It was a day so cold that even their breath seemed to freeze.
Heavy, lead-colored snow clouds stretched out overhead. The snowflakes were so large they looked like they would make sounds each time they hit the ground.
Perhaps regular families were smiling together around the fireplace as they ate soup. At the same time, a once-young boy—still a child—held a girl in his arms under the sky.
“No, Shion! I don’t want you to die.”
The girl, Shion, was about sixteen or seventeen. The boy was only around ten, and to him, Shion was both sister and mother, irreplaceable family.
But now her life hung by a thread.
She had lost half her body. The internal organs spilling out of her abdomen drew pretty vermilion grooves into the surface of the pure white snow.
Faced with this hopeless sight, the boy could do nothing but helplessly hug the upper half of the girl’s body.
Shion gazed up at him with vacant eyes that he doubted worked anymore. She sensed she was going to die soon. With trembling fingers, she took her last cigarette from her breast pocket and put it in her mouth.
“Sorry, it looks like this is as far as I can go. It’s all right. Hurry up and get out of here.”
“No! I don’t want to leave you!”
Unstoppable tears streamed down the boy’s face as he clung to Shion’s blood-covered body. Her blood had stained his clothes so thoroughly that you couldn’t even tell what color they used to be.
“I know you don’t. But look, I don’t even have legs anymore, so what can we do?” Shion laughed in spite of the situation. Then she touched the end of the cigarette with her finger and tried weakly to light it.
However, she no longer had the strength to even spark a cigarette. No smoke rose from it. Her trembling fingers just fumbled in the air.
“It’s okay, I’ll figure something out. So…so don’t die. Please, I’m begging you, don’t leave me alone.”
“You’ll never be alone. Become a great Informationist and keep everyone safe. You’ll find lots of companions, I’m sure of it. So please, escape while you still can.”
Shion gathered the last of her strength to raise her hand and stroke the boy’s head. Beyond her arm, the boy could see a massive ring of light constructed with Codes hovering in the sky.
Thousands of yards up in the sky, the magnificent glowing circle, probably a couple miles in radius, etched a pattern resembling a coat of arms. Dangling from the emblem were countless swaying arrows of light.
It had to be the work of an extremely skilled Informationist.
But to Shion and the boy, that light meant nothing but hatred.
After all, it was unmistakably responsible for her death. The glowing arrows had rained down on the Earth earlier, injuring her.
This was the consequence of her fighting desperately to protect several comrades.
“I’m glad I got to see your face at the end. Thank you.” Shion gave these final words to the boy as he gazed at the sky. The last of her strength gave out, and she left to him the gentle smile he loved.
Her arm dropped to the ground, and the cigarette slowly fell from her lips and tumbled onto her chest.
A life was gone. It was a scene the boy had witnessed many times before on the battlefield, but none of those losses compared to the tremendous grief that assailed the boy now.
He buried his face in Shion’s body, which rapidly cooled. Then he cried with voiceless screams. The boy continued to sob until he had no more tears left to shed, until he had completely used up all the words and sadness in him, expending everything.
Time passed unnoticed. The falling snow blanketed the earth, covering Shion’s blood in its icy embrace. The boy stood up, his face no longer bearing the innocence it once had.
He looked down at Shion’s lifeless body and made a vow.
The boy picked up the blood-soaked cigarette that had fallen onto Shion’s chest and placed it in his mouth. Although he had never smoked before, he lit the cigarette in imitation of her.
When he did so, his mouth filled with the bitter taste of tobacco. As he had a coughing fit, the boy’s final tear fell to his cheek in farewell to Shion.
I will never forget this bitterness. I’ll never feel this way again. Unable to properly mourn the person he loved most, the boy glared at the sky of the anguished land of Jabar.
Anything that stood in his way would become an enemy for him to erase. On that day, the boy found a reason to fight against the world.