A frightening silence.
Quiet enough to hear the heavy breathing of the uncle holding up the defensive array.
The beating of my heart, the pulse of my blood, the smell of blood in my breath, the heaviness of my body—all of it returned to my mind at once.
I looked back behind me.
A shattered screen lay buried in yellow sand.
Sand covered the broken stone of the ground and blocked the broken wall behind me.
My wings were pitch-black, gleaming with an oily sheen under the bright lights.
They were strong and powerful, easily able to lift my body from the ground into flight.
Blood slid down my arm and dripped onto the face of the pointed-eared onee-san looking up at me.
Hero, huh…
What a title steeped in the colors of otherworld fantasy works.
Then who was I?
In this situation, even if I smiled at them, I could not obtain understanding, right.
My wings, black and gleaming, so powerful.
The wind they stirred blew away the sand at my feet, revealing the original look of the stone ground.
When I passed over the Hero’s head he could not help raising a hand as if fearing me.
And after I left they stared blankly after me, then turned back to look ahead.
Before my eyes was a stretch of darkness.
I did not know how long I flew before a beam of light lit my vision again.
The wind raised by my wings sent the sand on the ground flying through the air, covering my eyes.
I slowly descended from midair.
The sand and stone under my soles gave a crunch-crunch sound, only making the surroundings seem even quieter.
A thread of fine sand landed on top of my head and slipped down my neck, itchy.
Looking up into the distance, that beam of light grew brighter and brighter, until it lit the endless yellow sand at my feet.
It looked as if I were in a long tunnel.
The place where sunlight fell was less an exit than a break in the ceiling.
Sand poured in through this hole overhead, forming a slope.
From the pits left on it, the Hero’s group had probably come in from here.
The sand was a little hot.
Even before I neared the opening I could feel the scorching blast of air outside.
After I finally climbed up, outside was still endless yellow sand.
Truly, this was too much.
Clearly in those fantasy works about crossing into another world the protagonist faced an easy, pleasant otherworld life that did not require using one’s brain.
The world I faced—what an excessive world it was.
Truly, too much…
When I confirmed that the world I faced was not the world I knew at all, what rose in my mind was not excitement and joy of the kind “so a fantastical event like crossing into another world happened to me.”
It was Uncle’s hand stroking my head, the braised pork Auntie brought out, and Aihua’s face that was always puffed up with anger…
My home.
The bed in my home.
The desk I had decorated with such care.
And that warm library…
Even though I had only just “woken” in this world a short while ago, when those things that had been before my eyes a moment ago appeared in memories beyond reach, all I could do was silently cry.
Why?…
Why me?
Why would I encounter something like this?
I considered that in the former world, overall I had still been a kind person.
So why would the gods play a joke like this on me?
Crying, I moved my feet aimlessly toward the depths of the desert.
Droplets fell on the scalding yellow sand and dried in an instant.
But my tears would not stop.
Waves of sour swelling filled my nose, because I was only an ordinary, fragile girl.
Until drop after drop fell, and rain began under a clearly sunny sky.
What is this.
Are you here to comfort me?
Clearly I had crossed into another world.
Clearly I should have become an admirable Hero like the young man I had just met and begun a pleasant yet twisting adventure with companions.
Yet I was not the Hero, but a “fallen angel” whose meaning even I could not figure out, becoming an existence people feared and kept away from.
I was only an ordinary and fragile girl.
Even if in the former world I had been a NEET who felt that I alone were enough, when I truly became one person walking alone I suddenly realized—a person actually cannot live on their own.
Loneliness.
So it was a feeling that made one so afraid.
Rain fell pattering.
Perhaps rain in the desert seemed rare and precious, but for me it only made the road ahead more difficult.
The rain made the already hard-to-walk sand wet, slick, and sticky underfoot.
Every step was a pit that pooled with water, making me feel exhausted.
The sky grew gloomy.
Torrential rain washed gullies through the sand and blurred everything before my eyes.
I found a stone step and sat down.
I did not know how far I had walked.
I only felt very tired, very tired.
Where was this?
I had already thought about this question for a long time, but I could find no clue from which to infer where this place belonged.
The only thing I knew was that this was clearly not the world I lived in, or at least not the same era.
In the place I had originally lived, in all these years I had been alive, never mind a desert—even a beach I had only seen in photos online.
And when I was in a place like this, all I felt was helplessness and loneliness.
Every step was so hard.
This place had many such ruined walls.
White stone structures looked gray under the gloomy sky.
I looked up at the sky overhead.
The clouds showing from the edges of the cover looked so high and so far.
Behind me was a stone pillar.
The top of the pillar should originally have been a crossbeam.
Its broken, shattered part lay not far ahead, showing a corner in the sand.
Directly opposite was another stone step, and above that step, same as where I sat, was a platform half buried in sand.
It was actually not a good place to shelter from rain.
Rather, it blocked hardly anything at all.
But after sitting in the rain a while, resting a while, I still calmed a little.
I liked rainy days.
No glaring sunlight.
Only the pattering of rain.
Whether there was wind or thunder, on days like this curling up in a corner that belonged to me always let me settle.
A ruin, huh.
It did look that way.
Besides the boundless sea of sand, these traces of buildings showing from the sand truly had the feeling of ruins.
In games I had liked exploring ruins a lot.
I always felt I would discover some ancient and mysterious stories in the broken fragments of buildings or other man-made things already forgotten by the years in some corner.
For a time I had also been absorbed in such books in the library, until later I understood that the vast majority of the stories in Unsolved Mysteries of the World were fabricated—real archaeology was actually far more rigorous than I had imagined.
Looking on the bright side, perhaps I had still “been born” in a place that matched my interests.