That was the only way to describe the oppressive lack of anything in front of my eyes.
The dim light coming from inside the house was barely enough to illuminate our group and nothing beyond.
However, since our voices weren’t echoing, it was clear we were outside. Chilly air seeped itself into me while I wasn’t paying attention. It wasn’t windy, but somehow it felt colder here than it did in the middle of winter back in Japan.
This cold wasn’t natural. It was an aberrant event that didn’t belong in this world.
As my eyes got used to the darkness, I managed to squint out a hint of light in the distance. It was spread out all over the horizon. Yet, it was so dim it was impossible to determine where or what it was coming from.
The dread I felt only accentuated when I realized that I couldn’t see anything up in the sky. Not the moon or even the dimmest of stars adorned the pitch-black void.
“Tsk. Now that it has come to this, we must switch to Plan B. Grab onto me,” Hikari instructed.
Shiina and I acted as the angel ordered and grabbed both her arms.
“I’m going to teleport us closer to the Shrine. For the sake of brevity, I will not make you faint this time. I apologize if you start to feel unwell.”
Without any warning, we vanished from existence.
Every external sensation of my body—from the feeling of my shoes on the ground to the unnatural cold on my exposed skin—was instantly erased. That would normally be a panic-inducing phenomenon, but there wasn’t even enough time to panic.
Moments later, the missing sensations returned with a vengeance. It wasn’t only the cold—in the span of less than a second, light and sound bombarded me. The intense dizziness that followed made me stumble backwards. Thankfully, a hand supported me just before I fell.
“Takeya, are you okay?” Shiina asked after helping me get up.
How the heck is she still fine after that?!
“Yeah… I think I am.”
With my normal state of mind slowly being restored, I began to notice my surroundings. We had reappeared in what appeared to be an alley. The ambient light was still dim, though it was much brighter than the ones at Hikari’s place. That was because the buildings around us were made of pure white walls which reflected most of the light. The angel was already ahead of us, at the entrance to a larger street. She was standing still, her gaze lost in the distance.
What’s up with all this noise?
An uncanny sound surrounded us, whose origin and timbre I couldn’t pinpoint. It was incomprehensible, almost sounding like white noise. It wasn’t especially loud, but it permeated the air so thickly, it made it hard to focus on anything else.
“Hey, Hikari, what is th—” I began asking as I moved towards her.
Though, before I could finish my question, I came face to face with what the angel was so absorbed in. And, just like with her, speech evaded me.
Turns out the narrow street we were in led to a much larger avenue. It was so wide that I could barely see the buildings on the other side in these lighting conditions. But it wasn’t the source of Hikari’s awe.
The large avenue led to a massive, and I mean a massive, circular plaza. In the absolute darkness, it would have been impossible to see its full extension. However, the entire plaza was illuminated by countless shimmering balls of light. These weak lights floated a few meters above the floor of the plaza, spread out in a grid. In such a large quantity they formed a lighthouse whose light pierced through the unnatural night.
With the plaza illuminated, its full extension—and everything happening within it—was apparent.
Under the lights, there were people.
Hundreds of thousands of people were crammed in this space. There were so many they couldn’t all fit into the plaza. Some spilled over to the avenue and two others in the distance. All of them, every single one of them, was on their knees with their arms crossed in front of their chests. They all looked up at the sky; the same sky whose light had abandoned them.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
They were all praying.
Only when I realized this did the source of the low rumbling permeating the air click. It appeared that each person was not only praying, but they were chanting in a low voice. The compound murmur coming from thousands of people chanting at the same time was almost unbearable.
“This is… something else,” I said, awestruck. “Is this sort of thing normal for you guys?”
“Not at all,” answered Hikari, having snapped from her trance. “This was also foretold in the stories about the Illumination. Each angel must offer their last prayers to God so they can be judged on their work—” Hikari cut herself off with a click of her tongue. “Well, not that it matters now.” She turned back to Shiina and I, who were still spellbound by the view. “I cannot teleport us any closer to the Shrine, so we will have to fly the rest of the way.”
The way she exposed her plan was so nonchalant that it took me a second to realize she had mentioned flying.
