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"Thank you for giving… my life to me."
It happened just like that.
Just like that, she was gone. I was left hugging the air and fell to my knees. Desperate, I tried to find where she was; but she was no longer there. There was nothing.
My tears still streamed down my face, and I could still feel the warmth of her body against my chest.
Confused and alone, I shouted her name as loud as I possibly could, hoping, wishing… begging the cruel world to let her hear my cries. But she was gone - I knew that.
I had no reason to leave the world I was in.
But without her, I had no reason to stay.
My tears never stopped flowing, and yet I somehow felt at peace. I was as calm as the wind. Still on the ground, I closed my eyes.
As everything faded to black, I saw the familiar faces of all the friends I knew. And as each one disappeared one by one, I too faded.
And then… I could see it. The oddly familiar streets of modern day Japan. An oddly familiar girl walking by, humming an oddly familiar tune.
I turned as she passed, and reached out to grab her.
And everything was black.
I didn't know anything anymore… It felt as if I was drifting through darkness. There was no way to tell what was up and what was down; what was left and what was right.
"Where am I…? Who am I…?" No response. "What am I doing here…?" I could feel nothing but the cold, gripping, darkness on my body, and the warm tears that still stained my face.
The only thing I could see in my head was an image of a girl - a small girl with silver hair.
Who was she? I didn't even know that. But though I didn't know, I spoke her name.
"Kana… de…" My arm raised itself into the air, trying to grasp the name my mouth had just spoken. But no matter how far it reached, it never grasped it. The name floated away, eternally out of the reach of my hand.
The girl named Kanade Tachibana. She floated away, forever out of reach.
Floating… just like…
An Angel.
Chapter One: Obliteration and Resurrection
'An Angel?' A heartbeat. The darkness receded from a blinding white light, yet it was somehow still dark. But now, I wasn't drifting. There was solidity beneath me.
"Alright, we finally have a damn pulse." A rough voice spoke out. I had no idea who it was, but it was strangely familiar. All I could see was the ever-stretching darkness.
"Well, it's about time." I recognized this voice too. Who… who are you people? "He's probably going to be up soon. Hinata. How are things looking?"
"Still nothing. Damn, this thing is worthless!" I heard the sound of plastic slamming into something. "Can't believe they dumped this junk on you, Fujimaki."
"Hey, what do you want from me? They were gone by the time I got here. All the note said was 'Use this to contact us, we have the other communicator. Just say Battlefront's passphrase and we'll answer'."
"Hinata, calm down. We'll figure something out. Fujimaki, how's he looking?" All the voices and names were so familiar, yet so distant. Just like that girl… Can I just sleep now?
"Ahh, damn. The moron's falling back asleep!"
"What!?" Loud footsteps made their way towards me, but I still couldn't see anything. "Damn moron, do not go to sleep!" Could you stop calling me a moron…? And I'm so tired… I can't see, my body hurts, and I just want to drift away.
"Yuri, this is not good!"
"I know that, shut up!" I felt their warm hands press against my body. I… I just want to sleep. "God dammit, Otonashi! Wake up!"
"Yuri, we have to do it. Now."
"But, he might not need…"
"YURI!" The one they called Yuri was silent for a few seconds. "Come on!"
"…I got it, alright?" What are you two talking about? "Takamatsu. Get it ready, we're going to have to force his memories." Wait, my memories?
"Yuri…" Another voice… this one was more familiar than the rest. You… "Will… Will Yuzuru be okay?" You! What's your name!?
"Don't worry. I won't let this moron forget anything." Forget? I don't want to forget! "Fujimaki. Do it!" No, wait! Whatever you're doing, STOP! "Okay, Otonashi."
"NOW!"
"This is an order! Don't make Kanade cry!" Kanade!?
…
…
…
I shot up with a jolt; a cold sweat covered my entire body. As I sat there, the blackness began to fade away. It was replaced with the image of a small, rundown hotel room.
Past the metal railing that was supposed to be a footboard for the bed I was on, sitting in the corner, tears streaming down her face, she sat there. Her eyes were probably as wide as mine.
"KANADE!" Ignoring whatever injuries I may have add, I leapt over the railing of the bed and wrapped my arms around her as quickly as humanly possible. "Kanade!"
"Yuzuru…" I could feel something wet and warm hitting my shoulders as I embraced her. "You're… okay." I grabbed her shoulders and pushed myself back, making sure to get a good look at her face - make sure it was really her.
"Yeah. I'm here. Please don't cry anymore." I held her again, but our touching embrace was quickly shattered.
"If you two are done, I'd like to progress things along." Reluctantly breaking away from my hold on Kanade, I looked back to finally start taking in my surroundings.
