The gale blew sand and grit straight at him, while the sand on the rooftop rolled away with the wind like waves. Squinting, Shade raised an arm before his eyes and turned to look towards the highest point of the rooftop, but the Long-haired Girl holding the silver-eyed cat, whom he had been thinking of, was nowhere to be seen.
Even though he had expected this, he could not help but sigh.
He bent over with difficulty, walked up the slanted rooftop, and then sat where Long-Haired Luvia in the dream had once sat.
Looking up at this world filled with yellow sand, he saw countless fragments of buildings and corpses floating haphazardly through the dim yellow sky. The Sun hung at the center of that horrifying scene, but it was black, edged in white and surrounded by a red halo. Like the mouth of a cave, the black Sun streamed a fiery-red line downward.
"It really is exactly the same as in the dream. It wasn't exaggerated at all."
If anything, because this was the True World, the apocalyptic sight and that terrifying Sun seemed even more shocking.
Looking up at a higher place, he saw a place surrounded by countless pieces of garbage and corpses. Gray clouds and a storm enveloped a building like a gigantic floating island. Black lightning continuously flashed through gaps between the rubble in the storm, but it was too far away for Shade to make out any more details.
"Could that be the floating island where Zaras Academy of Literature is located?"
The Sun and that floating island were both far in the distance, while the nearby city remained just as it had been in the dream. Windblown sand covered the ruins of buildings, and aside from Saint Derain Square, the structures in