The Meeting of Life and Death
Goooooo.
Click.
Though the city had been horribly ravaged, the buildings themselves had not yet collapsed, and so people still lived there. Most of them were old, young, or injured, of course, but the first people I could see in front of me were sturdy men and women at least carrying crude weapons.
Because of my harmless aura, no one was especially wary of me. They were simply so astonished by my presence that their shock bordered on awe. Even so, that astonishment carried something unexpected within it.
"W-we're already dead, aren't we?"
"I-is this heaven?"
"This is the mortal realm. What on earth are you talking about?"
"H-huh?"
"B-but then... why are you here, angel..."
In that instant, I understood the situation.
"So the underworld reaper has passed through here as well."
"Yes...."
"I saw the eight wraiths who followed him, too."
"One of them had a face just like the minister's father.... It was terrifying."
"And the reaper's darkness felt almost alive.... It was as if it could forcibly turn my thoughts in another direction."
"So you decided you had already died? And yet you were not dragged into the underworld, but reached heaven instead?"
"Yes...."
So that was it. That bastard must have come through here. If he was the underworld reaper I was thinking of, then there was only one possible culprit: the one who had split my home clean in two with a single blow and dragged my parents into death with him.
"I will bring him back. I promise."
"You will?"
Then, all at once, I had the uncanny sensation that a shadow had fallen across my light.
"Hiiiiiiiiiik!!!!"
Startled, the people hurriedly hurled themselves out of the darkness and into the safety of my light.
"Archangel, what value can possibly exist in the futile labor of insignificant humans? Their every ideology and method is utterly empty. In the end, it only leads to decadence, to a delighted surrender to being used to the point of death, and then to ruin."
"Everything you say only brings despair. Is it really necessary for you to feel superior to something at all times? Is it because you know no one else can force you by sheer strength?"
"Of course not. Rather, no one who is weak is good; they simply lack the strength to be otherwise. The reason all people look good in your eyes is that they only seem that way in front of you. The moment you say anything, if they do not crush their own nature as much as possible, their lives will be the ones sacrificed instead. In other words, there are plenty of wretches who secretly look down on you and envy the fact that you have power. What use, then, is the freedom to live for such people? They are the ones shouting at the top of their lungs that they don't need it! In truth, even trying to hide that fact is nothing more than an arrogant desire to brag that your intellect is superior. It is a foolish, pathetic struggle that will never work before me, a naked expression of emotion rather than reason, and yet how can they be so stupid and so vile in every respect, without a single exception? If anything, it would be proper for them to admit that stupidity and viciousness are all they are, to confess it honestly, and to leave every strand of their fate entirely to the being above them. And yet they dare to sneak around with such brazen tricks!!! Whether I kill them or let them live, it must be judged according to the logic they themselves keep preaching. For they will serve nothing but the laws and rules they made themselves. So hand over those mortals at once. I will pass judgment."
"That's not true... Of course these humans are the kind who force rules on others while making themselves an exception; if they can save one person or five, they will kill the one without a second thought in order to save the five. More than that, they're 'groups' that, just as you said, curry favor, praise themselves for being so good at it, and spend their time thinking only about why they're so righteous, even going so far as to fanatically believe that this is rational behavior. But can you really say that every individual is identical to such a group, inside and out? Of course not. If those individuals had that level of ability to begin with, they would never be hiding like cowards and relying on the power of society or the state. In other words, consciously or unconsciously, they always at least acknowledge that they themselves are lower than the community they worship, and lower than God or morality. So while they may seem like thugs whose brains have rotted from arrogance, isn't it true that, precisely because of that, they are desperately waiting for some great being who can overpower that arrogance? Moreover, that is why they do not give up. Because they believe that one day a hero will appear to save them. Nietzsche, who denied human exceptionalism, transcended truth, and valued fidelity to the earth and love for one's own life, also affirmed this. Even he did not think of himself as a heroic superman."
"Even so, that only amounts to forcing ordinariness on people. Those bastards always turn themselves into zero before trying to divide everyone by themselves. They have never once been any different. They have always lived while being brainwashed into believing that fixed rules are everything, and while brainwashing others in turn. That is the true face of what people call order, of what is represented by ordinariness. To those who keep preaching ordinariness, even death is something they cannot control. And however, whenever, or for whatever reason that death may occur, they still die as ordinarily as they lived. Why should the deaths of people who have craved nothing but ordinariness be special? However they die, death is just as ordinary for ordinary mortals! So I won't waste any more words. Hand them over at once. They are merely deceiving themselves."
