No Fatigue: Prologue

Thank you for taking an interest in 『NO FATIGUE The Tale of the Man Who Could Fight for 24 Hours』this time.
I thought to write this story by putting importance on the tempo and exhilaration of the story.
There may be parts that weren’t of my full capability, but I hope you continue associating with this story for many chapters to come.

※ For those who think ‘Prologues are tedious, get to the story already!’ I’ve prepared a ‘prologue of NO FATIGUE you can understand in 3 lines’ in the postscript.
Those of you who feel that way, please briefly scroll through and look at the postscript.

With that said, please enjoy 『NO FATIGUE The Tale of the Man Who Could Fight for 24 Hours』!

T/N: Both the prescript (is that a word?) and postscript are translations of what the author has written.

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1. Prologue

When I exited the Game Centre, I heard a scream.

In front of my eyes, there was man in a black jersey on the opposite street.

That man held a knife stained with blood, chased an office worker who was fleeing after being stabbed in the shoulder, and stabbed that fleeing back with the knife.

Without being concerned with the office worker’s screams, the man stabs the office worker another 2, 3 times.

The man loses interest in the limp office worker and starts searching for his next prey.

What caught his attention was a female high school student who collapsed in shock and couldn’t move after watching the violent murder.

The man ran towards the female student.

The female student tries to run but the man seized her arm before she could stand up.

The female student had trouble breathing, seeing the man grinning broadly.

Splattered in blood, the man raises his arm overhead.

I dashed from the opposite street and clung to that arm.

Maybe because it was this situation, I carefully observed the man’s appearance with my head completely cool.

He was around my age, maybe a little older, but probably in his thirties.
He had a slender face covered with stubble, but his bloodshot eyes and inflated nostrils brought about a strange intensity.

I tried to pin down the man’s arm somehow but the man shook me off and took out a new knife from his belt.
Looking at it, the man’s belt had various sized knives hanging from it.

The man swung his knife and I moved my rucksack to block it, and then used it to ram into the man.

However, the man dodged, circumventing my body blow, and used his knife to slash.

Blood sprays out from my arm.

My consciousness recedes due to the pain and by the time I am aware, a knife was pierced into my stomach.

“This…..!”

Anger erupted along with the pain.

I swing my rucksack around recklessly.
I feel the rucksack collide with something hard, and it hits the random slasher-man on the head.
Inside the rucksack was a sturdy ArcCon (Arcade controller).

I grappled with the man who was groaning with pain, and try to snatch the knife from his hand.

Somehow, I almost managed to take the knife from him. It was that moment.

The female student, who had sunk down to the floor, suddenly grabbed at the man.

Perhaps, she was probably trying to help me, but that’s when misfortune struck.

“….gubu..”

A sensation I’ve never experienced before transmitted through my arm.

The man collapses onto the ground with his eyes open wide while murmuring something.

I looked at my own hand in blank amazement.

There’s blood.

It’s a knife.

A blood-stained knife was clasped in my hand.

…..In other words.

―I.. stabbed him?

“C-criminal discovered!”

While I was frozen in shock, a pair of police officers appeared from street.

“The criminal is wearing a black jersey, and is a slender man in his thirties― I’ve confirmed it!”

I look down at my torso.

I was wearing a black jersey.

Moreover, I was certainly in my thirties with a slender build.

“W-wait a moment…! I am….!”

I reflexively swing my arms in front while calling out to the police officers.

But..

“H-he’s resisting!”

“Y-you’re mistaken…. I’m not the slasher….”

“Then what’s that in your hand!”

When told that, I check my hand.

Yeah, this is a knife.

And furthermore, it was dyed red with the blood of the criminal I just stabbed.

It was hard to deny it with this circumstantial evidence so I became flustered.

I was stunned.

And then of all things.

“Hey.. Hey hey hey.. just wait a moment, I am…..!”

Stuttering intensely, I tried to run over to the police officers.

Of course, it happened to be while I was still waving the bloody knife in my hand…..

Even if I was at the end of my wits, I must admit that I should have been more composed somehow.

“D-don’t come any closer…!”

The police officer warned, holding his gun out.

I was enraged, but I also came to my senses after seeing the senior police officer’s stern expression and the muzzle pointing at me.

However.

“Eep, uwahhh!”

This time the young police officer panicked.

“O-oi.. stop it….!”

The senior police officer’s restrain was also in vain, and the young police officer pulled the trigger.

And it wasn’t just once but many times.

