Before her foot hit the ground outside, the Kotori I knew reappeared in the place of the angel. It was a smooth transformation that was nothing short of impressive.
I had agreed to meet Shiina at the bookstore in the shopping district. Since it was close enough to my house, Futaba and I made our way there on foot through the biting cold weather, all while not addressing the elephant in the room. We spoke of school-related things one would expect classmates to talk about. A conversation that had all the telltale signs of youthful inability to communicate.
All throughout, my mind kept replaying the constant thought that ‘Kotori’ was, for all intents and purposes, a forgery. A fake personality intended to fool the foolish high school students who foolishly couldn’t understand they were being fooled. And the reasons why she was doing it made me even more unsettled.
We got to the bookstore at about 11 a.m, totally ignoring the Japanese custom that the guy should arrive at least thirty minutes before the designated time.
As we got closer, I spotted Shiina standing near the bookstore, fidgeting with her hair and trying to stave away the cold. This shopping district was covered, but it was still quite chilly outside the stores. She was wearing a turquoise winter coat that extended down to her thighs. Below she had thick black tights and tall boots adorning the rest of her legs.
Futaba didn’t even ask if the young woman was our target.
“So that’s Shiina, huh? Ayumi wasn’t kidding. Seeing her in person, I have to agree she’s quite cute,” she said with a teasing tone.
So you were listening to that conversation too, huh?
“Yeah, but as I mentioned, her personality is a bit weird. Heck, it’s almost like she changed personalities since Sunday. That’s definitely related to Michael, isn’t it?”
When I took a glance at Futaba, I noticed her expression was a bit conflicted, and her tone returned to that of the angel. “I cannot imagine this being a coincidence. If she really did ‘change personalities’, then this is more evidence for the worst-case scenario.”
At about that time, Shiina finally spotted us. At first, her expression relaxed, likely because she recognized me. But as we approached her, it degenerated to that of a pitiful, defenseless rabbit. The culprit was the girl standing right next to me.
“Hello, Shiina. It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Futaba greeted.
“I…I…” Shiina stammered, unable to articulate anything to the shorter girl who wore a mysterious grin.
She turned to me, pleading. “T-Takeya, w-who’s… this?”
“Ehh. Well… funny story, actually. This is my classmate, Kotori… Well, that’s not right, is it?” I turned to the angel with a sigh. “Can you get this farce over with?”
“Certainly.” Futaba gave a gentle smile.
The angel’s movements were so swift that my eyes barely managed to follow her. In a single moment, she brought her palm to Shiina’s forehead, causing the taller girl to roll her eyes back and faint in the blink of an eye. As her body lost strength, she collapsed onto the shorter girl, who placed her on a nearby bench.
“Hmm, just as I suspected. This girl has been banished,” the angel said, her expression clouded. “This is a curse for her… but somewhat of a blessing for us.”
“Care to clue me in, Futaba?”
“Banishing is a severe punishment for angels who disobey the law,” she explained. “It is done through a ceremony involving at least two archangels.”
“How did you figure out she was banished by making her faint?”
Her face got sterner; it was almost as if replying became difficult. “The same way I know Ayumi’s a human.”
I felt something sinister forming in the pit of my stomach.
“Wait, what exactly happens after an angel is banished?”
I have a bad feeling about this. Don’t tell me…
“Exactly what you are thinking. Banished angels lose all their powers and become human. Furthermore, they lose all memories of ever being an angel.”
“What?! That’s vicious!”
I took another look at the girl resting on the bench, completely unaware of our conversation.
“I completely agree with you. I never attend banishing ceremonies when they happen. They are akin to the witch trials from the 17th century. Truly barbaric.”
“Hold on, does this explain why her personality seems to have changed since Sunday?”
“It might be the reason. Angels who change their own personalities are not unheard of. This is likely Shiina’s case too. She had a personality-altering power constantly applied to herself which vanished when she became a human. That also explains why she seems so weak. If she was constantly consuming aether because of it, she would have to manage it carefully.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
It turns out Shiina’s real personality is this weak-willed one? I get the sentiment, but did she really have to go through all that trouble to change it?
“Although it is unfortunate this happened to a fellow angel, it is also a blessing in disguise. Now that she is a regular human, I can recover and read her memories. Banishing only affects the surface layer, so I should be able to recover all her memories as I did with you.”
“Okay, do it then. Let’s get to the bottom of this.”
With my encouragement, Futaba moved next to Shiina and repeated the strange motion she had done to me earlier. With her hands firmly on the unconscious girl’s head, she closed her eyes and waited.
A long, long time passed, but the girl with the braided hair didn’t move. It was almost as if she had fainted on the spot.
“Hey… Futaba? Everything okay?” I said as I shook her shoulders.
