Story by Tsugumi Ohba. Please support the official release of his work. The following is an adaptation of the original manga in novel format purely for the sake of enjoyment and the practice of writing.
CHAPTER 1: GIFT FROM AN ANGEL
A stern reminder to keep up with their studies.
The sound of a ringing bell.
An additional warning to remain out of trouble drowned out from the scrapes of chairs shoved across the floor followed by the clatter of feet.
The class instructor sighed in defeat before compiling the last few remaining utensils atop his desk inside a box filled with stacks of papers, office supplies, and finally the name plate at the front removing the last vestige of the semesters it had endured and any affiliation it had with him.
Students exchanged grins and laughter as they slid their bags across their shoulders, having already forgotten who had commanded their attention for months and where they stood, their eyes now only on each other.
Instead, the topics that arose amongst the youths looked to the future. To what school would they go next? Are you excited for the school trip? We should head out and do some Karaoke! Summer break had awoken with a snap and stretched to a standing position for these third-year junior high youths.
"You don't have the grades for Shuei High, Sayuri. Too bad you didn't accept my invitations to study together."
Conversation crossed the room over a young man whose unkempt hair hung over glassy eyes. Along with their words, so did their attention pass through him as if the seat had been bare.
"Yashiro… those weren't invitations to study together and you know it…"
Soon the boy rose up, his frayed backpack dangling down behind him from straps that dangled precariously with only a few threads to keep it hanging.
"We'll still be friends when High school starts, right Suzuki?!"
As one junior high wrapped his arms around another, wordlessly the distant boy put one foot in front of the other. In a trance, he passed them by.
"Stop being so weird, let go of me dude!"
The boy was gone.
Passing by shelves inside a convenience store outstretched a hand from the pocket of a school issued jacket. Clutching a small bag labeled 'Melon Bread' he lifted it up and kept walking forward past the doorway unnoticed. Sliding the crinkling package inside his front pouch where the hand had just been, without warning he sluggishly came to a stop.
There was no hesitation in his limbs, nor fear in his eyes.
With some more crinkling of plastic he dropped the bread back onto the nearest vacant shelf space and let his free hand fall to his side as he turned around and walked right back out onto the busy street.
The stride of his feet dragged more purposefully with each stranger his shoulders carelessly brushed against. Eventually a shadow loomed over the boy as he approached a large apartment complex.
Automatic doors opened at the call of an electronic ding and his gaze finally rose from his feet and scanned the lobby for something or someone.
He hadn't been inside here before.
Tightly packed inside of an elevator with adults carrying suitcases and luggage, the boy watched the lighted row of buttons designated for the floors of the building. The residents were making several stops, but not the right one. He forced his hand through as passengers hastily traded places with one another and lit up the top key.
His demeanor earned him a few passing glances, but closing his eyes and leaning back, he let out a long, drawn out breath through his nose. Listening to the slide of the metal jaws of the elevator let out individuals one by one, finally the ascent reached its peak and as his eyes opened, he was suddenly the only one remaining.
The distant sound of machinery and a chorus of people reached his ears. He had not quite reached his destination.
The blue sky sprawled above him as the elevator quietly shut behind him. On the rooftop there was little to see, but the boy didn't look around. Stepping up onto the elevated edge, he looked down below at the countless traveling specks of people.
All with lives of their own, all going somewhere, saying something, and all unaware of what was going on above them.
His lips parted and he whispered only for himself to hear. "I… just wanted to be happy." Those softly spoken words as his last breath, he raised one foot and put it front of the other as he did so many times before. He shut his eyes so he did not have to see what was to come.
Time to die.
A step into the sky, his body careened forward and the boy casually dropped from atop the twenty-three-floor building.
Gusts of air tearing through his limbs and clothes, gripping his limps and twirling him as if he was a small toy, he heard the wind whistling sharply past his ears muting the approaching sound of civilization.
The rush of cool atmosphere blasting past him.
Spinning.
Flailing.
Then overwhelming silence.
Stillness.
I'm still conscious? He thought. Don't tell me there's an afterlife after all? If I can't get away from living then what is the point in dying…
There wasn't silence. The familiar, faint sounds of the hustle and bustle of crowds gradually reached his ears. In disbelief, he cracked open his eyes and the bright blue sky returned into his view.
