An entire twelve hours soon passed by as I continued swinging the dagger on my hand, the crowd of scarecrows felt endless, yet I did not feel a single bit of exhaustion at all… rather I felt a bit excited as I swung my weapon with varying strength.

“Take this!” I shouted while swinging the dagger at an awfully slow and weak pace, striking the chest of the scarecrow as it disintegrated into dust.

After stabbing the scarecrow, I then turned around and swung my dagger, but this time with as much force as I had. The weight of the dagger immediately turned into that equivalent of two boulders, slamming down straight at the head of the scarecrow as it exploded on the floor.

“You aren’t getting me today!” I screamed while throwing a kick at my back, twisting my body around as I stared at the threads of the scarecrow. The threads looked loose which meant that the strength to be exerted must be weak, following my instincts, I then stabbed the scarecrow as weak as I could before suddenly, all the scarecrows disintegrated at the same time.

A sudden burst of claps echoed throughout the area as the beautiful brown-haired woman appeared before me like a shooting star, her face was filled with smiles as she stared at me with a gentle atmosphere. A thread of warmth twirled around my heart as she hugged me.

“You did well, as expected of my daughter!”

Her proud voice echoed throughout the area, an undeniable pride. Her embrace felt warm, when was the last time I was hugged by someone who once held me by her arms… almost the entirety of my childhood was spent alone.

After a few moments of hugging one another, she soon released me as she looked at me with a nod before her lips opened as she offered, “It’s time for the second round then, are you perhaps ready, or do you want to take a short two-hour?”

“I’ll take a break, for now, fighting for twelve hours seems to have exhausted me…” I said before limply falling to the floor as she caught me once more, placing me on the field before sitting down beside me as the two of us looked at the skies.

The skies were filled with a gradient of blue, pink, and purple; a single gigantic star made its way up towards the empty skies, filling the world with light as the woman turned her face towards me as she pinched my cheeks.

“Isn’t the sunrise beautiful?” she said before I nodded as she giggled all of a sudden, turning her attention back to the sunrise as she said, “Did you know… it was around this time when you were born when the sun climbed its way up towards the top.”

“The sky looked so beautiful, the sun looked like it was walking that the name Ayumi (歩美) came to my mind, the sun that walked its way towards the endless beautiful skies,” she turned back towards me before smiling.

“Coincidentally, the name Ayumi also means ‘bright, conquer, fascination, truth, reason’ which all describes the personalities you have. A person who would conquer everything in her path to become a bright and truthful person who will pair up with a reasonable one,” she giggled.

“That… that just sounds too weird!” I complained before she laughed, even more, patting my shoulder as silence surrounded us a few moments later. The two of us simply stared into the sunrise under a tree as the wind whispered into our ears.

All of a sudden, she turned towards me with a wry smile, standing up as she said in a soft voice, “Are you wondering how I ended up in this world, how I became this powerful, and why am I stuck here?”

I was a bit taken aback by her sudden question, but she was correct, those three questions were inside my mind for a while now. From what I heard… the spirit of a person should disintegrate upon death unless a deity comes involved.

“You can already tell… I was reincarnated by a certain deity… You may already know her as well, the Goddess of White Lilies… the purpose of my reincarnation was to fight against her opposite twin, the Goddess of Dark Lilies… it sounds like something out of a movie right?” she said with a little bit of a sad tone.

“It sounds like something coming off from a comic, I wouldn’t believe you had I not been reincarnated as well by the same person,” I said with a wry smile as she giggled a bit before looking out towards the sunset as she said.

“Well, the journey to this world was a bit rough… there were no air conditioners and all those fancy kinds of stuff until I came; there was an abundant number of monsters everywhere to the extent that I once almost died again but… as fate may have it, I almost met someone special on my first near-death experience in this world.”

“Are you perhaps some kind of princess to be saved by a princely knight?!” I looked at her shocked as she laughed out super loud, wiping the moist on her eye as she shook her head.

“I might have been, the person I met was someone very special to me… she was the First Princess of the Former Empire of Alcadia, a person who could also be called a Princely Knight; she was a very odd person, preferring to fight as a knight rather than a princess…” she looked at the skies with a smile.

“Elisa was someone who would be willing to fight against a demon lord rather than be caged up like a bird, she was someone really odd… that day while I was being overwhelmed by funny enough a group of wolves, ready to surrender to my fate… a certain white-haired knight came running towards me, slicing through the wolves in a single blow…” she said with a nostalgic tone.

It was as if she was remembering the happiest times of her life in this world, her eyes turned moist as a single tear fell from her right eye as she looked at me, squinting her eyes as she said, “I fell in love with another girl at that time… crazy right, a mother like me falling in love with another girl… it’s such a weird thing to talk about…”

“But… even such love only caused a disaster…. The two of us got together a few months after but the happiness only lasted short as The Goddess of Dark Lilies forbid such happiness,” she looked up, gripping her fists as if she wanted to punch someone so badly.

“That Goddess suddenly came into our residence one night in an attempt to assassinate me ahead of time, but her plan was foiled as the person who took the hit instead was… Elisa, she ran in front of me, pushing me back as the sword pierced through her heart…”

“Her tears kept dripping as she looked at me straight into the eye, smiling… It truly felt like my entire world had broken apart at that time, in a fit of anger, all the powers that were granted to me rampaged, sealing the Goddess of Dark Lilies in a dimension similar to this but at the same time, sealing me away in this dimension where I stay until the day that Goddess dies,” she said before turning around as she touched the tree behind her.

In an instant, the tree slowly vanished, leaving behind a single tomb where the name of a certain someone could be seen carved into it; the name of the person she fell for was...

“Elisa Fragaria”