Prologue 0-3: Zaia Gardendos Corona

The place once known as “the Dungeon of the Ruler” was a massive underground labyrinth with one hundred floors and countless traps. At the very bottom, however, its darkest depths held a girl who’d been sealed away there. Her name was Corona.

Corona once had many names, and right now she was dreaming of a time she’d been called one in particular by the people of another world. They’d called her “hero.”

A staff came down on Corona’s head.

“That really hurts!”

“Get yer durn head in the game, hero!”

“Hnngh...”

Corona turned her tearful eyes towards the holder of the staff—her traveling companion who was also the female wizard that had summoned her to this world.

“Pastel!” Corona whimpered. “What was that for?!”

“There’re some mountain vegetables growing there. I was sayin’ we should pick them together,” Pastel replied in her heavy accent.

“What? You want me of all people to pick weeds? And to eat them?”

“That’s ’zactly what I’m sayin’! Ya blew all the money the king gave us, so now we gotta get food ourselves!”

“Hmph! You’re the first person to ever make such a foolish suggestion to me. Who do you think I am? I’m—”

“Shaddup and do it!”

SMACK!

“That really hurts!”

Pastel showed no mercy to anyone, not even a hero. She was also pretty strong for a wizard. Her staff was a force to be reckoned with in more ways than one.

“Wh-Why you...”

Corona wasn’t happy. It was all Pastel’s fault that she’d been summoned to this world and made to be this strange “hero.” In fact, when Corona first arrived and was asked to defeat the Demon King, she’d answered instantly: “Not happening. Send me back.”

Pastel, the one who’d summoned her, had responded: “Only a genius like muhself can send ya back, but I’m ain’t doin’ it unless ya save my world.”

No one had ever refused her before.

“If ya wanna go back that badly, maybe I should make ya beg,” she’d suggested darkly. “If the Demon King invades, it’s all over, anyhoo. So, even if ya kill everyone but me, I’m not sendin’ ya back. Honestly, it would be faster to just kill the Demon King, if ya ask me.”

Corona and Pastel glared at each other, threatened each other, and argued with each other for three days straight. And in the end, Corona gave in. She’d always been lazy, but she wasn’t stupid, and she did like fighting. She was also up against Pastel’s unrelenting stubbornness and the fact that it really would be faster to defeat the Demon King than to persuade her to change her mind.

“Tch! I’m sick of this! I’ll just threaten that woman into sending me—Gyah!”

“I heard that.”

“Y-You...! Stop hitting me with the pointy part!”

“Ya keep talkin’ like that, and dinner will be tree root soup.”

“Anything but that!”

Their whole journey had been like that, and she relived it now in a dream. Her sleeping lips whispered Pastel’s name with a smile.

But this dream was endless for Corona. She would never wake up. Not until someone came and freed her from her seal.