His body was dangling. Looking down he saw his feet swaying side to side helplessly and far beneath them the blissfully unaware populace.
I… stopped falling? No… The people below are getting smaller. I'm… rising?
White billowy feathers crawled out from side to side above him, and between those a face looking down on him bearing a smile, with alarmingly red eyes softly watching his reaction. It appeared to be a young girl, her features child-like; however, her skin was a perfect ivory unlike anything he has seen before. Then right above her short and equally white hair, floated what could only be called shining halos of light.
So, they are real… this has to be an angel, right? That means there really is a heaven… If that's where I'm heading, then maybe I could finally be…
"I caught you just in time!" the cherubic being giggled. "Greetings, Mirai Kakehashi!"
"In time?" the boy muttered thoughtlessly.
"Yep! Look around, Mirai. There's no body on the ground and nobody is making a fuss. Of course you didn't die, not when I've caught you." Her grin grew wider, and her captive's mind finally started to turn with realization.
"Just drop me."
"What?!" she cried. "Why would I do that?! I'm your guardian angel after all."
"Guardian angel? Don't play with me… I did not ask for this. Let me go," the look of defeat returned to Mirai as his body went limp within the arms of his savior.
"No! I came here to make you happy, Mirai. Isn't that what you wanted?"
"Happy? I've given up on that… It can't happen. I was never meant to be happy. Not ever since…" He exhaled as if lacking the effort to talk and explain himself. "Please… let me die."
The angel's cheer faded. "Ever since you've lost your parents in a fire and had to live with your aunt."
Mirai's eyes widened and he tried to turn and look back at this strange being.
"After they took you in, they quickly grew cold. They had two children but all of the chores were given to you. Whenever you messed up, they beat you until they grew tired of it. Their kids would join and pick on you but you were not allowed to defend yourself. And now your parents will be expecting you to be getting a job so you can hand them your paycheck."
Mirai listened in disbelief as she listed out every bit of his miserable life matter-of-factly.
She really does know everything… maybe she really is a guardian angel.
"I have no friends in school… no goal of my own… not even anywhere else to go. You understand then that I have no hope to live, right? So…"
"Exactly!" the angel's bliss jarringly bloomed again. "That's why I, Nasse, am here to grant you the hope to live!"
"How could I possibly get anything like that?"
"It's easy! For starters, with the freedom to go anywhere you want in a matter of seconds; or the power of love, the kind that can replace friends and family with everyone around you."
"You can't give those to someone… You can't touch or see freedom and love…"
"Hm? You're looking at one of them right now, Mirai!" she looked to her right as the large, motionless wings reached out into the sky, expanding far out in front of them. "Angel wings! They can make anyone fly faster than the human eye can see! That is the freedom to be wherever you wish."
The wings suspended the pair in the air without flapping or concern for the air around them as if time had stopped.
Impossible…
"And then there's love…"
Her delicate arms had been wrapped under Mirai's own, until she took one out miraculously without affecting Mirai's security in the air. A vibrant, glowing ring hovered mysteriously around the wrist of her raised arm. Suddenly a deep red spot began to crystallize in her hand that matched the color of the ring, growing until finally it formed a pointed, translucent diamond. His junior high instructor would have rather called it an octahedron.
It had appeared from nothing, as if it had been imagined into thin air.
"This is an angel's arrow! Specifically, a Red Arrow. Pierce a person with this and they will fall deeply in love with you for thirty-three days, cherishing you more than they ever thought they could care for anyone."
A laugh, more like a cough, escaped his lips. "A cupid's arrow? Give me a break…"
"You don't find them lovely? Just say the word and both can be yours, Mirai. I need your permission."
Rolling his eyes, the drifting boy gave a disillusioned shrug. "Yeah, sure, whatever. Then will you go away?"
"Here you go!" she waved her hand with the strange band around it and the so-called Red Arrow moved with it as if notched in place with an invisible string in her fingertips. Just as quickly as it appeared, it folded in on itself like a puzzle until it vanished as if it had never been there. Her hand free, she pointed up above her head.