At those words, some of them finally felt their lives were pointless and approached him, ready to accept death without resistance. I, too, could find nothing to refute in what he said. The reaper then stretched out his hand...
Swish.
KRAAAAAAASH!
"Aaaaaaaaaaagh!!!!"
Swoooosh.
"If the hope and humility you value so highly are absent, or if one is not worthy of receiving them, then all you will do is expose your own shallow bottom. So do not deny death. If the ordinary nature of their lives was their true choice, then their deaths are, of course, ordinary as well. And in the end, it only means that at the final hour they will reject everything they have lived by until now. In the end, they spent their entire lives pursuing the ordinary while envying, desiring, and fearing the extraordinary. That is why they are mortals."
After harvesting the souls of the people who had given up, he disappeared. Naturally, the pain was unbearable, because he was losing his own self as it truly was; and because life itself was being extinguished, their minds shattered into pieces as they surrendered everything to his words. In particular, the final line he spoke turned the psychological struggle to deny the emptiness of life against them, guiding them toward death while also reaping their souls in reality, which meant that the more they resisted, the better it was for him.
"But remember this: I will not touch those who still have a genuine chance to be saved. If you wish to delay the deaths of mortals, go to the regions my hands have not yet reached. But their death will always be inevitable. One day, you will grow tired of wondering why you ever mistook the lives of those who long only for the death that is the fruit of ordinariness for something precious."
Then, with the darkness, he teleported away.
"Haaah... haaah...."
The people finally managed to catch their breath again and turned the words over in their minds.
"W-what do we do now?"
"Have you heard of Mephauric?"
"Yes...."
"If you go there, you should be safe for the time being. And what he said wasn't entirely wrong either. Peace is not something you find; it is something you enforce."
"Th-then...."
"Don't worry. That man is nothing other than the manifestation of death spreading across this world. Naturally, what cannot be seen is also what is most dangerous. So if death has taken on physical form and appeared locally in reality, isn't that, in a sense, better? Death only occurs when he takes a soul."
At those words, the people began to recover a little of their hope. Of course, I did not truly think so myself. I only thought that the souls he had harvested had been lost so completely, through total death, that not even the nonmaterial realm retained a trace of them.
"So go there... There, you can begin again whenever you want. Whether you stay there or leave and start anew is your freedom."
With that, I opened a portal leading to Mephauric.
"Thank you, Archangel...."
"We actually didn't want to go to heaven already...."
"Thank you for giving us a new life...."
And so the people hurried through the portal. Before that undeniable truth, whatever emotions they dared to express were beyond the reach of human language.
Hah, but there are still people left to save... Even if the underworld reaper's rampage is over, people will fight again. And... my feelings are only my motivation. They must never become my whole being. Let's go.
There, a fierce battle was raging. But I could not stand by and watch any more victims be made, so I intervened at once and stopped their fighting.
Whoooosh!
BOOOOM!
"Gah?!"
"W-what was that just now...?!"
Goooooo.
As I descended with solemn dignity, my white and blue-tinged wings spread wide, my eyes closed and a holy spear in my right hand, the people could only stare in dumbfounded shock at that overwhelming purity.
"Why are all of you so desperate to kill your fellow humans? And more than that, to stake even your lives on this so-called great cause? If you cannot become part of something greater, are you saying death is all that waits for you? (Why are you all so eager to kill the same humans at all? Furthermore, you took such a huge gamble on your so-called greater good, as if everyone must become part of something bigger or else death is all that awaits them?)"
My rebuke struck straight at the heart of the stunned crowd.
"So you hate peace so much that you may as well not want to die. You keep saying that war must always be fought, that it is more important than anything else, that on the grand scale all you're doing is struggling to survive through it all, and yet the moment individuals actually do that, you crush them without mercy. What on earth makes you any different from hippie terrorists? You all need to learn how to behave humbly as the majority before the minority. Before you ever expect humility from those stronger than yourselves!"
