[The Constellation Murderer has been annihilated.]
Thump.
Having lost his way, the Constellation Murderer had sunk into the garbage dump. His silver hair fluttered and flowed as if he were underwater. It looked like a tangled mass of marionette strings after they had been severed from the cross brace.
A calm voice echoed through the world.
[This world lacks its Constellation.]
[The first condition for world destruction has been met.]
[This world lacks its apostle.]
[The second condition for world destruction has been met.]
[This world lacks its followers.]
[The third condition for world destruction has been met.]
From somewhere, a beast howled.
[Warning.]
[All the conditions have been met.]
At first, the beast’s howl echoed only from the world’s edge; however, it soon closed in from all sides at a rapid pace.
The ground shook, and the garbage piles on the horizon trembled. Garbage rumbled from the mountains. This wasn’t a beast’s cry. It was the sound of the place sinking as it collapsed.
[The world is ending.]
The sunset broke into pieces. The sky became a sheet of glass and shattered into bits immediately after, each with a piece of the frozen sunset still inside.
Thuuuuuuud!
A shard of glass, the size of a quarter of the sky, fell onto a distant garbage mountain. The garbage mountain fell, spewing many plastic bottles. Billions of glass shards shattered again and again into smaller bits, each one bearing the imprint of the sunset and turning the shards red. The garbage dump now looked like blood drops sprayed into the air.
“Beautiful,” the Paladin muttered. Covered in wounds from fighting the killing puppets, she looked up at the shattered sky, clutching her arm. “It’s as if the world is blessing its own end. If this is how the world ends and this is the last sight I see, it’s not so bad…”
I could understand why she was saying that.
“Why are you just standing there and yapping?!” the Black Witch shouted. “Run, you fool! Unless you want to die from glass rain!”
“But, Anastasha, look. To run from such a sight is something a human simply shouldn’t do—”
“Don’t bullshit me! Nisha forced me to make her a promise! If I don’t bring you back safely, she’s going to make sure I won’t have any joy left in my life!” The Black Witch seized the Paladin’s wrist. “Gong-Ja, I’ll count this as my favor done for you, but I’m taking this fool back to Babylon. As for you… do as you please!”
“Ah, what a pity. It’s so sad. Think about it. If I must die, I want my death to be caused by the sunset stabbing me. Let me stay here a little long—”
“Teleportation!”
The Paladin looked sad. White light soon enveloped the two women, and they vanished.
The Inquisitor saluted. “Hmmm! Then I shall leave as well, Master!”
Estelle bowed calmly. “Father, I’ll also get going.”
Swoosh! Swish!
One by one, my comrades and vassals fled the collapsing world until only Kim Yul and I remained. We watched the world break into red light without saying a word.
Suddenly, I realized that the two of us were the only ones left in the garden of this world. Had the Paladin rubbed off on me? I knew I should flee now that the world had reached the smallest unit needed to sustain itself, yet I wanted to stay a bit more.
“Why did it have to be a junkyard?” Kim Yul asked.
I didn’t turn my head. We stood side by side, looking up at the world’s red glow. Some needed eye contact to have a conversation, while others only had to share the same air.
“Why did it have to be this place? I don’t have good memories of home. I lost my school slippers on Wednesday and had to wear sneakers to school until Saturday. As soon as classes ended on Saturday, I came back and searched through the piles of trash around home, looking for school slippers someone may have thrown away.”
Now that it was only us in this world, Kim Yul became a little more talkative. Or maybe he hadn’t changed at all, but only came back to how he had been before, though briefly.
“I managed to find one slipper, but I couldn’t go to school wearing just one slipper, right? So I kept on searching. After Sunday, I gave up finding it. Yet, when I woke up Monday morning, a second slipper was lying on my porch. Father found it during the night.”
“I see.”
“Yes, but they didn’t match because they were different sizes. I don’t think Father stayed up that night because he was worried about me. He would have thought I was deliberately dropping hints when I was walking around the garbage dump all weekend,” Kim Yul muttered. “That’s the best memory I have of my father.”
Kim Yul undid his hair and put the hair tie back into his pocket. Only then did I turn my head to look at him. He went back to his usual, quiet self.
“The Constellation Murderer would have erased all the memories of Kim Yul. I have no idea why and how he chose to make his holy ground look like this place. It may be forgotten in his head but engraved in his soul. Is that it? It’s silly.”
“But he embroidered this view onto the Tower’s corner. Thirteen people saw it, including you and me,” I said.
I could swear I saw Kim Yul smile faintly.
“Yes. After that day, many pairs of school slippers that I would never wear ended up piled in a corner of my house. Thinking about it that way, it’s not as bad a memory as I thought.” Kim Yul nudged me with his elbow. “I’ll leave first, Patriarch. This place is no longer my home.”
Kim Yul was soon wrapped in light, and I was left alone. The horizon collapsed, and the glass shards stripped from the sky crashed into the ground, shattering. Plastic and scrap metal scattered in the wind. Darkness fell and swallowed the world from the edge.
For one last time, I looked down at the remains of the killing puppets. After one last look, I spoke the last words recorded in this world.
“Teleport me back, please.”
[Teleporting you to the eighty-first floor.]
And so the world closed its eyes, welcoming the darkness.