Looking closely, it wasn't simply one halo she wore but a tightly packed set of four. Wagging her finger like a wand, one by one they spun out of place until only the center disk remained while the other three, with a life of their own, descended to a bewildered Mirai.
"What are those—" the boy called out before the rings rammed into his right arm and neck and he reflexively reached up to protect himself as a sheering sound clicked three times. However, there was no pain. No blood on his hands. Blinking, Mirai couldn't believe it.
Two of them had now surrounded his wrist and the last he could see below his chin—it was now resting a few inches around the base of his neck.
"Think of them as what you humans call accessories. These two bracelets hold your arrows and this necklace here carries your very own wings!"
"No! What the hell!" Mirai panicked as he continued to grasp at the bright objects, only to discover they were not objects at all. "Why can't they come off?!"
"Why do you want them off? You can't do that, they cannot interact with the physical world. These are celestial gifts. The material realm cannot interfere with these."
"They're stuck? This makes no sense!"
"Don't worry! No one else can see them. Only angels and those like you can see them! Here, let's get you back to the rooftop and you can see for yourself!"
The girl who called herself Nasse held him tighter and turned the two around, now arriving where Mirai had stepped off only moments before. Gently, she set him in the center and floated off to the side with a giddy expression.
A few moments of silence went before as they started at each other.
"Go on! Bring out your wings! Fly!"
Can I really do that? There's no way…
"Just call for them. Think about your wings and they'll answer!"
The boy shook his head. "Come on out, angel wings…" He exhaustedly called out while raisings his hands. "Or something," he added, suddenly embarrassed.
No later did the sound of what could have been endless sheets of cloth being shook out, his angel's necklace reacted and from an ethereal space behind him a couple of outrageously large limbs made from feathers spread out into the world.
"So huge! They really came out! W-Wings…" the boy's head spun left and right as he took in the breadth of these strange appendages.
"It's okay! Like I said, they can't hit anything, and almost no one can spot them. When you take off, nothing at all can stop you. Now come on, get off the ground!" Her smile got even bigger, surely it could not grow further, and she was now practically shooing him away.
The boy's dubious expression began to be replaced with shock, "I can… fly?" Before he could finish his breath, his feet lost the hard surface beneath him and he was being propelled upward by a force unknown, and his shock now gave way to sheer terror.
His cry was snuffed out as he faded out of view in a flash of light, now hurtling towards a direction Mirai had no clue of, and the country around him stretched into a dazzling panorama as it passed him by as if a spun globe.
Buildings he didn't recognize waved by faster than he could take notice.
Clouds buffeted his body; he chased the bend of the horizon.
Land was gone. Crashing waves of nothing but blue ocean as far as the eye could see.
But he could see more. The sky darkened and streams of light filled the sky, countless stars dragged across his saturated vision, and the afternoon of Japan had become just a distant memory. Clock towers and foreign landscapes blossomed in sight.
Then for a moment his view blurred, and warmth slid across his cheeks.
Why am I crying?
I had always dreamt as a kid to fly away, far away, and let the skies carry me.
The world… I didn't know it was so beautiful. This is incredible.
As his mind went to ease, he thought to stop and take a proper look, and he had now arrived at even further destination, his feet landing on top of a temple in an untamed forest. The boy had recognized its shape in history books, an ancient ziggurat built by people who've long since been dead.
Resting on the hard stone, he gazed out into the wilderness. Green, so much green.
This is freedom, huh?
"Wow! You did great! You only screamed out for a moment!"
A bubbly voice called out and the angel from before practically popped into the atmosphere a few feet from the boy.
"Well… I stepped off a building just a couple moments ago without wings, so…" he passively remarked, before looking up to where the voice came from. Whatever he said, it never affected her.
"Did you have fun? If you move that fast, you can steal whatever you want and never be caught. No one could stop you!" she laughed.
Is she for real right now?
"And the Red Arrows, they can control the minds of anyone! You wouldn't need to steal anything from them, they'd give you whatever you ask for. Awesome, right?"
"Are you…" he hesitated, as if unsure if he should ask. "Are you really an angel?"
