The inside of the transport ship was filled with a massive mechanical roar that pounded at his ears.
There, a man sat with his head bowed and his arms crossed.
He had his eyes closed, as if surrendering his body and waiting for time to pass.
Beside him, square-packed supplies were lined up neatly.
On the exposed side, there were pictures of firearms and ammunition.
All of them were tightly secured, not moving an inch as if they were one with the aircraft.
The man was simply letting the seat belt hold him in place, but that alone was enough to tell what kind of person he was.
He was...
a soldier.
“...”
With a short breath, the man lifted his head and looked out the window across from him.
White clouds drifted through the blue sky, but the sky reflected in his eyes seemed strangely blurred.
And as the transport continued forward, that blur only deepened.
He wasn’t trembling.
Anyone heading toward a battlefield would naturally be filled with fear.
But his face was calm, like a still surface with not even a breeze stirring it.
“Is it... about time...?”
What was about time?
The aircraft was still high in the sky.
It was descending little by little, but that should have only just begun.
They were still a long way from landing.
Rumble rumble rumble
As the transport plane began to slow, he muttered under his breath.
The fuselage shuddered.
He could feel his body being pressed upward.
Without a doubt, that meant the pilot was looking toward the destination.
“This is... right, isn’t it?”
The expression that had been calm just moments ago was now tinged with worry.
It was less hesitation than checking his own actions one more time.
Boom!!
A massive explosion erupted beside the plane.
Flames instantly swelled, and before long the aircraft was engulfed in fire.
The blast force shoved the walls outward and shattered the windows.
Sharp fragments rained down like a storm.
The secured crates flew wildly about, smashing everything around them.
The plane plunged downward at speed.
But that was not the pilot’s will.
The giant iron bird, trailing black smoke, headed toward the ground.
And with a roar that shook the earth, it vanished into the flames.
---
“Ugh... cold...”
The man woke with a shiver, jolted awake by sudden pain.
The drowsiness weighing down his eyelids was still there, but he couldn’t ignore it.
Instead of the soft, warm bed and blanket he expected, it felt as if he were lying outside naked.
He rubbed his eyes and sat up, disturbed by the unfamiliar sensation.
His body felt heavy.
And yet, at the same time, it felt light.
Not in the sense that he had simply gained weight... or anything like that.
It wasn’t even possible to gain that much weight in such a short time, and his body felt overflowing with strength.
To put it simply, he felt free, as if he had escaped gravity.
“Ugh... so bright.”
A blinding white light stabbed at his eyes from above.
But rather than telling him not to open them, it felt like a signal to look around quickly.
The man raised a hand to shield his eyes and slowly opened his field of vision.
“What... where is this?”
What met his eyes were towering buildings.
At first, he thought it was the LED light on his room’s ceiling, but soon realized it was the round moonlight hanging in the sky.
Strange.
He couldn’t understand where he was at all.
Hadn’t he fallen asleep in his room as usual?
What was even stranger was that it was the middle of winter.
The next day was supposed to bring a terrifying blizzard.
If he had slept like this, snow should have piled up thickly over him until he became a snowman.
Then, suddenly, a wind blew.
He instinctively held out his palm toward the direction the wind was coming from.
It’s warm...
The breeze brushing his hand wasn’t a bone-chilling cold.
Instead, a gentle warmth wrapped around his fingertips.
This wasn’t winter at all.
It was the feeling of a spring breeze, where life bloomed beautifully.
The man quickly looked around.
Unfamiliar buildings stood packed together, but they were nothing like any city he knew.
It wasn’t the old stone architecture typical of Europe, nor the ornate decorations of the East.
It was closer to a modern American downtown, yet with an even more futuristic feel.
He had never seen a place like this.
No... “strange” didn’t even begin to cover it.
When he first woke, he had simply thought it was an odd place.
But far away, there was something blurry in the distance.
He narrowed his eyes and focused.
If he was staring into empty air right now, he shouldn’t be seeing anything.
At midnight, with the moon hanging overhead, trying to look into the void was something only fools would do.
And yet.
This is a wall. I didn’t see it wrong.
A gigantic wall entered his view.
It was a massive natural formation, something no human-made barrier could ever compare to.
There was only one thing that meant.
This place was below the surface humanity had defined as ground level.
It was underground.
He remembered the enormous pit he had seen in China.
People lived there, in a place large enough to swallow even a forest whole.
Buildings around here wouldn’t be impossible either.
“Why in the world...?”
There was no reason for it.
Transportation would be inconvenient, and there was nothing to gain from living in a pit where moisture would collect everywhere.
“Ah...”
The man let out a sigh and looked up at the sky.
The pure white moon he had just seen was definitely shining.
But it was a little different from the one he had seen in the evening.
Odd.
It wasn’t merely reflecting light and emitting it back; it was as if the moon itself was the source...
“An artificial moon... no.”
At the very least, it felt like it was several kilometers away.
It felt like something far closer to the sky he knew had been placed here.
And then it clicked.
He knew this concept.
“Eternal Sky...”
The sky, yet not the sky.
The concept itself that made the prison called the Ark feel free.
“No way... it can’t be.”
Carefully, he started walking.
Moving blindly through an unknown place was dangerous, but standing still was no different.
To be honest, he thought he’d be fine.
The body moving now felt far lighter than usual.
The weight pressing into the ground was different too, but this wasn’t just confidence anymore.
It felt like he could take down ten local punks in one shot if they all came at him at once.
“What the... there’s nobody here?”
No matter how far he walked, the atmosphere of the unfamiliar city didn’t change easily.
He couldn’t see anyone who might help him, nor anyone who might try to harm him.
It was so quiet he almost wondered if anyone lived here at all.
If there was any good part, it was that there were no cars on the road.
That alone made driving easier.
The memory of a parked car turning a two-lane road into a one-lane crawl, leaving him tense and sweating as he passed, was still awful.
Lost in these thoughts, he came upon an unnamed park.
In the silence, where even his breathing seemed to echo, he felt that same sense of strangeness again.
“It’s too quiet.”
Usually, a park wasn’t something completed by flowers and atmosphere alone.
He could understand there being no people.
It was about the time most people would be asleep at home.
But right now, he couldn’t feel any sign of life.
Even if the grass swayed, that was all there was to it.
The things that should have been in between were missing.
“Ghh...”
His head throbbed as if it were about to split open.
It felt like his eyes might burst.
It was such a strange pain that he had never experienced anything like it in his life.
After the stabbing agony in his brain faded, he blinked.
Something was different.
Everything he had seen until now felt different.
Sharper.
Even windows several hundred meters away were visible in crisp detail, as if he had zoomed in with a camera.
That wasn’t all.
The artificial smell in his nose, the sound of the wind in his ears, the cold air that had once brushed his skin now felt blocked by something and couldn’t even tickle him.
Something had happened.
But the pain had only come once, and after that there was no sign of anything else.
Still, the man froze in place.
Something standing in the center of the park had caught his attention.
It was a statue that seemed to have guarded that spot for a very long time.
He was not the kind of man who took any interest in modern art.
There were plenty of sculptures in the park near his home, but even after more than ten years living there, he still didn’t know exactly what any of them were.
And yet he stared at it blankly.
The surface gleamed like pure white marble.
The delicately carved female body.
A pair of wings spread behind her back.
Her head and arms were broken off and gone, but the dignity and majesty of her original form had not faded in the slightest.
Beautiful.
Noble.
Countless other words rose and vanished in his mind.
An angel.
No.
Something even higher than that...
A god.
Its name was...
“Nikke...”
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