SBTYD 02

Chapter 2

Day 21

“Wow. What the hell is this?”

After wrestling with the boulder for a long time, I quickly collapsed, drenched in sweat.

There was no way a human being could move this thing.

There had to be a limit to how much they could mess with me. How the hell was I supposed to push this thing up a slope?

“Damn it! Damn it!”

Unable to contain my anger, I spent a long time punching the innocent boulder.

Of course, the only thing that hurt was my hand. Even after the skin on my knuckles was scraped raw and started bleeding, my breathing refused to calm down.

“Aaaagh! Aaaaaagh!”

The adrenaline wouldn’t go down, so I ran around aimlessly for a long time.

I was pissed. Really pissed.

But what could I do?

The faces of the twelve gods still wouldn’t leave my mind.

Zeus, Hades, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Dionysus, and Hermes.

I probably wouldn’t be able to forget those twelve faces for the rest of my life.

“To think I’ll have to stay trapped here for the rest of my life, just rolling a boulder around.”

Maybe it would have been understandable if I had committed some unforgivable crime, like destroying the world.

But all I’d done was defy them and hurt their feelings.

No matter how angry I became over such an absurd punishment, all I could do was run around screaming like a monkey.

The memories of my reincarnation had returned, mixing with my modern values and leaving me even more confused.

But when I looked back on the twenty years I had lived as Sisyphus, there wasn’t a single thing I had to be ashamed of.

I had a life as Sisyphus.

I had a family.

I had friends.

I had spent years struggling desperately to survive in this bleak world.

And all of it had been taken away from me.

It was too cruel to simply accept as something written in mythology or ordained by fate.

“Hoo…”

How many hours had passed?

I couldn’t keep running around like a madman forever.

I decided to calm down and assess the situation.

I looked around at the scenery.

The area around the altar where the boulder was placed was covered in grass, with dense woods stretching out to the left, right, and behind me.

The sunlight was bright, and the place looked like nature itself.

Yet I couldn’t hear even a single bird.

There was something strangely unsettling about it, and it made me uncomfortable.

In front of me was the mountain.

That was the direction in which I had to push the boulder, and the path was steep.

It was divided into different levels, almost like stages in a game, with each level having its own distinct theme.

There was a volcano with lava flowing through it.

There was also a snow-covered mountain battered by blizzards.

It even felt like I was climbing a tower.

The higher regions were hidden behind the clouds, so I couldn’t see what they looked like.

“Wait… A game?”

I tried to recall my memories more carefully.

This scene.

The slope where I had to push a boulder upward.

The structure divided into different stages, just like a game.

“I think I’ve seen something like this before…”

If this really was a world based on a mythology-themed game, then it made sense that it was so different from the original myths.

Perhaps this boulder-pushing stage was some kind of bonus minigame.

“The problem is that it became the rest of my life.”

Obviously, I had no intention of spending the rest of my life pushing a boulder.

Not for one year.

Not for two.

It could be a hundred years, a thousand years, or even tens of billions of years until the universe itself ended.

And I was supposed to spend all that time pushing a boulder?

By myself?

Absolutely not.

I had to find a way out somehow.

“Can I get out of here?”

Zeus had called this place Tartarus.

In other words, hell.

He had also called it the Time Prison of Cronus, if I remembered correctly…

I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant.

Cronus was a Titan god from a generation before Zeus.

Apparently, there were different kinds of hell, too.

For an ordinary human like me, getting out of here seemed impossible.

As far as I knew, the original myth didn’t exactly give Sisyphus a happy ending, either.

But—

“If this really is a game, then things are different.”

If this was a game I had played…

There was only one game I could remember that was based on Greek and Roman mythology.

I couldn’t remember the name anymore, but I thought it had been a dark fantasy action RPG.

The player raised a character and became a hero capable of using “Mana.”

By unlocking “Talents,” the player could learn “Skills” and “Magic.”

You hunted monsters with skills and magic, gained experience, and grew stronger.

You could also join a guild called “Eranoi” and build up your own faction.

You could even establish a territorial city called a “Polis.”

“Wait. Isn’t that exactly the world I lived in?”

The possibility seemed increasingly likely.

If so, could I use those skills, too?

“‘Space-Time Break’… was that what it was called?”

I thought that was the name.

It was a powerful skill capable of tearing through space itself.

It was memorable because it could send even gigantic monsters flying with a single strike.

“If it’s really a skill that can tear through space, then maybe I can use it to escape.”

There was a way to find out.

A word that only a modern person reincarnated into another world could confidently say.

I pushed my embarrassment aside for a moment and spoke it aloud.

“…Status Window.”

…

Unfortunately, nothing appeared in front of me.

“System. Status. σύστημα.”

I even tried saying it in Greek.

All I received in return was silence mocking my pathetic attempt.

“Tsk.”

Was a status window only given to the protagonist?

“Come to think of it, every game character was a hero.”

Heracles.

Odysseus.

The kind of legendary heroes everyone had heard of.

But me?

Sisyphus.

An utterly obscure nobody with practically zero recognition.

An extra among extras.

I had never had an epic written about me.

I had never participated in any great war.

What was it again?

Wasn’t I supposed to be a symbol of a pathetic human being?

Right.

And in twenty years of life, I had never even felt Mana once.

Mana was something only certain people could use from birth.

