I was brought back to consciousness in a snap. My body was a sweaty mess despite the cold atmosphere. Although I was extremely uncomfortable, I could not move an inch.

  The vestiges of a nightmare still lingered on my mind. It was a bizarre, irrational fever dream, yet one which felt tangibly real.

  A world falling apart from its very core. Corruption spreading to all corners, making life impossible. But among the destruction, countless balls of light came down from the sky. They swerved through the air and made the corruption retreat, working to revert the world to normalcy.

  So that no one could find out the truth.

  So that the lies could keep going forever.

  Despite being awake, I revisited this nightmare over and over again. Like an earworm, it refused to leave my thoughts.

  Was it real? Or was it the product of my crushed mind?

  I felt disoriented, unable to grasp reality.

  Trying to dispel the fog surrounding my thoughts, I turned on my bedside lamp. As if it had been a trigger, the nightmare was replaced by the bitter-sweet memories I chose to retain.

  Everything flooded in at once. Despite knowing I was here because of what we managed to accomplish, the gut-punch of the consequences overwhelmed me.

  She was gone. And this time, she wasn’t coming back.

  What was left of her was an incomplete person. A husk. A puzzle with a missing piece.

  When I noticed, streaks of tears were running down my face.

  * * *

  My sobbing stopped on its own some undetermined time later.

  No matter how much it pained me, I had to move forward. After all, I was the one who decided to take this route. Compared to the alternative, living in a world of lies, unable to ever know the truth, this was a piece of cake.

  Moving forward meant not only accepting that Ayumi was gone, but also that I would have to live with the burden of the truth.

  The truth of this world I called my own.

  But how could I accept such a thing?

  Everything was a fabrication.

  A lie.

  I wandered around my room aimlessly until I decided to take a peek outside.

  To my surprise, it was snowing.

  Light flakes fell from the sky in droves, dancing in the air before making their way to the ground. They covered the sleeping city in a white blanket.

  I opened the window and reached out, letting the snow fall on my hand.

  There was no forecast of snow for the next few days.

  That means this really is a backup, isn’t it?

  Despite all the insane events I had gone through, this realization was the most shocking of all.

  The cherry on top of this cake of absurdity.

  I had become a time traveler.

  The last time it snowed was three weeks before the Illumination. The night before Ayumi and I went on the exploration of that abandoned mansion.

  With the cold air rushing in from the outside, I began feeling my body heat being drained due to the sweat still clinging to my clothes.

  Before I fell ill, I closed the window and left the cold outside.

  That was when I noticed the snow globe sitting on my desk, the one my sister gave me all those years ago.

  I took it in my hand and gave it a gentle shaking to clear my mind. The fake snow swirled around in the liquid. After I stopped, it settled down, covering the little house and the pine tree, along with the ground, with a thick layer of white. The snowman inside passively watched the snow fall with a content smile etched onto its face.

  I gave it another shake.

  Then another.

  When the snow settled again, I shook it once more.

  Each time I did, I wondered how that snowman saw the world from inside the globe. For him, the entire world was this tiny globe. And that world was real, and so was the snow, and the house, and the pine tree, and of course himself.

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  The only event in the world inside the snow globe was the snow falling. The snowman had no idea what caused it. For him, it was just how the world worked. Sometimes, the world shook, the snow swirled around, and then the snow fell. You could say, for the snowman, that was nature itself. Something he could never hope to understand. An act of God.

  But, of course, that was ludicrous. The cause of the snow wasn’t nature, something beyond anyone’s control.

  I, shaking the snow globe, knew the truth.

  It was caused by someone.

  Me.

  For that snowman, I might as well be a god.

  But really, what makes me any different from this snowman?

  In this world, where it was snowing, everything was real. Me, my house, my family, my friends, and everything else I can think about.

  Just like the snowman, I was stuck inside my own snow globe, watching the snow fall with a content smile. Everything that happened in this world wasn’t caused by nature, by some God, nor by an obscure force that no scientist could ever hope to uncover. It was a meticulously crafted system inside a computer somewhere. A system designed to trick us into thinking it was a fool’s errand to understand how it worked.

  Now that I had seen a glimpse of the truth, I could no longer watch the snow fall passively without wondering who shook this snow globe and why.

  I was no longer just another snowman.

  Why did this world exist?

  Who—or what—made it and for what purpose?

  Why did angels exist?

  Who were the archangels, and why didn’t they seem to care about killing a million people?

  Everything that happened had a cause. A cause I could understand with my feeble mind. Knowing that simple fact became crushing.

  A curse.

  The curse of knowing that the world was much more than it appears. Yet, at the same time, it was much simpler than anyone believed. A world that was as fake as it was fragile.

  This was the curse Ayumi talked about. The curse of holding the knowledge and not being able to act upon it.

  But if I wanted to keep living, I would have to find an anchor amidst this sea of unknowns.

  I thought and thought about it. I spent many hours racking my brain, trying to figure out what I could latch onto.

  Just as I was about to give up, a lightbulb shone through the darkness.

  At that moment, I felt as if I were Descartes when he wrote the Cogito.