The seven of us - Kanade, Yuri, Hinata, Fujimaki, Ooyama, Takamatsu, and myself - were all in what seemed to be a tiny room inside of an ancient hotel. There was no drywall left on the walls, and the wood that was left was all rotted to the point that you could probably break it with a poke.
A small window with almost no glass left sat in the wall next to the decrepit bed I had been on only a few seconds ago, and a small, wooden end table with what looked like a walkie-talkie on it sat on the floor on the other side.
To the left of the end table was a small foyer, barely big enough for two people to squish into, which led into an almost broken down door.
"Right… So, for starters." I stood, wiping whatever tears may have still been streaming down my face. "WHERE THE HELL ARE WE!?"
Yuri took a step forward and brushed her hair behind her ear. When she crossed her arms, I made sure to prepare for a lengthy explanation.
"Starting with the big ones, eh, Otonashi? Well, no matter what question you asked, we'd have to give you roughly the same answer. An answer that is, in all honesty, very simple. We're in the Afterlife."
"The Afterlife? Wait, but I thought we just…"
"We did."
"Then, why are…?"
"Isn't it obvious?" Yuri glared into the air. "It's the Shadows."
"Allow me to explain." Now Takamatsu stepped forward, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "We are not currently inside of The Afterlife that we knew at the school."
When we left the 'School World', we did so because we realized that there was no other option. With the so-called Shadow Virus running rampant, we were forced to come to terms with our past and be reborn; or stay and be consumed.
At your suggestion, we probably would have obliterated ourselves without the Shadows, but we were too late at that point. The Shadows were there to force us back into the real world. At least… that was what we believed.
"When I went down below the guild…"
I discovered that The Afterlife was like a program that was built and maintained by a figure that could very well be considered God. It took people who died with regrets and trapped their souls inside of a different life - one where they could fulfill their desires so that they could pass on in peace.
The Shadows are a Virus in that program. After hundreds, maybe even thousands of years, his sanity couldn't hold on. He became an NPC, one of the things he had created. In his depravity, he infected the Afterlife Program he created with the Shadows.
Under his command, the Virus would hunt down human souls like us and forcibly obliterate them. Their souls would leave their bodies, leaving behind nothing but an NPC.
And so, I destroyed it all. In doing that, I saved The Afterlife from the Shadows. And, in a sense, I did. But it wasn't The Afterlife that I saved - it was an Afterlife.
"What do you mean…?"
"It means that there are more worlds."
"More… worlds?"
"Don't you get it? Isn't it strange that all of the human souls in our world were teenagers? That no matter how long we stayed there, we never aged or progressed to the next year? Nothing ever changed. But why would that be?"
Everyone remained quiet, like they knew it was rhetorical. They all knew the answer, and I was just starting to come to a realization.
"Then that means…"
"That's right. The answer, in all honesty, is simple."
We're in The Afterlife - a different Afterlife. One meant to serve as the Afterlife for those who died past the age of a high school student. This is different than our world; The School World. This is a world…
Infested with Shadows.
It was… a lot to take in at one moment, to say the least.
I sat there, holding my head as I tried to comprehend the vastness of it all. But no matter how many times I thought it over, one thing stood out in my mind. One unanswered question.
"Why us? Why are we here now?" Yuri frowned. I had seen that frown before, so I knew what she was going to say before she said it.
"That one, I can't help you with. There's only so much that we can figure out alone."
"At any rate." Hinata took two steps to stand in front of me, and offered his arms to help Kanade and I up. As he pulled us both to our feet, he continued. "We're here now and there isn't anything we can do about it just yet."
"I guess so." The same stupid smile that he always wore was still plastered on his face, but I could tell something was off. "So, where's everyone else?"
"That's the primary issue, actually. Us four, excluding Fujimaki and Ooyama, have only seen the seven of us here."
"That's pretty much how it is." Fujimaki tapped his shirasaya against his shoulder as he spoke. "Me and Ooyama 'spawned', for lack of a better word, here with T.K. and Matsushita. They took off about… seven days ago?"
"Wai- seven!? How long have you guys been here!?"
"Hmm… I dunno. Kind of lost count. Just to put it in perspective, you were out for a solid four days after your body appeared." My head started to hurt again. How long was I actually drifting inside of that black void?
"Otonashi. For all we know, it could have been months since our graduation."
"MONTHS!?"
"Yep. Nobody could know how long it would take to be reborn after getting obliterated. Even for whomever it is that got here first… it could have taken years."
"At least, in theory." Takamatsu took off his glasses - and somehow the rest of his clothes. "Take a look around for a second." After doing as he said, he continued. "Everything - and I mean everything - in this world is in this sorry state."
"Well, that's depressing." I lightly pressed my hand against the wood inside the walls, but the support beams simply cracked and broke into dust as I did. "Also, why are you stripping?"
"We've discovered that this is due to the Shadow Virus."
