King of Diamonds

Part VI

I apologize for taking so incredibly long. I'll try my best not to take months again for the next chapter! Hopefully you can enjoy this one nonetheless ~

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"Can someone please explain what the heck happened here?"

As we walked through Tokyo, I could barely stop shaking my head with disbelief. Chishiya next to me answered with nothing but a snort, although I noticed that he too was eyeing our surroundings with interest.

At the end of stage two, the city had been a jungle covered in corpses. Not only had nature taken back almost every part of the city, with trees splitting concrete and entire building walls, but the King of Spades had decorated the remaining streets with dead people. Chishiya and I had stayed inside the hotel for less than a week, and with the tempo of decay I had experienced until then, I'd been sure to find an even thicker jungle with hundreds of skeletons.

Obviously, that wasn't the case.

Not only the games had been relaunched – the Borderlands had gone through an entire reset, as if going back to an earlier safe point when playing a game. Tokyo looked more like Japan's capital city again, and there was not a single corpse. Not even bones scattered around here and there. Nothing hinted at the terror we all had been going through just two weeks ago, and it was something my mind couldn't really grasp.

Letting go of the blonde's hand, I pushed against the door of a grocery store and it opened with just a bit of force. A foul smell greeted me and I glanced to the produce section with disgust, not even daring to search for the meat or fish section, but the store was still full of cans and packages, drinks and all the stuff us players had been roaming for.

"I remember this store", I muttered, assuming that Chishiya had followed me inside since I heard footsteps behind me, "and it was definitely both empty and completely demolished. This... I...."

There were no words to describe the chaos in my mind. I could somehow accept the fact that hundreds of people disappeared into a parallel Tokyo. But this? An entire city rebuilding and restocking itself within just three days?

Chishiya reached for a pack of cookies and hummed with interest. "It makes sense though", he mused, "Tokyo has been ripped off anything useful once we finished the second stage. New players would starve to death rather than die in games if there was no restock. I guess this is the starting position for each relaunch."

My eyes flew to him in bewilderment. Pink glittering unicorns could dance around us and Chishiya would watch and analyze them without losing his poker face. "Don't take too many cookies, then", I scoffed, "leave them for the players. We have plenty of them in the hotel."

He held my gaze with a raised brow and took the cookies anyway. I knew he hardly cared about anyone else but him, less the new players that would try to kill him eventually. "You accepted your role as a Citizen, then", he stated.

I shrugged, feeling a bit of unease. "What else could I do."

We left the store and continued to stroll through Tokyo, through streets that were now recognizable again. Barely a single root had yet to make it through the concrete, and most of the windows were still intact. Looking around, it was hard to believe that the city would turn into a jungle within mere weeks.

The crunching of cookies was the only sound accompanying us for a while. When I had asked Chishiya to go for a walk with me earlier this morning, there hadn't been a certain goal in my mind. I'd just been longing for some fresh air and quietness, and Chishiya obviously didn't mind to go along with me. His wounds were healing extraordinarily quickly, which wasn't surprising to me anymore. Everything seemed to be possible in the Borderlands, and there were still so many things I didn't know.