That was not all. On the open ground further out, several mantis-type Gastrea with huge translucent wings were swinging blade-limbs sharp as guillotines, splitting great chunks of salvaged construction timber into neat, uniform strips.
Between two lamp posts, an enormous black-widow-type Gastrea had its abdomen raised, dutifully paying out a strand of silk of perfectly even thickness, drawing it taut and anchoring it in place.
Several dresses, washed spotless, hung along that strand, fluttering in the wind.
"They look a bit terrifying, but they really are useful labor."
Haimer took in the sheer contrast of the scene, a faint smile tugging at his lips.
Around these one-time nightmares, several hundred little girls sat in twos and threes on clean flagstones. Their faces were no longer grimy, and the wariness and dread of children living on the streets had gone out of them. Every one of them wore clean clothes.
The erosion rate that had once hung above their heads like the sword of Damocles had long since been erased by Haimer's Divine Power. They were, in the truest sense of the word, children with a future now.
And they were living well.
Every last Gastrea had, on that one night, been stripped of its will by the blood-red Divine Eyes his authority had taken shape as, remade into his most loyal puppets of war.
To these little girls, the creatures that had once been the nightmare of the human world were now their most obedient laborers and their most faithful guards.
Nor was that all. The humans who had survived the bloodbath of that divine punishment, spared because they had shown these girls some kindness, had turned all the way around and now revered them as "Children of God." After all, people always need something to believe in.
Having used his Divine Power to look over everything that had happened these past few days, Haimer drew his gaze back in.
He took half a step forward, and his body dropped weightlessly from a rooftop hundreds of meters up. Wind howled past his ears.
Less than ten meters from the ground, Haimer tapped one toe against empty air, and every trace of the fall's momentum dissolved. He came down like a drifting leaf, without a sound, into the shadows at the outer edge of the clearing by the bonfire.
Yet even with his presence fully hidden, the Gastrea reacted in the same instant.
"Hssss—"
The mantis-type splitting wood stopped mid-swing. Its compound eyes, glowing a dull red, swiveled and caught Haimer's figure.
Then the rest followed. The silk-spinning spider, the giant beetles patrolling the perimeter, every Gastrea branded in the mind by those dark red Divine Eyes, all set down their work as one.
Their massive bodies lowered in a rolling wave, forelimbs flat against the ground, heads pressed to the earth, and a deep, reverent humming rose toward the place where Haimer stood.
That sudden mass prostration caught the girls' attention as well. Several hundred small heads turned at almost the same moment.
When they made out the tall, black-haired, black-eyed figure walking slowly out of the shadows, the clearing fell silent for a heartbeat. Then it erupted into deafening cheers.
"Kami-sama!"
"Kami-sama is back!"
The girls dropped whatever they were holding and came at him from every direction, like fledglings streaming home to the nest.
Ringed in by the chattering crowd, Haimer's face was all gentle warmth. He bent down and ruffled the hair of the white-haired little girl standing closest to him.
It was the blind girl from before. Her eyes had been healed; she lived with her sister now.
"How have the last few days been?" Haimer asked softly.
"Great!" The white-haired girl nodded hard, holding on to the hem of his coat. "We get enough to eat every day, and nobody has to sleep under the bridge anymore. And everyone cleared out the rubble over there together and built a big flower bed!"
While Haimer listened patiently to the girls sharing their days over one another, the outer edge of the crowd parted on its own, opening a narrow path.
A girl with short brown hair came walking through it, carrying a clean aluminum cup. She did not bounce and shout like the others; her clear eyes held a maturity far beyond her ten years, though the moment she saw Haimer, a flash of excitement went through them.
It was Senju Kayo, the girl who carried the Model Dolphin factor.
"Kami-sama. You're back."
Kayo stopped in front of him.
"Order inside Eden has been more or less stable these past few days. The Gastrea work very efficiently. The prefabricated housing in Districts Three and Four is finished, and the drinking-water filtration system is running normally."
She gave the short report in clean, orderly fashion, for all the world like a little housekeeper.
Haimer looked down at this girl whose thoughtfulness was almost painful to watch. He knew that as a high-intelligence Initiator, Kayo, having lost her original partner Ikuma Shougen, had made him, the god who had come down here, the whole pillar of her faith.
He reached out and rested his palm lightly on top of her head, rubbing the soft short hair.
"You've worked hard, Kayo," Haimer said gently.
"You've done even better than I expected."
At the praise Kayo's shoulders went stiff. She pressed her lips together, a flush that belonged to a child of her age rising in her cheeks, and objected in a small voice:
"It's only what I should be doing."
