Kays Translations
Just another Isekai Lover~
Chapter 17: Resurrection on the Spot
“Musa Mein, what on earth are you trying to do?! Murder?!”
Marlon roared, his voice hoarse with fury, his chest rising and falling like a bellows. His eyes burned with rage, bloodshot and trembling—not surprising, really. Anyone would be furious, even terrified, if without the slightest warning someone had nearly blown their brains out with a gun. His heart still pounded from the close brush with death.
“No… not murder.” Musa Mein shook his head slowly. His gaze remained calm, almost eerily so, as if the earlier gunshot had been nothing more than a casual gesture. “I merely wished to prove something to you—that in this fragment of a dimensional projection I’ve constructed, death is real. One can kill, and one can also be killed.”
His voice was steady, detached.
Yet when his eyes drifted downward, settling on the severed hand lying at his feet—the hand that still gripped a magic-crystal pistol—the calm mask faltered. His expression shifted into one of genuine curiosity. “How… how did you do that?”
Following the trail of blood and the fallen hand, Musa Mein’s gaze lifted. It came to rest on a young woman standing tall and poised, her figure like a blade in the half-light. She had short chestnut hair and sharp, cool brown eyes that revealed nothing of her thoughts. A scarlet dress clung to her, scandalously cut—one side draped to her knees, the other slit all the way to the hip, exposing a long, toned leg. On her feet were strappy high-heeled sandals, elegant but absurdly impractical for combat.
And yet in her hands gleamed a pair of kukri blades, their curved edges still dripping with fresh, crimson blood.
The young warrior woman stared at Musa Mein with eyes empty of emotion. Blood slid from her blade in slow, rhythmic drops, pattering against the metal deck like the ticking of a clock.
Anyone, even a fool, could see it—this woman in the blazing red dress could, at any moment, with a single motion, lop Musa Mein’s head clean from his shoulders.
Who is she? I don’t remember there being such a warrior aboard The Isumenas Valkyrie. Then where… where did she come from?
Musa Mein seemed almost indifferent to the threat of death. His curiosity wasn’t for his own safety but for the identity of this mysterious crimson-clad warrior who had appeared from nowhere.
“You can call her Alice,” Marlon answered, his voice low, strained. He did not elaborate further. Instead he pressed urgently, “Musa Mein, I think I’ve begun to understand the nature of this dimensional projection you’ve made. But now you must tell me—how do I return? How do I go back to my real body?!”
He had no intention of answering Musa Mein’s earlier question—where Alice had come from. Of course he knew the truth.
Alice— Yes, the Alice. The heroine of the Resident Evil films, the woman who carved through zombies as though they were paper dummies, a deadly beauty with a combat rating of at least ninety.
And just as once, on the beach, he had accidentally summoned forth that bright yellow Camaro—Bumblebee—from his imagination, Alice too had been conjured by the same method. A thought, a whispered mantra, and she was there.
The incantation: imagine and summon.
Why Alice? Why her first?
It was simple.
The instant Musa Mein raised the pistol and leveled that black, gaping muzzle at his forehead, Marlon’s mind had not gone blank. No, instead it raced furiously, grasping for a way out. He realized two truths in the span of a heartbeat.
First—Musa Mein was too close. At that distance, Marlon had no hope of dodging a bullet. His reflexes weren’t that fast, and the body he was inhabiting wasn’t superhuman. He wasn’t some kung-fu god who could snatch bullets out of the air.
Second—if he couldn’t save himself, then someone else had to. A hero… or perhaps, a heroine.
Thus the mantra surged up in his heart, and his thoughts flew to those violent, gorgeous women from his memories of movies and games: Alice, the zombie-slayer; Selene, the moonlit goddess from Underworld; Lara Croft, the sultry aristocrat-tomb raider; the blood-soaked Bride from Kill Bill; and countless others.
But it was Alice, crimson-dressed Alice, who first surfaced in his mind. And so she came. And so, with a single swing of her kukri, she severed Musa Mein’s gun hand.
She was his creation, his summoned variant spirit crystal servant.
Of course, Marlon wasn’t stupid enough to admit all that. Revealing her name, “Alice,” was already more than he ought to have said.
“How to return?” Musa Mein finally turned his full attention back to Marlon. He gestured calmly at the severed hand on the floor. “It’s simple. Use this gun to kill yourself. That’s all it takes to leave this projection fragment and return your soul to your body.”
Marlon’s face darkened instantly. “Kill myself—with that gun? You can’t be serious!” He had zero desire for suicide.
“I’m very serious,” Musa Mein replied, as if Marlon’s resistance surprised him. His tone was matter-of-fact. “Ordinary objects can kill you here, yes, but you’ll always revive in moments. Only in two specific places, or when slain by one of seven special weapons—including this pistol—can your consciousness return outside.”
Ah. So that was why Musa Mein had pulled the trigger on him earlier without warning.
Marlon swallowed hard. He longed desperately to leave this battlefield, to return to the serenity outside the crystal sphere. But when his eyes fell upon the pistol, still clenched in that severed hand and glistening with blood, his stomach churned.
“Then tell me, Musa—where is the nearest of those return points?” he asked quietly. His tone was steady, but his jaw was tight with resolve.
For all his courage, suicide—or being killed—was unthinkable. The scars it would leave on his heart would never fade.
Musa Mein seemed to understand at last. He nodded. “The captain’s chamber. On this very ship, The Isumenas Valkyrie.”
His explanation was precise, almost clinical. He even described the route in detail: “The captain’s chamber is at the foremost end of the fourth deck. From here, take the stairwell down to the lower bridge corridor, follow it into the passage for the third deck, then proceed straight ahead to the sealed hatch at the end. Pass through, descend again, and you’ll reach the captain’s chamber…”
But he never finished.
Alice, who had stood motionless since severing Musa Mein’s hand, finally moved. She slid one bloodied kukri back into its sheath at her thigh, then bent to retrieve the fallen pistol. Her movements were efficient, precise, utterly devoid of hesitation.
She even extended a hand, offering to support Musa Mein.
“No,” Musa Mein declined calmly, waving her off. “In my current state, I could die again at any moment. What I need is your sidearm.” He pointed at Marlon’s waist.
Startled, Marlon touched his hip—and there it was, a holster he hadn’t noticed before. Inside rested a pistol identical in shape to Musa Mein’s, though without the sinister crimson rune etched into its barrel.
He hesitated. Give a weapon to the man who had just tried to kill him? Madness.
But then his gaze flickered to Alice. To the way she had intervened in the nick of time, saving his life with a single slash. That image alone made his decision.
Through Alice’s hand, Marlon passed the pistol to Musa Mein.
The man adjusted his grip awkwardly, left-handed now. Then, without a flicker of doubt, he raised the gun to his own temple.
Bang!
The gunshot thundered through the metal corridor, echoing like a cannon blast. Musa Mein’s borrowed body collapsed, his head bursting like an overripe melon, blood and gore spraying across the deck.
Marlon’s stomach lurched.
But scarcely five seconds passed before Musa Mein stood again. Whole. Unbroken. Even his severed hand was restored. He flexed his fingers, rotated his wrist, and smiled faintly.
“There. Now we can depart.”
Watching him rise, impossibly reborn, Marlon felt the last of his doubts fall away. Against his will, he believed him. Completely.