By the time I reached Nao and Saki, the situation had taken a turn that made little sense. Saki, who had taken a seemingly fatal blow, was holding her head and rousing. Sunao, who had sustained no such injury, was slumped on the ground, completely unconscious.
“Saki? What the hell happened?” I called out to the girl who had just woken up. Despite being struck with an attack strong enough to kill a bear, she appeared completely uninjured. Covered in blood, and totally out of sorts, but not hurt.
“Shin… what…” the situation seemed to slowly sink in for her, her eyes widening in shock as she patted her now-fixed body. “I’m alive? The wound is gone? How did…” she confused looked down at her own blood stained but healthy body, before turning her attention to the unconscious girl next to her. “Nao!”
Nao’s body was stock still. I wasn’t even certain she was still alive, her body utterly motionless. I worried that she had perhaps found a way to sacrifice her own life to save Saki’s.
It seemed as if Saki had feared the same thing, as she immediately put her ear to the girl’s chest to listen for a heartbeat. After a short second that felt like an hour, Saki breathed a sigh of relief.
“She’s alive. I barely hear her breathing, and her heartbeat is faint, but she won’t die.” Saki momentarily looked filled with nothing but relief, before seemingly remembering the direness of the situation. “I… Shin, I died. Not just clinically, my soul left my body. I shouldn’t be alive, I already passed on. Nao… I think she somehow brought me back.”
“I know Nao is an incredibly strong healer, but raising the dead? That’s not something I’d expect her to be able to do.”
“Nor I, but I know what I saw. Or felt, I guess. I felt my metaphysical presence leave my body, and yet I also felt Nao drag me back to it. She… returned me to life. I’m sure of it.”
Saki stroked the head of the unconscious girl that supposedly saved her life just seconds ago. I’d have never believed it myself if the evidence wasn’t so damning. Not only was there no other possible way for Saki to have survived such a grievous wound, Nao’s complete non responsive state resembled exactly what we had seen before when Kyouma exhausted her magical power.
“So… Nao unlocked her third ability then? That’s the only way all of this could possibly make sense, right?”
“I-I guess… all I know is that I’m alive now because of her revival. I owe her my entire life.”
Saki looked down at Nao with a pure affection so strong that it looked like a scene from a fairytale. There was naught in her eyes but unconditional love. The kind strong enough to cause miracles like this.
I was stuck between relief and fear, the current situation exaggerating the already dramatic circumstances I had yet to get used to. One the one hand, Saki had pulled through and survived a fatal blow, and Nao had seemingly been blessed with the ability to cure death itself. But it rendered her like this… her body and mind too exhausted to respond to her surroundings. She would recover within the day, but that was a long time in a world as hostile as this. One of our members being out cold due to overexertion of her magical reserves set a bad precedent. Unless she recovered quickly, her life would be in immense danger.
Saki had been brought back from the brink of death, but could we afford to pay the price? I couldn’t say for certain.
“Shin… did my plan work? Did we win?” Still stroking Nao’s head, Saki looked up at me with a pleading look in her eye. She likely couldn’t see far enough to find the other four surrounding and interrogating the dismembered demon.
“It did, we have the demon captured. The other girls are dealing with it.”
“In that case, I should come over with you. I can lead the interrogation by example.” There was a quiet rage in her voice, though I was unsure if it was Descartes or herself that she was more angry at.
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“I’m not sure I like the implication there, but sure, break a leg.”
Saki, clearly still disoriented after rising from the dead, gently picked her girlfriend up in a bridal carry. As she was brought close to me, I could hear Nao’s faint ragged breathing as her exhausted body fought to survive with its magic completely used up.
Silently, she and I began walking back toward our allies. The strike that had wounded her so badly had carried enough force to send her careening through the air, so we were quite far from the battleground we had left.
There was a question on my mind, though it was one I dared not ask for fear of seeming insensitive.
“What is it?” she asked
“What?”
