Editing Apocalypse Witch:Volume5 Chapter4 (section)

===Part 1===

Utagai Karuta opened his eyes.

He briefly felt separated from gravity and that wasn’t just his groggy head failing to fully wake up. For one, the bed was too fancy for him.

He felt something soft next to him.

Student Council President Omotesandou Kyouka was curled up in the same silk bedsheets as him. Her head was turned to the side and she was giggling.

“Good morning, Karuta-kun.”

“Were you watching me sleep? Don’t you have anything better to do?”

“Hee hee. I didn’t plan on it, but I found it to be amusing.”

How was that amusing?

She saw the same thing every day.

“Ugh.”

He sensed motion from the other side of the bed. That had to be his childhood friend Marika. Rather than waking up, she appeared to be caught in a light doze and tempted to fully return to sleep. She suddenly grabbed him from behind, bringing a smooth, soft warmth to his back. She held him like a small child with a big stuffed animal, but it was probably a subconscious thing. He heard her breathing settle back into sleep again.

Crystal Girl Aine was staring down at him from above.

His head was resting in her lap.

“Sacri-sama, it is time to wake up.”

“Yawwwn. Aine-chan, do we really need a time to take up?”

“You are the one who said we must follow a schedule and maintain a daily routine or we will grow undisciplined.”

She was right about that.

He extracted himself from Marika’s grasp, rubbed his sleepy eyes, and slowly got up.

He felt a dry wind.

The sea breeze carried a faintly salty scent to his nose.

“Phew.”

He set his feet on the floor.

The wind led him from the bed to the balcony and Crystal Girl Aine followed without a word. She may have wanted attention too.

They were in a seaside cottage that would have fit right in at a tropical resort. There were no walls, giving them direct access to the ocean. The building itself was built over the ocean instead of on the beach. A narrow wooden bridge provided a route back to land.

And the sea was dark.

It was absorbing the colors of the starry sky visible through the reinforced glass dome overhead, so the colors of space were mixed with the bright morning sun.

There was no blue planet here.

They were on an artificial planet in a different planetary system. The 50km enclosed space had been given to them as their world. From the outside, it may have looked a lot like a bunch of grapes. Each transparent dome was a few kilometers across, they each contained a different environment such as a snowy mountain or a jungle, and they could choose whichever kind of resort they wanted. The concepts of up and down existed within and the seawater did not just float up into the air. They had been told that was because the giant star the artificial planet orbited had its gravity intentionally amplified. The gravitons that created gravity still could not be mechanically produced, but increasing the activity of the naturally-produced ones could alter the apparent values. Karuta imagined it as something like how a microwave oven heated food by causing the moisture inside to rapidly vibrate, but he couldn’t say anything for sure when this was all done by the Threat’s mysterious technology.

That said, none of it felt as cold and mechanical as a spaceship. On the white sandy beach, palm trees and hibiscus flowers swayed in the artificial breeze, colorful butterflies and beetles lived there, and plenty of fish and birds ate them.

Remember the silk bedsheets?

All the necessary lifeforms were here, including the silkworms needed to make those sheets. The cycle and pyramid were complete.

Transline had not given them a spaceship or an artificial planet. Even if it was mechanically created, she had given them a proper “world”.

The entire ecosystem humans needed to live was present in this enclosed space.

Something else flowed by outside the dome.

Their orbits were all independent, but it felt like the artificial planets had been clustering together a lot lately. That showed just how many lifeforms Transline was collecting from here and there. All those pure nurseries were positioned around and constantly revolving around the shining star providing the center of their artificial planetary system. There was one each for every category: carbon, sulfur, oxygen, metal, plant, animal, etc.

They still hadn’t interacted, but Karuta’s group had discovered an airlock for docking hidden among the grass and flowers at the very edge of their artificial planet.

This might be an unnatural nursery, but it was also a perfect world with no chance of conflict.

Humanity’s ugly conflicts were nowhere to be found here. Nor the merciless slaughter at the hands of the Threat. Karuta and the others didn’t need to worry about being deceived, lied to, used, or abandoned by anyone.

They didn’t even need to be the Four Living Gods anymore.

They could finally relax and stop forcing themselves to be the world’s strongest.

They may have finally returned to being human.

“Karuta-kun.”

He heard a voice from behind.

He looked back to see Omotesandou Kyouka casually holding a bedsheet up to her chest while walking toward him on her own two legs. But if she had taken the sheet, what would he see if he looked to the bed where Marika had gone back to sleep? He already knew the answer. That childhood friend had a bad habit of stripping naked and crawling into bed when she felt sleepy.

He heard the faint sound of a machine operating.

The older girl’s legs were supported by black metal. That was what they had once called the Threat.

Kyouka had tried and failed to walk using a powered suit while on Earth, but it worked better with their help.

The Threat accurately reproduced her elegant movements.

“Karuta-kun. I’m glad you decided to get up, but what about some breakfast?”

“If someone will make some…”

“Oh, c’mon. Don’t be shy. Just come out and ask me to fix you something.”

“Your cooking is always so sweet it takes real courage to eat it first thing in the morning.”

They could use the phone on the wall to have any food they wanted brought to the seaside cottage. Made by black metal hands, of course. And that wasn’t all. The cottage remained so clean because Threats a bit larger than a backpack were constantly cleaning it for them.

Perhaps it was wrong to continue calling them the Threat.

Not after being taken in and cared for by them.