A man was wandering around in the twilight.

　There was no way he could ever return to the Boundary City. That was already clear to him long ago. He was an excellent anti-magician, and he was willing to sacrifice his life to save his friends. He was already prepared to die at that moment long ago.

　But he was alive.

　I don't know what the cause of his death was. But he was thought to be dead, and he had survived.


''Huh...............................''


　--where are they now?


　I don't know how many times I've thought about that. He didn't know how much time had already passed since he left the Boundary City. Hours, days, tens of days, hundreds of days...he had already lost that feeling.

　He was just clinging to life.

　He ingested all the demons out there, and plants tainted by the twilight, and everything else he could find. That's all he needed to do to live. No, that was no longer an action that he thought was necessary. It was an instinct that urged him to do so.


　--I don't want to die. I.........still want to live.....


　He was so jaded that it was hard to believe he was a young man in his early twenties. His cheeks are hollowed out and his beard is unkempt and full grown.

　What are his eyes looking at?

　He doesn't know anymore.

　He was just preoccupied with living. That's all.

　But there was a concern in his mind.


I'm going to have to go to the store and buy a new one.


　I whisper to myself. A man sits near a bonfire and sits near it. He looks up at the sky and tries to say something like that.

　That guy is my sister. He had a sister. His beloved sister. I've always been close to her and I've loved her. He had spent all his life with his sister, even though he was sad that one day he would be separated from his brother.

　But he will never be able to see his sister like that again.

　That is not a premonition. It's a pure fact.

　It is obvious that returning to the Kekkai City is not going to happen. It is now self-evident that I will surely die in this twilight, rotting away to death. But there was no way he could tolerate the end of being killed by a demon and dying here.

　He was an antimagician, a noble man with a will to save humanity.

　But even if he was such a man, I should just....give up. He had begun to think about that.


'No ... I still ... still have ... things to do.


　I want to live.

　I can't die yet.

　I want to return to the Walled City and see my sister again. She will grow up to be a beautiful woman. I want to be there to see her live.

　He decided out of such a petty desire.

　He decides that he will continue to live in this land of dusk.


　◇


Okay. That's about it.


　Reorganize your stuff and get it together. It had been years since then. He hadn't rotted away in the twilight land. At first, he was just confused. But gradually he had gotten used to it, and he had learned how to live in this twilight world.

　Water to drink, food to eat, and a place to sleep. He had everything he needed to live, and he was living on the move.

　He just lived in this world, hoping to return to the Boundary City one day.

　But at some point, he began to take an interest in this world.

　Was it a sign of a relaxed mind?


''I wonder what's going on in this twilight...''


　Muttering to himself, he continues to write his thoughts on paper.

　This has already become a habit. He had a pen and paper for whatever reason originally, so he kept writing his thoughts on it. In the beginning, it was something I did to vent my fears and look at them objectively.

　But at some point, it had become a way to summarize the questions I was thinking about.

　How did this twilight come to be, how could humans be invaded by the twilight, and how could the demon race be strengthened? It turned into a document that summarized such questions and other things he noticed.


　And so he kept going ... and arrived at a place.


''Is this a village?''


　The man found what looked like a village. He was halfway in, breaking the wards around him, and what he saw spread out there was some kind of village.


''Who's there!''
Are you human?
How did you end up here?


　It was an ogre that came from the back of the room.

　Of course I knew of its existence.

　I knew from past literature that among the sub-humans there was a race of ogres, a race that was skilled at fighting.

　A race with a large body and distinctive horns on its head. Although he had heard that they were belligerent, they didn't seem to be, as far as he could tell.

　Although they spoke to him in a high-pressure manner, it was not a sign of hostility. They just looked at me quizzically as a strange being.


'Gohito, are you human?'
Yes. His name is Raul Brady.
'Well I didn't know humans could get this far...'
Where are we?
'This is the eastern edge of the continent, supposedly the opposite of where humans are...'
''I see.......I didn't expect to come to the far east.......''


　Raul had always thought that he had come for a warded city, but he never dreamed that he had been progressing in the last few years in the exact opposite direction....


　From then on, I was welcomed in many ways in the Ogre village. The village chief's name was Edgar, and he was taken care of by Edgar.


　After staying there for about a month, I guess. Raul decided to leave the village.


'Mr. Edgar. Thank you for your help.
'My pleasure. Your days in this village have been very pleasant.
No. Oh, by the way...
What's going on?
'I forgot to mention the material I put together myself but I'll leave it here.
Are you sure?　Isn't it important?
If you see a human coming here, give it to him.
Yes, sir.
So we'll see you soon.
'Oh. Goodbye.


　Raul left the village as it was.

　He proceeded with the will to definitely return to the warded city.

　That's exactly how Yulia would arrive here a few years later and follow a similar trajectory... but Raul was going to take a different path than Yulia.


　◇


'Huh ... huh ... huh ... huh ...'


　Lately, my eyes have been getting blurry. It's been a few months since I left the Ogre village.

　There was no sign of the warded city at all. Nevertheless, something was going on with him.

　It is the inevitable fate of humans.

　The Twilight Syndrome.

　Humans can never escape the disease. In the beginning, the purple-black imprint was on a part of his body, but it had already extended all the way to his wrist. No, it wasn't just his wrist. It had spread throughout his body and was definitely invading him.


　The Twilight Syndrome 《Twilight Syndrome》 Level 5 was already well beyond. A normal human would have long since scorched his body to death.


　But Raul was enduring.

　He had endured, and endured, and endured.


　But now........maybe the end time was coming. He had such a feeling.





　I fall to the spot. His voice is now hazy. My eyesight had been lost long ago. All I could hear was the faint sound of the trees, but nothing else. But the only thing I could hear was the rustling of the trees and nothing else.


　--Oh. Is this where I'm going to end up?


　All these years. I've been living on the edge of death.

　I've lived, lived, lived, and acquired the skills to survive in this twilight land. And yet, in his last days, he would die of the Twilight Syndrome, or Twilight Syndrome, as if he were rotting away.

　He looked up to the heavens as he thought so.

　The twilight sky was spreading out. There is no change in that sky today or any other day.


''Hey, don't you feel anything, Milia?''
Does Tria think so?
'Yeah ... ah!　Is this a human...?
Looks like...


　The voice was that of a young girl. But even if he knew that, it was too late now. It's too late now, he thought.


　But Raoul Brady's life would still go on.