You can think of it as a quite literal virus, in fact. When a virus infects a computer, it can potentially harm any files or programs. If you personified that virus, it would go around corrupting everything it touched. And that, indeed, is what this is.
The mere presence of a Shadow has the potential to corrode and decay everything nearby. Prolonged exposure can increase aging speed by multiples that could possibly be in the high hundreds. A mere second touching them might as well be standing around for several years.
But it's also this that proves it hasn't been long since we arrived.
"This building is falling apart due to the Shadows, so if it had been years, it's almost guaranteed that where stand now wouldn't even exist."
"That's great, now put your shirt back on."
"We need to move." Yuri was leaned back against the wall whose corner led to the entrance of the room, her knees bent halfway. "They're coming."
Only a second, maybe even less, after she said that, the door - or what was left of it - shot like a rocket, crashing into the wall within seconds. As I watched each piece shatter into splinters, I could see it from the corner of my eye.
'A Shadow!' I reached down to my waist with both hands, but as I grabbed for what I was reaching for… 'My gun is… gone!?'
Two gunshots.
The whole ordeal took about four seconds, maybe five, to play through. It broke down the door, and Yuri shot before I would have been able to draw my gun if I had it. It stood for a split second - one that seemed like an eternity -, two holes gaping its face (?).
"RRRAAAHHHHHHH!" It let out a high-pitched scream before it faded into the air.
"There're more of them. Battlefront, get ready! On the count of three!" Everyone else took a battle stance with their weapons in hand as she started. "One." But I…
"Wait guys. I don't-"
"Two."
"-have a…"
"Three!"
"GUN!? Ahh, screw it!" As the other five charged out of the room, I took Kanade's hand and ran out after them.
As I ran through the doorway, I heard more of the high-pitched screams. Yuri had charged them with her knife. It was pretty risky, but I guess she knew what she was doing.
"No time to lose! Now that Otonashi is awake, we're abandoning the hotel. Let's go!" Each one of us nodded in agreement as we charged down the hallway. It was only a few seconds after that when we rounded the corner, and ran into danger.
"Damn!" At least twenty Shadows stood, almost as if they were waiting for us. Yuri took aim immediately "What a waste of bullets." As she began to pull the trigger, her gun was lowered.
"Then don't bother." Fujimaki walked ahead of her, his hand still partially on the barrel of Yuri's pistol. "Get the hell…" As he approached them, he unsheathed his shirasaya. "HELL OUT OF MY WAY!"
It only took a split second, and Fujimaki's body had seemingly teleported. He was already behind them, his blade in one hand and sheathe in the other, and his arms spread out wide.
"R… AAAAHHHHHHHH!" Each one of the Shadows faded away at the same time, leaving nothing behind but a scream.
"Let's go, keep moving!" Yuri ran passed Fujimaki as he slid his sheathe back over the blade, and the rest of us followed.
"A simple thanks. Is that too much to ask?"
After about ten flights of stairs - and fifty or so Shadows - we finally came out to the remains of the hotel's lobby. What was probably once a grand, plate glass sliding door was now nothing but bent metal and shattered glass. It was kind of depressing.
"Heads up, they'll be there by the time we get out."
"Wait, what'll be there?" She didn't answer.
Instead, she charged ahead of the rest of us, her gun and pistol at the ready. Almost the exact second her feet hit the cracked pavement, four or five rose from the ground.
"Die, you damned freaks!" Two gunshots and an extremely large ranged slice were all it took. Three of them had bullet holes piercing them near the top, and the other were in two pieces. These ones didn't even have time to scream. "Alright… they're gone."
'I swear, these people never cease to amaze me.' At that point, I was already out of breath. I figured it had something to do with not moving for at least four days.
"Alright, people." Yuri left her battle stance and holstered both her weapons. She looked around before she turned to us. "We're splitting up. Hinata. You, Fujimaki, and Ooyama head south. Otonashi, Kanade, and Takamatsu, you're with me. We're going north."
"Right," we all said in unison, with the exception of Kanade. She just nodded.
"Hey, Otonashi." I looked over at Hinata just in time to see him toss a gleaming, black, handgun towards me. It was my Glock 17, the pistol I had used in the other world. "Make sure ya check, make sure it works right."
"Thanks, Hinata." I smiled as I caught it. "We'll catch up with you guys later." He nodded, returning my smile, and ran off with Fujimaki and Ooyama right behind him. "Alright, o' fearless leader. Let's go." No response. "…Yuri?"
"I need to talk to you, Otonashi." She didn't even look in my direction. As such, I could only see the side of her face. But even from that, I could tell she was serious.
"About what?" Takamatsu had the same look on his face as he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. He even put his shirt back on.
"I want you to tell me about everything that happened… when Yui passed on."