Clear.
He was definitely asleep.
And yet, before he knew it, Bill was flying through the sky.
The air was warm.
In fact, it was so warm it was almost hot.
This was a dream.
Above all else, that much was certain.
People could not fly.
They could fly with the help of devices like jetpacks, but not in a natural, weightless way like this.
Besides, the Ark had no need to develop such things.
In other words, this was unnatural.
Below him, countless people had gathered.
Every one of them was holding a gun, and every one of them was a woman.
Their height and build were mostly the same.
Like copies made from a single model.
Of course, among them were a few who looked playable.
A woman in a hood carrying a staff.
A woman in a pink dress.
A woman wielding an Eastern sword.
A woman with a pure white rocket launcher at her side.
But even they failed to hold his attention.
There was only one thing he could truly see among them.
It was a woman with short pink hair, wearing a suit.
But that was fine.
He couldn’t reach her.
No matter how he stretched out his hand, he would never reach her, not even if he died and came back to life.
The feeling of looking down on them now...
It was like staring at miniatures.
It didn’t feel like looking at real people, but like part of a 3D game.
He reached out his hand.
Light burst forth.
A single beam of light instantly split into dozens of pure white rays and fell downward.
They exploded.
They exploded.
They exploded.
The ground burst apart, and human bodies scattered in every direction.
Heads were pierced, waists were severed, and legs melted away.
It was brutal.
He wondered if this game had no censorship at all.
Less than five minutes passed before they retreated.
The beams kept changing the terrain, and before long the land was covered in countless craters.
And then...
There were the corpses that no longer moved.
He was tired.
There was no desk to rest his elbows on, so he pressed a hand to his forehead.
Then he realized something.
His arm... was pure white.
His skin reflected the light as if it were covered in glass.
“Huh.”
That was the only sound he made in that instant.
And then...
He woke from the dream.
----------------------------------------
“That was a pretty nasty dream...”
Bill slowly sat up.
Sunlight was pouring into the room through the window.
When he checked the time, it was 11 o’clock. Since he’d gone to bed at 11 last night, that meant he’d slept a full twelve hours.
“Twelve hours, seriously...”
Fortunately, today was Saturday... though even on normal days, he didn’t exactly have plans.
Sleeping a little longer wouldn’t have been a problem.
But right now, whether his body was tired or he’d overslept wasn’t important.
The pure white arm he had seen in the dream.
Its owner had not been him.
“So I’ve finally gone crazy... I do like Cinderella, but... I’ve never once thought I wanted to become her...”
There had only been one reason he’d gotten into the game.
Cinderella.
Seeing her in the advertisement had been enough for him to install it in less than five minutes.
What he had seen in the dream must have been that past.
He couldn’t remember it clearly, but the view floating in the sky, the countless mass-produced units charging in, and the women in unusual outfits had definitely been the Goddess squad.
It had been a massacre scene from long ago.
“But why was it first-person?”
That was strange.
The scene shown on his phone had been Cinderella from the Goddess’s perspective.
The mass-produced Nikke had swarmed in, Cinderella had switched to annihilation mode, and she had bombarded the ground from a height even Lilith’s attacks couldn’t reach. That had to be it.
But that was reversed.
The position was reversed.
The Cinderella from that time had not been an ally, but a Heretic who had fallen into betrayal.
He had no memory of seeing that point in time.
“What is this...? For real...?”
If he had still been back before coming here, he would have immediately asked an AI about it.
It was the weekend, and he was bored.
It would have been a perfectly fine way to pass the time.
But this was not something he could bring up to anyone here.
Information was controlled in this place, and even the records that answered automatically were tightly managed by them.
More than that, if he wrote something about slaughtering Nikkes, he might even be mistaken for a subversive.
So Bill would have to judge this on his own and come to a conclusion by himself.
Even if that conclusion never came...
“Though... I don’t even have anyone to ask in the first place?”
That was right.
He was still at a stage that was basically the game’s prologue.
After Marian had been killed and handed over to the Rapture.
The only people he was close to were the classmates he’d gone to school with, and the only Nikkes he had any real familiarity with were Rapi and Anis.
Rapi might react to it.
There had been a time when she looked at Cinderella’s face and remembered Red Hood.
But he didn’t know how far those memories went, and Red Hood hadn’t shown up in that scene to begin with.
“Ah... maybe I should just go back to sleep...”
Bill lay back down.
It felt as if the exhaustion from waking up had transferred straight into his body.
He should probably just spend the whole day in bed.
Ding.
But right then, his phone chimed with a notification.
When he reached out to check it, it was a text from Anis.
“At 1 p.m.... a dessert cafe? It’s 11 now? No, wait... why do I have to go there?”
His dissatisfaction was boundless.
The place Anis had told him about sounded like a coffee shop... or something similar, the kind of place students or older women might go to.
For someone like him, who didn’t even drink coffee, it was an unfamiliar place.
Still, Bill threw off the clothes he was wearing and stepped into the shower booth.
He was out in less than two minutes, but he emerged looking neat enough, casually shaking off the water.
“This body is really convenient...”
Before he knew it, every droplet clinging to his body had vanished.
Even his wet hair had dried fluffy, so there was no need to fuss over it.
After getting dressed, he called out lightly, “All right, let’s go...”
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