Descended from the Sky (Part 3)

Day ten since the girl plummeted from the sky.

A full week had slipped by, yet my daily routine had not changed in the slightest since day four.

The moment the morning sun broke over the horizon, I made my rounds across the globe to scour away the Gates. Sifting through mountain ranges of collapsed concrete and shattered steel, I would scavenge an armful of readable books and head back to the hideout around lunchtime. From then until the next dawn, I sat vigil before the sleeping girl.

Anyone catching a glimpse of this arrangement would have declared me utterly unhinged, but honestly, what did it matter? I was fulfilling every one of my responsibilities, and how I spent my remaining hours was entirely my own business.

If pressed to name a silver lining, it was ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠that my quality of life had noticeably improved. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say I had finally reclaimed a scrap of human culture.

Staying awake through endless nights without the Demon Lord Gallery had naturally forced me to seek out other pastimes, which in turn steered me back toward one of civilization's most enduring traditions: reading. Pristine libraries and intact bookstores were impossible to come by, but by rummaging through the rubble, I had unearthed enough decent literature to keep the vigil from descending into pure agony.

"Still, though..."

Just when did this Sleeping Beauty intend to wake up?

Every time I looked down at her completely motionless figure, a swirl of questions crowded my mind. How was it physiologically possible to endure ten days without ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠a single calorie of nutrition? Had severe brain trauma left her in an irreversible vegetative coma? And if her metabolism was running fine, why wasn't she producing a single drop of sweat?

Because her condition remained entirely static, she yielded virtually no clues regarding her true identity. Not that I was wandering entirely in the dark, of course. While I had no idea why she had been dropped here, I had managed to assemble an educated guess about what she was. After all, tumbling through the atmosphere down to Earth and lying intact before my eyes was an overwhelming clue in and of itself.

Is she a bioroid?

I didn't know which laboratory she had escaped from, but several of her physiological anomalies pointed squarely toward an artificial human.

First was the garment she wore—a standard medical gown. Bioroids were typically brought to term in designated research facilities and kept in clinical isolation throughout their accelerated maturation cycles. Wearing an institutional gown during that developmental period was practically standard operating procedure.

Second were her astonishing recuperative powers and that bizarre esper wavelength. A natural esper could never possess the monstrous, unnatural regeneration she had displayed, nor would they radiate such a twisted, warped psychic signature. Bioroids, on the other hand—synthetic humans spliced together through radical genetic engineering—were occasionally endowed with such extreme physiological traits. Toward the tail end of the World War, various factions had successfully engineered a handful of bioroids capable of wielding psychic abilities.

That had been over twenty years ago. With two decades of technological refinement out in deep space, it wouldn't be surprising in the least if the spaceborne remnants had manufactured a bioroid equipped with multiple esper powers.

"...Come to think of it, what ever happened to bioroid civil rights?"

Bioroids had first appeared roughly fifty years ago. As the engineering matured, the biological boundaries between baseline humans and synthetics steadily blurred. Eventually, bioroids proved themselves superior to ordinary humans across a terrifying array of metrics, sparking a fiercely volatile social debate. Setting aside absurd conspiracies about synthetics subjugating humanity, society had burned through years of political turmoil over a single question: Should they be granted the legal status and rights of equal human beings?

Back home, a constitutional amendment had ultimately classified them as equal citizens. But how were those exiled humans living aboard the orbital colonies handling them now?

"I'd like to believe they aren't just treating them like disposable tools."

If my assessment held true and this girl was indeed a bioroid, consequences were bound to follow before long. Whether that meant orbital surveillance satellites realigning their trajectories, new recon platforms deploying overhead, or another visitor touching down on Earth.

To put it bluntly, a functional bioroid was a walking mountain of gold. The cost required to bring an artificial human to fruition was astronomical. Splicing esper capabilities into a synthetic specimen multiplied that price tag dozens of times over. Judging by the baseline specs I had cataloged over the past several days, her manufacturing budget had likely rivaled the entire annual gross domestic product of a mid-sized nation.

"Whatever happens, happens."

Regardless of what outside interference might come crashing down, my immediate duty remained the same: wait until she opened her eyes. Naturally, if she turned out not to be a bioroid but rather an unprecedented, specialized psychic mutant, that would complicate matters. Truthfully, other theoretical possibilities lingered in the back of my mind.

