Chapter 24: Day of Calamity

"Nice work, Hibari."

"Oh, Raika-chan! Nice work!"

After our usual joint training session, I went over to talk to Hibari.

She turned around to face me with a bright expression.

Relieved by that, I began to speak.

"You've gotten a lot better at coordinating with that guy. You did pretty well in today's mock battle, too."

"Ehh? You mean Shota-kun? Come on, Raika-chan, you should really call him by his name already. You sound like a tsundere girl who likes him but is too embarrassed to say his name."

"None of your business! ...Ahem. Hibari, you've seemed a little down lately. I'm glad if you've managed to feel a little better."

Pretending not to know what I already knew, I deliberately played dumb.

"Ahaha, it's nothing you need to worry about, Raika-chan! I'm fine!"

She gently rejected my attempt to interfere and laughed. I couldn't read the emotions hidden behind that smile.

But I already knew. Simply having him say a few words to her wasn't enough to erase her past.

Only by confronting the source of her trauma could she finally become free.

As I thought about that, Hibari's expression changed slightly. Maybe she had somehow figured out what I was thinking.

"Hey. You know where I used to live, right, Raika-chan?"

Her voice was somewhat quieter than before as she asked me.

Her hometown. For Hibari, that was synonymous with the Calamity God.

"...Yeah."

"Then why did you have me and Ree-chan participate in the Calamity God extermination operation?"

Her gloomy eyes stared straight at me. She was demanding to know my true intentions.

There was an eerie pressure in those eyes, far beyond what one would expect from someone her age. If I let my guard down, I felt like I might end up spilling everything.

She hid a dark nature beneath her bright mask.

──But I'm no different when it comes to hiding things.

Besides, I've had a lot more practice.

"Intentions? I just thought the most difficult mission should be entrusted to the most reliable teammates."

"Ahaha. That's quite a statement coming from someone who tried to die on their own not too long ago."

"...That one hits a little too close to home."

Her words pricked me, and I gave a small laugh.

"Could it be that Raika-chan has been won over by Shota-kun too?"

"When you say 'too,' does that mean Hibari has been won over by him?"

Rather than answer her question, I turned it back on her.

Hibari's ears turned slightly red, and she lowered her head.

"It's, it's not like that... But I don't think talking things out with someone can necessarily solve everything."

"Yeah. That's true."

It seemed that his words hadn't been enough to completely dispel the emptiness swirling inside her.

Talking to someone didn't mean everything would definitely work out.

For someone who had graduated a little earlier than most from being a child who could do nothing but rely on others for protection, that was probably an obvious truth.

No one could neatly resolve everything she carried with her—the past, the wounds, the feelings.

I remembered the story of her past as it had been told in the game.

For Kibogaoka Hibari, the Calamity God was nothing less than the origin of who she was now.

〈TIPS〉 Some Bluffer fight out of a desire for revenge against the "Fictional Invaders." While their powers are formidable, they also tend to be more susceptible to Ascension Flyout.

It was nothing short of a nightmare.

Even now, I still dream about it, as though it had happened only moments ago.

The day the ground beneath my feet came crashing down with a deafening rumble.

The day I became empty inside.

The day the place where I lived was invaded by monsters that emerged from lies.

The God of Calamity suddenly descended upon a part of the city center one day.

It fell onto the rooftop of an ordinary office building.

It was one of the many sights we casually saw on our way to school.

A district in the heart of the city. An area where countless companies had their offices.

Our middle school stood right in the middle of that concrete jungle.

"Was Ree-chan's mom early again today?"

"Yeah. She's been really busy with work lately..."

My childhood friend, Ree-chan, answered with a small yawn. Her hair was sticking up just a little.

Whenever her mother didn't prepare breakfast for her, she was always sleepy. She had told me that when she was alone at home, she would end up going back to sleep.

"I see. There have been one incident after another lately, after all."

Her parents were police officers. They were probably being called in to investigate the suspicious incidents that had been occurring so frequently throughout Tokyo.

Random attacks. Arson. People disappearing as though they had been spirited away.

The sensational news reports that played over and over had captured the attention of Tokyo's residents.

"It's ominous." "It's scary."

People said things like that, yet continued with their daily lives as usual.

The term "Fictional Invaders" did not exist yet.