Bang, bang, bang, the sound reverberated through my abdomen.

Together with these final sounds, a scorching heat ran through my chest.

My head turned blank from too much shock.

And then from the next instant, I lost hope.

Within my narrowing field of vision, I saw the senior police officer pin down the young police officer.

With that scene as the last, I collapsed onto the ground and lost my vision.

“T-this is…. too much, right….”

My lungs haemorrhaged after those murmurs.

Just like this, my life came to an end.

◇◆◇◆◇◆◇◆

“…..Indeed, this is a bit much.”

“Dowa..owa..uaaahh!”

I feel like I heard a woman’s voice but I was in no mind for that.

I don’t know how it became like this, but suddenly the world was at my feet.

…….

Sorry, that was poorly worded.

To put it simply, I was in the sky, gazing down at the world from a distance.

Look, there’s footage that is like ‘looking at the world from an International Space Station’, right?

It was that kind of feeling, I was floating on a satellite orbit and below me were blue oceans and reddish-brown land covered with clouds, green forests were spread about, that sort of situation.

“I-I..I’m falling…..!”

“Calm down. You’re not falling.”

I realised when I was told.

Indeed, I was high in the sky, so high that even air seemed non-existent, but it didn’t look like I would fall to the ground.

“Ah, yeah…. It’s true.”

I understood that I was safe for the time being (I didn’t know a single thing apart from that though), and I finally had the room to observe my surroundings.

First, the woman in front of me.

Well, how should I put it, that..

“A goddess?”

An apt description would be the image of Venus from Greek mythology.

She was an inconceivable beauty, with a magnificent body moderately covered with a fabric similar to white silk.

The difference was that her hair wasn’t blond like Venus, but more closer to black.

“Yes. That’s right.”

The goddess? said, with an enchanting smile.

“….yeah, well, I understand somehow.”

I say while sighing.

“Oh? About what?”

“In short, you’re God and I died in my previous world, and right now there’s an unknown planet below me. In that case, this is about reincarnation.”

I first thought it was Earth, but this planet doesn’t seem like Earth.

There were huge desert continents at random, red hurricane-like clouds, and islands floating in the sky. No matter how I looked at it, this wasn’t Earth.

“……Well, that sums it up generally though.”

The goddess smiles again and starts to explain.

“Just like you just said, you have died. Mistaken for the slasher, you were shot by police….. Ah, you don’t have to be worried about your honour after your death. The girl you tried to save was there, right? Thanks to that child’s testimony, the media reported that you weren’t a random slasher, you were just a third-party who tried to subdue the slasher.”

“….That’s good.”

I was just a corpse with no relatives anyway, so it doesn’t bother me even if I was treated as the slasher but as expected, I guess it seemed bad.

“Well, it seems like the police filed charges about you saying you died as the suspect of the murderer who stabbed the slasher though. There was a riot when they said the police shot you by mistake.”

“Serves them right.”

So I say, but as someone who ended up dying, I also feel like it shouldn’t be settled with just a few police executives being sacked.

“Well, it can’t be helped. No, maybe it could have been helped but society is like that. Since I get to live a second time, it’s best to forget the slasher and the stupid police.”

“Right….. But there’s something I’d like to say about that. I have some bad news.”

“Bad news?”

“Yes. That slasher has been reincarnated in the world you’ll be going to.”

“Huh!?”

“More than that, I want you to defeat that slasher. That’s the reason I’m offering you a chance to reincarnate this time.”

“Why do I have to do such a thing….”

That time I was absorbed in rushing out but what was I thinking, leaping at the slasher possessing a knife.

Anyway, now that I’ve cooled off, I don’t want to fight the slasher a second time, nor do I feel up to it.

“I understand your feelings but I’m pressured as well. The aforementioned slasher― he’s called Kizaki Tooru, but that man was summoned by a wicked sorcerer working for an evil god, and possessed the body of the baby girl used as a sacrifice and has been reincarnated.”

“Why can’t you let the humans of that world deal with him?”

“The rules of this world states that gods cannot interfere with the material world. An exception to that, or rather, an underhanded trick is to reincarnate someone like what I’m doing now. If there’s a crisis approaching the world or there’s interference from another world, in those kind of emergences the gods will attempt to resolve the situation like this by reincarnating a soul they personally choose.”

“Is that guy…. that dangerous? He’s not just a petty slasher?”