"Huh?" Totally innocent, her head tilted. "Yes, I am your angel."
"Stealing… brainwashing…" he dropped her heavy gaze and looked downward. "Those are the kind of things a demon would be suggesting…"
Her mouth's edges went up instantly, back to usual. "Ha! There are no such things as demons. If they exist, they would only be found in the hearts of man."
Mirai remembered the melon bread he had considered stealing before and unconsciously folded in on himself.
"I mean," she put a finger to her chin thoughtfully, "your aunt and her husband would definitely have their heart filled with demons after having taken the lives of others."
His heart skipped a beat.
"Did you just say… they committed murder?!"
"Your parents and little brother, Mirai." She didn't skip a bit. "It looked like a car accident but they caused that fire to kill them."
"No…" He was on his feet. "Why are you lying to me?"
"I've been watching you all along Mirai, I know everything about you." Then she added firmly, "I'm not lying to you."
Angels, wings, murder… is this all a joke?
Mirai buried his face in his hands, hiding it all from view.
"Why don't you use your arrows?" he could her voice closer. "Anyone affected by the Red will answer any question you have. I promise you, Mirai."
His hands slowly parted from his horrified expression and his eyes fell down onto the rings clinging to his right hand.
The boy was gone.
Warm beer slid down the woman's throat as the can tipped back, upended, pouring every last drop of the dark liquid before a loud crackle of metal as she crushed the now empty container and lazily tossed it onto the other side of the couch.
On a small, fuzzy screen another woman slapped a handsome man across the face and stormed out of a room as dramatic music played. With a flick the visual changed and revealed a game show with a individual inside of large shower, covered in glue, as money poured down and he desperately tried to stick every piece of paper that flew down while an applauding, roaring crowd cheered vicariously.
"Tsk… There's nothing good on…" The woman now held a small remote, pointing at the television set, which she similar chucked to the side as she reclined back into the sofa in resignation, raising her other hand that was followed by a trail of smoke. She raised the cigarette delicately in her fingers to her reddened lips and inhaled deeply, shutting her heavily outlined eyes.
After taking a long drag out of the cigarette and exhaled a plume of smoke, she opened her eyes and jerked forward in her seat out of fright. "You scared me, you creep!"
A boy with a bizarre, intense look in his eyes. The front door hung wide open.
"Close the damn door. You're late. The dishes, the garbage, the laundry, trying to put all onto your cousins, hm? Who do you think you are?"
"I really don't want my aunt to fall in love with me… but I guess I don't have a choice."
He raised his right hand straight across and aimed at the dumfounded woman. Otherworldly bracelets activated and inches from the reach of his fingers an eight-sided glass with a stretched, sharp looking tip was produced, indistinguishably from when an angel had done so before him.
"Um… excuse me?" she gritted her teeth, but not from the spectacle. There was no spectacle. The boy was just behind her with a raised arm. "Are you going to hit me? You wouldn't dare!"
As she rose from her seat after crushing her cigarette in an ash tray on a nearby table, the Red Arrow protruded outward in a line of crimson that stretch from the boy and directly into the chest of his aunt.
She didn't cry out in pain. There was no force from the impact.
The only reaction was her ceased advance. Her face betrayed a sense of rushing sensation. The boy watched her cautiously, not knowing what to expect next.
"Mirai…" escaped her lips. Her eyes found the boy again and she drifted towards him. The gentleness in her expression, the soft tone—he had never even known such things were possible from this cold woman.
Reflexively Mirai stepped back away from her but she caught up and gripped onto his jacket and pleaded him, "Oh Mirai… I'm so glad you're home. Where have you been? I've missed you so much…" Her eyes lingered over to the bedroom door on the other side of the living room they were in. "But my husband…"
"Did…" he stuttered, flabbergasted from this blushing, grown woman, a relative, and a person he has despised from the bottom of his heart, was hanging off of him in desperation. She tried to bring her face closer to his. "Did… Did you and uncle…"
He shoved her back forcefully and his aunt gasped. "Did you and uncle kill my parents?!" The question took everything out of him, suddenly he was out of breath, and his heart pounded in anxiety.