“Remember that I can read your mind, I know you have some sort of burning question. Come on, out with it. I won’t be mad.” I breathed in sharply, unsure of how to ask what I wanted answered. Eventually, I bit the bullet and simply asked outright.
“What was it like? To… die?”
She didn’t answer straight away, instead simply looking off into the distance, trying to put her thoughts into words. To pass on and then come back was not an experience most people would have in their life, so it was likely not easy to explain.
“It was… peaceful.”
“Peaceful?”
“Peaceful. In the last few moments before I lost consciousness, I was filled with all sorts of regrets, especially about not being able to live out my life with Nao, but shortly after I was at peace. My entire life flashed in front of my eyes, and I was content with it all. My soul was cleansed of all it’s stress and fear, and I was happy to have lived the life I did.”
There was a distant look on her face, almost as if she longed for the peace she described. While I had no desire to die, I couldn’t deny that her description of passing on sounded pleasant. In a sense, it eased my fear about the danger we were in. I still wanted to live and get through the coming battles, but if death was as calming as she described, I could face it down without regret if that’s what it came to.
However, it did raise one more question.
“Then… do you resent the fact that you’re back?”
“Not at all.” To my surprise, Saki shut the idea down immediately. “It was definitely jarring to be dragged back from the peaceful nothingness and into my mortal body again, but I’m also glad of the second chance. All those things I regretted… not seeing this mission through to the end, leaving you guys to fend for yourselves, not getting the chance to see out my days with Nao… I can rectify all of that now. If anything, I think I’m seeing everything more clearly now.”
I silently breathed a sigh of relief. I had heard stories of near death experience survivors longing for the release they had been denied. I was glad that Saki hadn’t begun to crave the death she had been dragged back from.
“But… there was also something strange about it…” Saki spoke once again, her tone carrying some level of concern. “I… never saw heaven. No God there to greet me, no Angels or Reaper to escort my soul to the great beyond. I just felt a blissful peace, and then nothing at all. But… we know there’s a God. We know there’s a heaven and a hell… I mean, for god's sake, we’re standing in it. But my soul… it was like it just went to sleep. I… I worry about what that could mean…”
“What it could mean? Like, that humanity doesn’t actually ascend to heaven after death?”
“Or worse, what if it’s not humanity? What if it’s us?”
“Us? I don’t follow.” Saki slowed to a stop, a melancholy on her face that I rarely saw.
“Do you remember what the Director said before? About severing someone’s connection to God? What if… what if it applies to all magical girls? What if the people we and Hana have lead into battle are now gonna be denied their eternal rest, and for something that’s not their fault? And what if… what if it’s our fault? What if it’s because of this rebellion that we started?”
It was an idea that hadn’t occurred to me before, but it made an uncomfortable amount of sense. These powers were supposedly divine, but in the past month every one of us that had been able to hear the voice of God in the past had since lost that ability. Perhaps this was a punishment doled out to all magical girls for our actions.
Had we condemned 300 innocent souls to eternal sleep by rejecting the rule of God? Now that Saki had brought it up, the idea ate away at me.
“I… can’t tell you whether your theory is right or wrong…” I said, after an uncomfortable silence, “but I do know that I don’t regret our decision. The people of Earth deserve to decide their own destiny, not to have their free will stripped away by a despot.”
“But aren’t we deciding their will for them? If we go through with all of this, if we fight back against both heaven and hell, who’s to say this ends with us? What if we deny the entire human race from ascension? Would we be heroes who saved the world from a despotic god, or traitors who condemned our world to suffer? Are we…are we sure this is what’s best for everyone?”
In truth, I had my own doubts. The complete obliteration of all ideas of individualism was still one I considered abhorrent, but there was no telling if this would truly benefit humanity as a whole. We had no real way to comprehend divinity.
“There’s too much we don’t know… but there’s only one thing we can do, right?” I said, turning to meet Saki’s eye.
“And that is?”
“We go to the seat of God and ask the bastard ourselves.”