Haimer smiled at that, walked over to a flat stone beside the bonfire, sat down, and waved the girls in around him.
They obediently spread out and settled on the ground, every pair of eyes fixed on him, as if afraid he might vanish the next second the same way he had arrived.
The bonfire threw up gold-red flames, and the wood snapped and popped.
"Kami-sama."
A girl in twin tails sitting on his left could hold her curiosity no longer and tilted her face up. "These past few days, did you go back to the Heavens?"
"The Heavens?" Haimer raised an eyebrow at the word.
"What are the Heavens like?"
Another girl edged closer, chin propped in both hands, her whole face full of longing for the storybook dwelling of the gods.
"Is it all soft beds made out of clouds, and strawberry cake you never run out of?"
Looking at all those wistful eyes, Haimer let out a quiet laugh.
"Then I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed."
His gaze went up to the first stars coming out over the night sky.
"The Heavens really are beautiful."
"White temples everywhere, rivers of stars flowing with golden light, gardens that never wither."
"But they're also genuinely dull."
Haimer looked back down at the children in front of him.
"The gods spent hundreds of millions of years up there."
"Time stands still in that place. Almost every view you see stays exactly the same, forever."
"Plenty of gods have lived so long that even counting clouds bores them."
The girls stared for a moment at this shattering of their picture, then glanced at one another. It clearly fell some way short of the flawless kingdom of the gods they had in their heads.
"If the Heavens are that dull..."
Sitting a little way off on Haimer's right with her arms around her knees, Kayo caught the important part at once. "Then you weren't in the Heavens these past few days at all, were you, Kami-sama?"
"Sharp as ever, Kayo."
Haimer nodded and admitted it openly.
"I've been down in the Lower World this whole time. In a city called Orario."
"Orario?"
The unfamiliar name caught the girls' interest at once.
"What sort of place is it? Is it full of tall buildings like the Tokyo Area?" one of them asked.
"Enju and the others, is that the place you took them to?" Kayo asked after her. "Are they doing well over there?"
"That depends on what Enju and Little Hiruko want for themselves. But my guess is they're enjoying it well enough."
Thinking of the handful of girls back home who turned the house upside down every day squabbling over bed space and Ability updates, Haimer shook his head in resignation.
"So what kind of place is Orario, really?"
The twin-tailed girl kept pressing, her eyes bright with longing. "If Enju and the others can go, does that mean we can go to that world too?"
Haimer looked at these guileless, wide-eyed children.
The whole purpose of crossing worlds this time was to bring this first group of a hundred and more Cursed Children back to Orario and settle them in the great castle on the outer ring that Hephaestus and the others were overseeing.
But he had no intention of taking them away by coaxing or by command.
This had to go step by step, so that they understood clearly what it was they would be facing.
Orario was no fairy-tale playground full of sunshine and laughter.
Its rules of survival were crueler than anything in the old Tokyo Area.
"Orario, hm..."
Haimer slowed his words down.
"You could call it a very prosperous city in that world, with all kinds of races living in it."
"Beast people with animal ears on their heads, the small-statured Pallum, and dwarves who are masters at forging weapons."
Hearing that, the girls' eyes went brighter still, as though they were already looking at some wondrous amusement park.
Then Haimer's tone shifted.
"But at the very center of that city stands a tower that rises into the clouds, Babel Tower. And beneath Babel Tower..."
"...lies an enormous labyrinth with no bottom in sight. The Dungeon."
Haimer's voice sank lower.
"The Dungeon?" Kayo asked, curious, though instinct told her that what came next would not be an easy thing to hear.
Haimer nodded.
"The Dungeon is full of monsters."
"Those monsters are nothing like the Gastrea you've seen."
"They hatch straight out of the Dungeon's walls and ceilings. As long as the Dungeon exists, the monsters can never be killed off."
The excitement went out of the girls' faces, and they began listening in earnest.
"And inside that Dungeon," Haimer continued, "the variety of monsters is endless."
"On the middle floors, somewhere past the tenth, you'll meet Hellhounds that breathe fire. Deeper down there are mammoths the size of small hills."
"And the deadliest part is this."
Haimer looked around at the girls, who had gradually stopped breathing.
"The monsters of the Dungeon hunger for the scent of the living."
"The moment an adventurer takes a serious wound while exploring, the faintest trace of blood spreading through the air will draw hundreds, even thousands of monsters from the surrounding floors in a single instant."
"And once you go down in that place, the chance to stand back up rarely comes again."
____
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