Chapter 226: Ghost

Ishiki turned back and saw Yuki and the broad shouldered man exiting the school building through the gap that Kenji’s body had made in the wall.

Yuki looked at Kenji on the top of the wall and then Ishiki… she had heard all of what Kenji had to say. She opened her mouth to speak but didn’t know what to say.

But Ishiki’s attention was caught to something else. There were two unknown things he saw. First was something akin to more walls far in the distance… they were made up of metal and seemed to be sturdied than anything Ishiki had seen.

There was an almost invisible blue barrier of light above them forming a transparent dome. It was like a City!

The second was the source of noise, there were two machines that descended from the direction of the far away city. They were unlike anything Ishiki had ever seen in his life, or heard of.

The machines were shaped like large drones, with four propellers that kept it afloat. It’s front was shaped like a eagle’s beak, but from metal. Under the seemingly clean machine, there were several missiles that were ready to take aim any moment.

They circled once and then maintained their safe distance in the air.

A mounted speaker crackled to life.

“Do not move. Identify yourself.”

The weapons mounted on the underside swiveled downward. Aimed at the two figures standing at the school building’s edge.

Ishiki had hidden behind the cover of a building and looked at Yuki, who looked back at him.

They looked at each other for a long moment, before she turned around to face the machines.

He could not go to her, even if he wanted to… that was actually what he hoped. But he knew that he had blood of an innocent girl on his hands and there was no way he could explain it anyone.

Kenji had jumped down the wall to the other side where only the vast ocean resided.

Ishiki waited for some time and then stepped backward, disappearing into the shadow of the nearest ruin’s wall.

He hid and watched Yuki through the gap as she talked with the people that came out from the machines. Then soon the soldier saluted Yuki and said something in a microphone.

The machines instantly lowered themselves and landed in the ruins.

Ishiki didn’t make any move during the time the soldiers were here and were asking questions to Yuki and the Broad soldiered man… then they left with both of them onboard.

He saw them move towards the far away city and not long after he could no longer see them or hear anything from direction.

He sat in the completely destroyed building with his back against the wall and looked at his hands. The right one had blood on the knuckles.

He had sat with blood on his hands before. It was not new. What was new was the particular of what it hadn’t achieved.

’Still alive,’ he thought. ’He’s still alive and he got away.’

He let the thought be there and looked up.

The narrow strip of sky visible through a large crack, was very mesmerizing to look at. It was the real sky. It was very clean and empty…

After a long while, he stood up and ordered the Divine Blood to come forward.

The black liquid moved up from beneath the skin of his face with complete obedience, and it spread in the specific way he imagined it to: jawline, forehead, nose, restructuring the topography of his face.

After the Divine Blood settled over his face like a secondary mask, he looked at his reflection in a broken mirror piece.

The person standing there was not identical to Ishiki anymore, with that he stepped out of the building and towards the city.

At the gates of Neo-Tokyo’s 12th Ward, a supply truck was checked and then allowed to move past the walls to enter the city.

Ishiki was sitting between the metal scraps this truck had picked up from the ruins.

He was observing the world curiously… he had found this truck about two kilometers away from his initial position.

As they moved towards the city, the ruins changed gradually… the collapsed buildings becoming less in number, then past an area they became scarce and the the land was cleared. There was a point at which the street they moved on stopped being rubble-interrupted and became paved and maintained.

He had expected something.

He was not sure what. He had been inside Nexus long enough to understand that the world would have changed in his absence, and the machines had already told him the change was significant.

But understanding that a thing will be different and standing inside the difference were separate experiences, and the gap between them was larger than he had calculated.

After they crossed the walls… it felt as if he had come to some entirely different place.

He jumped out of the truck and moved away without anyone noticing. All around him… glass buildings rose.

Not the buildings he remembered… these were completely different from what the lower sector’s consisted of.

These had been designed by people who had grown up after the Fall. He looked around in astonishment. It felt as if he was actually walking on the Floating heaven that he always dreamed of.

The streets were full and he walked through them without being noticed. [Ghost Blade] helped him stay hidden.

He let himself walk without destination, which was the correct posture for someone trying to understand a place rather than get somewhere in it. He walked and he looked and the city showed him itself in several ways he had never expected.

He saw a market street with stalls that had goods he recognized and goods he didn’t. Then he passed a building where a lot of children in uniform’s walked out talking to each other with a smile.

He saw a public screen on the side of a building, displaying something in text too small to read from the street.

He turned a corner and a small square opened in front of him. Paved clean, there were a few benches, a tree that had been planted deliberately.

Four children were running a game across the paving stones. Their game had rules he could not decode from watching it for thirty seconds.

One of them stopped and looked at Ishiki.

Ishiki crouched and reached the child’s eye level.

“Hey,” he said.

The boy kept looking at him and blinked.

Ishiki scratched the back of his head and asked embarrassingly. “What year is it?”

The boy’s expression moved through a brief arc. This was not a question adults asked unless something was wrong with them or they had a few loose screws.

“Don’t you know, big brother?” He said it with a grin. “It’s Year 63.”

Ishiki looked at him.

The other three children paused their game to watch whatever this adult was doing crouched on their square’s paving stones.

“Year 63,” Ishiki said. “After the Fall?”

“Yeah!” The boy was already turning back to his game. “After the Fall!”

He ran to his friends, leaving Ishiki crouched.

Year 63 after the Fall.

Sixty three years have passed since he entered the Scenario. He was baffled beyond understanding.

He was eighteen years old and sixty three years had passed him.

Everyone he had known back then was either dead or impossibly old assuming they had survived at all.

The world that had existed when the system first reached down and took them had continued for Sixty three years without them. It had broken and rebuilt, broken again and rebuilt once more and arrived at this: a city with clean streets and children playing in squares happily.

The world had not waited for them.

They had spent almost one and a half year in the scenario and while they were gone, sixty three years had passed on earth.

He stood in the square and looked at the city that had grown so much.

He looked at the children running their game.

They had never seen the actual fall of everything. They had been born into the inheritance of a catastrophe that was, to them, history.

He put one foot in front of the other.

Forward.

He did not know what he was going to do… he had no destination, no motive or even a semblance of one.

He only knew one thing with the clarity.

Forward was the only direction.

Not because it led anywhere or promised anything. But because the person who stopped moving became part of the landscape.

He remembered something he had heard long ago.

’You can not build a new object without the old one as its substrate. You could not move forward without carrying the mass of everything you were moving from.’

He understood that now.

He was eighteen years old and Sixty three years old. Just learning that the home he was returning to had been replaced by a city he had never seen.

He was a ghost moving through a city of the living.

Or perhaps — and this thought arrived quietly settling into his mind — perhaps it was the reverse.

Perhaps the city was the ghost.

Perhaps everything he was walking through was the ghost of what the world had been trying to become before the Fall interrupted it.

He walked into the city of Year 63.

Not towards home.

Not anywhere he had ever been.

But forward.

Because forward — in the end, in the beginning, in every moment that had ever mattered — was the only direction that had ever existed.

[End of Volume 2 – Heartless Angel]

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