I Run the Protagonist’s Favorite Café in a Hopelessly Depressing Game World

My Mind Was Going Fuzzy

My consciousness was getting hazy. I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore.

Blood, which you could call the drops of life, kept flowing out as time passed.

I had already lost the staff I needed to use magic.

At this rate, I’d have to handle magic power with my bare body.

For a witch, a staff wasn’t just some “item that helps with magic” like most people imagine. It was something to protect the body from magic power contamination—its role was basically the same as a protective doll to ward off bad luck.

Magic power was poison to humans.

Magic was shooting that poison out.

If I didn’t use a staff, the contamination would get way worse.

“But…”

My companions had all been wiped out.

They were still breathing, but nowhere near able to fight.

Right in front of me was the monster, still perfectly fine.

If I didn’t take it down by myself—humanity’s future would…

My companions had already begged me, “Please don’t use magic.”

I had used so much magic that both my hands weren’t enough, and my body was already falling apart.

There might not be a next time.

The next thing taken as the price could really be my life itself.

“Even so… it’s fine.”

I stretched out my arm.

I interfered with the space.

Not through a staff—this time directly with my own body.

“Guuu…!?”

In that instant, a flash of light shot through my spine.

No. It was intense pain so bad it felt like a flash of light. The magic power soaked into my arm was rampaging.

The underside of my skin burned as if billions of insects were going wild inside my body.

The nausea was terrible.

My vision blurred.

I couldn’t even tell if I was still standing or already dead.

Still, I had to finish it.

Kill the monster in front of me.

Protect the companions behind me.

This was surely why I got a second life.

To make their tragic lives just a little bit more meaningful.

“This makes it the twelfth time.”

According to the records, no witch had ever used magic twelve times.

They had all lost their lives in some way before reaching that number.

From this moment on, I—Aoi Komeiji—started being called the strongest witch in the world.

Well, I wasn’t happy about it at all. It was just painful and hard. Every day felt like a thin stretch of cruel torture… that’s what people called life. Days soaked in pain.

If I could, I wanted to die quickly.

Maybe the reason I used magic so many times was some death-wish-like urgency. No matter how many monsters I killed, there were still tons outside the barrier, and witches kept dying in every battle. They became sacrifices just to buy a little more time.

No matter how hard I struggled, I couldn’t see any hopeful future. The only thing left was to die as the foundation of this hopeless world. A life boiled down to nothing but misfortune.

“…Aaaaaaaaahhhhh!?”

It hurts! It hurts! It hurts!

It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts!!!

It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts… but.

It only hurts.

“…Haa, haa.”

I guess this is what they mean by having strong bad luck.

I survived using magic without a staff again. My body was burning hot like it could catch fire any second, and maybe my eardrums had burst because I couldn’t hear anything. I leaned my back against the rock wall and looked up at the ceiling.

Maybe my hearing got taken as the price. That would be annoying. Losing one eye didn’t cause problems in daily life. But if I couldn’t hear, it would be pretty inconvenient.

…Still, there are people born without working ears, so compared to using magic with my bare body, maybe the price was light.

I closed my eyes while my chest rose and fell.

My consciousness faded as if my body was sinking down, down.

My breathing gradually grew quieter and──.

◇

Astraedia United Kingdom.

In its center there was a certain school.

Not the kind you normally imagine—where teachers teach lessons and students gain knowledge.

It was an institution called the academy, created to train witches.

It didn’t have any specific proper name or person’s name attached because, originally, there was no other large-scale educational institution besides the academy, and normal schools were modeled after it.

If I give an easy example from my previous life, it’s like how the official name of Ise Grand Shrine is just “Grand Shrine.”

At the academy they taught how to kill monsters and how to use magic effectively in order to raise witches.

Of course they also taught about the accompanying costs.

People who couldn’t accept the costs apparently left the academy.

Though that hardly ever happened.

In the Astraedia United Kingdom, witches were seen as very noble beings.

That was drilled into them from a young age.

So most little kids’ dream was apparently to become a witch.

In short, it was brainwashing. The wording is harsh, but yeah.

Still, that’s pretty much how culture works most of the time.