The rosy color of her cheeks vanished to white and she backed away. Before his eyes, once again in mere seconds she completely transformed; from a school girl with a crush to a lady about to shatter in pieces.
"N-No… I mean… I didn't want to! I love you!" Her eyes erupted tears that were nowhere near in sight just a moment ago, which poured down her shaking face. "It was all my husband's fault! Yes, your uncle!"
Mirai's mouth and eyes widened in disbelief.
Mom. Dad. My little brother… Akira… It was years ago, but he remembered them keenly.
So keenly.
"Why… Why would you do something like that? Tell me!"
She turned away from him as if in physical pain, pulling at her hair. "My father had a large estate… he refused to die. Then your uncle said that if my older brother died, your father, he… he said that it would all go to us! Please forgive me, baby! I love you!"
His stomach turned in revulsion at her words. The room started to spin in his head as he clung to the nearest wall for support.
"What the hell is with all the screaming? I can't get any sleep… Oh, Mirai's back home?"
An unsightly man with a disheveled appearance, wearing a tank top revealing his hairy chest and arms, entered the room with a grumpy expression while scratching his belly.
His aunt turned on him in a second. "He's the one that caused the car accident! He knew that your family take you and your brother to school every morning… he did something to the car that caused an explosion!"
The man stopped in his tracks, his jaw dropping. "What… why are you saying this in front of him?!" Something snapped in his expression, and he went into a rage. His large form jumped forward and suddenly he had a hold of his wife and his knuckles turned white in his iron grip. His face was twisted in an ugly rage.
He had meant to die that day, Mirai recalled. He had forgotten his art homework and had to go retrieve it As he had ran across the sidewalk a massive boom sounded behind him and he lost his footing. When he had turned over and looked back, the three most important people in the world to him were engulfed in flames.
His survival had only meant that he got to live with his family's killers and be treated like a slave. They were nice to him initially, welcoming even. But as soon as they came upon some money, that money not meant for them, any resemblance to their warm reception vanished.
I should be dead. I should have been in the car with them…
"No…" Mirai spat out. He had slid down from the wall and hit the floor. His voice was nearly inaudible. A venomous sob. "No! I'm not the one who should have died! It should have been you!"
"Ow!" a cry went out.
A scratch now ran down his uncle's face from where his aunt had clawed him to escape his violent embrace. She stumbled away frantically and crashed into a kitchen cabinet, then looked at Mirai.
Her face was a mess from the tears running through her makeup, and as she watched her nephew curse him while crumpled onto the floor, she trembled as if in immense distress. Her hands reached for the drawers and she pulled one back so hard it came loose. Her hand saved one thing that came flying out.
"What are you doing…" the uncle took a step back, sweat beading down his face.
Mirai looked up from his curled position.
He would soon wish he had never raised his head.
"I love you, Mirai! I'm so sorry! I deserve—" her voice cut off into a sickening spurt as she dragged her arm across her neck.
She had grabbed a large kitchen knife.
"A-Aunt?! What is she doing?" Mirai shot up to his feet in a flash.
"It's because you told her to die."
The angel had been right outside the open door watching and now floated over as if gravity did not exist for her.
Blood erupted out of the gaping cut as she didn't hesitate to shove the blade deeper inside her throat until she dropped into a pool of a dark red puddle.
Mirai's hand covered his mouth as a new wave of nausea came over him. "The Red Arrow… it has that much power?! All I did was… I mean… I just…" he struggled to catch his breath, as if he had just been sprinting.
His uncle hadn't moved in inch, he had become no different than a statue. Then came his voice escaping through a slack jaw, "Ambulance… we need an ambulance."
"It's too late for that. I can tell, since I'm an angel," she answered him, although he could not hear her. "Look over there, you can see her own angel coming down and taking her soul away." A glowing, porcelain figure had descended right through the ceiling, heeding no mind to the living or even Nasse, and started to pull a clear image out of his aunt like pulling a sheet off a bed. It was a snow-white replica of his aunt that he could see right through… her soul… and without comment departed the house. "See? She's dead."
She's dead.
She took a knife and stabbed herself and now she is dead.
One moment she was alive and the next she is gone.