In the first place, Mana belonged to the gods.

Usually, it was demigods born with exceptional Talents who could wield Mana.

The kind of person capable of becoming a hero was decided from the moment they were born.

“Hah…”

A hollow sigh escaped me.

In the end, that meant I had no way to escape from here other than pushing the boulder.

“Wait. Do I even need to stay here?”

The thought suddenly occurred to me.

What was the name of the mountain where I was?

Acro… something mountain.

This wasn’t a game.

This was reality.

The world I had lived in.

Maybe I could simply walk down the mountain and escape.

“Let’s go.”

I immediately turned and ran toward the forest.

The moment I pushed my way between the trees, following no path at all, I emerged from the forest.

And found myself standing in front of the exact same altar I had started from.

“Damn it.”

I hadn’t moved long enough to lose my sense of direction.

Had I even been running for ten seconds?

It was as if the two ends of the forest were connected by magic.

I immediately ran into another section of trees.

But the result was the same.

By the time I realized how much time I had wasted, the sun had already gone down.

They called it a prison of time, yet I wasn’t hungry, and I didn’t feel sleepy.

Even my injuries healed much faster than normal.

The wounds I had suffered during my torture had already healed.

Even the ribs I’d injured when I slammed into the boulder earlier were completely fine.

I had no idea how it worked.

But I still got tired.

And pain was still pain.

If I ran, I became short of breath.

My legs still went numb.

Maybe only the laws of physics applied here.

In other words, I couldn’t even escape by dying.

It was truly a hell designed with malicious intent to torment its prisoner.

Two days.

Ten days.

Another three weeks passed.

I didn’t know if it served any purpose, but I decided to mark each day by making a line on the ground.

On the day I had made my twentieth mark, I had completed a thorough exploration of the entire area.

I came to one conclusion.

There was no way to escape.

I had explored every corner of every place I could reach on foot.

The starting point where I was trapped, the altar where the boulder rested, was surrounded by grass.

Beyond that was a dense forest.

The trees were unfamiliar to me.

Paleozoic?

High-altitude?

Whatever they were, the plants looked unpleasant and bizarre.

There were no edible fruits, either.

Even though I wasn’t hungry, having nothing to eat was still surprisingly painful.

I even tried pulling up some grass and chewing it, only to cut my tongue and accomplish nothing.

As expected, the sections without forests had only one route.

Upward.

The path was about thirty meters wide, with a slope of roughly twenty-five to thirty degrees.

There were tall barriers on both sides of the slope, or perhaps they were more like guardrails, designed to keep the boulder from rolling off.

I couldn’t get over them, and I couldn’t see what lay beyond them, either.

When I tried walking up the slope, I couldn’t take more than a few steps.

It was as if some invisible force, like a magnet, was pulling me back.

Magic, perhaps.

It seemed to mean that I had to bring the boulder if I wanted to climb.

I was starting to get bored.

I was tired of picking grass blades and using them to tell my fortune.

I was tired of lying on the ground and rolling around.

I was even tired of screaming insults at the Twelve Gods one by one like a madman having a fit.

“Haa…”

One day, I sat in front of the boulder and stared at it all day.

It felt like the bastard was challenging me to a staring contest.

“What the hell am I supposed to do?”

Even if I managed to get it to the summit, it was obviously designed to roll all the way back down the other side.

Judging from how it felt when I hit it, the thing had to weigh at least a ton.

“…Should I try?”

I didn’t want to.

I really, really didn’t want to.

In my previous life, I’d only signed up for a gym once.

Even then, I think I’d impulsively paid for six months, gone for about a month, and then quit.

How many kilograms were the dumbbells I used back then?

Whatever.

It definitely wasn’t anything like this boulder.

Still, I had no other choice.

Eventually, I stood in front of the boulder.

“…Hoo.”

The moment I placed my hands against it for the first time, all I could do was sigh.

Its perfectly round shape and smooth surface meant that if I applied even a little force incorrectly and slipped, it would immediately roll all the way down the slope.

“This is hopeless.”

Standing in front of the boulder was overwhelming.

It felt like the thing was going to swallow me whole.

“I can’t even see the summit.”

The starting point was a massive altar.

I raised my head and looked toward the mountain’s summit.

It was impossibly far away.

From what little of the course I could see, all kinds of obstacles were scattered everywhere, while constantly changing weather turned the place into a living hell.

“Let’s do this.”

I spread my arms and placed both hands firmly against the boulder.

The cold, inorganic surface already felt like torture against my palms.

I bent my waist and planted my feet firmly, putting all my strength into my legs.

“Uuugh!”

Only after putting every ounce of strength I had into it did the boulder finally move.

Grrrkkk…

The unpleasant grinding sound tortured my ears as the massive stone began to roll.

I pushed it onto the slope and then upward.

My breath caught in my throat, and the muscles in my arms screamed in protest.

But I’d already started.

What else could I do?

I had to keep going until I succeeded.

“Hnnngh!”

I continued to push with all my strength.

[Strength increased by 1.]

[You have entered “Cronus’s Tartarus.”]

[A prison of time created by the authority of the great ruler, Cronus.]

[The flow of time here differs from that of the mortal world.]

[All lifeforms in this place possess the “Immortal” trait.]

[The exit will open once the boulder reaches the summit.]

[Good luck.]