Stepping Out of the Dark
The world had ended.
Even young Ciel could feel that terrible reality with every fiber of her being.
"They say Glen Village has been turned into a sea of fire by the undead."
"To think the village we always went to for groceries would end up like that…"
It was a small rural church that doubled as an orphanage. The faces of the nuns, who had always smiled with such gentle kindness, no longer held any trace of ease. Instead of the morning prayers and hymns that once filled the air each day, the only sound that echoed through the church was the hammering of repairs—reinforcing the walls, boarding up the windows.
"It'll be all right."
Even in the midst of it all, Ciel's older brother never lost his smile. After their parents left for the village market and never returned, he was the only family she had left.
"Everything's going to be fine."
Ciel knew, in a vague sort of way, that his words were a lie. She could sense, by instinct alone, the faint unease hidden behind his smile.
"…Yeah."
But she wanted to believe him. She wanted all of this to be nothing more than a single night's nightmare, something that would vanish the moment she woke. She wanted everything to go back to the way it was when she opened her eyes.
"Today, of all days, let's eat our fill."
On the day one of the nuns brought word that the village at the foot of the ridge had become a sea of fire, the old bishop of the church emptied every last scrap of remaining food and prepared a grand feast. The younger children who lived with them at the orphanage came running with shining eyes—but the ones with even a little sense of the world understood what it meant to throw open their carefully hoarded provisions like this.
The end is coming.
Until then they had filled their stomachs with only the bare minimum needed to survive, and Ciel was desperately hungry. Even so, she could only pick at her food, watching her brother and the adults for cues. She could barely taste whatever it was that went into her mouth.
And on the night of that last supper, something pounded hard against the church doors.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Slow, but relentless—a steady, unbroken rhythm. One by one the sleeping children woke and stared at the door with terror-stricken eyes. The undead that had turned the lower village into a sea of fire had finally reached the entrance of the church.
"Has the main diocese truly abandoned us?"
The bishop gathered the sobbing children close and murmured as if in prayer. He had always told them that in the central city, where the great and powerful lived, there were superhumans who had gained their strength from a sacred place called the Tower—and that someday those people would come even here and save them. But a small church doubling as an orphanage on a rural frontier was always going to fall rather low on the list of priorities.
Crrrack.
The makeshift barricade they had thrown together by shoving furniture into place gave way. Hairline fractures spidered across the thick wooden doors, and the entrance ceased to serve any purpose as a barrier against the invaders.
Shiiing.
An old man who looked as though he had spent his entire life studying scripture drew a rusted sword with his frail body. The tip of the blade trembled violently, but the will to defend the church was clear and unwavering in his grip. The enemy, however, was not something that could be driven back by will alone. These were monsters beyond all common sense—creatures that had slaughtered even the strong young men of the lower village to the last.
"Aaaaaagh!"
Screams. Weeping. And a horrible sound of something splitting open with a wet crack. Before long, the chaos inside the church fell silent once more.
Ciel, who had been trembling with her eyes and ears covered, slowly lifted her head. The nuns. The friends she had played with. The bishop who had been swinging that rusted sword right in front of her. Without a single exception, every one of them was staring at Ciel with bloodshot eyes. Breathing roughly through their mouths, they looked far more like beasts than people.
"Ciel! Come here!"
While Ciel stood frozen, unable to move, her brother—drenched in blood—drove a dagger deep into the throat of an undead that had drawn too close. He was the older brother who would have left for the capital to train as a knight if the undead disaster had never struck. Even in the worst of circumstances, he refused to give up; he was still searching for a way out.
He seized Ciel's hand roughly and dragged her deeper into the church.
"Don't make a sound in here. No matter what happens, do not come out."
He hid her inside a wardrobe and whispered low.
"I'll come back for you. I swear I'll get you out."
With those words the wardrobe doors closed, and the world sank into darkness. There was nothing left but the cold floor and the muffled pounding of a heart held still.
God, please… please keep my brother safe.
In the dark, the only thing Ciel could do was offer the prayers she had learned, however shallowly, from the bishop. And time passed. Or had it? Ciel lost all sense of time inside that space. She could not tell whether minutes had gone by or hours—whether any of it was even real.
After what felt like an eternity, the wardrobe opened in a flood of brilliant light. But the figure that appeared beyond the doors was not the brother she had been waiting for. It was a strange being with wings.
"It was an angel. He said he thought highly of my faith, and that he would take me to the heavens."
Ciel's face was full of bitterness. For a story of salvation, there was not the slightest hint of joy in her expression.
"I asked if my brother could come too, but he said no."
Ciel had insisted she could not leave her brother behind—but she had never been given a choice in the first place. The moment she saw the light pouring from the angel's fingertips, she lost consciousness. When she opened her eyes again, she had been cast into a place called the heavens. There, Ciel became a newly enrolled student at the Fairy Academy.
"I didn't understand any of it. Not a single thing."
Had the being she saw at the end truly been an angel? Or had it been a delusion her exhausted mind had conjured without her knowing? Those doubts gradually faded as she received her education at the Academy.
