I Was Summoned to Die, so I’m Climbing the Pantheon for Revenge!

Consciousness returned not as a flood, but as a drip. Slow. Fragmented. Each drop of awareness landed on Kyouya Kusanagi’s mind like a stone into dark water, sending ripples through a void that had been empty for he could not tell how long.

The first sensation was warmth. Something soft beneath his back. Fabric, perhaps silk. The second was sound—murmured voices, distant but near, speaking words he almost understood. The third was light, filtering through his eyelids, pink and gentle.

He opened his eyes.

Above him, a ceiling of carved obsidian, lit by floating crystals. Not fluorescent lights. Not the stained tiles of his high school classroom. Obsidian. Crystals. Magic.

Kyouya blinked. His mind was slow, sluggish, as if waking from a hundred-year sleep. He tried to sit up, but his arms would not cooperate. They felt heavy, unfamiliar, as if they belonged to someone else.

“He’s awake!” a high-pitched voice squealed.

A face appeared above him. A girl—no, a young woman, but tiny, doll-like, with silver hair and crimson eyes. She wore a gothic dress covered in scythe motifs. Her expression was a mix of relief and lingering fear.

“Sofia-sama! Come quickly! The creepy guy is moving!”

Kyouya stared at her. He did not know her. He had never seen her before. And yet, something in her voice tugged at the edge of his memory—a shadow of a shadow, too faint to grasp.

Another face appeared. This one was older, more elegant. A woman with impossibly long dark hair and striking crimson eyes, dressed in a black traveling coat. Her features were sharp, aristocratic, and utterly beautiful. But her eyes were red-rimmed, as if she had been crying.

“Cain,” she whispered, her voice trembling. “Can you hear me?”

Kyouya tried to speak. His throat was dry, his tongue heavy. “Cain?” he repeated, the name foreign on his lips. “That’s not… that’s not my name.”

The woman froze. The silver-haired girl’s eyes went wide.

“What do you mean?” the woman asked, her voice carefully controlled. “What is your name?”

Kyouya forced himself to sit up. His body obeyed, though his limbs felt strange—longer, leaner, clothed in a dark suit he did not remember putting on. He looked at his hands. They were his hands, but different. Calluses he didn’t recognize. Scars he had never earned.

“Kyouya,” he said slowly, testing the name. “Kyouya Kusanagi. I’m a first-year high school student. I was in class, and then there was a light, and…” He looked around the room—obsidian walls, floating crystals, a massive stone table littered with maps. This was not a classroom. These were not his classmates.

“Where am I?” he asked, his voice rising with confusion. “Who are you people? Is this… is this an isekai? Did I get summoned?”

The woman’s face crumpled. She turned away, her hand covering her mouth. The silver-haired girl grabbed her arm, her crimson eyes filling with tears.

“Sofia-sama,” the girl whimpered. “He doesn’t remember. He doesn’t remember us.”

Kyouya watched them, his mind racing. Isekai. Summoning. He had read about this. He had dreamed about this. A magical world, adventures, maybe even a harem. But the faces around him were not familiar. The room was not a throne room. And the atmosphere was not one of celebration—it was one of grief.

“Someone explain what’s happening,” Kyouya said, trying to sound firm. “Where are my classmates? Shiori? Hiroto? Tatsuya?”

The woman turned back to him. Her crimson eyes were wet, but her expression was resolute. She knelt beside the low bed—for he realized now that he was lying on a cot, not a grand mattress—and took his hand.

“Kyouya,” she said, using his name carefully, as if testing its weight. “I am Sofia. Sofia Vileblood. You and I… we were allies. Partners. We fought together to reach this place.”

Kyouya stared at her. “I’ve never seen you before.”

“I know.” Sofia’s voice cracked. “Do you remember a goddess? A woman named Kamiya?”

Kyouya searched his memory. The summoning. A blinding light. A cold, arrogant voice. But the details were smoke, slipping through his fingers. He shook his head. “No. I don’t remember any goddess. I just remember the light, and then… nothing.”

Sofia closed her eyes. A single tear slipped down her cheek.

Behind her, the silver-haired girl—Scarlet, though Kyouya did not know her name—burst into tears. “This is all my fault! I should have protected him! I should have cut those soul eaters faster!”

“Scarlet, enough,” a calm, masculine voice interjected. Kyouya looked past the two women and saw a tall man in a butler’s tailcoat, his silver hair slicked back, his expression unreadable. Sebastian. The name surfaced from somewhere deep, though Kyouya could not remember why.

Sebastian approached the cot, his hands clasped behind his back. “Kyouya Kusanagi. What is the last thing you remember before waking here?”

Kyouya thought hard. “I was in my dormitory. My high school. I was feeding my cat. Then there was a summoning circle. And then... I don't remember anything.”

Sebastian turned to Sofia. “The disadvantage of [Absolute Gluttony of Everything]. We theorized it might have a cost, but we did not know what. It appears the price for absorbing the soul eaters was his memory. Not just recent events—his entire identity as Cain.”