Humanity had yet to become certain of the existence of the Invaders.

And then, without warning, death began to spread.

"...Huh? Something smells strange."

At first, I casually muttered those words.

"Hi-chan, what's wrong?"

My childhood friend asked me.

Once again, I focused on the faint smell that had caught my attention.

A pungent odor that seemed strangely familiar, as though I had smelled it somewhere before.

"It smells... kind of like gas..."

While I was wondering what it could be, the incident had already begun.

A man in a suit who had been walking in front of us.

He suddenly collapsed with a thud.

"...Huh!? A-are you okay!?"

I immediately rushed over to the man in front of me.

I didn't know what was happening. But I had to help him. That was the only thought running through my mind.

Foam was coming from his mouth as his body convulsed violently. His face was unnaturally pale, and his lips had turned blue.

"Um, sir! Please stay with me! Are you okay!?"

"...Ah."

The man's convulsions became more violent. More and more foam poured from his mouth, while the color drained further from his face.

All I could do was panic.

I knew nothing about first aid. I had no idea what condition he was in or what I was supposed to do to save him.

My childhood friend, who had been staring blankly at the scene behind me, seemed just as helpless.

"...Ah."

"A-are you okay!? Please stay with me!"

His breathing grew shallower and shallower.

As I stood there repeating "Are you okay?" like a broken machine, the man eventually stopped breathing.

"............Huh?"

My mind couldn't keep up.

To me, human death had always been something that belonged to fiction. Something that could only happen in dramas and manga, somewhere far away from reality.

My mind went completely blank. I couldn't accept what was happening right in front of me.

"H-Hi-chan... Everyone... everyone's collapsed..."

It wasn't the only abnormality.

I turned around at the sound of my childhood friend's trembling voice.

At some point, the street we knew so well had transformed into a completely unfamiliar scene.

The people waiting at the bus stop had collapsed one after another like dominoes. None of them were conscious. They had probably met the same fate as the man in the suit.

Cars driving along the road had crashed into the guardrails, billowing black smoke.

People lay scattered throughout the intersection.

The cheerful melody announcing the green pedestrian signal rang out in the empty street, painfully out of place.

"What... is this...?"

The familiar cityscape seemed to have turned into another world in an instant.

I didn't know this place.

I looked around. Everyone except my childhood friend and me had lost consciousness.

"What... what's going on...?"

I couldn't understand. My mind couldn't keep up.

I knew something dangerous was happening, but all my body could do was tremble. I couldn't move even an inch.

It was while I stood there confused and unable to understand what was happening that I saw the source of it all.

"■■■■!"

A growl unlike anything I had ever heard since the day I was born echoed through the city.

My childhood friend and I looked up in the same direction.

It was less than fifty meters away.

A ridiculously enormous shadow stood on the rooftop of an office building.

It looked like something straight out of a Hollywood movie poster.

A creature that could only be called a dragon had landed on the rooftop.

Even from this distance, its total length appeared to be at least ten meters.

It had enormous wings. Its four-legged body was powerfully built and covered in scales.

Yet something about it was wrong.

Its purple skin looked poisonous, as though it were infected with some terrible disease.

Its eyes were vacant. The air swirling around it was stained a sinister purple that was visible even from a distance.

It was infected with some kind of disease.

No.

That thing was the source of the disease itself.

The connection between the abnormal situation and that dragon finally clicked into place in my mind.

Something was happening that I could do absolutely nothing about.

Once I understood that, my mind finally began to function normally again.

"W-we have to run..."

I grabbed my childhood friend's hand and started running as fast as I could. Turning our backs on the dragon, we simply ran as far away as possible.

I no longer had the luxury of worrying about the people lying collapsed around us.

If that diseased dragon was the cause of this abnormal situation, then we had to get away from it.

Looking back, my decision had been the right one.

Not long after we began putting distance between ourselves and that place, a gigantic wall covered the entire district.

"What... is this?"

It looked like the "Berlin Wall" I'd once seen in a video. A gray wall had completely cut an entire district in two.

The area enclosed by that wall would later come to be known as the "Hated Land."

A hell created by the Calamity God, where every kind of poison and death was scattered throughout the land.

Almost without exception, the humans trapped inside it would perish.