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On an ordinary, quiet afternoon, the streetlamps along the road began lighting up one by one. The road and sidewalk were still buried under the snow that had been falling since morning. People walked on, lightly stepping through the snow as they went their separate ways. My name is Juhwan. I was just an ordinary high school boy, the sort you could find anywhere. My grades, my friendships, my family life, my finances, and everything else were all in an environment that was neither especially good nor especially bad compared to other people. That is, until that incident.
"Ugh... ngh..."
At some point, I managed to force open my heavily shut eyelids and looked around with the little strength I had left. Ahead of me, a passenger car had slammed into a utility pole and sat there with its engine blown out. The people walking along the street must have seen something serious, because they were looking down at me and reacting in all sorts of different ways to the situation.
"Eek~~!!"
"Hey... what do we do...? Is he dead...?"
"We should probably call 119 first..."
One person covered their mouth with both hands, another was calling emergency services on their phone, and yet another was making their own diagnosis while looking over my body. What on earth had happened to me? Was it trauma from the accident? I wasn’t really sure, but I probably had been in an accident. The large amount of blood flowing out of me would prove that much. Realizing the situation, I barely held on to my fading consciousness and tried to think about why I had ended up like this.
"Ah... right... today was Minji’s birthday, so I was on my way home after buying a cake..."
Only now were all the pieces starting to fit together. Today was my younger sister Minji’s birthday. So on the way home after buying a cake, I had been hit head-on by a speeding car, flung away from the crash site by the impact, and had been unconscious ever since.
"What time is it now...? I need to get home quickly..."
Still not fully grasping my own situation and only thinking about getting home, I noticed someone running toward me. By the looks of the outfit, he was probably a paramedic.
".....Hey.... are you alr...."
Just as the paramedic had almost reached me to help, my eyelids began to close little by little. The strength in my entire body was draining away like a balloon with a hole in it. Because of that, the consciousness I had barely managed to hold onto began to blur. I tried to cling to my slipping awareness so I wouldn’t lose consciousness, but whether my mind didn’t understand how I felt or my body was already telling me it was too late, I didn’t know. Either way, my consciousness kept fading.
".....alr...."
By then, I could no longer even hear the urgent voice of the paramedic tapping my shoulder beside me. My body and mind had already reached their limit.
"Ah... damn it... I still wanted to live... I still had things I wanted to do... I hadn’t even dated anyone yet..."
"............."
Now even the sounds I could hear were gone. And so my body ceased all function and met the death that religions speak of—my final moment. The end of my life was right here, on the cold asphalt. Just before my consciousness was completely severed, a voice began to reach my ears.
"I see. Then I’ll give you one more chance. As a service, I mean."
The moment the voice of some unidentified being—seemingly a man, or maybe a woman—ended, my consciousness came to a complete stop...?
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"This is..."
My consciousness, which I had thought would never open again, began to wake little by little. It was a truly unfamiliar ceiling. It wasn’t something I could call a hospital ceiling; some unknown material greeted me as I woke from death. Beside me, strange machines were checking my vitals.
"Ah~. You’re awake? Juhwan-kun? The vital check is finished now. You worked hard."
A man spoke to me in a friendly voice while I was looking around like a newly hatched chick. He had a ponytail that was close to pink, green eyes, and an expression that gave off the impression of a pure puppy. Then I immediately saw the name tag on his chest and blurted out a curse in shock.
"...Fuck..."
"? F-Fu...ck...?"
His name tag listed both his name and the institution he belonged to. His name was Romani Archaman, and his position was medical supervisor of the Human Order Continuity Guarantee Organization, Phoenix Chaldea...
"This place... don’t tell me..."
The Human Order Continuity Guarantee Organization, Phoenix Chaldea. Yes. It was that monumental place where my new life was about to begin.
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