Thanks to this education, there was a steady supply of girls who wanted to become witches, and that’s why humanity hadn’t died out.

I’d like anyone who complains to come up with a better alternative.

…Anyway, that doesn’t matter right now. Back to the academy.

They didn’t just give knowledge and graduate students, then irresponsibly say, “Okay, go dive into the dungeon now.”

While still enrolled, they gained combat experience against monsters under the supervision of witches to guarantee safety—even then, there had been many deaths in the past. No matter how careful they were, it was never enough when it came to dungeons.

Today, Tamaki Omuta, the new part-timer I hired, would have to cross that line of life and death.

“And there’s a chance it goes straight to a bad end right away.”

It really was a pain.

Like I said before, Witch or was a depressing game, but the developments were especially unreasonable.

Depending on tiny choices—even something as small as what you ate for breakfast—one wrong pick could get a character killed.

I mean, does breakfast really affect your life? Whether it’s bread or cereal, it shouldn’t make any difference.

If they told me it was some butterfly effect thing, I’d have to accept it.

I hadn’t thrown away my humanity enough to know a girl I was acquainted with might die and still send her into the dungeon without doing anything about it.

That’s why I pulled out the mask for the first time in a while.

If I wore the mantle that hid my build and put on the mask that disguised my face and voice.

The strongest witch in the world—Aoi Komeiji—would make her comeback.

“Dressing up like a woman is pretty embarrassing, honestly.”

I made sure no one was around and muttered to myself.

My own voice transmitted through bone conduction was a man’s, but what shook my eardrums was a woman’s voice.

The gap between the image and reality felt gross.

I was used to it now, but at the beginning I had suffered a lot—feeling both creepy and embarrassed.

The improvement came after—my hearing got dulled as the price of magic, I think.

Apparently the function of my eardrums had been taken, so the proportion of bone conduction increased, which eased the discomfort from the voice mismatch quite a bit.

Turning misfortune into fortune, huh. Well, it’s not really fortune. If you squinted really hard from far away, it was barely break-even at best.

I sighed and approached the dungeon entrance.

The dungeon—the hole in the barrier—was located in the northern part of the Astraedia United Kingdom, and no residents lived nearby. Obviously. Who would want to live close to a monster nest?

In reality, if monsters overflowed from the dungeon, humanity would be wiped out regardless of where people lived, so there wasn’t much point worrying about it. Still, emotions matter. It’s the same reason people don’t want to live next to accident sites or graves.

Just because there were no residents around didn’t mean the country was neglecting management of the dungeon. There was always the chance some suicidal weirdo would do something reckless in desperation. Entering the dungeon required national approval, and normally the condition was graduating from the academy and obtaining qualifications.

…That’s right.

Graduating from the academy was the condition.

Only girls could enter the academy.

I was a guy.

There was no way I could graduate.

Because I was a guy. I couldn’t even enroll in the first place.

But for a skilled witch it was different. Even without graduating from the academy, if you passed various tests you could be given a dungeon entry permit.

That’s why I took the permit out of my pocket.

It was my longtime partner that had been through thick and thin with me, so the print was worn and hard to read. What if they suspected it was fake?

In my active days I wouldn’t have had to worry, but since I had been away from the front lines for quite a while, there might be gatekeepers who didn’t know Aoi Komeiji.

That could be annoying~ I thought as I approached the stone wall.

By the way, even though I called it the dungeon entrance, the actual dungeon tower was still five kilometers away. Because there were monsters and it was dangerous. Naturally you’d want some distance. It was almost negligible, though.

A high wall made of stacked square stones.

What a nostalgic sight, I thought, and my cheeks relaxed a little.

It was the stone wall built in a five-kilometer radius around the dungeon to block anyone without permission.

A witch who had used magic a few times could probably get over it.

Modern technology wasn’t advanced enough to stop someone that strong.

“Hello.”

“Ah, hello──”

The gatekeeper, who had been looking down at the ground, suddenly changed color.

“The strongest witch in the world!?”

“Can you stop calling me that? I don’t really like it.”

“Ah, yes… understood.”

He said he understood, but he probably hadn’t processed the situation yet. In other words, he didn’t get it.