Just like my father, mother, and brother…
Mirai gripped his chest as his breathing grew louder. His heart pounded, blood pumping throughout his body at a rapid pace. Each pump an affirmation.
I'm alive.
I'm alive!
A memory unfolded in his mind that he had long since buried in his subconscious.
It was an ordinary afternoon with his mother inside their home. Mirai was barely able to look over the countertop where they stood, even atop the footstool he balanced on. In his small hands there was a picture of four stick figures smiling outside next a tree. A picnic.
"Look at what I drew mommy!" he had demanded proudly for her attention.
She looked down fondly at her son and then to the piece of paper covered in crayon.
"Everyone looks so happy, Mirai." She smiled back down at the small child. "I always believed that people were born to be happy, just like this. That people keep on living for the sake of being happier. That's what I choose to think. So Mirai… promise me that you'll try and live a happy life, the way you drew us. Okay?"
He screamed.
As loud as he could.
"Mirai! Are you okay?" his guardian angel drew close, airborne as always.
"…That's right… I completely forgot… I have to live…"
I tried to kill myself… What have I been doing all this time?
The picture he had drawn was long gone, like much of what he had from that time. Much of it was lost over the years living with his aunt and uncle who did not wish to be reminded of his family and how things were.
But the memory was etched into his heart and soul.
"I have to live… for my family… Mirai rose to his feet slowly as he wiped his face to remove the tears.
"Yes! That's right! That is why I am here!" the angel motioned enthusiastically. "Every human can find hope, no matter who they used to be. I, the angel of innocence, Nasse, promise this!"
Promise…
Mirai turned to this endlessly positive being. "You claim to be my guardian angel and to have been watching over me all this time. You say you want me to be happy… but why haven't I seen you until today? Why now, when I had almost thrown everything away?"
"I'm sorry Mirai… We can't do anything other than what we are ordered… Angels can't normally come down unless they are to ferry the dead."
Eyebrows raised, the boy asked, "Orders? Does that mean…?"
"From God. Who else?" she nodded.
God…
Mirai looked around and was reminded of his uncle nearby, yelling unintelligibly into a phone and throwing on a jacket.
"Okay… fine. I want to be happy." He turned away from his uncle, his aunt, and what had been his home and his hell for almost as long as he can remember, and went out the door, followed by his guardian angel.
By the time his uncle came over, crying out for his nephew… there was no sign of him.
Earlier, a day in Earth's time…
"The end of my seat in the celestial realm is nigh…"
It was a voice that traveled not through air by time and space. It echoed and bounced across the starry void, reaching the souls of those addressed.
"Over the ages I have done my best to grow and protect mankind. But now it is necessary that we find the next human to replace me up on high. A younger, fresher power, to watch over the world as I have done."
The overpowering waves of thought came from a dark figure, long hair cascading down his head. It seemed to be a person, and it seemed not. Wrapped inside a sphere of blinding light his visage was only a dark silhouette.
"Custom dictates that this individual is to be chosen among the thirteen angels I have gathered here. Each of you must select one candidate across the divide between the material and the celestial, and link yourselves to them, providing a connection to here and there."
Scattered in a uniform pattern were the very same numbered angelic beings that held their focus entirely on the speaker. Their appearances drastically differed from one another. A human's body chiseled out of a marble and adorned with feathers across their shoulders, arms, neck, feet, and anywhere else.
One among them was the angel known as Nasse, rather petite in comparison and perpetually smiling, with a hint of determination in her eyes.
This is my chance! I am going to make him happy!
"Whoever is selected to be the next god of mankind will have their allotted angel retire into a life of peace and tranquility at their side, serving as their right hand."
The other angels did not dare respond, or were not capable, but they each ruminated in their own thoughts and feelings.
I've risen my way to the top, special rank… I am tired of ferrying the dead.
I shall pick the first human I come across and try to finish up with this god selection process immediately…
I'm only a second-rank… what hope do I have of granting my candidate success?
"Your dictated time limit is nine-hundred, ninety-nine days on Earth starting…" the drift of consciousness paused for a moment.
"…Now."
Thirteen angels there were, and thirteen angels had gone.
Down to Earth, to find a human.
Their next master.
