Ayane had been crouched down this entire time to get a closer view of the sparkler, but now she shot back up to her feet. She clapped me gently on the shoulders. I assumed that since she was a ghost, her hands would just go straight through me—but they didn’t. There wasn’t much force at all, but I could clearly feel myself being pushed slightly off balance.
Try being a ghost? Loosen me up?
As my mind reeled in confusion, my vision blurred. There was an odd, momentary floating sensation, and I felt a sinking in my stomach—like when you lose your footing on a slippery floor or misjudge the number of remaining steps on a staircase. As soon as I realized I was falling backward, I scrambled to regain my balance—but as soon as I did, I found myself staring at the back of someone’s head from mere inches away.
And it wasn’t Ayane’s head—it was my own. Somehow, I was now watching myself—Sugisaki Tomoya, sparkler still in hand—from a third-person view.
It was an extremely unsettling feeling, and I immediately felt nauseous.
“Wh-what in the hell did you just do?!” I demanded.
“Relax,” said Ayane. “I just plucked your soul from its vessel, that’s all.”
“…Well, can you put it back? Please?”
“I will. Later.”
She grabbed me by the hand with frigid but soft fingers. This one touch alone was enough to make her once-illusory presence feel that much more tangible in my head. Now that my soul had been divorced from my body, she and I were no different from one another. And in this new form, I felt light as air—released from the bonds of gravity.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”
Ayane took off running, dragging me along by the hand. I was still quite a bit flustered, but all I could do was find my footing and follow suit. We raced down the runway and eventually, our feet left the ground. Before I could even register what was happening, we were floating in midair, sprinting up into the night sky. I took one last look back at my body where we’d left it on the runway as we kissed the earth goodbye.
And then that was that—we were officially in flight.
We floated higher and higher into the sky—so effortlessly that it almost felt like we were being sucked into the stratosphere. I couldn’t even feel the wind pressure around me.
“Take a look,” said Ayane, still holding me firmly by the hand.
I looked down and watched as the abandoned airfield fell further and further away from us. I could see suburban neighborhoods, river floodplains, and city lights across the distant horizon. We couldn’t have been more than a hundred meters above the ground, but it was still high enough to make my entire body shiver with fright.
“H-how are we even floating like this?” I asked. “Is there some sort of trick to it?”
“I just imagined us flying and my mind did the rest,” she told me. “We can go in any direction we want just by picturing it in our heads.”
Ayane led me by the hand as we glided through the sky beneath the pale moonlight. We could go as fast or as slow as we wanted—not even inertia had any hold over us. No matter how fast or how wildly we flew, we never had to stop to catch our breath, nor did we have to close our eyes to shield them from the wind. Before long, we had flown far enough away from the airfield that we were soaring above the station, way back in the commercial district.
Is this really happening right now?
“Hold tight. We’re going in,” she said.
I looked up and saw that we were barreling straight toward a large office building. Thinking we were about to crash, I braced myself for impact—but then we passed straight through its outer walls, then through corridors and offices where so many businesspeople were still hard at work, and then right out the other side of the building. Apparently, while we were in ghost form, not even physical barriers posed an obstacle to us.
“How ’bout that, Tomoya-kun?” Ayane said, wearing the smuggest of grins.
“You could do some serious corporate espionage like this,” I mused.
“Heck, you can even peek inside bank vaults if you want to—not that you can really do anything with what’s inside. It’s hard to pull off a heist when you can’t touch anything.”
It seemed like there was little she could do to interfere with the world of the living.
“Pretty much the only things I can touch are souls like yours, which are more or less halfway dead already,” she explained. “It’s only because your mind’s become so captivated by death that I was able to whisk you away like this.”
Up there in the ether above our city, Ayane slowed to a stop. Together, we gazed down at the crowds of people frozen down on the streets below—the bustling pedestrians crossing the street to wherever it was they needed to go were now trapped in stasis.
“Now you try,” she said. “See if you can fly on your own.”
“Huh?”
As Ayane relinquished her grip on my hand and floated a short distance away, my stomach dropped—and, having nothing to hold on to, I immediately went into freefall. My vision started spinning and I could see the ground beneath me growing rapidly closer by the second. All I could do was cry out in terror as I tumbled along the side of a tall building toward the asphalt. I braced myself for impact, and the moment I hit the pavement, my vision went dark—like someone had pulled the plug. It was more or less how I always envisioned it looking whenever I fantasized about jumping from a tall rooftop, only now I was actually experiencing it for myself.
And yet to my surprise, the asphalt did not stop me. My soul kept going—entering the street and tumbling underground. I panicked—it felt a bit like I just did a cannonball into a deep pool. I thrashed my limbs about, struggling to find my way back to the surface. It wasn’t like I was drowning or suffocating, per se (there was no need to breathe in this state to begin with)—it was more that I simply no longer knew which way was up and was desperate to regain my bearings.
It really did look and feel as though I fell into a deep pool of murky water—and although the concrete and mud I was passing through beneath the ground were obscuring my vision, it seemed as though I could perceive my surroundings through some other sense. I could tell, more or less, where I was underground in relation to all of the manmade structures that were also down on this level, like building foundations, underground shopping malls, and whatnot. However, my range of perception in that regard didn’t reach very far.