Fallen from the Sky (Part 2)
Conscription.
It was a running topic with a long and storied history on the board, boiling down to a simple, unvarnished truth: the gallery needed more unpaid slaves.
The Demon Lord Gallery spent practically every waking hour stoking flame wars and tearing itself apart, and whenever the fire burned out of control, the flames inevitably leaped toward the administration. Turning on the moderators was practically a sacred tradition. Up until now, disaster had been averted thanks to a handful of diligent sub-managers and the occasional intervention of Chief Manager Solomon, whose swift purges restored order in an instant. But this time was different.
The gallery was beginning to realize that mere hall monitors were no longer enough.
Some Demon Lords fueling the discourse argued that once the Pandemonium summit wrapped up, a bloody purge was inevitable, and fresh blood on the moderation team would be needed to stabilize the ensuing chaos. Others insisted that the scales had to be balanced by drafting a sub-manager from the Hell faction. Of course, the overwhelming majority were simply operating on basic forum logic: the gallery was an unmitigated dumpster fire, nobody was sweeping the floors, and therefore, it was time for a draft.
The draft thread snowballed rapidly. What had begun as a modest attempt to build consensus and lobby for an extra set of hands quickly spiraled out of control. This was a community composed entirely of Demon Lords, beings whose defining traits were chronic hyper-fixation and immediate overreaction.
Before long, the proposition to recruit an assistant manager had mutated into an impossible checklist of prerequisites for the ideal candidate. And that checklist, in turn, summoned another of the gallery's ancient traditions.
A Galdecup.
A full-blown, vicious online faction war where opposing camps tore into each other over absurd ideological extremes. In the Demon Lord Gallery, such disputes were normally settled through bloody Colosseum deathmatches before reaching this stage, but with the board in disarray, the flame war spilled unchecked across the front page.
The heated faction war spawned endless debates, and the endless debates eventually led to total exhaustion. After burning through so much fury, a wave of post-argument burnout washed over the exhausted Demon Lords. But even burned-out users served a purpose. When a forum was in flames, a thoroughly disillusioned cynic was the most effective fire extinguisher available.
Thanks to a handful of users injecting a dose of harsh reality, the fervor died down almost as quickly as it had sparked. Unlike usual, the Galdecup sputtered out, sinking beneath the rising tide of new posts. The prevailing topic drifted back toward the collective urge to beat sense into the Pandemonium crowd, and everyone's attention shifted toward the capital once more.
Yet, amidst the crowd, one particular Demon Lord was entertaining an entirely different thought.
"Wait... There's actually someone who fits that description perfectly. In fact, make that two."
A sly grin spread across the entity's face. They had just stumbled upon the ideal candidates for the badge.
Four, and forty.
If someone asked me what those numbers meant, I would tell them they represented waiting. Today marked the fortieth day since the Demon Lord Gallery had gone dark, and the fourth day since a girl had fallen from the heavens. In other words, forty full days had crawled past since I cast my Avatar Projection Magic, and I had received nothing resembling an answer.
"Just wait until that board comes back online..."
I muttered under my breath. Even if it earned me an immediate permanent ban, I was going to flood the forum with questions about the Avatar Projection Magic and whatever the hell happened at that Pandemonium conference. When surrounded by lunatics, becoming a lunatic yourself was the only way to survive. There wasn't much else I could do.
With a heavy sigh, I closed the interface window, which still stubbornly displayed the phrase [NOT RESPONDING].
"...And then there's you."
My gaze shifted toward the pristine white bed, where a girl of matching pallor lay motionless. Even after four days, she hadn't twitched a single finger. Suspended in a state of profound unconsciousness, she looked less like a living being and more like a doll. That wasn't mere poetic license, either. She was genuinely porcelain-like. Watching her rest so quietly without sweating a drop or bleeding a speck often made me wonder if she was truly alive at all.
Whenever that doubt crept in, I checked her breathing, only to find the steady, rhythmic intake of air that confirmed she remained tethered to life.
"Just what on earth are you?"
The questions surrounding her were piling up. Two days ago, her body had burned like a furnace, riddled with fractures and severe trauma. Yet by the morning of the third day, every single external injury had vanished into thin air. Even the deep wound on her ankle, along with her shattered bones and ruptured internal organs, had healed without leaving a trace.
It really caught me off guard.
Her regenerative capacity defied logic. Even by the evening of the second day, her wounds had looked like they were barely holding together, making her sudden recovery all the more surreal. I had been so alarmed by the severity of her state that I was seriously contemplating ransacking every ruined hospital within fifty miles for surgical equipment and pharmaceuticals, only for her to heal completely overnight. In all my years on this ruined earth, I had never heard of an awakened ability capable of that.
