Worthless Skill Escape (WN)

Chapter 228

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TL: ALT

Chapter 228 – Time Flows… It Doesn’t

As I bask in the spring sunshine, leaning back in my wheelchair and looking out the window at the trees,

“Kurashiki-san, would you like to join us for recreation today?”

A young nurse calls to me from the entrance to my room.

I automatically answer, “Ah… I’m fine.”

In a hoarse voice, I reply curtly.

As I answer, a strong feeling of uneasiness hits me.

What was that voice? Is it really my voice?

And before I could even think of an answer, it came out of my mouth on its own.

I casually dropped my eyes to my hand and was even more surprised.

On the handrail of the wheelchair was the back of a hand, wrinkled and with blue veins.

I tried to turn it over to see the palm, but the muscles were stiff and wouldn’t move.

The nurse didn’t seem to notice my change, and…

“I see. You’re always welcome here whenever you feel like it.”

The nurse said this cheerfully, but it seemed as if she didn’t really believe her own words.

In addition to the old man named Yuto Kurashiki being difficult to deal with, the relationships between the elderly people in the facility are fixed.

That’s because no one leaves until the day they reach the end of their lives.

――Thoughts like this come out of nowhere.

“…What is this situation?”

I mutter to myself, surprised that my voice is hoarse.

“I have a vague memory of it. Or is it really a memory?”

As soon as I feel discomfort in my current situation, the “circumstances” that led to it come to mind.

One day, after I broke out of my shut-in state and became active as a dungeon explorer, I suddenly received an unknown curse in the dungeon.

The curse was “Seal”―a curse that made it impossible to use stat effects.

Being unable to use status effects meant that I could no longer use my unique skills or abilities, and I also lost the ability to receive bonuses from my stats.

It seems that this is fundamentally different from status effects, and I was unable to find a way to break the “seal” curse.

Having lost the means to be active as a researcher, I once again became a reclusive hermit.

Fortunately, I had a reasonable amount of money in my bank account, but I don’t know if that was a good thing or not.

I wasted five or ten years without being able to get out of that situation.

The people who had encouraged me in the beginning became busy with their own lives, and I became increasingly isolated as the months and years went by.

After ten years of idleness, waiting another twenty or thirty years is easier than you might think.

Before I knew it, I was old and in a nursing home.

It was ironic that the nursing home was run by the former group company of Rakan, but by that time, the black corporate culture had been eradicated, and it had become just another ordinary company.

I spent more than thirty years regretting the day my status was “sealed,” and now I am approaching old age, waiting for my last moments with regret and emptiness…

This is a rather painful story that has come to mind.

However, there are many flaws in this story.

“I remember very well when I was an explorer. It’s like it was yesterday.”

According to my family doctor, patients with dementia sometimes remember things from the past more clearly than things that happened recently.

This comment from my family doctor also came to mind as if to make sense of the situation. It was like a movie narration.

But…

“This has happened before.”

It was after I stopped the collapse of the Okutama Lake Dungeon.

I was sent to a parallel world that was different from this one due to the interference of the Boundary Dragon Splefnir, who had entered from another world.

There, I was a high school student with an explosive, perfect life.

I might have been happy if I had stayed in that dream, but I still chose to return to my original world.

I gave up my life as a brilliant explorer with a promising future and returned to my old life, where I had spent my youth without any setbacks and had to live with the pieces of my broken heart, which had been broken into many pieces, putting them back together again and again.

“Is it the other way around this time? No, it’s not really that much of a trial compared to last time.

I don’t know why I am in this situation now.

But I already have a way out.

Just like before, I can use Escape from Difficulty.

Skill──────────────────

Escape

S.Lv1: Can escape from combat.

S.Lv2: Can escape from reality.

S.Lv3: Can escape from difficulties.

S.Lv3 “Escape from Difficulties”

Conditions for use:

Deeply realize that the situation you are in is completely unsolvable.

Special notes:

When you use the “Escape from Difficulty” function to travel back in time, the causal factors that belong to you will remain in their most recent state.

However, since the recognition of causal factors is a heavy burden on the human soul, if you spend too much time traveling back in time, the causal factors that belong to you will wear out.

Also, you cannot go back in time to a point that is not directly related to the “difficulty” you have recognized.

It is possible to escape the same difficulties over and over again, but each time you do, your soul becomes more and more defeated, and your sense of self-affirmation is permanently diminished. The only way to restore a diminished sense of self-affirmation is to overcome the same kind of difficulties.

────────────────────

“Maybe, but I think my current situation is not a parallel world but a hallucination. Could it be the effect of someone else’s unique ability that I don’t know about? It’s pretty powerful for just an ability.

I’d like to say that I have no idea why someone would want to kill me, but before I got into this situation, I had more than enough reasons to be killed.

Maybe the extremists of Tozaki’s domestic faction thought that I was an obstacle to the realization of Seiji Tozaki’s ideals, or maybe agents from other countries were afraid of my power and planned to assassinate me.

Or maybe they saw that they couldn’t kill me, so they resorted to this kind of trick.

“Even if that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine that they have a power that surpasses the otherworldly god, the dragon god Splefnir.

I can be optimistic about the situation compared to when I was thrown into the working world under the pretense of an ordeal.

However, there are some troublesome things.