“How much did he lose?” Sofia asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Sebastian’s expression was grim. “It is impossible to say. He remembers his original world. His name. His classmates. But he does not remember the summoning, the goddess, or any of his time in Cascadia. He does not remember us. He does not remember Cain.”

Kyouya listened to this exchange with growing unease. “Cain? Who is Cain?”

Sofia looked at him with such profound sadness that he felt a pang of guilt, though he did not know why. “You were Cain,” she said softly. “It was the name you chose when you rejected the goddess’s curse. You were the anomaly who broke the System. You saved us. All of us.”

Kyouya stared at his hands again. These hands had saved people? These hands had broken a System? He remembered nothing. He felt nothing but confusion and a strange, hollow ache in his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he said, because he did not know what else to say. “I don’t remember.”

Sofia squeezed his hand. “It is not your fault. The disadvantage was unknown. You took the risk to protect us.” She stood up, straightening her coat. “We will find a way to restore your memories. There must be a spell, an artifact, something in the tower.”

“The tower?” Kyouya asked.

Sebastian gestured toward the window. Through the obsidian frame, Kyouya could see a structure rising from the mountain—a black spire, ancient and forbidding, its surface absorbing the pale light.

“The Goddess’s sanctuary,” Sebastian explained. “The Brume Whale guarded it. You destroyed the whale and the soul eaters within. The path is now open.”

Kyouya looked at the tower. Something about it made his skin crawl. It was not the height or the darkness. It was the silence. No birds, no wind, no sound at all. As if the tower existed outside the world.

“We should rest,” Sofia said, turning to the others. “Kyouya needs time to recover. And we need to plan our approach.”

The demon generals nodded. Malakor, a massive armored figure Kyouya had not noticed until now, grunted his agreement. A woman in shadowy robes—Zephyra—said nothing, merely watching Kyouya with unreadable eyes. A skeletal being—Xaroth—floated toward the door. A frost-covered woman—Sylas—followed.

Scarlet hesitated, looking back at Kyouya. “Get better, creepy guy,” she said, though her voice lacked its usual teasing edge. “Sofia-sama needs you.”

Then they were gone, leaving Kyouya alone with his thoughts and the hollow ache of a memory he could not touch.

Inside the Tower

Far above the valley, in the highest chamber of the black spire, there was no snow, no wind, no cold. There was only silence, and the soft rustle of turning pages.

She sat in the center of the room, surrounded by shelves that stretched up into darkness. The shelves were filled with books—thousands of them, millions, their spines glittering with gold and silver lettering in languages that had not been spoken for millennia. A single beam of light, source unknown, illuminated her.

She looked like a child. No older than ten. Her hair was long, silver-white, cascading over the shoulders of a pristine white dress. Her skin was pale, almost translucent, and her eyes—her eyes were the color of fresh snow, utterly devoid of emotion. She sat on a simple wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap, her gaze fixed on the wall.

But she was not looking at the wall. She was looking through it, through the mountain, through the fog that had once concealed her home. She was looking at the valley below, where the demon soldiers were tending to their wounded, where the strange group of beings was resting in a crude camp.

She had watched them kill the whale. She had watched the man with the golden eyes destroy her soul eaters. She had watched him fade, and then return, changed.

“Interesting,” she murmured, her voice flat, devoid of inflection. It was not a comment on the battle. It was not an observation about their strength. It was simply a recognition of a variable she had not anticipated.

She unfolded her hands and reached for a book on the shelf beside her. Its cover was black, unmarked, and when she opened it, the pages were blank. She ran her finger across the first page, and words appeared—not written, but burned into the paper by an invisible hand.

The Anomaly has forgotten. His memories are sealed. He is now Kyouya Kusanagi, not Cain.

She read the words, then closed the book. Her expression did not change. Her eyes remained cold, empty, like twin moons over a frozen sea.

“So,” she said to the empty room, “the game continues.”

She did not smile. She did not frown. She simply sat, waiting, as she had waited for centuries.

The tower held its breath.

In the valley below, Sofia stood at the entrance of the command tent, watching the black spire pierce the starry sky. Behind her, Kyouya slept, his dreams filled with fragments of a life he could not remember.

Scarlet appeared at her side, her scythe sealed, her childish face serious for once. “Sofia-sama. Do you think he’ll ever remember?”

Sofia did not answer immediately. She thought of the white void, of the fragments of her own past that still eluded her. She thought of Cain’s hand pulling her back, his voice certain, his resolve unbreakable.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “But I will not abandon him. He did not abandon us.”

Scarlet nodded, leaning her head against Sofia’s arm. “He’s still the creepy guy. Even if he doesn’t remember.”

Sofia allowed herself a small, sad smile. “Yes. He is.”

The tower loomed above them, silent and waiting. And somewhere inside, a divine being turned another blank page.

✦ To Be Continued...