"You aren't a monster, so how?"
A few creatures spewed from the Gates had exhibited similar traits, shrugging off high-caliber rounds within seconds and regrowing severed limbs on the fly. The thought of an inhuman mimic had crossed my mind, prompting me to run several diagnostics on her, but every result confirmed the same thing: the girl lying before me was an awakened human. She wasn't an aberration masquerading in human skin.
All explanations aside, the puzzle had only one solution: wait for the mystery girl to open her eyes, and then get the answers straight from her mouth. For now, that was all I could do.
"Ugh..."
A dull ache settled into my shoulders, likely the result of keeping vigil at her bedside for four days straight without sleeping. Technically, I had long surpassed the biological necessity for rest, but after two decades of strictly enforced, mandatory sleep cycles, the habit was hard to shake, leaving a lingering stiffness in its wake. Spending the long, silent nights staring blankly back and forth between the wood stove and the bed didn't help with the sheer boredom, either.
I couldn't just wander outside, because there was no telling when she might stir. In fact, to keep watch over her, I had pushed myself to clear daily Gate incursions in under an hour. Though, looking at it another way, if her presence forced me to operate with peak efficiency, maybe it wasn't all bad. Besides, now that her injuries had completely healed, I felt an irrational fear that she would wake up the second I looked away, anchoring my boots to the floorboards.
How long had I spent rationalizing my refusal to leave her side?
A quiet, self-deprecating chuckle escaped my lips. I realized I was just constructing excuses to justify why I couldn't tear myself away from this stranger. The plain truth was that I couldn't take my eyes off her. It wasn't love at first sight or some dramatic romance trope, either. The sensation tightening my chest wasn't passion; it was a profound, hollow ache—a deep nostalgia.
The real problem was that I couldn't pinpoint where that nostalgia was coming from. Was I simply longing for another human being? Or was I yearning for the past?
"Haaah..."
Looking at her had a way of dragging up memories from decades ago, from back when awakened espers were hailed as heroes of the world. It had been an era when institutions straight out of comic books—Hero Associations, Esper Cooperatives, and mutual aid leagues—sprouted across the globe as powers manifested everywhere. Those memories remained remarkably vivid.
Countless espers were born across every continent, and young children awakening to their powers were led gently through the association's doors by the hands of proud parents. Watching heroes slay monsters pouring from the rifts and rescue civilians, a generation grew up dreaming of donning the cape. And back then, I had taken on disciples of my own.
In my twenties—young enough that anyone would have been justified in calling me a wet-behind-the-ears rookie—I took four students under my wing. What I taught them was crude, makeshift knowledge that could hardly be articulated into proper theory, yet their eyes had shone with reverence throughout every lesson. Perhaps that was only natural. At the time, I was revered as the world's sole savior, the only awakened human capable of permanently sealing a Gate.
The mistake had been my arrogance. I took their respect and goodwill for granted, treating it as something I was entitled to. Swamped with endless obligations—sealing rifts, consulting with association executives, attending summits with heads of state—I never truly looked at my students. I simply received their devotion and gratitude as passive tributes. I taught them how to fight and how to wield their powers, but I never once answered the affection, appreciation, and loyalty they offered me. That arrogance and negligence eventually sharpened into daggers that struck me right in the heart.
"......"
One of those disciples had been a young girl with flowing hair, much like the one lying in the bed before me. She vanished during a Gate subjugation mission, and I was never even able to recover her body.
Another had been an elderly man whose hair had turned snow-white, just like this girl's. He died with a monster's claw driven straight through his heart.
A third lost his life in the fires of the global conflict. The gray hoodie he loved so much was soaked crimson with his own blood, mirroring the bloodstained hospital gown this girl had worn, until he bled to death in the dirt.
And the last of them died in the most absurd way possible, crushed beneath the weight of a collapsing skyscraper. Her physical body, which had been sturdier than reinforced steel, suffered shattered joints and ruptured organs—just like the broken girl I had carried out of the crater—before slipping away into fatal shock.
Through my pride, my blunders, and my sheer immaturity, every bond I shared with my students had been violently severed. After that, I pushed everyone away. I couldn't bear the thought of losing someone else to my own incompetence. There was no wound on earth that cut deeper than losing what you had come to hold dear.
I had sworn an oath to remain alone. I had hammered that resolve into my very core.
Yet, looking down at the quiet face of this stranger, that ironclad vow wavered with every breath she took. And for the life of me, I couldn't understand why.
I truly had no idea.