In Midgar's Sector 7, there was a bar called Seventh Heaven. (From Final Fantasy 7)
And the owner of that bar was the kind of woman no one could ever forget once they had seen her.
There was no helping it. The owner was stunningly beautiful: an angel's face, a devil's figure, a voice like a singing bird—she was practically a goddess.
And right now, that "goddess" was sitting there as if lost in a daze.
One hand held a glass, unmoving for so long that the ice inside had nearly melted away.
She looked like she was spacing out, but in truth, she was watching a live stream.
The heart-stopping battle on-screen tugged at her nerves as if her heart were tied to it.
Especially now—after that grenade had been thrown in, and the blinding flash erupted—she was tense to the extreme.
Huh?
She also heard something deeply abnormal, a sound like the dying roar of a massive metal monster, mixed with a human's muffled cry of pain.
After the brief wash of white came a sheet of crimson, as if the world were smothered in flame, and the camera view began to spin violently.
Like someone had been blasted away, their body tumbling end over end.
But the firelight—or whatever that glare was—was too intense. She couldn't make out what had happened to them.
…Wait.
The picture cleared.
She saw the woman called A2, the woman called 2B, and the man who was probably the newly joined male member of the group—all of them were still there.
The three had survived, pressed close together.
No. It wasn't that all three were clinging together.
It looked more like the man had become a shield, covering the two women with his body.
Then Tifa noticed the man's outstretched arm in front of him.
It was in terrible shape—his hand was severely burned, like his skin had ignited in an instant, still spitting tiny sparks.
And then, as that hand finally slackened, Tifa noticed a faint disturbance in the air—like an invisible spherical barrier had rippled and quietly vanished.
Her pupils widened.
She took in the scene around them, and it was horrifying.
It looked as if the ground itself had been scraped away—an entire layer ripped off.
The forest that had been nearby was gone without a trace, replaced by dead earth.
So, judging by their position, Tifa became even more certain: the man had used some special power to protect them. That was why the small patch of ground they stood on was still somewhat intact—though it was barely holding together.
Like a thin tongue of land jutting out from the edge of a cliff, ready to break off and drop at any moment.
Of course, there was no hundreds-of-meters-deep abyss here.
But at that depth—and assuming gravity over there was the same as it was here—if Tifa fell without any protection, she might not die outright, but she would be crippled.
Ah—
The man coughed up blood.
There was blood from his nose and ears too. It didn't look like the blast shockwave alone had caused it, but rather like he had overdrawn that strange power and forced it beyond its limit.
Though, in a sense, that also meant he had borne the blast's impact.
Calling it "caused by the explosion" wouldn't be wrong.
"Why are you, as a human, living on Earth? Shouldn't you be living on the Moon?"
2B asked in confusion and panic, moving to support him.
That single sentence made Tifa's brow lift slightly.
The amount of information hidden in it was enormous.
The Moon? As in Earth's Moon?
If 2B believed humans should not be living on Earth, there was one possibility: Earth's environment could no longer sustain human life. Earth had become a dead planet.
And in Tifa's world, the planet she lived on was also being driven toward death—because of one organization's greedy extraction of planetary energy.
So, to protect the planet, Tifa had joined an organization called AVALANCHE, fighting back against Shinra, which continued consuming the planet's lifeblood.
So in A2's world, had humanity's homeworld also been ruined by human hands, leaving it unable to support life?
Or had the planet itself developed some fatal problem?
"Living on the Moon? What if I told you the humans in this world went extinct a long time ago?"
The man—whose ID was Golden Toilet—spoke with a tone that carried a heavy implication beneath it.
That line alone made not only 2B and A2 freeze on-screen, but even Tifa watching the stream went still.
This young man was from another world. Why would he say something like that?
He knew this world's information.
In his world, details about A2's world existed in some kind of work—something he had seen.
If what he said was true, Tifa's expression darkened.
Because it meant the humans of A2's world were gone.
That struck a chord in her. Would her world end up like that too?
"Your statement is self-contradictory. According to my current scan, you are almost certainly human, which is logically inconsistent with your claim that humanity is extinct."
2B replied on the stream.
She didn't know anything about the humans of Golden Toilet's original world, so what she said wasn't exactly wrong.
"I'm not a human from this world. But even if I were, if you invite me back to the Bunker, I'm probably going to end up with one outcome: being 'humanely destroyed.'"
He stated outright that he was not a native of their world.
"Humanely destroyed?"
2B didn't understand.
"Yes. If real humans still exist, that might not actually be a good thing for the android leadership."
"Unable to understand. Our mission is to safeguard humanity and protect humanity. We must not harm humans."
"That's what you believe. But do you think your leadership sees it the same way? Your leadership might even end up with the same kind of thinking as the machine lifeforms—wanting to destroy their own creator. Unfortunately, the androids' creators—humans—have already been dead for thousands of years."
Golden Toilet shrugged, as if he were talking about something trivial.
It was obvious he understood A2's world deeply.
"The machine lifeforms want to destroy their own creators?"
A2, who had been silent until now, couldn't help seizing on that point.
"Yes. If this world doesn't deviate much from what I know, then the aliens were wiped out hundreds of years ago—maybe more than a thousand years ago—by a rebellion from the machine lifeforms they themselves created."
He delivered it lightly, almost casually.
But A2's body swayed, as if the blow had landed directly on her mind.
Tifa thought about it for a moment, and she could understand why.
A2 had probably been clinging to her mission all along—fighting to win the war for humanity, to defeat the aliens.
Only to learn the aliens had already been exterminated by their own creations?
And the humans she was protecting had also been extinct for thousands of years?
Then what had these thousands of years of war between androids and machine lifeforms even been?
"I don't believe it."
"Oh, Ms. 2B doesn't believe it? In truth, you're shaken too, aren't you? The fact is, you aren't truly a standard 2B-model android. What is your real mission? The targets you 'process' are people who might discover that the Council of Humanity has long since become a mere façade—and then get silenced for it."
That made 2B visibly waver.
"And do you know what the real purpose behind creating YoRHa is? Do you want me to say it out loud? YoRHa Commander White."
Before the last word even finished, the man had already raised his gun and aimed it at the robot beside 2B.
That robot seemed… abnormal.
"Who are you?"
A mature woman's voice came from the robot.
It was almost certainly Commander White of YoRHa, remotely listening in through this unit.
Was this Commander some kind of conspirator?
An enemy?
(End of Chapter)
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