The gate.
In the end, it had not opened.
"The gate will not open except on the Day of Selection."
The adult man from before stood beside Gerda, looking at the gate.
Scorch marks and craters still lingered around it, telling the villagers what had happened here.
"Except for that one time with Gerda."
The adult woman spoke without thinking.
"I'm not going outside now. No one in the village is going to die now."
Gerda gave her response as well.
Then came a long silence.
—They had never encountered anything like this before.
Strangers from outside the village had fought the divine envoys, killed the envoy who should have opened the gate for them, and the remaining envoys had fled.
They had fled.
"But, but since the gate didn't open, we don't have to go outside, right?"
"At this time next year, the divine envoys will still come to open the gate for us. As long as we're still holding flowers then, we can still go to Valhalla, right?!"
The hand holding the bouquet trembled as the adult man looked at the adult woman.
But she did not answer him.
Instead, she looked at Gerda.
"Gerda, you don't need to panic. You did a good thing, so the divine envoys will forgive you, and Laura will survive."
"Still... the gate remains closed."
"Can we really leave this place on the next Day of Selection?"
Unease—
That was clearly an answer in itself.
It felt like a dream.
The divine envoys only descended on the Day of Selection. The gods had never said that the envoys could descend on days other than the Day of Selection.
But to truly wait another year—
Could they really do that?
No one could give these ignorant people an answer.
They did not dare