Chapter Text
At last it started. The beginning of the end.
The first Level 0.
A Level 0 was a Level 0 was a Level 0 was still an esper. And the rules of the game, as shown by the Misaka Sisters, demanded that all espers would die.
Up until then the city had at least retained some facsimile of life to it. Level 0s had made up some sixty percent of the student base, after all. Sixty percent of eighty percent of two point three million is one point one million, plus four thousand for significant digits.
Quote: a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths are a statistic. End quote.
Quote: you can’t just skip the boring parts. Of course I can skip the boring parts. End quote.
They all died.
There’s not much else to say. They all died. Doesn’t it sound so funny, so matter-of-fact and nonchalant and stupid, just like that? They all died. There was no miracle. No one survived. Not Accelerator nor Teitoku nor Mikoto nor Misaki nor Kuroko nor Awaki nor Junko nor Mitori nor Mitsuko nor Mii nor Aomi nor Shaei nor Kinuho nor Maaya nor the Sisters nor Dolly nor Last Order nor Kazari nor everyone else in the history of the city, whoever you ever knew the name of and whoever you didn’t know the name of, everyone you can possibly think of.
It was the end of an era, the end of espers, of the city of science, of what some people would eventually call pseudo-science, or more dramatically, some kind of special sin, or something like that. (Turns out God and religion would stick around far longer than espers did. Figures.) The smokestacks of the crematoriums chuffed happily until there was no longer anyone to man them.
In the final years there were two people who clung to life the longest and most stubbornly. One was Kamijou Touma, one was Saten Ruiko.
Ruiko had a good idea of why Touma was still alive. It was because he was special. As for herself, she really had no idea, she just knew that for some reason, it wasn't her time yet. At one point she had the horrific thought, what if we’re supposed to get together and have children? What if this is like that story of how the Earth is repopulated from two, Adam and Eve, Pyrrha and Deucalion? Fortunately or unfortunately, that never happened, and she and Touma only ever talked to each other distantly and politely, when they ran across each other in the great skeletal structures of decaying buildings and streets which you could no longer mistake as eerily similar to what they had once been.
She asked him, once, about what he thought about everything that had happened. He scratched the back of his head with his right hand and grinned sheepishly, although it was a hollow and melancholic expression.
“I failed, I guess,” he said. But Ruiko thought he was being too hard on himself. If only all the real problems of life could be neatly and cleanly punched away. It didn’t matter what he had been up to when everything had been going on. It was already in the past, too late, and she felt no ill will toward him. In fact, she only wished that he could forgive himself.
One day, she woke up and looked out the window and saw the sun, and she knew that she was the last person in the city alive.
She felt relieved, because it meant her time was coming soon, too. It had been very lonely.
When she bent over a few days later, coughing like her life depended on it, she was faintly thrilled to see the blood covering her palm when she peeled it away from her mouth.
A girl started following her around soon after, a blonde girl with blue eyes who had died long long before anyone else had.
“You’re not real,” Ruiko said.
“You’re the last person who’s left,” Frenda Seivelun shrugged. “Anything you imagine, anything you want, it’s real. No one else would ever know, anyway.”
“Hm…” Ruiko said. She considered it.
She imagined an alternate reality where everyone was alive and happy. It didn’t have to be a special place like this city had been. Maybe it was just an ordinary one where they were all ordinary students, going about their lives in ordinary ways.
She imagined a cloud, nice and fat and dark, that it might appear and cover the sun, which was shining so cheerily and happily above her, just like it would shine for the next five billion years, the light which was hitting and hurting her eyes, the sky so peerlessly and beautifully blue: could all the beautiful things that ever existed just disappear for a moment? All over the world, Ruiko imagined it raining. It would have been nice if it rained for them, if just for a little while.
When Ruiko eventually closed her eyes, she couldn’t tell where the wetness on her cheeks had come from. She imagined she was simply going to sleep. One day, she’d wake up again.
The city, hushed, the cradle of countless children.