Chapter 1: Prologue
[Thank you for choosing Asiana Airlines. Our plane will be arriving at Tengu Airport shortly. All passengers, please follow the crew's instructions───.]
"............"
Feeling the seat tremble beneath me, I stared blankly out the window.
The wings of the plane, with their two massive engines, stretched straight out. As it cut through the clouds, the scenery on the ground, which had been hidden from view, came into sight.
There was a huge crater, easily several dozen kilometers across, as if a meteor had struck it. The inside of the crater was filled with green. Against that green backdrop, a gray city stood packed tightly within the crater.
[Once again, thank you for choosing Asiana Airlines. Our plane is about to arrive in Tengu City──.]
Tengu City. Hearing that place name clearly over the speaker, I couldn't hide my excitement.
It really was Tengu City.
The Tengu City where Spirits often appeared.
The Tengu City with an abnormally high rate of Spacequake incidents.
And the city that served as a setting in the light novel "Date A Live."
"...Seriously. That's amazing."
Seeing a city I'd only ever seen in anime now standing right before my eyes, I muttered that to myself.
○○○
A few days ago.
That day was an ordinary day, no different from any other──or at least, it would be a stretch to call it ordinary in any sense.
It all started the moment I stood in front of the bathroom mirror.
"...What the hell is this."
My hair, which had been black like it had been dipped in paint, had turned white. And the eye color I almost failed to notice because I was so focused on my hair had also changed from my original black irises to foreign-looking blue eyes.
What. I never dyed my hair. And I never wore colored contacts to look cool either.
What the hell is this...?
Standing in front of the mirror, I kept tilting my head, questioning the sudden change in my body. I even wondered if some intruder had sneaked into the house and dyed my hair while I was asleep... but no way that could happen.
"Then what the hell is this...?!"
Unable to make sense of the situation, I grabbed my head and twisted my body around. The reflection in the mirror twisted along with me. My head already hurt from the cold I caught yesterday after I accidentally missed a step and fell into a lake, and now this unexplained phenomenon was making it feel like the headache was coming back all over again.
Damn it, enough. This is making me dizzy.
Feeling a slight wave of nausea rise in my stomach, I let out a deep sigh.
I have to go to school tomorrow, so why the hell did my hair suddenly turn white? If I go to school like this, everyone’s going to go crazy yelling, 'A student dyed their hair?!'
"Haa... should I go to a salon or something."
Muttering to myself, I reached out one hand and braced it against the wall. I kept sighing as if my lungs were sinking into the floor, then looked back at the mirror, thinking, Why did my hair turn white, anyway?
I wished it were just a hallucination, but even when I looked again, what I saw in the mirror was still the same.
Hair white enough to make a polar bear step aside, eyes dyed a vivid blue like some foreigner, and a blue flame flickering against my left eye even though I didn't have a lighter... huh?
"What the hell."
Startled, I jerked back and hurriedly brought my hand toward my left eye. The mirror clearly showed a flame, but strangely enough, even when I held my hand near it, I didn't feel any heat at all.
Was I seeing things? Or had I somehow taken drugs without realizing it?
It was only for a moment that I blanked out at the unreal sight.
Suddenly, a stabbing pain like a knife plunged into my head hit me.
"...?!"
It was such a terrible headache that I couldn't even speak. Clutching my head, I collapsed to my knees in front of the sink. The pain kept crashing over me, and I could feel something piercing through my brain again and again.
How long did I stay crouched there, drenched in cold sweat?
I didn't know how many minutes had passed, but the headache slowly began to fade. Once the stabbing sensation finally disappeared completely, I kept breathing hard and used my trembling arms and legs to force my crouched body upright again.
I had sweated so much that my reflection looked like I'd just taken a shower.
"...Ha. Good grief."
Then, when I put a little force into my left eye, where the blue flame was burning, spark—light flashed and several small bones appeared around me.
I controlled those bones freely, floating them all in midair, and then let out a dry laugh as I looked at the huge thing filling the background behind my reflection.
It was something like a dragon's skull, about one meter in size. Taking all of that in, I couldn't control my trembling voice as I muttered to myself.
"...I became Sans."
My name is Kang Haneul. I'm 18 years old, and this year I'm a second-year in high school... and somehow, I had turned into Sans... no, to be more exact, into an anthropomorphized version of Sans.
