Flowers of five colors were raining down. No, perhaps it would be better to say that they were falling all around like snowflakes. Since it was April, Arato first thought they were cherry blossoms. But, when he caught one in his hand, he saw it had long, thin petals like a chrysanthemum. It also felt strangely dry in his hand. The sight was so odd that, even though it was very pretty, Arato felt uneasy.
“Oh my, how lovely. I wonder what’s going on?” Marie, apparently judging that the falling flowers weren’t dangerous, raised her voice in excitement and kept walking down the street.
The neighborhood hIE left Arato behind and continued on, not bothering to brush off the flowers that settled in her hair. Arato just watched as her calmly walking figure grew smaller in the distance down the dark road. Then, he brushed the flowers off of his own head and went after her.
When he caught up to her, Arato saw that Marie had paused unnaturally mid-step. Her well-rounded figure was completely still, as if she had been frozen in ice. He was about to call out to her, but a sudden, intense feeling of wrongness stopped him.
Marie’s knee was stretched out in a random way, like she had forgotten how to take normal steps. Her whole body was trembling violently, as if she was about to burst apart at the seams. Then, her loose, medium-cut hair swished, and her neck creaked in protest as her head spun around 180 degrees.
The hIE’s face was expressionless as the shopping bag slipped from her fingers. With her joints still frozen tightly in place, Marie fell to the ground like a doll with a dull thud.
The hyperpigmented flowers continued to fall.
Arato felt something touching his neck. Reflexively, he grabbed at whatever it was, and held the thing in his hand under the light of the streetlamps. It was a colorful flower petal that had sprouted legs like a centipede.
The petal bug started walking around on Arato’s hand, and he screamed. He flailed his arm like a madman to get it off before it could crawl up his sleeve. It was late, but he didn’t have the presence of mind to keep his voice down.
“What the hell?!” he yelled in panic. “What the hell is that?!” The five-colored petals that now paved the ground were all crawling around like insects. Arato’s common sense told him to reject the reality before his eyes, because it was impossible. Reality itself had become a fairy tale.
Arato couldn’t believe what was happening; his mind was on the brink of complete chaos. He was worried about Marie. The fact that she was an hIE, not a human, sprang to mind. But he couldn’t just leave her there; she looked too human for that.
Strong light suddenly shone on him from the side as he stood there, dazed. A sedan that had been parked nearby suddenly roared to life, its wheels squealing on the pavement. As it came straight for him, he threw himself to the road to avoid it. His arm landed at an odd angle, and a sharp pain shot through his shoulder.
As he went to stand, the ice cream he’d bought for Yuka rolled out of the shopping bag. Reflexively, he grabbed it and returned it to the bag. Then he put his hand on the wall of a nearby house to stand.
The car, which Arato had thought would keep going, instead shifted into reverse and came straight for him. He tried to dodge again, but didn’t make it. A powerful blow struck him at waist level.
In that moment, he got a quick look at the interior of the car. Where the driver should have been, there were just flowers of every color, blooming like a giant bouquet.
Arato couldn’t wrap his mind around what was happening. He simply slid into a narrow alley to get away from the car. “What the hell is going on... This, this is...”
Looking up, he watched as the falling flowers continue to blot out the night sky.
It was such an impossible sight, but his senses were so keenly aware of the reality around him that Arato started to doubt his own sanity. It was as if the whole world was suddenly out to get him; as if everything he had accepted as reality had been revealed as an illusion. Only his pain and fear were real. His mind could do nothing but rail against the threats to his life that were all around him.
Frozen food was moving out of Marie’s shopping bag; the frozen packs had flowers with bunched petals blooming from them. The petals made a dry scratching at the ground as they sprouted legs.
A dark shadow stretched out under the lamplight. Footsteps approached from behind, each step painfully loud in his ears. Arato’s eyes were on the ground, and his breath was coming in ragged gasps. The shadow was wearing the same clothing as Marie. Whatever the flowers bloomed on became a monster; a monster out for human blood.
Headlights flooded into the alley that Arato had ducked into from the opposite side, followed by a whole car. The vehicle was out of control, rending its body as it scraped along the narrow alley toward him before it came to a stop, with white smoke pouring out of its underside. Countless flowers bloomed from its chassis.
Arato wished this was a nightmare, from which he just needed to wake up. But this was reality, which made it all the worse. His mind was stuck in an endless loop: make it stop, please just make it stop, he thought, fear rooting him to the spot.
Finally, he managed to get his body to move. Wiping the cold sweat from his brow, he tried to retreat from the danger all around him. But before he could get very far, the car that had just charged into the alley after him violently burst into fire. Arato froze on the spot again, his vision filled by a whirlpool of red flame. It was the same scene he had seen in his nightmares night after night. He knew, without a doubt, that he was about to die. So he screamed. He screamed like he hadn’t since he was a child. “Help me!”
A human figure appeared in Arato’s view.
The figure was facing away, but he could tell that the person was female. She appeared between Arato and the fire, seeming to melt right out of the heat haze. The coffin she held in one hand was pulled into segments by a skeletal framework, then reconfigured with incredible speed. When the reconfiguration was complete, the figure between Arato and the fire held a giant hemispherical umbrella.
Then, the burning car exploded. She remained there, standing between Arato and the fiery nightmare, as if to say ‘I will protect you.’
After the blast from the explosion blew away, it seemed to take his fear with it, and Arato finally got a good look at the young girl in front of him, and was struck speechless by her simple beauty. Her pale violet hair danced in the hot wind left behind by the explosion. She didn’t have a hint of makeup on, but he couldn’t take his eyes off her glowing skin and stunning face.