"I studied like mad. I thought maybe—just maybe—there was a way to go back to our world before it was completely destroyed."
The Academy was full of knowledge Ciel had never heard of, never even imagined. It was far too systematic to believe she had invented it all in a fever dream. Fortunately—if that was the word—Ciel had a talent for study. Growing up in a rural village where she had never so much as seen a book, she had never known she possessed it. Before she quite realized what was happening, she had claimed the top rank at the Academy, and in time she became a fairy assigned to the Tower of Trials.
"Tabriel-nim recommended I go to the Tower of Trials. I didn't know then that the Tower of Trials is built on the ruins of destroyed worlds."
When she told him she wanted to find her brother, Tabriel had said she might find a clue in the Tower of Trials. At first she had felt nothing but gratitude toward her teacher. But once she learned that the Tower of Trials used ruined worlds as its backdrop, a question took root.
"And then I realized. Ah. The world I lived in… is already gone."
Time would have kept flowing even while Ciel was in the heavens. Even if her brother had survived that hellish night in the church, he would not have lasted much longer. Rumors had already been rampant that even the central city of the nobles was on the verge of falling. Tabriel had been teaching her, in his own metaphorical way, that not only the brother she was searching for but the very world she had lived in had already been destroyed.
"That's why I didn't want to talk about the past. Because every time I do, I think of the brother I lost."
Ciel's shoulders trembled quietly. Watching her with her head bowed low, Do-yun spoke in a calm voice.
"You've got the wish ticket, don't you?"
The wish ticket they said you received for climbing the Tower of Ascension all the way to the top. Do-yun was bringing it up now.
"It's a wish powerful enough to restore an entire world. Slotting one extra person into that shouldn't be impossible, right?"
Ciel looked up at him with eyes full of tangled emotion—surprise and doubt, and a faint, fragile hope all mixed together.
"Could something like that… really be possible?"
The endless regrets, the longing, the wreckage of a past that would not be erased—all of it stirred inside her heart. Do-yun paused for a moment before adding,
"That, I don't know either."
He only guessed that it might be possible. Until he faced the wish itself, there was no way of knowing how it would actually work. Common sense said that a loophole like "please increase the number of wishes I get" would never fly. In the end, you had to rely on the flexibility of whoever was granting the wish.
"What do you mean by that?"
"Still. At least now you've got a realistic goal."
If he told her with absolute certainty that it would be possible, Ciel would take those words as ironclad truth. A single simple word of comfort from Do-yun would become the entire reason she kept living.
But that can't happen.
If she could not overcome this herself, she would simply collapse again the next time something similar came along. Do-yun did not want to see her become that. What he wanted was not a doll that obeyed orders, but a companion capable of making her own judgments.
"A realistic goal…"
Ciel murmured the words over and over, dazed. Come to think of it, she had never truly set a proper goal for herself. Before becoming a fairy, she had simply been a good child who listened to her parents and her brother. After becoming a fairy, she had been a model student who followed only the curriculum the Academy taught. She had vaguely wanted to learn what had become of her brother—but that had been nothing more than a wish. She had never taken the initiative to accomplish anything on her own.
"I've… made up my mind."
For the first time, Ciel made a decision by her own will.
"I'm going to become a high-ranking angel on the same level as Tabriel-nim."
The role of an administrator managing the Tower of Ascension. If she rose that far, the authority that came with the position would grow as well. She would learn secrets on the same scale as the one the Academy never taught her—that the Tower of Trials was a collection of destroyed worlds.
"Is that so?"
Do-yun watched Ciel clench both fists tight, burning with resolve, and let out a quiet snort of laughter. Seeing her recover her spirit was a surprisingly welcome sight.
"Then you'll need some eye-catching results first."
"Yes! I have to raise at least a hundred outstanding talents from the Tower of Trials!"
"A hundred, huh."
That would be measured by the superhumans who successfully climbed the Tower of Trials all the way to the end. Do-yun rolled the number around on his tongue, then spoke.
"That'll take care of itself once I reach the top of the Tower of Ascension."
The only people who existed in the Tower of Ascension were superhumans who had already cleared the Tower of Trials. If Do-yun—who had entered the Tower of Trials for the first time—surpassed every last one of them and reached the summit of the Tower of Ascension, wouldn't that be proof that he was a talent far greater than hundreds of ordinary challengers?
"You're right!"
"Clean up your face before you talk."
At Do-yun's words, Ciel startled and scrubbed her face with the back of her hand. Tears and snot had left it a complete mess—but the smile that bloomed through it all was no longer steeped in gloom.
"This time, I'll be the one who goes looking for my brother."
Long ago, a little girl had crouched inside a church wardrobe, waiting for someone to come and pull her out. At last, by her own will, she threw open the closed door and stepped outside.
"Then shall we pick our rewards?"
You have successfully cleared the 1st Stratum!
◈ Allows the selection of one E-Rank skill
The system alerts that had once stood like a wall between Ciel and Do-yun now floated side by side before the two of them—truly together, in every sense of the word.