"I don't want to die alone~"
Amidst the playful humming, Kivas Chariot walked home in the rainless dusk, boots clacking softly against the faded concrete, her figure a blur beneath neon haze and distant warning sirens.
It was always lately.
Silent streets. Empty benches. The air tasted faintly of copper, and the electric signs flickered above shuttered storefronts as if half-asleep, whispering to no one.
She adjusted the collar of her jacket and tilted her head toward the sky.
The sun looked wrong today. Not in color. Not in brightness. Just... wrong.
Like it was staring back.
"Another solar warning?" she muttered, pulling up her holopad to check the alerts. "Third one this week. Haah. It's like the sun's finally had enough of us."
It echoed too loudly in the stillness.
No one replied. No one ever did.
"Nyeh, people are too afraid to go outside nowadays." She shrugged. "It's not like the war will end if everyone remains inside..."
Kivas lived on the twenty-fourth floor of a half-abandoned high-rise. Her apartment was modest: a bed, a broken stove, three working lamps, and an old terminal that still ran legacy programs from before the Great Net Collapse.
"I'm home~!" She chimed, before she sighed. "Not even a single lockpicking attempt today too, huh. Maybe I should be the one who start intruding someone's shelter."
She settled in, peeled off her jacket, and stared at the wall for a while.
Lately, she'd started whispering to herself before sleep. Not prayers. Not mantras. Just... whispers.
As if maybe something out there might be heard.
"Please... I don't want to be alone forever."
She would say it like brushing her teeth. Out of habit. Half-joking.
"Give me a handsome dude, or a normal dude, or maybe just a dude!" Her eyes squinted, cheeks burned red. "Heck, I don't mind dating a woman at this point...!"
At the very least, she wanted a companion to converse with.
Ever since she wasn't permitted to perform her job activity from her current affiliated company due to the current restriction in her city, her anxiety was on the rise.
And at one point, sleeping on the bed wasn't even that comfortable anymore.
"How horrible of them, to leave without saying anything..."
When slumber came, so did a moment of peace. Sometimes she dreamt of arms wrapping around her from behind—gentle, warm, unjudging.
A face in the darkness murmuring.
And every time she reached back, her fingers grasped only the cold void.
The terminal on her desk buzzed with static.
Her eyes drifted to it.
The screen, for a split second, flashed white—then returned to normal.
"Solar interference?"
She got up and looked out the window.
The sky was bleeding gold. Not orange. Not red. Just pure, searing gold.
Then everything gasped.
A deafening crackle of wind shattered the stillness, striking the landscape.
In the first millisecond, a ball of plasma, hotter than the sun, erupted and expanded into a fireball kilometers wide.
Inside its radius, nothing remained—no ground, no buildings, no home. Just instant vaporization.
The flash came next. A wave of blinding light swept across the city ruins and beyond, rendering anyone who dared look at it temporarily blind.
The thermal pulse that followed scorched everything within 13 kilometers, burning it all to ash.
And then came the shockwave. ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ N0veI.Fiɾe.net
The fireball's energy compressed the surrounding air into a massive bubble of destruction.
Traveling faster than sound, the shockwave tore through 175 square kilometers, ripping buildings apart and flinging debris like confetti.
What once stood strong crumbled like brittle cards.
As the fireball cooled, a mushroom cloud of dust and ash rose into the atmosphere, a haunting reminder of the devastation. The cloud pulled in air from the surrounding areas, creating more destruction as it sucked everything inward.
Far beyond the epicenter, black rain would soon fall—radioactive ash descending on what little remained of the city, poisoning the ground and the few unlucky survivors.
In the days to come, silent, invisible radiation would seep into the earth and sky, ensuring that the scars of this moment would linger for decades.
Not a single trace of her remained.
She had been struck directly by the sun.
It wasn't long before a troubling realization hit her
"...Wait. How am I still capable of thinking!?"
There was nothing but her consciousness adrift in an endless void of darkness.
Even she herself wasn't quite aware.
"Haah, am I about to be judged? Sent to hell? Dear lords—all of you, if you exist—please hurry up and get on with it..."
Her mind floated in the emptiness, though there was no vessel, no physical body tethering her to anything.
"Huh... maybe the afterlife is a reincarnation after all. And maybe, waiting might works?"
So, she waited. Patiently. For anything to happen.
Time dragged on, and the boredom became unbearable. Death, she realized, was not a sudden event, but a slow, agonizing waiting game with no end in sight.
If it even ends at all.
Like a restless child counting sheep to sleep, Kivas began to count moments in her mind.
To one hundred thirty-four.
It was all she had to keep her sanity running, miraculously.
Eventually, years passed.
100 years, to be exact.