Did I hear that right? We’re gonna be flying? Not sure if you’re aware, but humans cannot fly.
“Regrettably… but do not worry,” the angel responded to my question. “I will carry all of us there. It will be similar to how I moved everyone in class during the fault yesterday. Though, to save aether, I will make myself float and bring you two along. Do not worry, we will not go too high, but be careful to not lose your grip.”
“I’m more worried about splitting my head open on the ground…”
Despite my complaints, Hikari grabbed our forearms with a tight grip.
“Try not to scream, or we will grab everyone’s attention. That would be undesirable.”
Propelled by Hikari’s levitation, my feet left the ground. My fight-or-flight response kicked in when we were about one meter in the air, and my grip on Hikari’s arm became so tight that I was worried it was hurting her. Yet, her own grip strength was absurd; the weight of my body and Shiina’s was easily being carried by her small body like it was nothing.
Reading my mind as usual, Hikari answered my concerns. “Do not worry about me. My body is sturdier than most. I can handle carrying both of you just fine.”
“Is there anything you can’t do? At this point, I half-expect you are capable of blowing up a city on your own.”
“Only one? You are undervaluing my abilities.”
“…Really?”
This short conversation helped me take my mind off the critical point of our flight—flying over the countless angels praying and the lights illuminating them.
As we flew, I noticed that we were on a collision course with a building, located directly across from the avenue we came from. It was rather large, with many blocky, tower-like protrusions, with seemingly no rhyme or reason to them.
I wondered if we were going to slam into one of the structures, which would have been less than ideal. Thankfully, Hikari’s control was precise and we zigzagged between the protrusions without hitting one. Greeting us on the other side of the building was a wide darkness spread as far as I could see.
As we began our slow descent, I realized that the darkness was in fact a forest. We made landfall on a path running through a clearing in the middle of it.
Only when Hikari released my hand did I feel like I had returned to reality.
A large bead of sweat ran down my face. “Absurd… That was totally absurd.”
“Everyone feels like that the first time they fly,” Hikari responded with a straight face.
“‘Everyone?’ Are you kidnapping random humans and flying them like this just to scare the life out of them?”
“I prefer to not answer that question,” she said with a smirk.
I sighed and took a look around me.
“So where are we?”
“This is… the p-path leading to the Shrine in the center of the S-Sacred Forest,” answered Shiina with a shaky voice. “To think I’d ever set foot in this place…”
“I have never been here before either, but the Shrine should be just ahead. Let us proceed before the archangels notice our presence.”
Despite one of those balls of light appearing next to us, likely conjured by the angel, our surroundings were much darker than in the city. I could discern only a few details. The path we were on was flanked by water on both sides, urging us forward. I couldn’t see the edge of this mass of water, nor how deep it was. A low rumbling noise in the distance, like that of falling water, caught my attention.
Following Hikari’s lead, we strode along the path cutting through the darkness of the lake until a small, circular building came into view. It was shaped like a tall cylinder, with a dome on top supported by various marble columns. A set of double wooden doors led inside. All things considered, it had a simple design that didn’t evoke the idea that this was the most sacred place for angels.
Without hesitation, Hikari went right up to the doors leading inside the Shrine. However, she stopped right in front of them, not stepping inside, as if in a daze.
“Huh? Hikari, what’s wrong?”
“I was expecting a barrier preventing us from entering the Shrine, but it appears there is nothing of the sort.”
I couldn’t fully appreciate the meaning of those words until Shiina spoke up.
“D-Do you mean that all this time there was nothing preventing normal angels from entering the Shrine?”
“I believe so. Is that not ironic? Such mythos behind it, and all this time nothing was preventing us from going in. Perhaps—”
Hikari’s sentence was cut short by a deafening sound akin to that of shattering glass. It originated right next to us and assaulted my ears with the loudness of a jet engine. My eardrums screech with pain.
“What the heck?!” I yelled.
Shiina immediately understood what had happened. “A barrier broke… Did you set it up, Hikari?”
How wasn’t she affected by that noise?
“Right on cue.”