A pure esper. An esper chimera. Or... a Hero.

Yet none of those alternatives withstood scrutiny. A baseline psychic could never manifest multiple discrete abilities without undergoing a direct mutation inside a Gate. An esper chimera made even less sense. Where on earth would spaceborne refugees harvest viable monster genetic samples? And even assuming they had preserved pre-war reserves in orbital cold storage, the fatal flaw remained: hybridization experiments between espers and monster genes had a failure rate hovering around ninety-nine—no, nearly one hundred percent.

If chimera engineering had been viable, every belligerent power during the World War would have kidnapped espers en masse to churn out biological dreadnoughts. But after both the United States and Russia suffered catastrophic, bloody failures in their black-budget laboratories, the entire world abandoned the concept. An esper chimera was a myth, a theoretical chimera whose actual success probability converged on zero.

And finally, the possibility of a Hero.

Compared to a multi-ability mutant or an impossible chimera, a Hero possessed slightly more plausibility. However, I distinctly recalled the intelligence shared on the forum by senior fixed nicknames like Odin and the Marquis of Wolves.

Terrified by the ominous title, I had spent hours combing through sticky threads and bombarding veteran accounts with private inquiries. The conclusion was reassuring: the "appearance" of a Hero merely meant a candidate had been designated by the cosmos, not that an invincible champion was instantly forged. An ordinary Hero adhered to a predictable developmental arc—Selection, Growth, Awakening, trials, and finally the climactic clash against the Demon Lord. Reaching the stage where a Hero stood before a Demon Lord took years at the bare minimum.

Some veterans on the ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠board had lamented that it took sixty years from the initial cosmic designation just to catch a glimpse of their Hero's face. Considering I had occupied the throne of a Demon Lord for barely three or four months, encountering a fully armed champion was an absolute impossibility.

They told me that unless the Scales shattered or Causality suffered an extreme localized collapse, there was zero chance of the timeline accelerating.

Besides, cosmic equilibrium wasn't something I needed to stress over. While I didn't grasp the deep metaphysics, the gallery veterans had sworn up and down that until the Grand Assembly at Pandemonium concluded, my dimensional sector would remain perfectly stable. Digressions aside, every line of logic converged on a single inevitable conclusion.

The girl resting before me was unquestionably an artificial human.

"Yaaawn—"

How long had I spent dragging my wandering focus back to the pages? The sun had long since slipped beneath the western horizon, and the scratched glass of my battered military wristwatch showed 11:59 PM.

Come to think of it, wasn't the atmosphere identical to this right before the Demon Lord Gallery manifested for the first time?

Vivid memories bubbled to the surface: staring blankly at this very watch in the dim silence of my hideout, only to leap out of my skin when an impossible blue interface materialized from thin air.

"Man, if the board could just magically come back online right this second, that would be perfection."

Now rounding day fifty-one of involuntary forum withdrawal, a miraculous restoration would be the greatest blessing imaginable. More than anything, the questions burning in my chest were driving me mad.

"Please..."

Whispering a desperate prayer into the quiet room, I willed the interface forward.

The exact same dead-end prompt that had mocked me for fifty-one days floated silently in the dark.

"Haha..." A dry, bitter laugh escaped my throat. Of course. Why would a miracle suddenly grant my wish? This ruined world was real life, not some convenient fantasy novel where coincidences fell into place on cue. Shaking my head at my own childish hope, I raised a hand to dismiss the frozen window.

Then—

A cascade of system text flashed violently across my vision. A radiant surge of cerulean light washed away the void, unfurling a pristine holographic interface.

It was the sanctuary I had spent nearly two agonizing months yearning for.

"Finally!"

Tears nearly welled in my eyes at the glorious, chaotic display of the forum feed. But before I could savor the relief—

"Agh—?!"

A spike of white-hot agony rammed straight through the core of my brain. Clutching my temples, I collapsed to the wooden floor, writhing as invisible needles tore through my consciousness.

The torment subsided as abruptly as it had struck. Breathing heavily against the floorboards, I blinked through the haze, suddenly aware of a torrent of foreign memories settling into place. Or rather, I was rapidly reading through a massive mental archive that belonged entirely to me.