At the same time, the white force carrying my will began to surge along with my blue-tinged white wings. Those who had already awakened to the importance of hope and humility through my very existence no longer feared it; they accepted it whole, feeling their own modesty and the natural current that flowed from it cut through their entire bodies, granting them both resolve and calm as they gained the knowledge and wisdom needed for a new life. But those whose bones were carved through and through with pride, the first, worst, and ultimate sin among the seven deadly sins, found that every wicked impulse they had meant to commit at that moment was converted wholly into pride, until everything else in them was washed clean away.
"KRAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!"
"How dare you speak to me like that...."
"You bastard knows nothing! Have I ever been wrong?"
"The world should obviously be run according to the rational procedures set by society!"
"What right do you have to say anything, you worthless bastard?"
"Even that pride is painfully immature. Just what part of the universe is the world you speak of? Those who inflict suffering upon others are always insane with self-righteousness, so of course they don't even know the limits of the society to which their own rules apply."
KWA-BOOOOOM!
At the same time, an explosion of a magnitude that split the entire planet in half erupted by my hand, and the surrounding star system itself began to convulse before spinning like a tornado, unleashing a chain of monstrous nuclear detonations no fewer than billions of times over.
And mingling with my light, it thundered through the void with such majesty and grandeur that it was enough to steal the very structure of thought from those who heard it.
Fwoooooooosh....
Koooooo....
Flarrrrrrrr.
The ground, unable to withstand the heat, was instantly covered in white flame, which then burned through every cell in their bodies.
"Now do you understand? You people never had anything like spiritual fortitude in the first place. Your arrogance merely prevented you from feeling guilt, and then became the source of every thought and action you ever took! You did not become evil because of some environment or some other person!!"
Crash!
At the same time, a white meteor struck the half-destroyed planet squarely and finished tearing it apart, while illuminating the vast cosmos and shaking the air molecules one by one as its roar echoed outward.
"Do you believe your status will save you? True strength comes not from authority, but from the courage to reach out to others, and this light shines only in the heart of the humble."
The humans, whose essence was nothing but pride, could naturally say nothing more. Even what they had just shouted was not a conscious rejection of reality, but the residue of instinct left behind in the unconscious. And yet that too was nothing more than their true face, the reality of the courage, wisdom, strength, unity, future, and freedom they claimed as their own. Their pride, in the end, gave rise to complacency, and made them justify themselves by treating as their only conscience the very things they claimed were unnecessary.
"Peace is made by those who know how to be humble, and it does not appear when someone tries to change the world with some grand ambition. It comes into being only when vice and injustice are actively targeted and removed. No matter how much people talk about goodness, the more they do, the harder it becomes to stop acts of evil committed in the name of virtue. Especially when such things are equated with order."
Once I had completely shattered the minds of the proud, the soldiers who had truly reformed and the civilians near me watched in reverent awe as I slowly descended to the ground.
Goooooo.
"You people try to find peace through war. And then you talk as if peace just means finding a way for everyone to understand your words properly. In that sense, there is a little Adolf Hitler in all of you. Peace is not something to be found; it is something to be enforced, and war is simply the way you discovered to struggle toward your goal. Whatever the reason, it always boils down to trying to become stronger and more prosperous. And that means fighting according to your own convictions and your sense of duty, with no mercy for the enemy. The value and shape of goodness, when measured through the order spoken of by your enemies, are nothing more than the price they must pay in the end, the result of the peace they forcibly imposed through a method of their own making. So do not, from this point on, try to seek the peace preached by those foolish anti-Western factions. Their supposed essential peace is no different from the utterly contradictory nonsense that claims one can forcibly pursue order in order to create good, while also insisting that creativity can be manufactured through such standardized education, all the while killing individuality through that same education. Goodness is what can be sought, and through it order is formed, and peace is then enforced. To try to create good through order instead is nothing more than the delusion of a child who thinks order is some toy he can handle however he likes. Do not use it as a shield to rob others of their freedom and their lives.
"That is why the concept of humility exists. Because for everyone, one's own peace does not simply end with finding it alone; it must be imposed on others as well. And the reason for that is nothing other than the sociality you value so dearly. Hope, too, is the same: without losing yourself, while inevitably oppressing one another, you fasten the leash of sociality around your own neck and pant through a suffocating performance, or else you only pretend to enjoy it while hiding your true self, pouring all your energy into blending into the crowd and never forgetting who you really are."