceful world looked like.

I’d nearly died the moment I was born so many times that it no longer surprised me.

Places where siblings tried to kill one another; parents who killed each child as soon as it was born; parents and relatives who shunned me or tried to kill me because they said I was cursed.

There were far too many to fit even into a truckload.

‘Up through about my fifth or sixth life, I did hope the next one might be better.’

But there had been ninety-nine.

No matter how hopeful a person I was, I couldn’t help giving up.

So the revolting words these people were using to force me to die didn’t actually hurt me anymore.

They merely made me think,

‘Well, here it comes.’

Seventeen years. I supposed I’d lived about the average length of time.

I had no attachment to life to begin with, and because I’d known it would come to this, even I had held no expectations of them whatsoever.

Even so, they really were shameless people.

Even while I was lost in thought, they went on prattling tirelessly.

“If we could do it ourselves, do you think we’d be so shameless as to ask this of someone as young as you? It’s for everyone! When you were born, everyone said you were the world’s only hope of salvation!”

My mother appealed to me through her tears, even though I showed no reaction.

Do people ordinarily throw the world’s only hope into a freezing little room and neglect her?

“Please, I’m begging you. Hm? Would it help if I knelt right here?”

I snorted at the appeal from the person called my brother.

Begging for the price of my life with a mere bend of his knees—was that a cheap price or an expensive one…?

“Don’t you think you’re being far too shameless?”

Was there really any need for me to be good and simply sacrifice myself to save people like them?

I spoke with an expression that said I was tired of everything.

“Why should I always do what’s best for you people?”

“Ch-child.”

My mother’s face rapidly filled with panic as she called to me.

After all, until now, I’d simply been the daughter who lived quietly, holding her breath in the tiny attic they’d assigned me.

Well, that was only because it was bothersome and I figured my fate would be much the same no matter what I did.

The determination of people whose lives were at stake could be terrifying. Even when I ran away and hid, they would somehow find me.

In any case, the fact that I, who had lived as quietly as if dead, had finally stirred seemed to astonish them.

“Y-your manners….”

“Is this really the time to worry about my manners?”

I gave a short laugh and looked at my father.

Fiddling with the end of the sleeve of my worn-out dress, I replied indifferently.

“I’ll save you, just as you want.”

Well, it wasn’t difficult.

I wasn’t sentimental enough to want everyone to die alongside me, and this wasn’t a world to which I felt that much attachment in the first place.

‘And arguing that I won’t save them would only be a hassle for me.’

It was a life I had no attachment to anyway. Better to choose the less bothersome option.

“A-as expected…! You are a kind person—”

I stared fixedly at the fiancé who had opened his mouth.

Perhaps my gaze frightened him, because he shut his mouth before he could finish his sentence.

“Kind person, my ass. You can all go to hell.”

I must have spent far too much time shut away in my room. My body felt terribly stiff.

I stretched and tossed the words at them with an unconcerned expression.

“Please take very good care of those pathetic lives of yours, with which you’ll never be able to hold your heads high again.”

Honor, my foot. When I was about to throw away my life—even if it didn’t mean that much to me—I had absolutely no intention of playing the good daughter for them.

“W-what do you mean, never hold our heads high—!”

Ignoring the question from the person called my brother, I slowly rose.

The moment I raised my right hand, a staff that had accompanied me through long years appeared amid a familiar glow, with a soft jingling sound.

Gripping the staff, I went out onto the balcony and looked up at the sky.

It was dyed in the familiar colors of destruction.

The power was overwhelming, but I wasn’t frightened in the least.

It would be impossible to stop if I insisted on living, but if I put my life on the line, it was power I could fully swallow up.

“Well then, goodbye.”

I swung the staff in a great arc.

My power drained away at a furious rate, and a fierce sensation swept through my entire body, driving it toward death.

And then.

“Th-this can’t be…!”

“What have you done?!”

“Stop, stop this instant! What on earth do you think you’re—!”

I could clearly see the horrified faces of my blood relatives and the man claiming to be my fiancé as they discovered my present.

We had lived under the same roof for seventeen years, after all. Shouldn’t I give them at least one present?

With wholehearted pleasure, I broadcast their ugly deeds to the entire world in glorious 4K surround sound.

“As if you really want me to stop.”

Your lives would be over if I did.

I smiled broadly and waved at them.

Wasn’t losing a little social standing still an incredibly—*incredibly*—cheap price to pay in exchange for my stopping the apocalypse and saving the world?

I slowly closed my eyes against the sensation that seemed ready to swallow my body whole.

Even their furious shouts, ringing in my ears, had begun to fade.

An all-too-familiar end was approaching.

‘Ah, I’m so tired of all this now.’

Wasn’t living for nearly two thousand years long enough?

If I was going to keep getting thrown into garbage lives every time, why on earth was I being made to live again?

‘Please let this be the end. Three digits would really be too much.’

And so, praying without much hope but with a brief moment of peace, I accepted my ninety-ninth death.

***

I hadn’t expected anything, but I’d wished for it pretty desperately, in my own way.

“A young lady has been born!”

Aw, damn it….