Fact number one: Avatar Projection Magic had executed flawlessly. My detached spiritual avatar had survived the dimensional stranding, attended the fateful assembly at Pandemonium, and returned to my flesh.

Fact number two: every trial, observation, visceral emotion, and scrap of intelligence experienced by my spiritual avatar had successfully fused back into my primary consciousness.

And fact number three: cross-referencing the avatar's multiversal intelligence with the empirical data gathered by my physical body on Earth yielded a terrifying, inescapable conclusion.

Staring at the bed in frozen horror, the words escaped my dry lips in a hollow whisper:

"...She's a Hero."

The pure white girl I had plucked from the smoldering crater was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a designated champion of causality.

Designation: Orbital Facility J_00_1.

Colloquially known across the Jovian diaspora as "Zero One," the deep-space station had always been a tomb of profound silence. This was no poetic exaggeration. Among the hundreds of orbital platforms administered by the Jupiter Human Alliance, Zero One was notorious for its unnatural, stifling stillness.

It housed no agricultural hydroponics bays. It contained no manufacturing foundries. It lacked even a civilian residential district. Within the colossal, pressurized cylinder, vast arrays of anonymous, pressurized domes stood clustered in shadow. It was a facility where casual conversation, industrial hums, and even the rhythmic click of footfalls were virtually non-existent.

Yet today, Zero One was roaring with frantic, deafening pandemonium.

Researchers in immaculate white coats, military security in radiation-shielded armor, special operations operatives in matte-black tactical exosuits, and four-meter-tall bipedal combat frames sprinted across the metal catwalks in a frenzy of coordinated panic.

Something priceless had vanished.

The perimeter was placed under absolute lockdown as strike teams swept the sectors. Hundreds of research personnel were herded into staging bays, subjected to brutal, marathon interrogations under cold halogen floodlights. From dark corridors, muffled shrieks, sudden bursts of gunfire, and the sharp percussion of localized detonations echoed through the ventilation shafts. Once or twice, a desperate sob pierced the metallic air, only to be abruptly extinguished by a single shot.

Slowly, inexorably, the frantic clamor began to drown in blood.

Twenty-four hours drifted past.

As if the madness had been nothing more than a shared hallucination, Orbital Facility Zero One returned to its pristine, deathly equilibrium. No voices raised in panic. No roaring servos. Not even a stray bootheel clicking against the grate.

A dozen research scientists had vanished from the personnel roster, but it did not matter.

A squad of soldiers had been expunged, but it did not matter.

A cluster of civilian transit passengers had ceased to exist, but it did not matter.

An unmarked transport vessel had slipped the orbital berths, but it did not matter.

Within the sovereign walls of Zero One, trivialities of that nature were wholly inconsequential. The only metric that held weight was the restoration of total silence. Truly, inside the sterile shell of Zero One...

Nothing had happened at all.

"Has the matter been settled?"

"Yes, sir."

"And the whereabouts of Subject One?"

"Evidence indicates she was covertly smuggled out aboard an automated bulk freighter. Exactly three hundred and twelve hours ago."

"...You noticed this remarkably late."

"It was a grievous failure on our part, Mr. Chairman."

"I am not reprimanding you. When a Chief Researcher orchestrates a conspiracy alongside her inner circle, subterranean blind spots are inevitable."

"We will maintain far ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠tighter vigilance moving forward."

"..."

"Furthermore, per your explicit directive, all secondary conspirators and collateral witnesses have been neutralized—excluding Chief Researcher Sara."

"You were thorough?"

"Completely, sir."

"Then that is sufficient. What is the status of the pursuit?"

"Her telemetry beacon was last triangulated along the Martian orbital corridor. The signal severed immediately thereafter, indicating the transport was either destroyed by intercept fire or an emergency escape capsule was manually jettisoned—"

"Probability of survival?"

"Extremely high. However, there is an imminent risk that external parties have intercepted the capsule."

"...Extend our pursuit vectors as far as operational range permits."

"I will requisition direct intervention from the naval admiralty at once."

"We retain contingencies, but you understand as well as I that this grand campaign affords us no room for leisure."

"Understood, sir."

"...See to it, then."

"At once, Mr. Chairman. For the restoration and eternal glory of mankind."