The girl finally moved her hands. They were trembling.
No, it wasn’t just her hands.
Her entire body was shaking, as if she had seen something so shocking her mind was incapable of processing it.
After hearing my voice, Futaba took a couple of steps back, but she lost her footing. Fortunately, I managed to catch her before she fell to the ground.
“Hey, what’s up? What did you see?”
As I helped her sit down, for the first time—be it as Kotori Futaba or as an angel with unknown motives—I saw true distress on her face. Her face was as pale as a sheet, her features frozen unnaturally, her mouth agape. Her beautiful, blue eyes were unresponsive and had lost their characteristic shine. Her arms hung limply by her side. It looked like she had seen a monster.
“T-Takeya, I…” Her voice broke. “I understand everything. I know the truth now.”
“The truth? What truth?!”
“This world… this world is—”
But before she could finish her sentence, before I could learn the truth, the angel stood up.
“Hey, Futaba? Is everything—”
Without warning the angel grabbed my sleeve, pulling me closer to her. “Takeya, we have to leave Earth. Right now.”
“Wait, leave Earth? Where are we going?”
“The Upper Realm.”
“The… what?”
Why now, of all times?!
Before Futaba could do anything, worry spread on her face. “Something’s wrong. I think it is a fault, but I cannot fix it alone. It’s too widespread,” the angel said with her voice steeped in terror.
As her voice trailed off, a powerful, dreadful feeling slammed into me. It felt like something was wrong. Something was wrong with the world itself. An unnerving and instinctive feeling that something, somewhere, was out of place.
I initially doubted my eyes and checked to see if my glasses were still on, but the problem wasn’t with me. Everything slowly started to blur, like a camera out of focus. The outline of the bench Shiina was sitting on lost its distinction and I couldn’t see its proper shape anymore. At first, it was almost imperceptible, but it quickly became apparent the effect wasn’t only in my mind.
The world was losing its textures.
Everything was losing resolution. It was as if someone had turned the graphics settings all the way down in a video game. The girls themselves began looking muddy and fuzzy, reminding me of characters from fifteen years ago.
The immersion of reality was now irreparably broken.
I knew exactly what this reminded me of. And this time, I couldn’t brush it off as just a coincidence.
I thought back to all the so-called “faults” I had experienced so far.
The deserted city—Ayumi’s “outline” that looked just like a wire mesh you could often see in in-development builds of games.
The jumbled street—textures of objects strewn all around in a chaotic manner.
The gym collapsing—the ground itself losing its “collision properties”.
The myriad electronic disturbances people had reported.
And now, the world itself was losing its textures.
In a spark of synaptic connections, I finally put it all together. And only then did I understand everything. This “truth” Futaba also found out.
This world—this entire world—was virtual.
After the ripples of the impact dissipated, serenity washed over me like a gentle wave approaching the shore. The disintegrating outside world became just a backdrop for my epiphany.
If these sorts of glitches were happening, then the existence of angels—elusive beings relegated to mere urban legends—made perfect sense. They were the patrolmen, the protectors of this world, and they kept everything in order to prevent humans from figuring out the truth.
It was now clear why everyone thought that Ayumi wasn’t crazy. The fact is, she knew all along that angels did in fact exist. That was the “lie” she was living. She knew the truth this whole time.
For her, this world was just pretend-living. A role-playing game. And she chose to pretend to be obsessed with angels.
I figured out how the puzzle pieces fit together in mere moments. The unnerving feeling I had ever since we experienced that light show evaporated like mist. Not everything made sense just yet. But this was the first time I had a clear foundation upon which to build the truth.
However, that mist quickly gave way to a feeling of pure despair. After all, none of that mattered if the world itself was quite literally falling apart before my eyes.
A heart-wrenching panic spread through my entire body, but Futaba’s words pulled me from the darkness.
“Don’t worry, I will save us. Grab onto me, we are teleporting.”
I had an iron-strong grip on Futaba’s sleeve as if my life depended on it. Likewise, she moved to grab Shiina as well.
But before she could do so, something stopped her. Something even more unthinkable than what was already happening.
The world was losing its shape.
Every object around us began morphing into simpler polygonal models and the polygon count was dropping by the second. Coupled with the fuzzy textures, we were quickly leaving the sixth generation of consoles and heading straight into the early days of 3D graphics. Not long after, the textures began erratically disappearing. They left behind only the wireframe mesh that made the world around me.
The whole thing was so far out there that every incident that happened before seemed tame in comparison.
Thankfully, someone managed to retain their senses through this madness. Before long, Futaba overcame her panic and grabbed onto Shiina.
A beat after, everything turned dark.
I fainted yet again, leaving the chaotic world behind as only a formless memory.
Should I spoil the twist in marketing?