In order to use “Escape from Difficulty,” I have to “deeply realize that the situation I’m in is completely unsolvable.

It’s difficult to fulfill this condition, especially when the crisis seems manageable.

Besides,

“Status Open… I guess it’s hopeless.”

As I mentioned in the story above, my status seems to be “sealed” at the moment.

However, this is not a hopeless situation.

“Escape from Difficulty” is a sub-skill of my unique skill “Escape”.

Even in the job world, where skills are not supposed to be usable, I was able to use Escape from Difficulty.

I think I heard that unique skills are engraved in the soul and are treated differently from other skills.

If that’s the case, I should be able to use Escape from Difficulty even in my current state.

“…No, that’s not right. I should be pessimistic here.”

In my current state, where my status is said to be “sealed,” I might not be able to use Escape from Difficulty.

What would happen then?

I would not be able to escape from this world of hallucinations or whatever it is, and I would end my life as a lonely old man with regrets.

No, there’s nothing wrong with an old man being lonely, is there?

The longer you live, the more people you have to say goodbye to.

It’s also a matter of personality, so if an elderly person has few human relationships, it’s a problem to just assume that he’s lonely and pitiful.

The caregiver I mentioned earlier also seemed to say something like, “It’s a problem that they don’t try to get along with other people, even though the facility provides opportunities for interaction.”

If I actually became an elderly person and went into a facility, I’m not sure I would fit in well with a group of elderly people my own age.

If you want to spend the last days of your life as you please, there’s no reason for people to complain if you choose to be alone.

Oops, I’ve digressed.

Old people may have to live with a certain amount of loneliness, but it’s still too sad that I’ve lost contact with people I know, like Serika, Honoka-chan, Haruka-san, and Haitani-san.

I don’t think Serika would give up on me just because I lost my status.

The same goes for Haruka-san, who feels indebted to me.

Or rather, there’s a good chance that Haruka-san, who’s an elf, is still alive and well.

That’s the kind of discrepancy in the story.

If there is someone who made up that story, then that person probably only knows me superficially.

However, if I dare to think of it in terms of a story, my current situation is hopeless.

I’ve lost everything I thought I had.

I can’t bring back the time that has passed.

They say you can start over at any age, but when you reach my age, there’s almost nothing left to do.

What’s more, compared to the other elderly people in the facility, my current health seems to be poor.

Ah, it’s over. I’m finished.

I keep repeating this sentence, which I have thought about many times before.

What comes back to me is not a made-up story but a vivid trauma.

Still, I got the impossible “chance” of a dungeon and got my life back.

What if everything was lost in one night, and there was no way to get it back?

I narrowed my perspective and let my heart soak in despair for a while.

I appeared in a space that looked like a galaxy with countless twinkling stars.

“Well, well. Did it work?”

When I looked down at my body, it had returned to my youthful form, just as I remembered it.

However, since this was a space where matter could not exist, my body was transparent.

I said it looked like a galaxy, but there are some differences.

While a galaxy spreads outward from a central point like a Japanese sweet, the one I’m looking at branches outward from the base like a tree spreading its branches.

When I looked at the tree up close, the sparkles that looked like stars were each image from my past experiences.

The scene where I hunted for special condition bonuses by visiting A-rank dungeons around the country.

The scene when I stormed into the Umihotaru Dungeon and captured the explorers of the Man’s Association and Kiriko Kandori.

The scene where Seiji Tozaki, after a short break, became president of his political party and gave the speech that shook the world.

And the days that followed.

The place where I am standing now is the end of a thin, short thread that diverged from the middle of those stormy days.

If the story that came to mind was real, then that story would have become the thick trunk of this tree-like chain of causality.

However, the branch that this story belongs to is thin, like a bean sprout that has not been exposed to sunlight, and it looks like it could disappear at any moment.

When you trace this “bean sprout” back to its roots,

“Oh, I see.”

I saw the point at which my life was diverging, and I understood the situation I was in.

I could think of several ways to get out of this situation immediately.

Countermeasures against attacks using unknown unique skills had been one of the objectives of the S-rank dungeon raid.

“So it was that suspicious Westerner.”

The status check had just been successful.

His name was Mikhail Uspensky.

He was a counselor at the Russian Embassy and the head of the Tokyo branch of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service.

His unique skill was…

“…I see. So that’s how it works.”

If that’s the case, it will be easier to deal with than I thought.

Maybe I didn’t need to use Escape from Causality.

“You made me go through all this. You can’t complain if I do the same to you.”

I read the description of Uspensky’s unique ability and reviewed the procedure for retaliation.

I planned to deal with unknown, unique skills in a more intelligent way.

The direction of this unique skill was too different from the other skills I’ve seen so far.

“Well, since I managed to do something about it in the end, I guess it’s okay.”

I selected the “point in time” I wanted to return to from the causality tree and focused my attention on the image that appeared there…

…What? Do you think the story jumps around a bit?

You’re right; I may have rushed it a bit.

Let’s rewind to the time immediately after Tozaki’s “Great Speech” (as it’s called in the world) as a review for me.

How did the world change after the Great Speech, and how did my own circumstances change at the same time?

If I remember while looking at the pictures of the Causeway Tree, I might be able to see something I’ve missed.

First of all… well, let’s see.

Let’s start right after that speech when I was separated from Haruka-san and met up with Honoka-chan, who had come to me for help.

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