When I burst through the doors of the Shrine, an unexpected scene was waiting for me outside.

  Hikari and Shiina had barely moved from their previous locations. The angel’s mighty expression had vanished. Shiina, on the other hand, had a rather complex frown, as if she couldn’t really follow what was happening.

  The reason for their grim faces became obvious when I took notice of the archangels. They were still imprisoned inside Hikari’s invisible barrier, but were no longer the only three people inside.

  There was someone else there. Despite having logged in, Ayumi was motionless, her gaze facing downwards, and held by Michael.

  Damn you, AI Assistant! I put my trust in you! You could have put her anywhere, but it just had to be inside the barrier!

  Moments after I pushed open the doors, everyone’s attention was on me.

  Hikari briefly smiled in relief at seeing my not-so-triumphant return.

  “Takeya, I am glad you are all right. Is it fair to assume Ayumi’s reappearance was your doing?”

  “Yeah, you could say that. I got a lot of help though.”

  The angel made a questioning look. “Help? From whom?”

  “It’s not important. Right now, we need to help her get out of there.”

  “Well, that’s going to be—”

  A scream cut through our conversation.

  “You, brat. You managed to enter the Controller room?” Michael howled. “How did you figure out the password?”

  An uncontrollable smirk rose on my face.

  “What, that little puzzle? ‘What’s the most important thing in the world’? It’s such an obvious answer. Angels couldn’t answer it because they are all conditioned to just say ‘God’ right away. Only those people who are unshackled by this society could have answered something different. I guess that’s the point of the password, right?”

  “Eh.”

  However, my explanation, instead of leaving the archangels flabbergasted, instead just produced laughter.

  “Eheh. Ahahaha! This must be a joke, surely. Something this funny couldn’t be true.”

  What the hell is he laughing about? What’s so funny?

  “Let me tell you something, little brat. A little treat for you, if you will. The password is the same for everyone. The AI gatekeeper or whatever it is doesn’t make a different answer for different people.”

  Wait. What is he saying? The answer… is always the same?

  But how’s that possible? After all, the answer…

  “Ayumi,” the man spat out the word with disgust. “That’s the password. That was the ‘most important thing in the world’ for the creators of the angels.”

  The cold air seemed to freeze in place. No one said anything. Hikari looked at me as if asking for answers, but I had none to give her.

  Raphael was the one who broke the silence. “We were careless. If anyone could possibly have figured out the password, it would have been the brat’s boyfriend. You should have gotten rid of him back on Earth, just to be safe.”

  “H-How was I supposed to predict that he would meet Hikari and make his way here?!” Michael said, his voice breaking.

  “And as soon as he got inside, the AI assistant could have helped him figure out what to do. Tsk,” Gabriel added.

  “H-Hmph. No matter! Bringing this stupid kid here won’t stop the installation of the new system. As soon as the angels are gone, there will be no evidence they ever existed. No one can go after us,” Michael said.

  Despite being locked inside Hikari’s barrier, the situation was still overwhelmingly in their favor. Hikari couldn’t hold them back forever. Even if she could trounce them, the Illumination couldn’t be stopped. Thus, it was only natural that the archangels were still feeling cocky.

  However, the dire situation never registered with me.

  That was because, ever since Raphael had opened his mouth, I noticed that a certain someone was already awake, just waiting for the right time to make a comeback.

  “Hey, who are you calling stupid?”

  A childish, high-pitched voice cut through the tension in the air like a hot knife through butter.

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  “You’ve finally woken up, hm?” The man holding her increased the grip on her frail body. “Just in time to see the disappearance of your little virtual friends.”

  “Well, actually, I don’t think I will,” she replied with such a jovial tone that it caught everyone by surprise.

  “Hmph. What can you do in this situation, hm? You’re just a powerless—”

  Right then and there, the unforeseen happened. With sheer strength, Ayumi broke free of the Archangel’s grip, flinging his arms out. It was an unreal sight; with her small body, there was no way she could have wrestled out of a grown man’s grip so easily.

  Michael groaned, and kneeled in agony. Before the other two could grab her, she ran over to us with a light gait. Unlike what happened before, when the archangels were stopped in their tracks by Hikari’s barrier, she walked right through it. She didn’t hesitate or get stopped at all. The girl broke through it effortlessly, the accompanying shrill of glass breaking piercing the cold air.

  Fair to say, Hikari was dumbfounded.

  For a split second, Ayumi locked her eyes with mine—and smiled.

  Her emerald green eyes shone with such intensity, such fervor, that it brought me to tears.

  There was no mistaking it.

  This was her.

  Ayumi was back.