○○○
My teacher used to say that in life, you never know what might happen. But even so, this is way too much, damn it.
No matter how I looked at it, nothing changed. Even after slapping my cheeks hard and washing my face to clear my head, the sight before me didn't change at all. It had already been ten minutes since I started a staring contest with the me in the mirror. No matter how much I denied it, reality wouldn't budge, and I could only let out a long sigh before finally admitting it.
Sans. A character from Undertale, the indie game made by Toby Fox. A skeleton, once the most obsessively adored character in the Undertale fandom, and the one who spawned all sorts of memes like, 'Wow! Sans! You know Undertale!'
And I had become that Sans. But also the anthropomorphized version of Sans.
For a moment, all sorts of random thoughts crossed my mind as I looked at my reflection—Why isn't he a skeleton?Why anthropomorphized of all things?Ugh, white hair and blue eyes, and TS is the standard, what a waste—but I really was relieved that I wasn't a skeleton, that I was anthropomorphized, and that I hadn't been hit with TS, so I let out a huge sigh of relief.
Me, who had originally been human, suddenly turning into a skeleton? Just imagining it was horrifying.
I don't know why the thought of TS being a waste even crossed my mind, but anyway, if things had gone wrong, my perfectly normal equipment could have vanished on the spot, and that made me feel a chill too.
Right. Cutting to the chase, the point is that I became Sans. But I had no idea why. After the headache I felt in the bathroom, the memory that I had become Sans and the methods for using Sans's abilities simply settled naturally into my head.
I thought about going to a hospital, but then I realized that wasn't a good idea either.
I had no clue how I was supposed to explain it at a hospital, and if I went up to a doctor and said, 'Wow, doctor! I woke up and turned into Sans! Wow, Sans! Papyrus! Thud-thud!' then it wouldn't be strange if they handed me a one-way express ticket to the psychiatric ward right away.
And if I showed them the abilities I'd suddenly gained, like bone summoning and whatever else, I'd obviously be dragged off by the government and sealed in formalin while still alive, so the option of going to a hospital was even less appealing.
"Should I call Jisoo and Younghee or something?"
I wondered if I should ask my friends for advice, but I had no idea how to explain what I was going through. If they didn't hang up after treating me like a lunatic halfway through, that would be a miracle.
"Ughhh...! This is seriously such a headache! What the hell is this...!"
...Hm?
"Wait. Why did I just use the expression 'such a headache,' which I never even use normally?"
Could it be that now that I'd become Sans, it was slipping out unconsciously? The phrase, one I'd never even used before, felt like it had stuck to my tongue.
"...Such a headache. What the hell is this──."
At that exact moment, my phone, which I'd left on the table, suddenly started vibrating and let out a warning tone: beep-beep.
An emergency disaster alert. Did another COVID case pop up nearby? Thinking that, I picked up my phone, and a text message appeared on the screen.
【Emergency Disaster Alert】
[Korea Meteorological Administration] 04/02 08:32 A magnitude B Spacequake has occurred 51 km south-southwest of Geoje, South Gyeongsang. Please be careful of safety hazards such as shockwaves, and nearby residents should remain calm and evacuate to the nearest shelter.
"...Hm?"
Reading the message from the disaster alert, I narrowed my eyes.
Not COVID, not an earthquake, not a typhoon, nothing. I've received disaster alerts plenty of times in my life, but this was the first time I'd ever heard of a disaster called a Spacequake.
What kind of disaster is a Spacequake? But weirdly enough, even though it was definitely the first time I'd heard of it, it felt strangely familiar... huh?
"...What is this."
Wondering what a Spacequake was, I went to Google and searched for it. And when dozens of results poured up, I widened my eyes in surprise.
Like the ground had been carved out by a sharp blade, a circular crater had formed in the middle of a city paved with asphalt roads.
With each photo I flipped through in the search results, scenes I'd never seen before appeared on the screen. And every time I looked at them, I kept feeling a strange sense of déjà vu.
I kept scrolling through the images. By the time I had gone through about a hundred of them, my eyes locked onto the description beneath one of the pictures.
A massive Spacequake that first occurred near the border between China and Mongolia 30 years ago, then struck the central part of the Eurasian continent and caused 150 million casualties.
The Great Disaster of Eurasia.
"This... don't tell me...?"
It was a familiar term I was sure I'd heard somewhere before.
Looking at a news article with that as its title, I swallowed hard.
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