“That slasher isn’t an ordinary slasher. He has received the influence ofMonguenues ― the evil god who reincarnated him ― and the number of people he has killed in your country exceeds one hundred.”

“O-one hundred!?

If that’s true, his cutthroat homicide would be at the world record level.

…..I did a really good thing.

“It seems that the slashing homicide was the death ritual dedicated to Monguenues. You managed to stop him, but he just managed to achieve his dearest wish and reincarnated in this world.”

“……Tch, so I was too late.”

In the end, I wasn’t rewarded for fighting with my life on the line.

“No, what you did was not useless. Kizaki Tooru’s ritual was incomplete because of you. Kizaki did not gain a perfect body due to that and was only able to reincarnate in this world by possessing an infant’s body.”

So it wasn’t completely in vain.

“Thanks to that, we have some temporal leeway until Kizaki Tooru grows to adulthood. In that time, you will―”

“Locate and kill him, huh.”

I gave a small nod.

This goddess is unable to personally intervene in the happenings on the surface.

Therefore, she was trying to reincarnate me, to somehow do away with the slashing murderer, Kizaki Tooru, who reincarnated in this world through the evil god’s schemes.

“……I understand what I have to do. However, I’m not a soldier or martial artist or anything. I don’t have any combat power though?”

I liked fighting games, but games and actual combat were completely different things.

I’ve actually never fought anyone until the fight with that slasher..

“Of course, I will grant you power. Although I say that, I am exploiting this reincarnation after all so I can’t give you that much power.”

“Hey, hey, isn’t the other party a dangerous character who was reincarnated by the evil god?”

“What I’m giving you is a Soul Seed, so to speak. If you give it water and fertilizer, and raise it, you will surely acquire the power to oppose the evil god’s apostle.

And then the goddess continues.

“You have your mission to do away with that slasher ― the apostle of the evil god ― somehow, but I don’t mind if you live as you wish aside from that. If you make the best of my power, so to speak……yes, I believe the [Cheater]’s way of life is possible.

Cheater. In other words, to play the game with an extreme and advantageous condition omitted by the game system.

That was the remuneration for accepting this goddess’s request.

Considering my death, it certainly wasn’t bad.

I would like to decline having the slasher as my opponent at all costs, but to challenge him with a distinct cheat is still preferable.

…..Well, I guess it’s not bad. The opportunity to reincarnate in the real world, I probably won’t have a second chance if I miss it.

“…. I get it. Originally speaking, the reason I died was also that guy’s fault. I’ll take a chance to the best of my ability.”

Moreover, although the goddess didn’t say explicitly, I didn’t have the choice to refuse here after dying in my original world.

The goddess cast her eyes down apologetically and said.

“Thank you. I am the goddess who governs the transmigration of souls,Atrazenec. And this world spread out below, the name of the world you will be traversing from now is Marquekt.”

The goddess extends her hand to my cheek.

An ethereal, soft and dainty finger brushes my cheek gently.

While stroking my face like she’s confirming something, the goddess speaks.

“Hmm, I see. I wonder if that skill would be good for you. The skill is a little direct, but it should be perfect for your choice.”

And then―

“I pledge. To bestow my divine protection unto the one who consents to fight the evil god. ―Skill conferment 【No Fatigue】”

Together with the words of the pledge, I felt the goddess’s moist lips on my cheek.

An unbelievable heat permeates through my body from the goddess’s lips.

“Uu….Gua…”

“…..It’s soon time to say farewell.”

The goddess says to me, who was crouched down holding my cheek.

Looking at me, my body was gradually becoming transparent.

“The skill is something that belongs to this world, Marquekt. You, who acquired this skill, have become partly Marquekt’s. And according to Marquekt’s rules, gods cannot interfere with those on the surface. We can’t keep you in this place.”

Together with the goddess’s words, my body floated gently.

No, wrong…. This is falling!

I fell to Marquekt with an intense force while listening to God’s final words.

“I can’t say I granted you this kind of fate but…… please take care of your life. You were brave for fighting against the slasher but you were also reckless. I don’t wish for you to stake your life for the sake of my mission. Use that skill to survive for sure ― Kagi Tomonori”

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Prologue of NO FATIGUE you can understand in 3 lines

• The protagonist Kagi Tomonori was mistaken as a random slasher and shot dead by the police.
• When he realised, a goddess was there and he was able to reincarnate in another world with the condition that he pursue the random slasher who was reincarnated in the other world through an evil god’s intervention.
• He received the <No Fatigue> skill from the goddess.

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