  I decided on the two facts that would keep me sane.

  First, that this world was real.

  I was real, and so was everything around me. Even if it was a simulation, a copy of the real world, it felt real for those of us living in Gaia.

  The second fact, the saving grace—I was human.

  According to Ayumi, I was a human.

  If what she said was true, then everyone living in this simulation was human.

  As human as anyone living in the real world.

  That included angels. Though they might be a bit more unique, they were humans like everyone else living on Earth. They weren’t simple cogs of a big machine someone could just throw away when they were no longer useful. They were worth protecting too.

  Which just made the archangels’ actions even more perplexing.

  It was at this point my thoughts became increasingly chaotic. I thought about many things, and nothing at all, at the same time.

  Eventually, my tiredness took over, and I fell into a disturbed sleep, bringing my worries into the land of dreams.

  * * *

  What’s the point of even being here?

  That was the question making the rounds in my mind as we took our first steps in an old—but to me quite familiar—house. Our boots left melting chunks of snow on the floor as a reminder of the fresh snowfall from last night. The faint winter light was weakened by the translucent paper panes covering the windows, giving the hallway a somber atmosphere. It felt like the house itself had absorbed my mood.

  In stark contrast to my disposition, the short girl in front of me seemed to be in particularly high spirits—is what I would be saying, but Ayumi’s mood somehow didn’t quite feel right. Almost as if she was here out of obligation.

  Just like I was.

  “Hmm, you’re particularly quiet today, Takkun. Usually you’d be complaining left and right about us coming here.”

  Her voice was the same as the Ayumi I’d ever known, but I couldn’t ever forget. This wasn’t the real Ayumi.

  Seeing as I didn’t respond, she called me again. “Takkun?”

  I was so lost in thoughts all alone that it took a while to reply.

  “Sorry. What were you saying?”

  “Hmm, you’re a bit strange today. What’s wrong?”

  Did she notice? She knows me this well, doesn’t she?

  “Sorry, I had a really bad night.”

  Actually, I’m just not sure what to say to you.

  How should I act around you? I mean, the last memory I have of you was… but that wasn’t you.

  Gosh, how confusing can this get?

  “You should have told me that before we came here! Hmm… should we go back home in that case? We can always come back another day.”

  It’s not like it matters anymore.

  I ended up accepting Ayumi’s proposal and, without ever making it beyond the hallway, we turned back the way we came.

  On the way down the hill, Ayumi began one of her usual ramblings. Maybe she was trying to cheer me up, but it had the opposite effect. I tried to pay attention to her, but I just couldn’t. It wasn’t because her topic wasn’t engaging or anything. I couldn’t listen to her voice.

  She was, by every single molecule, Ayumi. She looked the same, had the same voice and speech patterns. For those reasons, I was feeling quite flustered. Before, I found her behavior weird because I didn’t know the cause. Now that I knew the cause, and knew I could not do anything to change the situation, I was having trouble returning to normality.

  Is this also part of the curse Ayumi talked about?

  Ayumi spent the rest of the journey home hopping around happily, almost as if she herself didn’t want to be there in the first place.

  My preposterous supernatural days were over. The world was stable once again, and it seems those beings were doing exactly what they should—keeping to themselves, hidden from normal folk.

  While still having my mind absent from reality, I found myself thinking back to those women.

  What are they doing now?

  How did they deal with the aftermath of the incident?

  I wonder if they’ll ever pay me a visit.

  At that last thought, I couldn’t help but grin widely, feeling somewhat nostalgic.

  Ayumi, with her keen senses, spotted my reaction right away. “Takkun, what is it? What are you thinking about?”

  “Oh, nothing special.”

  As a sad smile made its way onto my face, I turned my gaze away from Ayumi’s dull green eyes to somewhere up in the sky.

  “Just thinking about a pair of angels.”

  Haruhi + Highschool DxD + Heaven's Lost Property, with the virtual reality setting mixed in somehow. My idea was basically "what if The Matrix, but the characters were NPCs?" I think that's a much more interesting scenario to think about. I hope you thought about it a little. Perhaps we're all living in Gaia as well? Initially the objective was for this virtual reality setting to be used to create a slice of life-ish story without very high stakes like Haruhi does. Can you tell I like Haruhi? Because I do.

  Earth XIV (because there were more "Earths"), and then Gaia Proxy (I think you can figure out this one). Eventually, for what I consider to be the "current" version, I landed on A World Without God after much brainstorming, although I wasn't too happy with that name initially. Nowadays though, I've grown rather fond of it. There's a double meaning to it, but with this Volume 1, you can only guess one of them.

  not such a roaring success that can justify investing much more into it, both from MoonQuill and me personally.

  and that can be more successful.

  The Angels' Epilogue and it covers what happens to Shiina and Hikari after the ending of Volume 1. It needs a lot of work (I just re-read it recently, it's actual garbage, and it doesn't even fit the current lore of this version anyway), so no promises as to when I'll be able to get it here, but I hope you'll give it a read when that time comes.

  here on my carrd. I'm more active on BlueSky and my Discord server nowadays.