“…gh?!”
At that moment, the panes in the classroom started to rattle, and Shido could hear an eerie siren wailing throughout the town.
“Wh-what…was that…?” Tonomachi opened a window and poked his head outside. Several crows took off into the air, perhaps startled by the siren.
The students lingering behind in the classroom all stopped talking, and their eyes grew wide.
The siren stopped, and a voice came over the loudspeakers, enunciating each word clearly to make the message easier to hear.
“This is not a drill. I repeat. This is not a drill. A foreshock has been detected. A spacequake is coming. All residents, please evacuate immediately to the nearest shelter. I repeat…”
The silent students gasped. A spacequake warning. Their hunches turned immediately to conviction.
“Whoa, whoa… For real?” Tonomachi’s voice was hoarse, and sweat beaded on his forehead.
Although everyone in the classroom looked anxious, they were relatively calm, including Shido and Tonomachi. At the very least, no one was spiraling into total panic. Because the city had been seriously damaged in the spacequake thirty years earlier, Shido and his cohort had marched through an annoying amount of evacuation drills since they were in nursery school.
Plus, they were in a school equipped with an underground shelter large enough to hold every student on the register.
“The shelter’s right there,” Shido said. “We just have to evacuate calmly, and we’ll be fine.”
“R-right.” Tonomachi nodded.
They hurried, not quite running, out of the classroom. The hallway was already full of students forming lines and heading toward the shelter.
Just one of them was going in the opposite direction—a girl racing toward the doors that led outside.
“Tobiichi…?”
Running down the hallway with her skirt flapping in the wind was the Origami Tobiichi.
“Hey! What are you doing?! The shelter’s this—”
“It’s fine,” Origami stated, stopping briefly before racing off again.
“Fine? What’s fine?” Shido craned his neck dubiously as he lined up with Tonomachi and the other students.
He was worried about Origami, but maybe she’d forgotten something. Just because the alarm had gone off didn’t mean that there would be a spacequake right that second. She’d make it in time if she came back soon.
“P-please stay calm! I-it’s all right! Don’t panic!” Tamae called out, guiding the students. “Remember the three don’ts!! Don’t push! Don’t run! And don’t t-t-twalk!” she squeaked.
Shido could hear some students snickering in response.
“…It’s weird,” Tonomachi said. “But seeing someone more freaked than me makes me feel better.”
“Aah, I totally understand.” Shido smiled wryly.
In fact, Tama’s helpless panic seemed to be putting the majority of the students at ease instead of making them more anxious.
Shido suddenly remembered something and reached into his pocket for his cell phone.
“Hmm? What’s up, Itsuka?”
“Oh, just, you know,” Shido muttered vaguely as he selected the name Kotori Itsuka from his call history and redialed.
He couldn’t get through. He tried a few times, but no dice. “…That’s not good. I hope she’s getting to safety.”
He was sure she’d be fine, as long as she hadn’t left school. The problem was if she had already started out for the restaurant.
There was a park shelter right near there, though, so that wasn’t really an issue, either. The thought didn’t reassure Shido, however. He could easily picture Kotori ignoring the alarm and waiting for him in front of the restaurant like a faithful dog. Her “Promise!” from that morning echoed in the back of his mind.
“I—I did agree to be there, even if there was a spacequake…but she couldn’t actually be that stupid… Oh right. I know.”
Shido could use an app to check the GPS location of her cell phone. After fiddling with his phone, an aerial map of the town was displayed on his screen, together with a red icon.
“—!” Shido’s heart stopped.
The icon indicating Kotori’s position was parked in front of the restaurant where they were supposed to meet.
“That idiot…!” Cursing under his breath, Shido closed his flip phone and stepped out of the line of students.
“H-hey! Itsuka!” Tonomachi shouted. “Where are you going?!”
“Sorry! Forgot something! You go on ahead!”
Shido ran in the opposite direction of his gathered classmates until he reached the school’s main entrance. He grabbed his outdoor shoes from his shoe cubby, stuffed his feet into them, and scrambled outside. Practically tripping over himself, he raced through the gates and down the hill in front of the school.
“…Th-this situation obviously calls for an evacuation!” Shido shouted, moving his legs as fast as they would carry him.
Before him was a disturbing sight. Deserted sidewalks and carless roads. There wasn’t a single person left on the street, in the parks, in the shops—anywhere. There was a lingering sense that people had just occupied these spaces moments ago, but they were nowhere to be seen now. It was a scene out of a horror movie.
The city of Tengu had been redeveloped with an almost neurotic sensitivity to spacequakes after the catastrophe. Naturally, it ranked first nationwide for the number of underground shelters at public facilities and came in at the top for shelters in residential homes. With the recent spate of spacequakes, the evacuation had been immediate.
“Why would that idiot stay put?!” Shido shouted, flipping his phone open as he ran.
Her location had not budged from in front of the restaurant. He decided that her punishment would be a barrage of forehead flicks. He kept pumping his legs at full speed.
There was no pacing himself. Shido simply struck at the asphalt as hard as he could. His feet hurt, and the tips of his fingers went numb. His throat closed up, his vision started to spin, and the inside of his mouth was desert dry. But Shido didn’t stop. All thoughts of danger or exhaustion had left his head. He simply ran toward Kotori with no regard for anything else!
“…Ngh—?”
And then Shido spotted something in the corner of his eye. Or he felt like he did anyway. Frowning, he turned his face.
“Wait—! What is that…?”
Three—no, four—human silhouettes were floating in the air. But he didn’t get the chance to ponder them for long.
“Whoa…?!” He instinctively covered his eyes as the buildings up ahead of him were suddenly enveloped in a blinding light, followed by an earsplitting explosion. A powerful shock wave slammed into him.
“Wha…?!”
He reflexively covered his face with his arms and braced his feet, but it was no use. The shock wave’s pressure was on par with that of a large typhoon, and it easily blew him back. He lost his balance and tumbled over.
“Ow! What the hell was…?” He sat up, rubbing eyes that were momentarily blinded by the intense flash. “Huh?” The scene left him gaping.
In that brief instant he’d had his eyes closed, the town he’d been staring at had…disappeared without a trace.
“Wh-what? Wait. What is this…?!” Shido stammered.
It was like an asteroid had fallen from the sky. No metaphor. No exaggeration. If he had to describe it, the scene resembled what might’ve happened if the uppermost layer of the ground had been carried off like a platter with the town on top of it. It had been hollowed out like a shallow mortar.
The neighborhood had become a giant smoking pit, and Shido could see a mass of metal rising in the center of the desolate landscape.
“What the…?”
He was too far away to really make out the details, but it kind of looked like a throne, the sort of thing a king would sit atop in an RPG. But that wasn’t the important part.
The real mystery was the girl wearing a bizarre dress standing there with one foot on the armrest.
“What is she doing?” Shido couldn’t see much more than her long black hair and her glowing skirt, but he probably wasn’t wrong in assuming it was a girl.
She lazily turned her head in his direction.
“Hmm…?”
Had she…noticed him? The young woman was too far away for him to be sure.
While he was craning his neck to get a better look, the girl kept moving.
On unstable feet, she grabbed hold of what looked like a hilt sprouting from the throne’s back, slowly pulling it out to reveal a massive sword with a broad blade. It emitted a fantastical light, like a rainbow or a star. The girl swung the weapon in his direction, drawing a luminous arc in the air.