  I tried my best, but in spite of the situation, my sobbing didn’t stop.

  Seeing Ayumi, the real Ayumi, back after an entire week—it seemed like a miracle.

  “Wow, Takkun!? What’s wrong? I’ve never seen you cry like this!”

  Seeing Ayumi’s eyes fixated on my lame figure was the push I needed to control myself. “It’s nothing… I-I’m just glad to have the real you back.”

  “Huh? Real me…? Oh, right. You had to interact with my proxy this entire week—”

  However, our reunion was short-lived.

  “You… how did you do that?” Gabriel asked, equally bamboozled as everyone else. “You shouldn’t be able to…”

  “What do you think I spent an entire week doing?” she said, turning back to the archangels. “I went and got some help from like-minded people who care when someone is about to commit genocide of a million people,” she responded with disgust permeating her words. “And through a certain connection, I got myself familiar with my own permissions. I have been training on how to use them while people found a way to break me in.”

  The archangels stared at the girl in front of them. It seemed the reality of the situation had just kicked in. This girl, who they’d thought to be no more than a footnote in their plan, had utterly crushed any hope they had of seeing it to completion.

  “Now, there’s much to do, and you little worms are in the way. So how about you have a taste of your own medicine?”

  “What… are you…” Michael tried to say, but the pain he felt was too strong to form a coherent sentence.

  “I’m going to banish you. In other words, remove your permissions. Ah, and forcibly log you out too. Some people are already looking for you on the other side.”

  “No, wait…”

  “Too late.”

  Ayumi moved faster than I had ever seen her move in my life, with a fury I had never seen on her either.

  However, someone moved faster than she did.

  “...Huh?” The girl said as she stopped in her tracks.

  Someone stood in-between her and the archangels.

  “Ayumi… please. Don’t do this.”

  She looked at the much taller girl straight at her eyes. “Shiina? But why?”

  There was no point in asking what she was doing. Instead, Ayumi asked “why”. Why was Shiina trying to stop Ayumi from banishing the archangels?

  The answer was obvious; but, of course, Ayumi didn’t know that.

  “Don’t you understand what’s going on? What’s at stake here? Angels—”

  “I understand. I understand everything,” the former angel said.

  And yet she didn’t budge.

  Something more important than her own existence—heck, the existence of all angels—was at stake for her.

  That was the perpetuation of the “lie” angels had been told all their existence.

  Yet, someone who was in the exact same situation as she was wouldn’t let her resistance stand.

  “Shiina, do you not get it?” Hikari said from beside me. “The archangels have been deceiving us! God, our religion, our powers—all of it is a lie. They even banished you because you knew too much! And yet you still stand by their side?”

  Shiina bit her lip. It took a while for her to answer. “It doesn’t matter. Without them, without all of this… What’s the point?”

  She paused, and looked straight into Hikari’s eyes. “Y-you should have never given me back my memories. At least as a human, I would have survived the I-Illumination. I could have kept on living in ignorance and rebuilt my life. B-but now, like this… I have nothing left. No powers, no duty… nothing. I’m worth… nothing. So it’s better to just let it all end as God intended.”

  Shiina’s words lingered in the stifled air like miasma. It’s not like Ayumi and Hikari couldn’t just shove her aside using their powers. But something about seeing that woman they both barely knew, and yet cared deeply about, not able to let go, made them stay rooted on the spot.

  A shrill laughter pierced the air, from none other than the ringleader Shiina was trying to defend. “Eheh. Ahahaha! That’s right! You’re worth nothing! You—all of you—you are all worthless! You’re not even worth the bytes you take up on this computer.”

  Something about what Michael said struck me the wrong way. As if there was a grain of sand stuck in my shoe that I couldn’t get rid of, and he had just reminded me it was there.

  Are these the ramblings of a lunatic, or something else?

  “It’s better that you all perish still believing in this delusion of ‘god’ or whatever crap you pray to. I’d suggest you trust in your little virtual friends and let things run their course, Ayumi.”

  Hikari was the first to act upon what he was saying. She asked the question none of us had dared to so far. Probably the most important question she had ever asked in her entire life.

  “Ayumi, please tell me. Is what Michael is saying the truth? Are we…”

  Ayumi, however, did not respond. She just lowered her head, as if saying the words out loud would break some sort of taboo.

  “Guess you haven’t figured it all out yet, little angel, so let me spell it out for you.” Gabriel spewed with venom in her tone.

  “All of you—the angel and the humans—all of you are just AIs. NPCs. Whatever you want to call yourselves, it doesn’t matter to me. None of you exist outside this simulation.”

  That was the moment my entire world came crashing down.