Labyrinth Restaurant

My name is Lisa Ichitsubashi, I am a fifteen-year-old high school freshman living in a local city in Japan.

My parents run a western restaurant, and my grandfather started it about fifty years ago. Our store is quite popular locally though it's not a fancy one.

When I grew up watching my healthy grandfather and his small but gentle father still cook and delight in many customers every day, I only began to admire the job of cook.

When I was in elementary school, I started helping the store by washing dishes and wiping tables, and now I can leave it to you if it's an easy dish to cook after such downsizing as peeling an imo or onion.

It's my dream to take over our store one day in public as a cook, although it still doesn't extend to my grandfathers at all.

There was now, for some reason, a "king” in front of me who was such a normal high school girl and cook apprentice.

A fine moustache, a bright red robe, and a purposefully king-like king wearing a large crown, are somehow lying flat on one knee against me and talking.

Well, I should have almost been home after school...?

Cosplay?

Or is it some kind of play or something?

But I'm not in the theatre department, and the high school theatre department won't hire foreign adult actors in the first place.

If you look closely, at my feet there are some strange patterns painted with glittering mysterious paint, magical formations like the ones you see in fantasy-based games and such.

Finally, I just realized that the clothes I'm wearing aren't school uniforms either, they're turning into armor made of somewhat shiny metal.

Could this be an alley?

I'm also a contemporary high school student and have some appetite for light novels, cartoons and other entertainment pieces.

There have often been developments in those productions where "students without any philosophy are summoned to work in different worlds”, but if this situation is not a dream, it seems to be exactly that development as it is.

I tried to follow my cheeks, but the pain seems normal, if it's not a dream, that's what I mean.

I was completely overheard because of my thinking so far, but apparently the King (tentative) story that I kept talking about somehow in front of me just now is over.

The king (tentatively) took a breath and asked me.

"O brave man, please defeat the demon king and save the world"

"Oh, yes."

As such, I, Lisa Ichitsubashi, had decided to go to defeat the Demon King as the brave Lisa without knowing the details.

In the meantime, I'm going to ask the King (tentatively) if he knows how to return to the original world.

When I asked the king (who was really the king, not the (provisional) one), there was a way back to the original world.

But they need to defeat the Demon King for that.

What it means is that, although in the first place the ritual of summoning the brave has itself been handed down to the kings of this country for generations, that ritual has the conditions to activate it, and no summons can be made without the demon king appearing in this world.

Why such a specification, she said, is that the goddess who taught the kings of this country a long time ago how to perform that ritual set such activation conditions so that people would summon brave men without darkness and not use them for their own lust or for wars between humans.

They say that when a brave man triumphs over a demon king for the same reason, the brave man is automatically restored to the original timeline of the original world.

And why did you perform the ritual of summons in the first place, when the priests of the temples in each country were entrusted with the appearance of the Demon King on earth, and with it, if the King tried the ritual, he could summon the brave (me), which means paradoxically it became certain that the Demon King appeared on earth.

Demon kings have appeared in this world several hundred years ago, and they say the damage at that time was already horrible. Whether or not the human population at the time was reduced to less than half.

Then I will know the king's desperation.

It was good information that no matter how much time passed in this world, no time had passed in the original world when I returned.

You can't go home without defeating the Demon King, though, and you can't even relax and watch it if the Demon King tries to destroy humanity.

That's how I decided to save this world as a brave man.